Our Singular Strengths: Meditations for Librarians

• Opening the door
  
• Library furniture
  
• Celebrating diversity
  
• The Library Journal, 1915
  
• First day at work
  
• "The money is there for technology"
  
• First books
  
• The solace of knowledge
  
• Your pornography, my erotica
  
• Starved of content
  
• Remote storage
  
• Library of Congress cards: R.I.P.
  

2 Values

• Islands in the sea of eternity
  
• Plain words
  
• Intellectual freedom
  
• Privacy and the Library
  
• The public good
  
• Bibliotherapy
  
• The reference interview
  
• The love of books
  
• Small libraries are beautiful
  
• Clash of values
  
• The fear of words
  
• "Non omnis moriar"
  

3 Lives

• Mister Jones
  
• Teaching by helping
  
• S. R. Ranganathan
  
• Libraries in Literature
  
• Hugh Craig Atkinson
  
• Pity the poor administrator
  
• Andrew Carnegie
  
• What do you remember from library school?
  
• Melvil Dewey
  
• Lonely people
  
• Miss Colwell
  
• Retirement
  

4 Laws

• Ranganathan’s five laws
  
• Ranganathan’s first law
  
• Ranganathan’s second law
  
• Ranganathan’s third law
  
• Ranganathan’s fourth law
  
• Ranganathan’s fifth law
  
• Five new laws of librarianship
  
• First new law
  
• Second new law
  
• Third new law
  
• Fourth new law
  
• Fifth new law
  

5 Change, Problems, and Realities

• Change makes you stupid
  
• Outsourcing
  
• Scholarly journals
  
• Foreign languages
  
• Modern library budgets
  
• The Newbery Medal
  
• Books into films
  
• Burnout
  
• Reference collections
  
• Distant Learning
  
• The problem patron
  
• My ideal library
  

6 Present and Future

• Libraries and democracy
  
• E-mail in libraries
  
• The tax revolt
  
• Copyright and electronic documents
  
• The paper-full society
  
• Downsizing
  
• Different in kind
  
• Virtual lives
  
• People or kiosks?
  
• Museums of failed technology?
  
• Library or pipeline?
  
• Night thoughts
  

7 Librarians

• The image of the librarian
  
• Learning to be a librarian
  
• Mysteries
  
• The impossibility of classification
  
• Political correctness?
  
• ALA conferences
  
• Problem colleagues
  
• The library "great person"
  
• The outsider syndrome
  
• The war of AACR2
  
• Women in libraries
  
• A word for Ned Ludd
  

8 Places

• The library as a public place
  
• National libraries
  
• Cotleigh Road branch library
  
• Beyond the museum
  
• Ssshh!
  
• Prisons
  
• Home base
  
• Libraries and the mall
  
• California dreams
  
• Art and decoration in the library
  
• "The flowering of the imagination"
  
• The love of libraries
  

9 Reading and Writing

• Electronic "books"
  
• The gift of reading
  
• The continuum of literacy
  
• The ladder of learning
  
• Back to basics?
  
• Paperbacks
  
• Library literature
  
• Collecting Books
  
• Jabberwocky
  
• The library hand
  
• Reading
  
• Are libraries dangerous?
  

10 The Wider World

• The A.D.A.
  
• The choice
  
• Bookstores
  
• Story time
  
• Multiple identities
  
• International book sharing
  
• Unbooks?
  
• Time machines
  
• Reports, statistics, and all that jazz
  
• Technology as religion
  
• "Thin places"
  
• 84, Charing Cross Road
  

11. Practicalities

• Bindings
  
• Dress for success?
  
• No food, no drink
  
• Coral reefs
  
• Circulation
  
• Filing
  
• Indexes and indexing
  
• Interlibrary loan
  
• "Indecency" online
  
• Fifty-cent technology
  
• Descriptive cataloguing in 131 words
  
• Central libraries vs. branch libraries
  

12 Eternal Promises

• Sunrise
  
• Library Time
  
• Reminders of continuity
  
• Where love begins
  
• Occam’s management theory
  
• What is "information"?
  
• Universal bibliographic control
  
• Illuminated manuscripts
  
• The librarianship of love
  
• Manuscripts
  
• Singular strengths
  
• Closing libraries
  

Epilogue