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Month: October 2011

Coming to blows over books

Published by Iris on Friday, October 7th, 2011

When I walked into the classroom today, several of the students were already there exploring the second edition of Jane Eyre that our special collections librarian had brought up for them. This had really no relation at all to what I’d be working on, specifically, except that we were talking about context-building at a college level, and the second edition of Jane Eyre certainly adds a little to their context for the work.

What I hadn’t expected was that the professor had to tear the students away from a spontaneous but very heated debate over the importance of the book as a physical thing vs an intangible narrative. Does it actually matter if you hold a book in your hands? Is there something about that experience that matters? Or is it simply a waste of resources and space to go about printing mass quantities of things that could exist as bytes instead?

The most vehement ebook advocate raged against “self-righteous book smellers” while the greatest advocate for printed books talked about how it was important to be able to capture pieces of history not just in the text of the novel itself but in construction and display as well. At one point I threw a wrench into the “it’s economically unconscionable to ship printed material around” argument by telling them the 2 second version of ebook lending woes in libraries and the digital divide (I couldn’t resist). At another point the professor and I had to step in when things got heated to the point of ad hominem attacks. It’s pretty safe to say that I haven’t been involved in another class where the students were passionate almost to the point of blows.

What was the resolution? We decided that it’s complicated, that neither side is categorically right, but that self-righteousness doesn’t get anyone very far.

Pretty interesting for a totally peripheral 10-minute piece of a library session.

(My next favorite part of the class was the audible gasp when I said “Well, if I were getting started on this assignment [on the Great Gatsby and the Jazz Age] I’d probably start with Wikipedia.” Bwa-ha-ha-ha)

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Arguments wear clothing

Published by Iris on Monday, October 3rd, 2011

A couple of weeks ago Bryan Garsten came to give a convocation speech here. The speech consisted primarily of a tale of several conversations in which his cast of semi-fictional characters hashed out what they thought college was for. But before he began that tale, he started with a beautiful little metaphor.

Arguments wear clothes, he said. When you bring an argument out into the world, it should be clothed for the appropriate occasion. There do exist argument nudist colonies, but in the end these remain on the margines. Appropriately clothed arguments, on the other hand, have power and sway in all areas of society.

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You know you’re a reference librarian when…

Published by Iris on Monday, October 3rd, 2011

I’ve had the more standard stress dreams, the ones where I’m supposed to teach but have no idea what or where and I’ve missed most of the term already, the ones where I’m supposed to take a final for a class I don’t remember enrolling in and have never attended. Last night I had a new kind of stress dream.

The library’s heavy duty stapler had died under the constant stress of massive eReserves printouts and student frustration. The library had decided that handing out large paperclips was the better way to go considering the expense of a new heavy duty stapler and the amount of time we spent fixing it every week. Then we got an email from a (fictional) history prof on campus who had forgotten that librarians might be on the all-campus email list and had sent out a passive-aggressive plea supposedly behind our backs asking for the campus to chip in and help buy a heavy duty stapler. (Man am I glad this guy doesn’t actually exist.) This prof hinted that the library must not care much about the history department since our decision hurt them the most. He also said that only one model of stapler would do and that he intended to collect the money and then hand it over to the library so that we could make the purchase.

When we looked into it, it turned out that this model of stapler was discontinued (and yet we knew we’d have to find one anyway). Not only that, but the staples that it required were only available in small quantities at auction, and each set of 100 staples came in its own display box, much like the little boxes watches come in, with the staples hanging from a display stand. As you would imagine, the staples weren’t a bargain.

At this point, I woke up in a cold sweat.

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