unshelved: imgagination?? maybe your imagination can double tap a word!!!

Raoul Dahl's Matilda Gets An e-Reader by Aaron Renier

And the music to go with it. Enjoy!

Read More

exams suck and i am nervous

I have an exam next week, the most dreaded part of my most dreaded course. This will be the first real exam I've taken since university, some 30 years ago. I had one exam last term, but it was open-notebook. This is closed book, part multiple-choice and part short-answer. It's 35% of my grade. And I am nervous.

I don't care about getting a good grade. My only goal is to pass. But I do have to pass.

I understand the concepts of the course - most of them, anyway - but I am worried about my recall. My crappy memory. My fuzzy brain. Like many people, I find it very difficult to absorb material that I'm not at all engaged with.

The whole thing just seems so stupid: trying to force this stuff into my brain so that I can regurgitate it to prove I've learned it. I'd much rather write a paper.

In addition, I'm nervous. That isn't helping!

Test-takers and test-givers, I have a strategy question for you, bearing in mind I'm aiming for a B-minus, the lowest possible passing grade. Of 10 course units, I have a decent grasp of eight and a poor grasp of two. Do I spend more time trying to get a better handle on the weakest two? Or should I focus on trying to do well on the less-shaky eight, and consider whatever I manage to recall on the troubling two a bonus?

Read More

gopnik: how the internet gets inside us and why this is really ok

This is a tangent to my previous post, but it deserves an entry of its own. I want to point out this excellent article by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker: "How the Internet gets inside us".

Gopnik reviews a pile of recent books about the internet and society, dividing them into three themes: technology is our saviour, technology is our demise, and technology has always been met with these same two responses. Gopnik calls them "the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers". It's a perceptive and entertaining assessment of how we conceive of technology in our lives.

Here are a few bits I especially enjoyed.

One of the things that John Brockman’s collection on the Internet and the mind illustrates is that when people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. Life was once whole, continuous, stable; now it is fragmented, multi-part, shimmering around us, unstable and impossible to fix. The world becomes Keats’s “waking dream,” as the writer Kevin Kelly puts it.

The odd thing is that this complaint, though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965. When department stores had Christmas windows with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart.

We must, at some level, need this to be true, since we think it’s true about so many different kinds of things. We experience this sense of fracture so deeply that we ascribe it to machines that, viewed with retrospective detachment, don’t seem remotely capable of producing it. If all you have is a hammer, the saying goes, everything looks like a nail; and, if you think the world is broken, every machine looks like the hammer that broke it.

It is an intuition of this kind that moves the final school, the Ever-Wasers, when they consider the new digital age. A sense of vertiginous overload is the central experience of modernity, they say; at every moment, machines make new circuits for connection and circulation, as obvious-seeming as the postage stamps that let eighteenth-century scientists collaborate by mail, or as newfangled as the Wi-Fi connection that lets a sixteen-year-old in New York consult a tutor in Bangalore. Our new confusion is just the same old confusion.

Naturally, I love this historical perspective. One of my minor academic triumphs in grad school has been a paper arguing that the print revolution of the 1600s was a greater communications shift - a more significant information explosion relative to what preceded it, and a more cataclysmic cultural shift by far - than the one we are living through now. (Thank you, Elizabeth Eisenstein!)

This bit on how our perception of television, relative to the internet, has changed made me chuckle. I loved Gopnik's resolution, suggesting we back away from all-or-nothing thinking and, if technology is bothering us, perhaps a few small changes are in order.

It is the wraparound presence, not the specific evils, of the machine that oppresses us. Simply reducing the machine’s presence will go a long way toward alleviating the disorder. Which points, in turn, to a dog-not-barking-in-the-nighttime detail that may be significant. In the Better-Never books, television isn’t scanted or ignored; it’s celebrated. When William Powers, in “Hamlet’s BlackBerry,” describes the deal his family makes to have an Unplugged Sunday, he tells us that the No Screens agreement doesn’t include television: “For us, television had always been a mostly communal experience, a way of coming together rather than pulling apart.” (“Can you please turn off your damn computer and come watch television with the rest of the family,” the dad now cries to the teen-ager.)

Yet everything that is said about the Internet’s destruction of “interiority” was said for decades about television, and just as loudly. Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” in the nineteen-seventies, turned on television’s addictive nature and its destruction of viewers’ inner lives; a little later, George Trow proposed that television produced the absence of context, the disintegration of the frame — the very things, in short, that the Internet is doing now. And Bill McKibben ended his book on television by comparing watching TV to watching ducks on a pond (advantage: ducks), in the same spirit in which Nicholas Carr leaves his computer screen to read “Walden.”

Now television is the harmless little fireplace over in the corner, where the family gathers to watch “Entourage.” TV isn’t just docile; it’s positively benevolent. This makes you think that what made television so evil back when it was evil was not its essence but its omnipresence. Once it is not everything, it can be merely something. The real demon in the machine is the tirelessness of the user. A meatless Monday has advantages over enforced vegetarianism, because it helps release the pressure on the food system without making undue demands on the eaters. In the same way, an unplugged Sunday is a better idea than turning off the Internet completely, since it demonstrates that we can get along just fine without the screens, if only for a day.

You can read the whole thing here. It's the same New Yorker issue with the much-talked about story about Paul Haggis and Scientology. I haven't read this one yet, but several people we know have recommended it and it sounds great. Why not thank a tree and print them both?

Read More

celebrating freedom to read week: liberate a challenged book!

This week is Freedom To Read Week, the Canadian cousin of the ALA's Banned Books Week. FTRW is sponsored by the Freedom of Expression Committee of the Book and Periodical Council. They say:

Freedom of expression is a fundamental right of all Canadians, and freedom to read is part of that precious heritage. Our Committee, representing member organizations and associations of the Book and Periodical Council, reaffirms its support of this vital principle and opposes all efforts to suppress writing and silence writers. Words and images in their myriad configurations are the substance of free expression.

The freedom to choose what we read does not, however, include the freedom to choose for others. We accept that courts alone have the authority to restrict reading material, a prerogative that cannot be delegated or appropriated. Prior restraint demeans individual responsibility; it is anathema to freedom and democracy.

As writers, editors, publishers, book manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and librarians, we abhor arbitrary interpretations of the law and other attempts to limit freedom of expression. We recognize court judgments; otherwise, we oppose the detention, seizure, destruction, or banning of books and periodicals – indeed, any effort to deny, repress, or sanitize. Censorship does not protect society; it smothers creativity and precludes open debate of controversial issues.

This year, FTRW has teamed up with BookCrossing to create Free A Challenged Book.

I hope you're familiar with BookCrossing, the amazing website that helps you share books and connect with book lovers all over the world. If you don't, please go here and read about it right now!

Free A Challenged Book is a special kind of BookCrossing.

