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Zeolites, whatever the heck THOSE are

Sometimes being a librarian means working on questions for which you have no feel, no particular interest. Just focus on the bottom line.

This is more about the librarian life than the mineral group of zeolites. The library where I used to work got this reference question to find out about this substance that’s used in various commercial products, including, I’m told, dialysis machines. Since I am usually seeking the opportunity to broaden my horizons, and the question was near the top of the queue, I took it.

I discovered that the website of the United States Geological Survey has a National Minerals Information Center. From the page I needed: “Zeolites are hydrated aluminosilicates of the alkaline and alkaline-earth metals.” Yeah, right.

“Natural and synthetic zeolites are used commercially because of their unique adsorption, ion-exchange, molecular sieve, and catalytic properties. Major markets for natural zeolites are pet litter, animal feed, horticultural applications (soil conditioners and growth media), and wastewater treatment.”

I also checked with this site, which indicated that zeolites “are built of corner-linked tetrahedra and contain exchangeable cations.” Yet, an hour and a half later, I was not only finished, I knew I had useful information.

“In 2018, six companies in the United States operated nine zeolite mines and produced an estimated 95,000 tons of natural zeolites, a 15% increase from that of 2017… New Mexico was estimated to be the leading natural zeolite-producing State in 2018, followed by California, Idaho, Texas, Oregon, and Arizona.

“The top three U.S. companies accounted for approximately 90% of total domestic production. An estimated 93,000 tons of natural zeolites were sold in the United States during 2018, an increase of 14% compared with sales in 2017.” After finishing the inquiry, I went into the office of the library director and said, “I have no real idea what I just researched, but I know it’s good stuff.”

Sometimes being a librarian means working on questions for which you have no feel, no particular interest. Just focus on the bottom line, and ignore sentences such as “The most common [zeolites] are analcime, chabazite, clinoptilolite, erionite, ferrierite, heulandite, laumontite, mordenite, and phillipsite.”

For ABC Wednesday

Librarians in America (and everywhere)

Working at FantaCo, the comic book store et al., has been very helpful in my current job. I know about balancing a checkbook, applying for a business loan, trying to get a better rate on a credit card.

Berkeley Lab Librarians Peter Palath and Michael Golden at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on Friday, October 6, 2017 in Berkeley, Calif.

My dear friend Deborah wonders if Asking Roger Anything would include her son asking me questions about finding work in libraries in America? (He is, last I knew, in France.)

Why, yes, it would. We should set up some online dialogue. Meanwhile, let me give you some general thoughts about being a librarian.

Whatever he already knows, in whatever field, is good. It’s because it will be useful in some yet unexplained way.

Working at FantaCo, the comic book store et al., has been very helpful in my current job. I know about balancing a checkbook, applying for a business loan, trying to get a better rate on a credit card.

Late last month, I gave a webinar about sales tax. It was, well, pretty damn good, according to the reviews.

My interest in such an arcane topic came from realizing that a comic book is a periodical and not subject to sales tax in New York State. But if you sell that same comic book for more than the cover price, it is then a “collectible” and therefore IS subject to sales tax.

(I know that last paragraph was REALLY exciting. Riveting, even. My friend Dave and I talked sales tax that very evening. Seriously. Of course he WORKS for the tax department.)

Working as an enumerator for the 1990 Census was likewise of great value to my current work. If you know the questions they ask, it informs what data might be available.

Librarians HAVE to be curious. You have to want to, no, need to know. You can be trained to do that, I suppose, but it REALLY helps if one is innately so disposed.

This is why my friends Judy and Jendy and Broome nagged me to go to library school in 1990. They KNEW. It was patently OBVIOUS to them, and eventually to me, that my mind works in a particular way. Ask my sisters; I’ve ALWAYS had a need to know.

He doesn’t have to be up on EVERY topic, just his areas of interest. But it is an occupational hazard that other people think librarians know everything about EVERYTHING, when it’s merely ALMOST everything.

This notion, BTW, is laid out in the book called The Library Book by Susan Orlean. Your son probably should read it. I’m about 2/3s of the way through.

I is for information on the Internet

And I won’t even get into malicious disinformation.

As a librarian, I naturally rely on data that are credible. When answering reference questions, I am loath to give out inaccurate information.

When I hear/read something that doesn’t seem correct, I’ll often ask, “Where did you get that?” More often than not, they’ll say, “I saw it on the Internet.” Or “Facebook” or “Twitter.” But that isn’t the answer to the question. I’m looking for whether they got it from CNN’s website or FOX News’ Facebook page or the New York Times’ Twitter feed. This helps me to ascertain how much credence I should give a report.

Also, since I scan a LOT of news, I start to see trends. A few months back, I read that Kirk Douglas, the actor, died four days shy of his 101st birthday. But I never saw this in ANY source I had actually heard of, such as the Washington Post or Chicago Tribune. Immediately, I went to Snopes.com and discovered it was a death hoax.

