Albany Public Library Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

There Go The Neighborhoods

I attended the grand opening of the new Delaware branch of the Albany Public Library on Saturday, January 9, just as I attended the event for the Pine Hills branch (a/k/a, MY branch) five weeks earlier. Also, on Tuesday, January 5, I went to the sometimes contentious meeting about the closing of the Washington Avenue YMCA (a/k/a, MY branch) at, not coincidentally, the main branch of the APL. And it brought home the fact that the issues of the branch libraries, the urban Y and also the post offices that have been threatened to be closed, including the South Allen location (a/k/a, MY post office) are all part of the same issue: the livability of the city of Albany. However, there have been quite varied outcomes.

First, let’s look at the good news. You MUST go to the two reopened branches of the library, although you may not fully appreciate their beauty and usability unless you had been to the previous incarnations. The old, one-story location at 517 Western Avenue was cramped and a bit dark; the new two-story facility is bright and roomy, and moreover finally has an adequate number of computers, even on a Saturday afternoon.

But even the old branch of the Pine Hills library was a palace compared with the old Delaware branch which was in a strip mall, next to a laundromat. I’ve had closets that were wider. At least thrice – and I admit I avoided going there very often – water, lint and noise from its neighbor was evident in the library. Now at 331 Delaware Avenue, a former funeral home that I’d only been to once or twice, it is totally reimagined to be bright and accessible.

As Dennis Gaffney, president of the APL board of trustees, has noted, Albany had rejected $150,000 for a Carnegie library back in 1902, by a 3-2 vote, because of the $9,000 annual maintenance. But a little over a century later, the people of Albany, by a 2-1 vote, embraced building five new or refurbished branch libraries.

At the YMCA meeting, CEO Dave Brown noted how much of the programming of the Albany Y is not dependent on that building at 274 Washington Avenue. He was followed by speaker after speaker from various organization noting how vital the Y building is to the populations they serve, from the medical student who destresses there to young man who promised more violence in the city without the facility.

I heard a lot of vague promises to work towards saving the facility, from organizations using the building to the Albany mayor, who, the day after his dire State of the City, promised his support. Yet Dave Brown’s promise of the “immediate shutdown” if certain benchmarks aren’t met remained.

Right now, because of some pricing incentives, it is a good time to join the YMCA on Washington Avenue. I’m cautiously optimistic that the first goal of 2550 households (up from 1800) can be met by April – is that the beginning or end of April, Dave? – but another thousand or more beyond that before the end of the year seems ambitious. The task force working on saving the Y I’m hoping can bring alternative funding ideas to the table.

The post offices unfortunately is largely out of local control, though the targeting of the urban settings, at least in this area, is disturbing. All I can say is that having a local facility was a major selling point in choosing a home. If making some noise will make a difference, let there be cacophony.

Three institutions. One good outcomes, two up in the air. All vital for a livable city. ROG

Doing Away With Dewey

There was an article in the local paper last week that the Albany Public Library was going to do away with the Dewey Decimal System in favor of a system that’s more like a bookstore, as I understand it. I have mixed emotions.

On one hand, I see why the library would want to utilize a system like that which the book-using public is used to. While I grew up using the Dewey Decimal System in the Binghamton Public Library, where I worked as a teen, it’s not as though I’m wedded to it. Indeed, the books in the special library where I work uses the Library of Congress classification, an alphanumeric system even more arcane for the casual user than Melvil Dewey’s categorization. Also, when I was going to library school, I quickly tired of the jokes about my devotion to the DDC.

On the other hand, the conversation suggests that DDC is complicated and that the bookstore model is “better”. Maybe it’s me, but I always find what I’m looking for in a DDC or LC library, while I’m more likely to have to ask for need help from a book store clerk. That’s because the categories in some bookstores are not as helpful as they might be.

The example that immediately comes to mind is Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas A. Blackmon. Last month, the Writers Institute and the Friends of the Albany Public Library sponsored Doug Blackmon to speak at APL.

For those of you not from the Albany area, the Writers Institute was co-founded 25 years ago by William Kennedy. Bill Kennedy is THE most noted writer to come out of Albany, and his fiction about Albany has been award-winning. I happen to particularly enjoy his nonfiction book, O Albany!

There was a dinner before the Blackmon presentation, and for reasons unknown to me, I had the pleasure to sit next to Doug Blackmon. We had a very interesting talk. One point that he made, relative to this current discussion, is how well or poorly his book sells in a given store depended, to a very large degree, on where his book was placed in said bookstore. If it was placed in the American history section – and the story certainly is an American story not often heard – then it sold all right. But if it were placed in the ghetto of the black history section (“ghetto” is my term) – as though the story were only important to, or applicable to black people – then it tended to do less well.

Now, a library book is not sold by the institution. But how often a book circulates certainly effects whether or not other books on that topic and/or books by that author.

I have no inside information just how this “bookstore” model is going to look until the Pine Hills branch – MY branch – reopens next month beyond what I’ve read here. But I’ll be very interested to find out.
ROG

I Remember Where I Was When I Heard Michael Jackson Died

I do know and am quite likely to remember how I learned of MJ’s death.

Just as I remember when JFK died – fifth grade, Miss Oberlik’s class, Daniel S. Dickinson School, Binghamton, NY. Just as I remember finding out about the Challenger disaster – working in the back room at FantaCo Enterprises, the late comic book store store on Central Avenue, Albany, NY, while listening to Q-104, when Mary Margaret Apple interrupted the music to give the news.

This is not to say – lest you start to fret – that I’m making a comparison about the import of these events. I am talking about how memory works.

