Posts on librarianship

My Big Fat Queer Cataloging Project

Lisa — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:15:56 -0800

Back in October, I wrote about ways to improve library service to GLBTQ youth. Here, again, are some of the suggestions and how my library has been working on them this fall:

Bolster your collection with recent and high-quality books and increase visibility with paperback copies. On top of our usual collection development based on new book reviews, we purchased a number of backlist titles to round out our collection, especially in the junior high paperback section.
Make a recommended reading list of GLBTQ books. Our "Gay and Lesbian Books for Young People" list is now available in the library and on our website.
Make queer books visible in a non-stigmatizing way. In addition to making more of an effort to include GLBTQ books in our junior high fiction displays, we made two special displays highlighting our offerings: "Different Families/Same Love" and "Just Be Yourself."
Improve access through the library catalog. That's what we're starting to work on now, in what I'm calling My Big Fat Queer Cataloging Project.

In my original post, I described some of the problems with current catalog subject headings for GLBTQ materials. I won't rehash them now, but instead I'll describe the basic steps I'm following.

Print out the catalog records for all books on the GLBTQ list.
Study current Library of Congress queer subject headings, identifying those most applicable to the books in our collection. I found two very helpful lists of headings, a (slightly older) alphabetical list from Dartmouth and a (more recent) topical list from Emory.*
Identify specific headings that apply to each book and would improve access through library catalog searches.
When in doubt, read the book to make that determination.
Suggest additions to our cataloging staff.

Parsimony is a huge deal in cataloging, sometimes to the point of stinginess, in part because time was you could only assign a set number of subject headings to an item. This is no longer the case, fortunately, so we can add subject headings without taking any of the current ones away.

Still, you don't want to dump a bunch of headings on an item. At least, I don't. Which means you need to try and pick the best headings, the ones that are just the right level of generality or specificness, the ones that best match what patrons are searching for with what they actually want. The additional headings I've most frequently suggested so far are "gay youth," "lesbian youth," and "children of gay parents."

My assumption is that patrons looking for these books are more likely to search for "gay" than "gays" (yes, the catalog search engine really is that picky) or "homosexuality," which is how most of these items are currently cataloged. A subject search for "gay" will turn up a crapload of books, including those about "gay youth," "gay teenagers," "gay high school students," "gay parents," and gay everything else. But at least the books won't totally fall through the cracks.

I'm less sure about "lesbian youth," and I would love people's opinions on this one. Should a book about "lesbian youth" also get a "lesbians" subject heading (same picky search engine problem)? Should it get a "gay youth" heading as well?

*For those of you who don't know much about cataloging, the Library of Congress is continually creating new official subject headings. If a new book comes along that doesn't fit the current subject headings, they'll create a new heading that does. (It's not quite that simple, but that's the general idea.)

Anyway, sometimes you'll be frustrated that there isn't that "perfect" subject heading for the book at hand. Other times you wonder what-the-heck book prompted the need for such a weird and specific subject heading. Some examples I turned up today:

Astrology and homosexuality
Gay labor union members
Lesbian Girl Scouts
Lesbians on postage stamps (also Gay men on postage stamps)
and, near and dear to me, Bisexual librarians.

Librarians These Days Have It So Easy

Lisa — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:38:01 -0800

Nice little article about public librarians 100 years ago: Librarians helped tame Wild West.

A timid, hair-wrapped-in-a-bun, pince-nez-wearing spinster.

Is that the image you have of a librarian from 100 years ago?

Try this one on instead:

Gun-toting, horseback-riding, walk-2-miles-to-work-in-a-blizzard type of woman.

Those were the kind of librarians who settled the West.

Question of the Day

Lisa — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:54:38 -0800

"Do you have a book called The Avengers of Tom Sawyer?"

Winter Book Display

Lisa — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:06:18 -0800

I've been a little lazy with the book displays the past few weeks. Or maybe I should say I've been very busy with other important things at work. That sounds better, doesn't it? And it's true, I swear.

