Photo: National Library of Scotland via Flickr Common

I’m intrigued by the idea of “voice.”  In feminist theory, we talk about voice in terms of being able to know who we are, and to speak our minds even though the patriarchy tries to repress us.  There’s also the idea of a scholarly voice, which is being able to speak in the formal language and conventions of your discipline in order for other scholars to respect your work.  And when I managed the grocery store I would train people to find their customer service voice through the analogy of the way they might speak to their grandmother, versus the way they would speak to their friends.

In my job search, I use my professional voice to try to convince people that I would be a sane and valuable asset to their organization.  I think this idea of a professional voice is becoming increasingly blurred.  And I blame social media.  I’m in the middle of reading several articles which present research on whether students want to interact with libraries via Facebook.  The findings so far indicate that in 2007 most college students felt that being friended by a librarian would be “awkward.” Students regarded Facebook as their territory and felt confused and suspicious when librarians or faculty appeared on the scene.

But that was 2007. Facebook was first developed in 2004, opened to high school kids in 2005, and then opened to the public in 2006. So in 2007 it was still largely the domain of college students.  Now however, there are more Facebook users who are over the age of 26, than those who are under.  All these older people have friends who are business or professional contacts, in addition to a younger person’s friendbase of childhood chums and fellow students. And they buy in to the idea that marketing is necessary and worthwhile, enough that the idea of a library or business having a Facebook page is also now more of a norm than an anomaly.  To ice that cake, some of those people over 26 are actually the grandmas of the younger people on Facebook.

So when these people with personal and professional friends, and these businesses and libraries, and these grandmas, all interact on the same social platform the lines between how we speak to different people get blurred.  The voices that we use for work, for family, and for friends become one voice.

Today I polled my Facebook friends to ask them if they used Facebook for a) for fun only b) professionally/for work and also for fun c) professionally/for work.  Of my 19 respondees, 10 said they used it for fun only, 6 said fun and work, 2 said work only, and one was a smartass (that makes a very low smartass coefficient which indicates that this is a very accurate poll).

Of my 19 respondees, 7 were personal contacts (family, friends from childhood or my undergrad degree, and othersuch), 8 were former coworkers, and 4 were from my graduate degree.  So even though the majority are using Facebook for fun, the majority of respondees were also actually professional contacts (albeit professional contacts who are also fun or friends or both).  They brought up some great points too, about how work actually is fun for some of us, how work acts as a Facebook conscience, and how many people only friend ex-coworkers in order to preserve the Facebook fun zone.

I can’t wait to see what these blurred lines look like in another ten years.

References

Bietila, D., C. Bloechl, and E. Edwards. (2009). Beyond the buzz: Planning library Facebook initiatives grounded in user needs. Paper presented at the ACRL National Conference, Seattle, WA. http://dspace.wrlc.org/handle/1961/5136

Chu, M., & Meulemans, Y. N. (2008). The Problems and Potential of MySpace and Facebook Usage in Academic Libraries. Internet Reference Services Quarterly, 13(1), 69-85. doi:10.1300/J136v13n01_04

Connell, R. S. (2009). Academic libraries, Facebook and MySpace, and student outreach: a survey of student opinion. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 9(1), 25–36.

Harriet Tubman photo by H. B. Lindsley via the Library of Congress

I am sure the author did not intend the sort of fixation I developed, so why was this detail included? Was it an attempt to reclaim the hideous and oppressive poverty she grew up in? To say “it was awful to be a slave but at least she had nice feet”? And really, can this even be a historical fact? Is there a journal or oral history which recounts the beautiful toes of the woman who led them north?

You know what’s really amazing about being alive right now? Finally seeking to assuage my curiosity, tonight I Googled “Harriet Tubman Straight Toes.” I was wondering if there really was some sort of significance to this fact, the sort of significance that could be found by idle internet browsing. I did not find any unifying theory. However, my first listed result was in fact the Google preview  of the very passage in the very book I read.  It says:

She was accustomed to the scratchy feel of the tow-linen shirt she wore.  Because she went barefooted, the soles of her feet were calloused, but the toes were straight, never having known the pinch of new shoes or any kind of foot covering.

So I suppose it was really just the effort to use sense details to make Tubman’s experience more accessible for children.  To set the stage for a woman who did truly extraordinarily good things in spite of an extraordinarily deprived and abusive childhood.

This book was  written in 1955!  The copyright was renewed in 1983, just in time for me to enjoy, and the edition digitized on Google Books was printed in 1996.  Generations of children have had the opportunity to learn about the toes of Harriet Tubman.  And now we can reconnect with this resource, via our friends at Google.

