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    This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
    This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
    This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
    Audiobook7 hours

    This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

    Written by Marilyn Johnson

    Narrated by Hillary Huber

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Buried in information? Cross-eyed over technology? From the bottom of a pile of paper and discs, books, e-books, and scattered thumb drives comes a cry of hope: Make way for the librarians! They want to help. They're not selling a thing. And librarians know best how to beat a path through the googolplex sources of information available to us, writes Marilyn Johnson, whose previous book, The Dead Beat, breathed merry life into the obituary-writing profession.

    This Book Is Overdue! is a romp through the ranks of information professionals and a revelation for readers burned out on the cliches and stereotyping of librarians. Blunt and obscenely funny bloggers spill their stories in this book, as do a tattooed, hard-partying children's librarian; a fresh-scrubbed Catholic couple who teach missionaries to use computers; a blue-haired radical who uses her smartphone to help guide street protestors; a plethora of voluptuous avatars and cybrarians; the quiet, law-abiding librarians gagged by the FBI; and a boxing archivist. These are just a few of the visionaries Johnson captures here-pragmatic idealists who fuse the tools of the digital age with their love for the written word and the enduring values of free speech, open access, and scout-badge-quality assistance to anyone in need.

    Those who predicted the death of libraries forgot to consider that in the automated maze of contemporary life, none of us-neither the experts nor the hopelessly baffled-can get along without human help. And not just any help; we need librarians who won't charge us by the question or roll their eyes, no matter what we ask. Who are they? What do they know? And how quickly can they save us from being buried by the digital age?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 3, 2010
    ISBN9781400186341
    Author

    Marilyn Johnson

    Marilyn Johnson is a former editor and writer for Life, Esquire, and Outside magazines, and lives with her husband, Rob Fleder, in New York's Hudson Valley.

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    Reviews for This Book Is Overdue!

    3.5/5

    596 ratings78 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I really wanted to enjoy this book. I'm planning on starting my masters program in Library and Information Science this fall, so I was excited to think that this book would delve into new areas of the profession, that it would be a true inspiration, and that maybe I would even come away from the read armed with a little knowledge about the latest-and-greatest in why and how traditional libraries are still ever-so-necessary in an increasingly digitized world. This book offered none of that.

      The first clue that I might be disappointed came when I realized that the author is not a librarian; I was hoping for an "insider" view but instead got "fan [non:]fiction." This isn't to say that Johnson didn't do a great job interviewing different librarians and recounting their stories, but that's about all she did. And so while she entertained me with anecdotes of tattooed librarians doing book cart routines and librarians silenced by the Patriot Act, etc (few of which were stories I had not already heard from the New York Times or through surfing the blogosphere), I found that there was very little in the way of any real insight into "how librarians and cybrarians can save us all."

      Johnson dispels the myth of the librarian as shushing-old-lady (does anyone even think that anymore?), and demonstrates instead that most librarians are highly adaptable and helpful people of all backgrounds who are doing a fine job of keeping up with technology. But here she jumps past what I would consider to be the most compelling space?the harmonization between the traditional library and new information technologies?and focuses primarily what I thought this book would dispute: libraries as nearly entirely digital entities in which the librarian's primary purpose is teaching people how to use that technology. She praises the archivist for preserving information for the future, and the librarian for helping patrons find that information, but these are text-book definitions of the professions that, again, do not offer the revolution suggested by the title.

      In the book, Johnson writes extensively about libraries and librarians in Second Life as if this is the answer for keeping librarians around, but ignores the facts that not everyone has access to the internet and that the means of getting access to information on the internet are largely proprietary and thus not guaranteed to be "free" forever. There's how librarians and cybrarians can save us all?by continuing to provide free and total access to information?but Johnson doesn't mention it.

