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December 18, 2007

Grupero, Narcocorridos, and Death

I live and work in a community that has a sizable population of people of Mexican decent. The local library (where I also work part-time) has a collection of Spanish language materials and does programming in Spanish. Even though a few of the staff are bilingual the library has paid for instruction for those wishing to learn Spanish. We feel pretty good about the work we are doing.

However, today I read an article about how 13 stars of Mexican country music have been murdered in the past year and a half. This is a mixture of current events, pop culture, and true crime that must be of interest to several people in our community. Yet, we missed it.

Even though libraries try to connect to their non-native English speaking patrons we don't always hit the mark. What I find most frustrating about this is I clicked on the links to YouTube videos of performances by two of the slain artists (Zayda Pena and Sergio Gomez) I liked their music. This all leads me to the question that is driving me crazy, how can you find out about a culture if you are not of that culture and you do not speak the language. As a citizen, I think I could be a better member of the community if I understood my neighbors. Being a librarian, I view the library as a place for this exploration and understanding to begin.

How are you doing this in your library?

Posted by anna at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

December 17, 2007

Chock Full of Goodies

There are so many great things on the web today, I can hardly wait to share:

Scholars Take a Look at Facebook (Again)
In the Dec. 71, 2007 issue of New York TimesStephanie Rosenbloom reports on how sholars are examining the uses of Facebook and MySpace with some interesting discoveries for libraries. For example, Hispanic teens seem to prefer My Space as opposed to Facebook. Read all about it in the article

Future of Bibliographic Control
Draft Report of the Working Group for the Future of Bibliographic Control Document will soon be submitted to the Library of Congress

Time Life Picture Collection
One of my lists also brought to my attention the great new "online collection comprised over 425,000 digital files, representing millions of original prints and negatives archived by the Time Inc. Picture Collection. A great place to feast your eyes.
Time (Refdesk.com)

Posted by anna at 12:06 PM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2007

Teen Uses Wikipedia to Wheedle Way to White House

BBC News has an interesting article about an Icelandic teen, Vifill Atlason, using bluff and Wikipedia to convince President Bush's secretary that he was the president of Iceland. Mr. Atlason was given an appointment for a phone interview.

I am pleased to say no librarians were involved.

Posted by anna at 2:42 PM | Comments (1)

December 11, 2007

"AskEraser"

Today's (Dec. 11, 2007) New York Times has an article about Ask.com offering their users a feature called AskEraser. This service allows the user to expunge their question and search history.

Posted by anna at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2007

I'm back! Comeback Tour Starts HERE

After not writing in awhile, I have decided to come back to the blogging world.

First, today is another "Slam The Boards" day. This is the brainchild of a group of librarians (especially, Bill Pardue from Arlington Heights Memorial Library) dedicated to promoting the value of library services in the virtual world. Librarians are encouraged to go to sites like Yahoo Answers, etc. and pick-up questions. Once the librarian supplies the answer, they are encouraged to estow the virtues of the local librarian and the librarian's expertise in finding information. I think this may be the third or fourth time that librarians have done this. I think it is a very cool proactive guerilla tactic to increase the general populations awareness of libraries and librarians.

Second, in the Friday, Dec. 7, 2007 issue of Slate, Jacob Leibenluft writes a wonderful article entitles, "A Librarian's Worst Nightmare: Yahoo! Answers, where 120 million users can be wrong." Read it and be frightened, very very frightened. I especially loved the advice about what to do if you spot a tornado heading toward you while driving. Enjoy!

Posted by anna at 3:15 PM | Comments (0)