31st January 2008

E-learning Opportunities for Librarians

In addition to the wealth of information and training that’s offered to librarians through sites like WebJunction, other organizations and librarians are providing free e-learning opportunities to be aware of (some states also offer librarians training such as Illinois’ LibraryU). Some sites to try if you want to e-learn more for free include:

InfoPeople: InfoPeople “moving libraries forward” provides materials used in its past training freely. They state that those who use the materials in the Past Workshops section should credit the author and the funding source.

Learn More: Run by Steve Campion at Library Stream, the “Learn More is a series of self-paced discovery entries for library staff interested in venturing out on the social web.” Topics covered thus far include avatars, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, tags and tag clouds, LibraryThing, wikis, social networks, Twitter, and blogs.

Learning 2.1: Expanding on the original Learning 2.0 23 Things, this site currently features things 24-47 and includes discussion around such useful tools as Animoto, LiveMocha, Photobucket, LetterPop, Zamzar, and Jott.

Learning 2.0: Learning 2.0 is “an online self-discovery program that encourages the exploration of web 2.0 tools and new technologies, specifically 23 Things.”

Online Programming for All Libraries (OPAL): “OPAL is an international collaborative effort by libraries and other organizations to provide web-based programs and training for library users and library staff members.” As such, OPAL offers a wide variety of online training sessions (e.g., pertaining to books, civic engagement, health, history, LIS, music, general training, etc.). View the schedule of upcoming events to attend a future live session or visit the archive of previous OPAL events for links to the slides and audio from past training sessions.

A useful list of e-learning opportunities is also available at the LibSuccess wiki on its Online Training Resources for Librarians page. The page discusses and links to both free and fee resources.

posted in miscellany, information literacy, technology, web 2.0 | 0 Comments

25th December 2007

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard translated by Jeffrey Mehlman (2007)

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

“I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.”–Oscar Wilde

Wilde’s epigram precedes Bayard’s table of contents and sums up the style of the book that is to follow. Bolstered by dry wit and an impressive grasp of a range of literary critical thought, Bayard discusses reading, non-reading, and the relationship between one’s reading and cultural literacy.

Bayard writes “Reading is first and foremost non-reading” since “…the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.” Bayard feels that removing the cultural stigma that is associated with non-reading and embracing the inevitability of non-reading (since it is humanly impossible to read everything) will free us to be more creative in literary exchanges and more true to ourselves. To convince his readers of the importance of non-reading and the legitimacy of talking about books one has not read, he organizes his book into three sections.

In section one Bayard describes the principal kinds of non-reading. To delineate the differences among non-readers, he uses quotes from the librarian in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. The librarian explains his non-reading: “‘The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the titles and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian…He’s bound to lose perspective’”. Basically, the idea of this section is that non-reading enables one to keep perspective–to see the relationships “the connections and correlations” among books instead of simply accumulating isolated bits of knowledge.

Principal types of non-reading according to Bayard include the absence of reading altogether (not being interested in content or location) and the abstention from detailed reading (ingesting only bits and pieces of a work via reviews, conversations, table of contents, etc. order to grasp its location to the whole). He supports the latter way of non-reading. As he puts it, this view represents a fundamental shift toward seeing reading as loss (whether that loss is due to skimming, forgetting, or the time expended leaving little time to understand its relationships to other books) rather than reading as gain (toward one’s cultural and individual literacy).

In section two, Bayard analyzes concrete situations in which we might be called upon to talk about books we haven’t read. He argues “there is no such thing as an isolated book.” Each book has a place in the “collective library” and it is the reader and/or non-reader’s job to locate the book’s relationships to other books. This section includes many humorous examples of situations in which non-readers are forced to navigate through social exchanges about books they “should” have read.

In section three, Bayard offers a series of simple recommendations from one non-reader to his readers. He suggest, “To speak without shame about books we haven’t read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps…” He repeatedly affirms his theory that reading is a process with “fault lines, deficiencies, and approximations.” By contrast, the non-reading approach to books enables seeing relationships among books, augments cultural literacy, and reinvigorates cultural exchanges in social situations while remaining true to oneself.

For me, one of the most enjoyable aspects of the work was following along with the examples he develops that so aptly buttress his arguments–to support his points he uses quite a few books I have not read (yes, I admit to non-reading) such as Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose but he also draws from works that I do know such as the Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Groundhog Day (yes, the latter is a movie, but it buttresses his point). Such diverse examples suggest a culturally literate author is behind the book and its ideas.

