Random Thoughts after a random (for me) AFR Luncheon

 It is not very often I get to enjoy a free lunch on another academic department's dime and get a free sort of lecture by three top scholars in their field all having a conversation on what they do, how they are doing it, and challenges they face, and it happened for me today. 

So we had an event at the library this morning, see flyer below but in a nutshell it was a lecture on Black children's books and women's fiction. I got to listen to most of it because, even though I was on duty at the reference desk, the event was in our children's collection area, which is right next to the reference desk. 

After the event, I got invited along with the library director and another librarian to a small lunch over at the college hotel's restaurant courtesy of the African American Studies program who were celebrating the guest speaker of the event. So there I am with the speaker, the director of the Carter G. Woodson Center on campus, who is also an AFR scholar, and one other Black scholar, and they are just talking in a bit of rapid fire. These scholars by the way all do work on Black people in the Appalachian region, so this is very topical for what we do on campus as well as just a bit interesting for me. As I said, they are talking about many things, book projects they are working on, some community work they do, connections of their work with family experiences, genealogy, etc., and I got myself a front row seat. 

A small detail that moved me from their conversation was when they were talking about being the one in their rural family who was destined to get out. Their parents knew they were tied to their land, and they were not going anywhere. But they knew their daughter would be and should be the one to get out and go on to do great things. 

That moved me a bit inside because for me I also got a bit of being the one that was destined to move on and do great things. Whether I have done "great things" is an open question that I guess my ancestors will judge me on when I join them someday, but I have tried to do the best I can with what I have, and I have tried my best to give back, to be grateful, and to pay forward. 

Another small thing the CGW director is writing a new book; I think if memory serves me right it is about rural Blacks and migration to big cities, Pittsburgh was mentioned. So I got to hear a bit about how a writer does some of their craft, and she even paused the conversation to make a note for the book on her cellphone. That was so typical scholar. 

Anyhow, that is a bit of what I did today working at my library, and the day is not quite over yet. As of now I still have a committee meeting, and a research consult. In the end, one of the things I enjoy about my work is the opportunity to just learn something new. 

 

Flyer for Campus Event: "Go tell it on the Mountain: Mapping Black Appalachia in Chidren's Books and Women's Fiction." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Short notes and thoughts on Congress.gov webinar

I watched this live webinar from the Law Library of Congress on June 11, 2026. Topic was the congress.gov website. Here are some of my notes from the event, mainly for me to look back later, and some small random thoughts. 

Webinar notes: 

• Overview of the website. 
• The search allows for quotation marks on phrases. 
• For things like keeping track of a committee, email alerts are an option, for example, to get a committee's schedule. 
• You can also search for CRS (Congressional Research Service) reports on the website. Before, you had to use FAS (Federation of American Scientists), where they kept a list (apparently no longer there) or Open CRS, which is no longer there either. Those were the days. Now they are in one place in congress.gov. I've often encouraged students where they can to use CRS reports in their research assignments if they find a relevant one. 
• U.S. Constitution Annotated. This includes the Constitution with legal analysis. Note additional features offered.
• Use the Support button (upper right on top) then click on Browse Help Center, then scroll a bit down to Collections. This allows you to see what a specific resource collection may cover and contain. 
• Also under Support, there is a Glossary for federal terms, in case you need them. 
• Under Support you can also find Ask a Law Librarian, if you need help search help, or finding a resource, or an answer from a librarian. 
• In addition to finding members of Congress from the main website, you can find them under Support. Just browse Help Center then Collections.  
• See also and use the Advanced Search for precise and/or specific searches. Use the Query Builder when you have few but specific details of your search. 
• See also Search Tools (on top of main page, next to the Support link). This tells you what tools, wildcards, so on you can use on the search. This is a detail I also encourage my students to do, though I am sure a lot of them ignore it anyhow. When it comes to a database, especially one you may be using often, take a moment to check the Help/Tools (or whatever similar name) section to see what wildcards and other search tips it offers. Knowing things like wildcards (also known as truncation of terms) can save you some time and make your searching better, but you got to put in a little time to learn the tricks. 
• See also More Options under the main search bar for some quick search options. It is a small pull down menu that opens filters and other limiters you may find useful. 
• If you make a congress.gov account, you can save searches and do email alerts. When they are available. There is a note today saying "accounts are temporarily unavailable" as of this post, and I do hope it is a temporary thing. 
• Using filters in searches as much as possible is helpful to narrow a search and make it more specific.  

