Be Good to Your Mother

Well my dear mother was not very happy with her portrayal as a hippie book addict. If you read the post you will see a comment from my brother confirming my side of the story.
Hi My Name is Phil and I'm a Biblioholic: Hi my name is Phil and I am a Biblioholic.

Something good has come from this though. My mom has finally begun to talk about her problem. She has decided to review the libraries in her life and face the stark reality of her situation. They say that admitting you have a problem is the first step.

Let the healing begin.

The first library I remember was at Douglas Grade School in Springfield, Illinois. The school was named for Stephen A. Douglas and was built around the turn of the 20th century. Its time and place dictated that the bookcases would be of oak and have at least some of the prairie style influence. (This library was a room in the school reportedly designed by Frank LLoyd Wright)

It was a small room and the books were divided not by Dewey but by grade/reading level. There were rows of stiff wooden chairs and we were all lead, single file, from our classroom to the library. It was expected that each student would quickly select a book and spend the remainder of our weekly library period reading. By the end of my eight years, before what Phil calls the torture of middle school was invented, it was increasingly difficult for me to find a book I had not read. I would browse through the books in vain for nearly the entire period, drawing frowns from the teacher but no help.

I have come to believe that the entire library collection was purchased when the building was constructed and never upgraded. This had some interesting results for me.

I learned how to relate to other children by reading the Betsey-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. I grew up on a farm, isolated from other children and supervised by my Grandmother. The house had no central heat and no running water. Given the circumstances, it is not surprising that I did not realize that Maud Hart Lovelace was writing of an earlier time. Her accounts of children who could find playmates next door, lived in a city and could go to the library on there own were wondrous to me. It wasn't until I visited the Minnesota Historical Society on my second honeymoon that I learned that she was from Mankato, Minnesota and that the stories were memories from her childhood.

As the location of the school influenced the library's physical appearance, the name of the school influenced the collection. While I do not remember meeting an actual librarian, the person who chose the books must have had a strong interest in the Civil War. That coupled with the fact that many of the Generals wrote and published their memoirs around the turn of the century resulted in a collection for the older grades that included Grant, Lee and Sherman's memoirs along with Mosby's account of the career of a partisan ranger.

The only other thing I remember from grade school was that the seventh and eighth grade teachers, both men, read the stories of Edgar Allen Poe to us on Friday afternoons. But the library brought a remarkable richness into my life. I've walked the streets of Warrenton, Virginia, seen Mosby's house and his beloved Shenandoah Valley, marveled at Grant's stoicism on the battlefield at Shiloh, and attended a re-enactment of Sherman's funeral in St. Louis. For ten years I worked as a Park Ranger at Abraham Lincoln's home in Springfield, spent quiet winter days volunteering at the Lincoln Tomb and walked the battlefield at Gettysburg alone on a beautiful spring morning. These experiences, and my love of history, I have been able to share and enjoy with my sons.

Today Douglas school is an alternative school. The library was turned into a media center in the 1960's.

Isn't it amazing how books and libraries can shape our lives. I wonder what kind of memories the Internet generation will write about and what will be the influences they remember.

Middle School

Middle School

After the heavy handed move by the ALA to put me directly under a library in some of my most impressionable and tender years I would eventually be thrown into that circle of Hell that Dante’s feared to even imagine let alone describe, middle school. I don’t know who the genius E.d.D. who thought it was a good idea to take all of the children at their most cruel and vulnerable ages 12, 13 and put them all together in one or two schools to fight it out but they should be taken out and shot. It is unfortunate that the educational establishment has continued the practice despite the prevalence of bullying and abuse heaped upon the children by their peers. If these groups were split up in a different manner the mitigating behavior and different situation would surely lead to a more hospitable environment for learning. The reason that students aren’t prepared for college is not the high schools but the middle schools, where ones survival as an individual and even as an uninjured person is constantly at risk.

