More About Libraries and Librarians

Last month, we discussed librarians of the past. Let us now look at librarians of the present and future.

• Things they don't teach you in library school: administering Narcan to patrons who've overdosed in your lobby. That's just one new responsibilities facing urban librarians. Worcester police offer free Narcan training to library employees. A recent column in the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that while other libraries practice fire drills, one Philadelphia library branch began overdose drills.
• Speaking of novelties, we installed a rotary phone in our summer home a dozen years ago. One of our granddaughters was staying with us for the weekend and wanted to call her parents. She went to the phone and, in a panic, said, "I don't know how to use this."
  In my technology courses, we often talk about lost skills. Dialing a rotary phone is one. Cursive handwriting is frequently mentioned. Another is navigating a card catalog in a library. For those of us who are nostalgic about such things, a book published by the Library of Congress provides a historical tour of these once-essential indexes. The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures shows the intricacies of writing and managing the thousands and millions of cards that once filled library rooms. Melvil Dewey, not content to provide just a scheme for numbering books in a library, worked hard to develop a standardized  notational scheme for the cards themselves. Dewey collaborated with Thomas Edison to develop a handwriting style for the library cards.
• When you search for books in Google, you'll now see ebooks that you can reserve at your local library. For example, a search for Weapons of Math Destruction will show links to CWMARS in the search results. You can then choose the ebook and, when it's available for loan, read it on your Kindle, smartphone, tablet, or computer. 
• Finally, for that special someone, novelty retailer Archie McPhee offers a Librarian action figure for times such as these.

Digit Nerds Catwalk Is An Anagram for Distracted Walking

The Boston Globe reports that Honolulu has instituted a fine for walking while texting, what the city calls "distracted walking."

Sure, we've seen the video clips, such as this:

And, of course, this:

Lest you think that the young'uns are the only offenders, a study by the National Safety Council indicated that twenty-one percent of those injured by distracted walking were 71 and older. Overall, more than half of such injuries occur at home. 

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