(If anyone missed it, two of the largest papers in the US were planning to endorse Harris, but the owners stepped in to prevent it. Editors have resigned in protest. )

This is why classes need library instruction

Student: I can’t find any scholarly articles on this subject!

Me: Okay, what’s the subject?

Student: Creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies.

Me: Alright, and what/where have you tried searching?

Student: I searched “creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies” on the library website!

Me:

I’m still mad about this because it happens frequently. Students at all levels of education need library and research instruction–they should get it before graduating high school, they should be getting it in several different classes in college, and there should be something in grad school–seriously, there are people in my master’s program who don’t know anything besides Google.

And don’t say “they should have learned in [previous level of university education].” Do you think every person continues education within a few years of their first degree? THEY DON’T. Even if they did get a then-good introduction to research, you think nothing changed between 2008 and 2018? How about the doctoral student I met today whose last degree–and last experience with academic libraries–was in 1996? How about the guy in my master’s cohort who got his bachelor’s degree in 1987?

Because look. See that very specific topic the student wanted? There may or may not be actual scholarly articles about it. But here are a few things you can do:

That said, this student did the right thing: they tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.

They tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.

I get goddamn professors pulling this shit, there is not one single level in the academy where research literacy isn’t lacking.  

Also: Everyone has forgotten how to browse the stacks. As in, find a book that’s relevant, go to the stacks, then look at what’s near it on the shelf. You will find stuff that way that would never turn up on a search. It really works and can be a useful supplement to electronic research even though it involves your corporeal form and books made out of paper. 

my law school requires a legal research class. you take it as a 1L, and it’s mandatory. you are signed up for it automatically along with all your other 1L courses. it’s a wise thing to do, because you’re fucked as a lawyer if you don’t know to find, you know, the law.

I have a library and information science degree, which I often refer to as a degree in google, and I’m only being a little facetious with that. I often impress people with my ability to find things online, but it’s only because I’ve taken so many classes in research methods that I know how to phrase a search well. It’s so important, not just in school! 

Goddammit there is so much information and so many way to access it that it burns my biscuits when we don’t give students the tools they need to succeed at this. Hell yeah all y’all above!

And here’s what I’ve got to add:  

Ask a Librarian

Seriously guys librarians are here to help. We would love to help you find the right resource for your particular informational need and we’ve been trained to do so as efficiently and effectively as possible. Nowadays you don’t even have to go to the library in person as many libraries offer online chat services as well as the option to contact via email. Further, and I think very importantly we are dedicated to our patrons rights to privacy. To quote the American Library Association the “rights of privacy are necessary for intellectual freedom and are fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship.”  

Search the Stacks

This is one of my favorite ways  to immerse myself in an area of study. While a good subject or keyword search will lead you to some good results sometimes is just as fruitful to go the library and plunk yourself down in section and browse all the books in a topic area. Libraries will label the (book)stacks based on whichever classification system they use and you can use the links below to figure out which area of the stacks you’ll want to look through.

Dewey: used in public libraries

LOC /Library of Congress: classification system used in university libraries

http://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit03/libraries03_04.phtml

Online Books

Some websites like gutenberg project are dedicated to making public domain books accessible to the public. Using the search term public domain books is a good way to go about looking for more sources of them. Open sourced is another good term to use when trying to find freely accessible books online and that’s not just limited to fiction books but textbooks are also offered by various sites.

Project Gutenberg is an online archive of tens of thousands of  books that have enter the public domain that can be freely accessed.

Openstax is one website that provides access to Higher Ed and AP open sourced textbooks.

Libguides and Pathfinders

As stated above librarians are in the business of connecting people to resources. If we can’t do so in person then we also do so by creating guides that can be found and used when we aren’t around. These guides are filled with search terms, books, articles, reviews, lists, links, and anything else we think would be helpful for patrons trying to explore a particular topic area. 

Pathfinder is a particular term used for these guides. Libguides is a particular platform which to host these guides. Using either word at the end of your search terms online will bring up guides that have been created in that particular subject area. Or you can explore libguides directly with your search terms to find what guides librarians across the country have created.

Note: Using pathfinder in your search terms may pull up resources about Paizo Publishing’s same titled tabletop RPG series and while dragons are cool you can modify your search to library pathfinder to exclude these resources.

Other than using a search engine or libguides directly I find a great many pathfinders on university library sites. Usually what I do is find a university’s library webpage, find their pathfinder/research guides/guides section, and then browse through their lists of guides. These are generally organized by field of study so just pick the one you are interested in and look through the resources they have listed.

