Books are a love language

I am consumed by my thoughts and desires

Pouring my heart and soul into every fire

I don't know how to stop or let it be

This obsessive nature is going to be the death of me.

— agelesslibrary

That unlocked a memory I didn’t know I had...

Malmantile Racquistato

The Reconquered Malmantile

This image appeared as the frontispiece to Lorenzo Lippi's posthumously published comic-heroic poem, "Il Malmantile Racquistato." The work was first released in 1676 under the pseudonym "Perlone Zipoli," an anagram of the author's name. The fanciful and linguistically inventive poem tells the story of a valiant poet who aids in the recapture of a fallen kingdom and earns the hand of its rightful queen. Crowned in laurels, the poet appears within the print under a hanging sign bearing the work's title, seated beneath a ledge on which a monkey works a mortar and pestle. This allegorical scene contains references to theater, literature, art, and medicine, while the poem itself contains numerous references to tarot and astrology.

Image credit: Zuccarelli, Francesco. “Malmantile Racquistato.” Laid paper, 1731. Science History Institute. Philadelphia.

Going on the TBR

The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitents by Ann Radcliffe

This book was supposed to arrive last February but it came in the mail just last week. I want to get my hands on every gothic novel that I can from the Romantic era. This is my first Ann Radcliffe book and I’m so looking forward to it.

I have been reading a lot of short stories and plays lately and I miss committing myself to a novel. Hopefully I’ll be able to get around and pick up the next book on my tbr.

Reposting so I can add to #TBR 😬

me @ myself: “It’s 2am and you’re still reading?! Honestly, why are you like this?!”

me @ myself: 

Pictured: Students protesting. Photography courtesy of the Asian American Federation

APAHM Spotlight: Asian American Federation

As part of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we’re highlighting some amazing organizations that are positively impacting the community. Asian American Federation is a pan-Asian nonprofit leadership organization that represents and supports a network of 70 Asian American community service organizations in New York. They’re focusing on mental health needs in the Asian American community, as a whole, as it’s been affecting a lot of people in the community. We sat down with Deputy Director Joo Han.

The Asian/Pacific Islander community is not monolithic. What are some common misconceptions about this ethnic group?

The Asian American community comprises 16 ethnic groups (including the Arab community who are included in our research) — that speak over 36 Asian languages.

The model minority myth really obscures the diversity and need in the community. For example, Asians are the poorest racial group in New York City, with 25 percent living in poverty (a rate that grew by 44 percent from 2000 to 2016). The majority, or 70 percent, are immigrants, with 70 percent also having limited English proficiency. If you disaggregate the data, you’ll also see that some Asian groups, like Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong, have higher status dropout rates (the percent of 16-24 year olds who aren’t enrolled in school and don’t have a high school diploma) than non-Hispanic Whites.

Mental Health is a journey that many of us go through. Unfortunately, many people of color do not have the accessibility for mental health/resources. How is the stigma towards mental health hurtful in the Asian/Pacific Islander community?

Deep cultural stigma is one of the greatest barriers to accessing mental health services in the Asian American community.

A study found that even though a higher percentage of Asian American high school and college students reported experiencing depressive symptoms compared to their White counterparts, Asian Americans are the least likely group to report, seek, and receive medical help for depressive symptoms due to cultural stigma. This stigma stems from the belief that mental healthcare is “only for crazy people” — or the seriously ill — and comes from honor/shame cultures that suppress negative experiences in order to “save face” or not be a burden to others.

Also, Asian Americans, who bear the additional burdens of the model minority myth and imposter syndrome, can further feel they are “weak” or “inadequate” when they struggle with stress, anxiety, depression, and so forth, which may deter them from reaching out for help.

How can we de-stigmatize mental health needs?

One of the best ways that we can de-stigmatize mental health needs is to develop and spread mental health literacy. Part of spreading mental health literacy also comes from sharing our own stories about how mental illness has touched our lives, whether personally or through a family member or friend, so that we can normalize mental healthcare as we would physical healthcare.

