A personal favorite Genre of Music.

I'm a big fan of Celtic music, Traditional and New Age. I love Fiona Ritchie's Thistle and Shamrock NPR's radio show, the Irish Aires show on KPFT, and the Celtic-themed editions of Hearts of Space by Steven Hill. Unfortunately, in Denton, on radio, all I can get is Ritche's show on KERA 90.1 FM (the greater DFW Public Radio station). I can get Irish Aires online, from KPFT's website. Much new Celtic music is going increasingly online.

And as I've expanded into playing around with MP3s and players like the iPod, I've discovered great resources like the website Songhenge and this podcast by Marc Gunn:



Great stuff! When I was a graduate student and recently graduated alumnus of Rice University, I did my turn as a bartender in the graduate student pub on campus in the basement of the old Chemistry building. Before they got all hi-techy and computerized their sound system, we used to have a CD player hooked up to the speaker system, and I would go visit Houston Public Library downtown and go select 3-5 new Celtic music CDs from various artists I had yet to listen to and then inflict these tunes upon my bar patrons. More often than not it was a success and patrons really liked the music. It transformed the whole atmosphere from an ordinary basement bar into something more like a cozy Irish pub, if only for the hour I was on duty as a bartender. I think our Guinness sales went up slightly when I was on duty, too. I think technically what I was doing was in violation of traditional copyright law, as we, the volunteer staff of the place, did not have the "performance rights" to the songs, but this to me is one of the more dick-headed perversions of Copyright law. Promoting such non-mainstream music in such a venue is only likely to pique interest and INCREASE music sales, but intellectual property lawyers don't give a sh*t about such cultural enhancements that improve the community even while they skirt the law a tad. I frequently had bar patrons come up and ask to see the album cover and sometimes the liner notes, which I gladly provided. This was admittedly back in the mid 1990s, when the Celtic New Wave was roaring at rip tide (it has subsided a bit since the early 2000s). I still love it, but my family origin is Scottish, so I have personal reasons to stay connected to this music.

Special Hell

If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater. — Shepherd Book (from the Firefly Episode OUR MRS. REYNOLDS)

...or people who steal shiny new books from Libraries.

We recently goofed and slotted for "Main Reference" a new (2008) GRE Prep book that actually needed to be sent to our Main Reserves, where we can control the use more tightly. These are evidently high demand items, and all the previous GRE Prep stuff is in Main Reserves. But, it came from acquisitions flagged as "Main Reference", so I (copy-)cataloged it, my student assistant did the end processing, and off it went to Circ, from thence to Main Reference, where it "sprouted legs" and walked out the door never to be seen again. Painful lesson learned, and that some people are just ruthless sh*ts. Yes, you to belong in that "Special Hell", if it existed, my dear Library thief.

We would've lost more of them if not for the fact that the copy records in OCLC are lacking 050 fields and my ClassWeb access is STILL down (2 weeks now) and I was too lazy to go poking around on LC and elsewhere for older editions from whence to crib a suitable call number.

I'm also taking my time cataloging a 2 volume set of American Women writers. I'm doing an original record that piggy-backs on an existing record for Vol.1 which has an extensive 505 field contents note. I feel obligated to supply an equally exhaustive 505 for Vol.2, but it's taking a goodly bit of time to transcribe page after page from the TOC in Vol. 2. I may also be fudging the rules a little bit in the 245 field, since thought the set has 1 main editor, the secondary editors differ from vol.1 & 2; I combine the statements of responsibility into one with an [and] between the incongruous names. The 505 transcription is even more tedious work than my ongoing NAF project, or at least it feels that way. I'm also progressing my way slowly through an online course designed to teach me how to catalog Integrating Resources (and how they specifically differ from serials). This past Friday I spent all day with an AMIGOS trainer learning the basics of ContentDM. It was okay, and good to play around with training software where I couldn't do any real lasting damage while I learned to set up a hypothetical digital image collection, etc. Much of the controlled vocabulary for images comes from LC-TGM (Thesaurus for Graphic Materials), since the "subject cataloging" for images tends more to be an extension of descriptive cataloging. More "what is" than "what it's about", per se.

It was a good way to spend Friday as our ILS was totally down (even on the user side) because they're upgrading to a new server. The ILS will probably remain down through a goodly part of Monday, which means I can't make any progress on the NAF project, so I'll resume the 505 transcription and re-save the bib workform in the save file. I'm over halfway done, but it's just such a tedious slog, can't be done in one sitting. I'll also log in to the online course and get caught up on the next module, etc.

