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• Title: The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen
• Author: Michael Ruhlman
• Publisher: Scribner
• Year of Publication: 2007
• Pages: 242

Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen is a reference book for cooks, professional and otherwise, who want to learn more about cooking. The book consists of eight short essays in the first fifty pages called “Notes on Cooking: From Stock to Finesse,” followed by a dictionary of cooking terms called “The Elements of Cooking: A to Z.”

Ruhlman’s “Notes on Cooking” includes such essays as “Stock,” “Sauce,” “Salt,” “The Egg,” “Heat,” “Tools,” “Sources and Acknowledgments: (Fifteen Good Books About Food and Cooking),” “Finesse: The Cook’s Finest Challenge and Path to the Ultimate Rewards.” These essays were the heart of the book for me. The author’s explanations of the important elements of cooking are illustrated with sincerity (where he, very easily, could have come across as pretentious).

As a recent foodie convert, I found The Elements of Cooking to be just what I was looking for: a useful and well-written book about food and cooking. I’m sure I will refer to it in the future, not least of all because of the veal stock recipe. (4/5)

• Title: Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian
• Author: Scott Douglas
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Pages: 330

Quiet, Please by Scott Douglas is a memoir of a twenty-something male librarian in Anaheim, California. It aims to be humorous and anecdotal, but fails to do either well.

As a recent graduate of library school, I took offense to most of what Douglas has to say. His stories about working with the mentally disabled, physically disabled, elderly, and teenagers are, for the most part, loathsome. They are loathsome because of his attitude towards, and ignorance of, those groups of people.

If a tag cloud was created using all the words in this book, I’m sure that “hate” and “hatred” would be two of his most used words. How can someone work in a public library that hates so many different kinds of people? How can someone who publishes a book about hating so much still keep a job working with so many different kinds of people?

There were parts of the book where Douglas says something like: “[Being a librarian] is my life, my passion. I look ahead and see the road is long, but the road is bright” (p. 318). He makes these statements after pages upon pages of either complaining about his career choice and making it sound like a job for people beneath him, or telling a story filled with ignorance and arrogance about a patron he did not understand or bother to learn from.

Additionally, Douglas employs footnotes and “pointless interludes to fill your mind with nonsense” (p. 4). This format is gimmicky and a waste of time. The writing is not at all challenging, and the author’s use of the gimmicky format adds to his condescending and pedantic tone of voice. Overall, I found this book infuriating. It gives a very bad representation of librarians in America. (.5/5)

Welcome to the new and improved Librarychan blog, formerly known as Library_chan on Blogspot!

I finally converted to WordPress because:

1. it is easier to customize than Blogspot, and
2. I like the interface more.

Who knew I would pick something over Google?

In other news, life after graduation has been interesting so far. It’s mid-July already and I’m still job-hunting (career-hunting?), but my future doesn’t look too bleak. I’ve been staying busy by cooking from the various cookbooks I’ve recently acquired (such as French Laundry, Bouchon, and the Zuni Café Cookbook) and reluctantly reading Quiet, Please by Scott Douglas. I’m also redesigning my website, slowly but surely.

Expect book (and cookbook?) reviews, software and game reviews, thoughts on administration, and other library-related posts in the future. I promise I’ll deliver.

Day three at ALA was my last day in California, after about four weeks of traveling throughout the state. By that point, I was very tired, and only managed to attend one program before heading home. The program I attended was called Hey! I Want to Do That Too! Gaming and the Elementary Age Child (1330-1500).

This program was presented by Dr. Warren Buckleitner, a former elementary school teacher, current New York Times contributor, current adjunct assistant professor at NYU, and current editor of Children’s Technology Review. His presentation was on creating a media center, or Mediatech (like biblioteca), for a public library. Dr. Buckleitner split his presentation up into two parts:

1. the history of Mediatech at his library, and
2. selecting the right materials to create a Mediatech of one’s own.

During the first part, Dr. Buckleitner explained how he developed a Mediatech at the library where he lives (and is a library trustee) in Flemington, New Jersey. Luckily for Dr. Buckleitner, when he pitched the idea to “VIPs in town” and the library board in 1998, he faced no opposition. In 2000, he already had the support of an attorney, schools, and library trustees to create a non-profit organization and begin fundraising. By 2001, they decided on the library as the location of Mediatech, and the library board contributed a $100,000 trust to renovate the space. Mediatech opened on May 23, 2003, marking the anniversary of Charles Lindbergh’s nonstop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris.

Dr. Buckleitner’s media center has about eight computers, all of which were donated. Most of the games available at Mediatech were donated by Dr. Buckleitner, himself, as he writes reviews for them.

Reflection on My Third Day at ALA Annual 2008

Dr. Buckleitner was a very good speaker. His presentation was engaging and informative. He definitely knows about children and what they want. However, I don’t know how useful this program would have been for someone who attempted to set up a media center, faced opposition, and was looking for advice. Dr. Buckleitner’s story almost sounded like a fairy tale; everything important went the way it should have. There wasn’t a struggle, which is a common thing in public libraries in America… what with the budget cuts and libraries closing everywhere.

I think this program could have been more useful if the speaker presented strategies for succeeding in cases where not everything goes the way it should.

I attended three sessions on Saturday, June 28, 2008: Kids and Ever-Cool: Find Them Together at Your Library (1030-1200), Metadata Mashup: Creating and Publishing Application Profiles (1330-1430), and Science Fiction and Fantasy: Looking at Information Technology and the Information Rights of the Individual (1600-1730).

Kids and Ever-Cool: Find Them Together at Your Library

The main speaker in this program was Gene Del Vecchio, author of such nonfiction works as Creating Ever-Cool: A Marketer’s Guide to a Kid’s Heart (1997), The Blockbuster Toy: How to Invent the Next Big Thing (2003), and young adult fiction like The Pearl of Anton (2004), and The Sword of Anton (2006). He has been in the business for 25 years, and his clients include such brands as Disney, Mattel, and Nestle. (“How many of you played with Barbie? I sold that to you!”)

The purpose of his lecture was to encourage children’s libraries to create a logo or brand that is as strong as McDonald’s golden arches or Target’s bulls-eye while making it cool and successfully fulfilling a basic emotional need. A formula for success at the library, Del Vecchio claims, is to satisfy a timeless emotional need and dress it up in a current trend or fad (while updating periodically). Here are some examples of brands that fulfill a basic emotional need:

• cereal that makes a child feel like a winner: Wheaties
• fashion doll stands for beauty: Barbie
• fashion doll stands for rebellion: Bratz
• yogurt that gives children control: Sprinkl’ins
• stuffed animal that gives children a sense of empowerment: Build-A-Bear
• candy that makes children feel brave: Warheads
• cereal that is about sensory gratification: Rice Krispies

One particularly striking part of his presentation involved his presentation of user needs survey results, wherein children provided their opinions on what would make a library better or cool. Some of those results were in the form of pictures, like one that had an ice cream stand, bean bag chairs, and music playing, with a very small corner of the room for books; another child had drawn a separate room for listening to music. Most of the children came to a general consensus: they wanted their libraries to adapt to what they were used to and expected. They wanted Barnes & Noble in their libraries. (more…)