The Default Art of Classifying the Occult

Even as the world of information moves increasingly away from print, academic librarians and patrons spend significant time in neighborhoods of books organized by Library of Congress Classification. Close attention to specific neighborhoods and historical inquiry into their organization opens windows into past and present constructions of knowledge. This essay examines one such neighborhood – the latter ranges of BF, and particularly its tail end, Occult Sciences. It explores the creation of this neighborhood in a deliberately recursive fashion, and the journey to determine how such content came to be collocated by the Library of Congress leads through other classification systems, bookseller catalogs, and even literature. As food for further thought many comments from the essay manuscript’s anonymous reviewers are appended

Madrona: A Micro-Geography of the 1960s and 1970s

Drawing on personal memory, detailed mapping, and archival research, this memoir explores the lived experience of growing up in Seattle’s Madrona neighborhood in the 1960s and early 1970s. A neighborhood historically characterized as both integrated and segregated, this book grapples directly with the truth of both statements. The author’s childhood was spent on a street where neighbors across the street were nearly all White, while neighbors astride the alley behind were nearly all Black. The lines of friendship and community interaction, however, were not so neatly defined, and changed markedly over time. To avoid a mere rehearsal of well-entrenched memories, the author deliberately and minutely informed this exploration of his personal past by creating detailed spreadsheets, sketches, and maps, tracking phenomena such as friends, routes, and violent incidents by year and place. Supplementing these self-generated materials with the reading of official reports, Census Data, archival materials, and generalized secondary sources, the author ruminated extensively on the confluence and contradictions of these materials with his lived experience. Considerable time was spent peeling away ready-to-hand memories in order to see more layers of what was not easily remembered, allowing the unnoticed, now noticed, to generate a more complete experience of experience. Though billed as a micro-geography, this book unavoidably addresses many macro phenomena: redlining, restrictive covenants, the tension between a gradualist civil rights modality and radical Black Power, and farther back, the Olmsted vision for restorative green parks and vistas, and the formative grafting onto Seattle’s topography of elite New England cultural values. As the author’s White parents were involved with organizations such as Model Cities, the Urban League, and the Black Panthers, the book provides a unique perspective on changes in the civil rights movement, as well as a child’s window on experiences in schools where desegregation efforts were now on and now off again. Perhaps most importantly, the memoir’s tentative definitions of the word ‘neighborhood’ point to the puzzling fact that though we all grow up in neighborhoods, most of us are hard-pressed to say what a neighborhood actually is

Peer Reference and the Out-of-the-Building Experience

Purpose – This article conceptualizes essential keys to the future of peer reference in academic libraries as extrapolated through the dual lenses of academic library history in the United States of America and recent experiences of a peer program with prospective and actual out-of-the-building experiences. Design/methodology/approach – A 30,000-foot historical view of the dispositions of space in academic library buildings, collections, spaces, technology and reference provision is integrated with a description of the responses and insights of a peer reference program during the program’s prospective and actual out-of-the-building experiences. These components are then analyzed to extrapolate keys to peer reference provision in any learning environment. Findings – Peer reference is a natural extension of the Learning Commons model as developed in many academic libraries. To find optimal success in leveraging the benefits of peer-to-peer learning, program coordinators should keep in mind the social aspects of peer learning and intentionally articulate a framework for service delivery that best matches the modalities of providers, patrons and the information environment. In reviewing training and service practices, coordinators should be particularly on guard for any bias due to traditional reliance on the affordances of a library building and/or physical service point. Originality/value – This article founds its conclusions in regard to the future of peer reference by contextualizing the evolution and future of such programs in the wider historical context of academic library dispositions of space in support of learning. It proposes a conceptual framework for intentionally matching the modalities of providers, patrons and the information environment

The LibRAT Program at Cal Poly: Full Partners in Peer Learning

The LibRAT Program at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo was first piloted in 2010. Although the program has expanded in scope and depth, the key to its continued success has been a commitment to core principles discovered during its initial launch. To this day, the LibRATs (Library Reference Assistance Technicians) form a small cadre of intensively trained students who are treated with respect as adults and as undergraduates. Communication, learning, and responsibility are multidirectional, and the LibRATs are full partners in the success of the program. The original design of the program was to post students in residence halls to provide research assistance, but this model failed to generate research questions. However, we discovered the LibRATs to be an untapped resource and we were determined to find ways to repurpose them. In 2011, unforeseen librarian leaves created a staffing shortfall, and we found a solution ready at hand: LibRATs. Within one year, the LibRATs were full partners in providing research assistance and in leading lower-division information literacy sessions. As research assistants, LibRATs now staff all Research Help Desk and local chat hours at the Robert E. Kennedy Library. The LibRATs also now lead more than one hundred instructional sessions per year. The rapid and sustained growth of our instruction program made possible by the LibRATs’ participation resoundingly justified the hiring of a foundational experiences librarian, who now coordinates the instructional component of the LibRAT program