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Operation Alexandria Gutenberg: How the Talking Book and Braille Library Transitioned to Customized Cartridges
Get PDFSince the beginning of the Talking Book and Braille program in 1932, books circulated to print-impaired users as single titles. Users had to return all the items that made up a single book in order to receive the items for another single book. Though the audio format changed several times over the years from records to discs to cassette tapes to flash-memory cartridges (reducing the number of items needed per book), the 1-for-1 circulation method remained essentially the same. But that was about to change.
A new circulation method had been in development by our ILS vendor for years, one that would allow us to load cartridges with customized lists of books based on a user’s requests and preferences. Each cartridge could hold up to eight audiobooks loaded from a digital storage unit that would be constantly updated in real-time. All users could have whatever titles they want whenever they want them. No more unavailable titles, no more waiting for copies, no more overdue items. This new method would reduce the number of cartridges mailed out per day from 1,200 to 150. The daily circulation process would be reduced from four hours to one hour. It would shrink our 90,000+ audiobook collection’s physical footprint from thousands of shelves to one computer. This revolutionary circulation method makes everyone’s life better.
Then COVID-19 happened. Elke was promoted to Program Manager in mid-March, and two days into her tenure she had to make the tough call to temporarily discontinue mail delivery of books—just one week away from implementation of customized cartridges.
Note: A new version of this article was posted on Nov. 6, 2020, to include the author's updated State Library of Oregon email address
History and Evolution of the Embedding Program at the State Library of Oregon
Get PDFThis article will describe what the embedding program does, its history at the State Library, and how it has evolved over time—including how important it has been for connecting with state agencies and offering our services and resources within our new reality of remote work. I will outline how the embedding program came to be, how it was developed, describe how it creates stronger connections with our state agency patrons and the various outreach programs we have developed to promote the program. I will also provide some examples of what has worked, and what has not, in the program.
Note: A new version of this article was posted on Nov. 6, 2020, to include the author's updated State Library of Oregon email address
“We Can Do It” [Wir schaffen das]—Creative Impulses Through Migration (a Report from September 2017, with an Afterword on the Situation Today)
Get PDFGeopolitical changes have always caused human beings to leave their domiciles and seek new homelands. The countries that accept them profit both from their capacity to work and their creative potential. In recent decades, Germany too has come to define itself as a land of immigrants, and in the meantime the effects of the arrival of people from Eastern countries, from Turkey, from the former Yugoslavia after it was destroyed by war, and since 2015 in larger numbers from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, are mirrored in German-language literature. This essay attempts to provide a report on recent authors and new literary publications in connection with current political changes in Germany, e.g. the growth of parties and tendencies hostile to foreigners
Spaces and Journeys in Ernesto Daranas’ Conducta: Che or Martí?
Get PDFIn his film Conducta (Behavior 2014), Ernesto Daranas portrays the ethical and physical challenges of an aging teacher, struggling to improve the lives of her students, not just within the classroom setting, but also in their family and social spheres. Thus, in response to a top/down social structure where an unseen government exerts economic and political pressure on schools and families in crisis mode, Daranas proposes model redirecting away from Ernesto Che Guevara and back toward José Martí as a pedagogic strategy for modulating conduct expectations of elementary school children. However, because government censorship sensitizes the spoken word, the filmmaker is careful to avoid negative repercussions by letting markedly visual elements of his mise en scène reveal indiscreet, if not outright subversive views of home, school, and cityscape. Also, through a recurring wandering narrative format, Ernesto Daranas conducts a political inquiry analogous to how Radicant aesthetics exercise wandering narratives.En su filme Conducta (2014), Ernesto Daranas destaca las pruebas éticas y físicas de una maestra que según envejece redobla esfuerzos por mejorar la vida de sus alumnos, no sólo dentro del aula, sino también en ámbitos familiares y sociales. Por lo tanto, como respuesta a una estructura social hegemónica, donde un invisible gobierno ejerce presiones económicas y políticas sobre escuelas y familias afectadas por la precariedad, Daranas propone substituir el modelo de Ernesto Che Guevara con el de José Martí como estrategia pedagógica para modular las expectativas de conducta para niños en escuela primaria. Sin embargo, debido a que la censura gubernamental pone en riesgo el libre uso de la palabra, el cineasta evita repercusiones negativas valiéndose de elementos marcadamente visuales que, en su puesta en escena, revelan condiciones subversivas en hogar, escuela y ciudad. Además, gracias a un ambulante formato narrativo, Ernesto Daranas ofrece al espectador una investigación política análoga a la que profesa la estética radicante
