My mirror staring back at me.

The students are leaving! The students are leaving! It's that time again. Summer vacation is almost here. The parking garage is so much easier to get a decent spot in, campus is less obstacle-course-ish with fewer texting students roaming the sidewalks, lines at the restaurants downtown are like, maybe three people long? It's nice.

I found out about some really awesome libraries today and decided it was high time I shared something worthwhile on this blog:

http://medievalfragments.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/the-last-of-the-great-chained-libraries/

Check out the above link to find an awesome blog post on chained libraries. There are about five left in the world. They are libraries from the 13th-15th centuries and were promoting free reading for populations that weren't wealthy enough to purchase books, but who really wanted to read. So, they chained the books to bookcases and lecturns in an effort to ensure the books didn't get stolen. But, the pictures on that blog are amazing. It makes me really want to go see one. I think the one in The Netherlands looks especially amazing. The one in Italy has managed to digitize a lot of their manuscripts, so I was spending time today looking through them. Very awesome. If I could read ancient Greek or Arabic, maybe I'd get more out of it. But, it's beautiful! I'm so glad there are a few that have been preserved. 

Oh, books! 

Also, oh, birthday coupons! I don't know if I mentioned that I had a birthday earlier this month, but I did. The day itself was kind of awful. It was during the first part of the month where everything was going wrong in a big way. But, things have gotten much better since then and I have several friends who have birthdays in May and we each got oodles of coupons from a business in town. We've been using them for the last couple of weeks and last weekend we went and painted pottery and this weekend when I go pick up my piece, I'll have a really cool (I hope) teapot! I've been on the hunt for a teapot for a couple of months, but nothing has been quirky or interesting enough for me to willingly shell out the money for one. They seem really expensive to me. Everything seems sort of expensive, actually. But, at any rate, with this really awesome coupon, I ended up painting a teapot in a way that I love and that didn't cost me an arm and a leg! I do like me some tea. I got a bunch of it for my birthday, so it's only right that I have a teapot to finish off the scene! I'll try to remember to share a photo of it once it's in my possession. Other than that, most of our coupons have been for food, so we've been doing a lot of group dinners lately. It's been fun! My coupons all expire on this Saturday, so my birthday will really be over then. One of my co-workers became an Aunt yesterday for the first time. She is one of my May birthday companions, so we were joking about how awesome this kid is going to be just because she was born in the right month. The weather is finally starting to clear up and be nice consistently, the students are done for the semester, everyone's chilling out. It's really great. Sigh.

I really want to see Iron Man 3. I keep putting it off, but maybe I'll check that out this weekend. I've loved the first two. I finally saw "The Avengers" last weekend, which helped get me back into the Tony Stark frame of mind. I never really liked Robert Downey, Jr., much in his pre-Iron Man films. But, like Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow, I can't imagine anybody else as Tony Stark now. He's just too good. I really like him as Sherlock Holmes, too. Although, Basil whatshisface from the 1980s/90s PBS Sherlock Holmes series is sort of the 'real' Sherlock to me. RDJ is a much more awesome, daring Sherlock. It's Sherlock-meets-Tony Stark. Works so well. A lot of my friends are prepping to go see The Great Gatsby re-make by Baz Luhrmann. I'm torn about that movie. I don't really want to pay the exorbitant movie fees to see it because TGG isn't really my most favorite book. I like the story, but I like the Robert Redford movie version just fine. I think Leonardo DiCaprio is good in pretty much everything he chooses to do, so I bet this movie is pretty good. And it does look pretty entertaining. I know Luhrmann did Moulin Rouge and I did really like the showmanship of some of the parts of that movie, and it looks like this is another showy sort of take. Glitzy and dancey and stuff. But, if you already know the story isn't your favorite, I'm not sure flashy costumes and dancing can really save it, you know? I'll probably redbox it at some point...  

I went and got my hair done recently and it's violet now. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) you can't tell because my hair is so dark that it's really not that visible. I know it's violet, so when the sun shines on it, I can sort of tell. But, it's not a shocker. I wanted a change because I was really getting bored with growing it out and being the same color all the time. There was a more intense violet that I think I might ask my hairstylist to color it sometime this summer. She thought it was too intense for me to do this first go-round with trying out violet hair. This is too subtle though...although, it is pretty. It sounds like it might not be pretty, I know. But, it is. It's sort of a reddish violet. Still, even the really intense violet that she talked me down from probably won't show up all that much on my hair. I know the grass is always greener somewhere else, but I do think it must be fun for people who have lighter hair to be able to actually change their hair color more than just a barely-visible tint, without having to completely bleach the hair to do so. I envy that. Lucky light-haired people!

I keep hearing Justin Timberlake songs on the radio. That guy is crazy talented. I did not recognize this during his Nsync participation in the '90s. If in 1998, someone had told me that 15 years in the future the blonde teenager dancing to "Tearin' Up My Heart" would be touring with "Hard Knock Life" rapper Jay-Z, I'd have been like, 'Whaaa? You're crazy.' 

Haters gon' hate.

