Conferencing

In the past week I was lucky enough to attend two library conference, at least in part. I went to one program at the Association for Jewish Libraries and spent two full days at the American Library Association conference.

The program I attended at the Association for Jewish Libraries conference was about German libraries' (specifically the Berlin State Library) possession of books that were formerly owned by Jews prior to the Holocaust. In the case of the Berlin State Library they are trying to find the past owners of these books (or their heirs) and return them. While I feel this is a noble deed it is creating hours of research and sometimes does not gain any return. The director of the Berlin State Library was the speaker at this program and she said she will not keep any stolen books in the library. The problem with this statement is that if a library were to truly uphold that statement there would be no antique books in the library because at one point or other they were all stolen.

Also as a Jew who has grown up with the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and World War II thrown at me from every angle I am tired of hearing about it. There is more to Judaism than the Holocaust and there comes a point where we need to find a happy medium between remembering what happened and moving on. Perhaps it would be better for the Berlin State Library to put a bookplate each "stolen" book to commemorate how it came to the library and make a note in the online catalog that corresponds with the bookplate. This allows the memory of these books and their previous owners to live on but also allows us to move on.

I was able to spend more time at the ALA Conference because it was held over the weekend. I attended sessions on Saturday and Sunday as well as visiting the exhibit hall. This was my first ALA Conference and I was immediately overwhelmed by the sheer amount of librarians that were all in one place.

Each day I was there I spent the mornings in the exhibition hall and the afternoons in programs. The exhibits are full of anything a library might need from book publishers to shelves to put them on. I spent most of my time in the publisher exhibits seeing what was new in children's and YA books. I ended up taking home about 20 new books, some for free and some for a nominal price, many of them were also signed by the author. I would have loved to spend more time in the technology pavilion but since I was not working in a library I did not have a technological need that needed to be met.

The two programs I attended were sponsored in part by the Office of Intellectual Freedom. The first one was called Libraries, Librarians, and America's War on Sex and talked primarily about how difficult it is to educate children about sex because a large part of America wants to demonize sex. The book It's Perfectly Normal was used as an example. Many adults believe this book is pornographic because it shows drawings of naked men and women with different body types and at different ages. The point of these drawings (really cartoons) is to demonstrate how everyone's body is a little different and that is ok.

The second program was titled Why is Tango So Scary? and was about the brilliant children's book And Tango Makes Three. This book is a true story about two male penguins from the Central Park Zoo that fall in love and raise a penguin baby (Tango). The couple that wrote it was at the panel (along with their own baby girl) as well as some librarians who have experience dealing with outraged parents who try and attack this book. GLBTQ children's books have always been challenged but this book in particular gets a lot of challenges. Perhaps it is because it is a real story or maybe because it is about penguins and this shows that homosexuality is in nature and not a choice. But most likely it is because it is a book that is about a happy gay family that does not in any way depict sex, which is perhaps even harder for the homophobes to deal with than one that does depict sex.

I attended the GLBT Roundtable Social on Saturday which was also part of the ALA Convention. Here I met two wonderful YA librarians who were fairly new librarians. They were very encouraging about my quest to find a job and I was very excited that they read Garrett's column in Public Libraries magazine (which makes them a-ok in my book). The three of us also got together to meet for lunch the following day, it was really fantastic to make some friends.

I have decided that with all of the free books I got last weekend I would use this time to read and learn to write book reviews (a good skill for a librarian) which I will post here for all to see. So hopefully I will start updated this blog a bit more and have some useful information for others to read. If I can't be a librarian in a library I will try to be a librarian online.