Fortunately out of this crucible of arbitrary educational goals and constant social persecution there formed within me an entrepreneurial spirit that while influenced by the ALA cabal had the potential to save me from its sinister clutches. A lot of students I knew liked to read Mad Magazine books and Charlie Brown books, as well as other comic strip type books. My mom who’s addiction by this time grew from Russian Literature to garage sales and bags of grass clippings started taking me out early Saturday mornings with here to steal bags of grass and shop at garage sales. I began buying books filled with comic strips for between 10 cents and 25 cents. I would then read them and then carry them with me to school and sell them for 50 cents each. I would buy back from the other students any book I sold them or that they brought in for a quarter or trade two for one with them. As I did this my inventory grew. I soon had al my desks and my locker full of books for sale with my most recent acquisitions in my back pack. This went on for 3 or four months and I was clearing between 15$ to 20$ a week in profit. Then the school administration found out and we had to have a parent teacher conference with the assistant principal. It turns out that entrepreneurialship and reading are not part of the 7^th and 8^th grade curriculum. Capitalism, math as in accounting, inventory, planning, salesmanship and developing a business plan with room for growth and additional employees were all apparently not part of my intended education and were in fact a corrupting influence that was against the rules. I was told to stop and received detentions for this obviously deviant behavior. Surprisingly we did have a library at our middle school but for the two years I was there not a single class that I was in went to it.

Well 20$ a week is way to much for a 12 year old to give up on, so I stopped carrying my books around and kept them only in my locker. I then made an alphabetical shelf list with prices and costs in a blue ledger that I purchased and did all my business out of the ledger and then passed out my inventory at my locker. After a couple of months of this the authorities again discovered my subversive behavior and punished me severely enough that I gave up on the book selling business. Yes I could have been a part of Barne’s & Reynolds or Reynolds’ Amazon of books .com. But all of that was thwarted by the educational establishment and ultimately by the ALA through its extensive connections in the educational community.

One may wonder why the ALA would go through so much trouble to get to just one twelve year old. Open your eyes man! They aren’t after one they are after them all. They have Literacy programs and information literacy and constant ad campaigns and volunteer friends groups to snare young impressionable minds and warp them into what eventually becomes a librarians worldview where nothing is in place, nothing is organized and everything should be left to us to straighten out. This idea of librarians’ megalomaniacal impulse to straighten out and rule the world is not a new one. It began in Summer and moved to Egypt where the librarians were part of the Priestly Cast controlling the Eternal and earthly destinies of entire populations through their stranglehold on literacy. Then over 2000 years ago in China the head librarian for Zhou dynasty “Lao Tzu” would write the “Tao Te Ch’ing.” This tome attempts to explain the the way of change or the order of the cosmos. Later other librarians would follow. Carl Marx who worked in the library at the British Museum, would develop the communist manifesto that swept across the world, then Mao Ze Dong, who started his adult life as a librarian and finished it as the leader of the largest communist nation on earth followed. Finally Laura Bush the unassuming school librarian, who all Washington insiders know is the true power behind the throne of the last superpower on earth. These are not accidents of history, but the diabolical plans of a cultural elite who will one day rule the world.

Next High School

The 4th Grade

My grade school in Quincy Illinois had been built in the early seventies right next to the old brick school building which was practically an overgrown one room school house. The year I entered 4^th grade was the year that they finished renovations on the old school house and guess what they did with it? One half of the basement was an music, art and activity room, the other half of the basement was a fourth grade classroom. The entire upstairs was converted into, you guessed it a library. Guess which 4^th grade class I ended up in. That’s right the one underneath the library.

Some might think this is a coincidence. They probably also think it is a coincidence that the LC call number for the Bible starts out with BS. Again it was a conspiracy by those misanthropist ALA demons again controlling my life, carefully leading me down the path of addiction and then obsession. The library was of course staffed with this friendly young lady, who read to us and let us get our own books to look at and read. She had a stack of large wooden keys painted in bright colors. We would take one of the keys and when we found a book that we liked we would place the key by the book and turn it to spread the books open and then we could pull our book out. We needed to remember our color so that when we were done we could go back and turn the key again to spread the books open and place our book back where we got it. I of course was her “big helper” in collecting the keys and putting away books others had left out. To this day I can not walk into Hastings without forgetting to get a movie and just get lost in alphabetizing their videos. It drives me insane. Their military section has a whole stack of shelves labeled WWI and the shelves contain nothing but WWII books. I almost had a seizure. The WWI books were in a completely different stack. I hunted down a staff member and asked her what was wrong with this picture? (Turns out it was Cassies’ old boss who wants her back) Do you know what the reason was? Hastings labels their books with price tags combination barcodes and a topic. They do not have a WWI or WWII topic or subject heading, they just have World War as a topic. So they sent a bunch of WWII books and a bunch of WWI shelf labels. So the store has to put a bunch of books about D-day, the Nazis etc. under WWI shelf labels. Has the world gone insane? This might explain why when I go to a book store and ask for a book on a topic they can’t do a topic search on their computer they can only do title searches. I have to instead b lead to this section with a generic label like “Sports” and look to see if they have anything related to what I want? That would be like someone coming to the reference desk and asking for a book on Tai Chi Chuan and us telling them to go look in the GV section. What’s up with that? How did bookstores become so popular with that kind of service? I don’t even get people asking if I need help anymore (Maybe it’s the clothes; maybe it’s the torturing of the staff) but I think it might just boil down to displays and merchandising. Maybe we need one list of what’s new this week and another of what’s hot this week? (Besides me)

