Time to review for this next crisis

Let's review. It was a mistake to close churches, libraries and outdoor parks and recreational areas, three institutions that strengthen mind, body and soul. Thousands of non-covid deaths could have been prevented if governors (and the managers of these institutions--like pastors and librarians) would have paid attention to the decades of research that show their positive social, economic and health benefits. I remind you, because at the rate Biden is going, it will happen again. In 2020, he said he had a plan. Now we know the plan, so be prepared.

Why retirees have problems cleaning out the files

Have you ever tried to clean out your storage or files and found out it takes days to go through one drawer or file cabinet or closet? For me, the big mistake is sitting down to read something I wrote 25-30 years ago. I don't know what happens in the offices of retired pastors who preach every Sunday and lead Bible studies or school teachers who saved reams of projects and lesson plans, but it's a nightmare for librarians like me who have attend hundreds of meetings and who had publishing requirements for promotion and tenure and saved all their notes.

For instance, my notes (never published because they were for me) for "The Ohio White House Conferences on Library and Information Services--Literacy," September 27 (1990?) held at the Worthington Holiday Inn. I'm not sure why I attended--it seemed to be for public librarians, and not academic. We live in different worlds and focus on totally different problems and clientele. Ohio doesn't have a "White House" so the title means each state or region was having meetings to funnel information back to the President--George H.W. Bush--information on which any administration rarely acts, but the money would have come from the federal government. My writing style always includes off topic ideas that occur to me, so before I wrote out my notes, I commented on the poor representation of the media at this conference and I blamed my profession, not the media.

"Librarians have been notorious for not being able to market their product. Distilleries put their information on billboards in the inner city and at interstate exchanges. Librarians put notices on bookmarks which can only be picked up in libraries. Cigarette companies give away cigarettes to induce a life time addiction. Librarians give away time and effort registering voters and showing movies in hopes that the user might check out a book. Librarians sponsor National Library Week when for the cost they could probably create one of those phony commercial talk shows for cable television that are on every channel from midnight on. Targeting neighborhoods with direct mail campaigns has sold millions of dollars worth of goods, but when was the last time you received a doorhanger from the library except at levy time? Have you ever received a phone call from a telemarketer interrupting your dinner to ask if your library card in current?

There are millions of literate people who never set foot in a library. They either don't need them, don't like them, or have had bad experiences in them. They join book clubs, subscribe to magazines and newspapers; they visit book stores and book sales, but not libraries. There are also millions of literate people who are non-readers. . .

The largest, single common denominator identifying all librarians is that we are members of that particular cultural group--the readers. We are so chauvinistic we cannot imagine anyone could be happy who doesn't share this common trait. Librarians have created every imaginable network, coalition, association, and service organization to lure people into their libraries, but they haven't been able to keep libraries in the schools, not even with all the dues we pay. We can't even get a librarian appointed as the "Librarian of Congress." [note: that did finally happen under Obama--a 3-fer, Carla Hayden, black, female, librarian]."

And I went on to mention the dropping numbers (30 years ago) for literacy among children, even in families where moms read to them. Then I wrote about the activities at my public library that week for children: 4 programs involving movies, and 3 for Halloween crafts.

I went on and on for pages--have no idea what happened at the conference. This was 8 typed pages, and no information on what resulted from the meeting. There is a printed report listed on Amazon as out of stock, Jan. 1, 1990, and a copy in the OSU library.

Maybe some attitudes have changed in libraries the last 30 years. I'm no longer an insider. If there were two institutions that should have been considered essential during this shut down it was churches and libraries. Both are filled with evangelists for their passion, and both were silenced, submissive and shuttered.

Todd Bol and Little Free Library movement

Todd Bol died recently at 62.  He was the founder of the Little Free Library. They grew out of his pain and grief over the loss of his mother.  There’s not a lot in life that’s free, but at the Free Library, you could get a book for nothing.

There are several Little Free Library boxes in Lakeside, Ohio, where we spend our summer, and I’ve counted at least 3 on my morning walks. They are great for picking up an old novel or even a text book about a  topic you know nothing about. And they are just as good for finding a good home for your summer reading.  But I haven’t seen any around Upper Arlington where we live.  Maybe because we’re so close to public library branches, church libraries, The Ohio State Libraries, Chemical Abstracts library, and Battelle Library.

