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Librarian buys library card.

Monday, January 18, 2010

This weekend I went down to Calgary Public Library’s Central branch and bought my first library card as an adult taxpayer.

I took out three titles, all of them nonfiction books about starting your own indie record label or promoting your band or going on tour. I am so definitely not a musician, nor am I interested in doing much besides taking the odd ill-advised violin class or checking out Beatles tribute nights at local hipster havens or advocating for rock concerts in libraries, but I was doing a little bit of informal research for a friend (Dewey 780, I told her, that’s all you need to remember) and I thought titles from 2004 through 2007 were probably not so egregiously outdated as to be useless. We pulled maybe twenty books off the shelves, and she selected the three with the cleanest covers. Or maybe the ones most relevant to her needs, I didn’t ask.

This is actually the first library card I’ve had since somewhere around middle school - you know, whenever I stopped being a child and the card stopped being free. It’s definitely the first card I’ve paid for.

For a long time I was kind of ashamed of myself, not having one. What kind of librarian doesn’t have a library card? It was something I’d say self-deprecatingly at social events when I was introduced as the librarian. And for a while during grad school it became a calculated statement that I’d toss off to friends: I could get my scanned journal articles and the latest canlit novel written by my old professors at UBC from the academic library on campus, so why would I bother to collect scraps of mail (which I didn’t receive anyway) and trek over to the main branch of Halifax Public Library? That’s ludicrous: as a student, if it wasn’t on the screen in front of me it most likely wasn’t all that useful anyway. I had deadlines, and HPL’s collection wasn’t exactly focused on academics anyway.

And then, after I moved back to Calgary, not having a card became even more of a statement: what kind of library charges its members - who already pay for the service through municipal and provincial taxes - for a piece of plastic? Shouldn’t they just be grateful that anyone in this day and age even remembers the library exists? Let alone charge them twelve bucks for the privilege of leafing through a grimy paperback? There’s a reason people prefer Amazon: it’s actually less effort to get an item shipped from Ontario than to try to find parking around 7th Avenue. Plus, the arriving text is less likely to be contaminated with swine flu or peanut butter.

But I went. And I paid for the card without arguing with the staff at the circ desk, and I got these three books that are actually kind of awesome - one was a serendipitous find off the new arrivals shelf, and was actually recent enough to mention social media as a viable publicity option - and I spent a few hours hanging out near the German Art Indexes from the 1970s reading and writing and listening to people and their totally unnecessary but still fascinating cell phone conversations.

I had a good time. I found what I wanted. I found something I didn’t know I wanted. I existed in a public space with my fellow Calgarians. I ventured into the vacant downtown core on a weekend. And I had to pay for the privilege. Five out of six isn’t so bad, CPL.

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add new post! finally!

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Things I have done between April and November of this year:

  1. graduated from Dal with a MLIS
  2. bought a house near the bird sanctuary so as to run into that spry herd of mule deer and the odd porcupine more often
  3. adopted a sickly but affectionate mutt, Olive, to keep my floors dirty for me and my slippers nicely chewed
  4. completed my first music class (maybe violin was not the most pleasant choice for my neighbours?)
  5. run my first 10k race (and a 5k, and a handful of cross-country 4ks)
  6. started the Spanish Certificate at the University of Calgary
  7. accepted a part-time permanent position with my current employer
  8. not posted here once. What!

I think the mistake that derailed me here was promising myself that I wouldn’t write about my job. Obviously, if this is a blog about my profession, I don’t think I can get away with not mentioning the job that takes up most of my time, provides me with most of my professional contacts and is the filter through which I view most library news. So I’m going to nix that limitation, and not hesitate to mention it when it’s relevant. I can brag about our massive (and so far very smooth!) migration to Sirsi’s Symphony, and the three weeks of training sessions we’ll be doing for school library assistants and teacher-librarians across the city, and also all the awesome books I get to see on a daily basis.

Let’s start with that last point. For instance, I was very excited about the Active Citizenship textbook that had the face of an old acquaintance from undergrad on the cover of it. She was pictured in her capacity as the national director for Students for a Free Tibet. “I know that girl!” I hollered to my colleagues, who all managed to look politely interested.

