Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians

#35, November 26, 1999. Published every Friday. Permanent URL: http://marylaine.com/exlibris/xlib35.html

IN PRAISE OF, PART I: THOSE WHO KEEP INFORMATION FREE

BOOKS FOR TOTS




November 26: Hanukah, newsletters by e-mail, webcams galore, shopping safely on the net, and more.

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What IS Ex Libris?

The purpose and intended scope of this e-zine -- always keeping in mind that in response to readers, I may add, subtract, and change features.

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Archive of Previous Issues

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My Favorite Sites on___:

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My Rules of Information

  1. Go where it is
  2. The answer depends on the question
  3. Research is a multi-stage process
  4. Ask a Librarian
  5. Information is meaningless until queried by human intelligence

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Guru Interviews

  1. Tara Calishain
  2. Jenny Levine, part I
  3. Jenny Levine, Part II
  4. Reva Basch
  5. Sue Feldman
  6. Jessamyn West
  7. Debbie Abilock
  8. Kathy Schrock
  9. Greg Notess

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Wanna See Your Name in Lights?

Or at least on this page, anyway? I'd like to print here your contributions as well as mine. As you've noticed, the articles are brief, somewhere between 200 and 500 words -- something to jog people's minds and get their own good ideas flowing. I'd also be happy to run other people's contributions to the regular features: RE:SEARCHING and Favorite Sites on _____. I'll pay you the same rate I pay me: nothing.

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E-Mail Subscription?

To subscribe to a combined subscription to Neat New Stuff and ExLibris, please click HERE, complete the form, and click on "subscribe." To unsubscribe, use the same form but click on "unsubscribe." To change addresses for an existing subscription, unsubscribe from that form and then return to the page to enter the new address.
PRIVACY POLICY: I don't collect or reveal information about subscribers.

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Drop me a Line

Want to comment, ask questions, submit articles, or invite me to speak or do some training? Contact me at: marylaine at netexpress.net.




Visit My Other Sites


My Word's Worth

a weekly column on books, words, libraries, American culture, and whatever happens to interest me. For the subject index, click HERE.

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BookBytes


My page on all things book-related. NEW STUFF ADDED in September!

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Best Information on the Net

Still my favorite pit stop on the information Highway. This is a mirror of the real site, which has moved to http://www.sau.edu/bestinfo/.

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My personal page

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My resume

or, why you might want to hire me to speak at internet or library workshops or conferences, or have me consult on building your library page.


NOTE: Just a reminder that there won't be a NeatNew or ExLibris next week. See you December 10.

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IN PRAISE OF, PART I: THOSE WHO MAKE INFORMATION FREE

Thanksgiving is a good time to express appreciation for the people who believe passionately in the public's right to know, and make that right meaningful by distributing information, knowledge, and wisdom free of charge and without strings attached.

Free of charge in spite of the fact that, as librarians know better than most, information is expensive. It costs money to produce it, catalog it, store it, and retrieve it. The fact that it exists in cyberspace may reduce our need for physical space and shelving, but it still requires server space to mount it on, and people to maintain the server and its files.

Not unreasonably, people who put information out on the net want to at least recover their costs. And large corporate empires see cyberspace as a glittering opportunity not only to make money selling us stuff, but to save themselves advertising money by constructing detailed personal profiles of our spending abilities and habits. You can read the New York Times for free, but not without giving the Times personal information that it can share with advertisers.

But many news organizations do offer a wealth of information for free without strings attached, not only current news stories, but extensive archives as well, because it's an extension of their normal newspapers, magazines or broadcasts; cyberspace gives them an opportunity to offer more information than fits into their newsholes, which helps them enhance their credibility.

But information is not necessarily wisdom. News organizations have no commitment to full, nuanced examination of the complexities of issues and public attitudes; indeed, because news stories tend to focus on conflict, "balance" or "fairness" is often catered to by getting one quote from each of two extreme positions.

Advocacy organizations put lots of information out on the net for free as well, but it is incomplete, because they have no commitment to fairness in their presentation of issues or facts or polling data.

Fans and hobbyists and crackpots, bless their hearts, will put everything they know about the objects of their passion online, be it quilting patterns, the plots of each and every Star Trek episode, lists of UFO sightings or the lyrics of The Grateful Dead. On the other hand, since we don't know who they are and how they got their information, we don't know whether we can trust it.

Who, then, are the people who are genuinely committed to providing free access to the tools for objective investigation and thoughtful analysis? They're the same people who can always see more than two sides of any issue, and whose philosophical stance on most controversial issues is, "well, yes, but..."

In short, US -- librarians, museum archivists, teachers, scholars, scientists, the open source folks -- the people whose instinctive response to the internet is to use it to share what we've got and what we know.

So here's to us, the folks who build and maintain physical collections, and who create and maintain the dot.edus, the dot.govs, the dot.orgs. We are the counter to the narrowing of the range of ideas and information in the new world of giant media conglomerates.

The first of a series. This is my chance to recognize and thank some of the heroes and pioneers of our profession whose work benefits us all, as well as some wonderfully helpful publications and organizations. Feel free to suggest your own heroes, with a paragraph or two explaining why you value their contributions.


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FEEDBACK PAGE

I have received some interesting responses to articles in ExLibris that are worth passing on to you, though I don't know if the writers intended their remarks to be public. I'm thinking of starting a Feedback page. If you would like to have your responses to articles posted, please e-mail them to me and use the word "Feedback" in the subject line.

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BOOKS FOR TOTS

I should not be irked by such a fundamentally generous program as Toys for Tots, but I am, because it is so narrow in its focus. I have talked to the marines who administer the program and suggested to them that they should include "books for tots" in their concept, and they have been polite and totally unreceptive.

In the media and entertainment environment our kids are growing up in, they have no difficulty understanding that toys are supposed to bring joy, but they have far fewer chances to learn that books can do the same. Where reading is poorly taught as a purely mechanical exercise, a matter of filling in worksheets after you've labored your way through a boring inane story, kids don't see reading as pleasurable. Many kids -- and I saw them a lot at my university -- never learn to read fluently; they read laboriously from word to word, instead of gulping down entire sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books.

And yet if they don't learn to read fluently, they will have great difficulty understanding everything else they need to learn. They will have difficulty following sequential logic. Linear thought is a capability that stems from reading and writing.

I am willing to bet that all of us can remember the first book someone gave us that we couldn't put down, the book we smuggled into bed with us and read with a flashlight under the covers because we COULDN'T go to sleep until we found out how the story came out. And according to Robert G. Carlsen, expert on young people's reading habits, once we read one like that, the first thing we say is, "Do you have another one like that?"

So my object is to give children books they will love, while they're young, and before they've begun to associate reading with boredom and failure. I support Reading Is Fundamental, and celebrating Dr. Seuss' birthday on March 1 by reading outloud to children. I give away books as well as lollipops to trick-or-treaters.

But the next thing is to give books to children at Christmas. If the marines won't work with us, maybe the PTA will. Or maybe we can form our own organizations to do it. Or we can individually do things like adopt a second grade class and give them all books. The trick is to make books as cherished a gift as toys. Want to join me in the effort?

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COOL QUOTE

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

Mark Twain

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You are welcome to copy and distribute or e-mail any of my own articles (but not those by my guest writers) as long as you retain this copyright statement:

Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999.