Profiles

Adventures of a Restless Librarian in Iraq

birdie — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 08:29:19 -0500

One woman's quest, profiled in the Sunday New York Times. She's Shelby Monroe, from Chappaqua NY, and this is her blog. To go to Iraq, she quit three part-time jobs — in libraries in Chappaqua and Peekskill and in the Village Bookstore in Pleasantville. When she told her bookstore boss, Roy Solomon, where she was heading, he bluntly replied, “What are you, nuts?”

From the article: "Her explanation for why she chose to become a latter-day Ernie Pyle doesn’t quite add up as a reason someone would want to risk her life — but that’s the wonderful Rosebud mystery of her life. She says, for example, that she returned to Iraq last December after being there six months in 2006 “mainly because I felt an attachment to the soldiers, who were very good to me during my first trip, and I wanted to keep an eye on them.”

“There is something to be said for stepping out of your comfort zone,” she finally admitted. “I like to test myself once in a while. I like to see what I am really made of and what I can endure.” She adds that “growing up with four brothers helped prepare me for this. Riding around with boys is something I’m familiar with. And it is a nice contrast to the deafening silence of the library.”

Current Information on the Dragon for March 1, 2008

Great Western Dragon — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 10:43:09 -0600

Dr. Daniel Messer
Circulation Supervisor
Interlibrary Loans Supervisor
Southeast Regional Library - A branch of the Maricopa County Library District
775 N Greenfield Rd
Gilbert, Arizona 85234
(602) 652-3234

Your very own Dr. Gonzo.

E-mail: greatwesterndragon (at) gmail (dot) com

Blogger:
Distant Early Warning: My personal blog.
Not All Bits: My information science and information culture blog.
Cultured Concupiscence: My adult entertainment and human sexuality blog.
Image Junky: My image appreciation blog.
Dr. Gonzo Recommends: My book review blog for adults.
Codexica Magnus: My book review blog for kids.
LISNews: To which I'm a regular contributor.

Writer:
Tales From the Circ Side: Gonzo Cyberpunk Librarianism- Currently in progress.
Intragalactic Librarian!: The Adventures of Skyler and J.E.S.S.I.C.A.- Also in progress.

New Age Musician and Composer:
Awedessy (1999)
Back in the Day (2005)
Spiral Dancer (2006)
Sonoran Standard Time (2007)

Digital Pin Up Artist:
My work has been featured on several websites, MySpace profiles and, strangey enough, an Israeli gay pride website.

Computer Programmer:
Author of HMPH (Held Materials Printer Helper) and Kaishakunin, two utilities for use with the Polaris Integrated Library System. Both programmes are free and open source. If you're interested in either, please contact me.

And I make a damn good cup of coffee too.

A note to so-called Safelibraries.org

Fang-Face — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 08:42:26 -0600

You're projecting your shadow and misrepresenting reality.

No, I am not imposing my morals anywhere, although that's what the ALA does

No, you are not imposing your self-righteous lunacy on others, you are merely attempting to seduce them into taking your para-schizophrenic world view onto themselves. The ALA, on the other hand, is, generally, encouraging people to hold onto the authority over and responsibility for themselves that they already have.

I am not telling people what to do.

Only, I'm sure, because you have no legal authority to do so. I have no doubt whatsoever that you would take great joy in usurping the authority free persons have over themselves if you thought for two seconds that you could get away with it. However, the statement is factual as it stands, because what you are doing, in reality, is simply screaming hysterically against the underlying foundation of freedom and liberty.

s-x-alized

Hyphens are not letters, they are punctuation. And if you are not emotionally mature enough to write a word out because you are embarrassed by it, then you are not emotionally mature enough to be let out on your own.

That aside, however, it is not the ALA, writers, publishers or booksellers, or any country's supreme court that is sexualizing children, it is people like you. It is people like yourself that see them as sexual objects as much as preferential child molesters do.

children are being s-x-alized by the ALA, in my opinion,

Can you define the term "sexualized"? Do you actually know what it means? You certainly don't appear to.

. . . I am not infuriated, and instead it works to my advantage to point out that your ad hominem attacks, even if true, are irrelevant to the underlying issues.