Or the time I realized that for a year I’ve been cataloguing John Crossingham’s (admittedly fairly low-quality) elementary-level books from Crabtee Publishing in St. Catharine’s - and yet I never realized that he’s the very same John Crossingham that plays in Broken Social Scene and put out a new, real children’s book this year: Learn to Speak Music. In his interviews he talks about how it took him a long time to commit to writing a book that he actually cared about. And what results is basically a book by Canadian indie musicians on how to be Canadian indie musicians. I’m looking forward to filing it under Vocational Guidance ; Musicians ; and Canadian indie-rock darlings of my heart. Naw.

Anyway, I really love cataloguing, I love getting to handle books and spend a little bit of time with each one. I keep a list of books to look up later (this list also tracks the endless recommendations for movies and tv shows and books I get just from chatting with my coworkers: everything from L. Ron Hubbard biographies to second wave feminist tracts). I also read the author bios at the back of almost every novel I see, because I like to envision their lives as I hold their work in my hands. And I definitely keep a running Google Doc of unintentionally hilarious/terrible nonfiction titles (Why do I vomit? ; Kids Talkin ‘Bout Death). And yeah, sometimes I think Dewey is entirely outdated. Let alone the descriptive aspects of AACR2. Let alone the school board’s ancient and rickety old ILS (migrate faster, data!).

So my job - even though cataloguing often gets dismissed as dry and nitpicky and antisocial - has a lot going for it. And I’m not going to hesitate to talk about it here anymore.

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Alberta public libraries: free for all.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Look at that, it’s April. And I haven’t posted since halfway through February. I’ll spare you the school-and-work-and-volunteering-have-crushed-me excuses and just get on with posting, how about.

Because the Alberta government has gone ahead and announced 9 million more dollars for public libraries in the 2009 budget. They’re touting it as a 39% increase, even though 2 million is being nebulously invested in technology/innovation. This is exciting. It’s the logical conclusion to the MLA committee that was touring around the province last fall talking to librarians, practically asking to be advocated-upon. (You can see their report and recommendations at the bottom of the news release). But I’m a little wary, because I’m not convinced that this money is a) enough (of course) or b) going to go towards the issue that needs it most.

I’ve just finished up with Wendy Newman’s phenomenal, eye-opening and inspiring Libraries and Advocacy course over at UofT, where I spent most of my time looking into that embarrassing sore on the otherwise dewy visage of my province’s public library systems: illegally charging our users for cards.

I can’t really pretend to be impartial about this, even though I know it’s a divisive issue round these parts. Looking at why libraries do it (users cough up an additional 7% for each budget, on average) and what it means for user rates (a 20% drop in borrowers since a $10 fee was implemented in Edmonton in 1994; and likewise, a 40% jump in membership in Banff when they got rid of their fee in 2000), I just can’t buy into the arguments for doing it. I think this quote, from Pat MacNamee, a library consultant at Alberta Community Development, sums up the shiftiness of the practice pretty well:

“Libraries are not permitted to charge a membership fee. All members of the public are library members, with free access to the five or six basic services that the Act mandates. But library boards are permitted, at their option, to charge for the issuance of a library card, for use in tracking borrowed materials.” (Banff’s Very Public Library, Jan 2001)

Public libraries are not permitted to charge a membership fee. So why is it that Calgary Public Library wants $12 for what, anywhere else in the world, would be an absolutely free piece of plastic with my name and a barcode on it? It’s astonishing, and the arguments for the practice (we need the money; charging for our services makes people value us more; it’s not that much money to ask for anyway in our [formerly] oil-rich boomtown) fall flat against the thousands of libraries across America and the rest of Canada that manage to 1) get by, 2) be valued, and 3) not gouge their users by taking their taxes and then asking for more cash at the turnstile.

And yet, though the ethical, professional resolution to this argument is pretty clear everywhere else, in Alberta it’s a bone of contention. Consensus-building on this topic somehow seems limited to high fives over beers at the pub, or water-cooler eye-rolling with colleagues. And even though Banff Public Library’s 2000 survey found that 91% of librarians would abolish fees if they could get replacement funding from the province, is this $9 - oops, I mean $7 - million going to be viewed as that? A replacement (and then some) for the estimated $3 million libraries raise from charging for cards? Or is it going to be seen as a chancy but much-needed windfall that will go immediately into updating outdated collections and increasing already-decimated hours of operation?

