{"id":1395,"date":"2004-12-18T20:13:12","date_gmt":"2004-12-18T20:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ubuntu.my\/wp30\/archives\/2004\/12\/18\/on_being_shunned_by_libraries.html"},"modified":"2004-12-18T20:13:12","modified_gmt":"2004-12-18T20:13:12","slug":"on_being_shunned_by_libraries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/archives\/2004\/12\/18\/on_being_shunned_by_libraries.html","title":{"rendered":"on being shunned by libraries"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the MEA mailing list, there was a discussion about this article: Students shun search for information offline<\/a>. Generally, the article takes the stance that students are lazy and assume everything online is true. I’m not going to deny those claims, but i want to offer an alternative story.<\/p>\n

I was first kicked out of a library in the 2nd grade (for reading inappropriate material for my age… “Flowers in the Attic” was not an appropriate “chapter book”). By middle school, i despised the library, having been kicked out many more times for talking, chewing gum, more inappropriate reading and what-have-you. There were rigid hours, limitations on what you could read and access. The library to me was a controlled space with authoritarian dictators. I was shunned by the library and i shunned it in return.<\/p>\n

I’m in graduate school in a former librarian school. My advisor was a head librarian. I’m still afraid of the library. I visited the Brown library twice – to give out donuts naked. I never visited an MIT library and i have never been inside a Berkeley one either. I’m still afraid of the library. I visit the NYC Public Library to sit on its beautiful steps. I believe in the value of libraries, support efforts to rejuvenate them and make them public space. I’m still afraid of the library.<\/p>\n

Combined with my book fetish, my fear of libraries has resulted in both a severe half.com addiction and a very acute ability to navigate material online to determine its validity. I order articles when i need them and ping professors for digital copies of their papers. Doing research online away from the controlling eye of a librarian makes me feel far safer, far more willing to explore new areas. Being always online, i’ve learned to figure out what makes something valuable and how to trace it to a source (and i lurve lurve lurve things like Google Scholar and Amazon Book Search).<\/p>\n

I have no doubt that students are not equipped to do research. Then again, i think that our schools are pretty fubared, but that’s a tangent. I am not convinced that it is as simple as getting folks to get offline though. For starters, this invalidates the security of information exploration that these folks know. Instead, how can students be taught to value lots of different perspectives that come in lots of different mediums and how can they be given the skills to understand the different mediums? How can the value of offline sources be coupled with online tools? In this way, i’m definitely of the ilk that believes in cultural studies, media students and a deep understanding of the relationship between information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the MEA mailing list, there was a discussion about this article: Students shun search for information offline. Generally, the article takes the stance that students are lazy and assume everything online is true. I’m not going to deny those claims, but i want to offer an alternative story. I was first kicked out of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}