liprairian

[liprairian]

I know this happens primarily because it's easy, but it still always baffles me to realize how much people don't realize this is how they're limiting themselves. I have so many libraries who, when asked to get community feedback, put out a survey in the library and pat themselves on the back... And hear nothing from anyone who can't make it in because of their hours, or because they don't feel welcome, or because the library doesn't offer anything they need. And then the library makes their decisions based on those surveys and double down on what was said by the people who were already fine there... And their demographic shrinks another few percent.

I think we sort of remember that the first step to building community is to seek it out, but we forget that the first step to seeking it out is figuring out who's made conspicuous by their absence.

I don't believe anything white tumblr queers say about the virtues of 'building community' when they've made it clear 'community' to them means 'me and my white friends.' what are you building? a polycule on a hobby farm?

[liprairian]

Oh god PLEASE hit up your local library and ask for discards. We have. So many

Want to fanbind? Need davy boards/book boards and low on funds? I have an excellent hack for you:

Repurpose shitty books

"But!!!" You may say, "no book is shitty! All human experiences are worth putting to paper!"

You're right! But, also, Counterpoint:

I went to my local thrift shop and got these for the low price of $5 for all 10. ("Getting into politics?" The lovely ladies behind the counter asked me. "In a manner of speaking," I replied.)

Once I got home, it was easy to turn them into this, their component parts:

("Please stop saying you're skinning them," my partner begged. Too late!)

[EDIT TO ADD: Here's a guide! Also on my tumblr. Also - when thrifting, bring a piece of paper folded or cut into the minimum size you need for boards: this way you can make sure you're getting big enough material!]

While these are just book boards, diligent deconstruction can even yield headbands, I'm pretty sure - I'll report back on my next trial run. [EDIT TO ADD: yup, you can!]

I cannot overstate the delight I have in giving these covers new life for binding fanfiction, particularly the queer kind.

Happy binding!

[liprairian]

nearly all libraries have a ghost, but medical libraries frequently have a ghost and a skeleton

[liprairian]

The second you start talking about some mysterious "they" that are controlling society in some fashion, you are engaging in dangerous conspiratorial thinking even if you're being woke about it. "They" did not institute the 40 hour work week specifically so you would be too tired to revolt. "They" did not invent the sleek minimalist aesthetic in order to crush the spirit of art in the common people. "They" are not pushing mediocre media into the mainstream in order to poison people's critical thinking skills.

Your best case scenario after that is you talk to someone who actually knows what the fuck they're talking about and you get embarrassed because you can't answer basic questions about your own ideology because you never learned anything past "the ruling class/capitalists/politicians are making things bad and if we got rid of them the bad things would all go away!"

Your worst case scenario is obviously the woo-to-fascist pipeline and you end up believing Jews are poisoning American food supplies with GMOs in order to turn us all into beta cucks, so like . . . maybe just stop blaming "them" before you fall down that route.

Obligatory round of disclaimers: Yes, sometimes people do bad things. Be specific about exactly who is doing what instead of ascribing it to some vague group of shadowy elites. Yes, sometimes things in society are bad. Learn to identify the root causes of complex social issues instead of assuming that they're actually extremely simple to fix and we're just not doing it because of some vague group of shadowy elites. Yes, minimalism isn't for everyone. Learn that some people don't share your tastes and get the fuck over it for the love of god.

[liprairian]

Just the essentials!

Music credit: "Cinema Blockbuster Trailer 7" by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/329-cinema-blockbuster-trailer-7 License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license (CC BY 4.0)

[Video Description: A 26 second video. Orchestral, cinematic music plays. Text reads The library is on fire! Grab the most important things!

A librarian at her computer spins around in her chair in slow motion, a look of horror on her face. Video cuts between various librarians frantically rescuing items. Each scene is labeled with the item:

The South Shore Posters: A librarian completely obscured by a framed South Shore Line poster she is carrying backs out of a room.

The hand chair: A librarian hauls away a large red plastic chair shaped like a hand.

Patron holds: A librarian shovels patron holds off the holds shelf onto a cart.

Benny the library skeleton: A librarian princess-carrying a large skeleton dressed in an oversized t-shirt frantically looks around for an exit before dashing away

The cardigan pile: A librarian almost completely obscured by the pile of cardigans in her arms runs toward the camera.

3D printer: A librarian dashes up to a large 3D printer and attempts to lift it off the table

Cecily the giraffe: A librarian pats a life size baby giraffe statue and then grabs it by the leg and begins slowwwly scooting backward to slide it across the carpet

The library tree: A librarian grips an enormous planter out of which springs an entire tree and pulls with all her might. It doesn't move.

James Patterson books? : The librarian carrying Benny sprints into frame between shelves loaded with endless Patterson books. Record scratch. The sound of a clock ticking as he considers the books for maybe two seconds.

Text changes to "Not enough hands". The dramatic music resumes as he sprints off frame with Benny.