Mein Foto

Photo added to blog (with paint/digital filtering), proof that yes, I was indeed an Aggie. Once an Aggie, always an Aggie. This photo was taken my fish year, at Parent's Weekend, way back in the Spring of 1990. I was a young 'un then, and had no idea about wanting to one day become a librarian. When this photo was taken, I still had my heart set on becoming a Naval officer, my coke bottle thick glasses eventually dooming that prospect, but I didn't know that then. Back then, I had a tentative offer of a 3-year NROTC scholarship and was wrapping up a successful if otherwise unremarkable freshman year in the Corps of Cadets. There was still a Cold War on, as far as we knew, because there was still a Soviet Union and Gorby was still the man at the helm over there. That summer I would journey to Germany for a 5 week trip (2 weeks classroom instruction, 3 weeks travel around German-speaking Europe). By then I had already switched my academic major to German, along with History as a double-major, the disapproving frowns of my Naval Science advisers notwithstanding. I eventually was NPQ'd for the scholarship, returned to life as a civilian student, then went on to grad school, first for my MA in German Studies at Rice U, then eventually to UNT for my MLS, and the rest is history.

My first academic major at TAMU has been Political Science, but after my first Poli-Sci class, which was deathly boring, I dropped that major like a hot rock and became a History major. I added German later. I might've been happier had I done my MA in History rather than German Studies, but c'est la vie.

Back then, TAMU was using the NOTIS system for their OPAC interface (not that I would have known the term OPAC back then). It was an amber screen, menu-driven system. Although my High school still used a card catalog and the Dewey Decimal system (which I confess I never really learned all that well), I really didn't find the NOTIS system to be all that difficult to use. I may not have known what the call numbers meant, but I was able to find my books fairly easily. I did eventually learn the Russian history books were in the DK's up on the 6th floor of Evans Library. When I got to Rice U, I learned the German books were in the PTs on the 2nd floor of the Fondren Library. I found that I liked hanging out in the H's a lot, too, and sometimes the DD's (German history). I now know the basics of LC fairly well, at least what the leading letters mean, at a glance. I know some parts of DDC, but not the whole thing in any case, not from memory anyway. I still find DDC to LC conversion tables helpful where they exist.

Rice U. had a primitive web-based OPAC called, I believe, WebCat. It worked fairly well, and was certainly more aesthetically appealing than the old Amber-screened NOTIS system at Texas A&M. I don't know if they still have it, but when I was a graduate student, the Fondren Library had retained its card catalog, but hadn't updated it since 1986, according to the signage at the time. I don't remember if Texas A&M in those early days still maintained a physical card catalog anymore or not, but I'm thinking probably not.

I really wasn't an avid library user as a kid; I do remember attending a kind of summer camp activity thing at the Walter branch of HPL back circa 1978 or so...little did I know then that the HPL Central branch had just opened a scant 2 years prior. During High School mom would sometimes take me to HBU's campus library to do research, but she understood the library search tools better than I did...good ol' Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, etc. I just know I enjoyed pulling the bound periodicals from the shelves and reading things like Life Magazine from the 1950s and 1960s. I thought it was so cool that somebody kept these old magazines around like that so many years later.

I didn't really become an avid library user until I got to college, as an undergraduate. My library use expanded in Grad school, as I became more aware of the overall layout of the collection as ordered by LC classification. Before I went to library school, I once had an apartment that was only 5 or so minutes from HPL Central downtown. I practically raided their media library for the best of the best in documentaries, educational films, etc. I checked out and read books avidly, audio books too. That period in the late 1990s, circa 1998-99 was my heaviest period of personal public library use, when I really fell in love with HPL central, and to a lesser degree Harris County Public Library's West U. branch.

I've yet to visit the main Dallas Public Library, but have been to Fort Worth Public Library's main branch. While at UNT, I did sometimes go over to Denton Public Library. It's ok, but just can't compare to HPL's offerings, nor even Fort Bend County Library system's offerings for that matter.

Now I work in a library. At long last, I feel like I have a job with a real future, not just marking time and paying the bills, like at my last corporate gig. It was fun there, but it was ultimately a dead-end job. Which I didn't care about in my mid-to-late 20s, but as mid-to-late 20s became mid-to-late 30s, it was clear to me it was time to move on, and Libraries was the best way I could figure to get back into Academia some way, some how. It seems to have worked. I feel like I'm making a difference here, enhancing scholarship, contributing to the greater good. It's a good feeling. Signing off again, la la land calls. ZZzzzzz.