      It seems that Johnson's goals in writing this book were to provide some entertaining anecdotes about how librarians aren't who you might think they are, and to explore her own interests in technology without really examining the true ramifications of the adoption of any given technology. As an entertaining read knowing that's what you'll be getting, I can call this book a great success. But with a title like it has, and being surrounded by all sorts of hype about how this book will make everyone realize how crucial it is to fund out libraries, This Book Is Overdue! still leaves us waiting.
    • 5/5
      Johnson gives an excellent overview of the today's library profession. Today's librarians aren't just sitting behind a desk, they are in Second Life, writing blogs, and teaching technology classes. While today's generation of students are doing research with Google, librarians are constantly being asked what they can provide that Google can't. What if you need a book on Buddhism, but you are asking Google to find books on "bootyism"? You need to consult a human to help you in your search. While Google is a wonderful tool to navigate the web, you need to know how to use it. Librarians, as they change and adapt to changes in technology, will continue to be invaluable.
    • 4/5
      Outstanding!! The personal stories make this a page turner. For example, the inside stories of the NY Public Library. Combining a love for books and a web enabled appreciation for rapidly changing information and everything digital, the author covers it all.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed listening to the audio version of this book. Although I was familiar with many of the concepts and people Johnson described, it reminded me how exciting a profession I have and what interesting people are my peers. It's great inspiration for anyone working in public or school libraries, or hoping to be.
    • 5/5
      If you have not read this book, IMMEDIATELY get it and read it! The chapter on "Big Brother and the Holdout Company" alone is worth the price of admission. Author Marilyn Johnson goes out of her way to track down and interview librarians. Along the way, she meets fascinating and (dare I say it?) heroic purveyors of knowledge and discovers there is far more to a librarian than the ability to check out books and shush noisy patron. She even goes deep into cyberspace to meet with the librarians of Second Life's many libraries. Who knew?Johnson's breezy writing style makes This Book is Overdue easy to read, but belies the incredible and largely unknown story of librarians and how they help preserve and advance true civilization.Every single library patron, supporter, and librarian in the country (if not the world) NEEDS to READ THIS BOOK!
    • 4/5
      Some chapters are more interesting than others, but you get to see various (and varied) aspects of the library world and what it is that librarians do exactly.
    • 4/5
      A rare look into the world of libraries, archivists, catalogers, and cybrarians of all stripes. The author investigates how technology is rapidly changing the role of libraries and contradicts the popular notion that such institutions are becoming obsolete. Information is multiplying exponentially and most of it simply isn't being found or preserved. Come along and get a glimpse of what libraries will look like in the digital age.
    • 3/5
      Reading this book made me feel good about being a librarian!
    • 3/5
      This book is a chatty celebration of librarians in the world today. At their best, the chapters have qualities of a good personal essay, and the author writes well throughout. But, the book has the tone of an expanded human-interest article from the newspaper -- the author gravitates towards characters, and delights in sharing anecdotes that are intended to give a feel for what the librarians she describes are really like as people. In the process, she touches on some really interesting policy issues and conflicts: how much access should law enforcement have to the information librarians keep about patrons? How should libraries relate to the market economy? What is worth saving for the future and what is not? But in every case, Johnson presents a one-sided and usually shallow perspective, because she isn't really engaging with the issues; she's portraying the texture of the personalities of the librarians (or IT people, or archivists) she meets. Based on the author's passing references in various chapters to reading books about library science, she must have done extensive research for this book, but very little of it shows up in the substance of her text. An uncomfortable aspect of the author's heavy focus on personalities is that, for color, she regularly repeats facts and views people shared with her in confidence, at least to judge by her own account of the conversations. Perhaps she's overstating to lend her book an air of pulling away the curtains -- but having read it, I certainly wouldn't speak off the record with this author. I've read other writers of the new non-fiction who handle this much better - you can read between the lines of the conversations they recount, but they never directly put their interlocutors in a compromised position.
    • 2/5
      It's just boring. I work at a library, and this was utterly boring to me. The sentiment is nice though. DNF.
    • 3/5
      As other reviewers have noted, the subtitle is misleading ("Random Dispatches from Some Corners of Libraryland" would be more accurate), the chapters lack a unifying focus, and the author spends too much time on her own, often entirely irrelevant preoccupations. Also, someone should tell her that a) "transgender" is an adjective, not a noun; and b) if you don't want to come off as fixated about a given librarian's gender expression, then don't write about it as if it were a big shock to you and then say, "I can't get hung up on this." If I hadn't been as far along when I started to finally get fed up, I would've happily abandoned the book.
    • 2/5
      Interesting book about libraries, librarians, archiving. Lots of boring details but overall a good read.
    • 3/5

      Frenetic ode to information specialists" - spends too much time on the few librarians who do amazing things (many of which are surely made more so by Johnson's breathless & superficial viewpoint) - not enough time in analysis of the potential for the future of everyday libraries and 'information specialists.'  I read lightly, I admit, but mainly because I felt like I had been dropped off in an alien world with no guide, no prep, no language, not even a brochure.  I see on GR that real-life librarians have mixed feelings about this, with a tendency toward the negative.  Too bad.

      I do recommend it to ppl who need the message, like city commissioners.  But the only ppl likely to read it are already members of the choir and do not need to be preached at... and, imo, will not be entertained.

