a loose definition of "library"

Every day I receive e-mails from websites such as Beyond and Glassdoor that contain job listings. Here are some of the recent listings I've been sent because I initially typed in the keyword "library":

Floor Supervisor, Shoe Carnival (Bloomingdale, IL)

Cocktailers, Food Runners & Dishwashers, Harry Caray's Restaurant Group (Lombard, IL)

Piano Teacher, Thumbtack.com (La Grange Park, IL)

photo credit: Andy Martinez

Blaster Explosives Handler—Deploy to Antarctica!, PAE Antarctica Contract (Chicago, IL)

Cabinet Sales, Resume Library (Chicago, IL)

Technical Scrum Master, Forbes Technical Consulting (Chicago, IL)

Aww, can't I be a technical scrum master in Antarctica? Everything in life is a trade-off.

"Obviously, my dream of making millions through poetry is dust."

My dad sent this Tom the Dancing Bug strip to me the other day, reminding me that I'd originally sent it to him in August 2000 after it appeared in print and online. Tom creator Ruben Bolling is wickedly funny and smart, and he gave good e-mail when I wrote him as a fan later that year.

Now that I'm studying library science this strip is even funnier, although the record industry's fate now seems much more dire than it did a decade ago, when Napster was the only music-pirating bug that needed to be squashed. And these days e-publishing, aided by ambiguous forces of good and/or evil such as Amazon.com, threatens to wipe out the traditional publishing industry, taking down bookstore chains like Borders in the process.

Everything's cheaper now, but we're all paying the price.

playing with infinity

I've now been home from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for a week. I was there July 21-31 for a "boot camp" semester in which an entire course in the school's Library and Information Science master's program was covered in ten days. Students were told well in advance to have all of the assigned readings completed before arriving on campus. Did the majority of us listen? Of course not.

But it was a great ten days, especially since we got to meet our fellow "distance learning" students before returning to our home cities, where we'll take classes online this fall.

Ten of us went on a tour of the UIUC library's Oak Street facility, where books are stacked 40 feet high and stored at temperatures of 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The first title I saw in those stacks was Playing With Infinity, a book about mathematical concepts by Rozsa Peter.

photo credit: Mallory Caise

libraries

"It was my habit to go very slowly up the low, broad steps to the palace entrance, pleasing my eyes with the majestic lines of the building, and lingering to read again the carved inscriptions: Public Library—Built by the People—Free to All. Did I not say it was my palace? Mine, because I was a citizen; mine, though I was born an alien ... My palace—mine! ... All these eager children, all these fine browed women, all these scholars going home to write learned books—I and they had this glorious thing in common, this noble treasure house of learning. It was wonderful to say, This is mine; it was thrilling to say, This is ours."

—Mary Antin, from her autobiography The Promised Land (1913), describing her visits to the Boston Public Library as a child, after her family emigrated from Russia