End card with the library logo. The words 'Not actually on fire. Everything is fine.' are typed across the screen. End description]

[liprairian]

bingo

[liprairian]

This only ever failed me one time. I had a kid I really liked in, asking about Olympic. It was an Olympic year, so I was super jazzed and took him to the section with all the books on the Olympics for kids, and he looked politely disappointed. This four-year-old kid had actually already consumed all the media he could find about the Titanic and was responding by chasing after her sister ships. He would, however, also have taken any books I could dredge up (NPI) on the Britannic.

i think part of why i prefer working in youth services than adult is that kids lodge much better queries and are much more satisfied with the results. an adult will come in and say they want a book, they don't remember the title but they heard about it on the radio. they'll say i think the author's name was goldberg, and you'll say, "oh i think i found it, its by frank goldman" and they'll say "uh that's not it i said goldberg, a name that sound absolutely nothing like goldman" and you'll read them the title thats extremely obviously the only mainstream book published in the last year about english landscape gardens by a guy whose name has gold in it and they'll be like "ok i guess -_-"

and a kid will come in a tell you they need to know about helicopters or they'll explode and you're lack no problem dude. we gotchu covered. and they're ecstatic.

[liprairian]

This is a semi spinoff of this post, but really its own thought.

When a job pays less than a living wage, it generally attracts one of two types of employees:

Desperate people (usually poor and/or otherwise marginalized or with barriers to employment), who will take any job, no matter how bad, because they need the money, or

Independently wealthy people (usually well-off retirees, students being supported by their families, or women with well-off husbands*), who don't care about the pay scale because they don't need the money anyway.**

And sometimes, organizations will intentionally keep a job low-paying or non-paying with the deliberate intent of narrowing their pool to that second category.

People sometimes bring this up when discussing the salaries of elected officials -- yes, most politicians are paid more than most "regular people," but they're not paid enough to sustain the expensive lifestyle politicians have to maintain, and that's on purpose. It's not an oversight, and it's not primarily about cost-cutting. It's a deliberate barrier to ensure that only rich people can run for office.

The same is true, albeit to less severe effect, of unpaid internships -- the benefit of "hiring" an unpaid intern isn't (just) that you don't have to pay them; it's also that you can ensure that all your workers are rich, or at least middle-class.

When nonprofits brag about how little of their budget goes to "overhead" and "salaries", as if those terms were synonymous with "waste," what they're really saying is "All our employees are financially comfortable enough that they don't worry about being underpaid. Our staff has no socioeconomic diversity, and probably very little ethnic or cultural diversity." ***

This isn't a secret. I'm not blowing anything wide open here. People very openly admit that they think underpaid workers are better, because they're "not in it for the money." This is frequently cited as a reason, for example, that private school teachers are "better" than public school teachers -- they're paid less, so they're not "in it for the money," so they must be working out of the goodness of their hearts. I keep seeing these cursed ads for a pet-sitting service where the petsitters aren't paid, which is a selling point, because they're "not in it for the money."

"In it for the money" is the worst thing a worker could be, of course. Heaven forbid they be so greedy and entitled and selfish as to expect their full-time labor to enable them to pay for basic living expenses. I get this all the time as a public library worker, when I point out how underfunded and underpaid we are. "But... you're not doing it for the money, right?" And I'm supposed to laugh and say "No, no, I'd do it for free, of course!"

Except, see, I have these pesky little human needs, like food. And I can't get a cart full of groceries and explain to the cashier that I don't have any money, but I have just so much job satisfaction!

And it's gendered, of course it's gendered. The subtext of "But you're not doing it for the money, of course" is "But how much pin money do you really need, little lady? Doesn't your husband give you a proper allowance?"

Conceptually, it's just an extension of the upper-class cultural norm that "polite" (rich) people "don't talk about money" (because if you have to think about how much money you have or how much you need, you're insufficiently rich).

*Gendered language very much intentional.

**Disabled people are more likely to be in the first category (most disabled people are poor, and being disabled is expensive), but are usually talked about as if they're in the second category. We're told that disabled people sorting clothing for $1.03 an hour are "So happy to be here" and "Just want to be included," and it's not like they need the money, since, as we all know, disability benefits are ample and generous [heavy sarcasm].

***Unless, of course, they're a nonprofit whose "mission" involves "job placement," in which case what they're saying is "We exploit the poor and desperate people we're purporting to help." Either way, "We pay our employees like crap" is nothing to brag about.

[liprairian]

clients across the world in all trades have access to smaller jpegs than you can even imagine

[liprairian]

Libby's search here is somewhat misleading; despite hitting "Blake Pierce (author)" in the search, it actually still counts partial matches in your results total. There isn't a way to search by one particular piece of metadata that I can find in the app. Luckily, the Overdrive catalogue itself (this is the one referred to in the article, which is where librarians shop for Overdrive items) has a slightly better system. I assume there'd be riots if they didn't.

