Banned Books Day 1: To Kill a Mockingbird
Opus May 8, 2005 Rhymes With Orange, April 5, 2011 Frank and Ernest, August 26, 2012
Author: dcdotnerd
-
-
Banned Books Week 2014
When I was in high school, one of my English teachers taught one day about Lady Chatterly’s Lover. We didn’t read it in class, and not because of any curricular intent to avoid it (at least, I assume), but we learned that it was a controversial book and was often banned. Of course my adolescent mind…
-
Notable DC figures: Patricia Roberts Harris
Patricia Roberts Harris is known to (relative) newcomers to DC because a school building is named for her. P.R. Harris Education Center is currently used as a location for the University of the District of Columbia Community College but previously was K-8 public school. It was closed in a round large of school closures in 2008.…
-
Musings on life, librarianship, and LIS education
The semester starts Monday. It’s been eight months–almost nine–since I was last in class and I’m starting to feel the HOLY FISH HOW AM I GOING TO HAVE TIME TO DO EVERYTHING anxiety that I haven’t felt since right before my first semester. The anxiety is not aided by my plans to volunteer 2-3 hours…
-
It runs in the family
Almost everyone in my family is an academic. Grandpa Blau taught at Columbia. Grandma and Grandpa Katz were both medical doctors but also did some university teaching. Aunt Rachel retired from Temple; Uncle Bob from Swarthmore. Aunt Jan is a dean at Old Dominion. Dad is at Hopkins. (The non-university-affiliated adults in my family? My…
-
Notable DC figures
District law requires that full names be used when naming a public space after a person. And we like to name public space after people. So if one pays attention, there is an opportunity to learn about the historical figures that we (or at least I) didn’t learn about in school because they weren’t rich…
-
Tisha B’Av and Ostriching
Today was Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, which is a day of communal mourning. In a fascinating stroke of coincidence, both the first and second Temples in Jerusalem fell on the ninth of Av. So we fast from sundown to sundown, read the book of Lamentations and other depressing…
-
Information Literacy, then and now
A digression deleted from my post on Hack Library School about information literacy. Go read that post, and come back here where it says to. Old standards: Determine the extent of information needed Access the needed information effectively and efficiently Evaluate information and its sources critically Incorporate selected information into one’s knowledge base Use information…