What a wonderful world.

I’ve got an ever-increasing list of places to keep my eye on.  Luckily many of them come to me, either through RSS or job cards. I’m primarily looking on the west coast (no farther from the bay area than about a $100 plane ticket).  I’m searching in public, academic and special libraries , because I have the curse of being interested in everything.

Job Boards and Othersuch

LibGig (they’re on Twitter too)
LISjobs
ALA JobList
CLA Job Bank
BayNet
CalOPPs
(includes Daly City library, City of Alameda Free Library, City of Mountain View)

I Need a Library Job (also a relentless Facebook page)

National Independent School Association Career Center

Idealist
Craigslist (I have RSS feeds for searches on “librarian,” “library,” and “cheese”)
CalJOBS (To be honest I’m not really looking here, but you have to register if you want to get unemployment.  Has anyone ever found a job from it?)

Job cards (Please note that having a job card at some of these places is a bit like wearing a belt AND suspenders: they will most likely show up on CalOpps or elsewhere)

Alameda County
Berkeley Public Library
Contra Costa County
City of Livermore
City of Oakland
City of Palo Alto
City of Pleasanton
City of Richmond Public Library
Santa Clara County
San Diego County
San Francisco Public Library
City of San Jose
San Mateo County
City of Santa Cruz
Solano County
City of Sunnyvale
Yolo County

There are a few cities that I found which did things a little differently:

City of Los Gatos – couldn’t find a job card or e-notify option.  It’s part of Santa Clara County
City of Hayward – enotify for all city jobs, couldn’t find one for just the library? It’s part of Alameda County.
City of Santa Clara – this is an RSS feed with all city jobs.  They also Twitter!
Where am I missing?
Are you looking anywhere that’s not on the list?

Photo: Bain News Service via The Library of Congress at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2004008785/

I hate politics but I love voting!

Normally I vote under the watchful eye of Jesus at the Christian Science Reading Room, but this time I voted at the Buddhist Bookstore.  I never thought of Buddhists as being more commercially-minded than Christians, but there you go. Anyway they are both LITERARY VENUES!

My poll workers were a teenage girl and an older woman.  The teenage girl wanted to try looking up my name in the book, but the older woman didn’t think she was ready yet.  Then I went to the privacy booth.  I used my smartphone to look at my notes about what I wanted to vote for!  I got two choices for some things, and THREE choices for others.  We have ranked choice voting. I used a special marker to make the arrows complete.  It is like taking the SAT only shorter and you have to stand. But YOUR ENTIRE FUTURE still depends on the outcome.

Then I fed my ballot into the machine, chomp chomp, and got a free sticker! I said thank you to everyone and they all gave me big smiles.  I live in a democracy!  We all do our part.

Photo: Lewis Walker, via the Library of Congress at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001042017/PP/

(Go John Avalos,  Go!)

Everyone knows it’s a good idea to research a potential career before setting out to find the perfect job.

Luckily the Internet Archive has a great video which is really helping me understand the possibilities! Click the picture to check it out!

Here’s something that’s been blowing my mind for a while:

In the paper age, written communication provided an authoritative record.  Text, once recorded, did not change.  It could be consulted multiple times, and more importantly for scholarly work, it could be cited.  Written communication provided a paper-trail for researchers; it allowed the development of knowledge to be traced and codified.  Ideas could be communicated asynchronously and without the presence of the author. However, written communication was received “as is.”  If the reader had a question, the author may not have been present to clarify. 

Oral communication, on the other hand, allowed for immediate clarification.  It was only when the recipient received information from a second or third hand source that the message’s twisting trail became apparent.  In the game Telephone, a message passes from one person to the next, often emerging totally transformed at the end of the journey.  Orally transmitted knowledge is the stuff of myth and rumor, and there is often no accountability for the source.  Both oral and written communication had advantages.

Today the qualities of written and oral communication are converging.  As we go paperless, we can more easily edit our written trail, be it a document, blog, or web page.  Crowd-editing and anonymous contribution challenges the authoritative nature of written communication. Written communication is more frequently synchronous through the use of Instant Messaging or productivity tools such as Google Docs.  Written communication literally becomes oral communication through the use of text-to-speech software. Audio recording, on the other hand, makes ephemeral oral communication indelible.  Stirring speeches and slips of the tongue can be immortalized for future generations.  The words and identity of the speaker can be locked in, and communicated without a garbling intermediary.

