A Soldier's Story

A Soldier's Story, a 1984 film about racial segregation in World War II, is a mystery in several ways. Most obviously, it is a film in which an military investigator seeks to discover who murdered the friendless Sargent Waters on a foggy night right outside camp. Did a local member of the Ku Klux Klan kill the black soldier as a "get out of Louisiana" message aimed at the African Americans in training? Did a white officer who felt Waters was disrespectful shoot him? Could it have been one of his own men, all of whom came from the Negro baseball league?

The other mystery is how so few of us remembered A Soldier's Story, which was based on a Pulitzer Prize winning play and nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Out of nineteen people at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library's showing of the film, only one had seen it when it was released twenty-four years ago. It was really quiet good. How had it been forgotten?

The story follows Captain Davenport, an African American investigator well played by Howard E. Rollins, Jr., as he questions anyone who knew the victim. Among the men from the company that he interviews is Private First Class Peterson, played by a very young Denzel Washington. In flashbacks, Waters is played by Adolph Caesar, who was nominated as best supporting actor.

The film has a very theatrical quality, as one might expect from a movie based on a play. At points lighting spotlights characters telling their memories. Dialogue has a scripted and quotable feel that one used to find in movies. It also seems almost like a musical, as it starts with Patti LaBelle as Big Mary singing in the local colored bar, and several other scenes follow with Larry Riley as C. J. Memphis singing in the mess hall or back in the bar.

A Soldier's Story was a good choice for our discussion group. We talked about the characters and the mystery first. Then we discussed the segregation of the American military until 1948 and the importance of military integration for the civil rights movement that followed. I recommend the film to film fans and other libraries holding discussions.

Laughing Without an Accent by Firoozeh Dumas

It is fun reading books before they are published. I get a privileged feeling just holding a review copy, which may be a bit silly, seeing that the publishers gave many of them away at the Public Library Association Conference in Minneapolis. Still, I was really pleased when Uma from our library offered to let me read an advanced reader's edition of Laughing Without an Accent by Firoozeh Dumas, the author of Funny in Farsi. The book is due out at the end of April 2008.

In her new volume, Dumas continues to tell amusing stories about her life as an Iranian who moved to the United States as a child before the revolution of 1979. In some ways, she grew up very American, watching television, eating fast food, and going away to college. Still, because of her early years in Iran, her perspectives remain atypical. She is a sort of inside outsider, a perfect person to notice the odd aspects of American life that natives tend to take for granted.

Many of her stories are about adjusting or not adjusting to a new culture. She features her own experiences, as well as those of her parents and her husband, who is French. Each story is well-crafted and compelling, and she makes readers feel as though they too are immigrants trying to sort out what to do in unfamiliar situations. I think my favorite story may have been her telling of her uncle's funeral at which the family traded the usual Iranian mourning customs for eulogies remembering the uncle's humorous traits; Dumas could hardly believe the family would accept this break with tradition but they did. She makes a point about how America has changed her family. She also tells how Iranians and other immigrants have changed America.

Most public libraries are going to want Dumas's new book. It should be very popular with memoir readers. It should also be popular with librarians, whom she compliments several times.

Dumas, Firoozeh. Laughing Without an Accent. Villard, 2008. ISBN 9780345499561.

Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment by Anthony Lewis

If I wrote "All war is immoral," could I be arrested and sent to prison. In many countries where the military holds power, I could. Even in the U.S., it depends on the time and the place, according to Anthony Lewis in his recent book Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment.

During the First World War, when there was very little tolerance for dissent across the country, the Montana legislature passed a very repressive sedition law. A traveling salesman who said in a Montana saloon that wartime food restrictions were a joke was sentenced to seven-to-twenty years of hard labor. At the same time, socialist Eugene V. Debs was convicted of violating the Espionage Act for saying in a speech in Canton, Ohio that three men who had been arrested for helping a draft resister were heroic. Did the Supreme Court help Debs? No, it upheld his conviction in 1919 and he served three years in prison. The man in Montana was luckier, as a federal judge there ruled that he and 47 other residents of the state had been wrongly convicted.

