Heyo it’s back to school time and here’s a research tip from your friendly neighborhood academic librarian.When searching for any topic on the internet just type in the word ‘libguide’ after your topic and tada like magic there will be several beautifully curated lists of books, journals, articles, or other resources dealing with your subject. Librarians create these guides to help with folks’ informational needs, so please go find one and make a librarian happy today!!
this is the BEST advice, and there are so many options, both if you’re doing academic research, or just curious and looking for information!
Thank you for excellent additions and very much agre ewith you that cooking libguides are the best!! Have you seen all the ones from the Culinary Institute of America??
Oh! Building on your notes I figured I should mention to everyone that most academic institutions with a library are going to have a page with the research guides the librarians have made for their patrons. This will include basic topic guides on things like how to use the libraryorhow to create citations. There will also be subject guides for areas of study like philosophy or biology. As well as specific course guides to assist classes that are being taught like FM 114: Introduction to the Fashion Industry or BME6938: Nanoparticle Nanomedicines.
If any of y’all have started university totally check out the ones your librarians have put up! There’s a ton up to help you along your research journey. And if you aren’t at university check them out too!! Some of the resources won’t be accessible but there’s loads of information you’ll still be able to use and get to.
Hello, fellow academic librarian specializing in instruction! Many libraries also include guides orientations on how to properly utilize non-subject specific databases. Watch those before diving into your first research project so you understand the tools and features available to you to make your life easier. Many universities subscribe to ProQuest or EBSCO and there are MANY tutorials that will teach you how to use them in less than 5 mins.
Believe me, you will save yourself A LOT of headache with both LibGuides and orientations. Good luck and happy hunting!
Ascension Community High School librarian Suanne Gordon reshelves books after a school renovation, a project of the U.S. military and Guyana Defense Force. 9/5/1997, NARA ID 6504646.
NationalSchoolLibrarian Day!
By Miriam Kleiman, Public Affairs
Today we honor the hard-working school librarians who patiently helped us find three sources for every paper, guided our debate team research, and brainstormed creative approaches to National History Day topics. Special shout out to Larry Rakow of Shaker High, circa 1980s!
Librarian at the card files at a high school in New Ulm MN, 10/1974. NARA ID 558218.
“Librarian,” from Labor Dept’s “Stock Photos Depicting Various Occupations, 2002 - 2007, NARA ID 81235343.
Librarian in the National Archives Library 1955. NARA ID 122213574.
"The Librarian Carefully Enters the Consignment Into Her Books” 12/1952. NARA ID 23932351
Pack Horse Librarian Delivering Books to Children, 1/11/1938, NARA ID 148728416.
During the Depression, this Works Progress Administration/New Deal program brought books to eager readers in the far corners of Appalachia. FDR Library Education Specialist Jeffrey Urbin shares the story of FDR’s Pack Horse Library initiative carried out almost entirely by women. Watch the video.
Never have I witnessed a more fragile specimen than a conservative with power. Embarrassing.
Absolutely disgusting
Ah haha!! As I make it my purpose in life to be Tumblr’s gay simp fairy ♂️ and spread Franjean’s LGBTQIA+ Dust of Broken Hearts all over the damn place through queer representation in the arts and literature *ahhh le sigh* I take this as a personal challenge!! Game on!! I will be photo dumping and posting simp worthy gayness for the rest of the day ❤ You can thank me later I will be the card catalog and micro phish extraordinaire!
Publishers, authors, and bookseller groups have joined the Unite Against Book Bans campaign
The American Library Association this week announced that more than 25 major organizations, including a host of publishers and author and bookseller groups, have joined its Unite Against Book Bans campaign, an effort to help communities defend the freedom to read.
Launched in April, the group aims to raise awareness about the surge in book bans and related legislation emerging around the country, reports Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly senior writer.
Among the groups declaring their support for the effort are the American Booksellers Association Free Expression Initiative, the American Federation of Teachers, as well as major publishers such as Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster.
“Awareness is a big part of the mission—but you’d have to be pretty out of the loop not to be aware of what’s going on here,” says Albanese.
“Awareness alone does not protect your freedom to read. This is one of those things where you need to show up—show up to your school board and library board and city council meetings, and get involved,” he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.
Nixon’s Favorite Sci-Fi: A Peak of the Genre During Turbulent Times
by Keith Roysdon
The period from 1968 to 1974 saw the release of more great science fiction films than any time before or since. The period coincided with one of the most turbulent times in United States history, from 1968 - the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the election of Richard Nixon - through Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 8, 1974. Those six years were the time of roiling protests and brutal police crackdowns, the Manson family’s murderous rampage, the Kent State massacre and escalation of the war in Vietnam. And the Watergate scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency.
