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This Book Is Overdue!
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This Book Is Overdue! (2010) (edit title/settings)

How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

by Marilyn Johnson (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

Marilyn Johnson has been a staff writer for Life and an editor at Esquire, Redbook, and Outside. She has written obituaries for Princess Diana, Jackie Onassis, Katharine Hepburn, Johnny Cash, Bob Hope, and Marlon Brando. She lives in New York.

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “information justice is a human rights issue; the public library must remain ‘the people’s university’ . . . and librarians can get involved and shape the future or they can sit back and watch the changes.’’”
    E.J. Josey cited in Johnson's book
  • “In a world where information itself is a free-for-all, with traditional news sources going bankrupt and publishersin trouble, we need librarians more than ever.”
    Marilyn Johnson
  • “Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level the field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the Ph.D. In prosperous libraries, they loan out laptops; in strapped ones, they dole out half hours of computer time. They are the little "d" democrats of the computer age who keep the rest of us wired.”
    Marilyn Johnson
  • “Are librarians obsolete in the Age of Google? A ll I can say is: are you kidding? Librarians are more important than ever. Google and Yahoo! and Bing and WolframAlpha can help you find answers to your questions, sometimes brilliantly; but if you don't know how to phrase those questions, no search engine can help provide the answers ... You can only get so far without human help.”
    Marilyn Johnson
  • “If you do the technology by now, you're either retired or you're off in a corner, waiting to be retired. There is still too much tolerance in the profession for being uncomfortable with technology ...”
    - K.G. (Karen) Schneider, Free Range Librarian
  • “the weirdos in our field ... we forget how normal and stable we are until we attend a meeting at the consortium, and when these freaks return to the Mother Ship, all the stops are pulled out. I would not be surprised to find anyone wearing aluminum foil helmets or devouring their own young.”
    Happy Villain, blogger
  • “So spying on what they're doing in the library ... is like spying on the voting booth.”
    - Peter Chase, one of the Connecticut Four librarians who challenged the USA Patriot Act
  • “whole chapters of contemporary history are disappearing into the ether as e-mails get trashed and webpages are taken down and people die without sharing their passwords.”
    Marilyn Johnson
  • “If you don't know where to find a book, it might as well not exist.”
    Marilyn Johnson
  • “Having a tech department to consult, it turns out is almost as valuable as having a doctor.”
    Marilyn Johnson
  • “Information used to be scarce; now we're buried in it.”
    Marilyn Johnson
  • “In the next phase of library history, librarians won't simply provide access to computers and use them to catalog, communicate, and network--they'll write the programs as well.”
    Marilyn Johnson
  • “I imagined the wired world of information and literature, full of brilliant, helpful, visionary librarians, as gleaming and immaculate as an Apple Store, except not just for those who could afford the Apple merchandise.”
  • “I've heard many stories about anonymous bloggers who were 'outed' and lost their jobs, and frankly, I just cannot risk it. ... I did start another blog in the same vein as the old one, 100% anonymous, but I don't update it often because I'm too paranoid that my bosses are out looking for me to start a new one ... Writers seldom just stop writing. We're like serial killers in that way. You have to stop us, because we cannot stop ourselves.”
    Happy Villain, blogger
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • Are librarians obsolete in the Age of Google? all I can say is, are you kidding? Librarians are more important than ever. Google and Yahoo! and Bing and WolframAlpha can help you find answers to your questions, sometimes brilliantly; but if you don’t know how to phrase those questions, no search engine can help provide the answers. It can’t explain in simple language how e-mails (let alone the rules of capitalization!) work, or how to navigate government websites. You can only get so far without human help.
    Highlighted by 21 Kindle customers
  • Librarians’ values are as sound as Girl Scouts’: truth, free speech, and universal literacy.
    Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers
  • Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organizational and analytical aptitude, and discretion.
    Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers
  • “One of the reasons I decided to enter this profession,” one of the Riot Librarrrians wrote, “was because I’m in love with information, and the library remains one of the few spaces in our lives where information is not a commodity…. There’s a subversive element to librarianship that I adore.”
    Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers
  • The profession that had once been the quiet gatekeeper to discreet palaces of knowledge is now wrestling a raucous, multiheaded, madly multiplying beast of exploding information and information delivery systems. Who can we trust? In a world where information itself is a free-for-all, with traditional news sources going bankrupt and publishers in trouble, we need librarians more than ever.
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • Library 2.0 is user-centric—it’s not about what makes the librarian’s life better. Just because librarians like to search for author, title, subject the way they used to in the old card catalog doesn’t mean the general public does that anymore. The card catalog is dead, people. Move on.” It’s a keyword world now.
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • “a library may be described as a gigantic mincing-machine into which the labours of the past are flung, to be turned out again in a slightly altered form as the literature of the present.” Books are sausages made by writers.
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • I was under the librarians’ protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
  • Because the digital natives did not learn by being lectured to. They learned by collaborating, networking, sharing. They were not just consumers of information, literature, wisdom, history, all that good stuff—they saw themselves as creators, too.
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
  • Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the Ph.D. In prosperous libraries, they loan out laptops; in strapped ones, they dole out half hours of computer time. They are the little “d” democrats of the computer age who keep the rest of us wired. In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.
    Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers
Show all 24 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

Down the street from the library in Deadwood, South Dakota, the peace is shattered several times a day by the noise of gunfire -- just noise.

Table of Contents edit see section history

1. The Frontier
2. Information Sickness
3. On the Ground
4. The Blog People
5. Big Brother and the Holdout Company
6. How to Change the World
7. To the Ramparts!
8. Follow That Tattooed Librarian
9. Wizards of Odd
10. Gotham City
11. What's Worth Saving?
12. The Best Day

Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography

Glossary edit see section history

  • "born digital" collection: e-mails and other electronic artifacts
  • digital immigrants: people born before the digital age who have to learn to use modern technology
  • cybrarians: new breed of tech-savvy librarians, part cyborg, part cat's-eye reading glasses.
  • archivists: people trying to capture history before it dissolves into the unrecorded past
  • digital immigrants: older people trying to catch up with new technology
  • digital natives: younger people seemingly hardwired for the new technologies
  • biblioblogosphere: librarians corner of the web
  • twopointopians: Annoyed Librarian's derogatory term for enthusiastic proponents of Library 2.0 Utopia

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Marilyn Johnson (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: HarperCollins
Country: New York, United States
Publication Date: February 2, 2010
ISBN: 9780061431609
Page Count: 272

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: Z 674.7 .J63 2010
  • Dewey: 020.23

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