Category Archives: library life

Looking Back/Looking Forward: Library Science

15 Thursday Jan 2009

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As we enter 2009 — and before I get lost once again in the maze of a busy academic schedule — I thought I’d post a few items on the projects I completed this fall and the projects that are up for the spring semester.


Enrolled as a part-time student, I’m attempting to balance three different sets of course requirements: those for my history degree, those for my general library science degree, and those for my archives management focus within the library science program. This fall, I took a haitus from the archives management courses and took LIS 407 (Reference Services). I had the usual frustration with Reference that I have with all introductory-level survey courses: they try to do too much in too little time, and as a result skim the surface of a great deal of information that could potentially take a lifetime (or at least a career) to explore. That pedagogical frustration aside, it was a good class taught by a knowledgeable, enthusiastic professor (thanks Rex!). I particularly enjoyed putting my annotated bibliography together on the topic of providing children and young adults with reference services in the area of human sexuality. For the bibliography, I surveyed the library science literature for articles and books on the topic (slim pickings) as well as poking around the internet for useful resources. Below are the internet sources I ended up listing in the finished project.

Internet Resources

A number of organizations provide a wealth of resources on their websites for sexuality education that would be of use in a reference setting. Below I provide a sampling of organizational websites and selected page descriptions that highlight some of the resources available that may be of particular interest in a library reference setting:

1. Internet Public Library’s TeenSpace. The Internet Public Library (based out of the University of Michigan and Drexler University schools of information) has a portion of their website dedicated specifically to resources for adolescents, which includes resources related to sexuality. Two pages of particular note:

Frequently Asked (Embarrassing) Questions. On this page, a list of links are provided for issues such as dropping out of school, medical questions, mental health, and social issues (“what do I do if my friend says something racist?”) as well as sexuality information. Also linked to this page is:

Health & Sexuality Links. This is an annotated list of websites that cover a range of issues on the topics of health and sexuality. These links are further divided into sub-heading categories such as “LGBT” and “Abuse and Exploitation.”

2. Scarleteen: Sex Education for the Real World. The web-based iteration of Heather Corinna’s S.E.X., Scarleteen.com provides message boards, sexuality Q&A, writing by young people, and a variety of other interactive resources and informational content. One of the values of Scarleteen, I believe, is its holistic approach to sexual health and orientation, not assuming its readership is in any one place in the orientation spectrum and emphasizing mutuality and health rather than condemning particular sexual desires or practices.

For Parents. The “for parents” section that explains the philosophy of the site and suggests some further reading for adults who are seeking to support the young people in their lives.

Start Your Sexuality Canon. This bibliography is Scarleteen’s own bibliography of essential books on human sexuality, starting out with the famous Hite Report and making suggestions on topics of gender identity, media depictions of sexuality, as well as providing a list of basic sexual health handbooks.

3. SIECUS (Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States). SIECUS was founded in 1964 by Dr. Mary Calderone, a former medical director for Planned Parenthood. Believing in the lifelong right of all human beings to comprehensive sexuality information, SIECUS provides a plethora of free web-based resources and publications. They are also an advocacy organization for greater access and outreach on issues of sexuality, and press releases on their website can be a useful way to stay informed about current controversies over providing sexuality information to the public. A few specific items of interest:

Bibliography – Books for Young People. This bibliography provides a short list of age-appropriate books for young people, sub-divided into age categories from pre-school to high school.

On the Right Track (PDF). This 78-page booklet makes suggestions specifically for adults who work in youth development organizations on how to integrate sexuality education into their work.

SexEdLibrary. SexEd Library is a database of lesson plans from various sources pulled together and vetted by SIECUS and made available online. Categories include things like “Relationships,” “Personal skills,” “Sexual Health,” and “Society & Culture.”

4. Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), hosted by ALA. For obvious reasons, YALSA’s website can be a useful place to research the intersection of sexuality information access and youth library services. They offer numerous booklists that often feature fiction and nonfiction books on themes of romance and sexuality, support a blog that reports on current issues and a host of other electronic resources for librarians. One example of the sort of resources available would be their “Healthy Relationships for Teens” booklist, which provides web-based and traditional resources on sexuality for young adults and the librarians who serve them.

5. Teenwire.com/Planned Parenthood. Teenwire is Planned Parenthood’s site geared specifically to a young adult audience. Much like Scarleteeen, Teenwire provides multiple avenues for accessing information on sexual health and relationships. There are topical sections, question & answer features, and information about sexual health services. Much of this information is also made available in Spanish.

Parents & Professionals. This portion of the site explains Planned Parenthood’s approach to adolescent sexual health and offers links to Planned Parenthood’s publications specifically for youth advocates.