Another AV review (brief)

Just a quick shout out to note I really enjoyed another title in the Portable Professor series from Barnes & Noble, specifically Deborah Tannen's He Said, She Said, which is a lecture series based on her previous books and academic research on the different linguistic speaking styles of men and women and how they communicate (or fail to communicate) with each other. It was very eye opening to me and I had lots of "aha" moments all throughout, remembering past incidents with my ex-wife and ongoing dynamics with my mom. Sometimes Dr. Tannen's research leaves you feeling a little despondent, like there's no way around the impasse, but I do think she's right that at the very least it's better to understand what's going on than to not understand it. It makes a Meta-critique of the language act(s) possible, though it's not always possible in the heat of the moment. It's also much easier to catch other's faux pas ("oh, that was really insensitive") than it is to catch your own, but I guess you learn with time, and even learn to think of better things to say that are more productive responses than the "typical" response one would make, as influenced by one's gender.

Tannen was recommended to me by a library colleague at a neighboring institution, who had read her books and found them very helpful and revealing, and this is a guy whose advice I trust when it comes to reading material. That advice was solid gold in this case. I downloaded the contents of the entire lecture series from its component CDs onto my old iPod Nano (1G) and listened to it the whole drive down to Sugar Land, Texas from the DFW Metro area, roughly a 6 hour drive, depending on traffic. My only complaint about that is that when the tracks were downloaded into iTunes, the naming conventions of the different chapters were inconsistent, and so I had to be vigilant to make sure I was listening to the lectures in their proper order. At least the lectures were internally consistent with each other, so no problem at that level, but because of the naming conventions used, Lecture 10 would line up in sequence before Lecture 7, for example. I would wait until I had open road ahead of me to hop around the tracks to get the next lecture set lined up properly and started. If I could, I would try to time this with my rest stop breaks, with the car fully stopped. If I was in the middle of heavy traffic, I'd just pause my iPod and either go silent or punch out the adapter from my tape deck and listen to the radio softly instead.

This would be a handy method for "reading" library books-on-CD as well. Library audio content that is already in MP3 format typically does NOT work with the iPod but will work with any other MP3 player. I resisted going to iPod for some time until I realized I could download podcasts of foreign language news content, especially German material, with better audio quality (and later video) that short-wave radio broadcasts on Deutsche Welle just couldn't match; their own Podcasts over the web were that much superior, and since I was listening asynchronously, I could listen at my own leisure, when and where I wanted to, and I still do. My bigger iPod (8G) is what I use for this now, since the video content (RTL news, Tagessschau, and other nightly news broadcast video from Germany) takes up a lot of memory, much more so than mere audio content.

I liked having the whole lecture series compacted onto my iPod Nano, because it was a lot easier to scroll through the iPod menu than it would've been to constantly be swapping out physical CDs into and out of my CD adapter/player, which plugs into my tape-deck. I use the exact same pseudo-cassette adapter thingy for both devices and it works just fine in each. I also have some spare computer speakers that I have set up on my nightstand so I can plug in either iPod and simply listen to the content aloud while I'm getting dressed, doing chores, surfing the web or whatever (it's easier than sticking in ear buds when engaged in physical activity). This is a much cheaper work-around than getting an expensive docking port w/ speakers for one's iPod, or more sophisticated adapters that broadcast your iPod to the car's radio on an open channel (which is what you'd have to do if you had only a CD player and no tape deck). I like my low tech work arounds, personally.

Well, time to sign off for me. I managed to stretch this post longer than I thought I could. I'll sign on again, as I feel like it or have something to respond to or get off my chest, and as always I'll pledge to try to keep it Library related, or at least Higher Ed related. If I don't keep my blog(s) semi-topical, they get too unfocused and end up going nowhere. This blog was built on the ruins of earlier abandoned blogs and even earlier abandoned static websites, now lost to the mists of ancient cyberia.

Fun philosophical fisticuffs...

Currently participating in a rather fun bit of philosophical fisticuffs on AUTOCAT between a Web/Libr 2.0 true believer and the big guns of AUTOCATland. I normally sit on the sidelines, or toss a grenade and run. I guess I sort of provoked our interlocutor to wander into AUTOCATland, sort of like a military reconnaissance scout launching a feint attack on a larger force, which gives pursuit and is lead into an ambush as they cross in front of our biggest guns, which open up on the invader. After the initial salvo, I swung back around and made a strafing run. Ah, such fun. I've been getting off-list private messages of support, back slaps, etc. Our interlocutor is a prolific poster, however, so it may have to wait until the weekend for me to respond at length over there.

