07.14.09
Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 11:32 am by Greg Landgraf
Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times columnist and author of The Soloist, told the Closing Session crowd how he met Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, and how their relationship grew and the story developed into the book.
“The deal with writing a column is, it’s like having a pet monster that’s always hungry,” Lopez said. “You have to keep finding more stories.” He met Ayers, a homeless musician with schizophrenia, while in downtown Los Angeles checking on another story lead. Ayers was playing a violin that was missing two strings, and on his shopping cart, he had written “Little Walt Disney Concert Hall”—a reference to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which houses the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Ayers wasn’t asking for money. When Lopez asked why he was playing there, amidst the sounds of car horns and sirens, Ayers pointed at the statue of Beethoven in nearby Pershing Square and said that it inspired him.
At that point, Lopez said, he didn’t even know if the story would develop into a single column. But he continued meeting with Ayers, and discovered that he had studied music at the prestigious Juilliard School. And when he called Harry Barnhoff, Ayers’ childhood music teacher in Cleveland, “I could hear Mr. Barnhoff weeping on the other end of the line,” at what had become of one of his most talented students.
“I wrote the column not really realizing what I had,” Lopez said. “That column connected because when readers saw the story, they saw a ‘There but for the grace of God’ element.” In the following days, boxes came into Lopez’s office: six violins, two cellos, and a series of other instruments including French horn, trumpet, and piano.
Lopez went on to describe his concerns that Ayers’ new instruments would make him a target for thieves and violence; how Ayers was eventually persuaded to take an apartment in the Lamp Community, an organization that helps people with severe mental illness move into homes; how he and Ayers were invited to attend a concert at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, how they took a road trip to San Francisco, where Ayers was honored by the National Association on Mental Illness; how Ayers reconnected with Juilliard classmate Yo-Yo Ma, and how his relationship with Ayers continues today.
He also shared his outrage at the state of treatment for mental illness in this country. “Why is it that on every Saturday morning there’s a 10K Race for the Cure for everything except schizophrenic paranoia?” he asked. “There’s still a stigma. That stigma means it’s okay for a Juilliard student or anyone else to wander the streets mumbling. Now that I cared about Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, it wasn’t okay.”
Lopez called his relationship with Ayers a gift, and expressed his hope that attitudes would change out of the story. And he recognized that Ayers was the individual that could make that possible. “If I were writing columns on mental illness, no one would have read them. But here I had a story” that resonated with readers.
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07.13.09
Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 6:28 pm by Greg Landgraf
Cokie Roberts discussed the writing and updating of her book We Are Our Mother’s Daughters, and her research into the roles of women throughout American history for it, before a crowd of about 700 at the PLA President’s Program.
“I, of course, use libraries all the time in doing research on these history books,” Roberts said. “It is amazing how much info is there and how helpful people are in getting it out.”
In the book, Roberts said, “I ask what is a woman’s place. It’s every place, because we’re needed every place.”
She observed that women have always performed many tasks at the same time out of necessity, citing her mother’s simultaneous dictation of a speech, while making pickles and cradling a baby. “Multitasking is just a made-up guy word to describe what women have done all along,” Roberts declared to a roar of laughter.
Roberts observed that women have made some gains in politics; her mother Lindy Boggs was the 16th woman in the U.S. House when she took office in 1973, while today there are 76 women. But she also noted that women have always played an important role in politics, citing political activities by First Ladies. Martha Washington, for example lobbied Congress for veteran’s benefits, and Dolly Madison was recognized as a formidable force in her husband’s election. Roberts was careful to include Laura Bush as an active political figure, noting that she was the first First Lady to deliver the president’s radio address, using it to call for Afghan women’s rights, and that she was the only First Lady to take the microphone in the White House briefing room.
“She remains an incredible fighter for human rights, and really gets little play for it,” Roberts said.
Progress is coming more slowly in many fields than it should, however. Roberts told of talking to tennis legend Billie Jean King and arguing that the status of women in athletics had made great strides with scholarships and media coverage. “Yeah, things are better,” King said. “We get about eight percent of the coverage on sports pages. But seven percent goes to horses and dogs.”
But Roberts celebrated women such as King and astronaut and physicist Sally Ride, who not only made great achievements in their fields but also worked to make it easier for other women to follow in their path.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 3:36 pm by Greg Landgraf
“From Legacy Data to Linked Data: Preparing Libraries for Web 3.0,” drew enough of an audience that some had to listen from the hallway.
