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Something Different Every Day

October 29, 2008

Faint praise

About a new fiction title, this Kirkus reviewer begins his/her review, “Modestly engaging, …”  Ouch!

posted by Susan at 8:43 pm | Comments (1)

Benjamin Franklin visits Niles

As you can see, Ben Franklin paid a visit to the Niles Public Library recently, in honor of a traveling exhibit the library is hosting all about HIM.  Ben mostly stayed in character, though did occasionally show a disconcerting knowledge of the score of the Bears’ game. 

At the exhibit opening, we were privileged to hear a quite inflammatory speech by Library Journal’s longtime editor John Berry.  Librarians as a group tend to be very liberal politically; Niles as a community tends not to be so liberal, so the crowd reaction was mixed.  He spoke about the role of libraries in modern times, and how they were still extremely imortant in the role they began with of helping to create an educated electorate.  He maintains that a good deal of the information that comes to the public has been corrupted by big business and special interests, and that the massive distrust of government is purely to benefit those trying to manipulate public opinion.  He sees the libraries as helping people sort out the good information from the bad.

Some in the audience were squirming and annoyed, but who can imagine that Ben himself wasn’t sometimes politically inflammatory?  He was a revolutionary, after all.  It was a great night.

posted by Susan at 5:56 pm | Comments (1)

October 14, 2008

Fare thee well, SATA!

I love Something About the Author.  I love all those pretty blue volumes sitting on the shelf.  I love learning about the authors, who are some of my very favorite people.  I love having the perfect resource when a student needs information about an author.

But I didn’t love it enough to keep buying it at $116 a volume for an increasing number of volumes each year.  I didn’t love that they started padding their content to increase their number of volumes.  I didn’t love that they began covering authors who hadn’t even published in the U.S.  And the last straw was the volume where they covered both Jan and Stan Berenstain, with multi-page bibliography for Jan Berenstain which they repeated a few pages later for Stan Berenstain.

The other thing I didn’t love is the same thing every Youth Services librarian doesn’t love.  All those pretty blue volumes are space hogs!  And so, at last, it is fare thee well to the whole 150 volumes. 

posted by Susan at 1:56 pm | Comments (0)