One of the many free eBooks available from OpenLibrary.org

I recently joined the 21st century and bought myself a Barnes & Noble Nook. Over the past few years, my opinions on e-Readers went from distrust (a threat to libraries!) to distaste (for the DRM) to curiosity and then, finally, I realized one could be useful. I refused to buy a Kindle due to the proprietary software and the fact that I wanted to use library eBooks.

However, Overdrive can be picky and difficult to use. With that, I was exceptionally pleased to see the Internet Archive’s recent announcement of an extensive free e-book collection at Open Library. From the announcement:

Today, a group of libraries led by the Internet Archive announced a new, cooperative 80,000+ eBook lending collection of mostly 20th century books on OpenLibrary.org, a site where it’s already possible to read over 1 million eBooks without restriction. During a library visit, patrons with an OpenLibrary.org account can borrow any of these lendable eBooks using laptops, reading devices or library computers…

Any OpenLibrary.org account holder can borrow up to 5 eBooks at a time, for up to 2 weeks. Books can only be borrowed by one person at a time. People can choose to borrow either an in-browser version (viewed using the Internet Archive’s BookReader web application), or a PDF or ePub version, managed by the free Adobe Digital Editions software. This new technology follows the lead of the Google eBookstore, which sells books from many publishers to be read using Google’s books-in-browsers technology.

The big differences between OpenLibrary and Project Gutenberg (of which I am also a fan) are:

• Size – OpenLibrary has over 1 million free eBook titles available already (Project Gutenberg has 33,000)
• Most of the books from OpenLibrary are from the 20th century, and not all are public domain. Many have never been available in digital formats before
• OpenLibrary also links to OCLC’s WorldCat
• Accessibility - OpenLibrary has been working hard to ensure that everyone – including blind and visually impaired patrons – can access everything on their website. They use the DAISY format and work with the Library of Congress ‘ National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS)

There’s no question that eBooks are becoming increasingly popular. From the Internet Archive:

A recent survey of libraries across North America was conducted by Unisphere Research and Information Today, Inc. (ITI). It reported that of the 1,201 libraries canvassed, 73% are seeing increased demand for digital resources with 67% reporting increased demand for wireless access and 62% seeing a surge in demand for web access.

American libraries spend $3-4 billion each year on publishers’ products. “I’m not suggesting we spend less, I am suggesting we spend smarter by buying and lending more eBooks,” asserts Kahle. He is also encouraging libraries worldwide to join in the expansion of this pool of purchased and digitized eBooks so their patrons can borrow from this larger collection.

To sum up, there are lots of reasons why OpenLibrary.org is good news. Check it out!

Riots not Diets, from flickr user gaelx

Anyways! One of the most exciting reasons I haven’t been posting is that I have been reading all about Fat Studies. My good friend and coworker Kate and I will be presenting on information bias inherent in academia surrounding fatness, and especially focusing on the impact in cataloging. It’s also been really interesting looking at the links between disability studies, queer studies, and fat studies.

Currently, academia and society both medicalize fatness, turning it into a disease (which it’s not, for many reasons). One of the many problems with this is that talking about the sociological or anthropological aspects of Fat Studies becomes almost taboo in conventional academia, and body positive books end up being cataloged under “Obesity,” clearly labeling all fat people diseased. We’ll also be looking at very “unacademic” sources of information like zines and blogs, and talking about how perfectly valid information can be gleaned from them.

There’s so much to this that hasn’t been explored yet. If you’re interested in reading up on Fat Studies, Kate has a great list of resources on her blog.

Kate and I will be presenting at the Sarah Lawrence College Women’s History Month conference (March 4th and 5th, 2011) which will be all about body politics. Check it out!

Book waiting to be discarded

While most people hate to think that libraries throw away books, with the limited shelf space that libraries have, weeding and discarding books are an unavoidable task. Recycling and donating are great, but what if your library has limited funds and you can’t get to a drop-off point?

We were looking into Books Through Bars, which donates certain books to prison libraries, but between their restrictions and the fact that we’d have to bring all the books ourselves to Brooklyn, this wasn’t feasible.

Now we’re checking out Better World Books, a for-profit organization that pays for all shipping costs, and has a good history of both recycling and donating books to a series of non-profits. As a student, I bought very high quality discarded library copies from Better World Books at reasonable prices. The student sustainability committee here has teamed up with BWB for the end of the semester, providing book drop-off boxes for students who don’t want to lug their books home.