Most Canadians probably don't even realize that on their own shelves sit challenged books. During Freedom to Read Week, your mission is to release challenged books all across Canada — on park benches, in coffee shops and in schools — as a way to mimic how challenged books are passed around, and to spread the word about challenged and banned books in Canada.

The Freedom of Expression Committee invites you to find a title you care about from our list of challenged literature and release it into your community. Perhaps your book will be picked up by someone in your community or maybe even by a foreign exchange student who will release it in another country — that's the beauty of this project and our hope for your freed book.

Interested? Here's how to get started...

1. Find a title from your own bookshelf that appears on our list of Challenged Books.

Here are just a few examples of books that have been challenged in Canada:
* Margaret Laurence, The Diviners
* J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
* Rosamund Elwin, Asha's Mums
* Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
* Elizabeth Laird, A Little Piece of Ground
* Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
* John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
* Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
* J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter
* Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
* Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
* more books...

2. Tag it with our handy book label.

3. Follow the link to BookCrossing.com and register the book.

4. Release the book into your community.

5. Log on to the BookCrossing website often to see who finds your book and what they think about freedom of expression.

More about my own Freedom To Read Week soon.

Read More

but there is some good news: becoming a librarian update

Despite my complaints, there is some good news. Nothing solid like a job offer - too early for that - but hope is beginning to take shape on three different fronts.

Volunteering. At the iSchool, we are absolutely inundated with opportunities to be more active in the library and information science community. Talks, conferences, networking opportunities, volunteering needs - our in-boxes are flooded on a regular basis. At first this used to add to the pressures I felt during my first term, but I learned to quickly scroll through the emails, then hit delete.

However, graduates are expected to have participated in some extracurricular activities. Library students are especially expected to go beyond, at least a bit. I don't think anyone expects our resumes to be laden with organizations and activities, but on the other hand, not having any would be a deficiency. I feel like I can't afford to have anything working against me - I'm not going through all this to lose out on a potential job because I didn't dig deeper.

Given how I feel about my time and my schedule, you can imagine how much I look forward to this! Because I'm attending school part-time, I've been able to put it off. Full-time students have only two years to touch all the bases; I have four. But now it's become time for me to keep an eye open for some volunteer opportunities. Anything I do must be both relevant and interesting to me, and work with my schedule. No small order! So when I received an email that had potential, I jumped on it.

A community centre in Toronto needs volunteers to read to children in their after-school program, and to generally maintain their small children's library. They ask for only one three-hour day per week - a minor time commitment compared to most things I do.

Inquiring further, I learned that there's a great need for volunteers after school ends, but before they break for summer - perfect for me. And they're in easy walking distance of my war resister meetings. So during May and June, before my Wednesday night meetings, I'm going to do this. I'm actually looking forward to it!

I also joined a children-and-youth library group, and although I haven't participated at all yet, perhaps I can write about this experience for the group blog - potentially interesting to me, and a useful resume-building activity. So expect to read about this in May and June.

Working in a library. When I started school, I was hoping and expecting to get a job as a page - shelving books - in the Mississauga Library System. This would give me access to internal job postings, plus bring in a bit of much-needed income. But my library school career coincided with the closures for renovation of five branch libraries, which had to be done simultaneously in order to qualify for federal stimulus money. So the whole system compressed, and hiring froze.

Now the first renovated branch has reopened, and the rest are slated to reopen soon. It will still be a while until a job opens up, but several librarians have told me there is movement on this front.

In one sense I dread this, as it seems that the only way I can squeeze in a part-time job is to give up my activism for a while. But it's important, and I need it; if there's an opportunity, I have to take it.

Career prospects. Several people at school have implied that not having library experience will be a gaping hole in my resume - that despite 20+ years of work experience, great skills and a degree, I may not make the cut because my past experience is not library-oriented. This is not a part-time job shelving books, but people who have made a career in libraries, working their way up through a library system, eventually hitting a ceiling, then returning to school for their Master's degree, and now moving into the professional level.

In January, I had a networking and informational interview with a librarian very high in the Mississauga Library food chain. Her response to this concern: absolutely not. She said, point blank, that I "should not hesitate" to apply for professional-level jobs upon graduation. Working one's way up through a library system is one path, but it's not the only one. In her mind, it's not required or necessarily preferred: it depends on the person and her or his skills. She was very encouraging that my life-work experience plus my degree would be considered a solid background, and that - at least in her mind - I would not be considered deficient because my career path hadn't run through the library. This was a great relief!

Along with the volunteer opportunities I mentioned above, iSchool students are bombarded with networking opportunities. I never attend. Most of them don't apply to the work I want to do, plus I am useless in those forced networking situations. I grow tongue-tied and shy. But one-on-one, although I do get a bit self-conscious, I am much more at ease. And since I know exactly where and how I want to start my library career, it seems much more fruitful for me to simply meet people in the Mississauga system - to let them know I'm here, and to periodically remind them I'm still here.

Read More

we like lists: top five reasons i hate grad school

A new list thread is coming soon, but first I must use my poor, neglected blog to complain about why my blog is neglected. This is not a participatory list - it's an extended whine.

I am very glad I am on the road to making a career change, and very hopeful about my prospective new career. I'm super excited about becoming a librarian. So far, my library-specific courses have been extremely interesting; the one I'm taking now - Intro to Reference - I love.

But being in school sucks. Here's why.

1. I hate always having to read for school rather than what I choose to read. Even if I have a bit of time in which I could be reading something for myself, I don't - the need to read for school is too pressing, plus my mind is so crowded and over-stimulated, pleasure reading isn't even pleasurable.

2. I hate not having adequate time to blog. Other than papers for school, blogging is my only writing outlet. I need it. I don't have enough of it.

3. My schedule is too tight. There is no give. Yesterday I had a hair salon appointment and a couple of errands to run, and that put me behind schedule. Without a partner who does most of the housework and errands, I don't know what I would do.

4. I resent having to take required courses that are either redundant or well outside my career goals.

Everyone at the iSchool - whether library, archives, knowledge management, whatever - takes four general courses on "information and society". There is widespread agreement among students that these could be condensed into two courses or even one. Contemplating the big picture is useful, but there are easily a dozen library-specific electives that I'd rather take, that would be much more useful to me, and that I won't be able to fit in.

This term I am slogging through the dreaded "Research Methods," which is intended for students going on for their doctorates, yet required for all. The school pushes students to get their PhDs; I've heard that's how funding is determined, and although I don't know if that's true, it would explain a lot.

Instead of this suffering through this class that I'll never use, I could be learning more about becoming a librarian.

5. I hate having to be so disciplined. I have to say no to so many things I'd like to do. I have to go to sleep at a certain time to be alert enough for morning classes. I have to swim on the only days I have available, and if I don't, there goes my exercise for the week. And so on. I've always been a disciplined person - writing while having a series of day-jobs demands it, and my health issues add to that need. But working, going to school, being an activist, and taking care of myself, which includes getting some exercise and having some down time, requires more discipline than I really want to bother with.

