Oh Bloggie...

In the words of Langston Hughes' Mother to Son, “life for me ain’t been no crystal stair!” The last couple of weeks have been so chaotic. These last two weeks have found me overwhelmed by work, school, and life! I had a great blog entry in mind that was going to give a detailed account of my stack experience at U of D Mercy. I had to borrow a book for them for my Urban Library Seminars course, and it ended up being quite the adventure. Although, I would really like to share my experience, I don’t have the time this week to properly write it. Hate to admit this, but I really need to dedicate time to my various school assignments as the deadlines are QUICKLY approaching! Not to worry though, I’ll be back to my usual detailed writing before you know it ;)

Class Highlight...

This week, for my Young Adult Literature class, some of us presented book talks. Book talks are presentations that briefly cover a book without giving away the ending. I have to do book talks for this class as well as my Children’s Literature class and I love them! What I most enjoy, is the variety of the types of book talks that I am required to do for both. My Children’s Lit class is online, so the professor has required us to create book talks using Power Point. However, my Young Adult Lit class meets every Tuesday, and I have many more options as to how I am allowed to present my book talks.

Did I mention that having a Theatre degree rocks?! Okay, well having a Theatre degree rocks, and here’s why, I get to use my performance skills to creatively appeal to audiences. It should come as no surprise that for my book talk, I choose to rap and perform a skit that I wrote based on my book’s main character. The book I read was A long way gone: Memoirs of a boy soldier by Ishmael Beah.

The book tells the tragic and emotional story of Beah’s journey to becoming a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Most of the book’s pages are filled with the sadness and grief that aided me in writing my skit. One of the things Beah and his friends loved to do growing up was rap to American music. They loved Naughty by Nature and LL Cool J and would often get together to rap to their music.

Inspired by the book, I decided that I would rap to Naughty by Nature’s hit O.P.P. Before I knew it, I was on google.com searching for lyrics to that hit song. After locating the lyrics, I purchased the song from iTunes, and began learning the first verse of O.P.P. Learning that verse proved to be intimidating at first, but after much practice the melody and words began to stick.

It’s Showtime!! Tuesday rolls around and I am gearing up to perform my rap piece and skit to my Young Adult Lit class. I had a great time performing O.P.P. and I believe that performance outweighed the skit's performance. My classmates thought it was pretty cool too, and my professor Janet Bobak was also impressed. Once class was over, she playfully suggested having me come to her school to do that for her students.

Final Thoughts: When I began to think of ways in which to present this book talk, rapping didn’t exactly come to mind. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became to rap. Realistically, how cool would it be if more librarians, teachers, and/or media specialists would rap to capture the interest of their students? They may not read the book, but if you present it to them in a way that’s catchy, exciting and attention grabbing that may pique some interest. Hence, the reason I chose to rap…

My Utopia

Generally the material that I am required to read for my LIS classes is BORING!! I find the most interesting LIS articles either on the listerserv or from my own research. For my Urban Library Seminars course, which I absolutely positively love, we were assigned to do a lot of reading this past week. My favorite article was called The Public Library in Utopia by Kevin J. Hayes. Although, the article is filled with various viewpoints I chose the three that most appealed to me.

First, Edward Bellamy’s ideal public libraries were conveniently open twenty-four hours a day (Hayes, 2010). In Bellamy’s utopia “no public service or convenience is ever suspended at the present day, whether by day or night, the year round (Hayes, 2010). When my classmate discussed this idea, he posed the question, how accurate have the predictions from this article proven to be? Last week I learned that in October, the Undergraduate Library will be open twenty-four hours. There’s an extended study area in the UGL that is open twenty-four hours from Sunday-Thursday. Now, the entire library will be open all day everyday for students and/or faculty who would like to use it.

Next, the article makes mention of how libraries were designed in the past. The stacks were designed so that librarians were able to keep an eye on the patrons and supervise everyone using the stacks (Hayes, 2010). Is it me, or does that sound completely ridiculous? Granted, they’re some patrons I find it necessary to monitor but only because they exhibit inappropriate behavior. Really, who has the time to sit and watch a patron’s activity while he/she is in the library? A librarian once told me something that I never forgot, in reference to children using the unfiltered computers in the adult section. When I asked why she didn’t stop children from doing this she said “we’re not babysitters.” My point exactly…

Finally, the article concludes within a description of the ideal public library. In fact, the last sentence reads, in utopia everyone knew how to use a library (Hayes, 2010). It is believed with any library, that the librarian must at some point show patrons how to access and/or use the library resources. While I do appreciate when a patron approaches the desk with some idea as to how to use the library catalog, I thoroughly enjoy showing he/she how to use databases or find articles. The day when everyone will know how to use the library is a scary day for me because if everyone will know how to use it, what then becomes of the librarian?

References

Hayes, K.J. (2010). The public library in utopia. Libraries & the Cultural Record, 45 (3), 333-349.

Religious Search Engines For A Thousand, Please

This week in the School of Library & Information Science, a student emailed a link on the listserv for SLIS students to check-out. The link lead to an article on NPR titled Religious Search Engines Yield Tailored Results. You can imagine that this email got people within the school buzzing, but is it really that big of a deal? Based on the dialogue it generated I’d say so, which is partly why I decided to discuss it in my blog this week.

Shea Houdmann runs SeekFind, a Colorado Springs-based Christian search engine that only returns results from websites that are consistent with the Bible (Nosheen, 2010). He says SeekFind is designed “to promote what we believe to be biblical truth” and excludes sites that don’t meet that standard (Nosheen, 2010). But SeekFind isn’t the only search engine carving a niche market among religious Internet users (Nosheen, 2010). There is also Jewogle for Jews and I’mHalal a Muslim search engine that started in the Netherlands (Nosheen, 2010).

As a Christian, I have never used a Christian search engine and I don’t plan to start in the near future. Although, checking out SeekFind might not be such a bad idea! My searches take place primarily on library catalogs and databases due to the nature of my school work. In my spare time, I have no problem using Google, Yahoo, and/or other search engines because they have yet to compromise my faith or spiritual growth. If something should come up that I don’t agree with I may be tempted to select it for hilarity or curiosity sake without having damned my soul to Hell (Pun Intended).

According to Michael Gartenberg, a partner at technology research firm Altimeter Group, these religiously centered search engines are bringing new users to the web (Nosheen, 2010). But not everybody has been supportive of the idea. Some people call it censorship (Nosheen, 2010). Some who oppose such search engines argue that allowing people to only access material that they already agree with will lead to an intolerant society (Nosheen, 2010).

Final Thoughts: I greatly disagree with the comment about people accessing material through religious search engines leading to an intolerant society. Culturally, and faith wise I believe that religious search engines are cool! To see people pulling together and creating technology that they prefer is fascinating. That’s good news to me! Religious search engines are no different than an angry parent coming into a library and demanding that a controversial book be banned. In fact, couldn’t one argue that despite the book being controversial it’s a least promoting literary interest within her child and perhaps others? Faith-based or religious search engines can be viewed in the exact same light because while they may censor/filter results, they are drawing new users to the web.

References

Nosheen, H. (2010, September 13). Religious Search Engines Yield Tailored Results. National Public Radio. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129709336