TILT #101 — You will begin again and again
Welcome to 2023 friends. Happy Spring Equinox. If you haven’t checked out The Library Workers’ Field Guide to Designing and Discovering Restorative Environments, now is a good time.
I’ve spent some serious time learning the ins and outs of a new house during a Vermont winter and have been happy for the meltier days recently. Another Public Domain Day has seen Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and Irving Berlin’s Puttin’ on the Ritz entering the public domain. Here’s another fun way to visualize public domain day with this icicle chart which shows 58,000 1927 published works found in Hathi Trust which are now in the public domain. Click around, it’s a good time.
I went to ALA (virtually) and put out an official “I’m looking for work” post on my blog. Now that selling my mom’s house is no longer my part-time job, I would like to do a bit more remunerative work. If you’ve got any leads, let me know?
Let’s talk a little about the culture wars over school libraries’ collections. In the 2021–22 school year, PEN America reported “a record-setting 2,532 book challenges affecting 1,648 different titles in 138 school districts.” The Brookings Institute looked into what the outlines of these challenges look like. One of the more important conclusions, not surprising to many librarians, is that these challenges can have a chilling effect on acquisition of content in “controversial” (abortion, racism and GLBTQ+) topic areas. Title IX rules, which bar discrimination based on the basis of sex, may actually help groups like the Texas ACLU effectively fight some of these book bans.
Meanwhile bills like H.R.5, the “Parents Bill of Rights Act” are making it plain that Republican lawmakers are mostly trying to eviscerate public education in addition to all of their other tactics from the white supremacist playbook.
A PSA that there are occasionally still worthwhile things to find on Twitter such as the tweet below but if you want to move to Mastodon, I’m at https://glammr.us/@jessamyn on an instance for GLAM folks.
Project ENABLE (Expanding Nondiscriminatory Access by Librarians Everywhere) has free training modules and lists of resources to help libraries give better service to people with disabilities. Here’s a blog post with a quick summary of what’s useful about it.
While we’re talking about nondiscriminatory access, Brian M. Watson and Beck Schaefer have written an excellent article for First Monday called Handicapped has been cancelled: The terminology and logics of disability in cultural heritage institutions. It looks at the LCSH heading “social disabilities” which became a term after the term “handicapped” was removed in 2001 and the headings which used it were rejiggered. However “social disabilities” seems to have been intended to mean disadvantaged or underprivileged but instead winds up being somewhat confusing. A good read and some nice explanations of how LC works or is supposed to work.
Along similar lines, “digital discrimination” is a real thing that the FCC has been charged with addressing as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. They propose to adopt a definition of “digital discrimination of access.” The National Digital Inclusion Alliance has a short post outlining the way people can receive unequal access which they have communicated to the FCC. The Benton Institute has a much longer essay outlining what this actually means and talks a bit about the history of the US trying to make access to communications technology more equitable. Of note is the effect/intent split. It doesn’t matter if broadband companies are not actively trying to discriminate, if people are getting discriminated against, that’s not OK.
You might enjoy this piece of real-feeling fiction about a man who illustrated the covers of books, books in his own personal library: Remembering Roy Gold, Who was Not Excessively Interested in Books. Here is more about the real author/artist.
Odds and ends of note
- How to Describe Characters — an informative essay for authors about how to talk about what your characters look like without relying on stereotypes
- I love this school librarian’s description of how she ran a very participatory mock Caldecott awards with her students
- JSTOR’s American Prison Newspapers collection has a series of interesting blog posts which offer various inroads into the collection
And a few articles from “OMG it’s the future!” category.
- How San Franciscans use their libraries is shifting dramatically — ever since San Francisco public published its report on how going fine-free affected its operations entirely positively, I’ve looked forward to their stats-based reports.
- Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced audiobooks — I have so many conflicting feelings about this
- Librarians Are Meeting Younger Readers Where They Are: TikTok — Notable quote “Lean into the cringe”
- On this day when we start hearing oral arguments in Hachette v. Internet Archive lets look at the past 25 years of ebooks
Not all of these recently-read books were good ones. I liked Dispatcher. I disliked The Sex Lives of Cannibals. The other two would probably be good books for someone but they didn’t quite click with me.
Stay heliotropic everyone.
Today in Librarian Tabs is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s available in more-accessible format your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.