They’ve only been in existence for a decade, and now there are 75,000 of them around the globe—all 50 states and 88 countries.  You could order one, or the blueprints for one, or build your own.  Some are quite fanciful. It must have been an idea whose time had come.

https://www.philanthropydaily.com/the-legacy-of-todd-bol-and-his-little-free-libraries/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/todd-bol-whose-little-free-library-brought-books-to-the-street-corner-dies-at-62/2018/10/21/7ae2cf64-d53b-11e8-aeb7-ddcad4a0a54e_story.html?utm_term=.a4199a528913

“In recent years, some social entrepreneurs have taken the Little Free Library idea and extended it to other things. In Fayetteville, Arkansas, Jessica McClard in 2016 started the first Little Free Pantry outside the Good Shepard Lutheran Church. She told ABC News that she makes sure to check the pantry every day because “it turns over in about 30 minutes” after the day’s supply of canned food is placed in the pantry.

In Lansing, Michigan, Adriana Flores, who recently got a master’s degree from the Michigan State University School of Social Work, created the E² Box to supply toiletries and feminine hygiene products (tampons, sanitary pads) not covered by government assistance. Why “E Squared?” Because, Flores says, that stands for “empathy and equity.” Right now there is only one E Squared Box, but Flores hopes to create more.”

NTIS/NTRL data base for searching

“The National Technical Reports Library (NTRL – U.S. Department of Commerce) has become an open access resource, following a decision made by the National Technical Information Service (NTIS).

The National Technical Information Service serves as the largest central resource for government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business related information available today. For more than 60 years NTIS has assured businesses, universities, and the public timely access to approximately 3 million publications covering over 350 subject areas.

The search window. https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/

Anti-Christmas bias isn't new

 In 1993, I was still 6 years away from voting for a Democrat for president, but I could certainly sniff out bias. Came across this letter of Dec. 1993 I had written to the American Library Association which had designed cards for libraries to send to other libraries and their staff.

Dear Colleagues,

Our Library received the very clever and attractive "Season's Readings" card from our sibling library, John A. Prior Health Sciences Library.

We are in complete agreement with your goal of supporting a campaign to promote libraries, reading and literacy through the sale of these cards. However, we are somewhat puzzled and curious that in your effort to include everyone else's language and holiday, you left out English speaking Christians. We Christians (a faith claimed by 1,783,660,000) also have a December holiday. In our language (spoken by 750 million others) it is called CHRISTMAS, and the traditional greeting is, "Merry Christmas."

Perhaps next year we could be included in the festivities.

Signed by me and the library supervisor, Daniel Martin

There is a civil war brewing among librarians

Librarians are missionaries, although non-pacifist.  They are also members of the most liberal of all professions: 223:1 liberal to conservative. There is a disagreement about the mission.

http://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.230/

There is a growing rift between those who believe the library’s most fundamental purpose is to support and advance the goals of its host institution and those who believe the library’s most important role is as an agent of progress and reform in the larger world of scholarly communication. Although these two areas of endeavor are not mutually exclusive, they are in competition for scarce resources and the choices made between them have serious implications at both the micro level (for the patrons and institutions served by each library) and the macro level (for members of the larger academic community). The tension between these two worldviews is creating friction within librarianship itself

Child porn in Niles, Illinois libraries

From the Chicago Tribune: Anti-pornography activist Megan Fox created a 2:30 video urging Niles IL residents to vote against incumbent trustee Linda Ryan.

In the video, which was posted on Fox's YouTube channel on March 11, she accuses Ryan of voting to allow child pornography on library computers. On Nov. 19, the library board voted to add content filters on adult computers that would block all nudity and pornography. At the time, viewing pornography was already against library policy.

During the meeting, Ryan was one of the trustees who voted against the filtering policy, arguing that it went too far, getting in the way of patrons' ability to access information. Fox used the clips from the meeting to suggest that Ryan would be fine with child pornography. In the video, she also insisted that American Library Association's policy were putting children in danger. 