Anyway, I had a realistic fiction display in our Junior High Fiction area all of November. High time for something different! We're getting out our Christmas (and Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, in much smaller numbers) books today, so to complement them I pulled out some wintry fiction.

Currently on display:
- Northlander, by Meg Burden
- The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper
- The Dreaming Place, by Charles DeLint
- Spud in Winter, by Brian Doyle
- The Winter War, by William Durbin
- Julie of the Wolves, by Jean Craighead George
- Girl Overboard, by Justina Chen Headley
- Far North, by Will Hobbs
- The Winter Road, by Terry Hokenson
- Miracle on 49th Street, by Mike Lupica
- Brian's Winter, by Gary Paulsen
- The Winter When Time Was Frozen, by Els Pelgrom
- Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett
- The Trap, by John Smelcer
- Feathers, by Jacqueline Woodson

Not a bad combination of adventure, fantasy, realistic fiction, and even a little historical fiction, if I do say so myself.

Any suggestions of books to add when the supply is depleted? They need to be upper middle grade and/or tamer teen fiction. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe does not qualify in our library, alas!

Turkey on Thanksgiving Is So Last Year

Lisa — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:58:55 -0800

In storytime this morning, I asked the children what they were doing for Thanksgiving.

Me: There's a special holiday later this week. What is it?

Kids: Thanksgiving!

Me: Right! What are you going to do to celebrate Thanksgiving?

Kid 1: I'm going to be a skunk!

Kid 2: I'm going to be a fireman!

Kid 3: I'm going to be a fairy princess!

Me: OK, let me tell you what *I'm* going to do on Thanksgiving. My parents and some good friends are coming over, and we're going to eat a nice dinner together and celebrate the things that make us happy. What about you?

Kid 4: I'm going to be Bob the Builder!

Kid 5: I'm going to be a ladybug!

Kid 6: I'm going to be a skunk, too!

Clearly I've been going about this Thankgiving thing all wrong. I need a costume for Thursday, stat.

Close Encounters of the Fuzzy/Scaly/Beady-Eyed Kind

Lisa — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 13:12:06 -0800

I just got to pet an opossum, a baby alligator, an armadillo, and a baby ostrich. I also got a close-up look at a tarantula and helped carry a 9 foot, 80 pound (baby) Burmese python around the auditorium.

My job rocks.

We hired zoologist Dr. Robert James to do his Animal Encounters program for a packed auditorium (about 85 people, and there were people who went disappointed). He brings a half dozen animals with him and walks the aisles with each as he talks about them.

You're allowed to touch all of them except for the tarantula—which made the stroll upon a little girl's hand. You're allowed to take pictures and video (I did not, sorry to say). The only rule is no talking.

All the animals are rescues who will be rehabilitated and released to the wild or orphans who have imprinted on humans and cannot be released. The animals are attuned to Dr. James's voice, to the point where they expect it. When he's on the other side of the world, back home his animals listen to recordings of his voice.

Dr. James said that after he spent time as a POW he vowed he would never cage an animal again, so he's very anti-cage, anti-leash. He guided the ostrich through the aisles with verbal commands in Spanish.

He also talked about appreciating diversity, not making judgments about an animal or person without having met them first, not making generalizations about a whole species/ethnicity/whatever based on your experience with an individual. Nevertheless, there were still people (adults, need I say?) who shrank back in fear/disgust when certain animals came their way. Sad.

More take-home points:
- Armadillos are hairy in spite of their leathery skin.
- Some possums have very pretty, clever faces.
- Alligators are dumb, have no saliva (so they don't eat unless they're in water to lubricate their meals), and bear a glassy-eyed expression similar to my dog when she's blissed out.
- Pythons feel like one really long, intense, chilly muscle and get freakin' heavy after 10 minutes. Also, they have two three-inch-long vestigial legs that retract into their bodies near the tail.
- My job, again, rocks.

48 Hours Take Their Toll

Lisa — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:01:18 -0800

Yesterday I wrote about how lack of Internet affects library functions. Today we continued that experiment, until we finally regained connectivity at 7:15 PM, 48.5 hours after we lost it. Conclusion: it's bad.