Data objects and agents already have identifiers, explained Diane Hillmann of the Information Institute of Syracuse and Metadata Management Associates. In linked data, however, relationships between data also have identifiers. That way, “The relationships can be identified and explained and given context,” she said.
“No longer can I as a data provider just present my data to you and say, ‘If you don’t like it, tough,’” noted Eric Miller, president of Zepheira. Instead, data providers—including libraries—should empower users to leverage that data, even without the provider’s knowledge.
As an example, Miller described the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Initiative, which collects and digitizes at-risk information. But Miller said that the information is siloed and disconnected. “A spreadsheet is a fine way in which people can curate and manage content,” he observed. “But what we can do by surfacing that spreadsheet in this platform is to give the Library of Congress tools to create different views from that same data.”
“This is very rich stuff,” Hillmann agreed. “And when people outside of the library world discover this, they’re going to use it too. And that’s good for us.”
Jennifer Bowen of the University of Rochester described the eXtensible Catalog, a project at the university to build open-source software that reuses MARC data in an extensible environment, define a schema that will support XC’s user-interface functionality, and implement an interim solution until the completion of RDA.
Software for XC will be rolled out through January 2010.
The program was one of ten Grassroots Programs, proposed by ALA members who do not belong to ALA committees or boards. The Grassroots Programs are part of ALA President Jim Rettig’s “creating connections” initiative.
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07.12.09
Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 4:52 pm by Greg Landgraf
Oak Park Public Library Warrior Librarians
Dressed in Viking armor and braids and performing to “Ride of the Valkyries,” the Oak Park (Ill.) Public Library Warrior Librarians took first place in the fifth annual Library Book Cart Drill Team Championship, winning a gold book cart from sponsor Demco before a standing-room-only crowd.
For the first time, two teams tied for first place in the judge’s scoring. Oak Park was selected over the Cart Wheels from Des Plaines (Ill.) Public Library in an audience vote. The Cart Wheels won a silver book cart for their Grease-themed program, while the Steel City Kings from the University of Pittsburgh took third and a bronze book cart, performing to Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation.”
Sticker distributed by the Delaware Diamonds
The results were in spite of a bit of pre-show trash-talking from the Delaware Diamonds, who distributed stickers and pins to the crowd before the competition.
Mo Willems and Jon Scieszka (wearing a giant “Ambassador” sash, in recognition of his position as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature) provided color commentary for the event.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 11:49 am by Greg Landgraf
Wanda Urbanska signs copies of Less Is More.
“The disease of overconsumption is on its death bed,” proclaimed Simple Living host Wanda Urbanska during her Auditorium Speaker Series speech, sponsored by American Libraries. As evidence, she cited three primary indicators, which she nicknamed “Heat, Feed, and Speed.” “Heat” refers to decreasing energy requirements for the heating and cooling of homes, which have been getting smaller since 2007 after a 60-year growth trend. “Feed” speaks to food choices, as gardens and farmer’s markets grow in popularity. “All of a sudden we’re waking up wondering why we’re so heavy,” Urbanska noted. “Speed” covers transportation choices, where people are driving less and buying smaller cars.
Libraries are inherently green, Urbanska argued, because of their role in helping to reduce consumption. Nevertheless, Urbanska urged the crowd to make green choices in their libraries and their lives. “Reclaim your role as eco-role models and exemplars in your community,” she said. “Change is happening rapidly. Let libraries continue to be at the center of it.”
She offered a host of examples:
- Timer systems for heating, cooling, and lighting systems.
- Eliminating phantom loads by unplugging electronics when not in use.
- Discouraging printing to reduce paper use.
- Recycling of paper—including paper from discarded books.
- “Freecycling” of magazines and books by having swaps at the library. “In today’s economy, that’s a big deal to folks, to be able to take home a book and mark it up and not have to return it,” she noted.
- Buying locally made products whenever possible.
- Reducing the use of disposable materials. Urbanska used her travel mug as an example, claiming that “In 20 years of carrying a travel mug everywhere I go, I’ve saved 7,000 cups from landfills.”
- Using green cleaning products.
- Bike or walk to work, errands, or meetings.
