andthat'saboutit @virginiahall - Tumblr Blog

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nobrashfestivity

Masahisa Fukase: Sasuke. 1977 Courtesy of Atelier EXB

helnight

small things we should appreciate more

the chirping of birds in the early morning

the way the sun shines through the trees

nature after it just rained

constantly learning new things every day

libraries, bookshops, bakeries and coffeeshops

aliteratepenguin

PSA TO ALL READERS while wandering around a mall today I was ensnared by a powerful force that bade me enter a place called Barnes & Noble. in a daze I wandered the displays and was compelled to even pick up several books that this force attempted to foist upon me at great personal cost to myself. it was only through great strength of will that I was able to fight off this befouling force by withdrawing my cellular device from my pocket and logging into my library account to place requests for the same books at no cost that i was able to escape without grievous harm. truly it's crazy out there, stay safe and remember that libraries are always there to provide aid as you fight against such forces of darkness

official-library-posts

official library post

emmaklee

spider eye arrangements

tinyghosthands

phasesmag

Mark Griffiths https://www.markgriffithsphotography.com/

baddywronglegs

Slow train journeys in rural England sure are an experience. You're going ten miles and it takes a day and a half because it stops at every lamp-post and the announcement says "The next station stop is Ferretley" or something and you think "I didn't know that was a place" and you get there and it isn't

baddywronglegs

Last stop was literally a picket fence, enough chopped wood to build another picket fence and, briefly, a train.

baddywronglegs

My guy Ferretby was barely builded here

baddywronglegs

Two clarifications:

Ferretby's name has been changed to protect the identities of it and its resident(s)

I specify slow trains to distinguish from the other two types of train in England: Delayed and Cancelled

sophiamcdougall

mybeingthere

Wally Dion, born 1976, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Fabric Star Quilts.

Wally (Walter) Dion is a Canadian artist of Saulteaux ancestry living and working in Upstate New York. Working in a number of media including painting, drawing and sculpture.

Wally explains:

"The first fabric star quilt was made as part of a 2022 residency at Wanuskewin Park. It was my way of reflecting upon prairie tall grass and the reintroduction of bison into the Great Plaines. I wanted to make several transparent quilts and superimpose them; one in front another... a quilt for the microbiome, another for the bison, their manure & hooves, another for the summer fires that scorch the ground and a final quilt for the sweetgrass braid.

I was considering how all of these things worked together for thousands of years to create what is known as the 'prairie tall grass ecosystem'. A vast and fertile expanse of land stretching from the foothills of Alberta to the banks of the Mississippi. I wanted to highlight the invisibility of systems when everything is working well, as it should be.

I started with the green quilt because it is the colour of the sweet grass braid that is exchanged in ceremony and relationship building. I considered the nature and tradition of quilting; impoverished craftspeople using tiny scraps of fabric. I considered the act of offering fabric and adherence to tradition. I thought of a thousand tiny prayers and how that might look; invisible acts of respect and adherence to protocols spanning decades. My thoughts travelled across the land, imagining the trees and rocks collecting these prayers like a bush of cloth, or an etched boulders."

prairie tall grass quilts, Bonavista NL, 2023 bison quilt, 2023. 127 ¼ h x 106 ¼ w. fabric, copper pipe. fire quilt, 2023

intothestacks

I hate the Dewey Decimal system so much.

I legit daydream about the day that I'll finally get around to switching the nonfiction section to the Metis system.

intothestacks

YEEES!!! Don't get me started on the 200s or we'll be here all night! I wrote an entire paper during my master's degree all about it!

Also, Indigenous religions being in the 300s under fables instead of under religion.

And computers being mixed with the generalities and what I refer to as "the unexplained" when talking to my students is just so funny. Like, of all the places to haphazardly stick this topic in when Technology is right there.

intothestacks

Hi @tucsonhorse, Metis is an organization system created by a group of elementary school librarians intended specifically to be accessible to kids by following kid logic (for example, Animals and Pets are two different sections, because when kids say "animals" they typically mean "wild animals" rather than domesticated).

It was created with school libraries in mind but was also created in such a way as to be flexible to the needs of individual collections (since different schools follow different curricula) so it could easily be adapted to a public library kid's section.

One of their innovations that I like the most is that the library signage for the sections has pictures along with the words so independent searching is accessible to younger children too.

I've already implemented this in my own library and I've already seen a drop in kids needing guidance to find what they want in the fiction section (which is a good thing, as it means they're confident enough to independently search). Most of my reference questions are now about nonfiction, because we still use Dewey and no one understands how it works because it wasn't created to be user-friendly to the public (let alone to kids).

prettyasapic

Also don’t forget Dewey was a horrible person who sexually harassed so many women he got kicked out of the American library association (in addition to being extremely racist and antisemitic even for the times!) fuck him and his crappy “system”!

intothestacks

Very true, which is indirectly part of why the system he created needs replacing; the biases of a person creating an organizational system always affect how they organize things (and boy, did his biases affect the DDS), and we have no place for his ilk in librarianship.

Plus there's already a need to decolonize librarianship, so what better place to start than how collections are organized?

Another part of why his system needs replacing is how counter-intuitive and non-user-friendly it is. (Even librarians get confused by it!)

As we learn in classification class, an organizational system is only truly good if it's accessible to its intended audience, and the DDS isn't really accessible to anyone. When creating an organization system you're supposed to use the information-seeking behaviour of your audience to help guide how you organize it.

For example, this past year I started devising an organization system for the novel study books the teachers use, and the first step was to track teachers down and ask them what kind of information they need when deciding on what books to use. In my case, their number one information need was to know what reading level the book is and then what the book is about, so the Literacy Advisor kindly helped me label the book spines with colour-coded labels with the reading level written on them.

I recently started re-organizing the nonfiction section with an adaptation of the Metis system, which always has whole words on the book spine label. My books that cover various topics (e.g. Guinness World Records, Weird But True, etc) are slowly being changed to have a label that says

FACTS (meaning it's nonfiction) MIXED KNOWLEDGE (where it should go, with topics organized alphabetically)

It makes way more sense for someone looking for the topic.

To be fair, I thiiink that at the time the DDS was created independent searching and roaming wasn't really a thing like it is now (or as much of a thing, at any rate), so it didn't need to be as publically accessible as we need it to be now.

havingapoemwithyou

entreaty by Catherine Pierce

catmint1

“Winter mornings are made of steel; they have a metallic taste and sharp edges. On a Wednesday in January, at seven in the morning, it’s plain to see that the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure.”

— Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

pclysemia

“EVERY year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch-black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness. The can of kerosene is brought up from the cellar and left in the hall, and the flashlight is hung up on its peg beside the door.”

— Tove Jansson, The Summer Book, tr. by Thomas Teal (Sort Of Books, 2003)