The most unappetizing part about this practice, for me, is the fact that it effectively does two things: increases income and decreases use. Increases books and decreases people. Increases the time spent cataloguing or shelf-reading, and decreases the number of reference questions, story hours, literacy programs, external partnerships and outreach activities. The idea that library staff across the province are resisting the idea of increasing circulation and membership - our best and only purpose for existing - at the expense of 7% of their budget is a nasty, unpleasant thought that I don’t like to entertain. Up until now, I preferred to blame our overlords up in the legislature for not giving us enough of those billion dollar surpluses. It’s funny, that now with the oil money gone and an illegal deficit looming, libraries are getting the fair budgets we’ve been advocating for since the ’80s.

So now we don’t have any excuses. This budget increase is a fantastic opportunity for the province’s libraries to put our collective feet down and re-embrace our first and most important professional value: equality of access. With twice what it would take to make up our user fees in the bank, there’s absolutely no excuse not to join the rest of the world in doing our jobs, and making our buildings and services and little plastic cards free for all.

Also, you can check out these sources for more background:

Alberta Municipal Affairs. (2008, April 9). Public Library Statistics.

Hammond, J. (2007, January). Cash Cow: User Fees in Alberta Public Libraries. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library & Information Practice & Research, 2(1), 1-22.

Shelley Mardiros. (2001). Librarians’ views on membership fees in Alberta.

Shelley Mardiros. (2001, Jan/Feb). Banff’s Very Public Library. AlbertaViews 4(1), 37-39.

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Two manila file folders and the digital age

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Maybe this is indicative of how much illegally downloaded television I watch (less than you’d think, now that I’m employed), but I’m seriously behind on my self-appointed role as pointer-outer of fictional libraries everywhere. I’m also expanding out into Records Management, because I’ve had it on the brain, lately.

#1: Dwight Schrute, with Kelly Kapoor’s Personal Confidential File

Shoddy RM practices abound

I just finished this file plan & retention schedule assignment for my records management class, and it involved a lot of pretty-much-made-up codes for various levels of files in a pretty-much-made-up university setting. But I did learn this: a mainstay of protecting employee privacy? Not filing by last name, but by employee number! Come on, Dunder Mifflin. I know Toby can do better than that: at the very least buy some locking filing cabinets.* Probably Dwight would jimmy them open with a buck knife, but then he’d be confronted with dozens of alphanumeric codes and have to turn to a subject index or some smug RM type for help. Awesome!


#2: Admiral Adama, blackmailing political prisoners with laundry lists

fakes good rm practices

I think the most hilarious thing about this scene is the idea that Zarek actually believes Adama when he suggests that in a motley assembly of apocalypse survivors living either a) in airtight metal containers with 12 other people and no work or entertainment to occupy them or b) under slave-like conditions on sewage/munitions/fuel refinery ships, someone is monitoring inter-ship trade and communication. Monitoring, and then typing up reports on that awesome octagonal paper that is one of the primary conceits of this universe (along with green jello liquor, um). I realize that one of the defining traits of Colonial society is a certain technophobia, but seriously: typing everything up and printing it out? Don’t they need those store rooms for Baltar’s marginalized harem? Of course, I guess their hard drives might be the size of octagonal banker’s boxes, too, so who am I to scoff? Okay, I take it back: the most hilarious thing about this scene is that the hunted and decrepit remnants of humanity are keeping track of their laundry lists. Alright!

#3: Frank, with Janis Joplin’s wikipedia page

30Rock

I heard more than a few weeks ago that Wikipedia might be pushing for some accountability in their article editing. Obviously, Frank got in just under the wire while torturing Jenna with deliberate misinformation. How much do I love this show that I can’t even articulate whether doing so is an indicator of the fundamental flaws of the mass collaboration non-system, or part of the glorious flexibility and creativity that makes it so awesome? I mean, if I want information on the 1867 Palliser Expedition, I’m not going to Wikipedia, I’m picking up Irene Sprye’s book. However, if I need to figure out which episode of English-dubbed Sailor Moon season 1 is the one where they introduce Sailor Mars, no one else besides some never-updated html sparkly-font homepage from ‘98 is going to tell me. I think you know what I’m saying. And besides, Janis Joplin is fairly dead, so this new ‘protecting living people’ thing from Jimmy Wales wouldn’t have saved her anyway.

