libraries

Life With Books: Abbreviated

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by Jas Faulkner 

This is probably a bad thing to admit, but I participate in a forum that follows a reality show about the Duggar Family and yet I rarely if ever watch the actual show.  When I do, I see that about eighty percent of the commentary is pretty accurate, but there are moments when I watch and what I see doesn’t seem as bad as it has been made out to be .

On a recent episode, one of the Duggars, a son who is now grown and married and has his own household, showed the documentary crew his eldest child’s library.  It was a shelf that contained seven or eight books.  I have seen criticism about the paltry space and selection in this little girl’s collection.  There were two things I kept in mind as I watched this:  1. The child in question is two or three years old. 2. Neither of these young parents grew up in homes where there was an emphasis on education beyond learning the basics required to take care of a family.  Sad to say, that might be the case with the next generation of Duggars, but I hope it isn’t.  

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The Paginated Babysitter

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by Jas Faulkner

Theresa* is a middle school librarian in Tennessee.**  When budget cutbacks hit her county, she didn’t mind taking on the additional hat of media specialist.  Doing so meant that she wouldn’t have to do circuit administration, meaning that she would be responsible for only one school.   She understood that all of that was part of working in public education.  And like many educators, she found that in the past five years, her job has turned into a constant battle and it has nothing to do with scrabbling for her share of the shrinking budget.   Her biggest opponent is not student apathy or parental antipathy, but the ubiquity of handheld gadgets.

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So You Want To Be A Writer…

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by Jas Faulkner

Tabitha and Samantha, my UBS  owning friends down in Mississippi, found out I knew an author who would be passing through on her way to a signing in Jackson before zig-zagging up to Memphis and then to Atlanta and then back west to Birmingham and…you get the idea.   Fortunately, so did Tab and Sam, who helps her sister run a bed and breakfast.  They offered my author friend a night of peace, quiet, and fresh vegetables from the kitchen garden, which she gratefully accepted.

Before anyone nods sagely and mutters, “Yep.  Celebrities get the breaks.” you need to know two things:

First:  Samantha sold a novel that was optioned for a movie that sat in development limbo for nearly a decade before it was finally made into a straight-to-cable feature.  She knows what it’s like to be expected to act like a celebrity when the truth is that few people in the room actually know who you are or what your situation is.

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The 30,000

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 by Jas Faulkner  

In those odd moments when there can be plenty to do and yet the mind wants to wander through Binkley’s anxiety closet,  it is easy to come up with hypothetical catastrophes that put us through a Green Beret-level obstacle course.  We see the thin veneer of civilisation stripped away as a mob mentality nudges thousands of people off the side of a cliff in a carb-fueled rage, all neatly battered, fried, and served on a biscuit with a side of fear and loathing of The Other.

Those of us who are caretakers of libraries, whether they’re large public archives of wisdom passed down through the centuries or linen closets that have been converted into repositories of books we have known and loved; we have all wondered what we would do if we only had a small, undisclosed time to save what we could.  What would we grab first?  Who could we trust to protect what we hold dear?  As a bit of woolgathering, it’s scary but there is the comfort that, at least for now, the chances of seeing our libraries destroyed is  fairly remote.

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Are We Setting Ourselves Up For Another Alexandria?

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by Jas Faulkner

Did Hypatia shush the barbarians one too many times, thus causing the destruction of the Library at Alexandria?

At a recent gathering of oral historians and archivists, the subject of data retrieval long after collection came up. Hard copies, acetate based media, anything mechanical, was still alive as far as many curators were concerned. However, when it came to digital media, the prospect of anything outliving its technology was far less likely.

One archivist recounted discovering that she needed to find an engineer who could help her recreate the the technology needed to rerecord interviews that had originally been stored on cylinders.  Finding a person who could do this via word of mouth took roughly two weeks.  Once the material was retrieved it was archived in a way that assured that the content of the interview would be accessible regardless of future technological changes:  a paper transcript was created and carefully stored.  The kicker came at the end of the month when the archive’s administrators refused to reimburse the personnel who elected to bring in the technician.  The administration’s argument was that a perfectly good digital copy had been made and should have sufficed when the need arose to retrieve the recording.

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