an end to who and where

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

I checked out this book a few months ago and am finally being forced to read it (someone has a hold on it). I never took a real literature course in college, and 10 pages in, I’m already in over my head.
But my [...]

google books will get better, or will it?

This afternoon I used Google Books to help answer a readers’ advisory question. Keywords from the patrons’ question turned up in a 1971 issue of Horn Book, the children’s literature review.
Google’s misshapen snippet showed part of a summary of the book, but nothing more. I took the elevator to the sub-basement, got lost, asked [...]

getting married and having kids

Now and then I hear that reference service differs between public libraries and academic libraries in that public libraries give answers, whereas academic libraries teach.
I’ve never accepted this definition. True, it is not useful to make distinctions when you are running a collaborative multi-type reference service, but mostly, I just don’t see it, and [...]

Thank you, John Hope Franklin

Oddly, given the number of history blogs I subscribe to, I first heard that John Hope Franklin had died from someone on twitter.  And I thought immediately that I wanted to write something, but I didn’t know what.  Then, too, the tributes and memorials and expressions of gratitude started pouring in everywhere I looked to [...]

inspiration and the right tools for the job

who doesn’t love getting things in the mail?  i went for a run on saturday with the dog and came home to drop her off after a couple of miles before going back out.  while i was out a mysterious little package arrived in the mail and in that package was a slim notebook labeled [...]

tomes, groans and micro-loans

As part of the reading and thinking I’ve been doing that lead up to my post last weekend, I’ve also been thinking about the question, if not books, then what?
Aaron Schmidt addresses this idea in his recent post, “libraries might not provide content in the future & it’s okay“. He talks about how much content [...]

a paradox in librarianship

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about literacy lately, as maybe you can guess from my recent-ish posts. Deep into Gunther Kress’ Literacy in the New Media Age, I find myself analyzing the structure of what I read and write, and especially outside of literary contexts.
Recently at organic gardening class for example, I [...]

the long road to darkness

The other day, Anne-Marie posted about online craft tutorials and pointed out that they often assume some skill or knowledge on the part of the reader. If not, the reader can search for more tutorials or ask questions in the comments.
I think that one of the things she is suggesting is that information literacy lessons [...]

serious readers

Just a quick post about the Levenger catalog that comes to my house, offering “tools for serious readers”, including pens, notebooks, bookshelves, “reading tools” and books such as a replica (”facsimile”) of the Sarajevo Haggadah.
That is to say, this catalog is not for me. It comes addressed to my father-in-law, who has never lived with [...]

live from #apollo: act 1

On Saturday, i participated in Portland Center Stage’s experiment with allowing a limited number of people to blog/post to twitter during a performance of the new play Apollo.  i’m still reflecting on the experience but want to write about some aspects of it while it’s fresh in my mind.
Since the play is in 3 acts, [...]