& coming soon:

#4: Pete White, The Venture Bros, the internet vs. the dictionary.

By my magical nurse shoes, I swear I’ll get to him eventually!


*fun fact: it’s my parents’ anniversary this weekend and I’m buying them a filing cabinet. I’m also volunteering my Saturday to go through their papers and get them all prepared for this inevitable move into the B.C. interior that they keep threatening. I am so helpful, best daughter ever, I know, right?

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Twentysomething in NYC goes to library. What?

Monday, February 9, 2009

Another one of my favourite blogs: I Will Teach You to Be Rich (Not a Scam), with Ramit Sethi. Like Penelope Trunk, it’s pretty obvious that he’s making his living and his long-term career options off of his blog, but as a casual reader, that just means more posts, so I’ll take the constant plugs for his book and his paid services as they come. My favourite is the anonymous money diaries. Most recently: the young employee in NYC about to lose her job to the Great Recession.

This girl seriously spends less on food (Kraft Dinner! Off-brand Ritz crackers! Canned soup!) than I do on my weekly laundry, and subsequently eats probably less protein than your average 5 lb guinea pig needs, but this is my favourite part:

Day 5, 12:00 pm:Pay $1.25 in library fines while checking books out from the library—I borrow 3 books on business, success, and surviving unemployment. I usually pay a few dollars per month in library fines because of how actively I use the library, but for the amount of reading/movie-watching I get in return, it’s well worth it.

Business, success, and surviving unemployment. That both breaks my heart and makes me feel awesome that the library is actually actively used a) by someone my age and b) someone who evidently needs it (that, and a bowl of quinoa, holy crow). All of the stuff we’re doing in advocacy class wherein we talk about how (in times like these) the library is the last bastion of help for the newly disenfranchised is actually not made up. If I’m not surprised, I’m at least very gratified.

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Recession-dodging, magic 8 ball style

Monday, February 9, 2009

I really enjoy Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist blog for a lot of reasons: her bluntness about office politics and job hunting, the occasional bit of titillating blogosphere gossip, her references to her work-life balance, her divorce, her kids. It’s nice to see a career advice columnist who puts it all in context. It’s also nice to see a feminist espousing a way of living in line with her ideology that doesn’t also shoot her in the foot professionally. I don’t always agree with what she says, but normally she’s convincing enough to at least make me consider her point of view.

Her post today (okay, a while back, I kind of forgot to post this while it was sitting in my drafts folder) is Don’t try to dodge the recession with grad school. She makes a lot of assumptions geared more toward social science and humanities MAs than a professional degree like an MLIS (which was, unshockingly, one of the few professions she didn’t mention in the post). But I still went through her list of reasons not to go to grad school, trying to save myself from some kind of temporary, externally-mandated regret, I guess.

Regret is not a big risk at this point: I’m three months away from the end of class and I just landed my first career job, so I pretty much have nothing to regret at this point, whether Penelope tells me I made a mistake or not. (Lucky me, this is as close to a recession-proof career and position as I could hope for.)

And an MLIS is not a mistake, recession or no. Basically she just tries to convince readers that med school is expensive, lawyers hate their jobs, MBAs are unemployable, the armed forces are a dead end and, baha, no one should ever bother studying English Literature, ever. I guess her quibble with librarianship, if she’d deigned to mention it - as one commenter did - would be that it doesn’t have enough social status as a profession, so it’s not a good return on investment. Or that it’s feminized, maybe, like teaching, which she also neglected to mention.

I don’t buy it. I decided to go to grad school before the Great Recession, but it was still during a slowdown. Alberta was going through a lull in upstream oil and gas functions. My company was laying off and I was responsible for paying the bills and sweet-talking the creditors, so although they probably would’ve liked to nix my position, it was essentially recession-proof until we got out of the hole. Still, I was doing a four-day, and then three-day furlough for the last five months, and when I gave my three months’ notice, they replaced me with someone who worked for half of what I was offered.

