I Practice Bibliomancy...

the art of Divination by jolly way Looking It Up!

I was unaware that there was a term for this special gift of mine until I happened to pick up a book at my local library. The book is called "This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All" written by self-described "librarian hunter" Marilyn Johnson.

Ms. Johnson has written a book cheerleading and praising many new developments in libraries, which may not seem like a big deal to most people. However, since we currently live in a world that is drowning in information, it doesn't hurt to be a little more interested in the people whose job it is to sort, sift, and otherwise focus the incoming noise into whatever it is we're looking for.

While many of us can operate a basic query in an on-line search engine, what happens when that query comes up blank? Or worse, when it returns 80000 entries? Ms. Johnson's book points up the fact that all of us need a little human help now and then. The librarian is the person who gets paid to provide that help, plus they keep it private. Like a bartender, a good librarian will hear pretty much everything and tell none of it.

The book itself is written almost like a collection of short essays grouped around a theme. She touches on the conflict between new information services and old library science, "information sickness", IT issues, The PATRIOT Act, Social Justice, Librarian Stereotypes, Bloggers, and Archivists. Most of her material comes from interviews with real librarians or archivists, with a healthy smattering of research from actually going into the libraries in question. That gives it an immediacy that makes it particularly appealing to me, since the copyright is 2010. In fact, I'd like to read it again in about 10 years or so to see what may have changed.

The most of this book had me bouncing around the room exclaiming and reading parts of it out loud to whoever was unfortunate enough to be in the house with me. The chapter on the "master's in Liberal Arts with a Concentration in Global Development and Social Justice" actually was so compelling I got up and ran to the computer to look up more information about St. John's University. I narrowly manged to talk myself out of another master's degree.

The only portion I didn't care for was the chapter and concentration by the author on the library systems in Second Life. Back in the day when I worked for IBM, Second Life was widely touted as an excellent product, easy to use, and recommended as the platform of the new Global Market. So I grabbed myself an account and jumped in. For a month I wandered around Second Life and I hated pretty much all of it. The graphics and UI were clunky and slow, everything cost real money for fake items, and I never saw another real human at all. I was bombarded with ads, but couldn't get any real time help ever. While the author seems to have had a really great experience in Second Life, I didn't. So there was no way for me to relate to her obvious enjoyment of the game. This was the chapter that allowed me to put the book down and go to sleep however, so there's a silver cloud in everything.

All in all, this book really helped me to take a renewed interest in my own long term goal of becoming a research librarian. I'm currently in school, working on my bachelor's degree in history towards the master's in Information Science and this book encouraged me to keep working on it. Even though I picked it up from the library, I'll probably go and buy this one just to keep it on hand as a pick me up when the work-load gets to me later.

Johnson, Marilyn. This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010. print

Mirrors and Truth

According to The Oxford History of Literary Translation In English: To 1550 by Roger Ellis "A Glasse Of The Truth, published three times between 1530 and 1532, and possibly written by Henry VIII, was translated into Latin (by Nicholas Hawkins) and French ( by John Psalgrave) in 1532." [pg 108] Henry was pretty hot to get out his opinion on the world at the time, in particular his thoughts on his on-going fight with the Catholic Church in general, and the Pope in particular. He was upset because he figured that he was a big boy and nobody should be able to tell him who he was going to be married to, particularly not some guy all the way over in Rome.

Myself, I'm not really worried about the Pope. I do, however, need a place where I can develop (or possibly locate) my own literary style and give out my own opinions on the world at the time. So I've gone ahead and borrowed Henry's rather catchy title. If he objects, he's free to drop me an email and we'll talk about it.

One of the reasons I wanted to use the term "glasse" was that in earlier times a mirror wasn't a false reflection of the things around us(See Christine de Pisan's Book of The City of Ladies) Instead, it was an accurate way to look at things without all the clutter of daily life. Into the Looking Glass was the way to see reality instead of all the false faces around a person. Do I expect to be able to "hold up the mirror" and show everyone the truth? I can try. I sort of doubt it'll be much more then my own opinion on things but I'd like to hope that's fairly well-thought out.

Who am I? Now there's a loaded question. Depending on the context it's asked in I am a wife, mother, ex-wife, girlfriend, sister, daughter(in-law), student, teacher, maid, actor, cook, researcher, director, fighter, healer, chauffeur and general danger to others. Professionally, I am unemployed. Socially, I am over-committed. Spiritually, I may be a speed bump. Habitually, I am a writer.

I am afraid the topics in question will veer wildly. I expect random book reviews, occasional rants, theatre and dance kibitzing, costume malfunctions, and selections from cookbooks. There may be commentary on video games, teen-agers, potatoes, podcasting, and cats. There probably won't be very many pictures but who knows?

I'm curious to see what happens next.