Pictured: AAF’s Executive Director Jo-Ann Yoo & New York Council members. Photography courtesy of the Asian American Federation

How can people continue to support the Asian/Pacific Islander community?

Plug into Asian-led, Asian-serving community-based organizations where you live. There is tremendous need for Asian Americans who can commit their time, expertise, and resources to serving the fastest-growing population in the U.S. And really commit—by volunteering to teach a class in something you’re skilled at, joining a board, or offering to hold a fundraiser. By serving the community, you’re actually investing in resources that will uplift you, your family, and the community as a whole.

Thank you for your time, Joo Han. We appreciate all your work with the Asian American Federation. Tumblr, how do you handle your mental health as a person of color? Use the hashtag #APAHM to share your story.

Dtf (down to fight)

Slytherin: alright that’s it. I’m going to physically fight the next person that insults my boyfriend.

Hufflepuff: I mean you don’t have to I’m not that great

Slytherin:

Slytherin: alright square up you beautiful peice of shit

WHEN THE PERSON NEXT TO ME ON THE PLANE IS READING 50 SHADES OF GREY

I’m just like:

#iamjudgingyousohardrandomperson

I mean, Harry Potter Fandom is a lifestyle!

So incredibly true. It's amazing how this happened and I never really understood it till I went through it.

I just spent 2 hours debating and testing and arguing in circles and bitching about library catalogs with two colleagues and I just want to say

AO3’s website is really, really, really impressive, functional and ergonomic and cohesive. the tag system is INCREDIBLE and AMAZINGLY maintained. this is my professional librarian appraisal.

I’ve found 1 library catalog that meets my standards. even the national library of France’s catalog is shitty in comparison to ao3.

praise.

It’s awesome! As a total ignorant, can I ask what AO3 does and library catalogs don’t?

i might actually type out a longer answer but what it really boils down to is: YOU ACTUALLY FIND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

ok so here’s the long unreadable (and probs uninteresting to anyone else than me) version:

- the site design and overall look. it’s easy to read, easy to navigate, and easy to notice what you can click on. Makes good use of fonts and text sizes and styles to make important things stand out and be easily found at a glance, and is just overall very readable. The icons with hovertext! The tags! the amount of info that’s readable at a single glance and actually fits on the same page!

this is BASIC STUFF and it is not a given on a LOT of professional library websites i run into regularly and that drives me INSANE. (Mostly bc one of the very popular, cheap, and easy French-language library catalog softwares has a default online catalog design that sucks and which librarians generally don’t tinker with much.)

- again this seems obvious, but the filters when you’re inside a fandom/tag are SO VISIBLE and SO EXPLICIT. The filters menu makes it instantly clear what it’s for, is easy to navigate and understand and use, intelligently suggests the most popular tags first (which also immediately gives you a lot of information).

My library’s online catalog (which uses the default website set-up I mentioned above) has exactly the same thing, but stupidly executed, unreadable and incomprehensible, and somehow completely unnoticeable despite being exactly in the same place on the page. The site design makes very bad use of the space on the page and basically you just don’t even look over there because it’s so far away from where the rest of the information is and it simply never catches your eye, and even when it does, the vocabulary used is so obtuse you don’t realize what it’s for.

IT’S SO… STUPID AND EASILY FIXABLE… but apparently no public library in the french language can afford a website designer, or they’re all horrifyingly bad

- and finally: THE TAGS. One of the biggest issues we have in catalogs is that people use different words for the same thing. In order for you to find books relevant to your search, we have to apply topic keywords to them (basically: tags), but of course there are Norms so that all libraries, or at least all employees in the same library, use the same keywords. Except despite the norm that still doesn’t happen. I don’t know how it goes in the English-language world but for French language it’s all horribly complicated and surprisingly non-functional, despite how easy it seems in theory, and leads me to complain about the Bibliothèque Nationale de France about once a week at least.

