The SurRural Librarian

I abandoned Talk of the Nation soon after Ray Suarez, so I missed this until now.

Neil Gaiman, Christopher Paolini and Tamora Pierce were on back in December. Audio can be heard here.

I wasn’t planning on mentioning the Higher Power of Lucky broohaha. What more is there to say? Puh-lease.

But when my favorite Saturday radio show had a good laugh at librarians’ expense yesterday, I did just want to hide under the rug. For every rant about the “stereotypes” of librarians just not fitting anymore, there’s a ridiculous librarian out there making a bad name for us all.

Fortunately, a little sunshine was brought to my day by Neil Gamain with this lovely & helpful post on his blog…

An Absence of Scrota — your guide to quality literature…

I’ve decided that librarians who would decline to have a Newbery book in their libraries because they don’t like the word scrotum are probably not real librarians (whom I still love unconditionally). I think they’re rogue librarians who have gone over to the dark side.
…
Helpfully, over at http://www.gelfmagazine.com/gelflog/archives/youth_literature_is_filled_with_scrotums.php you will find a list of books for the young, probably already in the libraries, with scrota (or even scrotums) in them. This is probably provided for rogue librarians who now need to hunt these books down and remove them, scrotums and all.

My Junior High is engaged in a year-long sustainability unit, and much of their work is focused on promoting the conversion of old lightbulbs to CFLs. They’ve been doing surveys of the town, and working on a publicity campaign and wiki.

This is such a fun topic to work with them on, and there’s always something new to talk about in class. Yesterday, All Things Considered did a long segment on CFLs and talked to the owner of One Billion Bulbs - a site where you can record the number of conventional bulbs you replace with CFLs and get a nifty banner for your site like this:

Please, Join Our Group!

What a nice surprise. A positive article on a hipster librarian in my tiny local newspaper. I hope I get to meet this librarian some day soon. Nice job!

Coolest place in town? The library

And that reminds me, the podcast of VPR’s Switchboard on libraries is available here, featuring three Vermont librarians. I called in toward the end of the show, to follow up on the caller who said that there was no open source software being developed in the US. (I don’t think he really meant to say that.)

This week’s This American Life starts with a great piece on the High Strung’s 2005 Library Tour in Michigan. This summer the band is on a national tour, playing loud rock in libraries.

These guys sound loud, like MC5 loud. Listening to that kind of distortion in a small space must be incredible. I love Alex Blumberg’s discriptions of the audiences, ten year olds covering their ears with their jaws hanging. Awesome.

Don’t miss the kids’ comments at the end of the piece on how the concerts made them feel differently about the library. I have to admit, I was really surprised. It’s great that this is the first concert alot of these kids are attending.

My favorite part was the band members’ description of why the library is cool. I wonder, are libraries seeing lots of touring bands coming in to shave and check their email?

Now if I could just convince the Boredoms to tour school libraries. hmmmm…

You can listen here if you missed the broadcast.