Though the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution protecting free speech was established in 1791, the first favorable ruling in the Supreme Court was in 1931. It took the efforts of numerous federal judges and Supreme Court justices through time to finally uphold the right of free speech. Among the heroes in this book are Learned Hand who was ruling in favor of First Amendment rights before most other federal judges, Oliver Wendell Holmes who took up the cause after the First World War, and Louis D. Brandeis whose dissenting opinions eventually swayed the Court.

A point that Lewis makes throughout the book is that our constitutional rights are not protected simply by the existence of the constitution. There have to be brave jurists willing to uphold the rights when legislatures, governors, and presidents try to circumvent them. In making his point, he points out the many attempts of the current administration to brush the constitution aside. The job of protecting our rights never ends.

Freedom for the Thought That We Hate is a quick and compelling read that discusses many aspects of what is protected by the First Amendment. Librarians should read it and put it on display.

Lewis, Anthony. Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment. Basic Books, 2007. ISBN 9780465039173

Your Brain on Cubs edited by Dan Gordon

When I heard the title Your Brain on Cubs, I pictured an ironic collection of confessional stories from die-hard fans. I expected to enjoy reading about long afternoons of watching the Phillies and the Cubs run their scores into double digits and of the heartbreak of seasons lost. I did not expect a serious book about brain science and psychology.

Your Brain on Cubs is a collection of essays by neurologists who tell about what is going on in the players' and fans' brains during the game and away from the park. Central to the discussion in "The Depths of Loyalty: Exploring the Brain of the Die-hard Fan" by Jordan Grafman is the idea that Cub fans actual find social benefits from the team's losing tradition. Around the team is a community of disappointed fans who live with a sense of mission from year to year. Members of this group exhibit great ability to delay gratification, to accept other hardships, and to reflect on life. Rooting for the team is thus character building and good for self-esteem.

Later essays deal with many serious issues, such as player use of performance enhancing drugs, the superstitions of fans and players, and the psychology of winning. It is best to allot ample time to read.

Your Brain on Cubs is not for the casual reader, as there is professionally serious vocabulary at points. If you have time and patience, there is a much to ponder. Warning: serious fans may see themselves in the clinical studies.

Your Brain on Cubs. Dana Press, 2008. ISBN 9781932594287

Jordan County by Shelby Foote

At some point this winter, Chicago Tribune book columnist Julia Keller wrote about authors who wrote fiction and nonfiction. One of the names included was Shelby Foote. I have never taken the time to attempt his Civil War history set (we have a ten volume illustrated edition in my library), so I thought I'd try his fiction. I got Jordan County, published in 1954.

On the paperback cover is the label "A Novel." That is a mistake. I wonder if the marketing department at the publisher whipped this up without opening the book. Jordan County is collection of seven short stories set in a fictional county in Mississippi along the Mississippi River, presented in reverse chronological order. The presence of the river is about the only connecting element. Short is also a relative idea. One of the stories is 150 pages and could be called a novella.

"Child by Fever," the long short story, is a masterpiece of slowly simmering Southern tragedy. As a reader, I knew what would happen in the end because Foote told me right at the beginning, but I was as caught in the narrative as its characters. Neither they nor I could do anything about the outcome. Readers who enjoy dark family sagas will appreciate this well-crafted, symmetrical story.

The first story is set in the late 1940s or early 1950s. What the World War II veteran does in "Rain Down Home" could easily be in a story about a returnee from Vietnam or Iraq.

Of the seven stories, only "Pillar of Fire" is set during the Civil War, the era with which Foote's writings are generally associated. In it we get both Northern and Southern viewpoints in an incident of useless violence. I mourned for the needlessly destroyed cabins and plantation mansions.

Foote was a well-spoken scholar, as we saw from his commentaries on Ken Burns's Civil War documentary. He was every bit as eloquent in his fiction. I bet that Civil War history is worth reading, too.