Anyway by the fourth grade any chance I ever had of enjoying a video or bookstore was gone. Linda and I two anniversaries ago after dinner and a movie in Lufkin ended up in their super Wal-Mart alphabetizing their discount video sales bin. Is that sick or what? I’ve got a monkey on my back and he has a digital dictionary and thesaurus he carries with him. I’d hate to think what it would be like if I knew more than one language. Unfortunately this story does not end in the fourth grade. It continues on into one of the levels of Hell that Dante feared to write about, Middle School.

My Name is Phil and I am a Biblioholic

4:45 AM the Last Night

There is one group. Up on the fourth floor. Being loud playing music (quietly) talking and having a good time. I have had to talk to this same group all week. Tonight it is to darn late, and I am to darn tired to get into a confrontation or scene on the last night. If there is anybody else on that floor and they don’t like the noise the can move to one of the three other empty floors in the building.

Now, I know that some of you librarians are wondering if you will chicken out under fire. Don’t you worry about that, I can assure you that you will all do your duty in a confrontation. That when you put your hand in a pile of confetti that a moment before was the third volume of the Oxford English Dictionary! (Cham – Creeky) You’ll know what to do.

Now it will be my pleasure and my privilege to serve with all of you anywhere anytime.

That’ll be all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDecLiA_Qbw

R Philip Reynolds

Librarian

Where will I be Working in Twenty Years?

I think it is like the title of the slide show suggested. The all nighter at the library turns the library into an extension of the dorm room. They study they sleep, they talk with friends, they surf the web, they play games and they do other things best not mentioned. I think this concept good or bad, useful or not, may be an important one. I have just not quite wrapped my mind around why it is yet. I think it is bound up in the academic commons idea, but I think now more than ever that there is an even wider disconnect between our thoughts and ideas as a profession about the library, and information, than I earlier suspected and mentioned in one of our Friday meetings.

I worry that we are not able to think radically enough or far enough outside of the box (and the library is a big brick box, our offices our smaller sheetrock boxes, our books and journals paper boxes and our computer monitors electrified boxes) to breach this gap. If we do I fear that the programs and solutions would so far beyond the pale that the faculty and administration and many of us would not be able to accept them. We need to search the journals, the web, the blogs and list-servs and compile the ideas that are really out there, especially in RIS. We need to be careful with all our vendors and their products. Careful that the features the vendors sell us are driven by our program and not have our program driven by their features. I have been thinking a lot about our RIS home page all week and the more I think about it the more unsure I become about what it and we should be.

Another observation; almost every student, and I mean 95 -99 % are wired to something. A laptop, MP3 player, cell phone, something. I know that we know this and see it every day, but as you may have noticed in some of the pictures it is a little more pronounced these last few nights. We need to be there as well. That is where they are at. This special deal that was recently announced by ITS on cell phones with Cingular, could an arrangement be made to have the info desk preloaded into those phones? It could be called InfoDesk, SFA Library or The Library or whatever, but what if we were already there? What if before every class, we had everyone get out their phone and enter the info desk number? I know that some do already but what if we all did, IL, SI, everyone. What if we had every student worker do this the day they were hired? What if we suggested that when they heard someone with a question that needed answered that they dial the number and hand over their phone? That is viral marketing. How many student workers do we have and how much of the student population do they interact with when they are not working? What do the numbers become when we add all our classes? This is what makes fortunes on the web now. Not big add accounts but people telling other people how great something is or inviting their friends (Facebook, MySpace, Gmail) to participate. I’m afraid we may just be taking old paradigms, giving them new euphemisms and then sticking it on the web or in the classroom and thinking we are making progress. I haven’t seen a suggested professional reading list of journals for librarians. I’m sure there are some. I wonder though if they include Wired, The Register, Salon, SearchEngineWatch, or the continual stream of reports from the Pew Charitable Trust. Our efforts should be research guided. I’m not sure that our profession’s literature is serving us well in this area right now. I may be wrong and feel free to tell me if I am. I think that maybe the research at: The Pew Charitable Trust Society and the Internet http://www.pewtrusts.com/ideas/index.cfm?issue=10 may serve us better and may be the place we should be looking to first.

