Things I've learned from my first year of library school

It's officially been "summer" for a week now, and I've been reflecting a bit on my library experience so far.

I've learned a few things.
  • I don't have to read every word of every reading. I can get the gist and participate in discussion without killing myself with thoroughness.
  • It's good to have something productive to do. I like completing assignments.
  • It's OK to refuse to do homework on the weekends. Life's too short.
  • I don't have to be the best. Good enough is good enough.
  • I avoid other people's stress at all costs. I'd like to commiserate, but I don't want to hear it!
Overall, I'm pretty sure I still want to be a librarian. So I guess that's good. However, I know that realistically, no matter how much "instruction" I receive and how many projects I complete, I'm still going to experience a steep learning curve and training time wherever I end up. So really, I feel like at this point I'm just being exposed to the ins and outs of the field. Even after three years of this, I don't think I'll be a library expert or anything. And that's OK.

Also, I think my focus is more narrow than many of my colleagues'. I already work in a library; I more or less know what I want to do and where I'm headed; and really, I think each person's journey is different, regardless of academic training. So where I end up probably isn't dependent on this program.

The honest truth is I kind of just want to be done. Sure, I've learned some stuff. It's been kind of interesting. But my heart definitely isn't in it as much as it was/is when I study theology. But then again, reading the Church Fathers isn't going to pay the bills. So.

Two more years.
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Theologian Thursday: Dorothy Day (1897-1980)

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 I'm not sure if I would typically classify Dorothy Day as a theologian, but she did a lot of awesome work and wrote some pretty good stuff, and since I've been pretty fascinated with her this week I thought she'd make a good profile for this week's post.

Dorothy Day was a major player in the Catholic Worker Movement, which was founded by Peter Maurin. She advocated for social justice and equality for the poor and otherwise disenfranchised through nonviolent means.

One thing I find interesting is that she didn't convert to Catholicism until her daughter was born (despite the urging of her partner, Forster Batterham, to abort the pregnancy), and she decided to give her the spiritual upbringing she never experienced. Subsequently, she found in the Catholic Church a positive outlet for her longing to do good in the world.

She worked creating "houses of hospitality" to serve the poor and homeless. She organized farming communes to give people work to do and provide food to eat during the Great Depression. She practiced "voluntary poverty," as modeled by St. Francis of Assisi, in order to respond to the call of Jesus Christ on her life.


What you should read:
Ratings:
(To read more about my rating system, click HERE.)
Gender Equality:
She believed all people had a role in caring for the poor, and served right alongside Peter Maurin in his work. (I do wish she used gender inclusive language in her writing...  but I know that's just a symptom of the time period in which she lived.)
Environmental Sensibility:  
The local agricultural focus of  her work illustrates the value she saw in caring for creation. I think her love for the environment also comes out in her disdain of violence and the atomic bomb.
Heretical Tendencies:
Though many of her views were politically radical, I think for the most part her spiritual beliefs were on par with Catholic orthodoxy. She was catechized as an adult, was baptized (apparently conditionally because of her previous baptism in the Episcopal church), gave confession, and took communion. Her cause for canonization is currently open, and she is considered a "Servant of God."
General Badassery:
The fact that she was an outspoken anarchist and a subscriber to a Christian form of communism during the Red Scare is pretty badass.

“What a confusion we have gotten into when Christian prelates sprinkle holy water on scrap metal to be used for obliteration bombing, and name bombers for the Holy Innocents, for Our Lady of Mercy; who bless a man about to press a button which releases death on fifty thousand human beings, including little babies, children, the sick, the aged, the innocent as well as the guilty.”
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Mutuality as Miscellaneous: Feminist Theology-Library Science Crossover!

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Since it's finally summer, and coursework for the year is over, I'm getting to some "fun" reading... which turns out to still be related to my Organization of Information and Resources class (so much so that I think it should have been required reading).

The book is called Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, and I'm only halfway through, but I highly recommend it--and not just to librarian-types. It's definitely everyone-accessible.

But the interesting thing is not the book itself.

What's interesting is that I'm reading it through the context of feminism and all the feminist theology I've been reading lately (including Rachel Held Evans's "Week of Mutuality" #mutuality2012).

Weinberger explains that there are three types of order:
  1. The order of physical things themselves--where things go, like books on shelves.
  2. The order of information about the things of the first order--a directory of where things go, like a catalog.
  3. The order of digital "things" which take up no space--the removal of the first and second orders' limitations
Weinberger talks about how, historically, people have been bound to ideas of "natural order" or "heavenly order" that, when analyzed critically, turn out to still be established rather arbitrarily. For example, planets are real things that exist in nature, but to classify an entity as a planet, it has to meet certain criteria, and this criteria is just a definition established by astronomers, and the astronomers don't even agree on the definition. Further, some think that the whole concept of a class of "planets" is totally cultural to begin with, and doesn't even translate globally. Weinberger says that "Maintaining a category of planets says less about the nature of our universe than about our need to imagine walking on speres other than our own blue one" (39).