Another half-truth. Even though this statement is correct, you are merely playing the wounded innocent. You are misrepresenting the full truth in an effort to direct attention away from the issues. This is not to your advantage, because most of the readers of this site can see for themselves that you doing that, and they are not fooled by it.

The rest of your bleating posturing is just more of the same, so I'm not going to bother with it. Instead, I'm going to demand that you define your terms. For instance, when you talk about children not being safe in public libraries, how do you define a child so as to differentiate him or her from one who is not a child, and what do you mean by "safe". Do you mean safe from criminal harm, safe from physical harm, or safe from ideas -- particularly to ideas that you do not agree with and do not want disseminated?

What objective criteria do you have by which something can be determined to actually be offensive instead merely offending your hypersensitivities?

Why do you reject and repudiate all those Supreme Court rulings that uphold the principles of personal freedom and liberty, cherry-picking instead only those that can be subverted to censor materials by which you are embarrassed?

(Due to technical difficulties I cannot post this to the Comments section of the Johnston County Libraries story.)

Librarian Rides a New Wave

birdie — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 06:37:27 -0600

At age 58, librarianship is Allan Pollchik's third career, and he's loving every minute of it. Former 'surfer dude', he likes to remind you that he was 18 in 1967, the "Summer of Love" -- in California, no less.

Ohio University students walking in and out of Pollchik's glassed-in office on the Chillicothe campus don't blink an eye at their library director's surfing simulations, an attempt to explain the rush he got when he surfed professionally more than 20 years ago during his previous lives as a psychologist and a high-powered fundraiser. Profile of this third-year academic librarian from the Columbus Dispatch.

Another Hattiesburg Librarian

birdie — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:17:00 -0500

Anonymous Patron writes "yes, Nancy Kaul is not the only one in town, there's also Yvonne Arnold."

Librarian keeps an eye on the trends

birdie — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:20:00 -0500

An attractive woman, but not exactly sporting l'haute couture. However in Hattiesburg, librarian Nancy Kaul, collection development coordinator for University Libraries at the University of Southern Mississippi, is considered to be at the height of fashion. Here's her regimen, from the Hattiesburg American.

Article on Sanford Berman by Holocaust Group

Blake — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:49:00 -0500

Steve Fesenmaier writes "The University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies has published a nice article about Sanford Berman's many efforts in libraries to fight for human rights. Read it in their current fall 2007 newsletter.

Local Librarian
Fights for Armenian
Genocide
Recognition
One might think that the issues of libraries
escape those who do research and
teach about genocide. After all, has a library
been mentioned in the Darfur genocide
discourse? However, in 2003, Rebecca
Knuth published a monograph,
Libricide: The State Sponsored Destruction of
Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century
(Greenwood Press). In case readers might
think this is an artificial subject, one might
reflect on the famous quote by the German
poet Heinrich Heine which is now at
the Bebelplatz at Humboldt University in
Berlin: "Where they have burned books,
they will end in burning human beings."
Luckily, this hasn't happened in Minnesota.
One reason is because of a local
retired librarian "watchdog," Sandy Berman.
read .

the rest of the story on page 9 [PDF]"

Being a Librarian...A People Job

birdie — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:05:00 -0500

Profile of Elissa Kinzelman, who will graduate this spring as a medical librarian (University of Wisconsin--Racine), but came to it a bit later in life, via a Masters in Anthropology.

Meet Charles Simic, New Poet Laureate

birdie — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 21:00:00 -0500

Meet the fifteenth poet laureate of the United States, Charles Simic of New Hampshire. Here's a profile from the International Herald Tribune of the Yugoslav immigrant who started writing poetry to impress girls. The post of poet laureate is chosen by the Librarian of Congress, James Billington.

Meet Jim Rettig ALA's New President-Elect

birdie — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 11:58:00 -0500

The head librarian at the University of Richmond (VA) is now also president-elect of the ALA. He received his education at Marquette University where he earned a master's degree in English, then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where in 1975 he earned a master's in library science. He has been a member of ALA since 1976.Here's the story. Congrats Jim and good luck on a challenging job.