Easy example that I’ve complained about today (for the 6th time this year): ADHD. The term used by the BNF, that we are supposed to use, is “Trouble de l’hyperactivité avec déficit de l’attention” (“hyperactivity disorder with attention deficit”). That’s… not only outdated but flat-out inaccurate (according to French’s current stance on it) — the term people actually use nowadays is the opposite way around, “trouble de l’attention avec ou sans hyperactivité” ( “ADD with or without hyperactivity”), commonly abbreviated to “TDA/H”. The BNF’s system does accommodate for various synonyms, but it appears unaware of this one, so if you search “TDA/H” in the keywords, you won’t find anything. You’d have to look in the title, and if none of our books have it in their title, you’ll find nothing at all, and won’t even be redirected anywhere if we strictly follow the BNF system. (WHAT IS THE POINT OF KEYWORDS THEN, one might ask.)

Tl;dr: you look for the word you and most people actually informed about a topic use, and find nothing at all because some rando has decided that’s not the word you should be using. (Unsurprisingly, this problem pops up a looot for keywords related to minorities, mental illnesses and LGBT+ topics.)

It’s like if you tried to search a site for “fluff” and didn’t find anything because the site has decided to continue using “WAFF” instead. Also, the site has decided that hurt-comfort and guro fic are the same thing, makes no distinction between levels of romance and eroticism so there’s no way to tell cute handholding from smut, and believes that the word “furry” means they get a dog.

=> The system of letting people use their words and linking them — making them synonyms — with what other people have used for the same meaning completely blows my mind. I am in awe of the fact that it works, and that it’s still happening, even though iirc tag-wranglers are unpaid volunteers. I couldn’t imagine doing something like that in just our catalog, and AO3 is massive.

The result is: not only do you find what you’re looking for, but if your search accidentally picks up other things too, you know what it’s actually about because you get it in the author’s words.

AO3′s tag system is an incredibly clever and simple solution to a very real and thorny problem that I run into almost every day.

tl;dr AO3 is just generally a perfectly functional and user-friendly site, instantly easy to use in order to tailor your search to exactly what you want (and even more so with the addition of the exclusion operator to the filters sidebar), and on a technical library-science viewpoint, it’s fascinating.

This is taking me back to when AO3 was first born, and I was having a conversation with someone (@icarusancalion, I think?) about how I didn’t think the tagging system was ever really gonna be useful. 

I knew the kind of top-down tagging system that libraries use was often useless for the same reasons you’re describing here: academics like the idea of a priori systems and exclusive classification schemata, but AO3 tagging is useful precisely because tags can be messy and overlapping rather than strict hierarchies. You’ll never get all fandoms everywhere to agree on a common tag family, I said c. 2008. It’ll be outdated before it’s even implemented. But relying entirely on user-generated tags will be a logistical nightmare, past!Maud also argued, because there would be no way to manage synonyms and near-synonyms and typos that would rapidly bloat the system to uselessness. 

Well, 2008!me was right about top-down schemata but wrong about user-submitted tags, thanks almost entirely to the work of the tag wranglers: human curators who take the time to link and nest related tags as they come up, without relying on a pristine (and utterly dysfunctional) a priori system to do so. 

Would real-world academic libraries benefit from tag wranglers? Absofuckinglutely, but I really don’t think most of them would ever implement them for the same reason past!me was skeptical of them. Maybe if they were shown how well it works on AO3 (where the wranglers are all volunteers!) they might be persuaded to hire some workstudies or under-employed PhDs to wrangle for them. And then the world would be a better place. 

Well this post was made for me. AO3 + cataloging

Yes! Libraries are supposed to be all about access, but when you can’t find what you want in the card catalog, you’re impeding access!

Such a great and informative post! Thanks for sharing the knowledge. The catalog system we use at my library is searching nightmare as well. #lame lol