* * * *

By now I recognize the pattern: I write posts like this in November and March. This is a bit early, but blame that on Research Methods.

I keep Impudent Strumpet's comment on the wall next to my desk:

It's March. You're in university. Of course you're a mess. You're going to be a mess for a month and then emerge, blinking and befuddled, somehow having completed all your coursework, into a beautiful spring where you'll watch baseball and blog as much as you want.

My term ends a week later this year, so I'll be watching baseball while writing papers and studying for a final. But here's to April, it can't come fast enough.

Read More

save our libraries day in the u.k.

Yesterday was Save Our Libraries Day in the UK: a massive national call to action to protest government austerity plans calling for the closure of 450 libraries, by demonstrating how much libraries mean to their communities.

The Guardian live-blogged the event, and has this interactive map of the UK showing where protests were held. There were read-ins, author appearances, massive book-borrowing, pickets, letter-writing campaigns, and all manner of creative protests.

These closures will devastate communities, while the crooks who caused the financial crisis continue to give themselves seven-digit bonuses.

Read More

egyptian youth protect their library (updated with video)

From Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new Library of Alexandria.

To our friends around the world: The Events in Egypt
30 Jan 2011

The world has witnessed an unprecedented popular action in the streets of Egypt. Led by Egypt’s youth, with their justified demands for more freedom, more democracy, lower prices for necessities and more employment opportunities. These youths demanded immediate and far-reaching changes. This was met by violent conflicts with the police, who were routed. The army was called in and was welcomed by the demonstrators, but initially their presence was more symbolic than active. Events deteriorated as lawless bands of thugs, and maybe agents provocateurs, appeared and looting began. The young people organized themselves into groups that directed traffic, protected neighborhoods and guarded public buildings of value such as the Egyptian Museum and the Library of Alexandria. They are collaborating with the army. This makeshift arrangement is in place until full public order returns.

The library is safe thanks to Egypt’s youth, whether they be the staff of the Library or the representatives of the demonstrators, who are joining us in guarding the building from potential vandals and looters. I am there daily within the bounds of the curfew hours. However, the Library will be closed to the public for the next few days until the curfew is lifted and events unfold towards an end to the lawlessness and a move towards the resolution of the political issues that triggered the demonstrations.

Ismail Serageldin
Librarian of Alexandria
Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Many thanks to David Heap for tagging me on this!

Update! Beautiful video of people committed to keeping their library safe.

Read More

webcam: living in the library, dreaming of a more just world

Remember those crazy Canadian kids, living in the library? Well, they're living the DREAM: they've set up shop, and you can watch them here, and they're blogging here.

More on DREAM here.

Read More

how to save the public library (a fry truck experience)

I have two papers due on the same day, and one of them is the most dreaded assignment for the most dreaded class of my entire degree. At least that will soon be over with! Unfortunately, though, this leaves me with little brain or time to blog.

I will use this as an opportunity to post one of my papers. The last time I posted a paper, it sparked some interesting discussion. At the very least, this will help me feel like my blog is not a total waste of pixels. Plus, this paper earned me fries! I got them yesterday. They were just the way I like them: super well-done, crispy.

This was my final paper for the course Foundations of Library and Information Science. From a choice of topics I chose this:

Select one type of library or information centre. Discuss the most serious challenges facing that institution today, paying particular attention to its foundational values, principles and assumptions. What kinds of activities (research, services, education, staffing, funding, etc) might turn these challenges into opportunities?

I've removed the citations or turned them into links where possible.

* * * *

Privatization, Digitization, and How the Public Library Can Survive:
the Four Rs

The most serious challenges facing the public library today are unchecked capitalism, the disintermediation brought by digital technologies, and the intersection of the two. This paper explores the present and potential effects of those challenges on the health and future of public libraries in North America. With a nod to the Canadian Library Association's President’s Council on the 8Rs, this paper proposes the 4Rs needed to turn these challenges into opportunities: relevancy, reinvention, raising awareness, and resistance.

The dominant economic model and social spending priorities

When discussing the challenges facing public libraries, funding generally tops the list. Funding, however, is a symptom of an underlying disease. First-world societies around the globe are suffering through drastic cutbacks of public-sector spending. In the United Kingdom, 500,000 workers will be jettisoned from public payrolls in the next four years. Widespread library closures are expected; as many as one out of every four librarians may lose her job over the next year. In the United States, cities and states cannot afford adequate public services; public libraries have resorted to charging fees, reducing hours and closing branches to survive. Although the situation is Canada is not as dire, Canadian municipalities have never recovered from the spending cuts of earlier decades. At the same time, in 2010 U.S. businesses earned profits at the highest rate since statistics have been kept, totaling $1.66 trillion in the third quarter alone. The tax structure ensures that the public coffers enjoy no corresponding rise in wealth, and a full 54% of the U.S. federal budget feeds a military-industrial complex that is largely privatized. Viewed through this lens, the public library suffers not from a mere lack of funds, but from an economic system that privileges private-sector profit over public welfare.

Digitization leading to a perception of obsolescence

The public library is also challenged by digitization and the disintermediation of the internet. In information school classes, professional journals and library blogs, one constantly encounters the question, "Can Google replace the library?". Titles such as "Where is the librarian in the digital library?" and "Competing with Google in a special library" abound. While many professions grapple with the encroachment of technology on jobs once thought to be immune to automation, librarians are unusual in the persistent gap between the librarian's understanding of her job and the public's understanding of it. Class discussions and student field reports demonstrate that library users underestimate and under-value the work of librarians, observations supported by research. While citizens may research medical or legal questions online, they still see a doctor when they are ill or hire a lawyer to represent them in court. After gathering information online, how many people consult a librarian? Indeed, our profession's core values may unintentionally contribute to our own demise, as we encourage independent information-seeking.

The perception that the internet has rendered librarians obsolete creates an easy, if mistaken, budget solution: their expensive professional salaries become a logical target for the budget axe. Without professional staff, the library becomes a mere book repository run by clerks. In several U.S. cities, human interaction has been eliminated entirely with the introduction of automated "book lockers," which resemble vending machines. The demise of the public library speaks to issues much larger than protecting our profession; it widens the digital divide. Many people depend upon the library for both computer use and internet access. Inadequate funding decreases public access to education and information – an injustice to the community, and a danger to democratic values. If we want a society that values education, inquiry, self-government and freedom of information for all citizens, regardless of socioeconomic status, then we must protect the public library as an essential service.

Four Rs: relevancy, reinvention, raising awareness, resistance

Public libraries can address this challenge with a four-pronged approach:
* relevancy – stay relevant to the community,
* reinvention – make the library an indispensable community centre,
* raising awareness – promote the reinvented library, and
* resistance – fight for a society that values public services.

