Tag Archives for Libraries

What I’ve Discovered in 2017 (the bookish version)

I’m a list-maker. I love lists, and I make lots of them. As a kid, I think I once tried to inventory everything that was in my parents’ home (down to the number of pencils and spoons). This project, unsurprisingly, was never finished. And so here is a different list.

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It is not a Best Books of 2017 list. I don’t read nearly enough newly published books to even attempt such a list. In fact, I have trouble making ‘best-of’ lists in general. Don’t they imply that you’ve somehow read/experienced/tasted/watched the gamut? I have not. And so this list is less ambitious. Out of all of the things I have come across and experienced this year, this list details what I have been most happy to discover.

EDIT: My initial list of things discovered was far too long. This is the abridged book/reading-related version.

What I’ve Discovered in 2017 (the bookish version)

1. You don’t have to finish the books you start

I used to have some pretty heavy guilt if there were books sitting on my shelves that I either hadn’t gotten to yet or hadn’t finished. This was most severe if the book was a classic, a recommendation from a friend, or ‘supposed to be really good’ by any other standard. But reading without enjoyment seems to me to defeat the entire purpose of reading (save of course what we have to trudge through during school and study). Reading without enjoyment also prevents you from getting to other books you’ll enjoy more. There are millions and millions of books out there – far more than you can ever hope to get to within your lifetime. Why waste your time on books that for whatever reason just aren’t interesting to you? Since embracing the idea that not finishing books is indeed okay, I have read far far more this year than I have in previous years – frankly because every (well, most) pages were enjoyable – and when they stopped being enjoyable, I just put the book down. See my previous post for more elaboration on the reasons why it doesn’t always make sense to finish the books that we start.

This habit of starting and stopping and abandoning books also works best when the books are free – as in, borrowed from a library, which brings me to my next point.

2. I love libraries

It’s not that I didn’t like libraries before – I just don’t think I’d ever been exposed to them in the right way and/or given them a true chance. I have fond (as well as tormented) memories of studying in the library while in university and I loved the Black Diamond Royal Library while I was living in Copenhagen. But I loved those libraries in the same way I like a nice bookstore or a cozy coffeeshop – as a space to sit.

This year though, thoughtlessly, I fell into libraries. It started with wanting a place to sit and read and work that was quieter than the coffeeshop I’d been frequenting – and where I didn’t feel guilty about staying past finishing my latte. And then I found so much more than a nice place to sit, namely:

A Few Reasons Why I Love Libraries

ONE: The obvious (but perhaps overlooked, at least by me) fact that you have access to basically any book you could want, for free. I’m lucky to live in a city with a well-funded and large library system. We can get from within our library system (or request via Interlibrary Loan) more or less any book title. For free. In my particular library system, this means I can check out 100 books at a time, with 3 week loan periods and the possibility to renew up to 6 months (provided nobody else is waiting on my copy). Sometimes, I just don’t understand why libraries aren’t a bigger threat to booksellers. That said, before 2017, I hardly went to the library. The biggest difference though is that before, I read much much less. I also ‘tried out’ books less. Today, I usually check out 6-7 books a week. I will browse through all of these, decide not to read 4-5 of them, actually read 2 from front to cover, – and then check out 6 more books the next week. If we assume that each book costs a (conservatively low) $15, that equates to a whopping $4,680 yearly book habit had I been buying instead of borrowing books.

TWO: Libraries are the last (truly) public indoor spaces. In many communities, libraries are the only indoor public spaces where you can spend as much time as you want and where there isn’t an expectation for you to purchase anything or spend any money. Coffee shops, bars, and shopping malls are all great places to meet up with friends, socialize, or just sit – but there is always the expectation of the purchase. And there is always the sense of outstaying one’s welcome should no purchase be made. In this sense, libraries are glaringly unique.

THREE: Libraries are putting on amazing events and programs. I was surprised by how many events my local library holds. From story time for kids to free yoga to knitting clubs to homework help sessions to family craft nights to writing workshops and local history lectures, they host such an impressive slew of free events on a daily basis. In this way, they’re becoming places not only to read but also to learn, to interact with others, to create and to make.