While I have my qualms about teaming up with a for-profit organization, it might be nice to get some money back for the books we can’t keep. At the same time, many of our books are in too poor a condition to be donated to BWB. So what else is there? I wish I could go to Radical Reference’s event on Discards and De-accession on Monday, but I’m busy.

The WLA conference had a couple of interesting panels, including one on Information Ethics & Web 2.0 techs, and another on using games to make Library Instruction a more participatory, active process (a powerpoint on this will be uploaded onto the WLA website sometime this week). But the keynote speaker was like a southern Italian-American version of Danielle Steele, and pandered completely to the stereotype (is it a stereotype if the majority of the audience seems to happily fit the bill?) that librarians are all cat ladies (why a bodice-ripper author is a good keynote speaker is beyond me), and another presenter who had written a book on dealing with difficult people knew nothing of libraries and their own brand of difficult patrons.

The majority of librarians seemed only interested in talking about using events on Twilight to get teens into the library, and overall I found the conference to be depressing and uninspiring. But perhaps I was just the wrong demographic.

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However, the event on Critical Pedagogy completely changed my professional life. I recently bought a copy of Critical Library Instruction: Theories & Methods (edited by Maria Accardi, Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier) and have been muddling through it (there are a lot of concepts I’m unfamiliar with, so it’s slow but fascinating going).

I’d never heard of Critical Pedagogy or Ira Shor before (I did know Emily Drabinski already!), so this was really an eye-opening experience. Learning that Library Instruction not only doesn’t have to be, but shouldn’t be a static learning experience where we spout facts at students and expect them to understand and retain. Instead, it can be dynamic and participatory, using collaborate knowledge from students to start discussions that lead to a greater and more relevant understanding of things like information, citations, etc.

I’m looking forward to going through my copy of “Critical Library Instruction,” supplementing it with copies of books and articles by people like Oscar Wilde, Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and others. I feel completely re-energized about the field, and am looking forward to bringing the things I’ve learned to my students.

It’s fairly inexpensive ($15/weekend, $10/day), so if you are in the NY area, you should stop by and get to see some really cool stuff.

MoCCA Festival

Saturday & Sunday April 10 & 11, 2010
69th Regiment Armory
68 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY

Someday I would like to have a “Recent Acquisitions” shelf in the library, but until that day (which could be months from now), it is my goal to find a way to let people know about these great new books. We have a bulletin board with book covers for mostly new fiction, but this doesn’t seem to be enough.

Another possibility is using our Library News blog to promote our collections, with a kind of “Staff highlights” or “New Books We’re Excited About” post. Yet we get far more books than we could enter in blog posts, and the blog brings its own questions (do we divide the posts by subject? how detailed do we get?).

Brendan and Aisling in the forest

The movie is utterly delightful – it might be a little frightening for young children at parts, but certainly doesn’t lose any enjoyment for adults. It’s a very lush movie – the music is well done and the visuals are worth finding a theater that has it.

While waiting for the movie, we stopped over at Artichoke, which only sells a few kinds of pizza but all wonderful. I had a slice of the eponymous pizza (which was the size of 3 slices), and M. had the sicilian, also delicious but smaller.

Since M. was finished long before me and the weather was so nice, we wandered next door to Led Zeppole, also run by the same guys, to get 3 piping hot zeppoles. I wanted to pick up some snacks for tomorrow, so we ventured over to Momofuku’s Milk Bar where I tried some of the cereal milk soft serve and snagged a compost cookie and a really buttery, delicious blueberry cream cookie. The cookies (and especially pies) are a little pricey, but they do have $0.85 day old cookies which (in my opinion) are just as good!

Since it’s Spring Break for the College but the library stays open, I’m using this quiet time to work on weeding and mending books! I came across this little gem just now: Child of Pleasure by “D’Annunzio.”

"Child of Pleasure" by D'Annunzio

Trying to figure out if we should bind, fix, discard, or reorder this, I open it at random to see what it’s about and find this gem of a page:

The carriage was standing at the foot of the great stairway; a footman held open the door. ‘To Madame Van Hueffel’s,” said the duchess to him, while Andrea helped her in. The man left the door and returned to his seat beside the coachman. The horses stamped, striking out sparks from the stones.

“Take care!” cried Elena, holding out her hand to the young man. Her eyes and her diamonds flashed through the gloom. “Oh, to be in there with her in the shadow -to press my lips to her satin neck under the perfumed fur of her mantle!”

He kissed her hand – pressing his lips to it as if to leave the mark of his burning passion. He closed the door and the carriage rolled rapidly away under the porch, and out to the Forum. And thus ended Andrea Sperelli’s first meeting with the Duchess of Scerni.

….what IS this book??