Relevancy. If libraries are to continue to receive public funding, they must remain relevant to the communities they serve – a seemingly simple statement, but a complex, controversial, and sometimes contradictory mandate. Relevancy may focus on collection development, with a robust collection of popular novels and movies. Or relevancy may be framed in educational terms: Baldwin feels the "'give 'em what they want' philosophy" is a dangerous mistake, and proposes librarians become "knowledge provocateurs," helping users access "real information" through alternate news sources. For Birdi, Wilson and Tso, relevancy presupposes empathy – the human touch that distinguishes the library from an internet search engine. Not only will relevancy be defined differently by different libraries, that definition should evolve with each community's needs. Relevancy should be an ongoing conversation – a process more than a product – that includes input from users, gathered through surveys, usage tracking, focus groups, and other methods. In an era when the need for the public library is being questioned, librarians cannot afford to ignore or dismiss this discussion.

Reinvention. This paper proposes that the best way for libraries to remain relevant is to reinvent themselves as community centres – a one-stop shop, so to speak, for a variety of services tailored to the needs of its community. Free computer classes, high-speed internet access, resume workshops, education and career research, and space for book clubs are only a few obvious possibilities. McKenzie et. al study libraries that offer storytime for parents and toddlers, and a meeting space for a knitting group. Fisher, Durrance and Hinton describe the rich programs of New York City's Queens Borough Public Library (QBPL), aimed at the borough’s burgeoning and diverse immigrant population. The QBPL's workshops in language, literacy, employment, and cultural understanding offer tremendous potential for users, and position the library as an indispensable resource. In the Mississauga Library System, users can join an English conversation circle, research their ancestry, or borrow a pedometer as part of a program to encourage physical activity. The possibilities are limited only by imagination and budget, and creative programming may result in increased funding.

Raising awareness. Programs are useless if people don't know they exist. Libraries must exploit every means available to promote their programs – social networking media, community newspapers, outdoor signage, email alerts, public school visits, brochures. The QBPL, for example, distributes millions of multilingual brochures annually and taps into ethnic media outlets. We must be alert to new and creative ways to trumpet our services and present libraries as the essential service we believe they are. Combining the first three Rs – reinventing the public library as a community centre with an emphasis on relevancy, then promoting those programs in the community – will ultimately translate into more library users. More users help justify continued funding.

Resistance. The final "R" in the 4R plan is resistance, used in the political sense: actively opposing government policies that destroy public services. Rather than see ourselves in competition with other public-sector employees for a slice of a shrinking public-sector pie, we should strive to make a larger pie. Author Philip Pullman made this connection when speaking out against the massive cuts to library services announced in the U.K.:

Those who think that every expert can be replaced by a cheerful volunteer who can step in and do a complex task for nothing but a cup of tea are those who fundamentally want to see every single public service sold off, closed down, abolished. . . . [T]he delusion that has gripped every politician in the western world for 30 years or so now is that when you lower taxes, the commercial world will take care of everything. The destruction of the library service is part of a wider malaise.

This activism can take many forms – lobbying the government, working to elect representatives committed to the public sector, writing letters to newspapers, blogging, leafletting. Resistance should especially include supporting other municipal workers in their struggles – teachers, transit workers, nurses, sanitation workers. We must look beyond the issues of our own profession, and help create a society that is willing to support public services. If we want a world that values public libraries, we have to create it.

Conclusion

While it may appear that the greatest challenge facing public libraries today is a shortage of resources, the developed world has sufficient wealth to maintain stellar libraries. However, the dominant economic system impedes the adequate funding of libraries and other essential public services. If libraries are to survive and thrive, librarians must keep libraries relevant and must raise awareness of library programs within their communities. This paper proposes a reinvention of the public library as a multifaceted community centre. From a broader perspective, librarians must join the struggle to create a society that values and maintains healthy public services.

[references not linked above]

Abram, S. (2005). Competing with Google in a special library. Information Outlook, 9(11), 46-47.

Baldwin, M. (2006). Librarians as knowledge provocateurs. Verso, 11(4), 11-14.

Birdi, B., Wilson, K., & Tso, H. M. (2009). The nature and role of empathy in public librarianship. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 41(2), 81-89.

Borgman, C. (2001). Where is the librarian in the digital library? Communications of the ACH, 44(5), 66-67.

Fisher, K., Durrance, J., & Hinton, M. (2004). Information grounds and the use of need-based services by immigrants in Queens, New York: A context based, outcome evaluation approach. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(8), 754-66.

Harris, R. (2008). Their little bit of ground slowly squashed into nothing: Technology, gender, and the vanishing librarian. In G. J. Leckie & J. E. Buschman (Ed.), Information Technology in Librarianship: New Critical Approaches. (pp. 165-180). Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

McKenzie, P., Prigoda, E., Moffatt, K., & McKechnie, L. (2006). Behind the program-room door: The creation of parochial and private women’s realms in a Canadian public library. In J. E. Buschman & G. J. Leckie (Eds). The Library as place: History, community, and culture (pp. 117-134). Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Read More

resistance is not futile: resistance is everything

I think a lot about resistance: about what it means when ordinary people refuse to yield to powers much stronger than themselves. I've been thinking of the many forms acts of resistance can take, why people resist, what it means.

Last summer in Toronto, groups of people walked the streets of their city to show that they could, to defy the sudden existence of martial law that claimed they couldn't.

All over the UK, students are in the streets and occupying buildings, resisting massive cuts to education funding. The situation in the UK and throughout Europe is very dire - but the people whose system caused the pain are not suffering. A friend who lives in London and I were emailing recently, and she summed it up this way:

...they are closing libraries, cutting everything, raising university tuition fees by 200% and sales tax is now 20%! Bankers are getting huge bonuses still. We work with quite a few financial services firms and it's like they are living in a different universe. Although of course they are taking the opportunity to lay off as many as they can as well even though they are continuing to make huge profits. Barclays doesn't serve tea anymore at meetings to 'cut back'.

Some of my friend's British compatriots are employing a brilliantly creative strategy of resistance to library closures. (Many thanks to Deang for sending this story.)

A town has emptied its library in a bid to fight plans to close it down.

People in Stony Stratford, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, have spent the week withdrawing their maximum allowance of books in protest against council plans to close it as part of budget cuts.

And today they said the plan had been a success, with all 16,000 books withdrawn from the library.

Today, as they celebrated the empty shelves, Emily Malleson from Friends of Stony Stratford Library (FOSSL) said they were amazed at how everyone in the town had pulled together.

She said it was calculated that books were being checked out at a rate of around 378 per hour - smashing the usual rates.

"A local resident mentioned the idea, maybe as a bit of a joke, but we thought it was a great idea so we put it to FOSSL," she said.

"I went home, put it on Facebook and emailed everyone I could think of and it's just gone absolutely mad."

They planned to start the campaign on Wednesday, but keen supporters of the library started taking books out the week before.

