Sarah the Librarian

A few things I've been reading lately that I didn't want to pass without comment: The suicide of Aaron Swartz made the regular news, but LJ  and Jessamyn West have a nice collection of information about the Internet activist who worked so hard for increased access to information online. His aggressive prosecution for intending to freely distribute JSTOR content online has been widely listed as a contributing factor to his untimely demise. Interestingly enough,  JSTOR recently announced that they're opening their collection to the public on a limited basis. So why was the government still pursuing such harsh sentencing for him? There's also been a lot of talk about feminism and the sneaky ways that's it's still hard to be successful as a woman at work. Hi Miss Julie had some interesting things to say about how big flashy things often championed by male librarians are what tend to get recognition in librarianship, while the less flashy, practical everyd...

Continuing my reading journey through a grandmother's collection primarily of romance novels, I'm writing about the first book I picked out of this pile. Married at Midnight  is another collection of stories, this time historical, all bearing the same title and about couples rushing to marry before a midnight deadline, most of them finding love only after they've become husband and wife. I like this one a little more than the Christmas collection I reviewed last, maybe because I can handle old-fashioned values in an old-fashioned setting better than in a modern one. Also, while the heroines in this collection still might not be very active participants in their relationships, they're all fairly brave at some point in their story. Jo Beverly's heroine searches out the father of her unborn child on a battlefield in Belgium so that she can marry him and ensure that the child won't be born a bastard. Samatha James tells of a heroine's attempt to end her fath...

Generally I do a really terrible job of reading books right after they come out, so I doubt that aside from Gone Girl  there are many books published in 2012 that I actually read in 2012. Instead this is a list of my favorite books read for the first time in 2012. Signing Their Rights Away  (2011) by Denise Kiernan - I was blown away by how fun, informative, and flat-out readable this collection of short biographies of the signers of the Constitution was. The chapter titles are clever, the stories pull out fun facts, yet still manage to tell the important history of the early years of this country, and the cover folds out to be a life-size replica of the Constitution. This is just a quality project all-around. Thirteen Reasons Why  (2007) by Jay Asher - I finally got to this recent YA classic about a girl who kills herself and then leaves tapes behind explaining her reasons why. You'll pick it up because it's about the important issues of suicide and bullying, but you'...

When my husband and I moved into our current home, our landlord left behind several of his late wife's books, which were mostly romance novels. I love romance novels, but am too cheap/lazy to go out of my way to acquire them, so I was pretty excited about this unexpected bounty. Unfortunately, thanks in large part to the roughly 50 year age gap between us, the books aren't exactly what I'd pick out for myself. A lot of the titles seem to fall in that weird gray area between old school romance, where the heroes "seduced" (aka raped) the heroines in order to convince them who they should marry, and modern day romance where rape is extremely frowned upon. Still, I find that transition fascinating and so I'm enjoying reading these books for historical, if not entertainment, purposes, and I thought it might be fun to share what I found. Since we just celebrated Christmas, I thought it would be appropriate to share Silhouette Christmas Stories 1990, a collectio...

For Banned Books Week we put up a nice display of the books we owned that have been popular targets for challenges. It was nice, but I didn't really think much about it since I've been in this profession long enough that I could put together that list of titles in my sleep. However, I was leading a tour through the library and one of the students brought the title Charlotte's Web  to my attention, and asked why in the world a beloved children's book like that had been banned. This is where I have to add that as someone who grew up on a hog farm, I got really tired of people asking me if I ever had a pet pig like Wilbur (the answer is no), but I still wore out my parents' VHS copy of the movie based on the book. I told the student I wasn't sure why it was banned, but guessed that it probably had something to do with talking animals. Only later did I discover I just how horribly right I was . Last year I wrote about how I was a little burned out on ...

While I had a lot to say about ebooks in libraries last fall, I've since  found it almost ridiculous to keep up with all the different news on that front. It's clear that things need to change, but there are so many possibilities for what direction that change is going to take. However in the latest round of ebook developments I have to bring up a point that I think I first saw put forth by Jamie LaRue (although I can't seem to find the link now). Hachette recently decided to follow the example of Random House and dramatically raise its prices for ebooks sold to libraries. The argument here is that a digital file doesn't fall apart like a book and so libraries can lend them forever and never have to buy new copies of perennially popular titles.  While it's true that libraries do buy replacement copies of books that don't physically hold up, during my years in a public library it was more common that mile-long hold lists were the reasons we bought more c...

I originally planned to post this on Friday as an extended #FridayReads, but I got too into what I had to say and was interrupted before I could finish it. I still think it was a worthwhile train of thought, though, so I took the time to finish up recording my thoughts and polishing the whole thing up a little. A lot of the non-fiction I've been reading lately has been parenting related, but currently I'm finally finishing an LIS career book I bought a couple years ago when I was going through a difficult time career-wise.  Rethinking Information Work  by G. Kim Dority is more aimed at LIS students and would make a good textbook for an intro class focused on planning your career (which, I think, is really under-emphasized in library school). Some of the suggested resources listed at the end of each chapter have me rolling my eyes, but if I were new to Libraryland, I would need to have them pointed out to me and would probably learn a lot from them. Published in 2006, ma...