That was reported at the LIS web site (discussion site for librarians).  Then a comment from “SafeLibraries” on March 25:

Chicago Tribune got the story wrong. That paper has for over a year of reporting on Megan Fox consistently and obviously intentionally left out that the issue is child porn. Leaving out that the issue is child porn puts a spin on every story Chicago Tribune writes. The spin is that Megan Fox is a prude and libraries are perfectly fine when they make porn available. The reality is that Megan Fox is exposing child porn, and besides, libraries are breaking the law when they make porn available, depending on the state law applicable. In Illinois, they are breaking the law.

"In the video, she also insisted that American Library Association's policy were putting children in danger." You do understand that ALA policy is that librarians are not judges so they may not determine what is child pornography, right? Chicago Tribune never reports that even though it is written in ALA's guidelines for how libraries should write policy.

If a library trustee supports ALA diktat on allowing child porn over her own state's law that precludes all porn in public libraries, then that is someone who is violating the public trust, correct? Megan Fox is allowed to speak out on that, correct? It's wrong for Chicago Tribune to spin stories to hide the child porn issue, correct?

Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum—Conestoga trip

Today our Conestoga group had a tour of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in Sullivant Hall on the OSU Campus.  I like libraries and I like art, so I was in “hog heaven.” The building is beautiful, and the “back room” peek at the moving stacks, specially designed boxes and equipment, was amazing.  It is open 1-5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday and is open to the public if you’d like to visit.  None of the books circulate.

The current show is "King of the comics: William Randolph Hearst and 100 years of King Features." It will be on display until March 15. Hearst bought the New York Journal in 1895 and soon dropped the price of a paper to a penny, increasing circulation 7x. When the competition collapsed, he hired their people including the best cartoonist. Soon he was shipping the Sunday comic section to other cities with his comic characters becoming national celebrities. The display is divided by decade, and anyone my age will remember a lot of these. Although some I know only from a book of cartoons my mother had from the 1940s.  It is my opinion that after the 50s, the quality of the drawings became less complex--but this is an art form about which I know nothing. But at 5 pm I sure know more than I knew at 2 pm. The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum is the largest cartoon library in the world. I think the building opened in late 2013 and is really magnificent--before that it was in the Wexner Center.

Lucy Caswell, Professor Emeritus and founding curator of the library.

Staff of the library in the stacks.

Walking outside the gates of Lakeside

I had my gate pass with me this morning, so I turned and walked outside the 2nd street gate at Oak Ave., and browsed around the neatly kept neighborhood.  I walked past a man sitting on a park bench, with his right arm in a sling, typing on his laptop computer.  “I bet you’re right handed,” I said as I walked by.  “You’ve got that right,” he said, going back to his one finger typing.

I looked at the lake for awhile then turned south on Park Avenue;.very nice new homes (about 10 years old) on that street.  Then I passed a “little free library.”  Take a book, return a book.  I’d seen them on the internet but had never actually stopped to look and borrow.  It had about 12 books behind a glass door, well protected from the elements.

This one is from Pinterest—I didn’t have my camera with me. But it was very simple.

I selected, The complete guide to walking for health, weight loss and fitness.  With bursitis and asthma, my walking days are probably numbered, but I thought I’d take a look.  Can’t resist a library. There were actually some pretty nice books—I saw C.S. Lewis and John Grisham, and a few others.  Lakeside has two volunteer libraries, one at the Methodist Church and one at the Women’s Club, plus there is one in Marblehead. We also have a nice bookstore with both new and used books. And of course, yard sales, like the one where I bought the 1934 Reader’s Digest.