      "
    • 3/5
      Meh. She gets some of what librarians do, but misses or misunderstands a lot. And likes the snark a little too much. Also, even though this book is only four years old, most of the content is five or six years old, and in libraries, as in technology, that's old. Far too old for a chapter devoted to libraries in Second Life. Old enough that Meebo was still used for chat reference and Zotero was a brand new baby. Old enough that only the basic principles of librarianship are still relevant, and she didn't quite understand them. I appreciate a cheerleader, but I'm not sure the profession needs this one.Side note: my blog got a brief shout-out in the list of blogs she was following, or at least noted, back when everyone was creating a blog.
    • 4/5
      My first audiobook in years, I enjoyed this book listened to in the car. Obviously my comprehension suffered but there was lots of interesting material. I found the reader's voice pleasant but I swear she says "liberry" and "liberian" every so often; as if she has to force herself to pronounce it correctly and doesn't catch herself all the time. I'm tempted to pick up the book to see if there was much material that was left out.
    • 4/5
      I listened to the audiobook version in my car over the last week and each day I learned something about Librarians that had never occurred to me before (they do a lot more than wait for you to pick a book and check it out). The book is well-written and funny in parts and was a lot of fun to listen to. I will say that the shift from one chapter to the next can be rather abrupt when listening instead of reading...the current chapter sometimes just ends with very little conclusion.
    • 3/5
      Lots of cheerleading for information professionals, which I appreciate. My reading this book caused a sort of preaching-to-the-choir paradigm, but it was still good for me to learn more about the variety of things other librarians are doing. It helps spark the imagination some, so I might get more creative ideas about what to do at my library. This would be useful for community leaders and policy-makers who seem to have never used the library because they can get all the internet, books, and media they need themselves.
    • 2/5
      As someone who loves nonfiction and librarians, I thought this one would be a no-brainer for me. Unfortunately it’s such a disjointed mishmash of information it feels more like a Wikipedia page than a cohesive book. Johnson seems to have written anecdotes about things she found as she research librarians without having a real goal or overarching message for the book. At one point she discusses, at length, the way librarians use second life. It just never came together in any cohesive way for me. BOTTOM LINE: Skip it, I can’t think of one substantive thing I learned from the book.  
    • 4/5
      It was an interesting book and made me think about librarians in untraditional roles. It definitely had information that I never heard about before that I am interested in learning more about.
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed the information I got from this book. Web Sites I could visit and other books I should read.
    • 2/5
      I tried really hard to like this book, but I felt like it provided me no new insight about the profession and how it is going to help citizens in the current day and age. It read like a love letter to librarians, which, while sweet, was overall disappointing.
    • 3/5
      As a devout library lover in my youth, though finding very little reason to visit in my older years (and actually feeling sad about this) due to largely to lack of reading time... this was a fun book to read. It does its job of making libraries seem exciting, and full of awesomeness. The writer expresses the loves that are close to all library-lover's hearts: books, collecting books, organizing books, reading book, knowing about books and the stuff we found in books -- oh and all that other media and stuff as well. She expresses this while describing the struggles, experiments, and changes made in libraries in these internet times.

      As a fairly adept computer/database programmer and all-around "IT" guy, and developer of a web site that currently gets about 500,000 unique visits per month, I felt that she could have used the thing she stresses many times in the book that libraries need now: competent computer/IT consulting/staff. Pretty much every library computer/web interface I've seen (in Canada) has sucked extremely badly. Excusing this by saying these companies who supply these systems (and horrifically expensive prices) were the only ones capable of handling such large collections at the time is just ridiculous to those of us who have some knowledge of these things. Excusing great mystery of the missing holds as finally (after how long?!) as being not the fault of the software, but of the librarians, equally misdiagnoses the problem. Were there no simple audit trails? Do the developers have no respect for data integrity?!!! Excusing this on having to interface with or work on top of legacy systems and structures, while certainly a consideration and a constraint, does not seem credible to me.

      It's truly broken my heart to see the crap my beloved libraries have installed, and tied themselves to. And continue to. The IT consultants they seem to end up with these days seem more to be sales people --- selling them a bill of goods. A short term we-want-to-be-hip-and-up-to-date solution tied to specific devices, or pathetic DRM schemes.

      And the length of time the author spends in Second Life is, to me, also rather startling. She does mention the lag and glitches. But she doesn't mention the relatively steep learning curve and hardware requirements just for entry. She describes the scenes she participates in that world with beautiful imagination: the (virtual) reality is vastly (if not infinitely) more clunky. Yeah, it's interesting and fun that a group of librarians have gravitated there and done interesting things... but Second Life is rather rather old technology by this point, which never really took off as expected: it's a niche of which you can say at least it did better than all of the other "revolutionary" virtual reality environments that were supposed to change the way we interacted with computers. Admittedly it's been years since I looked at it, and frankly I felt like I had entered a time machine and gone back about five years to hear such glowing reviews of it in this book. Five years!

      I was more interested in the social activism side of librarians; and some of the history of library initiatives was quite interesting.

      Lately, though I have no "information systems" training, I have found myself helping a local non-profit organization (for free) get their old, approximately 2000 volume, card catalog into a computer. I set up Koha for them (an excellent, free, open-source, library software -- even if it feels a bit hodge-podge) and wrote up documentation on the cataloging process, and circulation. Actually I've ended up doing the input for 1500 of the volumes myself in my spare time over the last year. I've become very familiar with MARC (in it's various flavours), Z39.50, worldcat, and related things.