One need not agree with everything Bayard propounds in order to enjoy dialoguing with his argument. I did not find his recommendations for removing the stigma of non-reading all that helpful, and I won’t be quitting reading anytime soon. Mainly, though, his non-reading argument falters in his emphasis on the social aspects of reading while failing to account for the individual pleasures that come from reading books word by word, phrase by phrase, page by page.

Nevertheless, his book provides much food for thought. He’s correct that each of us only has 24 hours in a day, and our reading selections do preclude us from reading other works. Pondering this serves to make me more aware and more selective about the books that I do choose to invest time in. In some cases, for books that one has no desire and/or time to read, the non-reading approach of abstaining from details in order to locate the book’s place in the collective library makes sense.

Bayard’s work also reinforces for me the value of reading other people’s ideas about a work (and along those lines, Sam Anderson has written a top-notch (and equally witty as the book itself) review of Bayard’s book)). Bayard’s emphasis on the importance of locating each individual book within the collective library (in this case, he practices this in his work by discussing how his ideas fit with the ideas of other scholars with regards to reading and non-reading) while not being a new idea is definitely one that merits the occasional reminder.

All in all, I’m glad that I read How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. It’s a solid selection for those who are interested in thinking about the relationship between books and cultural literacy and about the implications and consequences of reading/non-reading.

Now it’s time for me to take a holiday non-posting break. Happy holidays to all, and I’ll return to post about my reading again in the new year!

Take away quote:

“…culture is above all a matter of orientation. Being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others…It is, then, hardly important if a cultivated person hasn’t read a given book, for though he has no exact knowledge of its content, he may still know its location, or in other words how it is situated in relation to other books”

posted in nonfiction, information literacy, book review | 0 Comments

14th November 2007

Too Much Information

I recently posted a bunch of resources pertaining to the development of information literacy in young children, but, truth is, information overload has threatened to make us all feel slightly less than completely on top of things (ok, completely illiterate and/or uninformed). In light of the information overload that approaches most of us like a threatening behemoth from time-to-time, I wanted to briefly highlight a couple of recent articles that discuss ways to cope with information.

First, the New York Times article Too Much Information: Ignore it suggests “selective ignorance” to be the most workable strategy (also known as “the low information diet”). The article discusses Timothy Ferriss’ philosophy that he prescribes in his book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (you could also visit Ferriss’ 4-hour workweek website for more information…aaah, the irony).

In Phil Bradley’s weblog, Bradley responds with his own suggestions and tips for keeping up. I may just take to heart some of his suggestions such as tip Number 6 (although minimizing my RSS packrat tendencies will be difficult): “Out of date is out of use. No point in keeping stuff that you’ve not looked at in your RSS readers. If you haven’t looked at it in a couple of days then you won’t. Just junk it.”

At any rate, both of these perspectives on methods of dealing with too much information are engaging, perhaps even enlightening, and worth a read (unless you’re on the low information diet, then just ignore both those articles and this post, of course).

Final Note: Small Fuel Marketing has posted an interesting compilation of productivity tools for helping to handle  information and job tasks: Productivity Toolbox: 37+ Tools for Taking Action and Getting Things Done

posted in information literacy, libraries | 0 Comments

7th November 2007

Information Literacy Project

Just FYI, I have added a section to this site listing suggested resources designed to foster literacy about information literacy. The resources (websites, books, and more, oh my…with annotations, of course) were compiled as part of a 2006 graduate school project. They remain germane, and, thus, I have included them on this site. If you have any questions, comments, updates, or revisions, feel free to contact me or to leave a comment on this post. I’ve also briefly explained the site content as follows:

How to use the information literacy site resources (in brief): Since this information literacy project was not originally designed in this site, I had to make some design decisions on how best to import it.

Basically, I chose to import the content so that you can always return to the main information literacy page by clicking on the Information Literacy box on the orange navigation bar that displays below the header on every page of this site. Clicking on the Information Literacy box will always return you to the main navigation page from which you have access to all the sections of the information literacy related site content.

The content is broken up into four main sections of information literacy related resources: resources for teacher-librarians, resources for classroom teachers, resources for library/classroom collaboration, and general information about information literacy and information literacy models. Resources listed include related books, websites, and organizations.

posted in information literacy, youth services, libraries | 0 Comments

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