LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

Nice profile of University of San Francisco librarian Vicki Rosen, who wears her workout gear under her work clothes, just like Superman. Three times a week, Rosen, 60, goes directly to Fitness for Women Over 45.

Her mantra? "Showing up is half the battle." More from the SF Gate.

The news came in late last night that former Dallas Public Library director Lillian Moore Bradshaw had died at 95. Jerome Weeks, in his blog Art & Seek memorializes the woman who more or less made the downtown library what it is, not just the building but its remarkable collections in first editions and art books, and who also significantly expanded the city’s library system.

And from The Dallas Morning News: According to City Manager Mary Suhm, herself a former librarian, Bradshaw, 95, was the first woman in the United States to direct a major library system. She directed the system from 1962 to 1984. "She was an amazing woman and set an example for all of us in government," Suhm said this morning. Bradshaw was key to the raising of $40 million for the construction of the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library.

Following up on yesterday's story about a public forum on the candidates for Director of the Lexington Library, here's an opportunity to view the three candidates in actionon youTube. Who made the best impression (as if it's up to you...)?

After sixty-two years of service, and now as head of the Newark NJ Public Library’s Special Collections Division, Bill Dane has amassed one of the finest public collections of prints in the country, including works by Rembrandt, Matisse, Picasso, Miró, and Warhol. But today, he is curating his own departure.

The 86-year-old Dane is retiring, and his final act as Keeper of the Prints — a title he appropriated himself and snuck past a civil service clerk by insisting he had passed the (nonexistent) exam — is to give the biennial John Cotton Dana lecture at the library tonight.

"It’s a good time for the institution and for me, because things in this particular division are very positive," Dane said. "It seems to be just a fine time to pursue other things, like perhaps going to back to school and traveling a bit more. Cleaning house."

Dane wanted to slip out the door after a cup of coffee with his colleagues but, said Patricia Bender, president of the Friends of the Library, "We wanted one more opportunity to celebrate the phenomenon that is Bill Dane." NJ.com reports.

Robert Hallett, a longtime Baltimore County school librarian who invented a spandex-clad superhero named Red Reader to motivate children to read, died Monday of a rare form of leukemia. The Reisterstown resident was 60.

Mr. Hallett, who was called Bob when not assuming one of his alter egos, spent much of his more than 30-year career as a library-media specialist at Riderwood Elementary in Towson, where staff, parents and students described him as central to the school's spirit and culture.
Baltimore Sun reports.

By day, she's Beth Hollis, a 53-year-old reference librarian in Akron, Ohio. By night, she's MegaBeth, an ageless dynamo on the roller derby rink.

Before discovering roller derby, Hollis had been casting about for a hobby. "I tried knitting and literally got kicked out of the knitting class for just not being able to get the hang of it," she chortled. "I guess it was just too soon for me to try knitting. I needed something that maybe was a little bit more physical for a hobby."

Video and story From CNN.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I wonder about what a given writer's studio looks like. Do they have a studio? An office? Do they just bang away at a laptop sitting on the dining room table? The way an author lays out their workspace is really intriguing to me.

Where I Write is a project by Kyle Cassidy. It's a collection of photographs and interviews with authors about where they do their job. It's a fantastic and intimate look into the places that our favourite books first happen. He's planning a compilation book of his own, including the workspaces of Neil Gaiman and Lois McMaster Bujold.

From Public Broadcasting wbfo, Mildred Blaisdell remembers spending afternoons in the late 50's and 60's at the B.F. Jones Memorial Library, particularly in the summertime.

There wasn't much air conditioning in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania in the late 50's and early 60's. But the library was a haven of coolness on hot, humid afternoons.

The B.F. Jones Memorial Library was a classy robber baron equivalent of "My parents went to the beach and all I got was this tee shirt." While my grandfathers were working in the Jones and Laughlin Steel MIll for low wages, the Jones and the Laughlins built lovely granite public libraries for the use of the families of their underpaid workers. The library was the most beautiful edifice in town.

For the past year, Kay Ryan has been serving as America's 16th poet laureate, tapped by the librarian of Congress to be ambassador for American poetry. Profile, with poems written and spoken, from Voice of America.

The august marble-and-gilt halls of the Library of Congress, where Ryan has her official headquarters, seem an unlikely place for someone raised in what she calls the "glamour-free, ocean-free, hot, stinky, oil-rich, potato-rich" San Joaquin Valley of California. But then, growing up, Ryan didn't want to be poet.

"It [to declare oneself a poet] seemed like putting on airs," she says. "It seemed self-absorbed. It seemed like something that my oil well driller father wouldn't understand at all and that my mother would disapprove of, because it was just showing off."

Ryan nearly turned down the offer to become U.S. poet laureate. She says she wanted to protect her privacy and keep writing without being distracted by the job's many public duties.

"I think poetry is indestructible, and I don't worry about it, and I don't think it needs the protection of me or the advocacy of me or anyone."
Ryan likens poetry to gold coins: "You can lose it in the couch, or in the ground, or anywhere and when it's dug up its going to be valuable, so that real poetry utterly protects itself, [and] takes care of itself."

The Washington Post reports on the recent death of Helen W. Dalrymple, a Library of Congress researcher and spokeswoman. She was the co-author of several books about the library and was a leading authority on its holdings, history and mission She died Feb. 13 in Arlington VA of brain cancer.

"She was quite simply one of the nicest and noblest public servants I have had the privilege of working with," Librarian of Congress James Billington said. "I learned about the Library of Congress from her books before I was librarian." Throughout the 1970s, Mrs. Dalrymple worked closely with Charles A. Goodrum, who was assistant director of the Congressional Research Service and later became director of planning and development for the library as a whole. When Goodrum was asked by the Harry N. Abrams publishing company to write a history of the library, Mrs. Dalrymple became his chief assistant. "Without her," Goodrum said yesterday, "the book couldn't have been written."