5. Big Brother and the Holdout Company
The PEN America gala was just like high school: The Patriot Act is officially called The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, which stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.
During the height of the debate about the Patriot Act: Jessamyn West published “Five Technically Legal Signs for Your Library (plus one)” on librarian.net in 2005. Here’s another sample:
Organizations Who Have Not Stopped By This Week
Red Cross
Boy Scouts
United Way
FBI
Rotary Club
7. To the Ramparts
Zines represent a challenge: Jim Danky was the mentor who advised Freedman about archival copies.
She handed me a mini-zine: Sarah Gentile conceived and created Cite This Zine.
I curled up with a couple of librarian zines: Library student Alycia Sellie created the Library Workers Zine Collection.
8. Follow That Tattooed Librarian
The competition in 2007 was held in a hangar: There are numerous postings on YouTube of librarian book-cart drills, all of which seem to have been recorded on cell phones. They look like cheesy, retro, amateur events. They’re better in person.
If you don’t mention the stereotype, librarians will: Nancy Pearl’s program for the Washington Center for the Book, begun in 1998, has evolved into the One City One Book program, widespread in the United States. The Center for the Book at the Library of Congress tracks the books and communities that read them.
From the description on Amazon of one of the many, many steamy books: Jessamyn West has collected entertaining links to “The Famous Naked Librarians—Or Are They?” (are they librarians, that is; they’re definitely naked).
Tazmira and I had been Facebook friends: The Facebook group Archivists Without Crippling Personality Disorders seems to have disbanded, alas.
The phenomenon of smart, funny, cool librarians: Gary Shapiro wrote “For New-Look Librarians, Head to Brooklyn,” in the New York Sun, July 5, 2007. The Times’s story, “A Hipper Crowd of Shushers,” appeared three days later.
9. Wizards of Odd
I first learned about this world: Erica Firment of Librarian Avengers was formerly known as Erica Olsen.
Hypatia’s profile noted that she was lesbian and partnered: The librarian behind Hypatia Dejavu left the job where her boss despised Second Life. She is now a reference librarian at a branch of the New York Public Library.
Hypatia was waiting in the library plaza: In 2008, the librarians of Second Life launched their own publication, RezLibris, archived at rezlibris.com.
Each success made them bolder: After three years and eight months organizing and seeding library projects in Second Life, and following a 17 percent cut in their home consortium’s budget, Alliance Virtual Library passed the management of Info Island and its library initiative to a group of three volunteer librarian-avatars, Hypatia Dejavu, Abbey Zenith, and Rocky Vallejo (Bill Sowers of the State Library of Kansas) at the end of 2009. The new administrators will be know as the Community Virtual Library. Lori Bell will continue as their adviser.
In the blunter, more prosaic, other world: J. J. Jacobson is now Associate Curator for American Culinary History at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
10. Gotham City
I was entwined and entangled with the New York Public Library, even while reporting on it for this book. I applied for but didn’t receive a Cullman Center Fellowship, but I was given a key to the Frederick Lewis Allen Room, where I spent many happy hours writing and reading the books and articles that David Smith and the other librarians had gathered for me. I helped Paul Holdengräber put on two programs in the Trustees Room of the library while in the midst of writing this book, one a tribute to the fiction editor Rust Hills, the other, a panel on the art of the obituary with Ann Wroe, the writer of The Economist’s obituaries.
But Smith was an indefatigable reference librarian: The “black book catalog” is the 800-volume Dictionary Catalog of the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library, which contains photographic reproductions of the cards in the 6,000+ catalog drawers in the Public Catalog Room.
It was a beautiful moment: In an extraordinary gesture from David Ferriero and Paul LeClerc, David Smith was honored as a Library Lion the November after his retirement; former honorees include Philip Roth, Elie Wiesel, Salman Rushdie, and Oprah Winfrey. He has not given up the idea of an Office of Writers’ Services.
And the library is run like a philanthropy: Zahra M. Baird, now the teen librarian at the Chappaqua Public Library in New York, left her job running a branch in the South Bronx in 2000, for which she was paid $31,000 a year; “I didn’t choose this career to become rich,” she told the New York Times, “but I didn’t take a vow of poverty, either.” Starting salary in 2009 for a senior librarian was $42,000.
The website refers to the tangle of civic and philanthropic funds: See the website Driven by Boredom for the story “The Donnell Library Center: A Eulogy in Pictures.”
But, like library administrators everywhere: In 2009, David Ferriero was nominated by Barack Obama as Archivist of the United States.
11. What’s Worth Saving?
Her archives are gold.: Toni Morrison personally told me she had been so determined to complete a thought once that, even after the child in her arms (her son Slade) threw up on her writing paper, she continued writing the sentence. I could relate. She had returned my call for an interview about Oprah’s book club for Life magazine. I was frying hamburgers for my children at the time, and scrawled the notes from the interview through spatters of grease.
I tacked questions at the back of every interview: “We’re talking about terabytes…” came from a wonderfully obscene screed by Jason Scott on his blog, ASCII.
12. The Best Day
I’d see the library in my own time: I returned to the Darien Library a couple months after it opened, in March 2009, when it hosted an “unconference” on the future of the library. Some of the busiest librarians on the Internet were in attendance, including Kathryn Greenhill, then the emerging-technologies specialist at Murdoch University Library in Australia. John Blyberg introduced her by saying she “has never been to the States but she already knows everyone.” That was not much of an exaggeration; most of us in the room read her blog and followed her on Twitter. The presentations and free-form discussions of the day were live-streamed, so librarians from near and far could attend by videoconference. There were about fifty people there, and many of them were blogging the event as it happened. And when Greenhill wasn’t onstage, she was thumbing her smart phone, summing up the discussion for her Twitter network.
Long after I and all those smart library students and librarians had left, Greenhill, Blyberg, and blogger Cindi Trainor used their notes from the day to draft a vision of their profession for the future. They called it “The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians,” and it was grand: “The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization,” it began. “Why we do things will not change, but how we do them will…. If the Library is to fulfill its purpose in the future, librarians must commit to a culture of continuous operational change, accept risk and uncertainty as key properties of the profession, and uphold service to the user as our most valuable directive.”
The list of things librarians must do to remain relevant included: “Promote openness, kindness, and transparency among libraries and users…. Choose wisely what to stop doing…. Adopt technology that keeps data open and free, abandon technology that does not…. Trust each other and trust the users.” Naturally, it excited the interest of librarians around the blogosphere and drew the mockery of the Annoyed Librarian. “I Heart Librarian Manifestos,” she wrote.
I like the idea behind the “culture of continuous operational change”—the embrace of the shifting world—and I also like the statem
ent that service is the key part of the public librarians’ job. It’s a crazy, messy moment in the information era, but these librarians are lighting a path through it, and what better standard could they employ than usefulness?
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