"Mark Fenton strides right past all the fad-and-gimmick fitness books with practical, no-nonsense advice to help people of all ages, sizes and shapes start and stick with exercise."--Miriam E. Nelson, PhD., Director of the Center for Physical Fitness, Tufts University School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and author of Strong Women, Strong Bones

"Mark Fenton is the master at helping people get the most from walking. His new book provides a highly motivating, step-by-step plan to take you as far as you want to go--from beginner to race-walk marathoner. Even I gained a wealth of new insights about the science and practical application of walking for better fitness." --Kathy Smith, author of Kathy Smith's Lift Weights to Lose Weight

"Having competed in walking races all around the world, it took having a baby and adding a couple of notches to my belt for me to realize the full value of Mark Fenton's structured approach to developing and maintaining a healthy daily walking program." --Carl Schueler, four-time Olympic race-walker (Amazon reviews)

Fairfax County Library throws out usable books

Throwing out usable books and cutting staff, and hiring more non-librarians to buy more digitized collections is foolish. Information IS NOT FREE, whether it appears on your Kindle, your computer, or your paperback.  There are many people, children and adults, who would have been delighted to have these books.  And if the county isn’t allow to give away its own property, then the Friends of the Library should have sold them for a reduced price to get back some of the tax payer money.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/fairfax-county-library-revamps-system-discards-books-reduces-librarians/2013/09/09/e3dca65a-1724-11e3-be6e-dc6ae8a5b3a8_story.html?hpid=z3

For years, the public and librarians were told computerization/digitization would save money.  That hasn’t happened. It has just replaced library staff with IT staff and constant upgrading of equipment, software and contracts with book bundlers.   Also, digitized books/documents are easily edited with no one knowing--the earlier version is just gone. I recall looking something up a few years back in an e-encyclopedia at the public library only to discover the horrors of the Soviet Union had virtually disappeared.

Dumpster diving for books at Chantilly technical operations center in a Washington, DC’s affluent suburbs. (Median family  income in Fairfax Co. is about $120,000) Photo by Linda Smyth.

Liberal bias in the local library

    

Very appropriate. An information donkey. I don't know about school librarians, but public librarians are 223:1 liberal to conservative (based on a 2004 survey by party). In case you don't think that affects what is purchased for your local library, I have a story to tell you about the IRS. Library purchases can make or break a publisher. So that in turn affects which authors get contracts to publish.

Week 3 at Lakeside, 2012

The week (always on Saturday) started out in the breathless heat. I wondered how I would enjoy the wonderful program planned for the Hoover, but around 7 p.m. the wind picked up and the temperature dropped at least into the 80s. I managed a trip to the laundromat on Saturday afternoon (our washer started smoking on the 28th and is no longer usable).

The Osmond Brothers, Merrill, Jay and Jimmy, performed Saturday night. Wow. What amazing, accomplished musicians, but then they’ve been performing together over 50 years, having had their 50th anniversary as a family group in 2008. Seven of the nine Osmonds are musicians and/or actors--one brother who used to perform with these three in recent years in Bransom, MO and on tour has had a stroke and another has M.S. Donny and Marie still perform together occasionally. All the Osmonds use their many talents in other areas of show business. They did a lot of interacting with the audience, and one more row and I would have been able to shake Merrill’s hand. The audience at the end (about 2-3 encores) rushed up to take photos, and they obliged. Some performers are very stingy with their time, but not this group. They also called Shirley Starey (who is program director) to the stage because it was her birthday.

The Archives and Heritage Hall has a new director of operations, Gretchen Curtis, who did our educational programming for years. Keith Addy gave some “behind the scenes” stories about the days he was in charge of the Hoover entertainment, 1988-2004. My neighbor provided a few additional ones. He said his wife was the driver from the airport when the Osmonds (5 of them) appeared here in 1985. Also he said when the Lennon sisters appeared here (1960s?), they took a break after about 30 minutes. The audience waited and waited, but they never came back on state. They’d left during intermission!

On Monday and Tuesday Frank Deaner, retired Ohio Newspaper Association, talked about future of newspapers and the sunshine law. He was hopeful about the future of newspapers, although the dailies are down (1902, 2600; 2009, 1392), many people report using a newspaper daily (59%) or on Sunday (53%). News websites get 113 million adult visitors. E-content (tablet, etc.) readers are increasing readership. Many websites are going “hyper-local.” I learned that the Cincinnati Inquirer is getting out of the printing business, and will be printed by the Columbus Dispatch. Also new is a less than 7 day schedule, like publishing 4 days, and the current stories appear only on blogs or the website. Lots of multi-media cross digitization--Scripps Howard now owns Food Network (cable), for instance.

On Wednesday and Thursday Meghan Harper, Assoc. Prof., Kent State talked on the future of libraries. She was very upbeat and positive. Two of my library friends, Andrea and Marian, and I compared notes at the Wednesday picnic. Our view from the trenches was not quite so positive. Of course, none of us were as enamored of technology as Ms. Harper.

A great genealogy workshop this week, 5 days at 3:30, by Derek Davey, who is an instructor in genealogy, and a private, for-hire, genealogist. Many of the points I knew (although I don’t always follow). Met a woman who also has a Church of the Brethren background and I told her about the Brethren genealogy listserv that has been so helpful for me in finding Wengers, Danners, Geigers, and Fetters. Because maiden names were often not included in older records, it is nice to have such a helpful group.

Thursday night was The Glenn Miller Orchestra. Powerful performance. The leader said they tour 48 weeks a year, 4-5 performances a week! This also included a seminar in the afternoon, although I didn’t attend. After all, one has to preserve some nap time!

Friday night Judy Collins is scheduled. She is my age and still does about 100 performances a year. So I guess I can walk 3 blocks to hear her. She is multi-talented, and is also an author.

No dog in this fight

"To hear librarians tell it, video games are high-church, intellectual endeavors. Today, nearly 2,000 libraries across America will host National Gaming Day, a massive video game tournament and celebration." Daniel J. Flynn

The library as amusement park

"Only those who haven’t checked out a book in the new millennium would be surprised that the public library is now making video games available. The image of the urban public library as a citadel of culture and quietude shielding patrons from the noisy, dumbed-down, digital world outside has taken a hit in recent years. Anyone who has logged significant time at the library has noticed an environment at odds with what Andrew Carnegie had in mind when he bankrolled the construction of 2,811 libraries—roughly 1,000 more institutions than will be participating in National Gaming Day on Saturday. It’s not uncommon to see Internet porn on library computer consoles, and for those not satiated by simply looking, library bathrooms have become popular rendezvous points. Most conspicuously, the library has been transformed into an unofficial homeless shelter during those daytime hours when the official homeless shelter shuts its doors. Libraries have become comfortable hosting many activities unrelated to the life of the mind."

Dewey the library cat

Tonight our book club will be discussing Dewey; The small town library cat who touched the World by Vicki Myron and Bret Witter (Grand Central Publishing, 2008). It was my nomination back in May when we chose this year's books, so I am the discussion leader. And, if I must say so, I'm well qualified for this one, unlike when I did 1776 or Alexander Hamilton. I am a retired librarian, a former resident of two small towns in the midwest, and a current cat lover. In fact, my own cat is so intuitive, she's hardly left my lap since I began rereading Dewey in preparation for this event. I think she suspects competition. And she's right. She's a wonderful cat with her own personality and quirks, but she's no match for The Dewkster.

Everything you need to know about the basics of this book is on the front and back cover. The cat, the town, the world, Vicki, and the marketing blitz. I didn't do any internet searches to confirm my own ideas until after I read it. I didn't care for the book that much my first time through, but really enjoyed it while preparing for tonight. I originally read it in March when we were on our Holy Land Cruise and I was trying to fall asleep on the very rough seas--didn't work--so I only skimmed it. Asking an Iowa cat to compete with the Steps of Paul and the Pyramids is too much.

Those of you who've never worked in a library, particularly a public library, will probably skip over the library history and details--I loved it; if you've never lived in a small town you'll miss the places Vicki evens some old scores--I saw that immediately; if you haven't raised kids and been through that pulling away time when they are teens--that cuts like a knife--other parts may not be so meaningful; if you didn't grow up or live in the rural midwest, you may be puzzled that some people think flat acres of corn in deep black soil is as beautiful as the ocean or mountains. However, if you have a "companion animal" in your home, or remember one fondly from your childhood, you'll identify with all the Dewey stories which is only about one third of the book, the rest of it being about Vicki and Spencer, Iowa.

Dewey enters the library world on January 28, 1988 at about 6 weeks old, and died on November 29, 2006 and that's a very long life for a cat. But he lives on today in book tours and radio interviews with Vicki, a children's book that came out this fall, a young adult book not released yet, a sequel, and someone is working on the script for the movie, possibly with Meryl Streep playing Vicki. Dewey has made Vicki very rich and famous, and probably the target of jealously and envy back home. You go girl! You've done more to explain how the library world works than a hundred "how I did it good" articles in library journals.

I'll fight you for the library

I laughed so hard tears were streaming. . .



And on the impotence of proofreading

Did you know 4.0

But turn off the music--it will drive you crazy and you don't need it.

HT Rob Darrow

Unintended consequences of having too much

Not money, but information.

". . .we have found that no matter where students are enrolled, no matter what information resources they may have at their disposal, and no matter how much time they have, the abundance of information technology and the proliferation of digital information resources make conducting research uniquely paradoxical: Research seems to be far more difficult to conduct in the digital age than it did in previous times." Project Information Literacy Progress Report, Feb. 2009

I used to teach research skills and methods--whether it was called BI (bibliographic instruction), User Education, or graduate research seminar. Here was my method. Begin with a wide survey using tertiary sources (textbooks, essays, encyclopedias), narrow and redefine your topic, move on to secondary sources (bibliographies, databases), further refine, then tackle the primary sources (original research). What I didn't usually include in my lectures and handouts is that I myself never used that method. Oh, I suppose if you assigned me a topic on how to hit a golf ball, I might read up on it first, but for my own self-selected topics, I started with my own conclusion then worked backwards to justify it. If it had to be changed along the way, so be it; if not, I was happy. Then I relied as a fallback on serendipity--those items I might have on my office shelves, or which spoke to me ("here I am, take a look") as I wandered through the stacks in a particular call number range. One of my most successful projects, from which I got a number of published articles and which lead to further research, was a box of my grandmother's scrapbook clippings and a box of handwritten index cards for my grandparents' library. That pushed me into all kinds of areas about 19th century publishing, church history, serials and farm magazines, and reading patterns of rural people.

The only time I really relied heavily on information technology to write and publish an article was in writing about how to do it, and I tracked what I did to prepare for a speech at a conference (even where I was and how long it took to receive off campus material) and then wrote about it. It helped me in my teaching, however, I've since forgotten what it was I wrote about.

Research--it's tough to explain to people who don't do it or like it.

Censorship or common sense?

As a librarian I think I've seen or read just about everything that's out there (that's stupid) about digital porn, filters, libraries and access. It's always about freedom and never about protecting children or library patrons who have to sit next to the perverts. "Well, what if they are doing a school report about AIDS in Africa, and you've got a filter on the computer?" Yeah, sure. I know people who will not take their children to public libraries unattended--and that's just fine, indeed recommended, by some library directors. God forbid some slimeball should be prevented masterbating at the terminal or stacks while he views naked girls and women. Now it's Wikipedia. What? Librarians on their board/staff? Here's the story in E-Commerce News.

A decades-old record album cover showing a young girl posing nude may be illegal in the UK, but the controversial image has not been banned in the U.S., where Wikipedia is hosted. The user-created online encyclopedia has therefore determined it would be censorship to remove the image from its pages. Several British ISPs have restricted access to the page, however, in response to a complaint.

Library snacking reflects society

When I returned to work in the mid-1980s, the big discussion, at least at OSU and I assume other academic libraries, was food in the libraries. It was a huge maintenance problem and the trash was a problem both for staff and users. I don't recall much alarm then about health, obesity, and the greening of everything. So we pretty much went to a "no food and drink" policy as a preservation plan (of materials and staff) which soon was chipped away first in Health Sciences, as I recall. You just don't tell doctors, even those in training, where they can eat, drink or sleep. So then came rules about permanent holders, lids, sippy cups, etc. There was a snack machine in the room next door to the Veterinary Library, which the librarian before me raged about (he had other problems, including borrowing money from faculty and not paying it back, and not showing up for work--but oh, he watched that machine!). I've lost track of what the current plan is--the main library at OSU has been closed for renovation for several years. My library was torn down and replaced and I've only been in it once, although I planned it.

Libraries, like churches, give in to society's cultural norms and to common business practices, and are not the moral and ethical touchstones they aspire to be. So now in the 21st century library cafes are becoming popular. Even my local public library has tried to push that one, although you can walk across the street to a shopping center and get a nice cup of coffee served to you. The book, The Survey of Library Cafes, surveyed the current trend (40+ libraries, mostly public), and although I haven't read it, here are some of the highlights:

The study presents data from a survey of more than 40 academic and public libraries. The libraries provide data about their library cafes and other food service operations, such as vending machines. The report has more than 100 tables of data exploring a broad range of issues related to library cafes, such as their finances, impact on patron traffic, staffing and maintenance. Data is broken out for academic and public libraries, and by size of library, for easier benchmarking.

Some of the findings of the report are that:

- Snacks account for nearly 71% of the income of library cafes, though lunch adds a not at all negligible 20.83% of total revenue and breakfast chips in with another 8.33%, according to The Survey of Library Cafes.

- Salads in this era of health consciousness chipped in only a mean of 4.5% of sales, more in the public than college libraries. All salad sales came from the larger libraries, those with more than 600,000 annual patrons.

- The average price of a cup of coffee in the library cafes was $1.49, perhaps reflecting the Starbuck-ization of the library café. This figure also takes into account those libraries that gave their coffee away.

- More than 40% of the library cafes offered outdoor eating. Close to 65% of the libraries in the sample had vending machines, with an average of only about three vending machines per library.

So, libraries contribute to obesity on the one hand, then buy books on dieting and alarmist titles about an obese population on the other. I'd have to look at it to see if these cafes are subbed out to private contractors or they use library-hired staff, but either way, the building is paid for by you, the tax payer, and it competes with your business community which also has to pay taxes to support the library. Nice job if you can get it.

It looks terribly expensive for the compiled data--55 pages and 80 euros! I'm wondering if authors' intention is to provide library directors, like ours, data to convince their board and voters that they need the next bond issue to open a cafe, yada, yada:

"This report gives extensive data on library cafe sales volume, best selling products, impact on library maintenance costs, reasons for starting a cafe, affect on library traffic and many other issues regarding the decision to start and manage a library cafe."

Journal abuse

If a student or faculty member abused a library journal as badly as staff approved procedures, they'd probably lose their library privileges. Look at the cover of this journal



When the journal (Cultural Critique, No. 3, American Representations of Vietnam (Spring, 1986), was "checked in" after being received in the mail, it was smacked with a black ink date stamp, showing it was received January 2, 1987 at Ohio State University Library. Must be an old stamp, because the official name is The Ohio State University Libraries. Then the check-in-clerk marked it with a grease pencil. MAI in the upper right means that it was destined for the Main Library at Ohio State University, one of maybe 20 locations within the system. Then she scribbled the call number, volume and year across the cover. The brown stuff at the bottom looks like someone spilled coffee with cream on it--perhaps a user, but might have happened at check-in. The back cover, presumably by the same photographer, John Carlos Rowe, has a date due slip pasted over it, blocking about 1/3 of the picture. But the defacing didn't stop there. Before this journal was bound permanently (in 2006 according to a pasted stamp on the inside), it was "strap bound," with holes punched into the margins to keep several issues strapped together inside homemade cardboard covers, so when you open this volume, every page has four holes.

Eventually as things became more automated, grease pencils were discontinued and small stickers with call number and date received replaced the scribbling; I'm not sure about the temporary bindings since I haven't worked there in over 8 years. But I am still surprised when I see this sort of disregard not only for the artist, writers, publishers, but also the reader who may have found something useful in the cover. And publishers continue to include information on the cover or book jacket that may be no where else in the piece, and some libraries toss the book jacket, and paper covers may be removed if the book or journal is rebound.

I had no interest in resurrecting the Vietnam War, which is what this issue of Cultural Critique did, however, no author or group should have its work taken so lightly by those who say they preserve and protect information for future generations.