Jessamyn C. West's Blog, page 4

ALA Midwinter Report 2022

Hello from your local Chapter Councilor to the American Library Association. This past week I attended Council Forums and Council meetings virtually and this is my report.

Want to be a Councilor?

Brief note that my Chapter Councilor term is up in May. While I am more than happy to serve a second three-year term, I would also be happy to pass the privilege and responsibility on to someone else. Feel free to contact me directly and I can discuss what is involved. I was lucky to follow in the foot...

Ask A Librarian: Sharing links behind a soft paywall?

From a friend in my trivia community: I’ll post a link to an article or something on FB and/or Twitter, and I hear from Euro folk about how they’re blocked from reading it. I’d like to have a go-to answer for them that would be broadly applicable. Can you give me a generalized technique for this problem when it arises?

Sure! This is also how I get around soft-paywalls like “You have read all your free articles this month” (won’t work with “You have to pay to see this at all”) for news sites lik...

2021 in Libraries

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Only my regulars this past year. I picked up shifts at my local library and did a few months at Chelsea Public Library while they searched for a full-time librarian. While I taught some classes virtually for Rochester I only went inside the building once, really just to say hello. Forty-four visits, but only three libraries.

Kimball (20) – The library was open to the public for a while. I stopped in an occasionally worked a sub shift or met people here.Chelsea (23) – I was the W/Th librarian ...

2021 reading list and commentary

Here was the twitter thread of what I read last year but I should note, it has two 46es on it. I read about the same this year. I started and finished 115 books. Not bad. One more book got added to my best in show category: The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson, though I felt like I read a lot of good books this year.

Here are stats for the books that I finished.

average read per month: 9.6
average read per week: 2.2
number read in worst month: 6 (February)
number read in best month: 14 (...

A CRT statement from VLA

I’m on a team of people who help keep the town’s volunteer-run laundromat open. We’ve had a “mask suggested for vaccinated people” sign up since maybe summertime. I make the signs. I also do my laundry there. Yesterday no one was wearing masks. I don’t know their vaccination status but I do know about omicron and it’s concerning. So I suggested we replace the sign with one that says Masks Required. And everyone agreed. But no one suggested it until I did. And maybe the person to get your groups...

Preparing NOW for expected challenges

White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre speaks to reporters.

 

An email I wrote to our state library association about the concerning things happening in Texas.

Hello all — I am writing this kind of in my role as VT Chapter Councilor and somewhat as someone in the Intellectual Freedom Committee. I wanted to make you aware of an issue concerning book challenges.

As you are probably aware, Texas is one of the states where there are coordinated groups of “concerned parents” and others...

Ask A Librarian: Working Towards Racial Justice in Libraries

[diagram from hannah baer @malefragility]

 

Question from a soon-to-be library school student: as a white person, how can I go about this in a way that promotes inclusivity and justice for all people? I really want to help people with this profession by helping create and facilitate a space of accessible education but I also want to make sure I’m doing it in the right way. 

I think it’s tricky, I sometimes refer to this diagram about white people in social justice work generally (above). That is...

The fungibility of books

COVID-19 safety with mask, gloves by Michael Neubert. Public domain.

I’m on a mailing list where we discuss book issues. There are authors, publishers, industry people, and librarians on this list. Recently we’ve been discussing the Internet Archive’s ongoing legal dispute with the AAP (Association of American Publishers). If you recall the Archive made many copyrighted books available on their website via the National Emergency Library (NEL) during COVID. Publishers did not appreciate this and ...

How we announced we’re strongly encouraging salary/hourly pay scale in online job postings

I am the lead on the Vermont Library Association website. One of the things we do a LOT of is post jobs. Many of these jobs are in small or rural libraries and don’t always pay well. We made a decision to start strongly encouraging people to post the pay range and here was our explanation for why.

We’ve been talking amongst ourselves on the web team and wanted to put in a friendly encouragement for people to put salary or hourly $$ ranges and description of benefits in their job ads if they’re p...

Ask A Librarian: Adding content to Wikipedia as a business or data provider

I spoke with a woman who works for a website that is frequently cited on Wikipedia as a source for a particular kind of data–think IMDB for a different sector. They want to make sure their data is helping to increase representation of women and facts about women on Wikipedia but don’t know that much about the culture there and wanted some pointers on how to get started. We had a Zoom chat and then I sent along a list of links.

Every page on Wikipedia has a page (the main article) and a talk page...