And in just over a week, the shelves were emptied, with the final books withdrawn yesterday.

"People were going in last night to get books and there weren't any left, "she said.

"I think it's a very simple but clever idea and it's given something that people can act on and make their voice heard.

I love this for so many reasons: how this town values and protects its library, how people united can fight back, how a few organizers with a good idea can spark rebellion. I also love the story because it's about reading as resistance.

Reading has been used as act of political resistance through the ages. Countless books and movies depicting ordinary people struggling against totalitarianism will bring you to hidden books, an echo of children secretly reading books forbidden by their authoritarian schoolmasters, now with potentially fatal consequences.

I recently saw this connection in two differnt novels. (Still in the works: a winter-break "what i'm reading" post.) In The Chosen One, an excellent young-adult novel by Carol Lynch Williams, a young person's resistance to her parents' oppressive religion - and a forced marriage to a man four times her age - begins with reading. Her rebellion begins in the library, until the library becomes - literally - her means of escape.

In Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, after a man risks his life to save a Jewish boy, they read together, working their way through the man's vast library, the education of that boy becoming an ongoing act of resistance.

Reading as resistance isn't about beating the enemy: it's about maintaining some human dignity, stubbornly clinging to a shred of one's own humanity. That has been the case for all the subjugated peoples of the world who have refused to speak the language of their oppressors. At least in private, and often at great cost, people the world over will insist on speaking the language of their own people. It's a way of saying: we still exist.

Also in Fugitive Pieces, a shopkeeper in the Nazi-occupied Greek village hides oranges, saving the scarce fruit - and their desperately-needed nutrition - for the neediest families. The shopkeeper could be killed on the spot: hiding an orange as an act of courageous resistance.

Food can become an instrument of resistance. The movie "Hunger" depicts the refusal of food as the ultimate resistance: the 1981 IRA hunger strike, led by Bobby Sands in 66 days of self-inflicted torture. First we see an earlier form of protest, as the political prisoners in Northern Ireland refuse to wash or change their clothes, covering the walls of their cells in their own excrement, making their captors' jobs as disgusting and difficult as possible.

When the guards haul off the men for forced bathing - heavy accent on forced - the prisoners lash out with feet and fists and teeth, individual naked men fighting back against a small army decked out in face shields and batons. It's a stunning scene. I thought: this is what resistance means. Never going quietly. Never being docile. Fighting every inch of the way. Resistance means: we will not go quietly.

Michael Fassbender's harrowing, incredible performance as Sands causes you to question the very nature of human survival and sacrifice. Watching the effects of starvation on the human body and brain, you wonder, how could a human being choose this? Where do they find the strength? Inevitably, even a believer like me may be led to ask, what good does this do?

Then in the postscript you learn that 10 more men made the same choice - that the prison ultimately met all their demands - that during the hunger strike, Bobby Sands was elected to Parliament, opening the door for political recognition of Sinn Fein.

And suddenly the movie's title isn't about the needs of the body: it's about the human hunger for freedom.

Read More

in which i purposely try to get a lower grade, or how to succeed in graduate school without really trying

When I started graduate school in September of 2009, I approached it the same way I had approached my undergraduate studies. I intended to do all the work, and do it well, and on time. I assumed this was possible. And I almost drowned.

I was absolutely miserable. There was so much reading, and much of it was impenetrable academic gobbledygook. My experience in university was completely irrelevant. In those days, I was young, I had a lot more energy, and school was my full-time job. Now school is only one of the many hats I wear, I have a lot less energy, and I quite literally have fewer working hours in each day, as my health demands I get adequate rest. For a while there, I thought I might not be able to do it. I thought I might quit.

But as the weeks of the first term went by, I learned to do more with less. As my friend AWE, who went to law school in her late 30s, said, instead of working harder, I worked smarter. And the less work I did, the better my grades were. (How far can I push this trend? If I do no work at all, will I ace everything?)

Eventually I came to realize two things. One, what matters is understanding the concepts, not reading every word of every article assigned. And two, my grades don't matter. I only have to get the degree.

From that point on, my approach has been this: attend class, be attentive and participate, and when it's time to do assignments, figure out the minimum reading I need, and get the assignment done. And that's it. Much of the assigned reading has improved, too - more relevancy, more readable writing - so that helps. But regardless, this is my method. So far I've gotten As in every class, with one A-minus.

Eventually I'll have to participate in some extra-curricular projects and get a part-time library job (more on those in a future post), so not getting bogged down in useless academic reading will be even more important.

But it's one thing to say I don't care about grades. Actually not caring is another thing entirely. Grades are the only reward system we have in school. And getting good grades was one of the few things I was praised for through my whole young life. Other non-athletic, slightly misfit people may recognize this syndrome. I did eventually find a niche, eventually I had friends, and I did come to see myself as a leader of sorts. But long before any of that happened, I was a brainy kid, and that's all I had - and that is reflected in grades, and only grades.

All through school until high school graduation, I got excellent grades without effort. In university, I had to apply myself, and I learned how to do that, because I wanted to get good grades. (Also because I recognized I was being given a great opportunity, and I wanted to take advantage of it.)

In high school, when I wasn't naturally adept in a subject - when math was no longer simple - I was not encouraged to work harder: I was advised to take easier classes! I was told, "You'll never use this stuff, so don't sweat it." And off I went into below-average math and science classes, because the only thing that mattered was Getting Good Grades.

When something is this deeply embedded, it's not easy to simply not care.

* * * *

Last term was a great example of this. For my management class, I wrote a paper on disability diversity in the workplace. It was a very strong paper, and I was fairly certain it would earn an A-minus. But I also recognized its weakness, and I saw where it could be improved. That would have involved a lot more work: first more research, then extracting what I needed from that research, cutting part of the paper to create space for the new information, and re-knitting the whole thing back together. Was I willing to do that just to bring my expected grade from an A-minus to an A?

No, I was not. Allan and I talked it over - a lot - and I forced myself to stop working on the paper. It was difficult! I like my work to sparkle. But I reminded myself: it is one paper in one class. In the long run, it means nothing. And the difference between the A and A-minus means less than nothing. I turned it in without the improvement - and I got an A.

* * * *

This term I'm taking two required classes, one highly relevant, interesting and necessary to my future librarianship practice, the other exactly the opposite, or so it seems.

Intro to Reference touches on the very heart of librarianship. Reference is the mediation between the library's resources and library users. It is everything from "Can you recommend a good book?" to "I have a term paper to write and don't know where to start," to "I need information on...". It requires fully understanding what the library has to offer, being able to help people feel comfortable asking for help,  knowing how to discover people's information needs, and helping them feel good about the library. (I get really excited about this!)

My professor is terrific - tremendously knowledgeable, brimming with enthusiasm, and meticulously organized. Rather than assigning a mountain of reading of questionable potential, she has assigned a carefully selected, manageable reading list. Readings I actually might want to do.

