Librations

I’ve been a Librations contributor in the nominal sense for a month or so now, so I figured it was about time for me to actually step up and contribute. Oh sure, I could explain the delay away by saying that this is a ridiculously busy time for me at work (almost true) and in my personal life (actually true). And then, of course, I spent several weeks fussing about what I was going to write, and by the time I had finally drafted something that I was happy with, Librations went down for two weeks. Such is my life.

But the real cause of my initial fussing is that I was a little intimidated by kdt’s invitation. This is a blog for librarians, for crying out loud! Yeah, I spent five years of my life working in two different libraries (Oberlin College and Boulder Public). But that whole time, I was plotting and scheming and going to school and doing anything I could to get out of libraries and into publishing. (Not that I have anything against libraries. I love libraries. I just didn’t want to work in a library. But I’ll save that explanation for another post.)

So here’s my story: I’m not a librarian. I don’t even want to be a librarian. I’m an acquisitions editor in a publishing company. That means that I don’t really do much pen-on-paper editing (don’t worry, I won’t be all nitpicky about your grammar or spelling). I’m one of the people responsible for deciding what books get published. And I know what benefits I get from talking to librarians (anyone want to tell me what type of books you need or want for your library or yourself in history, geography, and international studies?), but I’ve been struggling with what kind of information you’d like to hear from me. So rather than struggle with that any longer, I’m just going to ask you: What kind of things do you want to know about publishing or content-related issues? Or, since this is the internet’s first library/bar, about my other area of expertise, Colorado microbrews? (Hint: pretty much everything from Left Hand Brewery is fantastic. But right now, I’m really into Avery’s Karma Ale. Just right with Pad Thai.)

I’m really interested in developing better relationships between publishers and librarians. If I publish books that you want, we both win. So I’d like to hear your questions and comments so I know what type of things you want to know from me. I’m not going to be intimidated by all you librarians anymore. I’m ready.

ps: I plan on tagging all my entries Colorado. Take that, Michigan!

I recently finished a housing search in Boulder, Colorado.  After seeing nearly a dozen apartments, I ended up with a fabulous place to live.  But along the way, I also saw the most frightening rental property I have ever seen.  Let’s call it “the cottage.”

The cottage was advertised in the local paper with very little detail–just a price, a neighborhood, and a phone number.  The price and location matched what I was looking for, so I called the owner to find out more about the property.  He described it as a “rustic” one bedroom, single-family home, and warned that a tenant had just moved out, so it probably needed a good cleaning before anyone else could move in.  I made an appointment to see it later that morning.  I had a very what-the-hell attitude since it was the first day of my housing search, and I figured that it couldn’t hurt to just take a look.  It wouldn’t waste much time, and I had other apartments to look at later in that same neighborhood.

I arrived at the cottage to find that it was an in-law building built behind another home and accessible only from an alley, not the street on which its address implied it sat.  It was surrounded by overflowing dumpsters and recycling bins.  The entire house was no more than 250 square feet, and it smelled of dead mice and mold.  It appeared (and smelled!) as if it had been vacant for some time.  There were no interior walls, and the ceilings were only about six feet high.  There were holes and cracks in the wood flooring that appeared to be open to a crawl space below.  There was no overhead lighting.  A previous tenant had been heating the building with a space heater.  The refrigerator was mid-1950s vintage–and not in a good way.  I’ll spare you a description of the bathroom.

Basically, this place was a nightmare.  The punchline to this story?  The landlord wanted $900 a month plus utilities.

So why am I posting this on Librations?  What does it have to do with libraries, or beer for that matter?  First, I really wanted a drink after seeing this place.  And second, this is a great example of how I could have applied my super-librarian powers of information literacy skillz to a real-life situation.

Even though the cottage was advertised in an actual newspaper (this wasn’t some shady Craigslist posting), and the owner paid money (albeit a small amount) for the ad, this doesn’t mean that any of the implied authority that comes with such a source should be automatically associated with the product being advertised.  As librarians, we deal with this sort of thing all the time.  Venerated publishers can do sleazy things (like Elsevier publishing fake journals to sell pharmaceuticals).  And Wikipedia (the anti-Elsevier?) has a large number of well written, clearly cited, and authoritative articles, particularly on topics related to popular culture and technology.

The owner’s use of the term “rustic” probably should have set off alarm bells in my head.  In a similar vein, pseudo-research about controversial topics can often be spotted based on the language and style used to discuss an issue.

And finally, sometimes you just have to dive into something to figure out if its credible, relevant to your research, and appropriate for the task at hand.  Man cannot survive on abstracts alone.  It was in the owner’s interest not to tell me too much about the cottage over the phone, so I had to see it for myself and experience the horror first hand.

Seeing this terrifying building wasn’t a failure, just as coming across an article or a book you end up not needing isn’t a failure, either.  It’s just part of the process.  Research (and house hunting), isn’t always clean, linear, quick, or easy.  Sometimes it involves dead ends, wrong turns, and readjustments.

