Guest blogging, sort of

I work as a reference assistant for IC/UGLS, the branch of the Wells Library that is geared towards supporting undergrads. Each of us gets to write an entry for the IC/UGLS blog, and this week is my turn. I wrote about free image repositories because hey, who doesn’t need images at some point?  You can read my post here:

A few free image resources online

Various Humbugs Regarding Banned Books Week

I dislike Banned Books Week.

I dislike Banned Books Week because of its imprecise language. When I think of censorship, I think of 1984-style memory holes and governmental restriction of information. Inherent in this view is the use of power to restrict access. To my view, a parent complaining about a book in a school library is not censorship, for it lacks the power dynamic. A parent has no state-granted power to restrict; a parent can only complain, and the real state authorities–typically public libraries or school libraries–can choose to comply with the challenge or deny it. According to the ALA, most challenges are denied.(1) Is this really censorship in any meaningful sense of the word? If we lose our heads and cry censorship over every school library challenge in East Nowhere, Nebraska, we’ll never be taken seriously when we complain about the real thing.

I dislike Banned Books Week because it does not deal with books that are actually banned. In America, I’m aware of no books that are banned; even books that are successfully challenged in one library can be requested from other libraries; can be bought from bookstores common in cities everywhere; can be ordered from a hundred websites at frequently trivial cost. As far as I can tell, neither the Banned Books Week nor the ALA websites acknowledge this. It’s hard not to see an element of intellectual irresponsibility in their failure to recognize this.

I dislike Banned Books Week because of the atmosphere of self-congratulation it promotes among librarians in general and the ALA in particular. We in America are blessed with intellectual freedoms that are rarely met and even more rarely surpassed by any nation-state in history; even other states in the West are inferior in some respects.(2) I don’t mean to say intellectual freedoms are in no danger here in America; heavens no. But consider the alternative: if supporting intellectual freedom were such a brave and dangerous position–if fighting censorship were a guaranteed tickedt to Room 101 and the Memory Hole–would a large professional organization be able to hold a weeklong celebration of said fight?

There is also a certain paternalism inherent in the efforts of those who are ostensibly fighting against this attitude. Consider the opening paragraph of the Banned Books Week Manifesto:

To you zealots and bigots and false
patriots who live in fear of discourse.
You screamers and banners and burners
who would force books
off shelves in your brand name
of greater good...

—Ellen Hopkins, from the Banned Books Week Manifesto (pdf)

And the ALA’s characterization of “censors,” AKA the citizens who express concerns about books:

Regardless of specific motives, all would-be censors share one belief-that they can recognize "evil" and that other people must be protected from it.
Censors do not necessarily believe their own morals should be protected, but they do feel compelled to save their fellows.

This quote is from an article titled–I am not making this up– “The Censor: Motives and Tactics.”

Heaven forbid a citizen ever question a librarian, I guess. I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read in library school about how we aren’t here to tell the public what to read, but actual practice flatly contradicts this. Read the ALA’s website and see if you can find any conception that a challenge could be legitimate. There’s a lot on there about listening to patrons and answering objections, but what it really means is telling patrons to STFU and accept our selections. It’s like the library equivalent of Team America:World Police: intellectual freedom is the only way.

As I finish, I’d like to correct one misconception that I’m sure will crop up: I don’t like library challenges, either. I don’t even dislike them. I think most of them are well-intentioned(3), but I agree with most librarians that most should not be upheld. I think it’s reasonable for parents and community members to feel uncomfortable with some of the items we select, and I think that we librarians should acknowledge that not all items are suited to all collections. (Anyone who disagrees is requested to post in the comments, in 500 words or fewer, why the contents of the Kinsey Institute Library or any other medical library should be duplicated at all public libraries.)

In short: let’s all support intellectual freedom, but let’s support it without declaring a week to celebrate how awesome we are for doing it.

————————————

(1) ALA.org, “About Banned and Challenged Books.” Available at http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/aboutbannedbooks/index.cfm.

(2) I have in mind Germany’s and France’s criminal penalties for  holocaust denial and the latter’s criminalization of positive depictions of drug use.

(3) Even the Banned Books Week website seems to tacitly acknowledge this; seven of the top ten most frequently challenged books are challenged for age-appropriateness–hardly “Do it to Julia!” territory.

“What we become…”

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”

—Thomas Carlyle

Musings of a bored librarian

I’m at the reference desk right now. I started learning Japanese this week, so now I can fantasize about using my rudimentary Japanese to save the day during a reference question and thus justify my presence during the nothing else that will happen the rest if the time I’m here.