Foote, Shelby. Jordan County. Vintage Books, 1992. ISBN 0679736166

Library Books from a Vending Machine: Go Where They Are

In yesterday's Library Link of the Day is an article from China about a vending machine for library materials. It holds up to fours hundred books, CDs or DVDs on three conveyor belts behind glass. Clients can use their cards to borrow items that drop into a drawer. If they do not have a card, they can make them on the spot. The inboard catalog links back to the Shenzhen Library which has 2.17 million items for which reserves can be placed. Clients are notified to return to the vending machine when items are available. Items may also return the items to the machine. RFID is used in the checkout and return processes.

This seems an interesting way for the library to go to the client. There might be an interesting number of applications we could make in both our urban and rural communities. In our suburb, it might be interesting to have one at the commuter rail station. We could probably stock it with donated popular reading and hardly touch the main collection. Time strapped commuters might be grateful!

The Canon: The Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier

I am 3.5 billion years old. More about that in a moment.

In the opening pages of The Canon: The Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, author Natalie Angier rues the attitudes that parents, educators, and other common folk often express about science. They say things like "We know it is hard, but just bear with it" to their children, passing on their prejudices. She contends that most children like science until adults dissuade them with their apologies and the dry ways that they teach. Wondering about how the world works is naturally interesting until young minds are worn down with standardized assignments and deadlines.

Believing the kids do not stand a chance until adults are re-educated, she takes readers through a tour of all the sciences in The Canon, starting with mathematics and statistics. Here she starts with her many splendid science stories and observations that awe and entertain. One of the sections that I liked best was about numbers and the age of the earth. She holds that the earth is really quite young, which may be hard to believe considering that it is 5.7 billion years. She points out that the number is not unimaginably large. Take the ages of all people currently living and add them up, and the formation of the earth can be reached over twenty times. Our body surfaces have more than 5.7 billion bacteria cell on them. What's the big deal about 5.7 billion?

Throughout the text, Angier is enthusiastic and entertaining. She talks about the three kinds of dental floss she uses, vividly describes the inside of the planet, and gives the best explanation of the expanding universe and the end of time that I've ever heard. In telling about the wines ancient civilizations drank to keep from getting water-borne diseases, she says "Better tipsy than typhoid." Her accounts of chemical reactions with their affairs, partners, and bonds is definitely for the mature reader.

As I said before, I am 3.5 billion years old. So are you. According to Angier, it was about 3.5 billion years ago that the first single cell organisms appeared, and the DNA within them evolved to form all the life that followed. All of the code from our initial and intermediate ancestors is still in our DNA. Life has never died out in that time, and we are the continuation of what went before. We are not really individuals. We are communities.

Angier spends a good bit of time explaining evolution and how the word "theory" does not mean the scientists are just guessing. She is 100 percent behind evolution and contends that any good scientist is as well. There is no doubt.

I listen to the audiobook brightly read by Nike Doukas over the course of a couple of weeks. I recommend it for making the drive to work and dusting the house entertaining.

Angier, Natalie. The Canon: The Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. Houghton Mifflin, 2007. ISBN 9780618242955

11 compact discs. HighBridge Audio, 2007. ISBN 9781598870893

A Mile Square of Chicago by Marjorie Warvelle Bear

A Mile Square of Chicago by Marjorie Warvelle Bear is a book with a long story of its own. Bear wrote the manuscript in the 1960s and 1970s and died in 1982 without publishing. Though her daughter Marjorie Harbaugh Bennett's efforts to sell the book to a publisher were described in a Chicago Tribune column by Eric Zorn in 1994, it was late 2007 when the long-awaited book finally appeared in print.

The square mile of Chicago in question is directly west of downtown, a bit west of the Chicago River. It now includes the United Center, surrounded by its parking lots. Along its southern edge is the Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center and the Eisenhower Expressway. It is no longer thought of as a family oriented neighborhood, as it was in the 1850 to 1920 period described by Bear in her book .

