This Book Is Overdue! Read online

  Johnson, Marilyn

  This Book Is Overdue!

  How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

  To Dave and Dotty Johnson

  Show me a computer expert who gives a damn, and I’ll show you a librarian.

  —Patricia Wilson Berger, former president, ALA

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1. The Frontier

  A blast of a six–shooter in the Wild West town of Deadwood sends us galloping into the world of librarians who wrangle paper history and digital information, and cartoon librarians who move and speak in real time on your computer screen…how obituaries of librarians are tracking the changes in this topsy–turvy profession…a silly and scurrilous entry on Wikipedia stands in for the mutating web….and we cast an eye over some of the stories of heroic librarians and archivists this book will tell

  2. Information Sickness

  Frothing at the mouth and keeling over from too much information: science fiction or modern affliction?…on trying to understand social networking and turning to reference librarians for enlightenment…who needs librarians in the age of Google? we do!…the fools who projected the death of libraries…computers level the information playing field, and librarians are their keepers

  3. On the Ground

  The uneasy alliance between librarians and the computer experts they rely on as it plays out during a calamitous computer upgrade of the online catalog in Westchester County, NY—complete with an apocalyptic storm!…librarians, pressured to get out front with technology, scramble to retrain themselves…and a few outlaw librarians drive the tech guys crazy

  4. The Blog People

  You might not think of them as mouthy and opinionated, but librarians have taken to the blogosphere with a vengeance, networking, entertaining, instructing, and venting…yes, they are venting, viciously and hilariously, about you, their patrons…don’t judge them until you, too, have cleaned up the poop in the book drop

  5. Big Brother and the Holdout Company

  An encounter at a glitzy benefit with two heroes of the library world turns into a visit with the Connecticut Four, in which three librarians and a tech guy recount their 1984–style nightmare as “John Doe,” who sued the government to keep their patrons’ records private

  6. How to Change the World

  Librarians at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, give students from developing nations, some of whom have never used a computer, enough tech training to pursue a long–distance master’s degree and join the global conversation on human rights…a visit to Rome, where the librarians crash–train one group and graduate another

  7. To the Ramparts!

  Librarians to the barricades! Anarchist librarians leave the building and hit the street, using smart phones and library databases to fight rumors and panic with trustworthy information for protestors…a visit with the librarian who helped launch Radical Reference and works to expand library service for those who live off the grid and to preserve their self–published stories

  8. Follow That Tattooed Librarian

  Our enduring and, frankly, absurd fascination with sexy librarians and that shushing business, and how some librarians deal with it…welcome to the exotic world of librarians who mock themselves by performing precision drills with book carts…and to pink–haired, tattooed librarians downing cocktails while ear–splitting music shatters that stereotype

  9. Wizards of Odd

  In which your author becomes an embedded reporter among librarians in the virtual reality site of Second Life, and discovers the vibrant and gender–bending world of international librarians who meet in the 3–D Web’s corridors and dark alleys to share resources and provide reference service to other avatars

  10. Gotham City

  A close look at the librarians of the venerable New York Public Library as they hurtle at warp speed into the digital age…the reference librarian who helps techno–stressed writers…the keeper of the treasures in a crumbling kingdom of scholarship…the digital guru…the guardian of black history…the arts and crafts librarian…and we discover which of them survives the great transition

  11. What’s Worth Saving?

  Toni Morrison’s house burns, and is anyone worried about her son? No, it’s her manuscripts everybody cares about…a course in literary archives using the papers of a writer considerably more obscure than Morrison…advice from an archivist on a personal mission…how the world’s most extensive collection of boxing artifacts survived hurricanes, fire, mold, and rats, thanks to a librarian who loves boxing and a boxing archivist…the difference between librarians and archivists, and how archivists are dealing with the digital age…creative innovations from the Library of Congress…yet another way information professionals save us

  12. The Best Day

  Outside in the cold with a crowd of happy revelers on a Saturday morning, waiting for the thrill of the opening of a new library…the recession–battered town of Darien, Connecticut, celebrates not just the new building, its dazzling design and user–friendly technology, but its librarians, who promote “extreme customer service” and who throw open the door to taxpaying locals and free–loading strangers alike

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  About the Author

  Other Books by Marilyn Johnson

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1.

  THE FRONTIER

  In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.