FOUR: They have the potential to be even more. Libraries in general are moving away from their traditional function – of being a building that houses books – and towards being a collaborative community space that facilitates learning. And learning can take place in many shapes and forms – from the reading of books to the usage of databases to the participation in classes to the joining of groups to meeting others with like-minded interests. The Aspen Institute’s 2014 Report, Rising to the Challenge: Re-Envisioning Public Libraries states it beautifully. On page 5, I found this quick and perfect summary that captures the role public libraries can play in today’s changing world and economy:

What People and Communities Need to Flourish in the Knowledge Economy

 

LIFELONG ACCESS to an ever-increasing and ever-changing body of knowledge and tools to ensure that their skills remain relevant to the current economy as it continues to evolve

THE CAPACITY AND DISPOSITION TO LEARN IN SMALL, QUICK DOSES rather than wade through
mounds of links and piles of data that provide too much information and too little knowledge

THE ABILITY TO USE, UNDERSTAND AND PROCESS INFORMATION IN MANY DIFFERENT FORMS including text, data, audio and video and to evaluate the quality of information from different sources and understand its relevance.

PLACES TO GATHER, collaborate and contribute to knowledge development

ACCESS TO CONVERSATIONS AMONG CREATIVE PEOPLE in their areas of interest so that they
can innovate and develop or maintain a competitive advantage in the knowledge economy

People and communities need PUBLIC LIBRARIES.

3. I can store, organize, search, and remember – what I’ve read

For the full, lengthy original post, click here. This year, Zotero has been my godsend. In short, it’s a research tool traditionally primarily used by students and researchers to keep track of journal articles and other documents read as part of academic research. I use it as a tool to keep track of what I read. When I come across things I read that I want to remember, I categorize, tag, and store these quotations and snippets of text within Zotero. I add notes and there’s a logical structure within which my excerpts are sorted so that I can find them later. Now, a year into using Zotero, I have thousands of quotations and excerpts all catalogued and searchable of all the things that I’ve read, loved, and wanted to remember. I can search – say using the tag – ‘creativity’ and find 20 different excerpts I’ve come across in the past year. I absolutely love this system.

4. Text Mining of literature is a very cool thing

My two favorite things are probably books and data. So, needless to say, it was a very good day when I learned about text mining and its application in analyzing literature, done through institutions such as the Stanford Literary Lab. The general idea behind text mining is that there are so many books that have been published and that are still being published that it’s impossible to expect to be able to read them all. How then can anyone expect to gain a comprehensive overview of ‘literature’ considering that a single person can only hope to read a slim portion of ‘literature’? Further, today through various efforts including Project Gutenberg, much of the literary classics (that are no longer covered by copyright) are digitized and freely available. This presents a new opportunity to analyze these texts using traditional data methods. The text can be ‘tokenized’ into measurable units, either words or short word-pairings so that they are then readable as data and able to be studied through programs like R & Python.

Examples of possible analyses include looking at word frequencies or lengths of sentences within a novel. Or to ask, are there more words with positive connotations during certain portions of a novel? Or, do male and female characters use different types of words? The Stanford Literary Lab has done some fascinating work. One of its pamphlets looked at the ‘Emotions of London‘ as expressed in literature. Place names were identified throughout a broad corpus (data set) of novels and the adjectives used to describe those place names were coded as positive or negative in emotion. The result of the project was a fascinating map of London color coded to display the breadth of emotion associated with each area as expressed in literature.

The possibilities for analysis, I think, are endless. Novels to some degree are a record of the feelings and thoughts of the time in which they were written. You could search within thousands of novels for the changing depiction of marriage, fidelity, and infidelity. You could analyze changing thoughts about death and the afterlife. You could look at conversations between servant and master, mother and child. Basically any analysis that has been done through close examination and careful scrutiny of a few texts can now be attempted through digital analysis of a large swath of texts. In a very nerdy sort of way, I find that all really exciting.

On Finally Appreciating, “How are you?”

It’s taken me a while to appreciate the question, “How are you?” For the longest time, it bothered me. At work, I would pass someone in the hall. As we walked towards each other, I’d hear a “Hey Jennifer, how are you?” but before I could answer we’d already have passed each other and I’d mumble a “Fine, thanks” into an empty hallway.

Or on the phone with a supplier, “Hi Jennifer, how are you?” “I’m good, thanks. How about you?” “Yeah, doing well.” Great. Glad we got that useless nothing out of the way.