I think my department was one of the least impaired. Yeah, we didn't know whether books were checked in or out, or where they were supposed to be shelved. But we muddled through with the help of each other, Children's Books in Print, and other libraries who actually had access to the catalog. I couldn't work on our Web 2.0 staff development program, so I weeded the juvenile paperbacks and prepared our bookmark contest entries for display. Tomorrow, everything will be back to normal.

On the other hand, circulation, shelving, and interlibrary loan will have two days' backlog to deal with: thousands of items to check in, route, sort, and shelve, all in one fell swoop. There's no way around it. I don't envy them.

A Day Without Internet

Lisa — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:33:51 -0800

People often ask librarians how technology, especially the Internet, has changed libraries. Often it seems to be with the expectation that we'll say, "Terribly! No one reads books anymore! They play Yahoo checkers all day and write their papers from Wikipedia!" I should specify that people who ask this questions are people who don't spend a lot of time in libraries themselves—or they'd see that libraries (my library, anyway) are still happening places.

Today, though, we got a taste of what libraries would be without the Internet. My library and several other area libraries lost all connectivity-related functions yesterday evening and hadn't regained it by the time I left work today. What this meant, in practical terms:

- No library catalog, so no way to locate an item except by knowing where it ought to be and hoping it was checked in.
- Items could be checked out manually (by writing down patron and item IDs) but could not be checked back in...
- ...which meant books could not be shelved, either.
- No Internet for staff or patrons.
- No computer access for patrons, period, because we use a network-based reservation system.

In other words, we were almost, but not totally, crippled.

Fortunately, I didn't need computers to do my storytime! And most of the questions I got at the desk were answerable from memory or with the help of reference books and my colleagues. I also spent several hours helping a coworker with a major shift of our nonfiction books (moving them to give all shelves more or less equal breathing space), which is hard, dirty, but rewarding work. Plus it's fun to be active instead of sitting at a computer all day, which... is most days, for me.

I hope the Internet's "fixed" by the time I come to work tomorrow, though! It's tough—tougher than I really like to admit—to have the world no longer at your fingertips.

"Different Families" Book Display

Lisa — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:14:44 -0800

Here's the promised book display to highlight our new GLBTQ list. "Different Families / Same Love"—that goopy enough for you?

The lit holder has copies of our Gay and Lesbian, Adoption, and Celebrate Diversity lists. And the books are a selection of picture books from those lists!

Sorry for the crummy (as usual) photos. I'd blame the camera, but—no, actually, I'll just blame the camera.

GLBTQ Book List Goes Live!

Lisa — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:11:04 -0700

Progress report on what my library has done since the ILA conference session on library service to GLBTQ teens:

We have ordered (but not yet received) Serving Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Teens: A How-to-Do-It Manual for Librarians, by Martin and Murdock (Neal-Schuman, 2006).
As of today, our list of recommended Gay and Lesbian Books for Young People is available on our website and in the library.
Modernizing/streamlining catalog headings hasn't happened yet, and I don't think it will for at least another month what with various other things happening. But it's still on my agenda.

So, more about the list. "Gay and Lesbian" is not a very inclusive title, I know. But we were going for transparency, and it was the best title we could think of that wasn't too long, clever, obscure, general, or clinical. We figure that people looking for a GLBTQ list will recognize this as such, and that people serendipitously finding the list will have a good idea of what it includes. The list description spells out the contents further.

As for what's on the list, it's got books about queer youth, children and teens with queer family members and friends, various other queer issues, different types of families, and some other gender identity issues. The books have an intended audience of preschool through high school. All the books are owned by the library at present. It's not comprehensive, but I squeezed in as many titles as I could within our one-sheet, double-sided constraints.

I'm very appreciative of my boss (Hi, boss! Yes, my boss reads my blog), my uber-boss, and my fellow youth librarians, who have been very supportive of this list. (So far, no one has asked why we need this list.) My boss has even suggested we do a display to highlight the list, after our Day of the Dead display comes down. That's really gutsy, but what is a good librarian, if not gutsy? Let's do it!