lis.dom

Today happens to be payday for me, and it also happens to be the first paycheck we got that reflects our annual cost-of-living raise (thank you, Wyoming energy industry, for continuing to flourish in these scant times).

Today is also the day after a flash flood hit the Louisville Free Public Library, where my friend Greg Schwartz works. He posted some pictures yesterday (and here’s one from the newspaper), but perhaps what got me the most (oddly, because despite my frequent postings about technology, I really think of myself as a book person) was his tweet from this morning: “Watching the h2o being poured out of our servers. Depressing.”

Libraries aren’t just stacks of books: among other things, they are stacks of findable books, organized books, books that can be checked out and checked in again, books that can be loaned to other libraries. Servers are part of what make that work possible, and one of the things that Greg does is look after them.

A lot of people want to send books to libraries who have been hit by disasters. This is a noble thing to want to do, but it is a very bad idea, because, as Catherine notes as Rachel notes and Catherine echos, your idea of what they need and what they actually need may not always match up. If you would like to help, though, you can send money. Checks can be mailed to The Library Foundation, 301 York Street, Louisville, KY 40203.

Steve Lawson has also started a Library Society of the World fund drive for the library. If that link isn’t working, the details are also available at Iris’s place. The gist of it is that Steve is collecting money (send donations to lsw.lfpl@gmail.com via PayPal or checks made out to Steve to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933.

I just sent in the amount that my paycheck increased by because of my raise, but any amount at all will help get books back on the shelves — and, just as crucially, get the servers that help keep the library running dry, safe, and back to doing their work. And while you’re at it, why not run through Dorothea’s little checklist and see how secure your data is in the event of a catastrophe. I know our data curation could use some work.

One evening in junior high I was sitting at our kitchen table (which was my great grandparents’ kitchen table and is now my kitchen table) studying for a test on the explorers, and at some point I asked my mother if she’d quiz me. Magellan, Vasco de Gama, Ponce de Leon, all that was fine. But then we got to Cortez. “Oh,” said my mother, and went off to fetch a book. “Listen to this,” she said, and then she read me

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
. . .
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific

Now of course Cortez did not discover the Pacific. (Neither, technically, did Balboa, who usually gets the credit — the Pacific did not require discovering — it was there already, it’s just that Europeans hadn’t run across it quite yet.) In any case, I pointed out that this poem, however lovely, was unlikely to be of much help to me, since it was inaccurate, and my mother said that it did not matter that it was inaccurate because it was so good. Such was the danger of asking my mother for help with school work. In high school, our geometry textbook asked us at one point why the Greeks considered the 30-60-90 triangle to be the most beautiful triangle. I thought my mother might have something pithy to say on the subject, so I went to ask her. Several hours and multiple volumes of C.S. Lewis and Plato and probably something else I’m forgetting later, I still didn’t have a pithy answer, but I had learned quite a bit.

“On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” is one of the first poems I ever deliberately memorized, and so it floats through my head fairly often. I’ve said to myself while waiting in lines or trying to fall asleep. I said it the first time I ever gazed on the Pacific, standing on Ocean Beach in San Francisco the summer I was twenty.

The poem ends not simply with Cortez staring at the Pacific, for there are others with him:

– and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

As I’ve read The Darien Statements, and the various reactions to them over the past week or so, Keats’s lines have been floating through my head a bit more often, and so has that evening when I was trying to remember the date Magellan circumnavigated the globe and my mother first read those lines to me.

Some days it’s important to remember the dates and places and times. Some preliminary knowledge about the world and its shape and its features and its history is useful — even necessary — for getting by in it. But some days — not all days, perhaps, but some — it’s also important to stare at the Pacific, to glance around at your compatriots with a wild surmise, to stand silently and contemplate the awesome mysterious wonderfulness of it all.

Similarly, it’s important to run your library. It’s important to get the books on the shelves correctly, to have a diverse and up to date collection, to provide timely reference services to your patrons, to keep your public computers running. That’s all important. But sometimes it is important to stand back from that for a few moments and think about what it is you’re doing and why you’re doing it. If the Darien Statements do anything, I hope they help us all feel for a moment like the men on that other Darien, as though we’ve discovered a new old world, or an old new world, all over again and ought to contemplate just what it is and what we are and what we should be doing and why.

So go read the Darien Statements, if you haven’t. And if you’d like, you can read the rest of Keats’s sonnet, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation. The Wikipedia page on it is not half bad, either.

I have been very tired and hence am very behind and thus am going to give you this fabulous link roundup instead of an actual post.

Radical Reference did a Library of Congress Subject Heading Suggestion Blog-a-thon last week that I managed to miss. If you did, too, you can read a write-up of the event — and I’m sure late entries are allowed.

The NYC Radical Reference Collective held a salon about library services to incarcerated people. That prompted me to go poking around our state library website, where I found a whole page about library services in Wyoming’s state institutions.

I don’t work in a large urban library (or even a medium-sized one), and I therefore cannot speak with much authority about the issue of homeless people in libraries. If you do work in such a place or if you are at all interest in library services to the disenfranchised, I urge you to check out the Working Together Project, which I found via LibrarianActivist.org. It has already gotten me started thinking about who in my community is socially excluded and what role the library might have in their lives.

A Fuse #8 Production points to a story about a women’s strike at Macmillan in the 1970s. It will both raise your feminist ire and bring joy to your activist heart. It did to mine, anyway.

And last but not least, speaking of activism and social exclusion: My mother is in the process of becoming a deacon in the Episcopal Church, something she got into in part because of helping out with the overflow housing that some of the local churches do in the winter when there isn’t enough room in the homeless shelter in Iowa City. Right now she’s spending a month in Boston helping out with Common Cathedral, which is a ministry that brings church services outside of the church in an effort to provide for those (including the homeless) who would like to come to a service but feel unwelcome or unable to come into the church. She’ll be talking more about what she does there on her blog, Called Judithio. Please stop by and check it out.