A Mile Square of Chicago, more of a reference book than narrative, is divided into three books. The first part is "Book One: Before My Day," which tells about the area up to 1897, when Bear was born. The first chapter tells about Brown School, an elementary school started in 1852, and its famous students. Tad Lincoln, Bertha Honore Palmer, Lillian Russell, Flo Ziegfield, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Eddie Foy, and five others each get between two and twenty-two pages telling about their lives, much of it beyond their years at Brown School. Most get pictures. The second chapter then tells about Old Central High School and another list of students, none of whom I recognize. The third chapter tells about the beginnings of all the area hospitals.

"Book Two: In My Day" starts with a detailed description of Bear's house at 654 West Monroe Street, which was later renumbered 1743 West Monroe Street. This may be the most important contribution of this book, as the author gives a deep look into everyday life at the beginning of the twentieth century. She tells about the rooms, the furniture, the bathroom fixtures, the kitchen, and the back yard. She includes interior and exterior photos, and describes ice and coal delivery. Then she tells what a walker would see in the immediate neighborhood and on a walk on Ashland Avenue.

Further along in Book Two, Bear uses school records to tell about textbooks and assigned reading and public library records to tell about children's books and popular periodicals. Her friends at Brown School, the clothes they wore, the music they played, and how they celebrated holidays. Then the author tells about more schools and more famous students. The names I recognize are the animator Walt Disney and the novelist Phyllis A. Whitney.

The third section mostly updates information about schools and hospitals in the area up to the 1970s. For a pleasure reader, this is the least interesting section as there are no personal details.

Bear ends with a short philosophical section, which is most quotes from poetry. It expresses the idea that a small neighborhood can give much to the world at large.

The 548-page book is a model of what would be a great personal project for any family history-minded person. A collection of family and neighborhood information could be invaluable to grandchildren and later generations, making their ancestors more than just names on charts.

A Mile Square of Chicago is an important acquisition to Chicago area libraries and research collections outside the area. The only way to obtain it appears to be through Google Base. If I read the source's entry correct, there may only be 32 copies left.

Bear, Marjorie Warvelle. A Mile Square of Chicago. TIPRAC, 2007. ISBN 9780963399540

Sports Genre Study from the Adult Reading Round Table

Last week I did something I should do more often. On Thursday afternoon I attended the Adult Reading Round Table Nonfiction Genre Study. Twenty-five librarians from around the Chicago area and Wisconsin met at the Downers Grove Public Library and spent nearly two hours talking about narrative sports books.

The homework assignment was to read one sports title by David Halberstam and two other sports books either from a recommended list or from one's own library. The idea was that there could be some common ground to begin the discussion and many directions it could go. And it did go in many directions, as we discovered a great variety of subjects, styles, and appeal factors in sports books.

Someone took minutes, which I will get in my email as a member, so I did not write much down. After three days, this is what sticks in my memory.

You don't have to like sports to like good sports books because they are about much more than games. They are always about overcoming some type of difficulty if not downright adversity. They may also be coming of age stories, friendship stories, tributes, memoirs, exposes, history, or even how-to-do-it. If they are stories about women, they may be women's rights stories. If they feature African Americans, they may be civil rights stories.

Being a fan does help some sports books. We had librarians totally disagree on whether Lance Armstrong was an inspiration or a jerk. What the reader brought to the book guided how she/he perceived the author's voice. Being a fan also helps if the book focuses on the action of a game, which a non-fan may find tedious if not written well. Fans are more likely to like the less narrative books on statistics or sports equipment or stadiums.

Some sports fans read books on their favorite athletes or teams to relive their lives. Lots of memories are mixed up with the days that their teams did well.

It is not enough to put out a selection of area sports team books and expect them all to move. Hand selling may help. They still need to be attractive for most readers to select them.

We probably talked more about Friday Night Lights by H. G. Bissinger than about any other title. I am going to have to move it up my reading list. I heard other titles that sound as though I might like them, including Can I Keep My Jersey? by Paul Shirley and Your Brain on Cubs edited by Dan Gordon.

The next ARRT Nonfiction Genre Study will meet at the Des Plaines Public Library on June 3, 2008. The title of the discussion is "Mining the 800s," and we will all try to identify those great books that get lost in the Dewey graveyard. You can become a member and get the announcements and minutes. The details are on the ARRT website.