  Down the street from the library in Deadwood, South Dakota, the peace is shattered several times a day by the noise of gunfire—just noise. The guns shoot blanks, part of an historic re-creation to entertain the tourists. Deadwood is a far tamer town than it used to be, and it has been for a good long while. Its library, that emblem of civilization, is already more than a hundred years old, a Carnegie brick structure, small and dignified, with pillars outside and neat wainscoting in. The library director is Jeanette Moodie, a brisk mom in her early forties who earned her professional degree online. She’s gathering stray wineglasses from the previous night’s reception for readers and authors, in town for the South Dakota Festival of the Book. Moodie points out the portraits of her predecessors that hang in the front room. The first director started this library for her literary ladies’ club in 1895, not long after the period that gives the modern town its flavor; she looks like a proper lady, hair piled on her head, tight bodice, a choker around her neck. Moodie is a relative blur. She runs the library and its website, purchases and catalogs the items in its collections, keeps the doors open more than forty hours a week, and hosts programs like the party, all with only part-time help. When she retires, she’ll put on one of her neat suits, gold earrings, and rectangular glasses and sit still long enough to be captured for a portrait of her own.

  Moodie is also the guardian of a goldmine, the history of a town that relies on history for its identity. She oversees an archive of rare books and genealogical records, which, when they’re not being read under her supervision, are kept locked up in the South Dakota Room of the library. Stored in a vault off the children’s reading room downstairs are complete sets of local newspapers dating back to 1876 that document Deadwood’s colorful past in real time. A warning on the library website puts their contents in a modern context: “remember that political correctness did not exist in 19th-century Deadwood—many terms used [‘negro minstrelcy,’ for instance, and ‘good injun’] are now considered derogatory or slanderous, but are a true reflection of our history.”

  If you want a gauge of how important this archive is to Deadwood, Moodie will take you into the vault, a virtually impregnable ro
om lined with concrete and secured by a heavy steel door. No fire or earthquake or thief is going to get at the good stuff inside this place. A dehumidifier hums by the door. Newsprint and sepia photos, stored in acid-free, carefully labeled archival boxes, are stacked neatly on shelves around a big worktable. In her spare time, the librarian comes down here to browse the old articles that a consultant has been indexing, systematically listing the subjects and titles of each story for the library’s electronic catalog. The town’s past lives on in this catalog, linked with all the other libraries in South Dakota. Anyone can log on as a guest, consult the library’s index online, and learn that the Black Hills Daily Times published a story in 1882 called “Why Do We Not Have Library & Reading Rooms?” and three years later, “Reading Room and Library Almost Complete,” alongside stories like “Accidental Shooting Part of a Free for All” and “Cowboys Shoot Up Resort.”

  Moodie, like her predecessor a century ago, is essentially organizing the past and making it available to the citizenry, but she’s doing so in ways that the librarian of the late 1800s could never have imagined, preserving images of one frontier with the tools of another. What would the proper lady in the portrait make of the current librarian’s tasks, the maintenance of the website, for instance, with its ghostly and omniscient reach?

  There’s another Deadwood library on the digital frontier. This one doesn’t resemble the elegant Carnegie building in the real town in South Dakota—it looks instead like a crude wooden storefront—but it, too, evokes the period that characterizes Deadwood, the late 1800s, the gold rush, and the Wild West. The difference is that this library exists solely on the Internet in the virtual world known as Second Life. People at computers around the globe, taking the form of avatars dressed in chaps and boots or long prairie dresses and playing the roles of prospectors, saloon keepers, and ordinary citizens, can visit the library in an historic reenactment of Deadwood in Second Life. They can enter this ramshackle building and, by typing questions in a chat box, ask the librarian what sort of outfit a prostitute would have worn, or where to find information on panning for gold. Or they can browse the collection the librarian has gathered in the form of links to dime novels and other old-time books, available in digital form from sites like Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.

  The librarian, Lena Kjellar, shows up onscreen as a cartoon woman in a bustle skirt. The person behind this avatar was trained to provide Second Life reference services by a real-life reference librarian and is part of an information network anchored by hundreds of professional librarians who flock to this interactive site for fun and stay to volunteer their skills—they figure everyone should be able to use library services, even avatars. In fact, “Lena Kjellar” is a retired electrical engineer and locomotive buff from Illinois named Dave Mewhinney; he feels that taking on a woman’s shape in Second Life makes him more approachable.