I could be way off. There are a lot of people a lot smarter than me thinking about this, but when I attend conferences I hear us (librarians) talking about ourselves a lot. When I read and look in other places I hear no one talking about us. The discussion of the Google digitization project is discussed one way by librarians and in a totally different way by everyone else. I know I am paranoid about this. I think it is because I spent eight years working with the web (at SFA which would make anyone paranoid), and have been using the Internet at least 11 years since the old UNIX command line days. When I came to this library there were three people who had worked in the SFA library longer than I had been alive. That is a career path that I don’t believe will be open for you Cassandra, or me, or for many others. I don’t see the library twenty years from now. Very few if any science fiction writers see us twenty years from now. Should we really be working to improve “library services”? Or is that the equivalent of the Soviets patching up the Mir station year after year to keep it going? Mir is at the bottom of the pacific now.

For today, tomorrow, next year and the next when there is a question to be asked I will answer it, a book to be found I will find it, and a class to be taught I will teach it. But, in the back of my mind I sense that something is wrong, the Library Profession is somehow on the wrong track, and that someway the needed change of course or transformation must occur from the bottom up, one librarian at a time, a grass roots effort, or maybe just a lot of rats abandoning a sinking ship. Many here are at a point in their careers that none of this matters, others of us are not. I wish I had the answers or at least knew how to begin looking for them. This feeling of watching a train wreck and not being able to help stop it is the worst part of it all.

I hope we can find the answers, and for the most part SFA library has been a place where we have been allowed to look for them and to try new things out.

On that happy note, I will go see if there is anyone in the library.

R Philip Reynolds

Librarian

Die Hard 2

Well after “discussing it” with Linda, Bruce Willis, Antonio Banderas, Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, and of course Nicholas Cage, may not do dishes but apparently R Philip Reynolds does. I tried to bring up the ninja point again put she asked” what would a bunch of ninjas want with our dirty dishes?” She had me there. I’ve seen a lot of Kung Fu and Samurai movies and they were never after the dirty dishes. I tried to say that a librarian of my stature shouldn’t… but I didn’t get to finish that sentence. Then I thought of the old “I take care of the outside of the house you take care of the inside”, but before I said it I looked out the windows and noticed the lawn was covered with leaves and remembered that the lawnmower was broken. That reminds me “What do you do when the lawnmower stops working? Slap him upside the head.”

But seriously, Linda was very sweet and did the last load of dishes while I was “sleeping” today. She had already heard all of my Bruce Willis jokes anyway and so I knew she wouldn’t be mad. I am lucky to have here, but I am going to have to come up with some new stories or she might get bored with me.

R Philip Reynolds

The Dishwashing (better looking than Nicholas Cage) Librarian

Where Wise Men Fear to Tread

Fourth floor Steen Library, encyclopedias, philosophy, religion, history, law, education, music, and a party between the elevators. I have made two trips up there in the last half hour. At least they are on the right floor “HX Socialism; Communism; Anarchism.” I think they have settled down. Some I think I just chased off and some got the idea that either UPD or my self were going to keep coming up there, and some got to hear my speech. I tell them about the vandalism and how if it keeps up they won’t have 24/7 hours anymore, then I tell them that I really don’t care what they do just as long as they 1) Don’t tear anything up, 2) Don’t bother anybody else, 3) Try to keep you clothes on. I don’t know why but there is something about peoples’ pants and being in the library in the middle of the night that just doesn’t work out. I’m not talking about some guy hiding in a corner somewhere. I’m talking about guys and girls of all races out in the open, changing pants, having their pants fall down, getting tears in their pants, I don’t know what is going on but I think we are missing out on some great money making opportunities. We need a stand that sells purple sweat pants with “Steen Library Sweeps Week” on them the library logo. These pants would only be available during dead week and finals. Fleece blankets and purple U shaped airplane pillows should be sold, insulated mugs for cold drinks. Wade and I had this idea of building a deck on the roof or maybe just clearing out the fourth floor adding some lights a DJ a cover charge and some drinks and we would have the hottest club outside of Dallas or Houston. We would just call it The Library and have lights streaming up from the roof. My younger brother Will said that a library in one of his home towns had the local strip club have a “librarian night” where all the girls at the club (not the librarians) dressed up as librarians (or at least started dressed that way) and then gave a portion of the proceeds to the library. They made a fortune. We could do that with that club down by the river. I bet I could take my camera and get a poster session at ALA for that! (I wonder what my travel request should say? I could also get comp time for it and Linda couldn’t complain about me working harder to further my career.) That would also go along with that have a librarian on your desktop ad campaign I keep talking about. I’m telling you it is a winner. We would get lots of attention. Anyway things are quieting down. I should be able to cut my trips around the building back a bit.