Mr. Adams's Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams's Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress by Joseph Wheelan

After reading Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy several weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to know more about John Quincy Adams, sixth U. S. president and the man who knew both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Fortunately for me, the new biography Mr. Adams's Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams's Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress by Joseph Wheelan just reached the library. Like the chapter in Kennedy's book, Wheelan book focuses on the later part of Adams's public career, when he served in the U. S. Congress long past the age most politicians retire.

Like his father before him, John Quincy Adams had few friends. Both men were studious, serious, and unforgiving. Neither would bend to the dictates of a political party, thus separating them from their colleagues. In the son's case, Washington liked him for his skillful diplomacy on European assignments and Lincoln liked him for his long-running opposition to Southern Democrats trying to expand the reach of slavery. Most of the country's leaders in the years between the first president and the congressman from Illinois, however, hated Adams for his arrogance and tenacity. Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and John C. Calhoun were bitter enemies.

Much of Wheelan's book is about Adams's fight in Congress to remove a gag rule that prevented members from introducing citizen petitions if they opposed slavery. A coalition of Southern congressmen and Northern friends had passed the restriction to quiet Adams and his abolitionist allies. Adams argued that the restriction violated the U. S. Constitution's First Amendment. Of course, the deeper struggle was over how to end or extend the institution of slavery, which Adams predicted would end in war. As part of the fight, Adams fought bills to annex Texas, condemned the forced removal of Native Americans from their lands, and supported the rights of women to write petitions (but not to vote).

This all sounds very serious, but there are light moments in the book. I especially liked descriptions of Adams's relations with his parents and the great devotion of his wife Louisa. The author also had a bit of fun pointing out that after Adams spoke for four and a half long hours at the Amistad slave ship case at the Supreme Court, one of the justices went home and died in his sleep.

For American history collections, libraries tend to buy heavily in the periods of the wars and are often thin in covering the in-between periods. This new and compelling Adams biography is a great title for the gap between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. Many libraries should add it.

Wheelan, Joseph. Mr. Adams's Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams's Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress. Public Affairs, 2008. ISBN 9780786720125.

Off Your Seat and on Your Feet: Continued Conversation

Jodi Lee and Christopher Korenowsky of the Columbus Metropolitan Library have quite bravely asked me for my thoughts about their PLA presentation. Before sending them my thoughts, I looked at their online handouts, which are really quite nice. The handouts do not tell you everything you want to know, but they do start the conversation about proactive reference with very relevant points. What I think is really good is the way that they incorporate staff testimonials into the attractive documents. Take a look at Telling Our Story and Off Your Seat and On Your Feet! The think about your reference service area.

Gulf Music: Poems by Robert Pinsky

April is poetry month. Selling poetry in our fast-paced world is a difficult task, but libraries may catch the eye of a reader or two with Gulf Music by Robert Pinsky on display. The bright Buddhist cover with skeletons who may be either dancing or fighting is hard to pass by without examining. It is a bit morbid, but poetry often is.

In referring to the "Gulf" in the title poem, Pinsky is topical and reflective. He does mean for the reader to think about the catastrophe in New Orleans but he brings in the 1900 Galveston hurricane and the gulf that is within us all.

Pinsky's poems can be enjoy in various ways. They simply sound good read aloud. I also like looking for the bits of wisdom or controversy within the verses. In the poem "The Forgetting" he challenges the reader:

Hardly anybody can name all eight of their great-grandparents.
Can you? Will your children's grandchildren remember your name?

I have spent much time in the past working on my family history (not much lately) and I find even I have trouble answering this question on a moment's notice. Are we too doomed to be forgotten?

The second section of the collection deals with the concept of "thing" and includes several thought provoking poems about the life within inanimate objects. Of course, a reader I am particularly interested in the thought of the poem "2. Book." Do other readers dread finishing books?

Pinsky, who was our poet laureate from 1997-2000, is usually accessible and a good choice for a Poetry Month display in the library.

