Who are we and how do we change that???

Wayne Wiegand, "Tunnel vision and blind spots: What the past tells us about the present; Reflections on the twentieth-century history of American librarianship," in Library Quarterly

Wiegand states that we, in libraries, lack a solid body of scholarship because most of our studies are uncritical of the past and celebratory of our history. I totally agree and if I didn't before I read this, I certainly did after.
Wiegand also writes on page 5 of the text that Melville Dewey and his allies in the library field "pressed their colleagues to expand services to more Americans" and these Americans were of all races and genders. Although he also wanted to make sure that these citizens did not read "trash" and elevated their reading from unintelligent fiction to more solid reading materials which were approved by the scholars in the appropriate fields. I would argue that in some situations, in some places this still happens today and I am sure that this was a point that Wiegand was trying to make in his writing here as well. I agree with Wiegand that we have to be critical in evaluating booklists and reviews (such as Choice) instead of just assuming that these sources check out okay because they seem to be respected among scholarly communities.

Marie L. Radford and Gary P. Radford, "Librarians and party girls: Cultural studies and the meaning of the librarian," library Quarterly

This leads me into the next reading for this week authored by the Radfords. I am a huge fan of the movie Party Girl and I have seen it way too many times. I will prove this now by bringing up something that the authors left out: The character of Mary in this film exhibits an organizational urge before she begins working in the library for Judy. In a scene after she agrees to work for Judy in the public library where a friend of hers is looking through her wardrobe while they all play music and get ready for a nite out dancing, Mary freaks out at her friend for messing up the order of her jeans. She is quite obsessive and knowledgable about vintage fashion and is actually quite a savvy business woman through the beginning of the film. This is not something that magically happens to her when she starts REALLY working in the library as the authors allude to.

So our authors here tell us that Stuart Hall believes it is possible to challenge stereotypes by using three approaches, 1) reversing stereotypes; 2) substitute positive images for negative ones; 3) contesting the stereotype from within the stereotype.

All three of these approaches brought to mind for me our first reading this semester This Book is Overdue. I found this book so compelling that I just could not seem to limit myself to writing a paragraph about one story, so I picked my first issue (which I wrote down a week before classes began) and ran with it in my blog, putting my own thought patterns and strings on it and reading my own fears into it. This Book is Overdue is a good book; it is a good book because it does precisely what this article states in the last few paragraphs: to break down stereotypes sometimes we need to teach others. Librarian as radical tatooed and Zine collecting revolutionary is a good way to start breaking those stereotypes down!