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[padg] FW: At ALA on June 29: Topics in European Studies 1:30 - 3:30
FYI: Bob Schnare,Library Director, Naval War College.
See paper on disasters in Europe.
-----Original Message-----
From: Western European Studies Section List
[mailto:WESS-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Heidi Madden
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 8:43 AM
To: WESS-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: At ALA on June 29: Topics in European Studies 1:30 - 3:30
The ACRL Western European Studies Section is pleased to announce the
latest in its continuing series of conference presentations, "Topics in
European Studies," to be held at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim on
Sunday, 29 June 2008 from 1:30-3:30 P.M. at the Hilton Anaheim
Oceanside Room. This series gives conference participants the
opportunity to present proposals or preliminary findings from research
projects and to receive constructive feedback from colleagues. The event
will appear in the ALA program schedule as the ACRL WESS Research and
Planning Committee meeting.
The papers to be presented in Anaheim (with authors' abstracts) are as
follows:
"After the Deluge: Long-Term Responses to Library Disasters with Some
Lessons for the Future" (Mark Peterson).
Libraries across the world are under threat from disaster and war. It is
the responsibility of librarians and, more and more, governments and the
international community to not only protect the world's collections but
also to recover effectively when disaster does strike. This has proven
to be very difficult. Not only are the efforts of saving materials very
complicated, but getting funding and help organized often brings
together very different groups and agencies. It does not help that books
are often the last things on people's minds when they are dealing with
the injured and with threatened infrastructure.
In this paper, I will be discussing the responses to the Elbe flood
of 2002 in Germany and the Czech Republic. This historic disaster caused
tens of billions of dollars in damage in Central Europe, including the
flooding of the basement of the Czech National Library. My focus is on
the institutional efforts to save books and libraries. How effective
were they and how have the efforts to recover from the disaster been
going? My greatest interest is in the long-term efforts to bring things
to normal by European countries, the aid that the rest of the world has
provided, and what we can learn from this for the situation in other
library disasters around the globe.
"A Good Ride?: The Views of Academic/Research Librarians with Subject
Doctorates on the Workplace and Profession" (Thea Lindquist).
The topic of academic/research librarians with subject doctorates is
largely unexplored in the literature, in spite of a projected shortage
of librarians with advanced subject degrees and academic libraries'
recent efforts to recruit them. In the limited literature that does
exist, surprisingly little has been heard directly from librarians with
advanced subject degrees. Under the circumstances, Todd Gilman and I
deemed it important not only to provide vital information to the
academic/research library community about academic librarians with
subject doctorates as a distinct and potentially sought-after group but
also to communicate their experiences to advanced-degree holders who
might be considering a career in librarianship. In this presentation I
will report tentative findings from the follow-up we are currently
working on to "Academic/Research Librarians with Subject Doctorates:
Data and Trends, 1965-2006" (appeared in portal: Libraries and the
Academy 8, no. 1 [January 2008]). This research concentrates on 664
respondents' experiences in the workplace and views about the advantages
and disadvantages of academic librarianship as a career for those with
subject doctorates. While founded on quantitative data like the first
piece, it will also exploit a rich mine of qualitative responses that
allowed respondents to relate their professional experiences and
opinions in their own words.
"Madmen, Hypocrites, and Degenerates: Readers and Their Books in the
Late-Eighteenth-Century German Novel" (Kathleen Smith).
This presentation compares several depictions of readers and libraries
or book collections in German novels of the late eighteenth century in
order to examine negative qualities attributed to the act of reading.
For example, in Goethe's 1795 novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrejahre,
Friedrich and Philine, two frivolous and sexually-uninhibited
characters, retreat to a villa. Bored with other activities, they are
eventually forced to turn to a small library of scholarly works, which
bores them even more until they begin arbitrarily reading short,
randomly-selected passages from the books. Since these books are
well-known scholarly works of the period, this haphazard and capricious
manner of reading questions the value of literary knowledge because the
two do manage to "educate" themselves in this way: Although the same
superficial person as before, Friedrich now peppers his speech with
classical allusions and conjugations of Greek verbs. Another example is
Karl Philipp Moritz's 1785-90 novel Anton Reiser, in which the titular
character begins his reading life as a product (or victim) of his
parents' conflicting literary tastes. A voracious reader, Anton's
simultaneous interpretation of both religious tracts and collections of
Greek myths as factual prevents him from properly interacting with the
world around him. Throughout the novel, his love of reading is presented
as unhealthy, self-destructive, and deluded. By exploring these and
other late-eighteenth-century depictions of readers and their
relationships with library collections, I intend to probe their apparent
conflict with Enlightenment ideals casting written knowledge as the path
to the healthy development of the individual.
==========================
The program will be followed by the business meeting of the WESS
Research and Planning Committee. Everyone is welcome to stay for this,
but there will be a pause to allow those who wish to depart to do so
unobtrusively.