But it wasn’t the economic conditions that made me want to go to grad school. I could’ve switched industries and found work: like I said, this was a teeny downswing after a period of ridiculous growth. And I even broke a number of the economic rules one commenter mentions as well: I didn’t get paid to go to school, and I hadn’t waited five years between degrees.

My long and meandering point, here? Yes. Library school. Yes. Whatever it is to me - feminized, recession-proof, professional status or just a list of acronyms and an apartment across the country - it was the right choice at the time, and I’m even happier with it now. So thanks, Penelope.

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if Dwight Schrute can fly like a vampire, I’m in

Monday, January 26, 2009

I just got an email from one of my three current institutions (hint: it’s the one that is conducted entirely online because no one wants to move that far north of Edmonton for any reason, let alone grad school) inviting my classmates and I to partake in some Second Life socializing. Quoth the program director:

One of the challenges of online graduate study is the lack of opportunity to interact informally with fellow students and faculty.

On one hand, it’s awesome that they’re doing this. Good on them for trying something new in their delivery methods. And they’re right: distance ed is a little lonely. Message boards only take you so far in your social interactions. Email is cumbersome when you’re working on a group presentation. Second Life might not be able to replace the one-liners, chatter and get-on-the-same-pagedness (see how much better that phrase is than ’synergy’?) of face-to-face interaction, but at least you can show up and see how many people wish they had green mohawks and full-body tattoos.

On the other hand, the topic of discussion for this informal interaction is as follows:

Please join me… to discuss how we can use Second Life for peer-to-peer and student-faculty networking and socializing.

In other words, they’re hoping people will meet up in Second Life to discuss meeting up in Second Life. That’s like having a networking event where the theme of the evening is, um, networking. Maybe with a speaker on networking who gives tips. And everyone then having to mill around using those tips at each other in a mutually excruciating exchange of awkwardness.

We definitely did one of those during orientation at Dalhousie. The entire incoming student population of the Faculty of Management was there: MBAs, MPAs, Environmental Resources, Marine Management, and the library kids. We all got little cards with networking tips on the back. Mine was, “It’s your responsibility to fit in.” Which I guess I can’t really argue with, as hilariously offensive as it was at the time. The only other option is to nurse a handful of carrot sticks in the corner and sulk, right?

However, the difference between the well-coiffed, stiletto’d, be-suited MBA students and the library kids in our cardigans and cat-eyes and odd hoodie was a little stark, and I have to admit that I stuck pretty close to the librarian/hippie side of the divide rather than making the leap to foreign shores of public/business administration. It was my third day in Halifax, after all, and I was overwhelmed and predictably starving at 6pm with naught but a handful of party-plate appetizers and a speech from the Dean (on networking!) to sustain me.

Which is I guess why this Second Life gig makes a lot of sense. It’s a lot more fun to take responsibility for fitting in when everyone’s wearing purple hair, bat wings and porkpie hats.

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Verily this book burning doth come as a surprise.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

So, being underemployed as I am, I’ve taken up a number of resolution-y hobbies this month. They involve things like researching mortgages for first-time homebuyers and figuring out the difference between whey and soy protein for delicious post-workout smoothies. But I won’t lie, I’ve been watching my fair share of tv-on-dvd in between discussion board postings for my many classes. Most recently I’ve ripped through both seasons of the Tudors, and approximately 2.5 episodes of the atrociously campy BBC teen romcom Merlin. And yeah, I had to give up after those 2.5 episodes.

So why am I bringing this up? What do they have in common? Well, nothing, really. One occasionally stretches historical dates to accommodate storytelling conceits; the other commits indignities to Arthurian legend that I would blush to recount. One has gorgeous atmosphere, lavish costumes and period-perfect set pieces (i.e. the taxidermied male wood duck sitting on top of a pie served to the French ambassador); the other has costumes made out of my old bedsheets and a cinderblock castle. One has beheadings, sex scenes and Peter O’Toole as Pope Paul III, and the other has a CGI dragon that can only fly up and down in the same way because the show could only afford to pay the graphic contractors once.

