Lower East Side Librarian

My last two posts were really long. This one will be short. Ride the City = Awesome!

When I see library programs with male heavy/corporate/administrator compositions I get a little outraged. At ALA this year, the Office for Internet Technology Policy is hosting a just such a panel discussion, called What is the Future of Libaries?.

I have nothing against any of the participants personally. In fact I've seen a couple of them speak and was very impressed. It's the line-up all together that bothers me, especially in the context of library futurism. Personally I want nothing to do with a future that is defined or molded by what these seven people represent as a whole.

Over lunch with a Columbia colleague, Karen Green, we discussed how our previous, non-library work prepared us for librarianship. For her it was bartending, for me mostly theater electrics and production management.

While I think there are some really great young librarians who went straight from college to library school, I think having post-college real life and even those random jobs you have in your twenties is extremely valuable for our work.

One of my favorite political cartoonists, Stephanie McMillan, whose cartoons I read via a Comics.com email feed just published two strips about Bunnista vs. the Chainsaw factory that cracked me up.

Library of Congress Subject Headings Weekly List 18 (April 30, 2008) and List 19 (May 7, 2008)

PLURALISM is dead in favor of MULTICULTURALISM and other cross references. And FIRST WAVE FEMINISM gets acquainted with SUFFRAGE.

I'm trying to catalog the zine, "I'm fat. You're fat. We're Fat! A collaborative zine project." It's a fat power zine, but sadly there's no subject heading for that. I looked in the Library of Congress catalog to see how they treated similar themed content and came up with OBESITY, which I'd say misses the point for I'm Fat, especially given the name of the conference for which the zine was created, Fat is Contagious: Political Fat Queer Visibility and Action in the Age of the "Obesity Epidemic."

A while ago Anastasia Diamond-Ortiz of the Cleveland Public Library wrote on the Zine Librarians Yahoo Group, "Blogs are immediate, zines are deliberate." And here I am blogging an event that happened three weeks ago now. I think I'm missing the point! Therefore, I'm going to wrap up my GLBT ALMS recap now or never! (And theoretically my next zine will be deliberate, rather than hastily thrown together, poorly proofread, and with weak, nonsensical graphics.)

So, following is my report back on the zine libraries discussion and Alana Kumbier & Christa Orth's Archiving from the Ground Up

I hate hate hate the winter and never feel like leaving the house. Then along comes May and all of a sudden there are a million things I want to do outside of the comfort of my own (or Eric's) home.

• Thursday, May 29 Zine Reading at Bluestockings
• Friday, May 30 Critical Mass at 7 and Zine Library Party at ABC No Rio at 9
• Saturday, May 31 some 11th or 12th St block party/BBQ/film night about which my info is a little sketchy
• Bicycle Film Festival Recycle a Bicycle program at 1pm

Since this doesn't seem to have much of a web presence, I thought I'd blog it, albeit a little late to do much good.

Ping Pong Tournament!
Sat. May 24 at 7PM
6th St. Community Center btwn B & C

Day Two of the GLBT ALMS conference at the CUNY Grad Center.

Susan Stryker talked about how history can be

• a monument to ourselves
• nostalgia
• a tool for future work

She was most interested in the last interpretation, and discussed it mostly through the lens of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, which she directed for five years after being a regular researcher and volunteer there.