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7d4388d
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Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organization and analytical aptitude, and discretion.
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librarianship
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Marilyn Johnson |
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cd43f1c
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In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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0ba5009
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We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.
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libraries
library
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Marilyn Johnson |
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88959df
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Librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy.
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librarians
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Marilyn Johnson |
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2ef7ded
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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.
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libraries
library
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Marilyn Johnson |
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b2281d9
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Bibliomancy: "Divination by jolly well Looking It Up."
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Marilyn Johnson |
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22f9a8a
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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 PhD.
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information
librarians
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Marilyn Johnson |
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d790079
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Yes, librarians use punctuation marks to make little emoticons, smiley and frowny faces in their correspondence, but if there were one for an ironic wink, or a sarcastic lip curl, they'd wear it out.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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4e4f8f5
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They to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after , was --for their patrons and themselves.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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19348ea
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In tight economic times, with libraries sliding farther and farther down the list of priorities, we risk the loss of their ideals, intelligence, and knowledge, not to mention their commitment to access for all--librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy, and they're right. Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education..
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Marilyn Johnson |
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b61079f
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We are all living history, and it's hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing's certain, though: if we throw it away, it's gone.
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history
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Marilyn Johnson |
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4cbf522
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Members of the Order take vows of literacy, obstinancy and bibliomancy. Bibliomancy? It's defined for us a little further down: "Divination by jolly well Looking It Up."
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reference
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Marilyn Johnson |
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ba003e2
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Maybe it begins the day you pledge allegiance, face the flag and suddenly clutch your left clavicle because you find a tender puff of breast where yesterday your heart was Or maybe it happens later when you're walking home from school and they rush you on the street-- those boys who reach out fast, disgrace your blouse with rubs of dirt, their laughter stinging hot against your face. And you bite your rage, swallow your tears because the fa..
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women
womansong
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Marilyn Johnson |
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a728f34
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What was archaeology to him? It was the opposite of killing things. It was trying to will life back into stuff that had been forgotten and buried for thousands or millions of years. It was not about shards and pieces of bone or treasure; it was about kneeling down in the elements, paying very close attention, and trying to locate a spark of the human life that had once touched that spot there.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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ab8e618
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It's almost impossible to teach that sort of writing except by pointing students to a stack of clips and telling them, 'Inhale these.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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5151bf0
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Of course. Ask your librarian. Always the right answer.
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librarianship
librarians
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Marilyn Johnson |
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f27f49c
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So when I hear this snarky question (and I hear it everywhere): 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.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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080dcd6
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It seems there was a custom in Ireland at this time of showing obeisance to your king by sucking his nipples. No nipples, you could not be a king.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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a973e07
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This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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28fc875
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You can tell the archaeologists, of course, by their photos. The tourists' photos feature people in front of mountains, terraces, stone structures, sundials. The archaeologists wait until the people move away to take theirs: they want the terrace, the stone wall, the lintel, the human-made thing, all sans humans.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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8455a87
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Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don't fit our categories?
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Marilyn Johnson |
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2b08bc5
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Librarians' values are as sound as Girl Scouts': truth, free speech, and universal literacy. And, like Scouts, they possess a quality that I think makes librarians invaluable and indispensable: they want to . They want to help . They want to be of service. And they're not trying to sell us anything.
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librarianship
librarians
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Marilyn Johnson |
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574ebf7
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So where does one go in such a wobbly, elusive, dynamic, confusing age? Wherever the librarians and archivists are. They're sorting it all out for us.
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archivists
librarianship
librarian
librarians
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Marilyn Johnson |
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10dcaa2
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Though I loved the wired world, the new-wave librarians, the avatars and activists, I turned into a dinosaur in that library. I couldn't help it; I was an old-fashioned writer who loved the ancient books summoned via pneumatic tubes, the archives, the quiet. I had found something rare there: an inexhaustible wonder.
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library
wonder
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Marilyn Johnson |
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571da04
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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."
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library
service
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Marilyn Johnson |
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37208e3
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We were bleeding information from the nose and ears, though dazed and disoriented was not how I experienced it. Most of the time, I felt like I was three years old, high on chocolate cake and social networks, constantly wired, ingesting information and news about information, books and books about books, data and metadata--I was, in other words, overstimulated yet gluttonous for more.
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technology
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Marilyn Johnson |
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718e3d0
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I understood--I thought I understood--then things changed, or I learned the next thing that made everything I knew before obsolete.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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a7d3132
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Agate, population 70, is one of those towns that people describe as 'blink and you'll miss it.' Lois A. Engel loved living in the blink.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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008ca0e
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One graduate student told me, "When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts," and I promptly added her to my address book. Knows how to make hill forts--who can say when that will come in handy?"
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Marilyn Johnson |
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9729f5a
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Writers seldom just stop writing. We're like serial killers in that way. You have to stop us, because we cannot stop ourselves.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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88ddb55
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Some of these tools were ingenious, including sets of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan--regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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1a47cff
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A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a "true reflection of our history," whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future."
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libraries
library
library-and-information-science
library-science
librarianship
librarians
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Marilyn Johnson |
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eac4a31
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I regretted my human form briefly; it would be so much easier to drag and rope information into the brain as neatly as one dragged and dropped information on the computer. Perhaps I was suffering from a touch of information sickness? If I could weed out my thoughts...There was one reliable cure I've found, a bit of the hair of the dog--the release in reading. Not a manual: something with a narrative, a chute built by a writer and waxed unti..
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reading
peace
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Marilyn Johnson |
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5ccb4a2
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I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children--and was..
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libraries
obituaries
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Marilyn Johnson |
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76cdbf4
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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.
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Marilyn Johnson |
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7cd9031
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Homo sapiens who lived in caves put trash in front and slept in the back; not so in the caves occupied by Homo heidelbergensis. Those humans, probably the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis, lived like frat boys 700,000 to 300,000 years ago, "flinging shit everywhere"--and the idea of slovenly boy and girl ancestors fascinated me. "Big heavy stone tools . . . probably solved things with brute force. Commandos without ..
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Marilyn Johnson |
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3a577c8
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bone grease with dried meat and berries to make pemmican, the energy bars of a thousand years ago, and with a pouch of pemmican, the Native Americans were good to travel far and wide. (If you can't pack portable food, you spend most of your time hunting and foraging).
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Marilyn Johnson |
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05112e5
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One of the advantages of living in the Ice Age would be that there are not very many people around. You're constantly moving, and you have to live by your wits. You can't just have fifteen different kinds of tools, you can't carry them. And no villages--no village idiots. Imagine a world free of idiots!" Idiots, he liked to point out, "don't survive in environments with lions."
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Marilyn Johnson |
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4068750
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The convention that there were two sides to every story eliminated the third and fourth and fifth sides. Even dividing the past two and a half million years into the "Neolithic" (the new stone age) and the "Paleolithic" (the old stone age) was reductionist. "Write this down," he said. "Dichotomies are for idiots."
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Marilyn Johnson |
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9ff2ef9
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Place is not the background of archaeology--it's the point. As any archaeologist will tell you, context is everything.
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Marilyn Johnson |