Registered on extremely short notice, I attended the CILIP Members’ Day and AGM in London yesterday. CILIP is the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, a professional body representing – as it says on the tin – Library and Information professionals in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Members’ Day and AGM took place at CILIP London in Ridgmount Street and at SOAS, just around the corner.
For me, it was a pivotal event, and also the kickstart I needed to get involved with the profession.
I had my first Enquiries Desk shift today! Most of the questions were fairly basic, like, “Which floor is *insert classmark* on?” or “Do you have a stapler?” Surprisingly though, a fair number of people were not aware of the existence of the library website and assumed they were going to be able to access online resources throught their myEssex page (the student portal which has personalised pages, e.g. for their class schedule and other study-related stuff). And some enquiries were so vague that I had to ask a couple of times and was still not sure what exactly the people were after – maybe they themselves weren’t so sure either…
Anyway, it is good to be out on the desk and actually interact with people, because strangely enough, that is the side of librarianship that appeals most to me. I did some library tours over the past weeks, which went well enough. Only the first one was kind of silly – ten people had signed up, but only four showed up and one went to the loo in the middle of it! Way to go to show your keen interest.
We (that is, me and my partners in crime, the two other trainees) have also been asked to put together a library newsletter. I am curious as to how that will go. Have to keep on top of CILIP news to find things to put in there!
Banned Books Week starts today, and runs until October 4.
What is it all about?
The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received a total of 420 challenges last year. A challenge is defined as a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness. According to Judith F. Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom, the number of challenges reflects only incidents reported, and for each reported, four or five remain unreported.
If you have ever watched Donnie Darko, you have an idea of the implications of this.
Why should I care? I don’t even live in the US.
Banning books is a form of censorship. It limits free access to information and the freedom of speech. Thereby, it limits the expression of opinions that are not the banner’s, and also potentially the formation of opinions. If you’re only ever allowed to read books that express a certain view of the world, you might not be aware that there are others, so forming an opinion and expressing it become more difficult.
Banning books is dangerous because if done in one country, say, the US, and found to be a good thing, other countries might imitate it and before we know, there will be books people don’t even know exist because they’re banned everywhere.
The world is paranoid these days, and threats to intellectual freedom lurk around every corner. You don’t have to go far to see them. For instance, I live in England, a free and democratic country, and am a librarian in training. Earlier this year, a Nottingham University library worker and the student he was helping got arrested and threatened with deportation because they had downloaded an Al Qaeda training manual from a public US government website. As a result, a new guidance for libraries was published, encouraging them not to stock “material that might be useful for terrorists.” Some of the unwanted side effects here, and also, more info about Clause 28 since it’s mentioned in the article.
Do not take free access to information for granted, and be aware of the threats to it. If you are a reader, a writer, a library user, a library worker, a parent, or a student, you should care about books getting banned and access to information being restricted. No matter where you are.
The 10 Most Challenged Books of 2007
The new Graduate Trainees arrived yesterday! They were shown around the library and their respective workplaces in Interlibrary Loans and Accessions. One is a recent History graduate of Essex University, while the other studied American and English Literature at Hull. I hope they will settle in well!
It’s Katie and David’s last day at the ASL today! They are going to Sheffield for library school, starting at the end of September. Two new Graduate Trainees will replace them come Monday, which means I get to play the Wise One Who Knows The Ropes (or some such thing). They will go to Accessions and Inter-Library Loans respectively, so they can tell me (and maybe you) all about working in these departments. Excitement!
As for me, I am still in Cataloguing, and will remain here until December. I have nothing much new to say about Cataloguing, except the fact that now that the new semester is coming up, we are updating reading lists rather than cataloguing new books. It’s a nice change from the routine, and I get to do things on the web (although Frontpage is rather old-fashioned for my taste).
The Law librarian was off pretty much since I came here, and today she is back again.
Which means that, as the clerical assistant who normally edits records and prepares boks for Labelling, is also off, I am walled in by Law books which want editing and Labelling preparation. At least it’s a change from cataloguing, so I figure I shouldn’t be complaining.
Recently, a library worker got arrested in Nottingham after helping a student research an al-Qaeda training manual as part of his legitimate studies. Both he and the student he helped were detained for six days and threatened with deportation. They were eventually released without charges.
The library worker downloaded the manual from an official US government website, so it was a publicly available document.
As a consequence of this, the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Council Consultation) updated its guidance and basically asked libraries to remove material that could be used by terrorists from their shelves. To me, this is a kind of censorship which is not compatible with the basic principles of democracy.
Luckily, many people in CILIP think along the same lines: Read the CILIP response here.
Today’s find are some interesting books on paganism!
Modern Paganism in World Cultures, ed. Michael Strmska, contains an essay on pagan customs in contemporary Britain. Also some interesting stuff on the Nordic pagan tradition, and it looked well-balanced amd concise in a general way.
Belief beyond boundaries Wicca, Celtic spirituality and the new age, ed. Joanne Pearson, is an Open University book on Wicca and paganism. I took it mainly for the essays on Wicca. I hope it’s not all “stay away from that kind of stuff, witchcraft is a dangerous thing”, but it didn’t look like that.
I am tidying the Biology section at the moment, which is loads of heavy textbooks on Genetics, Microbiology, and (another find today) fungal biotechnology. Sounds a bit dodgy, doesn’t it?. But Philosophy/Religion is on the same floor, which means I come across fairly interesting stuff.
Just checked out of the library in which I work one of my favourite bos of all time: Douglas Adams’s The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Bliss for one who loves her books but hasn’t got too many of them with her right now on account of having moved to a foreign country!
Today I was shelving and a guy came in who had some cologne/aftershave on him that nearly made me faint and fall off the kickstep. Meaning I could trace his way around the shelves after he had left because it was so strong.
Also, I found a book called “How to read a paper”. I know it’s on how to deliver a scientific medical paper, but that does not stop me from finding the title funny 
