Not only was my Friday drive to Pillars of Light & Love out in Trappe beautiful, it included a great listen. The Pulse focused on the rebirth of libraries, included a terrific interview with Siobhan Reardon, president & director of the Philadelphia Free Library ~and~ Library Journal's 2015 Librarian of the Year. A bold librarian, happily seizing this present day & striding boldly into the future.
A moment for confession - I've been having a passionate love affair with the Philadelphia Free Library since 1969, when I first used its theater archives to write a paper on Charles MacArthur for Greta Doering's class. It was my salvation in college, providing priceless resources on the Alexandrian Library (a paper for Prescott Rogers). It was the site of long leisurely visits & wonderful birthday parties for family friend, Marguerite de Angeli. It captured my teenage heart & never let go.
What unexpected joy, listening to Siobhan talk about my beloved library, its surprisingly forward thinking designers laying it out in a way that the building could be easily refitted for new uses. I never knew that the "book smell" I love so much is actually the scent of their decay! Oh, she was marvelous to hear.
My reader's heart raced, hearing plans for Temple's $170 million library, due to be up & running in 2017. And I do mean running, thanks to bookbots. The interview with Temple's dean of libraries, Joseph Lucia, is an engrossing listen, an engaging read.
My favorite listen - first on Friday, then again yesterday with John - was the segment on young librarians. Still smiling, remembering Jay Granger, a management & library/information sciences student in the online program at the University of Southern California (what a mouthful!), saying, "We will need to embrace a whole new kind of noise in the profession. Shushing in the digital age will just get spit on your computer screen."
From Jay, I learned how information specialists are capturing the Twitter feeds of the Arab Spring & other happening events. The historical - even the here & now - importance of tweets never occurred to me. How do we collect & archive digital pages? Jay explains what I'd never considered.
Another think I never thought was about the ink in an e-reader, the stuff that makes the letters. Turns out, what's described as "the gold standard" for most of today's e-readers was the brain child of J. D. Albert back in his twenties, a student at MIT. Who knew that digital INK could be so fascinating!
It just hit me that today - when we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday - is perfect for ballyhooing books & libraries. There was a reason slaves were not allowed to learn how to read. What a power keg a free library could be to an enslaved mind!
What better day to celebrate libraries - especially public libraries & our own Free Library of Philadelphia (the first free public library anywhere, founded by Ben Franklin) than this particular day?!!
Three cheers for libraries, for the librarians I know & love at the Southampton & Feasterville & Upper Moreland & Abington & Doylestown & Penns Park libaries, at the Free Library of Philadelphia (a special shout out to Amity Doering!), at the BACS library & ANC media center, and at my beloved Swedenborg Library!!!
Credits:
1) Family Circus, King Features Syndicate
2) philly.com
3) serendip.brynmawr.edu
4) archiveazcentral.com
5) azquotes.com
6) oxfordlibraries.wordpress.com
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