 

Side notes: 

This is the the kind of thing that regular people need to know and use to see what the federal government does. Librarians certainly need to know this in order to help their patrons wanting information on the federal government, especially Congress and legislation. 

We don't get many U.S. government questions here often, but we do get one now and then. At times I do wonder what they teach in political science when it comes to the federal government. 

At times I also wonder how many librarians show interest in this kind of stuff. I do, and I try my best to keep up my reference skills and knowledge base, but some colleagues could not care less. I've been told that if they get that kind of question, they can always send it to me. And while I do not mind, I think other reference librarians in general need to nurture this kind of knowledge too. 

As I wrap up this post, the thought occurs to me I am sure a few researchers, and more than a few librarians who should know better, would be happy to ask an AI Slop machine to look up the kind of information a site like congress.gov would offer. It is a sad reality, but that is a thought for another time. 

 

  

Dialectical notebook and some short thoughts on privilege

A note to remember a small exercise a professor showed their students in class. This happened prior to a library instruction session; instructor had some additional class activities to do before I did my part. They write to three categories, three lists: 

• Privileges I have
• Privileges I lack
• Benefits

 

Idea is students make their list, then pass their notebook around and others comment on what they wrote. After that, teacher discusses some of their lists and comments with the class. 

I have some time, so I will try to write my lists:

•  Privileges I have: 
• Being male. 
• Being Caucasian. 
• A good education: private schooling as a child and youth, relatively good universities. 
• Stable family. Many of my peers had divorced parents. 
• Having enough and a bit more. 
• Access to certain resources such as Internet, good libraries, books, water, food.  
• Privileges I lack: 
• Privilege of money. I am not wealthy, but I have enough. Here I mean not having the ability to just wave money around and make problems vanish or seriously minimize problems. 
• Health. This may be mixed. While I do have some health issues, I suppose I could be in worse shape, so maybe this is more a privilege I have. However, I am, like many folks, one medical catastrophe away from ruin, see above idea of money privilege I lack.  
• Second class US citizenship being Puerto Rican. This is a bit more a political thing, what I call being a colonial. It does bring in some degree of discrimination in the U.S.  
• Benefits: 
• Got a decent job. On a side note, the job provides mostly decent health care plan (it does the job for now). 
• A roof over the head. 
• Food on the table.  

I am sure there may be other privileges I have that I cannot recall, and a few that I lack that do not occur to me at the moment. This is just a short quick exercise just as the students did in the class.  

Book Review: The Internet Con

 (Crossposted from The Itinerant Librarian.)

Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. London, UK: Verso Books, 2024. ISBN: 9781804292143.  (link to publisher)

Genre: technology, Internet

Subgenre: social media, corporations, essay

Format: trade paperback

Source: Hutchins Library, Berea College 

 

In this small book, the author explains how major Internet companies became the monopolistic behemoths they are now. He also explains how these large companies manage to hold us hostage, making us stay with them even as we hate them and perhaps hate ourselves for staying. 

One thing I've learned in my years online, especially with social media, is that you have to be willing and ready to move on when a site goes to hell. By now, if I have to leave some people behind, so be it, but as much as possible I am ready to pack and go elsewhere when things get bad. In the book, the author reminds us we have the option to move, and he offers some tools to help make the move less painful. 

The book is organized in two major parts: 

• Part I: Seize the Means of Computation. Here the author explains how the companies get big and how for the most part they stay big due to influence, corruption, and legalized extortion. Add to this governments that are either lazy, clueless, and/or in league with said companies, and it does not leave room for hope. However, where there is a will there is a way, and the author provides some possible solutions. 
• Part II: What About. Here the author addresses possible objections including some corporate excuses not to do the right thing. 

The main concept to understand from the book is that of interoperability. It's the ability of different services to connect with each other and users in different places to interact on common ground. What the book explains: 

• "What interoperability is
• How interoperability works
• How we can get interoperability
• How we can mitigate interoperability's problems" (3). 