Well I think I’ll see if Netflix has a copy of “The Full Monty”

R Philip Reynolds

“I’m to sexy for my shirt”

Librarian

Day Three

Or night three, at this point does it really matter. The natives are restless tonight I cold tell things were edgier when I walked in. It’s more crowded and louder on every floor. The worst being the lobby then the 4^th, 3^rd. and lastly the 2^nd . in front of the elevators especially. Maybe we could move the first row of chairs and tables from around the front bank of elevators? People are more belligerent. It is hard asking one table to be quite when there are 5 or 6 other noisy tables within site. I have to go to each one separately and they usually have a sullen attitude about the ones I haven’t talked to yet. I need a bull horn so I can tell entire sections to shut the xxx (no wait, inside words, outside words) to please keep their voices down. I still have not seen an unreasonable amount of trash considering that the building is completely full. I have pictures but I can’t find my USB cable to connect my memory card drive. No vandalism and no I am not going to check up on people in the bathrooms! The guys will get the wrong idea and the women nowadays are dangerous. They all have tattoos, piercings, pepper spray, or they can just kick my butt. Linda isn’t here to protect me. If someone knows an area to watch let me know. I chased a couple of guys out of a stairwell I saw them go into that I knew led nowhere, but no real trouble just a lot of chatting. I think the stress and the caffeine are building up and it may get worse tomorrow. I may have to look for some library camouflage or wear a ball cap and go under cover as a student. Things could start to get a bit dicey. I’ll have to watch my 6’s. Only a few more klicks to go tonight and I can hit the sack.

This is Ref Base One signing off.

Semper Scholaris Librorum

Hi my name is Phil and I am a Biblioholic.

I really had no choice. Yeah I know we all have a choice, but the odds were stacked against me from the beginning. My mother was already addicted when I was born. She's a real mess now. She doesn't just read Lincoln biographies, or three volume series' on the the Civil War anymore, she's gone on to harder stuff, like train spotting, bird watching, and even genealogy. We tried talking to her, getting her to see a doctor, even just to watch a little TV but none of it worked. We finally had an intervention, but she's going to have to hit bottom and start scrap booking before she can get the help she needs.

For me it started with my mom. I remember her taking me on my bike when I was five years old to the local Carnegie franchise. Yeah, "Free Public Library" the first hit is always free. They even had a special room down in the basement for kids. It had it's own full time pusher, reading to you, smiling, and being nice. How is a kid supposed to resist something like that that?

Then came school. They actually started teaching us to read?! What were they thinking? I remember Dick and Jane. Poor Dick and Jane, I wonder if they knew what they were being used for? Where are they now? Some dusty boiler room living out their last days all alone in the dark, or worse yet in a landfill with all rest of humanity's waste?

I can remember wanting to live like Dick and Jane. They were always having a good time, always happy, smiling, holding hands and running together, we never did see them the day after, when they crashed. I don't see Dick and Jane running and jumping anymore. I'm just glad that the authorities finally took this meth problem seriously.

But none of that is an excuse for me. Why do I have library of over 1000 books and a garage full of countless unknown others. Why can't I park my car in the garage like normal people instead of searching through boxes for my next book fix. I should never have picked up that first book, with its brightly colored cover and all those pictures on the pages. That seems so long ago now that I sit here 30 some odd years later, a Librarian.

Just give me a minute.

I need to get this out.

I need to tell the story of how a once happy innocent child who loved to ride his purple bike and once walked to the corner grocery totally naked and was sent home wearing a grocery sack, while his mother read Tolstoy. How I came from that innocent begging to now embody the plague that has spawned the billion dollar publishing industry and clogged our networks with pointless ramblings and blogs.

You've seen how the journey began, but can you follow it to its end?


My name is Phil and I am a biblioholic.