change?

Job well done. Thanks, my fellow Americans.

BUT, I’m still not satisfied. While the overall outcome of the election pleases me in many ways, the many referenda that passed around the country frustrate me to no end. They have me thinking this morning about Plato’s Republic, James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill and what they all have to say about the tyranny of the majority. Why is it that in our contemporary society the number of people yelling something has greater value than the substance of what is being yelled? Consenting viewpoints are struck down simply because they are outside the mainstream. “This is a democracy and I have a right to my opinion,” is touted all over the place as if one opinion is as good as another, irrespective of any supporting evidence. And if enough people have the same opinion, well, then, it must be right…right? What? this is ludicrous…we’re actually admitting here that we believe justice is simply the obedience to the rule of the strongest? (Thrasymachus anyone?)

Google Books Now, Yeah!

In “A Champion of Information Literacy,” William Badke tells us about a former student of his who had left the print world behind. In the article, Badke replays his discussion with the student:

“Student A, mind you, was not simply dumbing down to a Google search, grabbing the first three results and using them willy-nilly. No, he was doing real research using good academic resources.

Journal articles, peer reviewed and all, were easy to get with all the electronic full text available through our proprietary databases. But what about books?

‘Ah,’ he said, without an ounce of shame, ‘I use Google Book Search.’

‘But that won’t always work,’ I told him. ‘Google Book has copyright restrictions that limit you to only a few pages.’

He admitted that such was the case. Then he smiled, exuding confidence. ‘But you can beat it. All you need is 15 Google accounts and you can pretty much read the whole book.’”

A for effort. A for inventivness. But that was then, this is now.

Banned Books Week (A Day No Pigs Would Die)

You could probably label me and my wife (and by extension, my son too) as flexitarians. We eat mostly a vegetarian diet, but make allowances in certain situations (for social, pragmatic, cultural, or nutritional reasons). Why are we flexitarians? Well, partly, to save money. Partly, for health reasons. Mostly, though, I (and, I would guess my wife too) eat a mostly-vegetarian diet because of (imo) the major ethical problems and environmental dilemmas associated with the production and slaughtering of meat or animal products for mass consumption, especially on the scale that we see in the United States and many other Western nations.

I mention this because I think it makes my choice of BannedBookToReviewToday more interesting. A Day No Pigs Would Die (ADNPWD), the sixteenth most challenged book of the 1990s, provides some difficult reading material, even for me, a “hardened” adult. ADNPWD was first published in 1972 and tells Robert Newton Peck’s (semi-autobiographical) tale about becoming an adult on a 1930s Vermont farm. It’s a coming of age tale, but one in which the protagonist, Robert, struggles into adulthood in an entirely different age.  Jim Mulvey, in “A Defense of A Day No Pigs Would Die,” notes:

Combine the deadpan humor of Huck Finn, his realistic dialect and uncouth language, his often sad observation of human misery, and his understated accounts of poverty, sin, and death and place this narrator in a Charlotte’s Web-like world, but without its transcendent, rosy pastoralism, and you will perhaps see why Robert Newton Peck’s A Day No Pigs Would Die is a major achievement of adolescent literature and one of the most challenged novels in America’s schools.¹

Banned Books Week (and tango makes three?)

Most Challenged Book of 2006…quick, what was it?

One of the Harry Potter books?

No.

Something from the His Dark Materials Trilogy?

No.

Animal Farm? The Anarchist’s Cookbook? The Color Purple? Catch 22?

No. No. No. No.

Banned Books Week (Grapes of Wrath)

Clell Pruett burns a copy of The Grapes Of Wrath as Bill Camp and another leader of the Associated Farmers stand by. At the time this photograph was taken, Pruett had not read the novel. Years later, after he read the book at the behest of Rick Wartzman, Pruett declared that he had no regrets about burning it. (Kern County Museum)

 

Monday marked the beginning of the American Library Association’s 27th annual celebration of the freedom to read, more commonly known as Banned Books Week (BBW). As the ALA’s web site on BBW notes, “BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them.”

