Spring 2007

& The Chuckanut Radio Hour

Last night I went to hear Sherman Alexie:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Alexie
I don't know what I was expecting, the only books I have read of his are Reservation Blues and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven. And, of course, I have seen Smoke Signal (based on the latter book) and The Business of Fancy Dancing. I guess I was expecting a tidy little book reading regarding his new book Flight. I forgot that it was also a taping of The Chuckanut Radio Hour-a Prairie Homesque Radio show a la Bellingham. This made the evening a bit messy, and Sherman only popped in for dissapointingly short, radio sound bytes. But, then, at the end, he did his monologue which floored me. He was completely irreverent, politically incorrect, DIRTY, and absolutely hilarious. I haven't laughed so much in a while, it was nice. You can stream the show after it airs on the second saturday of May, although I am not sure where you go to do this...

Posted by Amy Stefany at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Weeks 16th-20th & 23rd-27th

Since our schedule is a little off due to the WASL I have been working on small projects. One thing that I am going to do that I'm excited about is fix up the part of the books that are arranged by the dewey decimal system (the non-fiction books). Right now, on the shelf below the books there is just a label with the call numbers that the shelf contains (i.e. 341.002-345.1). We were thinking we could make labels that contains the subject and the call number, so that the students can browse the shelves more easily. We also want to create a corresponding wall chart. So I went to the public library to find kid literature on the dewey decimal system. There is only a small section of books on libraries in the children's library in Bellingham, but they're fun, and I couldn.t help checking out a few others. Here's some pictures of ones that I grabbed.

This is a really simple book about the Dewey Decimal system. I am going to use it as a reference for this project.

This book was mentioned in Sacred Stacks, about the saving of the books of Iraq. It is laid out like a graphic novel.

This is a book we read to the younger students during library. It's pretty cute. Although it does not directly reference it, I think it might have been inspired by the lion sculpture outside the New York Public Library.

And...here are a couple others...

Posted by Amy Stefany at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reading Reflection

Marshall McLuhan is widely known for coining the idea of the “Global Village” and especially for his catch phrase “the medium is the message.” Taken apart from his full body of thought, these sound bytes can be misconstrued; assigned the wrong meaning or taken at face value without any further consideration. Upon reading further into his ideas, one finds that there are three major changes our culture has gone through that led McLuhan to these appropriate diagnoses. These changes include the creation of the phonetic alphabet, the invention of the printing press (the Gutenberg Revolution) and the invention of the telegraph, which spawned the current electronic revolution.
He is quoted in 1973 as saying “The phonetic alphabet is unique in being formed by phonemes, meaningless bits. All other alphabets consist mainly of morphemes, or meaningful bits. The extreme abstraction of meaning from the formal sign…releases the visual faculty from its embodiment in the other senses.” It is the phonetic alphabet, McLuhan contends, that has transformed our culture from an oral society to a visual society. The letters, having no meaning in themselves, save for their phonetic representation, disengage the other senses (i.e. the oral and the tactile) of the reader and the literate society. This narrowing of the senses has changed us. With this change comes a tension and detribalization that, according to McLuhan, is responsible for everything from military aggression to cultural homogenization and “civilized” detachment.
The next major change noted by McLuhan is that of the Gutenberg Revolution. The isolation of the senses caused by the adoption of the phonetic alphabet is thought to have been intensified through the linearity of movable type. McLuhan makes a distinction between “hot” and “cold” media. Hot media require less interaction from the consumer and cold media require (even encourage) more. Print, according to McLuhan, is hot media. It “…provided a vast new memory for past writings that made personal memory inadequate.” Print, McLuhan states, has “isolated the scholar”, and “made all of history simultaneous.” It is also movable type that laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution and the subsequent mechanization of our culture.
“Every aspect of Western mechanical culture was shaped by print technology, but the modern age is the age of electric media, which forge environments and cultures antithetical to the mechanical consumer society derived from print.”
It is electronic media (television, computers, telephone), McLuhan believes, that are beginning the process of retribalization in society. These “cold” media are thought to engage not only our visual senses, but auditory and tactile senses as well, causing a return to a pre-literate oral sensibility. Electronic media are thought to replace the old tribalism with the new “global village.”

