Twilight Librarian--Jim Rettig's ruminations on libraries, librarianship, the infosphere, and more

The SKILLs Act will correct on of the deficiencies of No Child Left Behind. It will add school librarians to the "highly qualified" personnel schools should have to comply with NCLB and require school districts, to the extent feasible, to ensure that every school within the district employs at least one highly qualified school library media specialist in each school library. When Congress passed NCLB it was either not aware of or chose to ignore a large body of research that has demonstrated in study after study that student achievement is higher in schools that support their students with a well funded, professionally staffed school library.

If ever there were an issue all libraries can get together to support, surely it is the SKILLs Act. All of our society benefits when students enjoy good school library service. All of our libraries suffer when students are deprived of the learning opportunities their school library is uniquely able to offer. When school systems eliminate librarian positions, the burden for library service falls by default to the local public libraries. These libraries are not staffed to compensate for the lack of school librarians. They cannot carry out their primary mission and develop close collaborative relationships with teachers and spend considerable time in classrooms teaching with teachers. Students deprived of these library experiences are at a disadvantage when they enter college. Faculty expect them to be able to use their college library independently. They aren't prepared to do that and academic librarians have to do a good deal of remedial work.

The SKILLS Act serves our interests--but far more importantly, it serves the needs of our students in elementary, middle, and high schools.

I wrote to my senators and representative in July. I have not received a response from wither senator. But I did receive a letter form my representative. In her response she wrote, "As a mother, I understand the important role school libraries and librarians play in education." But she hasn't demonstrated her understanding by cosponsoring H.R. 2864. In fact, H.R. 2864 has only one cosponsor. Time to act on behalf of the SKILLs Act!

Books are for use.

Every reader, his book.

Every book, its reader.

Save the time of the reader.

A library is a growing organism.

14. It must be impossible to find any refreshment inside the library, under any circumstances...

Then there is Eco's first rule:

1. The various catalogues must be housed as far apart as possible from one another. All care must be taken to separate the catalogue of books from that of periodicals...

His first rule imposes other incomprehensible, maze-like inconveniences on information seekers. No librarian can read this without seeing glimmers of truth and reality beneath the thick irony. Today we are, of course, struggling to eliminate the need to consult multiple special purpose catalogs, indexes, databases, etc. We want to simplify the search and discovery process for our users. The rallying cry for this quest has been "The OPAC sucks!" We can't violate Eco's first rule soon enough to further the broad vision of the Five laws.

I haven't yet reread "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1." My recollections of it from more than a decade ago lead me to believe that it might be a metaphor for certain aspects of the American Library Association. I'll find out soon how well my memory serves me on this.

I shared this concern with Mary Ghikas, ALA's Senior Associate Executive Director. She described coming procedural changes designed to improve the situation. She also described a phenomenon I had not heard of. In some cases when several members are going to share a room, each of them books a hotel room until they decide which booking to use. This takes rooms out of the pool for unknown lengths of time. I don't know how common this practice is. While understandable, it is problematic. As one of the many currently waitlisted for a hotel in Washington, I think that ALA needs to plan for the robust attendance we have seen at recent conferences (with the anomaly of New Orleans) and increase the pool of rooms and make all of them available at the start of registration. It is in ALA's interests to solve this problem. If members decide that it is just too hard to get lodging for a conference, they may decide not to attend. That will hurt revenues. Members who book multiple rooms for the same group of roommates should book just one. It will take trust between ALA and its members to solve this. We can create a win-win solution. If the problem persists when I am president, I will lead the Executive Board in working with staff to solve it then.

Looking further, I followed the URL printed on the cover to talkingphonebook.com. That turns out to be another one of those portals to personal information about millions of individuals plus opportunities to buy background check and criminal records reports. It was a bit creepy, however, to look myself up and see a list of residential addresses associated with me back to 1979! The list included only city and state' full addresses are available for a fee. I also learned there is a James Rettig my age somewhere in New York.

But I do like the ZIP code information along with the address and phone number.

1. Several years ago the engine went on the 1984 Pontiac Sunbird I inherited from a dear aunt who died in 1999 at age 92. In fifteen years she had put 22,000 miles on that car. It died on me a few miles short of the north end of the Blue Ridge Parkway, a bit more than 100 miles from home. It happened late afternoon on a Friday in September. At first I thought it had just overheated. But after a while it became clear that the engine would never run again. I was able to get a faint signal on my cell phone up there. But it turned out that it was also dying. I managed to complete two calls on it--one to AAA and the other to my wife telling her I didn't know when I would get home, nor how. The sun set. Fortunately I had been away for a few days so I had clothes in addition to the ones I was wearing. As the sun set, the temperature dropped, probably into the upper 50s. Good thing I was able to add clothing. After getting permission from the US Park Police to bring a tow truck onto the Blue Ridge Parkway (cars only, no commercial vehicles permitted) the guy AAA sent arrived to rescue me. It was nearly 9:00 when we got to his garage in Waynesboro, VA. He took dropped me off at a mom and pop motel and I was able to get an inexpensive room. I was also able to squeeze one last call out of my cell phone, to arrange for my wife to pick me up in the morning so we could rush home, change clothes, and then backtrack 50 miles to get to a wedding in which our oldest was a bridesmaid. We now have AAA Plus (towing up to 100 miles), I have had several new cell phones since then (have you found the one I lost in April 2002?), and the ancient Sunbird, with a rebuilt engine, never strays more than about 60 miles from home--within the AAA covered towing distance!