Next semester, it’s back to the archives with LIS440: Archival Access and Use.

Looking Back/Looking Forward: Internship

09 Friday Jan 2009

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As we enter 2009 — and before I get lost once again in the maze of a busy academic schedule — I thought I’d post a few items on the projects I completed this fall and the projects that are up for the spring semester.

My tenure as an intern at Northeastern University’s Archives will continue through the spring, this time as an official internship requirement for my second archives class at Simmons. Just today, I published the last finding aid for the small collections I processed this fall to make them available for research. In addition to my first, miniscule collection the Albert Hale Waite papers, I also processed the collection of Milburn Devenney, a social worker and AIDS/HIV activist from the Boston area, documents related to the history of Northeastern’s Disability Resource Center and course notes from the history department’s Western Civilization class.

Next week I will begin work on a much larger collection, the Carmen A. Pola papers. Ms. Pola is a Boston-area community activist who worked for a number of different social justice organizations such as Roxbury Unites for Families and Children and the Puerto Rican Festival. She served in the administration of Boston mayor Ray Flynn during the 1980s. We have over thirty boxes of unprocessed documents and photographs that I will be responsible for organizing so that researchers will have meaningful access to the contents of the collection. Wish me luck and watch for the results sometime this summer!

Ref. Book of the Week: Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage

10 Friday Oct 2008

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I have a mountain of sources to review and annotate for my reference class this semester, and I thought it would help to keep myself on task if I got to choose a particularly interesting, amusing, and/or valuable book each week to highlight on the FFLA. So here’s installment number one: The Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage. (This was going to go up on Monday, but as you can see I’m already lagging behind on my self-assigned task!)

So, confession of a word nerd: I love dictionaries. Looking up an unfamiliar word is usually a welcome excuse to browse in my Shorter Oxford English two-volume dictionary. So one of the greatest perks of being a librarian — and a reference librarian in particular — is the pleasure of mucking about in dictionaries. So I knew I was going to have fun when one of the dictionaries on our review list for Reference was Rosalie Maggio’s 1991 Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage: A Guide to Nondiscriminatory Language.

This dictionary is actually a combination style guide and thesaurus along with a dictionary of some 5,000 word entries. Rather than being a straightforward “meaning and etymology of this word” dictionary, Bias-free attempt to provide cultural context for how the word has been used and why people object to it. In example:

LADYLIKE. Avoid. The word lady is generally unacceptable, and ‘ladylike conveys different meanings according to peoples’ perceptions of what a woman ought or ought not to do, say, think, wear, feel, look like . . . (159)

Or this one, even more strongly worded:

SLAVE GIRL. Never use. In addition to its unpleasant associations with slavery, this sexist, racist term perpetuates the false notion that women secretly enjoy being enslaved (252)

Maggio also includes definitions for terms related to discrimination (“sexism,” “homophobia”), demographic information in relation to professions and experiences — so that chosen pronouns can accurately reflect reality — and “key concept” entries which read more like short encyclopedia articles (the entry on “rape” for example, provides statistics and discusses cultural narratives surrounding rape). Her overall goal is to assist writers in editing their work for language and metaphor that is rooted in discrimination of one sort or another (sexism, racism, etc.).

It’s easy to make fun of the earnestness with which this guide was put together, as well as the author’s obvious value-judgements which are contained within each entry. Skeptic that I am, it is difficult to see how such injunctions as “never use” are applicable for any word, because words change their meaning according to context. While “slave girl” would be a highly inappropriate description of, say, a modern-day woman, if one is an historian (coughcough) writing about a child who was enslaved, “slave girl” may simply be a description of the individual based on age and class status. Similarly, because of the historically-specific context in which all printed dictionaries are compiled, usage and cultural meaning can quickly become out-dated. This is particularly true of politically-charged language such as is found in the Bias-Free dictionary. The use of the word “queer” in relation to sexual identity and action had a not-unrelated but significantly different cultural meaning in 1991, for example, than it does seventeen years later.

All of its shortcomings aside, the word-nerd within me enjoys reading the Bias-free in order to think about how words were perceived at this one particular moment in language and political history (during the late 1980s and early 1990s). And my feminist self applauds the intention behind the work, if not its somewhat clumsy execution.

Reference 101: Source Evaluations

29 Monday Sep 2008

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For my reference class, we’re required to review and evaluate many different types of sources throughout the semester. This week, we had a trial run: an assignment to choose a single work in the Simmons library reference collection and review it. This process is something that reference librarians do constantly, either systematically (in recommending acquisitions for reference collections) or more improvisationally (when assisting patrons in answering reference questions). At the MHS, all of us on the Reader Services Staff take our turn highlighting a reference work in our collection as part of an ongoing “reference book of the week” project. For those of you who are interested in what goes into such an evaluation, below is the assignment I did this week for class.

