Our Singular Strengths: Meditations for Librarians

Front Cover
American Library Association, 1998 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 196 pages

Michael Gorman, one of librarianship's most accomplished and impassioned practitioners, is back. Drawing on his four decades of library experience, Gorman has written a thoughtful and humanizing book that not only reminds librarians why they chose their craft, but reinforces the importance of their work.

Our Singular Strengths is a compilation of 144 comforting and uplifting thoughts about library work presented in the popular meditations format: a quotation, a short essay, and a resolution. The book is designed to present a topic, thought, or story that encapsulates some aspect of libraries and learning as an aid to understanding and reassessment, and to simply provide comfort to beleaguered librarians. Gorman takes his passion for libraries and their importance to society and offers observations rooted in experience and reason that may provide insight into libraries, librarianship, and being a librarian in today's ever-changing world.

From inside the book

Contents

Mysteries
103
The Impossibility of Classification
104
Political Correctness?
105
ALA Conferences
106
Problem Colleagues
107
The Library Great Person
108
The Outsider Syndrome
109
The War of AACR2
110

Starved of Content
13
Remote Storage
14
RIP
15
Values
17
Islands in the Sea of Eternity
19
Intellectual Freedom
21
Privacy and the Library
22
The Public Good
23
Bibliotherapy
24
The Reference Interview
25
The Love of Books
26
Small Libraries Are Beautiful
28
Clash of Values
29
The Fear of Words
31
Non Omnis Moriar
32
Lives
33
Mister Jones
35
S R Ranganathan 18921972
37
Libraries in Literature
39
Hugh Craig Atkinson 19331986
40
Pity the Poor Administrator
41
Andrew Carnegie 18351919
43
What Do You Remember from Library School?
45
Melvil Dewey 18511931
46
Lonely People
48
Miss Colwell
49
Retirement
50
Laws
51
Ranganathans Five Laws
53
Ranganathans Second Law
55
Ranganathans Third Law
56
Ranganathans Fourth Law
57
Ranganathans Fifth Law
58
Five New Laws of Librarianship
59
First New Law
60
Second New Law
61
Third New Law
63
Fourth New Law
65
Fifth New Law
67
Change Problems Realities
69
Change Makes You Stupid
71
Scholarly Journals
73
Foreign Languages
74
Modern Library Budgets
75
The Newbery Medal
76
Books into Films
77
Burnout
78
Reference Collections
79
Distant Learning
80
The Problem Patron
81
My Ideal Library
82
Present Future
83
Libraries and Democracy
85
The Tax Revolt
87
Copyright and Electronic Documents
88
The PaperFull Society
90
Downsizing
91
Different in Kind
93
Virtual Lives
94
People or Kiosks?
95
Museums of Failed Technology
96
Library or Pipelined
97
Night Thoughts
98
Librarians
99
The Image of the Librarian
101
Women in Libraries
111
A Word for Ned Ludd
112
Places
113
The Library as a Public Place
115
Cotleigh Road Branch Library
117
Beyond the Museum
118
Ssshh
119
Prisons
120
Home Base
121
Libraries and the Mall
122
California Dreams
124
Art and Decoration in the Library
125
The Flowering of the Imagination
126
The Love of Libraries
128
Reading Writing
129
Electronic Books
131
The Gift of Reading
133
The Continuum of Literacy
134
The Ladder of Learning
135
Back to Basics
137
Paperbacks
138
Library Literature
139
Collecting Books
140
Jabberwocky
141
The Library Hand
143
Reading
145
The Wider World
147
The ADA
149
Bookstores
151
Story Time
152
Multiple Identities
153
International Book Sharing
154
UnBooksr
155
Time Machines
156
Reports Statistics and All That Jazz
157
Technology as Religion
158
Thin Places
159
84 Charing Cross Road
160
Practicalities
161
Bindings
163
No Food No Drink
165
Coral Reefs
166
Circulation
167
Filing
168
Indexes and Indexing
169
Interlibrary Loan
170
Indecency Online
171
Fifty Cent Technology
172
Descriptive Cataloguing in 131 Words
173
Central Libraries vs Branch Libraries
174
Eternal Promises
175
Sunrise
177
Reminders of Continuity
179
Where Love Begins
180
Occams Management Theory
181
What Is Information?
182
Universal Bibliographic Control
184
Illuminated Manuscripts
186
The Librarianship of Love
188
Manuscripts
189
Singular Strengths
190
Closing Libraries
191
Epilogue
193
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 67 - Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.
Page 120 - I know not whether laws be right, Or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year whose days are long.
Page 28 - It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.
Page 165 - A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness — Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
Page 79 - Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Page 36 - For I assure you, there is no such whetstone to sharpen a good wit, and encourage a will to learning, as is praise.
Page 20 - Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.
Page 154 - Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Page 41 - in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.
Page 96 - The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the same effects may be more easily produced.

About the author (1998)

Michael Gorman was Dean of Library Services at the Henry Madden Library, California State University, Fresno from 1988-2007. From 1977 to 1988 he worked at the Library of the University of Illinois, Urbana as, successively, Director of Technical Services, Director of General Services, and Acting University Librarian. From 1966 to 1977 he was, successively, Head of Cataloging at the British National Bibliography, a member of the British Library Planning Secretariat, and Head of the Office of Bibliographic Standards in the British Library. He is the first editor of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, Second Edition (1978) and of the revision of that work (1988), and he is the author of The Concise AACR2. Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness, and Reality (co-written with Walt Crawford) was honored with the 1997 Blackwell’s Scholarship Award. Our Enduring Values, published by ALA in 2000, was the winner of ALA’s 2001 Highsmith Award for the best book on librarianship. He is also the author of Our Own Selves: More Meditations for Librarians (2005) as well as hundreds of articles in professional and scholarly journals. He has given numerous presentations at international, national, and state conferences. Michael has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Margaret Mann Citation in 1979, the 1992 Melvil Dewey Medal, Blackwell’s Scholarship Award in 1997, the California Library Association/Access, Collections, and Technical Services Section Award of Achievement in 1999, and the Ken Haycock Award in 2010. He was a member of the American Library Association’s Council (1991-1995 and 2002-2006), the ALA Executive Board through 2007, and was president of ALA in 2005-2006. He was made a fellow of the [British] Library Association in 1979 and an Honorary Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) in 2005. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of the Thames Valley in 2007.

Bibliographic information