When a patron wants to give me a hug.

No. 

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Summary: The novel is a detective story set in an alternative history version of the present day, based on the premise that during World War II, a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Sitka, Alaska, in 1941, and that the fledgling State of Israel was destroyed in 1948. The novel is set in Sitka, which it depicts as a large, Yiddish-speaking metropolis.


Why I read it: My mom's family spoke Yiddish, and it won the Nebula and Hugo awards (among others). I also love exploring alternate universes/realities/timelines. It's a pretty great read, and well worth a look!

The Twitter.

The title of this post comes from a conversation I had with my dad, about why exactly he should care about ‘tweeting’. (It's interesting how my parents tend to throw "the" in front of words- my boyfriends mom still calls it "The Bell")

It took me a long time to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. It took me relatively less time to jump on Facebook way back when, but I was bribed with the ability to find friends and travel mates pictures from our group trip to China. I’ve always been iffy about what I publicize about myself, and I found it weird that people would base judgments of me on 140 character statements. Also, I didn’t overly understand why exactly I (or you) would care about what I bought for groceries, that I’m getting take out, that I’m mildly bored, or, as one of my recent tweets stated as I awkwardly sat with a roomful of librarians at an AGM watching me awkwardly from my glass surrounded office right beside the board room where in a roomful of librarians, every one of them over 60 has an ipad, and everyone under 40 has paper. The rest have laptops.

The longer I’m on it (and I’m past a 1000 tweets, for better or worse) the more pleasantly surprised I am by it. I’ve found some interesting professional and personal relationships and as a way to get up to date information it’s invaluable. I’ve found colleagues around the world with similar interests, am able to follow news of my undergraduate degree and I even have a Direct Message (ok, so secret) book club where we chat about all of our guilty pleasure books. I’ve connected colleagues in relating but separate fields of film and music, to web designers and grant writers, had off the wall late night study decompression tangents, and even created a Toronto trivia team like no other. Twitter, blogging and other social media outlets can be a great way to both connect and stay connected but are also an amazing tool for staying relevant.

Government information vs. Freedom. Round... who knows.

Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs Withdraws Its Warning to Students About Leaked Diplomatic Cables

Last week, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs Office of Career Services sent an email to students saying that an alumnus who works at the State Department had recommended that current students not tweet or post links to WikiLeaks because doing so could hurt their career prospects in government service since many of the diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks are classified. That warning has filtered down to some law school career services professionals. Boston University School of Law’s career services office, for example, issued a similar warning [text of email via ATL].

The Dean of Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, John H. Coatsworth, has now withdrawn its warning to the School’s students. Quoting from his email:

Freedom of information and expression is a core value of our institution. Thus, SIPA’s position is that students have a right to discuss and debate any information in the public arena that they deem relevant to their studies or to their roles as global citizens, and to do so without fear of adverse consequences. The WikiLeaks documents are accessible to SIPA students (and everyone else) from a wide variety of respected sources, as are multiple means of discussion and debate both in and outside of the classroom.

Should the U.S. Department of State issue any guidelines relating to the WikiLeaks documents for prospective employees, SIPA will make them available immediately

Why take notes when you have voice recognition software?

Texting in Class: Survey Findings and Recommendations

There was recently a case at the University of Toronto where in a first year physics class, a professor was distracted/frustrated/angered/hurt/annoyed by students meowing in his class. This situation is one of many examples of what happens when class sizes get too large, and students feel they are part of a system, not a person.

Deborah Tindell and Robert Bohlander, Wilkes University psychology professors, surveyed 269 students anonymously about students texting in class. They found that:

• 95 percent of students bring their phones to class every day.
• 91 percent have used their phones to text message during class time.
• Almost half of respondents said it was easy to text in class without instructors being aware.
• 99 percent said they should be permitted to retain their cell phones while in class.
• 62 percent said they should be allowed to text in class as long as they don’t disturb their classmates. (About a quarter of the students stated that texting creates a distraction to those sitting nearby.)
• 10 percent said that they have sent or received text messages during exams, and 3 percent admitted to transmitting exam information during a test.

(Emphasis added.)

None of this surprised me. I graduated with my undergraduate degree in 2007 from a very small liberal arts university in New Brunswick. I don’t want to say I was there ‘pre’ phone, because that’s a bit ridiculous – we all had cell phones, but at the same time very, very few of us had smart phones. I don’t know if it was the vibe on campus, but in addition until my last year of school most of us didn’t bring laptops to class either. This may have been because of small class sizes – in a class of 3-15 you notice when one person isn’t paying attention, or is texting – but for whatever reason, we actually paid attention to the professor.

The authors offered the following suggestions based on feedback:

• Have a clear, written policy about cell phone use and enforce it consistently. State that phones must be out of sight and turned off during class. Make penalties clear, such as losing points or dropping a letter grade for unauthorized cell phone use. Penalties can be applied to attendance or participation credit by assuming that if a student is texting in class, they are not “present.”
• Classroom design is an important component in curtailing cell phone use. The smaller and more intimate the classroom setting, the more difficult it is to text, students say. Desks that do not permit hidden cell phone use are helpful as well. If the classroom contains columns or other visual obstructions, instructors may want to prevent students from sitting in seats that are obscured from the instructor’s view.
• Instructors should circulate around the classroom, and spend some time in the back of the classroom. Teachers should avoid focusing their attention on the blackboard, lecture notes, or on projected images at the front of the room, and instead pay attention to the activities of the students, making frequent eye contact. Survey respondents indicated that it is easier to text in class when the instructor is not paying attention to the students in the class.