I will probably be able to attend to this blog more now that I have a working Desktop PC at home in my bedroom and don't have to rely on my laptop. I love my laptop, but damn do I hate laptop keyboards. If I have to type anything over a paragraph on one it's just plain painful. The conflict averse are playing kissy-make up on AUTOCAT right now, with the list traffic slowing up a bit, but I'm not ready to make nice. I do think I've made most of my major points already, but half the fun is responding to the overblown rhetoric of my opponent. I don't have time to go into the details here, but it may be fodder for future postings.

The Weeding (& Reading) of History in Libraries, reconsidered.

I recently finished an audio lecture series (Portable Professor by Barnes & Noble) delivered by Professor James Loewen, author of the landmark history book Lies my teacher told me. Loewen is a sociologist by training, but has long experience teaching history, and particularly the history of race relations in America. This is evident because the most outstanding, most eye-opening (to me at least) set of lectures delivered by Loewen in this series is the two part lecture titled The Nadir of Race Relations in America, 1890-1940. The lecture series itself is entitled Everything you've been taught is wrong: Fact, Fiction and Lies in American History, consisting of a grand total of 14 lectures on CD, plus a bonus CD of samples from other lectures in the Portable Professor series.

Loewen does far more than recount notable facts and dates and the exploits of great men in American history. He goes a level deeper to give his listeners an education in the nature of historiography itself. As a librarian, it has made me reconsider my attitude towards the weeding of Academic library materials, at least in the subject of history. At more than one point Loewen stresses not only the importance of primary source material (which every historian at least pays lip service to), but also points out that in relation to secondary sources, many times it is the older sources, closer to the time of the actual events described, where the more straightforward and honest, less embellished accounts of history can be found (and give clues on where to look with regards to primary sources). This sort of goes against the grain of our training in contemporary librarianship, where NEW is assumed nearly always to be inherently BETTER. And in Scientific and technical fields, this does tend to hold true. But this "insight" is potentially damaging when misapplied to the humanities, and particularly the field of History. Loewen's lectures really opened my eyes to the LIS implications of his research. I will think twice before recommending some older, dusty history series be chucked out because it's "too old" and "nobody" reads it. Loewen's own research patterns contraindicate this, and we ignore the needs of "expert" library users like Loewen at our peril, especially in academic libraries. I happen to have had the chance to physically handle these older history books very recently in my current ongoing Name Authorities project I am working on.

One byproduct of this NAF work is that periodically I will encounter a bibliographic record, usually of older materials dating from the TSCW or even "College of Industrial Arts" period of my current institution, where the record is basically incomplete/temporary, and seems to have been hastily added from a catalog card long ago and never upgraded; Often no holdings listed in OCLC, and some of these short local records even lack adequate LCSH's. So I physically pull the volumes, look them up in OCLC (frequently able to do so by LCCN, but generally only for materials published since the 1950s, mostly in the United States). With enough digging, I am usually able to find these missing materials, import the proper record, attach our holdings in OCLC, and overlay the brief record with the robust, full record that should have been there to begin with. Some of the brief records don't even fully match the book-in-hand their barcodes relate to (dates are wrong, a later second edition record is used for a first edition work, etc). It's kind of a mess that has been long overdue for this kind of cleanup, and I'm grateful to take a break from rather constant copy-cataloging and original cataloging during the regular semester to get this done.

When I first handled these books, my inclination was at first "ugh, why do we even still keep these around", but upon listening to Loewen's lectures, I have a deeper appreciation for these rarer books, and also an appreciation of making my home institution a better library citizen, by attaching our holdings and announcing to the world that these sometimes rare resources are available through I.L.L.

Of course, such work does require, for lack of a better word, something of a leap of library faith. You can't know for sure if any of your detailed, behind the scenes work will directly benefit anyone specific. It might not even matter in your lifetime. You're handling a collection that is bigger than yourself, something that will outlast you, but you have the awareness that decisions you make now will leave footprints later, directions taken now will either help (or hinder) research in the future. That's a humbling realization, and keeps one striving to do good and avoid doing harm in cataloging work.