My other class, Research Methods, is the class I have been most dreading. It's designed mainly for students intending to (or considering) writing a thesis or getting a PhD. Neither applies to me, but it is required nonetheless - which I resent. Today, in our first class, the teacher took pains to explain why, even if we are not intending to do our own academic research, this class may be useful to us. I'm skeptical. But the good news is, she seems excellent, and the class may be more interesting - at least not nearly as dreadful - as I thought.

But. Here's the but. Research Methods could be fine, if I stick to my approach: go to class, be attentive, do as well on the assignments as I can, and resist the urge to always submit stellar work. But in this course, if I apply Laura's Method of Minimal Work, I am unlikely to do A-level work.

Can I live with that? I want to be able to live with it. I am really going to try.

Read More

what i'm reading: apex hides the hurt

I'll probably write a combined "what i'm reading" post for everything I read on my winter break. But right now I'm reading a novel I love so much, that I just couldn't wait to tell you about it: Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead.

I don't want to give too much plot away, because I love the way the novel unfolds, but here's enough to go on. A "nomenclature consultant" is hired to help a town re-name itself. This is a man who dreams up the names that brand our world - the popular pharmaceuticals, the cell phones, the toothpaste, household cleaners and video game systems. Now he's going to judge which name best suits an old town with a new look - new money and new computer-related jobs.

But the town already has a name. Gentrification and job growth are important, but what about tradition? Which leads to the question... whose tradition? Turns out, the town's current and historic name was itself a re-naming, not unlike "America" or the "West Indies". History is written by the conquerors - and the definition of "traditional" depends on where we start.

History, race, class, advertising, language, and consumer culture converge. Yet somehow this all happens in a slim, wryly funny, wonderfully readable, little miracle of a book. I am fascinated by - and so envious of - how certain writers can do so much in so little, layers of meaning packed into so few words.

Apex Hides the Hurt skewers marketing, advertising, and contemporary consumer culture. It's a commentary on the pervasiveness of marketing in our lives, and how marketing reduces everything to its demographic parts. It's about language, and how language is exploited to sell - products, ideas, people, history, anything.

The novel also plays with the contemporary penchant (or obsession) for naming every phenomena of the world around us, the kind that Urban Dictionary collects, but perhaps with a biblical reference, as a man continues to name the animals.

What do you call that terrible length of time between when you see that your food is ready and when your waitress drags her ass over to your table with it? He saw Regina emerge from the back of the restaurant. His eyes zipped to the plate sitting on the kitchen ledge. Tantalasia. Rather broad applications, Tantalasia, apart form the food thing. An emotional state, that muted area between desire and consummation. A literal territory, some patch of unnamed broken gravel between places on a map.

Apex Hides the Hurt even contains a wry send-up of libraries and librarians. A town librarian has written the official history of the town.

Winning over the town librarian for sympathetic press wasn't too much of a task, he figured. A set of leatherbound Shakespeare would do it.

Later, the narrator tries to visit the town library, only to find it has been displaced by a big-box clothing chain, a fictional version of Old Navy.

On the rare occasions that he entered libraries, he always felt assured of his virtue. If they figured out how to distill essence of library into a convenient delivery system - a piece of gum or a gelcap, for example - he would consume it eagerly, relieved to be finished with more taxing methods of virtue gratification. Helping little old ladies across the street. Giving tourists directions. Libraries. Alas there would be no warm feelings of satisfaction today. The place was a husk. The books were gone. Where he would usually be intimidated by an army of daunting spines, there were only dust-ball rinds and Dewey decimal grave markers.

Whitehead writes the hipster librarian with a perfect eye for detail. As she chats with the nomenclature consultant, he thinks, "Slimpies: Ready-to-Wear Shrugs for When You Just Don't Have It in You."

* * * *

Before the digital era and the explosion of activist creativity, before YouTube and viral marketing - and before the shelf life of taglines had been reduced to nanoseconds - there were some standard activist slogans you'd always see. The same dozen sayings would emblazon the t-shirts, bumper stickers and postcards sold at demos and folk music festivals. "I long for the day schools have a surplus and the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale" and "Why doesn't Crayola's flesh-coloured crayon come in 52 shades?". In those days, there was something called a "flesh-coloured" crayon, a pinkish-beige hue.

Now we live in an era where flesh-coloured crayons come in many shades. Our TV screens are populated by people of all colours. But is that multiculturalism promoting equality, empathy and understanding among all people? Or is the appearance of diversity merely a tool used to induce more people to buy more products? This is a central question of Apex Hides the Hurt. It's about, among other things, what I wrote about here: "you can't find inner peace in a bottle (of iced tea)".

With this brilliant little book, Colson Whitehead becomes one of My Favourite Writers.

* * * *

I've also read Whitehead's wonderful, unusual debut novel The Intuitionist, in which ideas about race and how we perceive the world converge and double-back on themselves in a world of skyscrapers and elevator inspectors. Whitehead is also the author of some of the greatest words ever written about New York City, a collection called The Colossus of New York, the cultural grandchild of E. B. White's classic Here Is New York.

I blogged about Colson Whitehead after a terrific essay of his ran in the New York Times: "I write in Brooklyn. Get over it." And I included him in a trio of Great Writers on the Great City: please go here and especially here. (New York City fans: click on that last link.)

I have not read his novels John Henry Days (2001, shortlisted for Pulitzer Prize) or Sag Harbor (2009), but I will.

Read More

in which i successfully clear another hurdle

Another term down! That's three down, five to go - or six of 16 classes completed. I just submitted a totally rockin' final paper. I am tired but happy!

Winter break begins right now. Last year I had four weeks of break, but this year only three. On the other hand, Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year's Day all fall on the weekend, so it will be a true vacation.

There's the possibility of some very well-paid overtime from my weekend job during my break. We really need the money, so if I'm offered it, I must say yes. But I dread the thought of spending any of my precious time-off working. I'm both hoping I get called and hoping I don't.

Read More

building a dream: living in the library to foster global literacy

Remember when you were in university, and exam time would roll around, and you felt like you lived in the library?

Or if you were a book-loving kid, as I was, and the library was your sanctuary? Did you ever wish you could live there?

In January, students at nine Canadian universities will be doing just that: living in the library. Through Live-in For Literacy, they'll be focusing attention and raising funds for a global literacy project, DREAM: Discover the Reality of Educating All Minds.

In university libraries from coast to coast, two students will camp out for one week - eating, sleeping and living in the library. For each hour they live in the library, the students earn five minutes of break time, which they can accumulate and use for washroom breaks. Other than that, they're there 24/7.

The current Live-in For Literacy takes place from January 27 to Feb 3, 2011, and will be broadcast by webcam.

Calvin Santiago is the coordinator of the University of Toronto initiative. Calvin writes:

As university students, we already have a deep, personal understanding of the challenges against access to education. Most of us are privileged to have grown up in Canada where access to primary and secondary education is relatively easy and hassle-free.

