December Days 2022 #2: Erudite
Dec. 2nd, 2022 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[What's December Days this year? Taking a crowdsourced list of adjectives and seeing if I can turn them into saying good things about myself. Or at least good things to talk about.]
This one seems like an obvious one to apply to a librarian. For as much as the world of the library has changed with the advent of networked computers, the fundamental unit of the library is still the book, and more often than not, the printed book. (Not least because of the ways that electronic books and resources are usually only offered by one vendor, which allows them to charge arbitrary prices for their resources, and are governed by rules that are different than the ones concerning physical ones, which allows them to set arbitrary rules about how their material gets used for those arbitrary prices.) And to get a job as a capital-L Librarian at this point in time, you have to have traversed the pathway of university not once, but twice. That's a fair amount of papers written, projects completed, and books and articles read to get all the way through. (It is expensive, but I did it, and I was able to get a job that paid enough to pay off all of my student loans on time, barring the ones that I got forgiven for working where I do. I wrote an undergraduate thesis, I maintained excellent grades, I had extracurriculars. I did very well on the GRE, and then maintained that excellence all the way through graduate school, even finding time for some relationships. I know more now about what I want than I did then, so even things that could be viewed negatively have some positive benefit.)
The great irony of working in a library is that you don't often get the opportunity to do a lot of reading while on the clock, excepting perhaps for things of professional interest or that you can twist into being something of professional interest, for awards or for displays or for putting together a thematic list. I would like to have a job where I can pick books off the shelf that look good and read them and count it as work, but the reality is that the modern library is often seen as part of the social safety net when it comes to access to resources and sometimes access to other governmental entities, or as one of the few remaining places that sell help someone get up to speed on a digital device without mortgaging any remaining funds they have for it.
I still do book-related things with children, to be clear. Story time programs and visits to schools to promote the e-book platform and to exhort students to continue their reading habits outside of the school environment and context are all still part of my assigned duties. And I have to make decisions about which books have earned their place on my shelves and which have not, so that new books trying to earn their place on my shelves have a place to land and make their case.
I still believe there is a lot to learn from books, especially the ones that are marked as fiction. It sometimes feels like the difference between categorizing something as fiction or non-fiction has more to do with the rigor and amount of sources in the citations rather than whether the story being told is true. For plenty of genres, even though they may be situated in time periods and worlds not our own, they speak volumes about the world and the time period of the writer, and sometimes they are the way an idea starts getting discussed where no other method had been able to make it into the collective consciousness. Sometimes because of the story itself and the popularity it gains (whether the opinion is that the popularity is a good thing or its opposite) and sometimes because the author uses their platform to advance specific causes (we always hope it will be for the betterment of everyone, but there's more than enough authors who use their clout to promote harmful beliefs).
The things that were in the books (and other media properties) when we were younger gave us ideas to work with and concepts to either accept or reject. Publishing is slowly working in the direction of having more ideas and more types of people represented in works for younglings. The more we learn about and listen to our younglings, the more we realize they need age-appropriate materials on far more topics than had been previously thought. (And not always on topics that we are comfortable talking with children about.) This additional knowledge and acknowledgement of the complexities of the lives of our children has provoked a major backlash from those who do not want to grapple with this reality and would prefer their own children be raised in what they declare were simpler times. (The "simplicity" of those times usually resulted from the social suppression of topics that we can, and sometimes have to, talk about now .)
Much of my knowledge comes from books, much more of it these days comes from articles and papers, usually recommended to me by you, the reading audience, and the other sources of input that I have. I'm still learning, every day, from the things that you post about, whether scholarly work or shitpost. That you think I'm erudite reflects very well on you, since you're usually the ones providing that erudition.
- erudite (comparative more erudite, superlative most erudite)
- Learned, scholarly, with emphasis on knowledge gained from books.
This one seems like an obvious one to apply to a librarian. For as much as the world of the library has changed with the advent of networked computers, the fundamental unit of the library is still the book, and more often than not, the printed book. (Not least because of the ways that electronic books and resources are usually only offered by one vendor, which allows them to charge arbitrary prices for their resources, and are governed by rules that are different than the ones concerning physical ones, which allows them to set arbitrary rules about how their material gets used for those arbitrary prices.) And to get a job as a capital-L Librarian at this point in time, you have to have traversed the pathway of university not once, but twice. That's a fair amount of papers written, projects completed, and books and articles read to get all the way through. (It is expensive, but I did it, and I was able to get a job that paid enough to pay off all of my student loans on time, barring the ones that I got forgiven for working where I do. I wrote an undergraduate thesis, I maintained excellent grades, I had extracurriculars. I did very well on the GRE, and then maintained that excellence all the way through graduate school, even finding time for some relationships. I know more now about what I want than I did then, so even things that could be viewed negatively have some positive benefit.)
The great irony of working in a library is that you don't often get the opportunity to do a lot of reading while on the clock, excepting perhaps for things of professional interest or that you can twist into being something of professional interest, for awards or for displays or for putting together a thematic list. I would like to have a job where I can pick books off the shelf that look good and read them and count it as work, but the reality is that the modern library is often seen as part of the social safety net when it comes to access to resources and sometimes access to other governmental entities, or as one of the few remaining places that sell help someone get up to speed on a digital device without mortgaging any remaining funds they have for it.
I still do book-related things with children, to be clear. Story time programs and visits to schools to promote the e-book platform and to exhort students to continue their reading habits outside of the school environment and context are all still part of my assigned duties. And I have to make decisions about which books have earned their place on my shelves and which have not, so that new books trying to earn their place on my shelves have a place to land and make their case.
I still believe there is a lot to learn from books, especially the ones that are marked as fiction. It sometimes feels like the difference between categorizing something as fiction or non-fiction has more to do with the rigor and amount of sources in the citations rather than whether the story being told is true. For plenty of genres, even though they may be situated in time periods and worlds not our own, they speak volumes about the world and the time period of the writer, and sometimes they are the way an idea starts getting discussed where no other method had been able to make it into the collective consciousness. Sometimes because of the story itself and the popularity it gains (whether the opinion is that the popularity is a good thing or its opposite) and sometimes because the author uses their platform to advance specific causes (we always hope it will be for the betterment of everyone, but there's more than enough authors who use their clout to promote harmful beliefs).
The things that were in the books (and other media properties) when we were younger gave us ideas to work with and concepts to either accept or reject. Publishing is slowly working in the direction of having more ideas and more types of people represented in works for younglings. The more we learn about and listen to our younglings, the more we realize they need age-appropriate materials on far more topics than had been previously thought. (And not always on topics that we are comfortable talking with children about.) This additional knowledge and acknowledgement of the complexities of the lives of our children has provoked a major backlash from those who do not want to grapple with this reality and would prefer their own children be raised in what they declare were simpler times. (The "simplicity" of those times usually resulted from the social suppression of topics that we can, and sometimes have to, talk about now .)
Much of my knowledge comes from books, much more of it these days comes from articles and papers, usually recommended to me by you, the reading audience, and the other sources of input that I have. I'm still learning, every day, from the things that you post about, whether scholarly work or shitpost. That you think I'm erudite reflects very well on you, since you're usually the ones providing that erudition.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-03 04:33 pm (UTC)