My only criticism of Everything you've been taught is wrong is the lectures that touch upon Kennedy and the early 1960s. This is Loewen weakest material; though that said it's still better than many standard textbook accounts. Loewen also offers a criticism of Socialism early on that may well apply to certain total forms of state socialism, but do not hold true across all forms of Socialism. My own Socialist views are tempered by an anarcho-syndicalist/radical democratic streak. More Rosa Luxembourg and less Lenin. Loewen glosses over this distinction, painting with an overbroad brush. But these criticism are really minor. In the main, Loewen does a fantastic job of deconstructing, well nigh demolishing the Triumphalist/Nationalist (not to mention Neo-Confederate) View that dominates in the teaching of American history today at the secondary, and even the undergraduate collegiate survey course level.

As someone who lived though the ending of the Cold War as a young adult, I'm leery of the way history books are teaching this geopolitical drama to the younger generation who were too young to have any meaningful memory of it. I saw TOP GUN in High school, I watched the Berlin Wall come down on live television. It was very real, lived history to me, and people like me were in a unique position to critically re-examine the Cold War and realize just how much of a chimera and a charade much of it was. We were too young to be committed Cold Warriors (either pro or anti Soviet), so our views were still malleable, but the Cold War was also lived reality for us in ways it wasn't and can't ever be for those who come after us. It's not impossible for them to gain the same insights, but I'd assert it will be more difficult.

Heck, some of the Freshmen that will be starting this Fall will have no personal memory of the O.J. Simpson trial, let alone Rodney King and the ensuing L.A. Riots circa 1991. They were too young for these events to have any real meaning for them, and if they have any knowledge at all of the events, it's from immediate family and extended relatives who may talk about the events, or maybe they stumbled on a YouTube clip about it, or a Wikipedia article, or got curious about this stuff watching VH1 on cable.

It makes me glad to have cataloged a lot of ephemera we collected on VHS tapes which we inherited from the Minerva Center, a think-tank in Washington DC that studies topics pertaining to women and the military. Many of them were recordings of live television news programs and talk show discussions about 1980s-1990s debates surrounding women in the military, the Tailhook scandal, and Clinton era revived debates about gays and lesbians serving in the military. These are important pieces of history, too, right down to the corny 1980s television commercials in between the news segments.

Librarians, especially Academic Librarians, need to cultivate a finely attuned sense of history and historiography to fully treat their collections with the respect and care they deserve. I think most Librarians do make that effort, though with some Web/Libr 2.0 advocates I do wonder.

I would definitely recommend Loewen's lecture series as an audiobook acquisition even for Public libraries, and I am currently investigating other lecture sets in the Portable Professor series. Our local Barnes & Noble is having a clearance sale on them and I scooped up a bunch of titles for myself lately. I understand these will never be popular enough for B&N to keep on their in-store shelf-space and fully expect these to be internet-only available items. But these are items worth of consideration by collection development and acquisitions librarians. Precisely the kind of stuff we ought to be promoting that, though they will never be a commercial success at B&N, are nevertheless vital to the intellectual health of the nation. This is part of why Libraries differ from bookstores, and why we can and must exist peaceably side by side.

Mixed feelings about the renovations at HPL central

I took a personal tour of the newly renovated central branch of the Houston Public Library. I have to say, elated as I was that my old main library was back in operation again after a long hiatus, well, it's like that awkward feeling you get when a girl you secretly like changes her hairstyle...for the worse. You're tongue tied. You can't REALLY tell her what you think and so you say "looks great", or something equally innocuous. It would be too gauche to say "I liked the way you had it before", even if that's how you really feel.

In the case of HPL, it's not as though I necessarily liked the "before" better than the "after" picture here (you all are shocked, I can tell). No, it's just that after all the facelifts, nips and tucks, you'd think the result would be better than it is.

In no particular order, the biggest changes...the Elevators--gone. No big loss, really, as nearly half of them tended to be out of service at any given moment and you had to walk up them anyway. They've been replaced by a central stairway and elevator.

Children's library--was in the basement, now on the very top floor. Not so crazy about this change either, because it displaces the media library that was on the 4th floor. More on that in a minute. Anyway, so you're making the kiddos either ride the elevator or climb a lot of stairs, and heaven forbid if the elevator ever konks out. Lots of tired, surly kids going up and down those stairs, through the center of the building, making noise that can be heard all over the building, since it's an open and exposed staircase. My personal preference would've been to keep them in the basement, as always.

The basement itself is now 100% enclosed staff workspace, and a white, clinical void for patrons, with one lone security guard. The parking garage is similarly transformed. The public elevator is now the staff elevator. The new public elevator is located in a sterile, white room, encased in Plexiglas, with one lone security guard at what looks like a lectern, and an automated ticket teller machine (heaven help you if you don't have exact change, since the guard can't.). I know this saves from having to have the security guards put in a shift as the gate teller, and that it had been like that even before the renovation, but I still don't like it.