What does this do to our idea of authority? Can’t traceable, tangible oral communication now be used for scholarly work? Could I speak a paper rather than write a paper?

The film People are Knowledge presents some ways that oral clips could be used to fulfill Wikipedia’s citation requirements. It explores the intersection of Western scholarship with more oral cultures, making some great points about authority, knowledge and digital or written intermediaries. Fascinating stuff!

People are Knowledge (subtitled) from Achal R. Prabhala on Vimeo.

From the ODLIS (that’s the Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science, of course):

bibliographic coupling

The idea that two scholarly papers containing a citation in common are bibliographically related in a way that is likely to be of interest to researchers. A similar relationship, called co-citation coupling, is established between two or more documents when they are both cited in a third. Citation indexing is based on the principle of bibliographic coupling. Synonymous with citation coupling

Two or more documents cited in a third!  Steamy!

And the Jamie Lee Curtis of libraries, the

bibliographic hermaphrodite

A term coined by Crystal Graham, serials librarian at the University of California, San Diego, in reference to a publication in any medium that has characteristics of both monographs and serials. Most are complete in one part but have the potential to continue. Their defining characteristic is “updatability.” Examples include loose-leaf services, databases, Web sites, and some electronic journals. Beginning in 1995, reconsideration of issues related to seriality resulted in a new model, dividing the bibliographic universe into finite resources and continuing resources, a more accurate reflection of changing patterns in publishing. This new distinction has been adopted in AACR2 2002.

Kind of a dull definition for such a racy term, right?

Help me build my list! Can you think of any more?

The Black Death

Photo: Hernán De Angelis Campephilus (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons

Squirrels carry Bubonic plague:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-10-denver-squirrel-plague_N.htm

Leprosy

Photo: http://www.birdphotos.com (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons

Armadillos carry Hansen’s disease:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=armadillos-leprosy-humans

Consumption

Photo: Marie Richie from Portland, Cascadia (Flickr) via Wikimedia Commons

Badgers and Cows carry tuberculosis:
http://www.politicalanimal.org.uk/area/westminster/bovinet

Hydrophobia

Photo: Korall (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons

Racoons, as well as many other mammals, carry rabies:
http://www.cdc.gov/rabies/transmission/index.html

So this post, with its punchline of “Mozarella soaked in Cream” really caught my attention”

http://drizzleanddip.com/2011/07/25/chilli-and-garlic-prawn-pizza-with-zucchini-and-mozzarella-soaked-in-cream

I don’t go as gaga over burrata as some do.  Although I certainly enjoy its mild, creamy character, I’m not sure that its so elevated above regular fresh Mozzarella that its worth the  extra bucks.  However, making my own Burrat-a-like sounds like a fantastic thing to do when regular old fat amounts just won’t cut it.

Image by The Gribler Bank Note Co. from photo by Bakers Art Gallery (Library of Congress[1]) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

QL 706.2 .H44 1982: QL encompasses Zoology, and QL 700-739.8 are devoted to mammals.

Author: Ruth Heller
ISBN-10: 0448018225
City and Publisher: New York: Grosset & Dunlap
Copyright Date: 1982

Reader’s Annotation: Rhymes and pictures illustrate the similarities and differences represented in the mammal class.

Plot Summary: This book will blow your mind!  Mammals may share some similarities, but there are also a fascinating range of differences.  Animals Born Alive and Well showcases different groups of mammals, illustrating the fascinating variation in existence (and in extinction).

Critical Evaluation: Heller uses clever, rather than twee, rhymes to pull this book along.  The words and pictures really work together to create understanding.  The text has humor, without being too jokey.

Illustrations: The pictures are a detailed enough to be interesting to young minds, but are never busy.  Heller uses naturalistic colors, primarily muted browns.  Her animals have personality without being anthropomorphized.

Reading Level/Interest: 4-8
Curriculum Ties: From the California State Science Content Standards. Kindergarten – Students know: different types of plants and animals inhabit the earth. As a basis for understanding this concept: Students know how to observe and describe similarities and differences in the appearance and behavior of plants and animals (e.g., seed-bearing plants, birds, fish, insects).
Booktalking Ideas: Ask if students know what a mammal is.  Bring in some mammals to show off!

Challenge Issues: There are a few pages of nursing babies, which may create some awkward questions that some parents would rather not answer.

About the Author: Heller graduated from UC Berkeley in 1946 with a degree in Fine Arts.  She published many children’s books and coloring books.  She lived in the San Francisco Bay Area all her life.  More information at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/07/03/BAGG77GB7G1.DTL&ao=2