The day of the individualist, of privacy, of fragmented or “applied” knowledge, of “points of view” and specialist goals is being replaced by the over-all awareness of a mosaic world in which space and time are overcome by television, jets and computers-a simultaneous, “all-at-once” world in which everything resonates with everything else as in a total electrical field, a world in which energy is generated and perceived not by the traditional connections that create linear, causative thought processes, but by intervals, or gap…which create synaesthetic discontinuous integral consciousness.

It seems that, with his ideas of global telepathy and instant messaging, McLuhan could have bee predicting the onslaught of our current internet culture, which he did not even live to see.
It is McLuhan’s belief that these things: the phonetic alphabet, the printing press and all electronic media have had such an impact upon society, in terms of sheer form, that the content that they carry could be considered irrelevant, or, at least, secondary.
“The medium is the message.”

Posted by Amy Stefany at 06:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After Amazon completely botched my order for Revolting Librarians Redux (I will never buy books there again, I promise) I called (can you guess)...the Bellingham Public Library. Not only did they have it and put it on hold for me but the reference librarian seemed very interested in the subtitle "radical librarians speak out"...sounded like she might check it out herself sometime. Even though I now can't deface the pages of this book, the whole experience left me feeling pretty warm and fuzzy. Maybe I'll see if they have some of the other books since I can't afford them anyways.

Posted by Amy Stefany at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since I can't attend seminar from Bellingham I decided to go back through our other books from the past two quarters and see just what exactly those who we have already read have had to say about McLuhan. For Landow it seemed to be mostly name dropping; McLuhan was listed almost 20 times in the index. There were several mentions of him in Internet Art, but I was not suprised to find the most comprehensive and succinct mention of him in David Nye's Technology matters. Below are the quotes worth quoting....

Hypertext 3.0 by: George Landow

Pg. 32:

“Writing, printing, cinema, and video are all forms of asynchronous communication, which, as McLuhan points out in The Gutenberg Galaxy, permits reflection, abstraction, and forms of thought impossible in an oral culture.”

Pg.102:

“Eisenstein, McLuhan, Kernan, and other students of the cultural implications of print technology have demonstrated ways in which the printed book formed and informed our intellectual history. They point out, for example, that a great part of these cultural effects derive from book technology’s creation of multiple copies of essentially the same text.”

Pg. 213:

“…hypertext environments have, if not precisely McLuhan’s message in the medium, at least certain tendencies that derive from specific features of the software.”

Internet Art by: Rachel Greene

Pg.24:

“ ‘TV as a Creative Medium’, an exhibit curated by Wise in 1969, signaled the widespread influence of Marshall McLuhan and engineer, mathematician and architect Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) and galvanized an interest in mass-media-based art.”

Pg. 21:

“Like many working in working in media art, VanDerBeek was heavily influenced by composer John Cage’s (1912-92) interest in found materials and debris as musical content, as well as by Canadian writer and theoretician Marshall McLuhan’s (1910-80) ideas that each type of media should be considered an active metaphor able to translate experience into new forms and revert agency to the participant. Many decades later, McLuhan’s rhetoric of subjective experience, feedback and choice has often been invoked in arguments that cyberspace is an open and encompassing democratic medium.”

Technology Matters by: David E Nye

Pg. 27:

“During the 1960’s Marshall McLuhan won a large following as he argued that every major form of communication had reshaped the way people saw their world, causing changes in both public behavior and political institutions. For McLuhan, innovations in communications, notably the printing press, radio, and television, had automatic effects on society…For McLuhan, not only did the media extend the human sense organs; each new form of a medium disrupted the relationship between the senses. McLuhan argued that the phonetic alphabet intensified the the visual function and that literate cultures devalued the other senses-a process that movable type intensified. Furthermore, McLuhan thought electronic media extended the central nervous system and linked humanity together in a global network.”