He goes on to show how Aristotelian categorization has prevailed as the organizational structure of choice for millennia, with its hierarchical trees and nesting of smaller categories into larger.

Truly, the Aristotelian system is useful in many ways (if only because its engrained in our collective psyche). But with the rise of the digital age and postmodernity, its cracks are beginning to leak.

I see that this is also true in the patriarchal hierarchy of the church.

Weinberger says that "Classification is a power struggle--it is political--because the first two orders of order require that there be a winner. The third order takes the territory subjugated by classification and liberates it. Instead of forcing it into categories, it tags it" (91-92).

I refuse to believe that this is not as relevant to me as a woman in the church as it is to me as a librarian in a digital context.

There no longer has to be a winner. Men and women (and everyone in between) can live and serve and minister as miscellaneous persons, "tagging" themselves as they are called and doing what they are meant to do.

The first two orders are no longer sufficient for organizing information or society. We are in a new time--historically and in light of the incarnation and resurrection--and we should be liberated by the ability to be miscellaneous, be what we are, without trying to force our new wine into old wineskins. This new wine will burst the old wineskins. Let's allow it to spill out.

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Paper Crane Graffiti!

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I don't think I've ever shared why I named my blog "Paper Crane Library."

Probably because it's not a very exciting story. I decided I needed a blog as I started library school, looked around my office for name inspiration, and saw a few tiny paper cranes I'd been folding in my spare minutes of work (which were plentiful last summer...). Then a few weeks later, when I was in Seattle for the MLIS program orientation, I found a little ceramic crane (pictured in my header) in a shop and bought it for good luck.

I don't really believe in luck. But I like the idea and the symbolism. Paper cranes are also supposed to symbolize peace. I like that too.

I was reminded of all this when I saw this article about a French artist who is creating "graffiti" with origami in Paris. Check out the article here, and this video:

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The Effect of Popularity on Social Metadata

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For a class assignment, I had to choose two books and analyze their records in both WorldCat and LibraryThing. I chose one well-known book (Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club) and one lesser-known book (Val Webb’s Why We’re Equal). The gap in popularity between these two books had clear consequences for the thoroughness of their records. For example, Webb’s book had zero ratings and zero reviews in both catalogs, while Tan’s had hundreds. On some level, a book’s popularity should not determine how well done its record is; I feel like records should be somewhat objective. But at the same time, with the rise of social aspects of information sharing, the more people who access a material, the better filled-out its metadata will be. Looking at the two different catalogs addressed both of these issues.
WorldCat had the more “objective” records. Despite the fact that Webb’s book seems to be virtually unknown, its metadata did not feel to be lacking when compared to Tan’s. There were a few attributes in the “Details” section that Joy Luck Club had that Why We’re Equal did not, but the only one of these I felt was wrongly missing was that of “Genre.” Others, like “Additional Format” and “More Information” probably were just not applicable. Granted, Webb’s book was also missing the tags and reviews that Tan’s book had, but those were part of the social metadata anyway.
LibraryThing was definitely much heavier on the social tagging. And the number of “Members”  a book had definitely corresponded with how much information was in the book’s record. Tan’s book has 10,276 members, 103 reviews, and 30 tags, as well as extensive information about characters and setting, and relationships to other works—“Is contained in,” “Has the adaptation,” “Has a student’s study guide.” (I thought this “Work-to-work relationships” section was especially interesting.) Webb’s book, on the other hand, had only 11 members, and consequently no reviews, seven tags, and absolutely no information in the “Common Knowledge” section that contained all in the information that was available for Tan’s book.
Surely, part of this dearth of metadata (and publicity) could be due to the fact that Tan’s book is fiction, while Webb’s is non-fiction—i.e. there aren’t really characters in Webb’s book, so that facet would not be applicable. However, there were parts of the Webb record that were empty on LibraryThing simply because no one had gotten around to filling them out, and that could be because only 11 people had “added” it.
I love social tagging. I like being able to see what other people are reading and what they  think about it (though I prefer GoodReads to LibraryThing). And I think that having users fill out metadata fields can really add value to records, but I think it’s unfortunate that a book’s lack of popularity can result in it having an incomplete catalog record. There should be some kind of standard minimum. I think WorldCat did a good job of providing that minimum, but also integrating social features—tagging from users and reviews from GoodReads members.
In the end, though, a book’s popularity should not dictate the quality of its metadata.