- Host green programming, such as a workshop on making useful materials from plastic bags or a vegetarian cooking class.
- Purchasing products made from recycled materials.
This last point proved to be one of the most commonly shared challenges as audience members asked how to purchase recycled paper when they’re locked into a bidding process that requires them to buy the cheapest materials without regard to whether they’re recycled or not. Urbanska suggested treating the process as a campaign rather than a single instance and seeking partners, both among colleagues at the institution and through the use of petitions and letters to the media.
Suggestions that emerged from the brief audience discussion included seeing if other savings could be applied to the green initiatives and creating demonstration press releases for proposed changes, which would let the decision-makers see how the change could be announced—and how it would make them look like heroes.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 7:32 am by Gordon Flagg
To anyone attending an ALA conference, viewing the many attendees toting laptops or sporting smartphones and the exhibit hall dominated by high-tech vendors, it’s inescapable how pervasive technology has become in our society; in developing countries, it’s obviously another story. “Technology and the Developing World,” a Saturday-morning program presented by the Library and Information Technology Association, illustrated various approaches to rectifying that situation
Randy Ramusack, U.N. technology coordinator for Microsoft, described the firm’s Partners in Learning initiative, launched in 2003 to help teachers learn how to use technology. Since then the program has reached over 100 million teachers and students in 110 countries, and Ramusack said they hope to boost that to 250 million by 2010.
Microsoft also supports Research4Life, a public-private partnership that gives scientists in developing countries free or low-cost access to information in more than 7,000 journals.
Ramusack also touted other programs in which Microsoft is involved, including the World Database on Protected Areas, an important tool for conservation activities, and a project with the U.N. High Commission on Refugees to use technology to promote education in refugee settlements.
The One Laptop Per Child project is a nonprofit organization that has put over 1 million laptops into the hands of children in developing countries. OLPC developed the XO computer, a low-cost ($188), low-power (3 watts) unit that has been deployed in 20 countries, half of them in Latin America. SJ Klein, OLPC manager of content, said the design goals were to develop a computer that was cheap, robust, easily repairable, and designed for kids, and that would run on free or open source software.
The $188 XO
Klein said the XO, which has built-in wireless but no hard drive, provides a means for children to chat, play, read, and publish their ideas. He noted that such empowerment is “both awesome and sometimes scary for teachers.” The children—who are often the only literate members of their families—take the XOs home from school, where they become part of their lives.
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07.11.09
Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 8:15 pm by Bev Goldberg
[July 16, 2009] UPDATE: Commentary continues to appear both in and out of the biblioblogosphere speculating about the actions that precipitated the cancellation of the “Perspectives on Islam” panel. On July 14, the Huffington Post ran a story by CAIR-Chicago Executive Director Ahmed Rehab that purports to tell the real behind-the-scenes story. In turn, Jihad Watch blogger Robert Spencer has also posted his version of the sequence of events leading up to the cancellation.
Irony #1: The details offered by each to refute the other corroborate the facts offered by American Libraries on July 12 (see below), with two exceptions. Spencer asserts that the three panelists who withdrew their participation within a week of Annual Conference to protest his inclusion had gotten at least a month’s notice about his spot on the panel. Rehab asserts that the panelists weren’t directly informed about Spencer’s inclusion before July 6, and names Ellen Zyroff, the co-chair of EMIERT’s Jewish Information Committee (not the “Jewish Librarians” as reported in HuffPo) as having “reportedly lobbied the ALA to invite Spencer arguing that ‘their side needed to be represented.’”
The truth of the matter seems to be far more mundane—one of standard operating procedure gone awry. According to EMIERT Chair Myra Appel, all four speakers were invited to comprise the panel months ago even though the conference program book erroneously listed only two confirmed speakers (skip to page 109 in the PDF file). Indeed the 2009 Annual Conference Preview bundled with the March 2009 issue of American Libraries did not include any panelists in the program description because none were invited until the spring; ALA’s constantly revised conference wiki lists all four. (And yes, Zyroff did invite Spencer to join the panel in the context of presenting diversity of opinion, Appel told American Libraries.)
Irony #2: In the spirit of collegiality ALA members take pride in, Zyroff and Tara Lannen-Stanton, who coauthored an open letter protesting Spencer’s scheduled appearance, are planning to develop a bibliography and other collection-development aids about Islam.
