Happy Halloween!

Have a wonderful and safe Halloween!

EDI Leadership Conference

Last week I went to Kansas to attend the EDI Leadership Conference . I learned a great deal, met new friends, and met friends of old friends. I still feel as if there's a wonderful and exhilarating tornado inside of me full of emotions, memories, and ideas. I haven't sorted it all out yet. Photos can be found here , here , and here .

Northwest Central

I have updated my profile at Northwest Central.

Motivation and Diversity: Factors that Influence the Choice of LIS as a Career

This presentation is from the University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Podcast Archive which can be found here.

Lisa Hussey (British Columbia, Library, Archival and Information Studies) discusses her dissertation, which focused on building an understanding of the motivations of ethnic minorities to choose library and information science (LIS) as a career. Diversity in LIS and diversity initiatives in LIS programs have been important topics in the profession and in the literature. Increasing the presence of librarians of color may help to improve diversity within LIS. However, recruiting ethnic minorities into LIS has proven to be difficult. The central questions explored can be divided into two parts: (1) Why do ethnic minorities choose librarianship as a profession? (2) What would motivate members of minority groups to join a profession in which they cannot see themselves?

There is a presentation as well as a podcast .

LibraryThing

I joined LibraryThing in September, but didn't really begin doing anything with it until last weekend. I've added and tagged over 200 books. I can see that this will be a very useful tool. See my profile here .

O Canada

A music video of Nipissing First Nation in Ontario, Canada with original music by Keith Mcleod.

2007 Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums Conference

The 2007 Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums Conference is being held in Oklahoma City on October 23-25 and even though I'll be in Emporia, Kansas the week before attending the EDI Leadership Institute Conference and Oklahoma City is less than 250 miles away, and I'm on the program committee for the 2009 Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums Conference which will be held in Portland, I won't be able to go.

It's another example of "so close and yet so far."


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First Nations DVD: Making a Difference

The Ontario First Nations Public Libraries has developed an eight minute DVD entitled "Making a Difference", to promote and increase awareness about libraries in First Nations’ communities. A short clip from that video can be found on their website, Ontario First Nation Public Libraries .

The Photo Detective

An article in today's Wall Street Journal entitled The Photo Detective , describes the work of Maureen Taylor, formerly the Library Director at the New England Historic Genealogical Society. It begins:

Maureen Taylor has dated a photograph to 1913 by studying the size and shape of a Lion touring car's headlamps. Armed with her collection of 19th-century fashion magazines, she can pinpoint the brief period when Victorian women wore their bangs in tight curls rather than swept back. Using a technique borrowed from the CIA, she identified a photo of Jesse James by examining the shape of his right ear.


and ends

Ms. Taylor gives about 20 lectures a year, has a column in Family Tree Magazine and writes books, including "Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs" (2005). Her latest quest may well be her most ambitious. Using census records, Ms. Taylor and a colleague, David Lambert, are tracking down photos of Revolutionary War veterans who lived to see the photography era in the late 1830s. So far, the researchers have found 100 images. They've also found photos of Revolutionary War families, including widows, by searching public and private collections for 1840s-era photographs of elderly people.
"We're looking for pictures people don't know they have," says Ms. Taylor, who's working on a book about the topic. "The majority of photographs from that period are still unidentified. They're lost."

A fascinating read!

Banned Books Read-Out

This report from the Banned Books Read-Out, held September 29 in Chicago, features ALA President Loriene Roy and Judith Krug from ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom speaking on the importance of choosing your own reading material, and authors Carolyn Mackler and Chris Crutcher on how librarians "save our lives daily."

Spring Semester 2008 Classes

I've registered to take ten credits next Spring. My classes are:

LI809 Introduction to Archives
LI810 Research and Inquiry in Library and Information Science
LI833 Information Transfer Among Special Populations
LI866 Introduction to Copyright
LI899 Thesis

Course descriptions can be found here .

Banned Book Week

The 26th anniversary of Banned Book Week began a couple of days ago and continues through Saturday. See the ALA site for further details. And here is an extensive list of banned or challenged books .


You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
~ Ray Bradbury

Saving Ancient Manuscripts

A brief article in the October, 2007 issue of The National Geographic Magazine caught my eye this morning.


Filed under Archaeology, the article describes how, in the 1500s, a scholar and scribe around Timbuktu by the name of Mohammed El Mawlud bought and created handwritten Arabic texts on topics ranging from theology to astronomy. When a foreign army sacked the library, destroying some of the texts and taking others, families began hiding them in caves and behind walls. More than 300,000 books survived and most are still in the hands of the families that protected them. Grants are now being used to help repair, protect, and scan these books, some of which date from the 12th century.

Read more here , a story in the Guardian Unlimited entitled In Fabled City at the End of the Earth, a Treasury of Ancient Manuscripts: In Timbuktu the Race is on to Preserve Papers that Document a West African Golden Age

And here is a link to Libraries of Timbuktu for the Preservation and Promotion of African Literary Heritage