Pinsky, Robert. Gulf Music: Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. ISBN 9780374167493

PLA Reconsidered

Nearly 10,000 librarians, support staff, trustees, and others attended the 2008 Public Library Association National Conference in Minneapolis last week. Now, they have all gone home and must consider what they saw and heard.

As you might expect, there were some mixed messages. Some of my programs recommended new services and the tasks to accomplish their creation and maintenance. Others admonished us for trying to do too many things. The tough thing now is weighing what is worth doing.

I continued to report on PLABlog during the conference. Here are my final reports:

From Hype to Help: Making A Difference with New Technologies

Think Outside the Book: Online Service as Outreach - about teen services

When the Story is True: Practicing Nonfiction Readers Advisory

The next PLA National Conference is in 2010 in Portland, Oregon. I hope to go.

The Memoir: The Readers' Advisor's Dream or Nightmare

With the controversy of totally fabricated memoirs in the news, The Memoir: The Readers' Advisor's Dream or Nightmare was a hot topic session at PLA A good-sized crowd congregated at 8:30 on the final morning to hear a panel discussion about the collecting and promoting of memoirs in libraries.

The program started with Donna Seaman of Booklist comparing the memoir to biography and autobiography, both of which are usually linear in arrangement and externally verifiable. The memoir is a slipperier item, more akin to poetry than history. Its purpose is to communicate the feel of a life, or, as Seaman says, "the texture of one's days and nights." There is more demand for an honesty of disclosure than for getting every fact straight. Because it is "a life remembered," there is bound to be mistakes. Unfortunately, some authors have violated the trust recently.

A good memoir is about more than the individual life. It usually includes ever widening circles of family, community, and universe. The memoirist seeks to describe experience in a effort to find meaning or identity and to communicate hard lessons learned. Like novels, they do this through the setting of scenes, describing of characters, and telling of stories.

Seaman had an interesting story of being a reviewer. After publishing reviews of memoirs, she sometimes gets calls from the author's family, complaining that what he/she wrote was not true. In response, all Seamon can do is refer them back to their son/daughter/cousin/ex-wife who wrote the book. She is just a reviewer with only the book to judge.

The speaker then reported on two subgenres of memoirs that are currently very popular. The first was the memoirs of people of mixed heritage. Among the books she recommended were:

• Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
• One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life - A Story of Race and Family Secrets by Bliss Broyard
• Sweeter the Juice by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip
• Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family by Ronee Hartfield

Identify is a prevailing theme in these books, and the author often has to become a sleuth to uncover the story.

Environmental memoirs are also popular, as new books are coming out to join Walden, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Desert Solitaire. Among the many books Seaman suggested are the following titles:

• Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson
• Unbowed by Wangari Maathai
• Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams
• Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land by Amy Irving

Joyce Saricks followed with thoughts about why librarians love and hate memoirs. On the positive side, they have many of the same appeal factors as fiction, including character, setting, and story. They are hot in a time when the public is fascinated with the personal story, as shown by the popularity of reading blogs and of watching reality television. On the other hand, they are hard to categorize and shelve and sometimes hard to identify, depending on how the publishers market them.

Saricks added that she usually prefers audiobooks not read by the author. For memoirs, however, authors as readers is often a plus, as their personalities come through. She particularly recommends David Sedaris in audio.

Defining a memoir is not exactly easy, according to Saricks. Many narrative nonfiction books have memoir qualities even when there are third person author because these reporter (1) include so much of their subjects voices and (2) their quests to get the stories are memoirs. She recommended Shadow Divers by Robert Kuson.

Barry Trott of the Williamsburg Regional Library, Virginia, said that while character is the main appeal of a memoir, to choose one to suggest to a reader, you have to look at the other appeal factors such as setting, subject matter, story lines, etc.

Trott talked about the travel memoir, which has several common scenarios: including the hapless traveler (A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson), someone escaping their everyday life, or someone going to exotic places. These have the appeal of letting readers go interesting places without leaving home.