Upon entering post-secondary education however, many of us are suddenly faced with overwhelming financial barriers and sadly for many prospective students, these challenges prove to be insurmountable and they get left behind. While we understand that we as university students ourselves can’t solve everything, we also know that every little bit helps.

Now imagine living in a world where even access to primary education – arguably the most important stage in a child’s education – is faced with financial barriers. It has been shown time and time again that education is a strong social determinant of health where the higher the level of education you’ve attained equates to how healthy you are. Imagine again living in a community ravaged by poverty where the most basic of human needs of food, water and shelter are compromised. Similar to education, poverty is also a strong determinant of health where essentially the richer you are, the healthier you will be.

The DREAM project seeks to alleviate some of these harsh financial burdens in the communities of developing countries. Standing for "Discover the Reality of Educating All Minds," DREAM has focused on raising money to build educational facilities through its partner organization, Room to Read. Since its inception five years ago, we have raised over $70,000 to build new school libraries in Nepal and India as well as a computer lab in Cambodia. Since then we have expanded to seven university campus and our goal this year is to raise $20,000 for two purposes: to build another library in India and to support publishing of 10,000 children’s books by local authors.

I love this:

While we understand that we as university students ourselves can’t solve everything, we also know that every little bit helps.

It's the perfect activist attitude. And while many of us want to create a world without these gross inequalities and injustices, children right now, today, need access to education. Calvin:

Our first goal will target the problem of access to education by enriching a community with a library and allowing school children to explore and discover the world found within a few pages of a book. We are particularly excited about the latter goal as this will hopefully give a much needed economic boost to an impoverished community. Our hope is that this will have lingering beneficial effects on the community rather than a simple band-aid solution that is seen in so many other initiatives.

Besides people who want to live in the library, Live-in for Literacy needs local businesses to give in-kind donations or gift cards, used for raffle prizes.

Live-in for Literacy will take place on these Canadian campuses: Simon Fraser, McMaster, Memorial, Queen's, University of British Columbia, University of Ottawa, University of Toronto (Mississauga), University of Toronto (St. George), York, Concordia. For more information: Live-in For Literacy, Queen's DREAM, Room to Read.

Read More

personal update of the better variety

Updates, we have updates.

I am better! I feel like myself again. Myself before I fell off the cliff last week - the almost-50, fibromyalgia version of myself. My brain functioning has returned to its usual suboptimal level, and my energy is back. Whew. Huge whew.

The pain and tenderness level, on the other hand, is monstrous. My nerve endings must be going berserk. So that sucks, but it's much easier to live with pain than with pain plus fatigue and brain fog.

Remember when I identified the single greatest challenge of my grad school experience?

Well, yesterday I emailed redsock from class to announce an unexpectedly kick-ass grade. His reply: FRY TRUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I had forgotten all about the A+ rule! I owe myself some fries!

This week I was alerted that some anti-choicers would be demonstrating outside Robarts, the main library at the University of Toronto. As it happened, I had a class right next door the same day. I drove in early and joined the counter-demo for a couple of hours.

The pro-choicers were a mix of my activist friends and some university women who I didn't know. It was a brilliantly sunny, brisk day, and we handed out pamphlets and buttons, and (at least while I was there) outnumbered the fetus lovers three-to-one.

I felt so strongly in my element. I'm appalled to see this fight in Canada, but if I have to, I will throw my whole body and soul into the battle. I don't believe that will be necessary, but this minority has hijacked the majority on so many issues. It could happen.

Movie Season update! I liked both Crazy Heart and It's Complicated very much. I had some issues with the last parts of both those movies, but in general they were both quite good. I loved Broken Embraces, and highly recommend Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

But the show-stopper so far - as many of you predicted - is Slings & Arrows. It is great. It many ways it reminds me of my favourite series ever, The Larry Sanders Show, which seems destined to never come out on DVD. (I only saw a few seasons, and I would love to own the whole series.) Slings & Arrows and Larry Sanders are both "behind the scenes" shows, with a similar mix of comedy and pathos, and some common themes: the tensions between art and commerce, the constant craving for approval, the complexities of human motivation - all while somehow never lecturing you. Slings & Arrows has Shakespeare going for it, but Larry Sanders had Rip Torn. We've finished S&A Season One and are waiting for the second season to arrive.

We also watched Season Two of Flight of the Conchords. Predictably, it was nowhere near the quality of the first season - how could it be? - and the last few episodes sucked. I'm relieved they had the good sense to pull the plug. Death Comes To Town is a sleeping pill.

We've seen some others, but those are the highlights.

Still no resolution of the $500 water bill. It's a standoff: Peel says we owe it, we say we don't. I paid an amount that would represent normal usage, wrote a letter, and am waiting for Peel's next volley. Our landlord is also mystified.

We are getting ready for our annual US Thanksgiving road trip. This will mark one year since our first trouble at the border. I must admit I am dreading the delay this time. It's one thing if we're driving to Buffalo, but on a 10-hour drive, after working all weekend, a 90-minute or two-hour delay is such a drag.

After our last detention, Allan submitted a form requesting more information on an "adverse border crossing experience". When he checked for updates, he was told it had not been received - more than a month later. He then filled out the same form online. We figure the response will be amusing, if nothing else. I just wonder how long this will go on. Forever?

I am already counting weeks and days until my winter break. Last year I had a full four weeks off, but this year only three. No fair! On the other hand, Christmas and Boxing Day fall on a weekend, so Allan and I have a whole weekend off with pay, plus the following Saturday - beyond rare. Can't wait.

Read More

rage against the library machine

Yesterday in my "Foundations of Library and Information Science" class, we discussed the role of the librarian in the digital era. It's a fascinating and important issue for librarian students to unpack, as there are vast implications for public services, education, equal access - and our future employment. I can't do it justice here, but I will pass along this alternative vision: the robo-library.

Wall Street Journal:

New Library Technologies Dispense With Librarians

In this suburb of St. Paul, the new library branch has no librarians, no card catalog and no comfortable chairs in which to curl up and read.

Instead, the Library Express is a stack of metal lockers outside city hall. When patrons want a book or DVD, they order it online and pick it up from a digitally locked, glove-compartment- sized cubby a few days later. It's a library as conceived by the Amazon.com generation.

Faced with layoffs and budget cuts, or simply looking for ways to expand their reach, libraries around the country are replacing traditional, full-service institutions with devices and approaches that may be redefining what it means to have a library.

Later this year Mesa, Ariz., plans to open a new "express" library in a strip-mall, open three days a week, with outdoor kiosks to dispense books and DVDs at all hours of the day. Palm Harbor, Fla., meanwhile, has offset the impact of reduced hours by installing glass-front vending machines that dispense DVDs and popular books.