Is the Great Wall of China visible from space?

During the sermon last Sunday, Pastor Dan mentioned that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure visible from space. I had the vague impression that this wasn’t the case, but I couldn’t think of a good counterexample. (I’d heard that the Salton Sea also fits this claim, but it’s debatable whether it’s truly man-made or truly a structure.) It was time for research.

The first stop was Wikipedia, where I learned that the original version of the claim was that the Great Wall was visible from the moon, not just space. I would go on to find that this is still the most common claim about the Wall’s visibility, as various WikiAnswers-type pages frequently features this or something similar (e.g., “What are the only two man-made strucutures visible from space? Great Wall is one.”) Snopes’s article was written about it, too. It wasn’t until I checked Space.com that I found a detailed examination of the lesser claim of visiblity from “space,” (low earth orbit, for our purposes). The Straight Dope also takes on both versions extensively and declares them both factually bankrupt. I’m not sure I trust About.com, but they deny the moon claim but say that the wall is “barely visible” from orbit. Disappointingly, the Encylopedia Brittanica Online doesn’t say one way or the other, though it did answer my question about the Wall’s width–about 30 feet, which would seem to make it much less visible than a lot of other things.

But while these sources are a good start, we can do better than that. Let’s see what NASA has to say.

You can tell NASA has had to deal with this question many times in the past, for the NASA website’s page on the claim describes it somewhat tendentiously as a “space-based myth.” NASA identifies the origin of the claim as a 1938 book, and now that I know that I wonder why anyone ever took the claim seriously, much less after the age of spaceflight began. The page does allow that the Wall is visible from orbit with the aid of binoculars or a digital camera with a telephoto lenses, but then, so are a lot of things, including bridges, dams, airports, and the Egyptian pyramids. Even then it’s difficult without the right weather conditions: the Wall was built from bricks made from the surrounding dirt, so it’s awfully hard to spot a wall of dirt against the dirt if there hasn’t been a recent snowfall or the like. So NASA’s answer is basically “No,” albeit with the caveat that under the right conditions you might get extremely lucky and find something that may or may not be the actual wall.

Finally, I came across a BBC article written after one of China’s early space launches. China’s taikonaut looked for the Wall and couldn’t find it, and in response the Chinese government pressed publishers to redact the claim from their textbooks. That about settles it for me; if even China calls shenanigans on a point of Chinese pride, I feel safe declaring the claim false.

Musk for librarians?

Library-scented perfume.

While I do like the smell of old books, I can’t say I’ve ever been tempted to ask one out.

Westminster council report: Librarians “should be sexier”

We’re doing our best, people.

(Link to the Evening Standard article on the report.)

Library cynicism – I

iPhone Experiment Helps Make Sense of the ’semantic web’

The semantic web: doing what people have already been doing with less effort for years.

Libraries, Knowledge, and Love

I have nothing substantial today, only a quote:

“Despite popular theories, I believe people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. Either they are amazed by something a beloved knows that they themselves do not know; or they discover common rare knowledge; or they can supply knowledge to someone who’s lacking. Hasn’t anyone found a strange ignorance in someone beguiling? An earnest question: what day of the week does Thanksgiving fall on this year? Nowadays, trendy librarians, wanting to be important, say, Knowledge is power. I know better. Knowledge is love.

People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. We are people whose dreams run in a particular way…

Unromantic? This is a reference librarian’s fantasy.

A patron arrives, says, Tell me something. You reach across the desk and pull him toward you, bear hug him a second and then take him into your lap, stroke his forehead, whisper facts in his ear. The climate of Chad is tropical in the south, desert in the north. Source: 1991 CIA World Factbook. Do you love me? Americans consumed 6.2 gallons of tea per capita in 1989. Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States. Synecdoche is a literary device meaning the part for the whole, as in crown heads of Europe. I love you. I could find you British Parliamentary papers, I could track down a book you only barely remember reading. Do you love me now? We own that book, we subscribe to that journal, Elvis Presley’s first movie was called Love Me Tender.

And then you lift the patron again, take him over to the desk and set him down so gently he doesn’t feel it, because there’s someone else arriving, and she looks, oh, she looks uninformed.“

–Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant’s House

(No, I’m not posting while in class–I’m testing Scribefire’s timestamp feature. Yay for plausible deniability!)