TILT-Y Mail #8
Every newsletter its reader
People have asked me “Why a newsletter?” and I have no ready answer except that I work well with weekly deadlines and I’ve always been a fan of email. Onward!
More than any other “historical” librarian, I’ve been influenced by S.R. Ranganathan, an Indian librarian who started as a mathematician and became a librarian. He developed colon classification, the system of faceted classification similar to what we use on Open Library (and Yahoo!) today. Unlike weird creeps like Melville Dewey, Ranganathan’s approach to classification came out of his love of order more than his need to control. His Five Laws of Library Science fit in a tweet and are still a good guiding principle for the practice of librarianship. His birthday, which is today, is celebrated as National Library Day in India. I celebrated by fixing up his Wikipedia page.
In a profession that is much whiter than the general population we need to be aggressive about workplace diversity and inclusion because the lowest difficulty setting is to let our diverse collections and our tolerance speak for themselves and that’s not enough. As allies we can do a lot to read widely with an eye towards diversity (that article is challenging but important) and stay on top of other people doing the work such as the #WeNeedDiverseBooks project. We can also amplify signal on people who have been effective in areas where we may still struggle.
There are a few people whose names come up frequently as eloquent — Chris Bourg comes immediately to mind — but it’s great to see people who are well known but maybe not in that area talking about diversity and inclusion. This brief talk-turned-blog-post by David S. Ferriero, the National Archivist of the United States, explains how they turned “promises into action” after creating a strategic plan that included not just recruitment but also retention of a 21st Century workforce. His twitter is also good reading.
Along a different access vector, helping a wide variety of patrons, including those who are the hardest to serve, remains our mandate. Sarah Houghton, an early blogger and Director for the San Rafael (CA) Public Library organized a training for her staff about library services for people with memory loss, dementia or Alzheimers. This is the sort of thing any library could set up. As I helped my 91 year old landlady troubleshoot her computer issues — her faculties are all pretty great except her spotty memory — it occurred to me that this sort of thing is going to be more and more necessary.
The California State Library recently started a grant program for their Mental Health Initiative which is starting with a Mental Health First Aid Instructor Certification Program. This sort of training, with specific toolkits as well as empathy and “soft skills” support should be essential for any public-facing positions. More tech-inclined people might also want to read about Open Sourcing Mental Illness, a project by Ed Finkler with the goal of changing how we talk about mental health in the tech community.
Remember that one of the things we know about libraries is that people who use public libraries the most need them the least; and people who need them the most, use them the least (cite).
Quick shoutout to Cal State librarian Gabriel Gardner who got some flack from the Association of American Publishers because he writes about SciHub and other scientific paper sharing schemes. His boss wrote a very supportive letter in response (pdf).
Writing this from the air conditioned splendor that is Vermont Technical College’s Hartness Library. The librarian assured me that this monsoon would stop in the next five minutes and sure enough, it did.
TILT-Y MAIL is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s also available in your inbox via TinyLetter.