Walter, Lynn. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Women’s Issues Worldwide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.

The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Women’s Issues Worldwide provides researchers with an easily-navigable overview of contemporary women’s issues across the globe. The work is organized in six volumes by geographical region (Asia and Oceania, Central and South America, Europe, The Middle East and North Africa, North America and the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa). Within each volume, the contents are arranged alphabetically by country, or group of countries, profiled. Each volume was edited by a scholar who is an authority on the region, and contributors are drawn from predominantly American universities, with a healthy representation of individuals at institutions of higher education across the globe.

Each contributor was asked to profile her or his assigned country, or group of countries, with an eye toward “locating women’s agendas,” “differences among women” within the region, and the activities of self-identified women’s movements and non-governmental organizations. Each author follows the same outline, covering uniform topics that fall under the broad categories of “education,” “employment and the economy,” “family and sexuality,” “health,” “politics and law,” “religion and spirituality,” “violence,” and “outlook for the twenty-first century.” The summary narrative is augmented by a selected bibliography and resource guide within each chapter that points the researcher to further information in suggested readings, audio-visual and Internet material, and organizations of note.

With each chapter laid out in the same basic pattern, it is fairly simple for the researcher to cross-reference subjects such as “contraception and abortion” to find out how access to birth control varies depending on whether one lives in Denmark, the United States, or South Africa. Each volume contains a subject and person index for that volume, with a comprehensive index found at the end of volume six. Maps and images are included, though not in color, and are not indicated in a separate index. Appendices in each volume provide statistical information on the education, health, economic status, and political participation of women in the region.

Reviewing the encyclopedia for Choice Reviews Online in May 2004, P. Palmer describes the work as “current, well written, and informative, providing scholarly content, useful detail, and sound documentation.” Sally Moffitt, reviewing for Reference & User Services Quarterly, highlights the ease of cross-country comparisons and points out that “it will be a matter of regret if its editors fail to bring out regularly updated editions.” Indeed, since it was published in 2003 the Encyclopedia of Women’s Issues is now five years out of date as a truly contemporary source of information on global women’s issues. However, it remains the most recently-published resource attempting this level of breadth and depth, and is a valuable tool for both entry-level students of women’s studies as well as higher-level researchers seeking comparative data the status and experience of women worldwide. The target audience is students and faculty in higher education, although high school students with a particular research need will also find it accessible and informative.

[1] P. Palmer, review of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Women’s Issues Worldwide, by Lynn Walter, Choice Reviews Online (May 2004). Available online at http://0-www.cro2.org.library.simmons.edu/default.aspx?page=reviewdisplay&pid=2658010. Accessed 27 September 2008.

[2] Sally Moffitt, review of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Women’s Issues Worldwide, by Lynn Walter, Reference & User Services Quarterly vol. 43, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 348-349.

First online finding aid!

05 Friday Sep 2008

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This morning I finished and published my first online archival finding aid as part of my internship at Northeastern Archives. It involved a lot of fancy footwork with Microsoft Word macros and Dreamweaver . . . but the important thing in the end was that it worked and the papers of one Albert Hale Waite (graduate of Northeastern’s School of Law, class of 1933) are now fully processed and accessible for research. You can view the finding aid for Mr. Waite here.

Semester-in-Review: Cataloging

19 Monday May 2008

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Now that the term is over and I’m starting to recover my faculties, I thought I would treat y’all to a taste of the sort of work I was doing over the term. Cataloging (officially known as “Information Organization”), taught by the legendary Candy Schwartz, was a whirlwind introduction to the principles of information organization. One of my favorite segments of the term was actually the final segment, in which we learned how to assign call numbers to books using both the Library of Congress Classification scheme (LCC) and the Dewey Decimal System.

In both systems, you have to find a single way to characterize the nature of the book as you can: what it’s about, what kind of book it is, who it’s by, and so on. In each system, there are complicated rules explaining how you locate and construct the call numbers. We had to practice on lots of pretend titles in each system, and at the very end of the assignment Candy had us assign call numbers to ourselves using both systems. I thought I would walk you through how I created these two call numbers as a way of sharing a little bit about how these systems work.

Both LCC and Dewey are subject-based classification schemes–grouping books about like subjects in the same general area. This is clearly a benefit to browsers, who most often go to the library looking for information on, say, fish breeding. So first, I had to pick a general subject area (an individual person encompasses too many subjects to be classified easily in a single area). I tried to find a subject classification that would capture the dimensions I highlight in this blog (the “feminist librarian-activist” self). In both cases, this turned out to be a women’s studies-type categorization, though the way each system broke down the idea looks a little different.