      I've also become rather intimate with the blessed cards, and all their peculiarities. Notes written on them by librarians 20 years ago which are now indecipherable. At several points the cart catalog was gone through and a system of small lines, dots or checkmarks were added to the corners of cards indicate some sort of status. No one really remembers what the marks meant -- and what they do remember no one knows if the information is still valid. There are professinionally printed cards with LCC numbers. But most of the cards are manually typed: I am amazed by the skill of the old typewriter formatting! So much time and love went into these cards. Little details. They were lucky to have had a real librarian labouring with love on these. Some cards are hand written...
      the physical cards themselves are a treasure which in some ways I hate to supplant.

      Perhaps we will image them, and add the card catalog as an item to the online database as a curiosity. (Most are already photographed as part of our digitizing process.) Some amateur librarian in the future who cares about this little library may like to just randomly flip through some of the card images -- for some nostalgic fun, and inspiration.

      Anyhow, it was interesting to read the author's own, non-techie, struggle with the simple (yet so complex) business of saving web pages for herself. And it was nice she gave a vigorous and insightful nod to the importance of open source software in cataloging and storing information for the long term (even if it what she meant was "open formats").

      I just wish i had more time.
    • 2/5
      I had to walk away from this one. Although I am keenly interested in the subject matter, I really didn't like the writing style. It was a chore to read....so I stopped reading it. On to the next!
    • 3/5
      As a new librarian, it's interesting to see someone from outside the profession talk about their perceptions of what librarians do. From that standpoint - the book was valuable, as it points to some places where librarians still need to improve the image of their profession, as well as others where they've done quite well. The book also contained some amusing anecdotes, as well.

      However, as far as living up to the subtitle - how librarians and cybrarians can save us all, the book falls short. There is a lot of focus on where change has brought us so far, but nothing about where we might be going...so either the book is poorly titled or it doesn't live up to its promise. The author, for all of her research, still seems unclear on some areas of librarianship, as well. For example, the few times she brings up weeding, she seems squeamish (to be fair, I know many librarians who are, as well), but I don't get the sense that much effort was made to really understand why libraries must weed (unless they're a gigantic research institution).

      The chapter on Second Life stood out as one where the author put a lot of time into research - but didn't make any sense out of her research. To put it bluntly, she forgot to give the chapter a thesis/purpose/point - whatever you want to call it. There was some potentially useful information there, but I'm not sure what I, as the reader, was supposed to do with it.
    • 2/5
      While it's nice to see an entire book on librarian-appreciation coming from outside the profession, the level of faux(?) naivete can be really irritating. "Wow, librarians are unicorn magic! Look at them go! Did you know some of them have orange hair and (gasp) tattoos?! Radical!"

      Much breathless wonder is devoted to librarians in Second Life, apparently a booming population. No mention, though of who consults Second Life library services, for what purpose, and how often--all things I'd be curious to know, even at ballpark level. So in the end this kind of information providing comes off looking more like a hobby (slash... excuse for frequent virtual costume changes) than like a public service.

      This is not the "Control of Nature" of library books—sorry, McPhee-mentioning reviewers!
    • 5/5
      This book is fantastic. Her understanding and research in and of librarians and libraries is astounding. And so well-written, it's such a fun, informative and I must say-inspiring read. I don't care how you feel about librarians and libraries, you really must read this ...book. I'm immediately seeking out her first book, Dead Beat (about obituaries-which led her to writing this book since she discovered librarians had the most interesting obits) and I am very excited about whatever she might write next.
    • 3/5
      Yes, we will be the saviors of the world! Nice mix of history and contemporary issues and the role of librarians as the keepers and retrievers of human knowledge. I had hoped for a faster pace and more wit - I hate to see more proliferation of the dour-faced librarian.
    • 3/5
      Good, kind of inspiring, kind of kooky, kind of sad
    • 5/5
      A must-read for every librarian!
    • 4/5
      This book was definitely a great advertisement for the profession, especially as it was written by someone outside the profession. Its evocation of the tattooed knitting zinester librarian cliche (certainly better than the shushing bun cliche) could have become a wee bit silly, but I think it mostly managed not to.

      *browses other reviews* No, it wasn't a serious-minded document that used dollar signs and political philosophy to change the way government and citizens think about libraries, but it was a charismatic document that will make people question the "libraries are obsolete" fallacy. It does what it sets out to do, I think.

      It was a major oversight for there to be an entire chapter about Second Life and hardly a mention of school librarians (whose presence in a school is shown statistically to raise test scores). Maybe I'm just bitter because my computer isn't fast enough to really run Second Life.

      I could also have used a feminist-analysis-of-the-history-of-librarianship chapter, but that might have come on a little strong. ;)