(Emphasis added.)

I think the recommendations are vital but it’s also an important discussion on classroom politics in general. In my undergrad we paid attention because the profs knew our names, and would call us out and ask us questions. But again, by my fourth year my class sizes averaged 10 people- when you’re working with a classroom size of potentially 600+ students that just isn’t feasible. The largest classroom size possible at my undergrad was 150 students, and that only happened for first year classes. How do you inspire students to care about the work, and respect you when they feel that you don’t/can’t care about them being there?

So I have a little free time on my hands...

A lot, apparently. Chris Good goes over past precedent where the 20 members crossed the line for their peers. Charlie Rangel was always safe, unless he angled for the Spanish territory in Louisiana. More at The Atlantic.

Then there are these CRS Reports:

Status of a Member of the House Who Has Been Convicted of a Felony (RS21196 April 15, 2002)

Expulsion, Censure, Reprimand, and Fine: Legislative Discipline in the House of Representatives (RL31382 Jan 25, 2005)

Expulsion and Censure Actions Taken by the Full Senate Against Members (93-875 Nov 12, 2008)

Recall of Legislators and the Removal of Members of Congress from Office (RL30016 March 26, 2010)

What do you do if you can't google.

One of the things I do in my spare (ha!) time is work with youth in a literacy program. It’s a wonderful experience, and I truly do love doing it, but sometimes I really do wonder what’s going on in schools. To contextualize, while this is one experience I have had similar conversations with students at public, private and Catholic schools and yes, I remember when I was in my first year of university being TERRIFIED of having to go to the library for books.

“I’ve noticed on some of your Facebook pages a lot of talk and excitement about college. Some of you are getting your acceptance letters back, the juniors are making the rounds visiting schools – what about a Get Ready For University workshop?”
“What do you mean? Like school work?”
“Well, yeah. Um, I noticed just now that you said that you use Google for your research papers. Uh, you can’t really get away with that in college.”
“What do you mean? How else do you find stuff?”

From here we discussed what, exactly, happens during their paper writing process: they use Google to find websites. They cite (if they are even required to have a works cited page) the websites. They are often required to have one or two “book” sources. They use Wikipedia. They cite Wikipedia (and sometimes get away with it). They LOVE Wikipedia arguably more then they LOVE SparkNotes and copy them profusely. THREE of them had ever heard of a “journal” or used a “database” and that was because they were in IB programs and their teachers taught them for their special graduation projects.

Back to reality:
“OK, so when you go to university in the fall, you will have to use databases and find journal articles and read books in order to do a paper properly. Wouldn’t you like to learn some of that ahead of time? I can show you…”
“Nah. I mean, if we don’t know about all that, we can’t be the only ones – we’ll figure it out when we get there.”

Now, I feel I need to make something really clear, here – these kids, are half cream of the school’s crop – they’re in the literacy program not because they are low on the scale, but because they have talents that have been recognized by their teachers and this is a reward (it also allows the teachers to focus more time and energy on kids who need it more – I’m kind of a glorified babysitter). Seriously. Top of the class. Members of band, theater, Student Council. A few have been accepted to Ivy schools in the States, most of them have scholarships. And not only do they not know what a database is, they have never been required to know. The other half are the ones who need help - who need to be shown reading is fun, not punishment, and not a chore.

Want to know the scariest part? When I work with kids who are in the literacy program because they need help with reading, they are the ones who have been taught what journals and databases are – their teachers figure that if they give the kids tools to find the coolest, most interesting, relevant and specific information, they’ll want to learn to read better, and have more interest in reading as a whole. (it works. really well).

Metadata: Not a dinosaur. Or a Transformer. Though, it could be.

One of the big deal spilling of ink issues over the past 25 years in legal librarians is on the topic of West’s Digests and Key Number system, and how those systems have influenced legal research, and, arguably, to a lesser extent how lawyers think about the law. The question of if the free-text system of computer-assisted legal research allows for a deeper, more interpretive research. It can get intense. Part of the big deal is that lawyers don’t use the digests anymore, really, only legal librarians do – and even that can be questioned. I, personally am of the mindset that if West is paying someone to put keep their eye on an opinion, that person could be adding more useful data than simply a rephrasing of a key legal issue. By data, I actually mean metadata (because I am in library school, and we like metadata in these parts). With additional metadata, we could extend the opinion by wrapping the entire order, parts, paragraphs, sentences, or words with tags that could assist in locating the opinion (via queries, search, linking, etc.) and giving greater context for it in a way that enhances the Key Number classification, but avoids the debate of whether and to what extent the “literary warrant of the Key Number System” should be expanded

BooksBooksBooks.

Be a Real Librarian. Just Add Books.

I recently came across this link for the Little Librarian website. As the site says:

"Little Librarian is the first personal library kit made just for kids! It encourages reading and is powered by creativity and imagination, not batteries! Little Librarian provides book lovers with everything they need to transform their book collection into a library. Kids can practice the important skills of organizing, sharing, borrowing, and returning. Book pockets, check out cards, library cards, and bookmarks are just like the ones from the real library. Little Librarians will issue overdue notices and awards. Favorite books can be stored in the reading journal and shared with friends.
To get started just add books!"

I think that not only is this the cutest thing ever, but that I want one for Christmakkah. Please?