Library Lackey

This is my current list of things to do, in decreasing order of importance:

Return books to the shelves
Cover Books in preparation for being shelved
Finish Display project, unless it is at a point where I cannot do anything in which case move to 
Work on making the website suck less (I need to be delegating to Aaron, but I have not been in at the same time as him for a while now)
Weeding books
Facing stacks
Cry (I never do this, as there is always something more important to do)

I've been on a bit of a tear lately with weeding books. I even have commandeered a cart for the express purpose of hunting down books that don't get checked out. Commandeer... cart... condemnation cart...

 

Poor Mary, every time she empties the cart I go out and retrieve a new load of books. At this point I have shifted at least 200 pounds of books through the system, and that is with being incredibly kind to some sections. As an example, quilting is extremely popular here. The 746.6 section devoted to needleworking in general and quilting in particular took up, no joke, three full-to-bursting shelves. Now it still takes up three shelves, but there is enough extra space to market books by showing off their bright covers and cheery titles. "GEORGIA BONESTEEL'S NEW IDEAS FOR LAP QUILTING" is one of my personal favorites. Georgia Bonesteel is this amazingly well known quilter (quiltist?) that has written something on the order of twenty books about quilting, all in extremely specific areas. It would not surprise me to find a book called "GEORGIA BONESTEEL QUILTS TOGETHER HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS" with a cover picture of her cutting apart the Magna Carta with a pair of sewing scissors, the Constitution torn into neat strips on the table behind her. If she could, Georgia Bonesteel would make baby blankets out of the Shroud of Turin.

With a name like BONESTEEL, she will never die. I can see it all now: Georgia Bonesteel, quilting dreams as she rocks slowly atop the White Cliffs of Dover watching humanity destroy itself. When the universe wears down, when all the stars have burnt out, when all the galaxies have folded in on themselves, Georgia Bonesteel will cross the gulf between black holes trailing a thread of dark matter and she will quilt the remnants of the universe into a blanket for God.

Or maybe she's just like the rest of us, only good at quilting.

Of course, there is still plenty of work to be done. I've already dabbled with a little pulling in the astrology/crystal healing/dowser section, and that is quite possibly the hardest pulling I have ever done. Being grounded in reason, for the most part, I harbor a certain dislike for astrology, so it can be difficult to maintain impartiality when pulling in that section. As it is, I do derive a bit more satisfaction from the pulling process in that section. It's like anywhere else: first, I look for redundant books. In the case of Nostramus-related books, there were a good six of them. Then, I look for the books with either the most outdated information or the shoddiest covers, preferably both. In the case of Nostradamus, I removed a book that covered Nostradamus' predictions for the year 1984 and that appeared to contain a splatter of dried blood on the inside of the front cover. 

I do love an easy pull.

The Mall Scavenger Hunt went off without a hitch. Even now, looking at that sentence, I am slightly incredulous. But it's true! Absolutely nothing went wrong, and pretty much everything went right. 

The basic premise of last night's activity was this: After meeting at the library, all of the participants were carpooled over to the Twin Falls mall. When there, they divided themselves into five teams of three and one designated person in each team was given a series of questions via text. Then the teams scattered throughout the mall, seeking the answers. The questions themselves were hard enough that the winning team took a little over an hour to answer all questions correctly.

My favorite question was easily number four, which went something like this: Macy's is at 11:00, Chili's is at 2:00. What store's west entrance are you in front of?

This question rules. For one, the way it is written directly implies a store with multiple entrances, meaning that many of the smaller stores in the mall could be immediately discounted. Secondly, the question involves direction skills that most kids these days do not ever get a chance to learn. Heck, a lot of kids don't even know how to read a traditional clockface, as evidenced by the amazing number of teens we get at the front desk asking what time it is. When we point to the clock on the wall behind us, almost invariably they have little to no idea how to read it. Sometimes I want to cry.

At any rate, the mall scavenger hunt was a resounding success. None of the groups got kicked out of the mall, and all of them managed to answer most of the questions. I was even pleasantly surprised when no one in the group bought anything. Take that, capitalism!

For those that don't wish to read back and figure out what i mean by that, my display project is an anti-graffiti ad meant to be placed in the teen section of the library. My current plan for it is to place a vandalized stop sign on a pole in the small free area by Tina's desk, with a small table jutting from the pole with educational pamphlets strewn upon it in a visually arresting manner. 

I have acquired my stop sign, but have not yet mounted it. It's an insanely good sign for the purpose, as it came pre-vandalized! It's covered in all sorts of ugly colors, all crudely painted on. The guy I got it from, Mike at Public Works, was pretty enthusiastic when he was telling me how much stop signs cost. With the rising cost of aluminum and new laws governing sign reflectivity, a new stop sign now costs $70. That's a hefty chunk of cash. The county is doing it's best to save money by buying decals to increase the reflectivity of old signs, but even the decals cost a good $20 or so. 

I've been arranging facts for the information sheet, and there is a gap on the first page that would be best filled with some sort of anti-graffiti image. However, I can't find a good one online. What's more, I'm finding a lot of good graffiti art online. The spidery gang-related crap that adorns walls in Jerome is terrible and deserves to be painted over, but graffiti can be so much more. Check out this picture of graffiti found in Thailand, depicting a soldier using the Olympic torch to beat a Buddhist monk:



That's one hell of a powerful statement. Which, of course, leads to the crux of the issue. In America, there are many groups that see graffiti as an expression of First Amendment rights. Only about 8-10% of graffiti is gang-related, while most of it is either hip-hop or tagger-related:



Generic graffiti is non-threatening messages such as "I Love Doritos" or "Class of 2007". To many, however, graffiti is a sign of urban decay, a harbinger of blight whether it really is or not. Graffiti is much more common in poorer areas. Originally much of American graffiti was created to address social injustices stemming from class and race distinctions, and there is still much of that graffiti being created today. However, graffiti as art is not an issue in Jerome, where most graffiti is focused on gang activity. That's a damn shame. Graffiti as art is a completely viable notion, but as with most things the irritating minority ruins things for the decent majority. 

I'm a pretty big fan of art everywhere. We're human beings, so there is no reason why the things we own shouldn't be beautiful. Many buildings are meant to be artistic in their form, such as the capitol building and churches. However, there are plenty of silos, shacks, and sheds that could only benefit from a beautiful paint job. 



After browsing the net for a good twenty minutes looking for a decent picture of crappy graffiti to place on my pamphlet, I've given up. No one is taking pictures of bad graffiti, they're all way too busy taking pictures of this kind of thing:



Forget this search. I'm going to find a nice, dual-color picture of a stop sign and modify it in MS Paint. 


*five minutes later*



A couple more tweaks here and there, and that should work.

Tina came in from weeding the parking lot today saying she had found a patch of large mushrooms in the wood mulch. This was naturally very exciting to a biology major, so I traipsed outside to take a look after donning a pair of rubber gloves and grabbing a book on mushroom identification (Mushrooms of Idaho and the Pacific Northwest, by Edmund Tylutki) from the shelves. Having all this reference material around is awesome!

I identified the mushrooms as a mix of narrow-cap morels and black morels, then read the remarks section for both. Apparently, narrow-cap morels are suspected to just be a growth form of black morels, which are known to appear in gardens where wood mulch has been applied. They are both edible, although I suspect the large abrasive looking specimens in our parking lot aren't too good.