He also talked briefly about the recently hot food memoir. Chefs, waiters, and critics are among the people telling stories about their experiences. Calvin Trillin has been doing this for years, and even Euell Gibbons' Stalking the Wild Asparagus was a food memoir of sorts.

Many more titles were mentioned by all the speakers. Seaman said that she will put a list of them on the Booklist Online website.

When asked whether they would move the recently exposed memoirs to fiction, the speakers said no in most cases. Most of the exposures have been of fudging the truth. The totally fabricated memoirs may require some rethinking.

The Abbess of Crewe: A Modern Morality Tale by Muriel Spark

I am reading old forgotten books again. The Western Springs Library Friends have more books than they can store at the moment and have a table loaded with free books. I found The Abbess of Crewe: A Modern Morality Tale by Muriel Spark, one of my favorite novelists, a couple of weeks ago and chose it to take on my trip to Minneapolis. I started it in a coffee shop yesterday after the closing session of the Public Library Association at 1:00 p.m. and found time to finish it just after takeoff of my 6:45 p.m. flight to Chicago. At 116 pages, it is a delightful quick read.

The story takes place in a convent of nuns in Great Britain in which the old abbess has died and a new abbess is elected. In the period of mourning before the peers select their new leader, who will exchange her black robes for white, a thimble is stolen from a nun's sewing box. The box itself is a highly debated subject among the sisters, as it is a bit grand for a nun who has renounced all worldly possessions. That young nun has also frequently missed attending Matins and Lauds, and the gossip is thick.

The 1974 copyright date is significant. I do not want to spoil surprises, but I will say that Spark skillfully relocated highly reported events of 1972 to 1974 to her fictional nunnery. Anyone who lived through those years will recognize the replay by the end of chapter one. The book is wickedly funny, and Spark's insertion of classical poetry as the new abbess's theatrical asides is masterful.

I have not actually figured it all out. Can someone tell me who Sister Gertrude is and why she is flying around the globe visiting remote cultures?

Spark, Muriel. The Abbess of Crewe: A Modern Morality Tale. Viking Press, 1974. ISBN 0670100293

Off Your Seat and On Your Feet! Proactive Reference Customer Service

Jodi Lee and Christopher Korenowsky of the Columbus Metropolitan Library, Ohio, confused an audience of librarians at the Public Library Association today. It was not that their proposal was misunderstood. It was very clear that they are eliminating their reference desks and having their librarians roam, float, wander, hover, whatever. What was confusing was their presentation. At moments they seemed to be saying that the action is a very radical idea, but at other moments they reassured the audience that they are not really changing that much.

Korenowsky also lost many of us with his "three-tiered research phase" portion of the talk. He did not tell us any of the research findings. What did "knowledge vs data" refer to? How are Starbucks, Blockbuster, and Nordstroms relevant? I know I've had lackluster service at each of these stores, and they still have big service desks.

I think the duo make a mistake in organizing their program around dispelling myths. We now know a lot about what they are not doing and not really that much about what they are.

I am sounding very cranky, but I am actually very sympathetic to the idea. Our library has a huge desk that separates the librarians from the clients. I want our reference librarians up and about helping people when there are people to help. I wish they would have given me more solid arguments for redesigning service areas and changing working procedures. They could have talked more about the smaller desk designs and the working of the headsets. I think they missed an opportunity to be really helpful.

Also, the mantra "stop doing things that don't need to be done" to address the work that librarians do at service desks when not assisting clients is not realistic in small libraries where there are not centralized services to do all the non-client assistance work. Lee and Korenowsky are limiting their ideas to larger libraries unnecessarily with this approach. I hope they revisit and revise what can be a liberating idea.

Minneapolis Skyway Hike Slide Show

For those unable to visualize the PLA 2008 experience, here is a slide show of my walk from the Radisson Hotel to the Minneapolis Convention Center. There are a few tricky turns.



My best time was twelve minutes.

Down the escalator at the end of the Skywalk was a really nice convention center, where we had a really good conference.

Girl Scout Cookies on Sale in Late March!

