June 2010

Fiction Is Dead: Again? Every few years someone finds a platform to declare fiction dead, despite all evidence to the contrary. This time around, it’s Lee Siegel, writing in The Observer. Siegel’s piece flogs a tired horse, that fiction is less central to our culture than it was in the 1950s and 1960s, and not as good. It’s hard to figure out which is more problematic: how poorly Siegel’s argument is made, or how many things he gets wrong in the process.

After Walt Disney died in 1966, his grieving staff sealed his office suite in Burbank, and even as work proceeded on “The Jungle Book” there was anxiety that the company’s past might be brighter than its future.

Four years later, those worries deepened as key executives approached retirement, including Walt’s older brother, Roy O. Disney. That’s why, in 1970, the company handed the key to Walt’s still-sealed office to a former UCLA research librarian named Dave Smith, who was sent into the chamber to learn its history.

Eugene O’Neill’s Revenge On A Provincetown Librarian

Pulitizer Prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill was known for modeling characters in his plays after people from his own life.

But what he did to a Provincetown librarian proved that he could be a cruel and vindictive man.

Abbie Putnam ran the Provincetown library during the days when O’Neill and his entourage of Greenwich Village friends summered in the east end. She was an eccentric and legendary personality

Somerville’s Non-Union Employees Save Library Jobs
In order to keep Somerville’s libraries at their current staffing levels, non-union employees in the City government will take a one-week furlough. This action will allow the library to keep its current workforce of technicians in place. It also marks the second year in a row that Somerville’s non-union workforce has taken a furlough in order to help balance the City budget and preserve other jobs inside the City.

George W. Bush presidential library details revealed

One of the biggest challenges in the construction of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas will be recreating the Oval Office, the architect overseeing the design of the center said Thursday.

“Several different presidential libraries have an Oval Office,” said Graham S. Wyatt, partner with New York-based Robert A.M. Stern Architects. “None of them got it right.”

ABU DHABI // The capital’s first private library started for a simple reason: Aisha Lakdawala could not find anything to read. How a do-it-yourself librarian brought a city to book The library is her pride and joy, and one day she hopes to expand further, with space for a separate children’s reading area and a book club for adults. In addition to being the proprietor of Abu Dhabi’s first private library, she also has the dubious distinction of possessing the country’s largest private collection of Mills and Boon novels, with more than 4,000 of the titles.

Thinking about Open Source

The fundamental problem with the proprietary software model is not one of evil ownership or grasping vendors. I’ve seen both of those occur in the open source software community. The problem with proprietary library management software–from a high-level perspective, profession-wide–is that it makes us stupid. It deprofessionalizes who we are and disengages us from tool creation.

A man faces charges after an unusual incident at a local library. 52-year-old Darrell Bess was taken into custody yesterday, naked, armed with knives and several pounds of stolen cheese.

Bess was ordered by a judge to stay away from the Main branch of the Cincinnati-Hamilton County Public Library in downtown Cincinnati because of prior thefts.

But police say Bess ignored that warning. He was found naked, bathing in the men’s bathroom at the library on Wednesday. Police searched his bag and found two knives, two library CD’s and 4 pounds of parmesan cheese which he allegedly stole from a local store.

Report from Local 12.

Neil Gaiman says closing libraries would be ‘a terrible mistake’
Neil Gaiman said librarians were “more important than ever” in the internet age.

His comments came as he received one of the world’s most high profile literary award for children’s books, the CILIP Carnegie Medal, for his novel The Graveyard Book.

The following letter may in the May 15th issue of Library Journal. I would be interested to hear people’s comments about this letter.
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I may have missed a paradigm shift in LJ Book Review policy. LJ reviewed Dorothy Hamilton’s Love What You Do: Building a Career in the Culinary Industry (LJ 4/1/10, p. 83), published by iUniverse, possibly the largest print on demand company currently in existence. While I don’t in any way impugn the quality of some self-published works-especially given that the large publishers are primarily motivated by dollar currency and not idea currency-I really don’t think reviews of self-published works are useful or helpful for collections librarians working with limited budgets and for clientele whose reading choices are largely driven by whatever is reviewed in the mainstream media.

In any given fiscal year, I am typically besieged by dozens of authors peddling their self-published works. In an attempt to mediate sympathy with fiscal responsibility, the policy I instituted…was to welcome donations of self-published works but not to purchase them. Generally, the authors are content just to have their works in the local public library…. Even when a self-published title seems germane to my collections mandate, the line has to be drawn somewhere.

Of course, it becomes awkward when library patrons request this material, but it usually turns out that they are either thinly veiled friends or family of the author…. At the moment, I have a shelf of these books in my office waiting to be cataloged. It is even more difficult to explain to these same people that the cost of acquiring the book doesn’t factor in the costs of cataloging and processing. I’d be interested in hearing how other collections librarians handle this.

-Eddie Paul, Bibliographic & Information Svcs., Jewish P.L., Montréal