This process helps me determine whether the things I read are true. I saw an unattributed graphic that said that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan wanted to raise the Medicare age to 76. I had never heard that before. Sure enough, there was a 2016 story that Ryan wanted to hike the age requirement to 67, which is bad enough, but NOT 76. One’s antipathy for a politician may make the worst news seem plausible, though not necessarily accurate.

A friend of mine, obviously frustrated that she was asked an easily knowable thing, mused, “Doesn’t anyone Google anymore?” Assuredly they do, but it does not mean that it’ll be right. I Googled for the price of a current first-class stamp and the first item I found gave the information for 2015 rather than 2018.

And I won’t even get into malicious disinformation. Or the difference between fact and opinion.

Some people have said to me that being a librarian now must be easier because I have so much information at my fingertips. Others have said that we don’t NEED librarians now because EVERYONE has so much information at their fingertips. Neither of those assertions is true; librarians spend an inordinate amount of time separating the wheat from the chaff.

O is for occupation: librarian, NY SBDC

It was a radical innovation when the discs were on a LAN

October 19 marks the 25th anniversary of when I became a working librarian, all, as it turned out, at the Research Network of the New York Small Business Development Center.

Now it’s not the first job I ever had in a library. I spent seven months as a page at the Binghamton, now Broome County (NY), Public Library back when I was in high school. I used to help people use the microfilm machines, find and then refile the magazines in the closed stacks, and check the shelves to make sure the books were in Dewey Decimal System order.

After 8.5 years at the comic book store FantaCo and a dreadful year at an insurance company, I was nagged by two librarians and a lawyer, all friends of mine, to go to library school. I was resistant to return to graduate school, having suffered a disastrous experience a decade earlier.

But this time, I survived, and even thrived in grad school. I worked in the dean’s office and one of my tasks was to calculate the demographics of the students. I discovered that I was, at that time, the average age of a student at UAlbany’s School of Information Science and Policy. There were lots of returning students.

The task has always been to provide reference to remote SBDC counselors who were meeting with their would-be entrepreneurs and active businesspersons, Still, the job of this librarian has changed a lot over the quarter century. We used to send packets of information via the US Mail or UPS.

My first phone was a shared line with the fax machine. When it would ring, I was never sure when it rang if I would pick it up and hear a wall of aural pain.

In the days before the wide use of the Internet, we had a number of CD-ROMs to use, and we had to take turns using them. It was a radical innovation when the discs were on a LAN (local area network) so that two or three librarians could use ReferenceUSA at the same time.

The World wide web, of course, changed our reference ability, but it was a gradual evolution early on. We wanted to be able to deliver data via email. Now EVERYONE has it, but in the 1990s, it was hardly a universal service, even at the colleges and universities where our SBDCs were housed.

When email became more universally available, sometimes the data packet was so big that it would bounce. Now, there’s a location on a closed website where counselors can pick up the information.

Being a librarian has changed a lot in the past two and a half decades, but finding the information remains the goal.

For ABC Wednesday

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Is Looking for a Librarian

The only cataloging of music material I’ve ever done was for my personal use.

About a half dozen people sent me, usually via Facebook, an article about a job ad: The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Is Looking for a Librarian. Now it is true that I am a librarian, and for nearly 25 years. It’s also correct that I am interested in rock and/or roll, based on the one or two articles I’ve written on the subject the past dozen years. I’ve even been to the place in Cleveland, OH the past year, as I indicated here and here.

So I just HAD to look at the job description: “The Librarian reports to the Senior Director of Library and Archives and performs descriptive cataloging of library resources; assists in providing instruction and reference service and engaging users through outreach activities; assists in the collection development of library resources; and supervises the work of the Library Assistant, interns, and volunteers.”

I have done instruction, engaged users online on a few webinars, supervised interns. I’ve had only passing opportunity to do collection development. But I really haven’t done cataloging at all.

Moreover, in looking at the full posting, I have NO “Experience cataloging using RDA, AACR2, Library of Congress-Program for Cooperative Cataloging Policy Statements (LC-PCC PS), Library of Congress Classification (LCC), Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Library of Congress Genre-Form Terms (LCGFT), and MARC formats.”

In fact, the only cataloging of music material I’ve ever done was for my personal use. For instance, I have several LPs that are compilations with various artists, such as the Warner Brothers Loss Leaders, benefit concerts such as The Secret Policeman’s Ball, and some soundtracks. I created a 3X5 card for each artist, with song and album name, better to make mixed tapes; ah, Arlo Guthrie’s Voter Registration Rag is on Burbank.

And that was about a decade before I even went to library school, which SHOULD have told me something. Was that geeky or what?

So I shan’t be moving to Cleveland, alas. But I appreciate all the notices from the people who have been thinking about me.

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