Irony #3: The EMIERT board will be revisiting its procedures and calendar for developing programs. Appel told American Libraries of the decision July 11, three days before Rehab recommended such an action in his HuffPo essay.
Because of its unwavering commitment to intellectual freedom and inclusion, the American Library Association prides itself on representing diverse viewpoints at its conference programs. That commitment can—and has—caused headaches from time to time for program planners, presenters, and concerned bystanders. This Annual is no exception as evinced by this morning’s yesterday’s eleventh-hour cancellation of the intriguingly titled “Perspectives on Islam: Beyond the Stereotyping” because three out of four panelists withdrew their participation.
What happened? It all depends on who you talk to (like so much else in life), but the essence of the story boils down to this: Some months ago, the Ethnic and Multicultural Information Exchange Round Table (EMIERT) began developing a panel discussion that would provide information about Islamic cultures around the world as a guide for collection development. So, speakers were invited, invitations were accepted, and plans moved along through the spring and early summer.
As member-leaders do, Appel posted a message to the EMIERT discussion list several weeks before Annual that detailed her group’s conference offerings. The email included the names and biographies of the four confirmed speakers: Alia Ammar, Marcia Hermansen, Esmail Koushanpour, and Robert Spencer. And that’s when the trouble began.
Within a day, Appel told American Libraries, she received an email from an EMIERT member Tara Lannen-Stanton, who took issue with Spencer’s inclusion on the panel because of his views about Islam as expressed on the Jihad Watch blog and elsewhere. Ammar, Hermansen, and Koushanpour said they were dismayed to discover so close to conference that the panel was to include Spencer, who is described in some circles as an Islamophobe.
After several email exchanges with the concerned ALAer and EMIERT board members, Appel sent the round-table list a reminder about the program, prefaced by a statement hoping members would attend. “I anticipated that individuals would attend with an open mind,” Appel said. But, several days before Appel was scheduled to fly to Chicago, Koushanpour withdrew from the panel.
At the suggestion of a colleague of Koushanpour, Appel invited Ahmed Rehab, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Chicago office, to join the panel. Instead, CAIR-Chicago issued a press release July 9 calling for ALA to disinvite Spencer, which EMIERT did not do. The next day, Ammar and Hermansen withdrew as well, leaving only Spencer as a confirmed speaker; CAIR-Chicago published statements from the three in a July 11 press release announcing EMIERT’s decision to cancel the program altogether.
Appel explained, “With the withdrawal of three of the four panelists we cannot provide a fair and equitable forum to explore the diversity of opinions that the panel would have offered.”
The ultimate irony is the feedback Appel reports receiving from EMIERT members, who emailed their appreciation of programs with such diverse viewpoints.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 6:22 pm by George Eberhart
James van Praagh signs a copy of his book for Michigan Library Association Director of Professional Development Denise Cook
Despite murmurs of controversy surrounding his Annual Conference appearance Saturday afternoon, survival evidence medium James van Praagh had the undivided attention of several hundred truth seekers curious to hear about “what the dead can teach us,” which serves as the subtitle of his latest book, Unfinished Business (HarperCollins).
Even as a toddler, van Praagh said, he could see spirits and otherworldly lights around people. “When I was about two years old,” he reminisced, “I remember being able to see a man with beautiful blue eyes smiling at me from a corner. It was only later that I found out from a family member that the description fit my grandfather who had died before I was born.” He continues to be able to perceive and communicate with discarnate entities who reveal their presence in many ways — visually, electromagnetically, or through birds and animals. The Friday night CBS television series Ghost Whisperer, now in its fourth season (of which van Praagh is co-executive producer) is based partially on his work.
Although he said he doesn’t conduct personal readings anymore, van Praagh did seem sensitive to the private concerns of some of those who asked questions at the end of his talk. When one woman mentioned her husband who had died seven years ago, he acted as if he sensed the man’s presence around her, mentioning the significance of a toy that he and his brother had played with in Germany. Skeptics might say that this was an example of “cold reading” his audience (making high-probability guesses by picking up on personal cues), but whatever his technique was, it seemed to resonate with those willing to credit information apparently coming from the “other side.”
