This Book Is Overdue!

This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson has been circulating among the staff at the library where I work. It's an enjoyable read about modern libraries and librarians. Her stories show that the librarian stereotype - a prim bespectacled woman shushing patrons while surrounded by dusty piles of books - no longer applies. Each chapter examines a different aspect of modern libraries in the digital age.

Chapter 6, "How to Change the World," explores a distance learning graduate program, mainly for students in emerging nations, that is "designed to give people around the world some useful tools for promoting social justice: a program that would enable students to remain in their communities while learning how to investigate, document, and fight injustice using the Internet." Full scholarships and laptops are given to students from emerging countries, and they all meet in Rome for two weeks before pursuing the rest of the degree online. I had never heard of anything like this. I love the thought of providing access to information to students and communities who did not have it before and, as Johnson puts it, "creat[ing] and activist community across language barriers and time zones."

Chapter 10 dives into the New York Public Library including the Design by the Book video project, which followed "five young artists from their visits to the NYPL to their studios to their final art projects." The idea was to use library resources to inspire artists' creations. I think that is a fantastic idea! (Here are links to the other three videos: Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4.)

These are just two of the stories in This Book Is Overdue! Others include librarians standing up to the FBI, librarians taking to the streets during political conventions to provide information to protesters, and the librarian craze on the virtual world Second Life. Johnson isn't a librarian and you don't have to be to enjoy her humorous and informative stories.