All well and good, but what they really have in common is - oh yes - librarians!

Observe:

Here’s our young wizard Merlin making a magical photocopy (with magic!) of a coat of arms so that he can fraudulently get his new best friend Lancelot into some sort of fancy knight tournament. I will admit, I didn’t watch this entire episode, just the first five minutes so I could see if the Lancelot character was going to be as badly butchered as the rest of them. Short answer: yes. So basically, what we have here is the medieval equivalent of identity theft. Observe the suspicious, berobed librarian sneaking up in the background. He doesn’t shush Merlin, but he certainly does seem like he’d prefer that Camelot Library operate under a closed-stack policy. There are some bad stereotypes being propagated here, but obviously the librarian has good reason to be suspicious! Merlin is performing some serious copyright infringement! If only they’d conducted an Access Copyright workshop, or better yet, implemented some youth services programs to save this enterprising young man from a life of white-collar fraud.

Next up: John Leland, King Henry VIII’s antiquary-cum-librarian.

Here, we see His Majesty’s Librarian smugly informing a Catholic monk, circa 1536-1541, that he’s arrived to “peruse and dilligently search” through the monastery’s manuscripts and texts and remove certain items to the Royal Library. There are a few implications here: one, John is going to take what he likes; two, he’s not going to like anything that doesn’t fall in with Reformation politics; and three, probably the rest will be burned. Or maybe not. But he certainly looks like the kind of librarian that classifies books two ways: “good” and “burn.” Look at that hat! Look at that fancy gold chain! Look at that well-groomed facial hair! Let’s just call him John “Censorship” Leland, and revoke his CLA membership.

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Are we cooler than the library? No. Are we cooler than the idea of the library? Maybe.

Monday, January 12, 2009

The other day my friend Andrea sent along a link to an episode of what is probably my entire library school’s favourite radio-show-slash-podcast, This American Life. We all kind of blame Andrea for getting us addicted, so her recommending a show is not that unusual. I’ve listened to maybe 50 hour-long episodes in the past three months? And sometimes I say “ak” instead of “act” just to be more like host Ira Glass. And in turn I’ve pushed This American Life’s high-quality, often hilarious non-fiction stories (Ira says: “each week we bring you a theme, and several stories on that theme”) on everyone I’ve ever loved or wanted to be happy, because literally that is how great this show is. Life-changing! Better than fiction! Complete with adorable American accents, but fewer xenophobic themes than the title might imply!

So. Anyway, Andrea sent a bunch of us a link to one particular show from 2005, wherein one of my favourite contributors, Alex Blumberg, does a twenty-minute story for a show themed “Image Makers.” The story’s about a library. And here it is for free, if you’d like to listen to it.

Specifically, it’s about a Michigan youth librarian - Bill Harmer - who invites a Detroit hipster rock band - The High Strung - to play concerts at something like 34 public libraries across Michigan over the summer of 2005. I guess I’m not that surprised by the fact that I’ve a) never heard of this initiative, (even though the rock library tour has gone across America now, twice); and b) that I’ve never heard of the band, either (CBC Radio 3, you fail me in that you’re so awesome that I go nowhere else for music, so I miss out on the American bands.)

Listening to the story, I noted a few things:

  • the band is kind of adorable and endearing and if I was queen of my own library I would pay them all my late fees just to hang around Alberta and play indie rock shows in their “get ups” (read: matching super-tight white jumpsuits with blue stars up and down the sides)
  • although the target age range is 3rd to 12th graders, I would’ve totally gone to something like this if I’d seen it advertised. Book readings and Harry Potter parties are one thing, but rock concerts I can get behind. Tragically, 2005 was a summer when I was just a few states over, in Connecticut, teaching at a poncy arts summer camp. I feel a sense of loss that I missed seeing this epic library travesty firsthand, with a juicebox in my knapsack.
  • Blumberg totally plays up the stodgy “famously quiet” thing, talking about card catalogues and kids covering their ears, including one reference to a mean old guybrarian who hates that newfangled noise you kids call music, although maybe it’s true that he likes music just fine, it’s just the noise that patrons and librarians and books in general despise.