Forging Community Connections at the Claire McGill Luce Western History Room
Get PDFThe special local and regional history archives collected together under the banner of the Claire McGill Luce Western History Room at the Harney County Library have played a role in recent community efforts to retain a connection with our county’s pioneer roots while pursuing creative efforts to revitalize a once-vibrant economy through preservation, restoration, and promotion of heritage-based businesses and activities. Community members and organizations seeking historic home designations, organizing living history events, celebrating the arts and cultures of Harney County, and preserving and restoring downtown buildings have all incorporated resources uniquely available for public access within the library archives to bring an element of historical context into our daily lives. It all began in 1970 with a pledge and a vision: one thousand dollars per year for thirty years to document and preserve local history at the newly constructed Harney County Library. Little could Harney County-born Claire McGill Luce have guessed that her initial bequest would eventually blossom into a fund of over two million dollars and give rise to a historical research facility rivaling institutions many times its size
Volume 25 Issue 4 Introduction | From the Guest Editor
Get PDFThis issue fulfills a goal to highlight youth services librarianship in Oregon, and to dedicate one full volume to celebrating what we are doing now, what we hope to do in the future, and ways that we are changing the emotional, intellectual, and literary landscape of the lives of children and teens. It’s a great mix of articles, and I’m proud of each of the authors. I appreciate their time and efforts, both in their daily work and in their contribution to the written field of librarianship practices and philosophy. We are practicing all the good stuff of librarianship: programming, collection development, readers’ advisory, activism, reference assistance, and engagement that is all combined into the important work every librarian does. Add in the elements of intellectual freedom (which are, of course, also of note for non-youth services librarians), privacy rights for patrons under the age of 18, the programming fun and challenges of working with youth, and code-switching to connect with kids, tweens, parents, educators, and our own non-youth oriented librarian peers, and you’ve got the quintessential youth services librarian. You’ll find each of those features represented in this issue
The Impossibility of Return: Güney Dal and the Exilic Condition
Get PDFThis article examines the role exile plays in the works of the first generation of Turkish German authors by focusing on Güney Dal. The first part of the article deals with Güney Dal’s interviews with other Turkish German authors in 1983. Even though the authors interviewed by Dal do not consider themselves exiles, I show that exilic consciousness is marked not only by the impossibility of returning home, a condition that the authors interviewed deny sharing with exiles, but also by the fact that the exilic subject is already displaced within and is as such unable to be at home. In the second part, I interpret Dal’s novel Eine Kurze Reise nach Gallipoli (1994), which he wrote after moving back to Turkey, as a work that showcases this insurmountable uprootedness and argue that Dal’s modernist novel shows that the disintegration of exilic consciousness can establish a link with political and ethical issues beyond the reach of the isolated and paranoid subject
“More Than a Trip”: Memory, Mobility, and Space in Un Franco, 14 Pesetas (2004)
No full textIn Un Franco, 14 Pesetas (2004), Carlos Iglesias tells the story of Spanish migration to Central Europe during the 1960s through a fictional remembering of his family’s years as immigrants to Uzwil, in the Swiss eastern province of Toggenburg. His memories of the Swiss landscape, luminous, green, and open contrast with a grim, grey and enclosed Madrid, both origin and end of the six-year journey. This essay explores the interrelation between memory, space, and human mobility in Un Franco, 14 Pesetas. Through a journey of migration to Switzerland, Iglesias tells a story of return to Madrid, and unveils the contradictions of Spain’s so-called ‘economic miracle’ of the 1960s. Merging experiences of arrival and departure, presents and pasts, Iglesias’s film shows how immigration is rooted in space, and inseparable from economic, political and social processes that are historically specific
Borders, Migrants, and Writing
Get PDFWe tend to think of migrants as moving between states and borders as fortifications of states. I would like to prove the reverse: that migrants produce and reproduce the state in the first place. I think we have got this story backward, and I think a very different politics would arise by getting this the right way round. I would like to try and rethink political philosophy starting from the figure of the migrant