  Somewhere between Jeanette Moodie’s frontiers and Lena Kjellar’s is the story of a profession in the midst of an occasionally mind-blowing transition. A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a “true reflection of our history,” whether it’s a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future.

  I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler’s army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children—and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast—or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress’s map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.

  There were visionaries like Frederick Kilgour, the first to combine libraries’ catalogs in one computerized database back in the early seventies. This was a great act in the history of knowledge—its efficient and useful multiplication. Under Kilgour’s direction, what began as a few dozen college libraries in Ohio sharing their catalogs soon snowballed into a world catalog, the Online Computer Library Center. Now anyone can go to WorldCat.org, the OCLC’s catalog of a gazillion library records, and find many libraries that carry the item you need; WorldCat has made every computer a portal to institutions from the Library of Congress to the Tauranga (New Zealand) District Library. Kilgour lived to the age of ninety-two and taught till he was ninety. His obituarist noted that during World War II, “like many librarians…[he] gravitated into intelligence work.” Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organizational and analytical aptitude, and discretion.

  I met Judith Krug, another visionary librarian, in the course of my research. Krug fought censorship for four decades while running the Office for Intellectual Freedom in the Chicago headquarters of the American Library Association (ALA). She was tiny, beautifully turned out, and ferociously clear about the librarian’s role in fighting censorship. I didn’t realize until I read her untimely obituary that Krug had launched Banned Books Week back in the eighties, a bold and pointed celebration of everything from Huckleberry Finn to trash and political incitement. The banners flying in my public library the last week of September each year had been dreamed up by her.

  But the first in a long list of memorialized librarians who made me want to inhabit this world was Henriette Avram. She beckoned from the obits page, with her mysterious, knowing smile, the chain-smoking systems analyst who automated the library records of the Library of Congress and wrote the first code for computerized catalogs (MARC—Machine Readable Cataloging), a form of which is still used today. She inspired a generation of women to combine library work and computers. Her intellectual daughters and sons met after she died to pay her tribute, wearing giant buttons edged in black ribbon, bearing the image of their gray-haired heroine and the legend Mother of MARC.

  Whether the subject was a community librarian or a prophet, almost every librarian obituary contained some version of this sentence: “Under her watch, the library changed from a collection of books into an automated research center.” I began to get the idea that libraries were where it was happening—wide open territory for innovators, activists, and pioneers.

  The profession that had once been the quiet gatekeeper to discreet palaces of knowledge is now wrestling a raucous, multiheaded, madly multiplying beast of exploding information and information delivery systems. Who can we trust? In a world where information itself is a free-for-all, with traditional news sources going bankrupt and publishers in trouble, we need librarians more than ever. We might not need a librarian to tell us that the first chapter of the Wikipedia entry about a Red Sox ballplayer, which we happened to look up during a slow moment of a Boston blowout of the Yankees, was scurrilous mischief: “[He] keeps his beard grown out to hide a rare birth defect. [He] was born with a huge vagina where a normal human chin would be. This would explain…why [he] is constantly fidgeting around in his beard because yeast infections are common in chin vaginas.” This passage disappeared from Wikipedia in minutes, but not before I’d preserved a screen shot of the page and my printer had spit out a copy. Chin vaginas! What next? But in this age of mutating wikis, how much else is untrue? With the same number of keystrokes, I could have found more than a dozen articles in a database on my local library’s website, and called up any of them using my library card. Or I could have summoned a librarian via one of the chat services that proliferate on the Web, like the one at the Boston Public Library that offers “24/7 reference—A Professional Librarian, on Your Computer, at Your Convenience.” I didn’t need a car
d to claim the undivided attention of a professional who made it her job to find me reliable information, whether it was about something as important as a Supreme Court decision or as frivolous as a baseball player’s beard.

  Librarians’ values are as sound as Girl Scouts’: truth, free speech, and universal literacy. And, like Scouts, they possess a quality that I think makes librarians invaluable and indispensable: they want to help. They want to help us. They want to be of service. And they’re not trying to sell us anything. But as one librarian put it, “The wolf is always at the door.” In tight economic times, with libraries sliding farther and farther down the list of priorities, we risk the loss of their ideals, intelligence, and knowledge, not to mention their commitment to access for all—librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy, and they’re right. Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the Ph.D. In prosperous libraries, they loan out laptops; in strapped ones, they dole out half hours of computer time. They are the little “d” democrats of the computer age who keep the rest of us wired.

  In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.