Granted, the theme of the episode is organizations trying to escape their own reputations by re-branding themselves, so Blumberg has an angle to sell, but I kind of have a hard time buying that in 2005 six-year-old kids were coming into Michigan Public Libraries and being told to shush. He hints at it, anyway. But I mean, does that even happen anymore? Would any childrens’ librarian ever do that? I was a little saddened by the idea as well as irritated by some of his deliberately parochial jokes.

Anyway, my sadness at the easy pickings of our apparent uncool aside, my favourite part of the story was by far the band talking about how - even if some of the kids at the concerts aren’t convinced the library is cool, and indeed might be more convinced of the band’s uncoolness through the affiliation - they all use and abuse the public library in every town they come to on their regular rock-club-smoky-bar-drunk-audience tours. Shaving in the sink, using the internet, reveling in the luxury of a clean toilet with toilet paper and a door that locks. Public libraries, according to the High Strung, are where you will find most poor touring bands as they drive across the country. Duly noted.

Also, I came across this quote from Bill Harmer in Library Journal, June 2007:

I’m hoping to, in some ways, change people’s images of what libraries can be, not just for just [sic] people who walk in the door, but people who work in libraries. Also, I want young people to see that the library can be a vibrant, relevant place to go. I’m 39. I’m living vicariously through The High Strung.

Top three bands I would live vicariously through as a librarian:

  1. Library Voices (straight out of Regina, Sask, a ten piece pop collective)
  2. Shh… this is a Library (and so is Brent from New Jersey)
  3. Woodpigeon (Calgary’s own darlings, along with their most excellent album, Treasury Library Canada)
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Obadiah Stane comes down hard on copyright

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Probably sometime around last January, my friends at library school and I realized that somehow, somewhere along the line, something fundamental had changed in us. One term at SIM, and probably 10 293 392 repetitions of the word ‘information’ (followed closely by the 234 349 repetitions of the word ‘professional’) and we suddenly couldn’t sit through half an episode of Battlestar Galactica without elbowing each other in the ribs and going ‘eh, eh, records management, eh?’ and chortling wickedly.

So, in the spirit of my tainted worldview, I bring you a piecemeal and scattered representation of all the times I have to stop, turn to whatever poor soul is stuck consuming some vapid bit of entertainment with me, and go, “LOOK! AN INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL!”

First up, 2008’s gloriously misogynist depiction of a deeply flawed and deeply entertaining Robert Downey Jr. as himself, and also, Iron Man. See below:

OBADIAH STANE, gloating: You really think that just because you had an idea it belongs to you?

What’s that, Obie? You’re not into respecting Tony’s copyright on his gold-titanium-alloy superhero costume? An ultra-capitalist war-profiteering bomb-builder like you doesn’t want him - or perhaps, anyone - to have proprietary rights to their own intellectual property? Now, I’m no expert on the subject, but you’d think that a company as heavily into R&D as Stark Industries would have a team of sharp-suited sharks circling the swimming pool, waiting to tear into any other company (Oscorp? Wayne Enterprises?) that so much as smells like an infringement. So it’s funny that you should argue otherwise.

Of course, Stane’s point here is that the good dudes who share their creations - his example being Howard Stark’s, um, involvement with the Manhattan Project - are helping the world out. It’s selfish, he insists, not to.

The whip-snapping irony here, of course, is that good-naturedly sharing an atomic bomb leads mostly to lots of dead people. Ho ho, Marvel, good one. Way to set up your straw man argument. Considering that you’ve been on both sides of the divide here, with various entities like the country of Iraq and the Foo Fighters claiming you stole content from them, while yourself suing other entities like, oh, Disney, and also the creators of the videogame City of Heroes for stealing your content, I’m pretty sure you’re on the side of keeping IP under lock and key.

Still! Wasn’t it nice to hear the argument for creative commons in the form of a premature victory monologue from a treacherous, double-dealing supervillain? Keep it up, pop culture! Let’s always keep librarians relevant in the third act turning points!

Next time: The Venture Bros episode #37, ORB, in which the albino Pete White uses the internet.

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