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It just seemed pointless, fake. A shallow pretense of caring without the appropriate goodwill and feelings behind it. I preferred my conversations to be authentic. As in, please don’t ask me how I’m doing unless you genuinely care.

My non-American friends seemed to agree. Together we’d complain about this strange American thing that we didn’t understand. Until lately.

I work now in a library in a small town. Jones, Oklahoma. Population 2,600. People like to say that if you blink while you’re coming down the road, you’ll miss it. There’s a Sonic Drive-Thru, a Dollar General, and not too much else.

People here really like the whole “How are you?” thing. I’m expected to ask it. And so I do. At first, it was with a heavy dose of awkwardness and uncomfortableness that was not entirely all in my head. I’d have customers tilt their heads and ask me, “What was that?” Really, it’s not a question I’ve been used to asking. And there’s a whole art to asking it at the right time, at the right volume, with the right inflection.

But now that I have a few months of practice under my belt (timing, volume, and inflection are thankfully coming along), I see the question as holding so much more.

Most importantly, I see it now as an invitation to connect and share that can be accepted or politely declined. What I mean by this is that a lot of time, people don’t need in that moment the “How are you?” They answer it just like I usually do – with a “Fine, thanks” and the conversation stops there.

But sometimes, I’ll ask the question and you see them pause and there’s a change in the eyes. And they share. We’ll spend five minutes talking about the difficulties of having a child with ADHD or a member’s failing vision and their fears of losing independence in driving. An older gentleman will brag about his young granddaughter and a middle aged woman will prattle off each and every dish she and her family had for Thanksgiving. Without that “How are you?’ though, there is no invitation to share. There is no possibility for connecting. When you say “How are you?” I feel like what you’re really saying is, “I have time today to talk to you, and if you want to talk, we can. What’s on your mind?”

I’ve never been one to naturally share, and so excluding conversations with friends and family, I’ve don’t really myself take others up on the invitation. But many people do. I’m always surprised by how many people just seem to want to talk – and for a long time. If the library is quiet, we’ll speak for ten or fifteen minutes just going through whatever’s on their mind.

And if the question is never asked, there is no possibility really, of connecting. I’ll get them their books and we’ll tell each other the rote “Have a nice day,” but without anything more. An opportunity missed.

3 Things: The Case for Idleness, Rooting for the Library over Audible, & Steps to Clear the Mind

From the pitfalls that can face a society that overvalues productivity and work for work’s sake to an undervalued resource in your public library to a mantra that can provide solace to an ever anxious society, here are three things keeping me interested:

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  • In Praise of Idleness: Bertrand Russell makes the argument for leisure
  • Audible & Library Audiobooks: Doesn’t the library also provide Audiobooks – for free?
  • BRFWA: Breathe. Relax. Feel. Watch. Accept. Simple instructions to lessening anxiety.

In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell

It never ceases to amaze me how relevant this piece is although it was written way back in 1932. Amid the rise in automation and the impact it will have on many jobs as well as murmurs in Scandinavia and elsewhere of universal basic income, Russell is so very prescient and just makes things so clear. In this essay, he challenges the traditional notion of ‘work for work’s sake’ and contends that more leisure rather than more work would make for a better society.

One of the more famous parts of this essay is an example concerning a factory that produces pins. The text is as follows,

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

Obviously this is an oversimplified example, but it brings up an interesting point. In our world where more and more tasks are becoming automated and we are easily able to produce things more efficiently and with less labor than ever before – what is the end result? How is it possible that we work more or less the same number of hours despite these increases in efficiency? Are we producing more than we need – and thus being wasteful, do we somehow need more than we used to, or as in the pin example are the more productive of us overworked in producing on behalf of the masses while others are underworked or unemployed?

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Sure, you may say, but what then is the alternative?  Surely mass underemployment is as harmful or more harmful than the current state of affairs. Here, Russell is optimistic in terms of the capabilities and tendencies of the common man. He points out that the pleasures of the working urban population are mostly passive. People watch TV, watch sports, listen to music. In their leisure, people are recovering from their work. They are unwinding and attempting to undo or release the tension built up during the workday. There is less energy for active leisure, leisure in which we not just consume but also create. Russell creates an optimistic but inspiring picture of what he thinks could perhaps be possible,

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

He points out that historically, most of the great advances in society and thought have been made by men of leisure. From the great Greek philosophers to English poets to the men of science – these were not day laborers that pursued their interests in the evenings or on weekends. They did not draw a regular salary from the large corporations of their era. Many of them were financially independent by one means or another. They were men (or perhaps women, but for reasons let’s not go into here mostly men) of leisure that had the time to fully explore their intellectual curiosity. Bertrand argues that such freedom should be afforded to all.