Mastodon and the Fediverse embody this pretty well. In simpler terms, this is what allows your GMail to communicate with someone else's Yahoo! email and both to communicate with Outlook Email.  For the most part, services like Facebook are walled prisons keeping users hostage. Once you understand interoperability, it makes sense. The author takes time to explain it, shows why it is important, and worth fighting for. 

The book for the most part is accessible, though there are some passages that may get too technical for some readers. The first part also has some repetitive passages, and it is a bit slow reading at times. The second part is an easy read in contrast to the first part. 

The author strives to give solutions, and points out some positive bits of legislation, but in these Hard Times it is difficult to be optimistic our governments would do anything right that would benefit regular people, less so if those things would displease those big tech companies that often keep those politicians in their pockets through political donations as well as dark money. So in the end, this all sounds great, but I would not hold my breath. What I will keep doing is using and learning more about Mastodon and the Fediverse and other open access options. They may be small and not glamorous, but they are not beholden to Big Tech. 

In the end, this is a good read even if it is not an easy read. It's not easy in the sense many folks may not want to hear the truth. Staying in Big Tech's prisons is easier for many folks than making a liberatory effort. 

Overall, I recommend the book for public and academic libraries. For me, as I am starting some research to craft a social media policy for our library, the book gives me plenty of food for thought. Maybe it will give more folks out there something to think about as well. 

4 out of 5 stars.

 

Additional reading notes: 

Why we need to fix tech: 

"Fixing tech isn't more important than fixing everything else, but unless we fix tech, we can forget about winning any of those other fights" (18). 

 

What is reverse engineering: 

"'Reverse engineering' is a time-honored and important guerrilla tactic in all technological struggles. Its meaning is well captured by its name: reverse engineering takes place when a technologist deeply probes a finished product or service to determine how it works, and also how to change or replicate the way it works" (84).  

 

This book qualifies for the following 2025 Reading Challenge: 

 

 

Book Review: Literacy in America

 (Crossposted from The Itinerant Librarian) 

Lawrence R. Samuel, Literacy in America: a cultural history of the past century. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2024.  ISBN: 9781538189542.

Genre: literacy, reading

Subgenre: history, education

Format: hardcover

Source: Hutchins Library, Berea College 

This book presents a history of literacy in the United States over the last century. Literacy here refers to learning how to read and the ability to read. This is not a book about what Americans may or not have been reading.

The book makes some good points, but it is a seriously slow read, and it is pretty much a dry textbook. Sure, it considers how literacy is a contested ground for race, gender, and class, and those are important topics. However, the important ideas get buried in the constant citing of scholarly articles, trade publications, and other academic sources. To be honest, the book reads like a student research paper where the student, instead of being selective in what sources to cite to support their claims, just cited everything they found to fill up the page quota. Whatever voice the author has gets lots in citation after citation of this scholar in a journal article or that teacher in an education magazine.  

This is what the author intended with the book: 

"Supported by hundreds of research studies conducted throughout the years as reported in scholarly journals and popular magazines, the book intends to make a contribution to the histories of education, language, and literature, sociology, and the United States as a whole" (vii). 

Oh, he lays those research studies and periodical articles pretty thick. As for the contribution statement, that is an ambitious declaration.

I was honestly hoping this would be more interesting, but it was not. One detail I will mention is that history often repeats itself. Some of the concerns today on whether kids can read or not are pretty much the same as concerns back in the day. Every time a new technology comes along, be it radio, television, or the internet educators freak out about kids abandoning reading. For the most part, the kids are still reading, even if it is not the "classics," but that is another conversation. 

For example, back in the 1920s aand 1930s, pearls were clutched because kids were not reading classics or wholesome books: 

"Students tendency to choose less than hearty literary fare was just one problem associated with literacy in the 1920s and 1930s" (1). 

Gee, the generation coming out of the Great War (World War I) and its horrors wants to read light, fluffy, escapist fare. The humanity! I would say not unlike today with readers seeking light, fluffy, escapist fare to forget the Hard Times for a while. 

Overall I would say this book was just OK. For libraries, this is highly optional. If I had been able to read a review copy beforehand, I would not have ordered it for our library. This may be one for larger academic libraries with comprehensive collections in education and maybe some large library school libraries. Small academic libraries can pretty much skip this. 

2 out of 5 stars.