Some of the resources will be accessible for anyone while some might be locked for students of the particular university.  If the article, book, or resource is locked by a school portal you can either search for it online outside of the university portal or you can go to your own university/public library to see if they have access to the resource there. Even if they don’t have it currently in their collection libraries are often connected with other branches and may be able to request an interlibrary loan of what you need.

Online Reference Resources

Sometimes the problem isn’t finding information but finding good information. Below are two sites that I use regularly to help me with this issue when searching online for resources.

The Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association gives a list of the best free reference sites on the internet

The Ipl2 is a good authoritative source to find general information on a variety of topics. Even though the website is no longer updating there are still a plethora of subject guides that can be explored.

Open Sourced Journals and Articles

Just as there are open sourced books and textbooks so too are there open sourced journals and articles available. Again  you can add the term open sourced when searching for these resources.

DOAJ is the Directory of Open Access Journals and you can search through here to find both articles and journals freely available to access.

Journal Article Tips

Finally whenever I’m searching through journal articles there are a few things I always like to keep in mind.

Build context. Once you find an article that is relevant to your search you can do this by exploring the citations. Both those that the article you are using references in its bibliography and those that reference the article itself. 

Every database is going to do this differently but generally with a few clicks you can find out who has cited an article that you have read. If nothing else try popping the title of your article into google scholar and you’ll see a blue ‘Cited by’ below the description. Also in some cases you can click on the author directly in a database to see what else they have written in the subject. Totally ask your librarian for help navigating the particular database you are using again they will be stoked to do so. 

Building this context of literature by finding and reading these extra articles is important to building a critical understanding of your topic and will allow you to build the best possible defense of your arguments. This will also allow you to see if the article you’ve initially selected is in itself a viable position or if it is an outlier of its field.

If you can try and find reviews of literature articles and special issue/special topic editions of journals. These are your best friends in the resource world as these types of articles and journals compile a great deal of information on particular topic in a tiny space. They are immensely helpful in building context in an area of thought and useful to finding out what to read further to be informed in an area of study. Add those words to your search terms to see if you can get some useful resources.

Dream of the Endless would be a great professor, but you know what else he'd be amazing at?

Children's Librarian

Kids are full of stories. He would absolutely love to hear them and help nurture that creativity. The really young ones could be read to and have nap time. Parents would love him. Kids would love him. Hob would love him.

also it would just be really cute 😌

had this on my desk unscanned for *checks watch* way too long, anyway they will find the book about an princess who is also an onion who befriends a dragon

Source: [X]

TL;DR – Twitter thread by a library worker on a news article about a woman who pulled hundreds of books out of a library dumpster and donated them to an underserved school. THOSE BOOKS WERE THROWN OUT FOR A REASON. Like outdated science, racism, and misogyny. #ContextMatters 

Sorry, book burning is ALWAYS bad.

Listen, even if the books are legit crap and promote the most horrible things in the world, I am against burning them. The kids should be able to read these books - with the understanding that these books are flawed and have racism/misogyny within them. And maybe it’s a good opportunity to teach them how to recognize propaganda and misinformation? Or to see how outdated science can evolve?

But book burning is the wrong move. Always will be. Don’t go down this road, it will end up backfiring.

… books being discarded by a library is not equivalent to being burned or banned. To even be considered for removal, books will either be in very bad physical shape or will be ones no one has checked out in several years, or will be replaced by newer editions of the same biok. Copies of these books still exist in archives with the express purpose of being preserved, and can be gotten by the library through inter library loan if someone wants to read them.

Weeding and discard of books are very thorough processes, and as the thread says books in good condition that would be useful elsewhere are donated, or sometimes sold to fundraise for the library. Many libraries will also have a cart of free books for people to take if they want.

If, after all this work, and evaluation, and opportunities for reuse, a book is placed in a dumpster, it’s because it isnt needed or useful anywhere else.