It is not easy being a librarian when people generally think the world has passed you by. That your profession is archaic and that you aren't relevant because of the on-set of Google. This is a problem for librarians everywhere. Historically, librarians aren't used to having to defend their profession. And because of that, it's difficult to get them to defend it. It's hard to fathom living without a public library. Can you really imagine living in a place without a library? Or within close proximity to a town with a library? Or a bookmobile? Something? They are so ingrained into our culture that it's really difficult for to imagine life without them. And, despite what you might have heard, 'digital libraries' have not taken over. I get proof of that every time I work the reference desk at work, fielding e-mails from people asking about authors of books, titles of books that include a chapter on __(enter obscure topic here)___, etc. And when I find those books and respond to the patron, I include a link to a digital library form if available. And more often than not I get a response from the patron saying "I don't understand about 'digital library', but that's all right." Granted, many of the patrons that I work with are of an older age, but that's the majority of the United States population and it will continue to be this way for a while to come. Yesterday, just before the close of business, the Secretary of State very nearly gutted the Missouri State Library, giving lay-off notices to most of the employees in the name of 're-structuring'. I won't go into all the details, but it's an ugly situation made uglier by the fact that they were all forced to re-apply for their jobs a couple of months ago and were told they were all able to keep their jobs. It's hard to have friends and colleagues go through lay-offs, but its only made worse when you know the situation was handled in a really callous way.

Chin up, librarians, and remember:

Library choices

I've taken it upon myself to spend today kind of messing up the 'system' of the library I'm trying to transition from old card catalog to computer. There are some major things wrong with the way that some of the books are numbered. Usually, I just go with whatever number they've already got on them and ignore the fact that it's completely wrong. Each book has a card (obviously, since it's still a card catalog system), and when I've brought up the fact that a number is wrong, the person I tell isn't happy about having to change it and it becomes kind of a hassle. Nobody uses these books. I'm the only person who has taken most of these books off the shelf in decades, probably. The dust is ridiculous. Anyway, all this is to explain my daily predicament: When is the number SO off that I feel I need to take it into my own hands and re-arrange the entire library? The answer came today when dealing with a set of periodicals from Norway that has been given the same exact number as another set from Norway and causes duplicate numbers for entirely different books. I mean, we're not talking about the same museum just changing the name of its periodical and so they decided to keep the same number. We're talking about putting the same number on a periodical from different institutions. The real issue will be reshuffling the shelves when I try to fit these back in. What I really feel is that since nobody uses these books, it would actually be possible to completely weed the collection and get rid of a ton of these books and instead maybe use a small budget to purchase books that the students actually would want to use. But, no. That's not my job. And that's not a priority at all. It makes for a sad little neglected library. And a sad little neglected library student.

Last night I went to a farewell dinner for a friend of mine who is moving back East to where she grew up. She worked at the State Library when I worked at the Archives and we became friends. She's super wonderful and really really an asset to whatever institution she's a part of. She was taken completely for granted and it's a real shame that they're losing her expertise because of the behavior of a couple of people. I'm not sure how many people are going to be left at that place. On the project that I worked on, there are now only 2 of the original 5 left. Two of us left last summer, and now one more is gone (the head of it). And all three of us (despite being from different divisions) have one person in common as part of our reasoning for feeling that we couldn't stay. The office is mis-managed beyond repair at this point, I think. The best thing is for people to get out, if they can. Some people don't want to be chased away and they view those of us who jump ship as allowing one or two people to bully us out. There is a point at which a person has to choose either not being chased out or choose to be happy again. No job should ever come down to that sort of a decision, but sometimes it does. As for my friend, I've seen her a few times over the last few days and this is the happiest I've seen her in years. A month ago she wasn't even planning on quitting her job or anything. Thirty days later, she's all packed up and moving halfway across the country back to her family. It's so good to see her happy again and smiling and practically bouncing with good energy. It reminded me of how I felt when I left last summer. It was so wonderful, knowing I wouldn't be stuck there any longer and feeling total relief and happiness. When you feel that after making such a big decision, you know you've made the right choice. So, my super happy buddy leaves Missouri this week with no job yet, but I feel very certain that she'll be scooped up by some place back East and they'll be really lucky to get her.

Good luck, Tricia! I will miss you!

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. My soul was just slapped. One of the art preparators just vehemently said that Frank Sinatra was "just a rich little mafioso boy who couldn't carry a tune". I am currently trying to hold back the angry eyes. I'm happy to say that I'm not the only one who appears to have just felt insulted. One of the curators and the educator are standing up for Ole Blue Eyes. This particular art preparator is the sort of person who has a lot of opinions, but who you sort of wonder from what information exactly they were formed. I think he just likes to get a rise out of people by saying things like that. But, he seems to be extra-vehement on the Frank Sinatra subject. Whooo buddy, it's getting bitter in here. I will gladly offset the blasphemy by providing my internet space with the loveliness and classiness that was Frank Sinatra.

Fund, fund, fund!

I know that it is impossible to make everyone happy when dealing with a recession, but honestly, cutting libraries is just dumb. When a government cuts funding over and over, they are not just cutting access to books, it's cutting people's access to free internet, free community information, a place for people to gather for support groups, story times, free movie nights, etc. Libraries are much more than places with a bunch of shelves of books. They are bigger than that and need to be protected. Freedom of information is part of a democracy and when elected officials decide to no longer support that freedom, it makes me question how well they understand the principles of democracy that they were elected to protect.

I've been wondering it a lot lately in light of the ridiculous things politicians have been doing lately, but the cause of funding libraries is really dear to me (obviously for my own livelihood as well as actually believing in them as community centers).