Biblioburros

We were sitting in one of my classes the other day, wondering what it would be like to be librarians during the early days of Wisconsin librarianship. We had been reading about that century's library commission and the circuit librarians, traveling from township to township, delivering books via horse and carriage. However, even in this age of precision bombs and satellite television, not every library runs on oracle and xml, and not every librarian has a computer:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/world/americas/20burro.html

I still secretly wish that there were more burros in my job description. And as my pedagogy teacher so aptly reminded us in class last night, it all comes down to engaging with and caring about your students and giving them the tools they need to learn.

And thanks to The Lost Albatross for sharing the link.

Dream Jobs

Whenever I get bored or dissatisfied in my classes I start looking for jobs. Over the years I've enjoyed looking for jobs on:

http://www.lisjobs.com

And after working in a number of different library departments, I decided that this is pretty close to my dream job:

http://sirsidynix.iapplicants.com/ViewJob-13659.html

It includes teaching, interacting with folks, getting to travel, getting to be geeky about technology, helping people be more efficient with their use of technology, and so on.

Museum of Jurassic Technology

While in Denver last month, I visited the Denver Zine Library and saw a short documentary on the 'Museum of Jurassic Technology' located in Culver City, California. It is an entirely different pretext of creating a public event, part science, part art, part question, and part answer. On one of their sites, they comment:

"The rarest and most precious knowledge is not that which is imposed, but rather, that which is absorbed, inhaled almost, from the ephemeral substance of the world in which we are contained."

Unfortunately, I have the feeling none of these sites successfully capture the nature, the aboutness of this enterprise. It plays upon that which we already know and take for granted, and push those assumptions to their edge, twisting them just slightly into the realm of myths, but rooted in a level of childlike wonder for the complexity of the world.

If this Museum of Jurassic Technology merges the lines where science and myths intersect under the name of 'museum', what would a library along the same pretext look like?

The Simplicity of Basics

I make a habit of trying to explore different libraries in different corners of the country. Many libraries seem in a struggle for identity, caught between being archives of history, warehouses of books, educational institutions, public spaces, study areas, social anchor points, and purveyors of print culture and reading.

These things all sound so similar, but the tension between them is clearly in our discussions of 'library as place' and whether the 'library without walls' is ever going to replace the brick and mortar edifice of my youth. It's also in the tension between food policies and the coffeeshops, as well as the struggle to serve youth in the same space as the elderly, poor, and homeless.

Yesterday I was sitting in the periodicals section of the Penrose Library at the University of Denver (Colorado). Sitting there, completing an online training for managing federal records, my eyes kept wandering to the brightly colored magazines surrounding me. My fingers were itching to touch the glossy cover of the news magazine from Africa, but then, looking around, I realized that every third magazine interested me enough to want to pick it up: Ms., Bitch, Natural History, Der Spiegel, Popular Mechanics, and so on. I think I heard a soft slurping sound as I stood up and was thoroughly sucked in by the collection.

I don't remember the last time I was in a browsing collection that was so simple and yet effective. Comfy chairs + visually engaging materials + display shelves = drawing in readers. In my four hours there, I did manage to complete my online training, but I also learned about the issues of air quality in Peking surrounding the Olympic games, as well as how Obama's trip last month to Berlin was organized.

And yet, despite the struggles that many colleges and universities are having with basic literacy, the libraries that I have been to lack the encouragement to read for pleasure and background understanding of larger issues. Sure, we're all too busy these days to take time out to read the paper. And sure, our budgets are being maimed by the lack of fiscal support for the public sector. But somehow, when the chair and the shelves are both at my fingertips, it seems a lot less daunting to squeeze it in, like a furtive cigarette between my classes and work.

In an educational institution, sometimes service doesn't mean just giving the patrons what they need for their classes, but rather giving them the room to grow beyond their current understanding of the materials.

Travel Destinations for Library Geeks: Philological Library, Free University of Berlin

What library nerd isn't going to swoon over a library designed to be shaped like a brain? Honestly, I was skeptical when I first visited the Philological Library in the southwestern corner of Berlin, Germany. I've seen too many architectural feats of design that were beautiful but entirely impractical for the reality of shelving books and accommodating patrons. But in this case I was pleasantly surprised by the success of form and function.

With the stacks resembling the lobes and the folds and the stem consisting of the central staircase, this language and philosophy library in the student union of the Free University, Berlin is a great example of modern architecture working as a modern library. The whole building is a solid investment in design, from the environmentally friendly heating/cooling to the passive lighting, from the staffing to the study areas. Despite the artistic bent of designing the building to look like a brain, the function of the library was clearly weighted equally in the design process. The whole library can be run in the evenings by one or two staff members. The bright (and warmer) upper levels offer a variety of study space, while the interiors of the lower levels house the books.


The attention to detail in the design and execution is carried out on the digital side of the equation as well. Searching the catalog yields your standard lists of books and resources, but also offers the user a floor plan of the library with the location of the book clearly marked. This sounds like an obvious innovation for an online library catalog, but has been terribly slow in being implemented in most libraries.