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Get Your Public Library Card Today

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PubLib 2013mango2September is Library Card Sign-up Month and here in St. Mary’s county we celebrate with a library card sign-up swap. For two weeks in September the college library and the public library do a registration swap. Students, faculty and staff at SMCM can sign up for a library card for the St. Mary’s Public Library on campus at the library circulation desk. St. Mary’s County residents can sign up for a SMCM library card at their local branch library.

What do you get with a public library card? Access to COSMOS the gateway to the libraries of Calvert, Charles and St. Mary’s counties print and online materials. That’s a lot of popular reading material, newly released movies and online tools like Mángo Languages. Yes, you too can learn to speak Pirate from your bedroom with a St. Mary’s County Public Library Card.

What Makes a Librarian a Librarian?

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If you are in the library and you have a question you can ask a librarian!  And anyone you see working behind a counter or desk in a LIBRARY must be a LIBRARIAN, right?  Not so fast.

bunwoman

There are all kinds of people working in libraries.  Librarians, archivists, digital media specialists, paraprofessionals, volunteers, and even
. .  . wait for it . . . students.  Can anyone be a librarian?  We librarians are pretty proud to be to members of a club which isn’t all that exclusive but which does require credentials.

All librarians have a master’s degree.  Here at St. Mary’s the librarians have degrees from different library schools (yes – we still call some of them library schools, although some have changed their names to schools of information).  We have been to U. of Texas at Austin, U. of Pittsburgh, University of Michigan, Rutgers, U. of South Florida, U. of South Carolina, and U. of North Texas.  AND – our degrees have different names including MS, MLIS (Master of Library & Information Science), MIS, MSI, MSIS, and MLS.

I have an MLS from Rutgers University.  Most of the time MLS means Master of Library Science.  But my diploma says “Master of Library Service.”  Come on up to my office if you want to see it. Rutgers doesn’t give diplomas with that name anymore so pretty soon I’ll have a genuine relic.

So how does a person learn to be a librarian?  Do we learn the Library of Congress classification system?  Practice speaking in a whisper?  Memorize the almanac?  Actually it depends.  Some library school students study how to catalog materials (organize and classify them so you can find them).  Some take classes to learn to become good researchers and to help other do research.  Some learn how to preserve materials or archive them.  These days many library school students also learn to create digital learning materials, to use social media, to blog, and to develop tools for finding information.  Some library school students write a masters’ thesis and some don’t.  Most do an internship.  Most of us take statistics and research methods.

Who wants to be a librarian?  Almost anyone!  Lots of SMCM alums have become librarians and archivists.  Did you know that the head archivist at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum and Archives is a SMCM alum (and she’ll be on campus later this semester).  A totally cool young adult librarian in a northern Virginia public library is an alum.  And did you know that the associate director of the SMCM Library is a SMCM alum???  Go find Kat Ryner (LI 225) and ask her about becoming a librarian.

We are always in the process of becoming librarians.  We learn lots of basics in library school and the real education starts once we get out and working.  Those graduate school courses give us a really solid foundation, get us started thinking about all kinds of issues that librarians care about (fair use of materials, copyright, open access, the digital divide).  We learn to do research and about important library journals (librarians research, write, and publish just like other faculty).

So now you know what makes a librarian.  If you want to know more, ask a librarian to lunch, or coffee. Another thing you should know is that librarians LOVE to talk about why we love being librarians.  We might make you want to be one, too.

tattooed librarian

Advice regarding the treatment of College Freshman. From 1495.

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Whenever searching through primary source documents, you never know what you might find.  One can only imagine the circumstances surrounding the issuing of the following statute, prepared by Leipzig University in 1495, but the folks at the Ask The Past Blog were good enough to dig it up for the world to see:

“Statute Forbidding Any One to Annoy or Unduly Injure the Freshmen.

Each and every one attached to this university is forbidden to offend with insult, torment, harass, drench with water…, throw on or defile with dust or any filth, mock by whistling, cry at them with a terrifying voice, or dare to molest in any way whatsoever physically or severely, any, who are called freshmen, in the market, streets, courts, colleges and living houses, or any place whatsoever, and particularly in the present college, when they have entered in order to matriculate or are leaving after matriculation.”

Leipzig University Statute (1495). From Friedrich Zarncke, ed., Die Statutenbücher der Universität Leipzig, (Leipzig, 1861), 102. Translation adapted from Robert Francis Seybolt, The Manuale Scholarium: An Original Account of Life in the Mediaeval University (Cambridge, MA, 1921), 21-2, n.6.

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Perhaps at least one of these freshmen are concerned about somebody “crying at them with a terrifying voice.”

Feel free to contact the librarians or archivist for assistance with finding primary source materials for your papers and presentations!

The Library Tour

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Dove in the window seatA tour is a great way to get to know the library and the people who work here. I took one of the college’s newest residents, Dove, on a tour this summer. He got to see one of our new spaces, the browsable DVD collection, and tried out some technology. Being a 21st century bear he opted for the scanner rather than the copy machine, but couldn’t resist the record player. Dove also checked out his first book, got help with some research and found pretty much every comfortable napping study spot available. You can see Dove’s full tour on our Facebook page.