2. My tonsils were removed when I was thirty years old. I used to get several step infections a year; since then I have one at most every few years. So it worked. Nevertheless, if you have to have that done, I recommend that you do it when you are younger.

3. I have appeared (I wouldn't say performed) in the center ring of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus. A guy who lived down the street when I was a kid and with whom I was in school from kindergarten through high school ended up working as an accountant and manager for the circus. He traveled with it and lived on the circus train. When we lived in Chicago and it came to town he got us complimentary tickets. Some years later after we moved to Williamsburg and the circus came nearby, he got us complimentary tickets--third row, center ring. Traffic getting there was bad and we arrived a little late. I had barely taken my seat when a clown bounded up the stairs, took me by the wrist and dragged me into the center ring. Thousands of people watched him try to pose me in various one-footed ways that required more balance than I could muster. I don't know if the act was finished or if the clown (a big international star, featured on the cover of the program) despaired over his choice for a straight man; but after briefly amusing thousands with my inability to do what he wanted me to do, he gave me a lollipop and sent me back to my seat. There I found four people who were pretended as much as they could that they had never seen me in their lives. My wife muttered, "I hope nobody we know is here." It could have been worse. I think the next clown and the things he did with a guy he dragged from the audience made my family grateful that I was picked first. He got much bigger laughs, but was also placed in a much more embarrassing situation. There but for the grace of God go I...

4. When I was about twelve that same neighbor who years later gave my family circus tickets invited me to a Boy Scouts meeting. I haven't been to one since--just not my thing. I fit in better in the circus, actually.

5. I have a bachelor's degree in English, a master's degree in English, and a master's degree in library science. These make me the family slacker in the formal education department. My brother earned his MD at Harvard and my sister earned her PhD at Berkeley. I'm a middle child; I even earned my degrees in the middle of the country.

assesses page popularity by examining the number of other pages that link to it and also the popularity of those pages. Another algorithm, that examines the number of links needed to get from one article to another.

“If I have a medical student who's particularly interested in neuroscience, I could custom-generate a list of reading suited to them," he says.

When Wikipedia is good, it can be very good. See, for example, its article on hurricanes. Then it can be very bad as it certainly was for a time with the Seigenthaler article. And it can be something less than mediocre as it is today with the McEwan article. And that leads to the weakness of Wissner-Goss's new software--it limits itself to the Wikipedia universe of information. It may be Google-like, but its is less useful than Google since Google searches a larger universe. Yet, as useful as Google is (I think I have used it to advantage half a dozen times so far today), it misses much of the information universe. So far, the best mediator between the vast online and the vast print information worlds is the library and its helpful staff who understand the strengths and limitations of both world and can help others find needed information without limiting the search to either universe.

The Task Force's take on one issue, the forms and media scholarship can take, is very heartening. Two of the recommendations in the Executive Summary address this directly:

3. The profession as a whole should develop a more capacious conception of scholarship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph, promoting the scholarly essay, establishing multiple pathways to tenure, and using scholarly portfolios.

4. Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship.

The humanities have embraced new media as something worthy of study and of degree programs, but have been reluctant to confer legitimacy on scholarship produced in those media. Apparently, the field's collective irony alert has failed--until now at least. In a media richculture, it makes no sense--to use a word much favored in recent years in the humanities--to "privilege" the printed text over other media, to confer advantage on the container and disregard the value of its content. Academic libraries have been ahead of humanities scholarship in collecting sound, video, images, and other electronic and non-proint media in support of the humanities. How much richer humanities scholarship promises to be if senior faculty take the Task Force's recommendations to heart. Its report deserves a better reception than the Iraq Study Commission's report has received in the White House! If the senior faculty "recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media" as well as collaborative works, the tech-savvy, next generation of tenure track faculty, raised in a multimedia world, will offer an explosion of creativity in the ways in which they present their research findings. This promises to reinvigorate the study of the humanities and has great potential to engage undergraduates in subjects that allegedly have no practical value.

This will have welcome implications for academic librarians. It will open new opportunities for collaboration with humanities faculty who turn to librarians and educational technologists for assistance and guidance. Librarians and educational technologists can even form partnerships to help senior faculty learn about the role new media can play in humanities scholarship so that these faculty will be able to make truly informed judgments about their younger colleagues' work. That, of course, will require diplomacy, but will be well worth the effort.

• New modes and models of participating in ALA
• Innovative or needed services for ALA members
• Continuing education and professional development
• Advocacy
• Diversity
• Salaries

Given that the Supreme Court ostensibly upheld CIPA, I am glad it also rewrote it. I learned today form a colleague at a major urban public library that she used a filter-burdened library computer to access my ALA presidential campaign Web site. Or, she at least tried to. But the filter blocked her from it! What, I wonder, on my Web site triggered the filter? I cannot guess. I am grateful that this particular filter program in that one library is being modified to allow access to http://rettigforala.org and I hope that many of her colleagues will exercise their restored freedom to read it.

One more example of the inherent faultiness of Internet filters. If your library has a filter installed, see if it blocks access to http://rettigforala.org.