Once selected, Author Blake Pierce has 770 books and, interestingly, substantially more than that in audiobooks. That's definitely the oddest part, to my eyes.

I think the article is misleading too, if I'm being honest - the article writer doesn't seem to be super familiar with how or why this would affect library purchasing, and reports on it as a sort of scandal. None of the possibilities the article speculates on are really that big a problem, from the point of view of library purchasers.

The worst effect of floods of AI fake authors on library purchasing would be honestly no more or less than a particularly large bout of spammers would be to one's website contact form. It's annoying, somewhat time-consuming, and indicative of scummy behaviour on the part of the scammers, but it isn't an industry upset, at least where libraries are concerned. The criteria in your standard collection development policies are honestly really good at handling this sort of thing already. The mandate of a public library is so huge and potentially self-contradictory that collection development policies in particular have a really fantastic balance between guidance and flexibility. Selection criteria are reasons to consider an item, not a list of possible failure points as reasons to kick it out the door.

The problem and the solution is this: Even if you were browsing for failure points, there isn't a single thing on that list of selection criteria you can ding an AI-written item for that isn't also perpetrated by a human author and duly represented somewhere in a library collection because somewhere, other criteria outweighed that issue.

So the real question becomes, does an AI-written item stand out on any of the reasons to select it? The "AI-written" part is redundant; it's the same question no matter what. Generally, the only reason an AI-written item is at all likely to be considered when following a normal collection development policy is a high amount of patron demand. And at that point, the answer is almost certainly just to buy the damn thing; if it's actually in demand, it's serving some need in the community even if we can't imagine what that could possibly be.

Please read this. It is deeply, DEEPLY freakish.

[Robin, a librarian] received a message from a patron of her library system that there was something wrong with an audiobook they had borrowed. The patron reported that during a quiet part of the audio, there seemed to be a tiny portion of another recording inserted into the silence. It happened more than a few times and the patron also provided a timestamp, because this patron is very awesome. Robin says that this isn’t unusual, and the process is pretty routine:  “It’s usually just a corrupted file transfer or something. And we contact the publisher and let them know, or let OverDrive know, and it gets re-uploaded.” So then what happened?  Robin: “So I went to look up the specific book to see who the publisher was. Mostly because I wanted to know. We would contact OverDrive about the error, and they would fix, or talk to the publisher directly.” Digital files get corrupted often enough, so this isn’t alarming. But then, Robin and her coworkers noticed the name of the narrator: “Scarlett Synthesized Voice.”

And that's just the beginning of it. Who is "author" Blake Pierce, and how do they have more than seven hundred books??

[liprairian]

I think we should all fuck off. I think we should all go to the library and just fuck off.

[liprairian]

This post is going around my circle and I keep feeling unwarrantedly smug about my answer but it's just because we all lowkey panic every time a book series gets adapted by Netflix.

I tried the first book so I could have an idea of what everyone was on about and couldn't figure out anything to like about anyone, so I left. This gives Bridgerton points over Virgin Rover because despite deciding that the Bridgerton brothers have terrifying unaddressed anger management issues, I did get enough of the way through that series that I based this conclusion on "3 out of 3 sisters' love interests have been beaten up by the Bridgerton brothers".

[liprairian]

Was just reading this post and didn't want to derail it but God, the "women work for pocket money" thing hits so fucking hard in my corner of this industry. It's often better in the cities, but in the small rural libraries where I work, it's this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. There are so many tiny libraries where the manager works part-time hours, minimum wage no benefits, to run what amounts to a single-person business. If you ask them about it, it is always a passion project for them - because nobody who needed to make a living from it would ever have been able to apply.

You start talking to people and it becomes terrifyingly clear that rural libraries are basically a Husband-Subsidized Industry. That's not casting any aspersions on the husbands - one of the really common ways they subsidize is by providing free labour because they want to help their spouses! But I look at all that free labour and the fact that you couldn't work these jobs at all without a spouse earning more to pick up the slack... How much of libraries is propped up by the Husband Subsidy?

[liprairian]

i'm tired of how boring the little free libraries are in my neighborhood. i'm going make a little newspaper to put in them. i will inject some whimsy and delight into this godforsaken suburb all by myself

[liprairian]

<.<

His nonfiction is one of my all-time favourite pulls for when I'm looking for something fun to add to booklists, I am uncertain when he sleeps but grateful he doesn't.

aparently in the latest fantastic 4 comics johnny storm has been in a relationship with an alien, and that would be pretty standard affair for marvel heroes, right.

except someone at marvel with fucking balls of steel and the biggest brain in the known universe made the alien look... actually alien

this is the greatest thing ive seen in my life, is almost enough to make me want to read the comic

[liprairian]

[liprairian]

Ppl on the other hellsite losing their minds over this in every imaginable direction lmao