And what’s a good house hunt without at least one horror story, right?

At the risk of being that guy piling on the hype, I wanted to share this  interview with the evil genius behind the super-naughty @alasecrets.

Some highlights:

Why Twitter?
I can’t think of another venue where something like this could have caught on so quickly and generated the kind of buzz (and ire) it did in such a short amount of time. I was really bored by the sort of tweets I was reading with the #ala2009 hashtag that day, so it made sense to me to create a back-back-backchannel to the kind of banal “I am here” and “This is great” tweets I was reading elsewhere.

****

What would you say to all those who call the feed “a sewer of depravity”?
It’s obvious that there were tweets claiming dubious sexual exploits, but to think that hooking up at conferences doesn’t happen seems really naive to me. I really had no idea that sex would have dominated the feed so early in the experiment, but that direction didn’t come from out of the blue. Librarians are grown-ass adults with sex lives and senses of humor…

****

What are your favorite couple of tweets from the original @ALAsecrets?
‘I’m a librarian. That’s why I am reading every single word on every single slide out loud to you. Now go to sleep.’

‘I am an expert at technology integration and I will prove it just as soon as I figure out how to make my slides advance.’

‘Watching some vendors use twitter at #ala2009 is as painful as watching my parents try to figure out ‘their facebooks”

I saw this fascinating information presented fabulously when Veronica Vergoth sent it out to the SI-all email list. It’s really cool! It’s a data tool that presents some of the results of the 2008 American Time Use Survey. You can see breakdowns on a ton of different demographics, like men/women (alas, no info on transfolks…), white/black/hispanic (no one else is real…), employed/unemployed/”not in labor force”, and a few other key aspects.

I imagine that they made the interactive graphic have only 3 options for most demographic characteristics to make it more manageable to present, so I’m not too irritated that, once again, a major mainstream data source doesn’t reflect me or a lot of other people I know at all.

The information that is there is just fantastically informative!

Then I read the accompanying article, which focused on the employed/unemployed differences:

“Without a paying job, these Americans have picked up other forms of labor: vacuuming the house, sending out résumés, taking classes and caring for family. “

all was well until I came across the closing quote:

“If all we were doing is substituting production at home for production in the marketplace,” said Daniel S. Hamermesh, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, “then maybe unemployment wouldn’t be so bad.”

Read it twice.

My first reaction: ass-hat! Making money is not what defines “productive” (read: necessary, valuable) work, in my worldview anyway. Furthermore, work in the internal/domestic sphere is historically “women’s work”, and in spite of changing attitudes, it is still a social and cultural expectation that women are primarily responsible for it, so when it’s excluded from being considered “productive”, we have clear sexism interfering (and in a post-colonial world, there’s of course also the race+class element: who does what work in whose home?) and overemphasizing the contribution of external/public sphere work in the economy.

There is such a thing as a non-monetary economy, and we have many of them, whether you believe it or not! And I’m not chasing after a chicken-egg question: plain and simple, if you don’t have your needs met in the domestic sphere, you can’t function adequately in the public sphere (e.g., if you don’t have food, it’s pretty damn hard to work all day at BankCorp, Inc. trying to bring home bacon, i.e., the ‘masculine’ side of the gendered division of labor in our neoliberal world contributes only material support to the home).

My second reaction: okay, maybe they cut off what he was saying. The reporter probably talked to Dr. Hamermesh for 20 minutes and then had to choose one key quote to meet the 500 word limit and was writing on deadline, and then the article got edited.

Third: I wonder exactly what Dr. Hamermesh means by “so bad”. I think it sucks when people don’t enough money to feed, shelter, clothe, educate, and spend time with themselves and their families adequately. Since money is a means to all of these things under American capitalism, well, then certainly higher unemployment means more people aren’t going to be able to do all that stuff as easily, and some not at all. But the way “we” Americans live, the going rate to live like that is wildly expensive. The cost of time, money, energy, and (other) resources is exorbitant for food, housing, clothing, education, and enrichment. Exorbitant!

But I have a suspicion that this is not what Dr. Hamermesh means when he says “so bad”. I can’t say for sure (his CV highlights many publications related to labor, but I don’t know what his angle is).

The way I see it, displacing work from the external spheres to the internal ones can’t be so bad. That’s where all the nurturing and cultivating work gets done! I would love to see a follow-up study of the same respondents measuring quality of life, and controlling for emotional, psychological, and physical/material stress related to unemployment and loss of income.

Ten simple steps to looking (and acting!) like a professional:

1. Open Outlook.
2. Open (read) all unread emails.
3. Respond to emails you can respond to right now.
4. Flag emails you can’t respond to right now.
5. Delete or block emails that suck.
6. Check your email again later and take care of the oldest flagged item.
7. If you’re feeling it, take care of that newest flagged item, too.
8. Get a drink of water.
9. Do something else productive.
10. Repeat.