The wave of innovation is aided by companies that have created new machines designed to help libraries save on labor. For instance, Evanced Solutions, an Indianapolis company that makes library software, this month is starting test trials of a new vending machine it plans to start selling early next year.

Read it here. Even some of the comments on that story are surprisingly worth reading.

In this vision of the library, there is no serendipitous discovery of a new book - or a new idea. There is no one to help with research. There is no children's storytime, ESL classes, or resume-writing workshops. No quiet, safe space for teens and tweens to study after school. No free internet access for the millions who cannot afford it at home. No private internet access for people who need to research something without their family's knowledge. No help for those confused about computer use but too embarrassed to ask anyone they know for help. No place for seniors to read magazines.

Really, there is no library at all.

Read More

needed: a plan to get through the next eight weeks

Yesterday a school friend - who is also a war-resisters friend - showed me her computer screen: she's following wmtc.

First I thought, how cool. Then I thought, what a crappy time to join this blog in progress. I don't blog very much or very well during the school term. I mostly pass things along and share half-formed thoughts. Earlier this year, I had a mild freak-out about this, but I've come to accept the reduced blogging (both quality and quantity) as a necessity.

My big goal this fall was to set firmer limits and stick to them: school, war resisters, work, swimming or walking. And that's it. Stop trying to fit anything else in. I've been sticking to those limits... but now I think the limits are set too high.

As I recently told another friend: I'm in over my head. I am barely keeping up, but unwilling to drop anything. I cannot afford to work myself into a fibro crash, yet I'm not pulling back. I feel like I'm rolling down a hill, faster and faster, soon to be careening out of control. Which will come first? Winter break, or slamming to the ground at the bottom of the hill?

In the years after I was finally diagnosed with fibromyalgia, I gradually learned how to reduce the incidents of flare-ups, or crashes, as I call them. Instead of being completely out of commission for 2 or 3 days a month, I could reduce that to every-other month, then a few times a year. The flare-ups would be less severe, too, and I'd bounce back more quickly. Now, with better medication and supplements - and, undoubtedly, a good bit of luck - I haven't had any serious flare-ups for several years. All the pieces work together, but I think the single most important factor is getting enough rest.

Last fall, when I started graduate school, I felt that delicate balance being threatened for the first time in many years. At the beginning, I took a month off from the war resisters campaign and froze my gym membership. I re-joined my activism, re-joined the gym, and figured out how to do the necessary school work with the minimal possible effort. It's been working so far.

Now I feel the whole enterprise teetering. Yet I have no plan for change.

A wise friend recently emailed: "YOU have to do it. NO ONE can do it but you!" It's true. I'm not asking for your help, because there's nothing anyone else can do. But feel free to kibbitz and commiserate.

Read More

for-profit libraries creeping into u.s.

The march of privatization goes on. In a country with money for war and nothing else - where most corporations get taxpayer subsidies but pay zero taxes themselves - corporate interests profit from empty public coffers. And in some cases, they profit from public ignorance.

A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.

Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy.

A $4 million deal to run the three libraries here is a chance for the company to demonstrate that a dose of private management can be good for communities, whatever their financial situation. But in an era when outsourcing is most often an act of budget desperation — with janitors, police forces and even entire city halls farmed out in one town or another — the contract in Santa Clarita has touched a deep nerve and begun a round of second-guessing.

Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then?

“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”

. . . .

L.S.S.I. got its start 30 years ago developing software for government use, then expanded into running libraries for federal agencies. In the mid-1990s, it moved into the municipal library market, and now, when ranked by number of branches, it places immediately after Los Angeles County, New York City, Chicago and the City of Los Angeles.

The company is majority owned by Islington Capital Partners, a private equity firm in Boston, and has about $35 million in annual revenue and 800 employees. Officials would not discuss the company’s profitability.

Some L.S.S.I. customers have ended their contracts, while in other places, opposition has faded with time. In Redding, Calif., Jim Ceragioli, a board member of the Friends of Shasta County Library, said he initially counted himself among the skeptics.

But he has since changed his mind. “I can’t think of anything that’s been lost,” Mr. Ceragioli said.

The library in Redding has expanded its services and hours. And the volunteers are still showing up — even if their assistance is now aiding a private company. “We volunteer more than ever now,” Mr. Ceragioli said.

Key phrase here: "...while in other places, opposition has faded with time." That's how it works.

This guy volunteers for a private, for-profit company and he can't think of anything that's been lost? Maybe his pride and common sense are under the bed with the lost socks. When library hours and services are cut because they're not sufficiently profitable, he won't find them there, either.

That "overhead" they cut is another word for your services. Why would you rather put money into shareholders' pockets than into good jobs in your own community? The for-profit library isn't going to cost any less, and you won't see a penny of the profit it turns.

There are many services that - done properly - can never and should never create profit. Health care and education are tied for first on that list. Public access to information is another.

Read More

on saying no

One of the most challenging - and most important - parts of being an activist is learning how to say no. If you're an activist, you've been there. No, more than that, if you're an activist, you live there, almost all the time.

Setting boundaries and limits is important in all aspects of life, and something many people find it difficult to do, whether for work or family obligations. Many of us have had painful experiences around giving too much, and have had to learn to set firmer and more explicit boundaries. You've been there, I've been there.

But today I'm writing about boundary-setting in relation to grassroots activism. When you're an activist, you're working hard to achieve goals that you care deeply about. Time is always short, as everyone is juggling several pursuits, trying to squeeze unpaid activism around other non-negotiables. Hopefully - presumably - you enjoy what you're doing, and you love the people you're doing it with, so the activism doubles as a social life. That helps, but it doesn't make the issue go away.

When you're passionate about your cause and serious about getting things done - and there's a chronic shortage of time, money and people - it can be very challenging to say no. You find yourself squeezing in ever more tasks, whether or not you foresee the space and time to get them done.

And once you're in an activist network, you hear about other causes, other actions that need your help. You hear about events - talks, demonstrations, shows - that you'd like to attend or be part of.

We've all known activists who can't say no, and end up either freaking out, burning out, not making good on commitments, or all of the above. It doesn't help anyone. And we all know - theoretically, at least - that our own health and well-being must come first.

I think the single greatest challenge of being in graduate school - even more challenging than the chips truck! - at this time of my life is saying no. I did a mediocre job of it my first year; I need to run a tighter personal ship this year. There is work, school, and the war resisters campaign. I am determined to swim twice a week, and take Tala on a long walks another two days. And that's it. It has to be.

I need to re-learn some basic lessons in boundaries. Just because there's space on your calendar, doesn't mean you can say yes, and fill it in.

Just because you live nearby, doesn't mean you can attend.

Just because you're needed, doesn't mean you can say yes.

You can't be two places at once.

All humans need to rest. Each of us has different needs. Just because someone needs less rest than you, doesn't change your own needs.

Who ever thought I'd need Nancy Reagan?

Read More