I was at the Albany Public Library, main branch, computer room, shortly after 6 p.m. on Thursday, June 25. I needed to write about my daughter for a blog post the next day. Then I heard someone say to the woman at the desk that Michael Jackson had died. WHA? So I went to CNN and AP, both of whom indicated that Michael had been rushed to the hospital but neither of whom had announced his death. Most sources indicated that TMZ, the Matt Drudge of entertainment sites, WAS declaring Michael dead, but that they were seeking independent verification.

About 15 minutes later, CNN notes that “multiple sources” have noted Michael’s passing. In the moment, I was more peeved that TMZ had been right in breaking the story, that this was a greater sign of the deterioration of the mainstream media, than the death of an entertainer who I’d watched, sometimes with tremendous admiration and other times in disdain, over the past four decades. Someone who, and I ALWAYS hate this, was younger than I am.

The death of Michael Jackson is this fascinating cultural and technological phenomenon. It slowed Twitter to a crawl and taxed much of the rest of the Internet as well.

Here’s what always bothers me about these types of stories. There are folks who say endlessly, “Why do people care about THAT? If people spent more time caring about (pick one or more) world hunger/the health care crisis/the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/whatever, rather than some entertainer’s death, we’d be better off.” It’s often the same people disdain the use of television (they don’t have one or only watch PBS).

I’m willing to bet that if people spent as much time worrying about the health care industry as they did about Michael or Jon & Kate (who I must admit, I didn’t even know who they were until a month ago) or some other “frivolous” thing, it would have next to zero impact on the important issue. It is as though some individuals feel that passion for Off the Wall, Michael’s best album, could be somehow transferable to other, more “significant” things. (Speaking of which, apparently Michael’s soul has been saved, in case you were wondering.) Thank goodness ABC was planning repeats of Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice last Thursday so they could preempt them for instant specials on Michael and Farrah Fawcett, who, not unexpectedly, had died earlier that day. (What, no special on Sky Saxon of the Seeds?)

So I will remember how I learned of Michael’s death, just as I remember John Lennon’s (heard it from Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football) or the shootings of Lee Harvey Oswald and Robert F. Kennedy (saw them on TV in real time). The intensity of the events will wane, but a piece of the recollection will likely remain.
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Just discovered The Dead Rock Stars Club. Have only been in 2009, but it is quite detailed. Not does it have obvious choices such as MJ, Sky Saxon and Koko Taylor, but more obscure artists such as Viola Wills, and even folks you wouldn’t have thought of in this context: Gale Storm (I’m old enough to remember My Little Margie), Ed McMahon, and David Carradine, e.g.

ROG

The Rest of the Story

PART ONE:
Last week, I wrote a story on the Times Union blog about reconciliation. I mentioned listening to a podcast operated by a US expat living in New Zealand. But I didn’t just happen upon it. Nik from the Spatula Forum, a blog I read regularly, was being interviewed by his fellow expat, Arthur. At the end of the interview, Arthur indicated that his next podcast would be about reconciliation in Australia, so, of course, I listened. Not so incidentally, at the end of that podcast, he reads listener/reader comments, including a couple from, of all people, me.
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PART TWO:
For the Albany Public Library blog, I noted Green Eggs and Ham, admittedly my favorite Dr. Seuss book, had won some library award. So, I thought it would be fun to add some YouTube videos, and I did. One was a straight reading, one was a seven-minute cartoon, and the third was the same cartoon, altered and sped up. I was going to also use the famous Jesse Jackson reading of Green Eggs and Ham from Saturday Night Live; the picture quality is marginal, but the sound is good. What prevented me, ultimately, was a series of racist remarks in the Comments and Response section.
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PART THREE
Someone named Gail, a “dorm mom” from Texas, asked me about the group that sang the Brian Wilson song Love and Mercy at the Kennedy Center Honors back in December. The group is named Libera, and they have a new album called New Dawn coming out in March. Gail says that Love and Mercy will be on that album. Here’s the video from the TV program via YouTube:

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PART FOUR
Rose is having a thing called What the hell is blogging – Blog Contest where one has to define blogging. Off the top of my head – I was on a 15-minute computer at the library before a meeting – I came up with “Blogging is the organization of the important and the ephemeral in the life of a person or organization, ideally in an appealing manner.” If I had had more time, I’m not sure WHAT I’d have come up with.
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PART FIVE
I’ll have to write something more substantial about William F. Buckley’s passing. I was a devotee a LONG time ago.
ROG

Library Poster Person

In lieu of actual content, an article that appeared in the October 2007 Albany Public Library BiblioTech newsletter, on the back page. This article, I understand, has been, or will be, copped in my neighborhood association newsletter:

Roger Green loves to use APL, and he does it from the comfort of his home or office. He is a librarian at the New York State Small Business Development Center and almost daily he uses the APL free databases that he accesses from his office computer with his library card. As a business librarian, he finds the various databases such as Reference USA, Business and Company Resource Center, and the Thomson Gale Legal Forms extremely helpful.

And Roger gives back to APL. As Vice-President of the Friends of the Albany Public Library, he promotes the library and helps create programming. He also created and runs the Friends of the APL blog.

Roger worked as a page for the Binghamton Public Library when he was a teenager. He assisted patrons using the microfilm machines and put away the items in the stacks, including the magazines. He might have glanced at some old issues of Psychology Today and Billboard a little too long before refiling them. “As wonderful as I found going to the library as a child, I’m even more appreciative that what the library usage is no longer limited by four walls,” he says.

Outside of work, Roger does visit the library frequently. He loves to bring his three-year old daughter Lydia to the library for story times and to borrow books and DVD’s. He’s impressed with the Youth services staff and the extent of the collection available for his daughter.

To find out more about the Friends of the APL go to the Friends’ blog at http://aplfriends.blogspot.com/. To find out more about Roger go to his blog at http://www.blogger.com/profile/05298172138307632062.

ROG