The headline of this article is purposefully tongue-in-cheek, mainly because there’s little evidence that Nixon enjoyed or even saw many science fiction movies, a genre that had only recently grown past the 1950s atomic monster trend – yetI can’t think of the films of this era without thinking about them in the context of Nixon.
The essential list of films screened at the White House during Nixon’s time in office is What Nixon Saw and When He Saw It, compiled by Mark Feeney for his book, Nixon at the Movies. Pouring over the list of films screened at the White House, Camp David, San Clemente and other sites from January 1969 until the month before Nixon resigned shows that while the president liked movies and regularly screened a mix of classic and recent films for himself, his family and guests, few sci-fi movies were shown: Marooned, the 1969 film about astronauts stranded in space, Fail-Safe, the tense 1964 thriller about a president (Henry Fonda) trying to prevent nuclear war, The Omega Man, the 1971 after-the-end-of-the-world thriller starring Charlton Heston and On the Beach, the melancholy 1959 after-the-bomb film, shown at the White House about two months before Nixon was out of office.
The lack of scifi in Nixon’s taste feels funny in hindsight; I think some of the period’s science fiction films would have been Nixon favorites, had he seen them. If nothing else, *A Clockwork Orange would have reinforced his love of law and order.
In March 2021, my mother, Nancy Bourne, a lifelong nonsmoker, died of lung cancer. Two weeks before that, though, as she cycled in and out of hospital wards, she was on her laptop sending off a flurry of query letters to literary agents asking for their help in selling her first novel. Six months before that she learned that another book of hers, a collection of short stories titled Spotswood, Virginia, would be published by a university press. In fact, in the last decade of her life she wrote dozens of short stories and published 35 of them.
But perhaps what’s most remarkable about my mother’s late-life literary renaissance is how few people knew about it. It wasn’t a secret, exactly. She belonged to two writing groups and took numerous creative writing classes and workshops. But outside a tight circle of family members and writing friends, she rarely talked about it.
Four times more male characters in literature than female, research suggests
A study by University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering used AI to measure pronoun use, uncovering a huge disparity in gender frequency
Mayank Kejriwal at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering was inspired by work on gender biases and his own work on natural language processing to carry out the experiment.
Kejriwal and fellow researcher Akarsh Nagaraj used data from 3,000 books that are part of the Gutenberg Project, across genres including adventure, science fiction, mystery and romance.
The study used Named Entity Recognition (NER) to identify gender-specific characters by looking at things including female and male pronouns. The researchers also examined how many female characters were main characters.
“Gender bias is very real, and when we see females four times less in literature, it has a subliminal impact on people consuming the culture,” said Kejriwal.
What bookstores and the literary life contribute to … life
A stack of new books illuminates the wonder of printed books — writing them, buying them, reading them
by Michael Dirda
Marius Kociejowski opens his enthralling memoir, “A Factotum in the Book Trade,” by observing that bookstores have begun to follow record stores into nonexistence. “With every shop that closes so, too, goes still more of the serendipity that feeds the human spirit.” While there may be “infinitely more choice” in buying from online dealers, “to be spoiled for choice extinguishes desire.” As he says, “I want dirt; I want chaos; I want, above all, mystery. I want to be able to step into a place and have the sense that there I’ll find a book, as yet unknown to me, which to some degree will change my life.”
An accomplished poet and beguiling essayist (try “The Pebble Chance”), Kociejowski has also enjoyed a long-standing career with various London antiquarian bookshops, starting with the once-venerable firm of Bertram Rota. Though a self-described “factotum” — which my dictionary defines as “an employee who does all kinds of work” — he nonetheless specialized in cataloguing modern first editions, once even handling books from James Joyce’s library. Over the years, Kociejowski came to be friends with poet and translator Christopher Middleton, travel writer Bruce Chatwin, “arguably the greatest prose stylist of his generation,” and the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who as the reigning monarch of the joke Kingdom of Redonda, appointed him poet laureate in English of that tiny uninhabited island.
While authors can be colorful, book dealers are often notably cranky and eccentric. One conducting business in fashionable Cecil Court put up a sign that read, “Do not mistake courtesy on my part as an invitation to stay all day.” An independent book scout known only as Mr. Howlett invariably “wore an old, battered, greasy brown trilby all the year round, an aged raincoat in summer and a threadbare overcoat (two sizes too large) in winter.” What’s more, “he carried his ‘stock’ in a series of cardboard boxes,” these last secured with sisal twine until they fell apart.
Despite what pop culture might have you believe, librarians neither time travel, fight mummies, nor have unlimited budgets—read Kristen Arnett on the realities of librarianship.
