The Librarian Hero (WisCon 30 panel)

The Librarian Hero: Real and Imagined (WisCon 30 Panel)

151 The Librarian Hero : Real and Imagined

Politics, Religion, and Money•Senate B• Saturday, 10:30-11:45 p.m.

Protectors of free speech, free access, and information resources unite! Some librarians get to fight vampires, preside over the Jedi library, or time travel... lucky them. Those of us in the real world must fight against shrinking budgets, uncaring administrators, and an increasingly restricted society. How are librarians represented in genre? What are the issues in the library world in relation to genre (such as the graphic novel issue or classification/cataloging)? How can librarians, real and imagined, influence each other? Can SF/F help the library profession reimagine our profession and spaces to overcome the issues we face?

M: Heather H. Whipple, Jay Lake, Laura M. Quilter, Georgie L. Schnobrich, Deborah Stone

some notes

• quote from The Golden Globe by John Varley

Hal had a UniKnowledge module, which was the nearest thing we'd ever get to summing up all human information collected since the days of the Cro-Magnon. It held all the libraries of Old Earth. All the movies, television shows, photo files. Billions of billions of bits of data so obscure a researcher might visit some of it once in two or three hundred years, and then only long enough to find it no longer had any reasonable excuse for being. But it wasn't thrown out. Capacity was virtually infinite, so nothing was ever tossed. Who knew? In ten centuries the twenty years of telemetry from Viking I might be of use to somebody. A vanity-press book, published in 1901, all about corn silage in Minnesota, of which no hard copy existed, might be just the reading you were looking for some dark and stormy night. The UniKnowledge held thousands of books printed in Manx, a language no one had spoken in a hundred years. It held Swahili comic books teaching methods of contraception. It contained cutting-room debris saved from a million motion pictures, discarded first drafts of films never made. A copy of every phone book extant at the time we began to record data by laser, and every one printed since. Fully half of the information in the UK had never been cataloged, and much never referenced in the centuries since its inception, and most of it was likely never to be cataloged. That would be taking the pack-rat impulse too far. Librarians had other things to do, such as develop more powerful search engines to sort through the inchoate mass of data when somebody wanted to find out something truly obscure.

Works Cited

• The librarian in Terry Pratchett's Discworld - horace warblehatt (orangutan)
• library in Gene Wolfe's city of the new sun - library underlying time & space
• david brin's libraries in his uplift series
• use the library & then you get the bill ...
• Piers Anthony's Macroscope sort of a library
• the grand complication / kurzweil - research librarians
• Cheshire cat in thursday ... series / Jasper Fforde
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novel series / librarian of the dreamland
• Fingersmith / by Sarah Waters - (not a speculative novel) features a Victorian porn librarian
• the librarian in The Mummy
• Elizabeth Peters' jacquelyn kirby characters
• "Barbara Gordon" who was Batgirl & managed to run a public library size of NYPL straight out of library school; then when crippled is now Oracle, reference librarian to entire superhero community
• the librarian of basra / Jeannette Winterson
• "read or die" / anime - miniseries; broken into 3 parts, avail on one disk. then a series b/c that was so popular. but doesn't contain main characters.
• Rex Libris comic book series - issue #4 - "Slave Labor Graphics"
• Jedi Librarian
• Harry Potter librarian (creepy)
• Steven King / "The Library Policeman"
• Joel Rosenberg's librarians of the flame
• Gill Alderman / The Archivist
• "In the Stacks" edited by Michael Cart - short stories about librarians
• Magic and Madness in the Library ed. by Eric Graeber
• "Mainspring" / Jay Lake - librarian saving the world
• Other Jay Lake librarian characters

where to get more

• novelist / what do i read next - reader advisory services
• bookstore in ohio / book detective

real librarian heroes

• Kathy Glick-Weill / newton free library - stood off FBI for 48 hours
• Clara Breed / librarian during WW2 - when Japanese Americans were taken away to internment camps she kept in touch with her patrons
• Miss Ruth Brown - racial integration in her southern library. "Storm Center" movie; book by Louise Robins
• The 4 Connecticut librarians who resisted the PATRIOT Act subpoenas

External Links

• http://feministsf.org/bibs/librarians.html Librarian Bibliography from feministSF.org