More staff reductions on the first floor. The good news, more check out lanes, on BOTH sides now. The not-so-good news--all nearly 100% automated with exactly 1 circ clerk to handle any issues (like fines & blocks, etc) and one security guard.

Media Library...abolished; VHS holdings--gone. I can sort of understand that...I myself switched to DVDs after I broke down and bought a PS2 (i.e. when the PS3 came out--I'm always a generation behind on Playstation units; I was enjoying the hell outta my PSX when PS2 was all the rage). But what really gets my goat is that I *KNOW* they didn't replace all the VHS holdings with equally ample DVD holdings. These are MUCH reduced today. Ironic for me, the notorious book snob, to complain about HPL's Media Library policies, but I love AV media, actually; It's just that I prefer the more elevated discourse of educational Documentaries, Human interest films, Artsy and Foreign flicks...i.e. the stuff most Blockbuster outlets will at most devote one aisle to and would prefer not to go near with a 10 foot pole if they could.
Libraries can do a great service in picking up that slack, and sometimes they have modest successes.

Their audiobook collection also shows signs of heavy weeding...all CDs now, no audiocassettes that I saw, though I could be wrong. It was certainly CD-dominant if not 100%. Again, sign of the times, not that much of a surprise. I was glad that they had more titles from the Teaching Company and in principle the fact that all the titles were in DVD format shouldn't have been an issue, but...Look, I know the Teaching company offers ALL their lectures on audio as well as on DVD, but some titles make a LOT more sense on video than others...like Mathematics topics or Art appreciation topics, something with a visual element as a legitimate part of the material, not just filler material for the voice overs. Which is what they were stuck with with the titles they selected...a series on Shakespeare, another on Hitler, etc. These are primarily lecture courses, mind you, so you won't be seeing moving visual clips from Leni Riefenstahl on the Hitler lecture, I bet. What HPL has done is virtually guaranteed that nobody will check these DVDs out. Even I would hesitate whereas if they were audio-CDs, I wouldn't hesitate to check them out. An Audio CD is something I can burn onto my iPod and take with me...a DVD isn't. I'd prefer cassettes for my tape deck in my car, but again, that's the latent Luddite impulse in me. I have a CD adapter of course...I decided I wouldn't pass up Bill Bryson or Sarah Vowell's latest on audio over a mere formatting quibble. Though I must say I was delighted to be able to order David Sedaris's latest work When you are engulfed in flames on audiocassette. That was totally bad ass, thank you David, thank you thank you.


Library geek that I am, of course I had to stroll through the 000's, to check out the LIS material. Still pretty robust, though I wish they wouldn't have weeded so much of Alternative Library Literature, the biennial anthology. They ditched all but the last volume, 2000-2001, which is a shame because the earlier volumes had lots of good material as well, some of it quite timeless. They also had updated DDC22's, having replaced the earlier DDC21's they did have. I did finally get a used copy of the DDC21 for my own curiosity. But on the whole, the LIS collection at HPL has undergone some shrinkage, and that's also unfortunate.

In the Foreign Language collection, the library has nearly abandoned bibliographic control altogether. It's a Dewey-Free zone. Now just a basic language code (SP, Fr, G, Ru, Vo) and the first 5 or so letters of the author's last name, alphabetized. The selections for the German books were fair-to-middlin'; some pieces of belle lettres and pieces of translated English bestseller crap from the US and UK (too much of the latter for my taste). I suppose I should be happy they still HAVE a foreign language section and that some stupid nativist English-only bunch of nutjobs hasn't lobbied to shut it down yet.

The plaza of the Library has been festively painted with geometric square and rectangular patterns in primary colors. It's ok, but doesn't really move me. I was upset that they'd removed the metal sculpture out front. It's not gone completely, they just moved it up a block to front Smith Street, but still, it looks out of place next to the more classical building design of the older branch of the library where the Texas state documents, genealogical and local records are kept. That modernist piece of sculpture clashes completely next to this building, but I'm glad it was preserved in some form, though they should've just left it where it was.

Also, as a concealed carry permit holder, I noticed the library is a 30.06 regulated "gun free zone"; It always has been, actually--it just irks the sh*t out of me now that I'm more aware of the issue and have a stake in it. The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas also has a 30.06 sign. As if signage there would've made a difference back on November 22, 1963, but I digress.

I guess the best thing I can say about HPL Central branch is, I'm glad you're back in operation, baby. Not sure about the new look, but I guess it'll grow on me eventually.