Girl Scout Cookies on Sale in Late March!
Originally uploaded by ricklibrarian.

I knew there was a reason to come to Minnesota in late March besides the beautiful weather. On Wednesday, March 26, there were three tables along the Skyway, selling lots of cookies to conference visitors and office workers of Minneapolis. There seemed to more parents than actual Girl Scouts, who must have been in school. Several of my friends at the conference were thrilled to hear that there were cookies for sale. I gave directions.

No Snow in Minneapolis

The forecasts were for rain and snow in Minneapolis yesterday, but we got a beautiful day instead. It was a good day filled with meetings, three of which I reported on PLABlog:

Readers' Advisory Toolkit III, with ideas about how to get books off the shelves and into the hands of others and how to have the books when the readers want them
Technozoo with Leonard Souza, which featured news about Web 2.o Internet sites and gadgets that will may work their way into libraries
21st Century Library Design, with many out of the box ideas

I also recommend Cat William's report on John Wood's opening session speech. She gets in a lot of quotes I liked.

I expect more to report today.

What Does It Take to Be Good at Reference in the Age of Google?: A PLA Presentation by Joseph Janes

Joseph Janes, Associate Professor of the Information School at the University of Washington, Seattle, spoke today about "What Does It Take to Be Good at Reference in the Age of Google?" It is a natural topic for Janes, one he has discussed well many times before. The topic keeps changing and he keeps up. He was particularly entertaining and thought-provoking this morning. (It was the fifth time I have heard him speak. Does that make me a groupie?)

Janes began with an old quote, as he usually does. This time he quoted librarian Margaret Hutchins from 1944 to emphasize that good reference does three things for the client:

• saves money
• saves time
• ensures possession of facts which by themselves they could not obtain

He came back to these numerous times through the presentation.

According to Janes, what Google and other search engines do is provide ready reference. The services is "free, quick, easy, good enough." He says that reference librarians lose on free and often lose on quick and easy, if the information need is really ready reference. Where the librarians win is at good enough. We do much better than good enough and we need to market that.

The professor said that as librarians we will continue to do ready reference, but it is not what we should emphasize in marketing. When we put out publicity saying we can find the capital of Nepal or the number of seats in a stadium, people interpret that as the limit of our abilities and think "I can do that with Google." Instead we should be saying what Margaret Hutchins said:

We save you time and money and find information that you can not find on your own.

Janes said that we are seriously challenged by the search engines for the attention of the public, but we do have many strengths. Librarians beat them at the following:

• gathering
• selecting
• evaluating
• deciding
• understanding
• helping
• depth
• accuracy

Librarians rule when it comes to print and fee-based information. Google is just an ad agency with a search agency attached.

What is most essential for librarians is that they do good reference interviews, whether they be face-to-face, telephone, virtual, IM, email, or whatever. Search engines will never do this as well, though they are trying to establish question services. The fact that they keep trying indicates they know that are still lacking.

Janes says that we must be the best users of the search engines, knowing all the Google tricks, such as inurl: and filetype: and view:timeline. We need to learn to use the slidebars in Live Academic and Yahoo.

The public library is at a great advantage, as it is the only point in many communities for the citizens to connect to the Internet. We should leverage this to our political advantage. Let people know how happy we are that they come for our computers. Never put up unnecessary blocks.

We should also remember that many of the people who ask questions only do so because they have failed to find an answer themselves. They are as a last resort asking a stranger in public. Other professions have private offices for giving out information.

Janes said again that print collections are our strength and we should market them. This advantage will fade in it time, but we still have it.

Librarians need to be tool makers. He still likes creating virtual pathfinders. It is one of the ways we add value to our collections. He also said that we need to take over Wikipedia instead of crabbing about it.

Near the end he said that as good as we are in person we have to be even better online. Our websites have to be compelling, effective, and high quality. Our virtual reference and IM need to be great. If not, we will be quickly cut off.

He finished by saying that librarians are first among the professions. If we include archivists in our midst, we keep the culture civilized. The human record is in our care. We are essential.