Posted by Amy Stefany at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

week 1

From here on out I am spending Thursdays and Fridays at the Lincoln Elementary school library. They are wonderful there. This week we read Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen with the kindergarteners and first graders. After reading, the librarian talks about the rules of the library and they get to check out one book which they bring back the following week (each class gets to have an 'official' library class once a week). The older students also are required to read one book from the library and write a book report on it each month. I'll attach the forms sometime. I had the priviledge of checking the books out this week. We check the kindergarteners' books out to the teacher, but they hand us their book and we ask them their name to help them feel responsible. When asked their name, some of them will just look at you and say "I don't know." It's so cute! The kids, in general, are extremely well behaved when in the library. If these students' attitudes towards the library are any indication of the future of libraries, I think we will be in good shape.
The librarian I work with has a completely full day both of the days that I am there. She also teaches a math class. Both of the librarians there are former teachers.
Next week is WASL so I will be doing independent projects because I don't think the kids will be coming in for library.
If you don't know what the WASL is look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASL
It can be a pretty hectic time for schools. I only recall taking the Iowa basic test, and it always seemed like fun to me. But times have changed, so has education and so has the library.

Posted by Amy Stefany at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reading Reflection

Sacred Stacks by Nancy Kalikow Maxwell is nothing short of a locker room pep talk. If you have any doubts about the validity, or the divinity, of the profession of librarianship-this is the book for you. If Borges’ paradise is ‘…a kind of library’ Nancy Kalikow Maxwell’s angels are the librarians inhabiting this paradise; safely guiding patrons to the other side. Through all manner of analogies between organized religion and libraries Maxwell seeks to “…address the hidden religious aspects of the nonreligious use of secular libraries. (p.3)” Through anecdotes, historical examples, and dogged persistence she succeeds in proving the similarities between church and library.
Theorizing that our religious experience in this day and age has become something of a self-improvement, self-help, smorgasbord of meaning seeking-Maxwell sees the library stepping in to provide some of that meaning for its seekers. Some ways she sees the library filling this role is through providing community, uplifting individuals and society, and bestowing immortality.
The library is inherently communal, providing the public with copies of books to be loaned and not sold. Like church, Maxwell sees the library as somewhere one goes to be alone with other people (lower your voices and raise your mind) as well as interact with your community. She sees the two competing (along with Starbucks) to become Oldenburg’s third place; the place the public goes most frequently after home and work. Unlike the church, however, the library encompasses all people regardless of religious persuasion “Nothing on the shelves of the library can be ‘proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval. (p.111)”
“The person comes into the library because of some acknowledged lack or need, believing the answer will be found there. (p69)” This search for information, according to Maxwell, is much like one’s spiritual search for meaning. The library, like the church, provides answers and forgiveness of the sin of ignorance. This unconditional support and the information itself is an uplift to society. Where the church seeks to free individuals through deliverance of sin the library seeks to free the mind of the patron through knowledge and books.
Another way that Maxwell finds the library fulfilling the duty of the church is through bestowing immortality. She tells of authors giving free copies of their books to libraries so as to ensure they will “live on” through their existence in the library’s collection. The written word contains our collective memory, and if your story is recorded you become, in a sense, immortal. Maxwell quotes Harrison Salisbury who states that “If every school, every university, every other source of knowledge were destroyed, but the library survived, civilization could be rebuilt.”
Maxwell agrees with Ranganathan that the library is a growing organism. It this belief that has allowed the library to survive and it is growing and adapting to change, Maxwell believes, that will assure its survival and ensure its continued sacredness.

Posted by Amy Stefany at 07:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Northwest Regional branch

Yesterday I visited/toured the WA State Archive building here in Bellingham. Apparently there are a total of five regional branches like this one which handles local archives and one state archives in Olympia that handles primarily government material. There is also the southwest regional archives located in Olympia. The other three are in Ellensberg, Cheney, and Bellevue.

