TILT #34 Waiting for the Age of Anxiety to drop dead

Waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy

Hello! I’ve been working in a library! And with library software! As someone with a lot of ideas about libraries but without day-in-day-out library experience, I need to make sure I’m constantly calibrating to find solutions that work in the real world. This week I’m filling in at a rural public library that serves 1200 people. A town that hit its population peak in 1840. The library is classic, lovely, and somewhat stuck in time because of space and money concerns. The library runs on a budget of just over $52K a year.

Their librarian, my friend Virgil, left to take a job in another library, a job that wasn’t part-time and that offered health insurance. That library serves 3100 people and has a budget of $368K.

It’s tough to keep people running small rural libraries. You have to both want the job but also have the professional background to do the job well. And if you have that professional background, you can usually get a job elsewhere that pays more. So rural librarians in Vermont are people who want to be there. This is mostly the good news, but isn’t always.

I may have mentioned that in addition to all the other high-level tsurris, our state is looking for a new State Librarian after the last one wasn’t reappointed. The application period just closed. Now we wait.

Political news continues to be bad and Vermont’s response to it continues to be good. My elected representatives are grumpy and scrappy and probably some of the other seven dwarves. The IMLS statement on the proposed budget’s complete elimination of their organization is surprisingly tepid. ALA’s is somewhat better.

The American Library Association will mobilize its members, Congressional library champions and the millions upon millions of people we serve in every zip code to keep those ill-advised proposed cuts from becoming a Congressional reality.

EveryLibrary and the California Library Association have put together this guide about how librarians can talk to their Congresspeople about these cuts effectively.

A few funding notes of interest.

• The Knight Foundation is giving out $50K prototype awards to help fight fake news. Deadline is April 3.
• The Awesome Foundation has an Innovation in Libraries Chapter sponsored by Library Pipeline. Small grants, given monthly.
• ProQuest is offering no-cost access to its databases for “students and researchers who have been separated from their universities and libraries because of travel bans or other immigration changes” Nice move, nice statement

Adrianne Jeffries does a deep dive into what is going on with the Google “featured snippets” feature and how these preferred-placement results can be worse than no results at all. And the more contentious the issue, the more likely the inaccuracies.

With more and more Internet of Things devices taking short cuts to trying to give you what you want and entrusting the lookup to someone else, this matters. My car’s GPS has some, but not all, of the small libraries around me in their Libraries list. Where do they get their data? It’s hard to tell, hard to fix. And how when I ask Siri whether my library is open now, it has no idea because my library’s hours aren’t in Yelp.

My absolute favorite example of this was this gaffe.

Everyone was like “Hah, stupid people don’t know gender symbols” but actually, there’s a reason for this

• Someone looked up “female symbol” on their phone’s browser
• The results list shows Wikipedia results up top, “female symbol” redirects to “gender symbol”
• The first image (because we all need the pictures) on the “gender symbol” page and therefore on the results list is the male symbol, because Mars comes before Venus

The noteworthy part here is that the person doing the search had to literally not click the link to get to the actual page. If they had, they would have seen the correct symbol. This is reproducible, I did it today.

Librarians understand this. I didn’t see anyone else talking about how this happened, just lulzy hot takes and eye rolls because it happened.

Harper Collins celebrated their 200th Anniversary with a spectacular website looking into their archives. A treat for all book nerds. Here is a telegram to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ agent concerning One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The title and subtitle of this newsletter are from one of my favorite poems in honor of World Poetry Day. I am the “official tweeter” of Vermont’s Department of Tourism this week and I made a thread of some of my favorite poems. Along with this friend’s poem/song/picture for the Spring Equinox, I feel like maybe there is some light coming in. Send me a poem if there’s one you always love to share.

Today in Librarian Tabs is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s also available in your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.