Again, this is not the same thing as banning books or burning them. If that were the case we’d be talking about stuff like trumps autobiographies, not outdated books from the 70s that haven’t been circulating.

do you guys wanna hear the latest drama among librarians across the country

Ask and I shall deliver

Okay so the latest drama is apparently there is a man calling across random libraries across the country and he’s asking for information on a court case specifically Brady v Maryland and when he calls he claims he doesn’t have a computer so he asks for the case to be read aloud to him

Here’s the thing. He is asking for uh not legal reasons but umm because he well….he well…he’s yknow 😳 And he’s called multiple libraries and done this and the FBI is supposedly involved and can’t catch this pervert that’s just calling libraries and getting off on librarians reading about some random court case

And apparently the dude called my work! And I wasn’t there for it but they put him on hold cause they were like “is it him…” so they got a male coworker to answer the phone and he immediately hung up and like hdjdhsjshhs?!? What is happening!!

the weird thing is, when I view my job as some sort of background extra it becomes much more palatable. people go to a library and see me shelving a stack of books in my cardigan and glasses (now with glasses chain!) and they go "yeah, that's exactly right. that's how it's supposed to be in a library." and for some reason, that's comforting? the work is whatever, and the customers are customers, but sometimes it feels like I'm being paid just to make sure this places looks right, and I find that very fun.

stop being funnier than me on my own posts

Hi this is absolutely killing me, could someone please point me in the direction of that video of the guy in like a train station who’s pretending to be a street preacher but he’s reading the Very Hungry Caterpillar like it’s the book of Genesis

God bless you

I...think i just found religion

@apocrypals

My sister-in-law is a librarian, and every word of this is true.

Also, I was six years old when I was finally allowed to join the library with my own little record book (this was WAY before computers) and I remember the feeling every time I walked in - endless stories, and everyone encouraging me to discover them.

I'm screaming from this post on a librariam group

yesterday one of my coworkers came in saying ‘did you know the president is giving James Patterson a medal’ and we all started yelling

Why do we hate Patterson? I mean, I’m down to hate him but I wanna know why

Sure! I wasn’t expecting this to get traction so I didn’t go into detail.

‘Ghostwriter sweatshop’ isn’t a perfect term - I believe the term typically used is co-writers, although I’m not sure that’s fair either. What happens is that Patterson gives writers an outline and a plot, and they write the books. He’ll read and sometimes revise what they produce. Here’s one of several articles on it. Some people have used text analysis tools to confirm that his books tend to read far more like the co-writers than him - ‘author’ may not be the best word for his role. He’s more like the director. 

That being said, many librarians don’t resent him for that. We resent him because, if you work in a public library, he has probably taken over an entire library shelf by now, maybe two. Shelf space is valuable, but when it’s a bestseller you have to buy copies, even if there’s better stuff you could be purchasing. 

I work in a library and literally we all dislike Patterson to varying degrees.

Just the other day I was shifting all the books (because we had just weeded) and I was desperately trying to fit the Pattersons on the shelves and there were no patrons in the library so I yelled “PATTERSON NEEDS TO STOP WRITING ALREADY” and my coworker—not missing a beat or even looking up from what she’s doing—just deadpans back, “He already did.”

So yeah librarians and library employees generally tend to hate Patterson.

I work at a library and recently an email was sent out to all staff with this as the subject line

I’m very pro-rereading books you loved as a child at different stages in your life

a chapterbook: *came with a stitched in ribbon bookmark, had a cloth spine, had those rough edged finished pages, or came with a map*

8 year old me: i am a 500 year old librarian and this is the most valuable book in my collection. i rescued it myself from a castle as it burned to the ground. *gingerly runs my little grubby hands down its spine and gazes wistfully out of the school bus window* i am the keeper of all civilization’s knowledge

Me: I need a library card, but I just moved so I don’t have an ID with my address or any mail with it.

Librarian: -slides me a blank library postcard- Write your address on this like it would be mailed to you.

Me: Sure?

Librarian: -takes it back- Great! Now we have mail with your address on it!

Me: …does it really work that way?

Librarian: the rules don’t say it DOESN’T work that way. Here’s your new library card!

I spent the afternoon arranging our books by size and color (and it’s so satisfying and looks amazing) and my partner came home and stared in shock at the bookcase and then said “i’m a librarian, you can’t do this.”

him: you split up all the song of ice and fire books

me: yeah i know, they’re all primary colors, it’s perfect

him: [self-destructs]

You’re a monster

As a former bookstore employee, this hurts my soul. I mean, sure it looks nice, but how do you find anything?

it has occurred me during this process that apparently not everyone thinks about books by what color they are? like, literally when i’m looking for a book, i picture it in my mind. i have a very…tactile experience with the books i read and idk! i thought everyone did that lol.

my partner was like “how will i find [this book] for instance” and i replied “easy, it’s purple” and he looked at me like i was a witch.

I’m getting a masters degree in library science and one of the first icebreaker assignments was to take a picture of how we organize our shelves and plenty of us do it by color and shape and other tactile factors. I used to do mine by date published so all the old out of shape books were together.

*crashes through the wall*

I VOLUNTEER!