TILT #58 — xylarium that word I can never remember, and one you will never forget

Look at that lovely bookshelf. Just kidding, it’s a woodshelf! Australian National University has a xylarium, a collection of 47,000 samples of wood specimen types. Here s a history of it and a 2011 significance assessment of the collection.

A short housekeeping list:

• I won my case against Equifax (no one is as surprised as I am) and I love how they included “librarian” in the headline.
• I visited eleven more Vermont libraries as part of my Vermont 183 Project to visit them all.
• I have joined the board of the Vermont Humanities Council. If you look at that page and think “That is a lot of white people!” you are not alone. Longer story about that once I’ve started my work, but I warned them I was going to be the Black Lives Matter drum major and they said they were okay with that.

Speaking of, The Diversity Gap in Children’s Book Publishing report is out for this year. Books are getting more diverse, but their authors still aren’t. Related: this Google spreadsheet is a good list of Summer/Fall Books by Marginalized Authors in case you’re looking for good “to buy” lists. We can do better. And everyone knows diverse teams perform better.

Emily Drabinski wrote a great talk about the important parts of Critical Librarianship and thinking about the structures inherent in the work that we do as librarians. You should read the entire thing and dwell on “It could have been otherwise.”

It is simply not enough, not ever and certainly not in this urgent moment, to develop a critique, and then head to the pub for a pint. We must first locate the structures of power available to us — our unions, our cataloging and classification schemes, our electoral system — and begin to use those structures as ladders, bridges, staircases for building better worlds. To my mind, librarians are some of the only people who understand what organizing for power and for change–concretely, materially, and in the present tense–can mean.

The Unshelved folks have a Kickstarter. it’s already 1000% funded but in case you hadn’t seen it, I thought you’d like it.

Wikipedia did their antipodal 1Lib1Ref project and it was interesting being not-involved this time around. I didn’t see it in my social media streams. I continue to do my regular wiki-editing and lately I’ve been focusing more on authority control, making sure the data in Wikipedia is inwardly and outwardly linking. If you are linked open data (LOD) curious, this article by Stacy Allison-Cassin and Dan Scott explains what it is and how to use it. You can learn other ways Wikipedia works well with library projects and goals in the Wikipedia + Libraries: Better Together section of WebJunction which includes a training curriculum

Odds and ends:

• Alternatives to all Google products
• My GPDR statement is basically like this one. I’m mostly ignoring it but I also won’t give your data to anyone, fyi.
• If you’re a site owner and are worrying about how to stay compliant, this TechBoomers article should help you
• Also this, from the facebook… 😂😂😂

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.