Lower East Side Librarian

My picks for LC's new subject headings from May 14-June 4. Highlights include CUTTING (SELF-MUTILATION) and EASTERN FILBERT BLIGHT suggested during the the Radical Reference LCSH Blog-a-Thon.

Since Google is tracking my every move, I figured I should share some of the juicy bits with you, as well. Following are all of my Google searches (personal and professional) for June 18 and 19, 2008. Stuff in the parentheses was not part of the search.

In trying to catalog the zine Reproductive Autonomy: Crossing the Species Border, I discovered that the Library of Congress does not have a subject heading for REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS. MESH does, but LC doesn't.

This new blog by Jillian Cuellar, the project archivist for the New York Chamber of Commerce records at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, promises some geeky archively goodness.

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."