Full text here.


Audible and Library Audiobooks

Audible, if you haven’t already heard of it, is an Amazon owned subscription service that allows access to audiobooks for a monthly subscription fee. There are various subscription options but one of the more common and basic packages allows for 1 audiobook a month in exchange for a monthly payment of $14.95. You can keep the books forever, even after you cancel. It’s not a bad deal, especially considering the usual prices of audiobooks (very high to ridiculously high – easily $30+ per book) and if you are a regular listener. A few years ago, I bought a 6 month gift subscription for my dad. He enjoyed it, it worked well, there were a lot of options in terms of books – no complaints.

However, I now work at a public library. Within my public library system (Metropolitan Library System – Oklahoma City), you can check out almost any title as an audiobook – the majority of these are also available as an eAudiobook (as opposed to CD versions or audiobooks preloaded onto rentable audio devices). In my library system, you can rent up to 100 items at a time (as opposed to 1 a month). Yes, sometimes there’s a wait, but there’s also a supplementary streaming service called Hoopla that also carries thousands of eAudiobooks where there is never a wait and you are allowed 4 materials a month (still more than the 1 allowed by Audible’s basic package).

No, you can’t keep the audiobook forever, but you can check it out again and again. And to me at least, while I can understand the appeal of owning a physical book and being able to write in the margins and arrange it on your bookshelf and whatnot, the appeal of owning an audiobook is to me less obvious, and especially so for eAudiobooks.

Here in Oklahoma City, I’ve seen a lot of advertising recently for Audible, and it just makes me cringe. Theoretically, because of what our library system is able to offer, Audible probably shouldn’t do that well here…but it probably will because people don’t know what the library has to offer. I think a large part of your customer base for Audible is probably your young professional – the age group libraries sometimes struggle to attract.

So, the takeaway here is – as a customer, check and see what your library has. And libraries need to do a much, much better job in marketing themselves.


BRFWA

Breathe, Relax, Feel, Watch, Accept. I first encountered this set of instructions through the book Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment, but it’s actually a well known technique from the Kripalu style of yoga. Used to clear the mind when one is frustrated and anxious, it’s a useful tonic that has done me wonders. From when I’m lying awake in bed frustrated at myself and the world for not being able to simply fall asleep to when I find myself tense and irritated at a customer in the library who is letting her children run wild and systematically wreck havoc shelf to shelf, this process helps.

Sometimes feelings emerge, uninvited, that disturb us. Sometimes you can’t logically think your way out of a feeling. It is just there. Being frustrated at the feeling breeds more frustration and magnifies the sense of discomfort. The feelings are often there for a reason and are our reaction to something. The feeling is an indication that something is off and uncomfortable. Sometimes, we are able to react based off of those feelings. Confronted with a betrayal by a close friend, anger and disappointment alert us to reconsider the friendship and to exit a potentially dangerous relationship. Other times, there is nothing to be done and the feeling is just there, unpleasant and simmering.

In these cases where there is nothing to be done, frustration directed at the feeling itself and general unfocused anxiety can emerge. But frustration at the feeling, at the situation, at ourselves isn’t helpful. In these cases, BRFWA can be helpful.

  • Breathe – Take pause, take a deep breath, and clear the head
  • Relax – Enjoy the end of the breath and the physical exhale
  • Feel – Allow yourself to feel, however painfully, whatever it is that you’re feeling without fighting or trying to suppress the feelings
  • Watch – Observe whatever it is that you are feeling. Take note of it. Take note of how you are reacting to these feelings.
  • Accept – Accept it all. The feeling is just a feeling, and it’s okay to have all sorts of feelings, even the negative.

In the case of being frustrated at my insomnia, this means inhaling and exhaling deeply (Breathe & Relax), allowing myself to feel all my frustration and anger and unhappiness at the insomnia (Feel), noticing and taking stock of all these feelings (Watch), and then simply accepting that today, I am unable to sleep and I am frustrated at the fact (Accept). When the mind stops fighting, it’s often then easier to sleep.

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