This particular branch is also home to The Center for Pacific Northwest Studies whose mission is "...to enhance public and scholarly understandings of the region's past and present through the management and expension of its archival collections, the development of public programming, and the publication in print or electrronic form of select material." The person showing me around worked for this organization. They have some interesting things, here is a link to their website
http://www.acadweb.wwu.edu/cpnws/

Other documents held at this branch include:

Birth and death records from January, 1891 to July, 1907
Marriage records
Court records including naturalization records, court dockets, and civil, criminal, and probate case files
Land records including general indices to recordings, deeds, and patents
County commissioner's proceedings, ordinances, and resolutions
Real and personal property tax records
School district and Educational Service District records including school censuses.

I visited under the pretense of looking up records of the house that I am living in and I found some interesting information in old maps from the fire department, and also in the directories which date from as far back as 1900 to as recent as 1999. You can look up your street address and find the names of the people occupying the property and then, in the older books, look up that persons name and find out there occupation. There is also a photo archive online. The person showing me around indicated that there is not as much/or many of the archives digitized as the website would lead one to believe. There is so much there! Your local archives are a great way to familiarize yourself with where you are living.
For more information here is a link to the wa state archive websiite:
http://www.secstate.wa.gov/archives/

Posted by Amy Stefany at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Reading Reflection

In his book The Librarian Larry Beinhart presents the reader with an atypical characterization of the profession of librarianship. While the book is largely fictional, it combines enough realistic elements to blur the lines of fact and fiction. With this line blurred, one may find this new archetype of the librarian superhero a believable, even enticing, alternative to the old, traditional stereotype.
Beinhart first introduces the reader to the traditional librarian stereotype through his character Elaina. He states that Elaina “…loved books and presumed they would love her back and she wanted to serve humanity, so she became a librarian. (p.4)” Elaina ends up murdered before her character is even developed. With her death it can be said that Beinhart is putting to death that stereotype of the mousy unconfident librarian. The character that emerges is the protagonist David Goldberg a would-be poet turned librarian who finds himself caught in a plot to steal the presidential election. His ideology is similar to Elaina’s, holding to “…the love of books and the love of knowledge and the love of truth and free information and letting people discover things for themselves…and giving poor people internet access. (p.72)” However, when faced with immanent death, rather than retreating into the stacks Goldberg takes the challenge head on; escaping on horseback, wielding a gun, and having romantic interludes. Not your typical day of work in any field.
We believe in this librarian turned spy character, as absurd as it may sound, because it is juxtaposed beside similarly unbelievable events which, upon second glance, are actually quite close to reality. On page 298 Niobe describes the right wing perception of feminism to be that of “…a socialist, anti-family political movement that encouraged women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” Although he is not given credit, this is a direct quote from televangelist Pat Robertson, taken from a 1992 fundraising letter. There are other parallels to our current political climate (or that of 2004, when the book was published): there is (above all) the election with its incumbent right-wing, wartime candidate who owes his previous win to some corruption in the Florida ballots.
With all this blurring of fact and fiction the reader finds herself caught up in the drama of this academic librarian. If one can look at the almost absurdly corrupt political climate created by Beinhart and see obvious parallels to our current (and previous) administrations, surely one can look at this archetype of the librarian superhero and see real parallels to the profession as it is today.

Posted by Amy Stefany at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Where I wil be working 10 hrs a week

Here is a link to their Library http://164.116.116.6/lincoln/news.asp?pagenumber=126

Posted by Amy Stefany at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For Spring Internship

Week 1 - The Librarian: A Novel by Larry Beinhart

Week 2 - Sacred Stacks: The Higher Purpose of Libraries And Librarianship by Nancy Kalikow Maxwell

Week 3 – Essential McLuhan by Marshall McLuhan, pt 1

Week 4 – Essential McLuhan, pt 2

Week 5 - Revolting Librarians Redux: Radical Librarians Speak Out by Katia Roberto (Editor), Jessamyn West (Editor)

Week 6 - Straight from the Stacks: A Firsthand Guide to Careers in Library and Information Science by Laura Townsend Kane

Week 7 - The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

Week 8 – The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco

Week 9 – Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein

Week 10 - Interactive Realism: The Poetics Of Cyberspace by Daniel Downes

Posted by Amy Stefany at 03:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)