Much of van Praagh’s outlook is standard spiritualist or New Age philosophy, as illustrated by many comments he made during his talk — during an out-of-body experience your “spirit floats on a silver cord attached to your solar plexus,” “this dimension is illusion,” “we are outside of time,” “we have several nonphysical bodies all attuned to different frequencies,” our departed family members can “hear our thoughts and prayers,” and “every single one of us is God.”
Van Praagh also believes that after death, our belief systems persist and “we go to a place that we believe in” and where similar believers also reside. “Mindset attracts mindset,” he theorized. He also believes in reincarnation; but when a questioner asked how spirits can exist in the afterlife yet be reincarnated simultaneously, he answered that only an “aspect of the soul is reincarnated, so you’ll still see your family.”
Spirits return to visit the living because they have “unfinished business,” van Praagh concluded as he left for the Exhibit Hall to sign his book of the same title.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 6:18 pm by Greg Landgraf
Opening General Session speaker Christie Hefner drew a clear parallel between businesses and libraries in terms of what they need to do to survive. She noted how, as Playboy CEO, she came to the conclusion that the company “didn’t want to be a magazine company—we wanted to be a company that represented a style of content.” That led Playboy to expand to television in the 1980s, the internet in the 90s, and mobile devices today.
Libraries, she said, can not simply fill the traditional roles of providing books and research materials. Hefner suggested several ways libraries can and are moving beyond those roles, including the online distribution of materials, instantaneous translation of materials, bridging the digital divide, and partnering with both for-profit and non-profit entities. “Who could you partner with to make having and using a library card really cool?” Hefner queried.
She reminisced about the founding of the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards, which grew out of the magazine’s 25th anniversary celebration in 1979. As part of the anniversary, the magazine bought the papers from the trial of John Peter Zenger at auction and toured them around the country, inviting students to enter an essay contest on what the First Amendment meant to them. At the end of that year, the award was founded.
“Over those three decades, not surprisingly, we honored a number of librarians,” she said. “Extraordinarily heroic people, and we got to know them through the close working relationship with the ALA, the Freedom to Read Foundation, and Judith Krug.”
Hefner called working with the Foundation the best perk of her position as Playboy CEO. “For me it was more fun doing banned book readings than to go to the Playboy Super Bowl Party,” she said.
Citing Iranian citizens’ recent use of Twitter and Facebook to get out information that the government wanted to repress, as well as the six states where gay marriage is legal, Hefner argued that the digital revolution has generally made society more tolerant of diverse viewpoints. But she also observed that there’s as much effort to ban information as there ever was.
“I found that the way to respond to those is to be sure you’re true to what you believe,” Hefner said. “I would argue that the way to do that is to spend less time thinking about what you’re doing and more time thinking about what you represent.”
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 4:01 pm by Gordon Flagg
Author James Ellroy is an arrogantly proud Luddite who exults in his disengagement with contemporary culture. “I live in a vacuum,” he told a rapt crowd who attended his Saturday-morning Auditorium Speaker Series appearance. “I ignore pop culture, I don’t read a newspaper.”
Ellroy, known for L.A. Confidential and other unrelentingly gritty crime novels, saved his highest disdain for technology. He sought to enlist his audience of librarians—whom he called “lions of literacy, reptiles of reading, and beautiful beasts of books—”in the fight between digital dystopia and the book.” Extolling the printed word over on-screen information, Ellroy maintained that “computers shrink consciousness to peanut size,” while books burn images into your brain forever.
Born in Los Angeles, the “film noir epicenter” at the height of the genre—”Geography is destiny,” he observed—Ellroy related the story of his harrowing early years as the product of “a fractious childhood and an early escape into the printed word.” Already a voracious reader, when his mother was brutally murdered, Ellroy shifted his reading to crime books, laying the course for his literary career. Around that time, he discovered the city’s Wilshire Branch library. “I read books, books, and more books,” he declared, “and I usually read them in public libraries.” At age 30, when he took up writing, “I instinctively knew how to do it because I had read.”
Ellroy called his new book, Blood’s a Rover—the final volume of his American Underworld trilogy—”library-born and library-bred,” adding that it “rebuffs the digital age.” He joked that the job of his audience, as guardians of literature, “is to launch this fucker into the hands of readers nationwide.” Concluding his remarks—frequently delivered at the top of his voice and with animated gestures—Ellroy said, “Let us exalt books at every opportunity. . . and work to reestablish the book as the dominant cultural medium of our times.”
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