Pamela

Now Hiring: Library PFP position, Instructional Media Fellow

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pfp-advert

The SMCM Career Development Center has a fantastic Professional Fellowship Program for interested sophomores, juniors, and seniors. You can get a great internship-like experience at a greater pay rate ($10 / hour) than your average student worker. Last year, the library’s PFP student, Taylor Robb-McCord, started work on a new video series: The SMCM Library in 60 Seconds. This year, we’re looking for a new PFP student to continue the series and put their own creative spin on it.

We’re calling our PFP position an Instructional Media Fellowship. You can learn more about it on the CDC website, but here’s a brief description:

The library is seeking a creative student interested in video production or advertising to help develop the “SMCM Library in 60 Seconds” video series. The fellow will develop instructional videos promoting library services and resources to the SMCM community.

To apply, email me, Veronica Arellano Douglas with your

  • resume
  • cover letter describing your interest in and fit for the position as well as your cumulative GPA and
  • contact information for one faculty/staff reference.

You can also call (240-895-4265) or email me with questions about the position!

Turn Coat by Jim Butcher

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Dresden Files Turn CoatHarry Dresden is a private investigator in present day Chicago. He is also a wizard. Taken together, these two facts tell you almost everything you need to know about the Dresden Files series. Really, the only other relevant information is that the books are fun to read. In this particular installment Harry is heroically and possibly stupidly defending an old nemesis, the warden Morgan, from the wrath of another set of nemeses, the White Council of Wizards, while trying to keep the collateral damage amongst the non-supernatural denizens of Chicago to a minimum. There are also vampires, werewolves, a skinwalker, a hard-boiled Chicago cop named Murphy, and what is apparently a sentient island of some sort. All in all, it’s an excellent breezy page-turner.

Availability: USMAI or COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Michelle Milne, Assistant Professor of Physics
Rating: Recommended

Too Awesome Not to Share

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As Celia mentioned in her last post, librarians have a long tradition of upholding library users’ privacy. It’s in our professional Code of Ethics!

We protect each library user’s right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.

Code of Ethics of the American Library Association (last amended Jan. 2008)

We’re quite good at making sure that library users’ records and web browsing sessions are kept private (or not kept at all), and have a great history of standing up to legislation we see as infringing on users’ right to privacy (see the NYTimes article in which we receive the now infamous radical militant librarians label, then see us put it on a t-shirt). In general, people love us for this, but people also love social media, online shopping recommendations, and seeing what their best friends just bought on Etsy. There’s a weird conflict between the kind of privacy people say they want and the kind of privacy infringement they’re willing to put up with in order to have a personalized online experience. Libraries have largely stayed out of it, but recently I came across this really cool initiative that seems to have a good balance of user privacy and personalized recommendations.

Behold, THE AWESOME BOX:

sometimes things are awesome

This project is the brainchild of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and is being implemented at not only Harvard but a select group of public and academic libraries in the U.S. The concept is simple: Think something is awesome? Return it to a special “awesome box” or flag it with an “awesome bookmark” and library staff will scan it and have it magically appear on that library’s Awesome Page. What you read remains private, but you now have a better sense of what your fellow-library-goers are reading, watching, and listening to throughout the year.

Plus who doesn’t need a little awesome in their day?

What are your thoughts on the Awesome Box? Would something like it fly at St. Mary’s?

The Likeness by Tana French

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The LikenessEarly one morning, police detective Cassie Maddox is called to a murder scene. When she arrives she is horrified to discover she looks exactly like the murder victim, Lexie. Next, the cops on scene all decide not to notify the victim’s nearest and dearest, but instead report Lexie as injured and recovering so they can send Maddox undercover in her place to investigate the crime from the inside and the plot carries on from there.

If you can accept the assertion that Maddox is capable of imitating Lexie so well that she can successfully fool the woman’s four best friends/roommates and the even more outrageous assertion that any cop anywhere would think this was a legitimate investigation technique, this is an excellent mystery. French has a genius for writing wonderfully evocative characters and beautiful prose. This mystery was much longer and more rambling that is usual in the genre, but it was a great pleasure to read.

Availability: SMCM Library
Review Submitted by: Michelle Milne, Assistant Professor of Physics
Rating: Recommended with Reservations

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

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Righteous MindThe Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is an interesting take on how humans make moral decisions. The book’s thesis has two main points. Firstly, humans make moral decisions via instinct and then use reason to rationalize their decision after the fact, which the author amusingly illustrates using the metaphor of a rider (reason) carried along on the back of an elephant (instinct). Secondly, humans evaluate moral behavior using six different foundations (care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation) rather than judging behavior solely on whether it causes harm to anyone or anything. Haidt argues that the weight a person assigns to each of the foundations is closely correlated with that person’s political affiliation. This argument goes a long way toward explaining how two people from opposite sides of the political spectrum can each leave a debate legitimately convinced that they occupy the moral high ground and that the other person is morally depraved.

The book is a descriptive rather than a prescriptive study, so don’t expect any judgements on what ethical behavior actually consists of. However, it is a pleasure to read and very clearly written. Haidt concludes each chapter with a scrupulous summary highlighting his main points so that the material is easy to understand even if you have no background in ethics, philosophy, or sociology.

Availability: SMCM Library, COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Michelle Milne, Assistant Professor of Physics
Rating: Highly Recommended.

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