To personally celebrate that freedom, I have decided to feature a different banned (or challenged) book each day for the remainder of this week. Read on for more about the book being tossed into the flaming can above:

 

 

LibGuides @ SHU

At the suggestion of the Department of Research Services, the Ryan-Matura Library has recently purchased a subscription to LibGuides, a platform for the delivery of our subject guides. Subject guides have traditionally been a great help to those students who find out about their existence. There are so many students, though, who never stumble across them. The LibGuides platform will not only allow us to make our guides more accessible (widgets can be dropped in Blackboard, facebook, and any web site), but it will also allow us to present these guides in a more user-friendly way, one that takes into consideration all of the benefits of the social web (ability for users to leave comments, rating system, social bookmarking tools, email updates, rss, fully-integrated virtual chat, ability to allow users to submit useful resources, etc., etc.).

Click the picture above to view a guide that I am currently working on, check back here for updates over the summer, and look for many more such guides this fall!

Summer Reading

Okay. My apologies to anyone who has been checking this blog over the course of the past couple of months. I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus. This is to change, though, especially as the fall semester grows nigh. Each of the other research librarians are to be starting blogs soon and as the new semester begins, I hope we’ll have a more comprehensive online community going on here. Apologies now having been bestowed upon all of you faithful readers, I’ll move on to this post:

I’m finally nearing the end of John Banville’s Mann Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sea. The eventual moment that I first shut the back flap has been a long time in coming. I bought the book as soon as it reached American book stores (spring 2006), though I didn’t crack it until this past spring. It sat there on my shelf begging me to open it, but I was too busy. Even after having begun the book, the process of finishing it has been slow-going. I don’t quite know why it has taken me so long to read this; it’s not that it’s dull, especially dense, dreadful, or any other pejorative d-word. Actually it’s quite good and I not only recommend it to anyone who has an affinity for fine literature, but to historians, archaeologists, archivists, and anyone else who is interested in anything dealing with the concepts of memory, the past, death, the terminally ill, relationships, etc., etc. (the list could go on). Banville’s prose is beautiful and his multiple musings that touch on our understanding of memory and history are particularly perceptive. Be forewarned, though: If you’re used to reading mainstream American best-sellers, The Sea will be a different sort of read, as it’s not a plot-driven, page turner type of book. If you’re still reading this post and are interested, read on for a couple excerpts…

why humanities?

I’ve been running across this question all over the place recently. Stanly Fish (Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago) has blogged on the value/need for humanities education twice in the past month. His first post on the topic received 484 comments and his follow-up garnered 448 comments. I remember reading through every single one of those comments, cursing, jeering, cheering, muttering, and eventually drooling as my eyes twitched and spasomed (brain rot from reading too many comments…dangerous and painful infliction…curable, though…as long as you spend an adequate amount of time away from the computer screen).

Today I received my first newsletter from bigthink.com, the site billing itself as the youtube of ideas. The featured user question, from cuixotiq, was, “what purpose does forcing the study of the humanities (or the ‘lofty’ subjects) – be it literature, art history, philosophy et al – serve for the career-driven college student?” Oh, that nasty little bugger…what a way to word a question: “only you non career-driven students have the time for the lofty humanities…”

Anyway…you can read on for my quick, off-the-top-of-my-head, response…or you can go over to bigthink.com and pitch in with your own opinion.

doing historical research? (check ebay for important documents)

Lawyer, former medievalist, American history buff saves the day! Mr. Joseph Romito, a lawyer in Virginia discovered someone selling on ebay an artifact (an obscure letter signed by John C. Calhoun) that he knew to be in the collection of the NY State Library. That someone turned out to be Daniel D. Lorello, a 29-year employee of the NY State Archives. Lorello has now admitted to taking 300-400 documents from the Archives in 2007 alone. Why was he doing this? He says to pay off his daughter’s credit card bill. See the NY Times reporting of the case here.

Wow, LoC.

I’m not completely sure how to start this post. First, I guess with thanks to John Fudrow, else it would have been even longer before I found out about this development (how did I miss this?). My original title for this post was LOC + Flickr = Interesting, but then I saw that the LibrarianInBlack already used a similar approach (LoC + Flickr = happy land), so I decided to change.

Why do I mention this? I’m not sure. Perhaps I’m still procrastinating, as I’m not sure how to proceed with this post. Do I simply sit back, grin, and celebrate the wonder and joy of seeing such an established institution, the Library of Congress, make a bold leap into the Library 2.0 realm…or do I perhaps analyze the benefits/drawbacks of such a move.

How about this: I’m smiling right now and just enjoying it. You too can smile, go read about the pilot project, view the photos, contribute tags, and forget all about my post….or, you can come back and read on for my analysis: