Monthly Archives: May 2011

Libraries preserve the past

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Boone online archive

In previous posts, I have stressed that the library is more than a warehouse for books and other physical materials. But after all, it is in part a warehouse, and that is one aspect of an important function: Libraries preserve the past. Are you interested in history? genealogy? biography? novels set in the past? Do you want to know the background to today’s news stories? Today’s books, magazine articles, web sites, etc. are possibly only because libraries have collected and preserved all manner of documents that historians, family researchers, and authors need in order to gather their information. Since time … Continue reading →

The librarian’s job

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Library action figure with real shushing motion. Modeled on a respected librarian with a good sense of humor!

According to an old stereotype, a librarian is a socially awkward woman with bad hair who checks out books to some people and tells others to be quiet. Librarians have fairly successfully battled that stereotype. At least no one assumes that a librarian has to be unattractive, incapable of having fun, or even a woman. But as long as people still think of a library as just a warehouse for books, people will misunderstand the job of a librarian. Just as a library is much more than a warehouse, a librarian is much more than a clerk who works in … Continue reading →

FYI: initialisms in OED

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Texting abbreviations

What have texting and its conventions, abbreviations, and shortcuts done to our language? And what does it mean that some of them have even ended up in the Oxford English Dictionary? The end of civilization as we know it? Calm down! Can’t the spate of common initialisms be traced back at least as far as the New Deal? Isn’t the Oxford English Dictionary itself known as the OED? Granted, finding LOL, IMHO, FYI, BFF, and the gang in such august company as antidisestablishmentarianism and floccinaucinihilipilification is a bit of a departure. I have lately managed to reconnect with lots of … Continue reading →

How can libraries survive? Apparently better than bookstores

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Some rights reserved by bigoteetoe

Not long ago, I noticed two articles on the same page of the local Sunday news paper (News & Record, April 17, 2011, p. H6). The headline above the fold asked Can bookstores survive? Directly underneath that article appeared one titled Library piling up e-books. While I make no claim that the juxtaposition of those two headlines completely answers the question in libraries’ favor, it does point out yet another way that libraries work to keep up with new social and technological trends. And yet some people have been trying to write off libraries for years. Among the falsehoods that … Continue reading →