In the Library of Congress system, you search through the classification index, which is available online to subscribers, for the topic. As many of you probably already know, LC is call number that is made up of a a letter-number combination. In LCC, the “H schedules” are the social sciences, and any number beginning with “HQ” is a topic having to do with “the family, marriage, woman” (’cause, you know, women naturally belong in the same conceptual category as family and marriage). By reading down the table, we construct the following:

HQ (for The Family. Marriage. Woman)
HQ1180 (for Women’s studies. Study and teaching. Research)

Below this general category is

HQ1186.A-Z (alphabetical by region or country, A-Z)

This means we use the letter-number combination (known as a Cutter number, after librarian Charles Cutter) for the geographic region the “book” discusses. I chose the United States as a whole.

HQ1186.U6 (for United States)

Finally, I create a cutter number so that I can alphabetize the book on the shelf by author. This cutter number consists of the first letter of the last name (C), followed by a number from 2-9 that roughly corresponds with the second letter of the name (O).

HQ1186.U6 C7 (by Cook)

So I–or perhaps this blog–could be given the call number of HQ1186.U6 C7, meaning “a resource dealing with women’s studies research and teaching in the United States.”

The Dewey system is similar, but only uses numbers, rather than letter-number combinations, until one reaches the cutter number for authors (again, C7 for Cook). Dewey uses the numbers from 0-999 in groups of 100s (so we talk about “the 100s” or “the 300s” as a unit). The 300s are the social sciences:

300 (Social sciences)

Which are then broken down further,

305 (Social groups)
305.4 (Women)

In Dewey numbers, a decimal point always follows the first three numbers for readability (like the way a phone number, at least in the U.S., is always given in 3-3-4 combination).

305.42 (Social role and status of women)

Since I wanted to specify my interest in feminist history, I added the “09” designation, which is the standard number for “history and geography” that can be added to any subject classification.

305.4209 (for Feminism—history)

At this point in the number construction process, I wanted to specify that this was a book about feminism in the United States. In Dewey, you do this by adding the number for the country (73 for the United States).

305.420973 (for United States)

And finally,

305.420973 C7 (by Cook)

So 305.420973 C7 is a call number meaning “a resource on the history of feminism in the United States.”

While I’m not ready to become a professional cataloger, I have to admit there’s a great deal of satisfaction in puzzling out how to classify and order things (hey, this is the woman who has her personal library arranged by LCC call number). And now, if I ever happen to be turned into a book by a nefarious curse or inadvertent spell, I will have the call numbers to ensure I’m properly shelved.

Classification Politics

13 Thursday Mar 2008

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Just before Spring Break in my Organization of Information class, which is the introduction to library cataloging and classification schemes, our professor Candy launched into the segment of the course devoted to Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which are used in many English-language libraries worldwide.

My friend Aiden has been doing research–and enthusiastically passing materials along to me–on the concept of classification as a form of oppression. The connection seems obvious: any time that you construct a schema for organizing ideas, you make choices about how to arrange those ideas, what associations to make between ideas, and how to label those ideas so that others can find them. Therefore, I was tickled when Candy just happened to illustrate her lecture on subject headings with the following example:

“United States–Annexations”
USE: “United States–Territorial Expansions”

Ah, yes. An early example of spin.

So I look forward to seeing where Aiden goes with his classification activism! If he makes any progress, I’ll let you all know :).

Ahem!

06 Sunday Jan 2008

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There’s an ad campaign up around Boston right now for Sony’s new electronic “book” device, extolling its virtues over the traditional printed word. Here is my personal favorite:

Like many great ideas, I suspect this particular ad campaign has one (or more) librarians behind it, since early versions of the ad simply read:


One can only imagine that members of my future profession had, shall we say, some constructive criticism for Sony’s PR firm. I believe version 2.0 is greatly improved (though it still doesn’t convince me that anything is sexier than a book).

Fun With Old Things

16 Friday Nov 2007

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Tonight, I am headed to the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair to admire, well, antiquarian books, manuscripts, and prints, in an atmosphere of bibliomaniacal excitement. A group of us are headed down after work, and my friend Hanna is meeting us there. If I buy anything I’ll report back with pictures! I doubt anything will be in my price-range (<$25) though. Oh, well, it's fun to window shop!

I also thought I’d share this link from the MHS website. It’s our monthly object of the month, which a number of archives have started doing as a way to increase the visibility of their holdings online, and give people a taste of what sort of resources archives have to offer. MIT also has a fun collection on their site.

In the MHS collection, I particularly like the entry showcasing eleven-year-old Sara Putman’s dairy, with an account of her 1862 visit to the aquarial gardens, which was an early Boston aquarium.

Everyone have a good weekend!