Action Librarian

Made a BBC’s Sherlock cross stitch sampler for my friend Carolyn for her birthday. In exchange for my birthday, she gave me some of her homemade sugar scrub which she also sells!

If you’re interested in trying out this sampler, here is the pattern that I made. I made it in 8-Bit style and guestimated on the colors. Have fun!

I attended the C2E2 (Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo) convention this past weekend and it was awesome!

The whole thing kicked off when my pal Toby Greenwalt from Skokie Public Library graciously invited me to talk on his panel concerning the relationship between Libraries and Comic Book Stores. The panel was titled “Wonder Twin Powers, Activate: The Library-Retailer Partnership” and it was a lot of fun! I talked about how my library at the AANM works with Green Brain Comics down the road from us. Lots of great information from the other panelist, Jim Mortensen who owns Comix Revolution in the Chicago area. The slides from that panel are below:

I’m trying to give up dairy. I’ve been trying to give up dairy for a while now but it always draws me back in, with it’s cheesy delightfulness. There is nothing wrong with dairy, in general, but it makes me feel sick so I should really try to avoid it when I can. In the process of giving up the dairy, I’ve been trying alternative things to replace milk, cream, butter & cheese in my cooking. Vary rarely do I have any of these things on their own, usually I’m mixing into something else so alternatives won’t be so horrible.

I’m avoiding straight up buying the fake cheese from Whole Foods as long as I can. That stuff does not look right but for my milk needs I find Coconut Milk to be great. It’s not overly coconutty and if you get it unsweetened then it’s pretty milk-like. Depending on what brand you get, the watery-ness varies. Silk sells the coconut milk in cartons if you’re looking for a drinking milk or cereal milk substitute. For cooking, I like the canned coconut milk. It’s usually thicker and if you get Thai kitchen brand, the coconut cream is very thick on top. This is a great sub for cream or milk in cooking.

Do you know what else is creamy??? Avocados! I love avocados very much and I like to add them to everything I can. I was about to go to sleep one night and suddenly a thought popped into my head, “Is avocado alfredo a thing?” I had to search the internet to find out and yes, it does. Kind of. I found this recipe and I thought I would riff on it with my own additions and methods. So here it is:

As a librarian in a research library, it shouldn’t come to anyone’s surprise that I don’t come in contact with too many young adults or teens in my daily working life. When I had my stint in the world of Public Libraries, I held my own at the Youth Desk but I’m more in my element amongst people doing some research. But what kind of librarian would I be if I didn’t step out of my comfort zone every once and a while? A bad one, that’s what!

Anyway, I had a teen come into my library today asking for some novels about Muslim Teenagers. She got my blind spot! I had a couple of books for her in my library but the problem was that only a fraction of the books about Muslim Teens were also about Arabs. Several Muslim Teen books have South Asian, Iranian or Afghani main characters, which means they are not within the narrow parameters of my Special Library. Does this stop me? NAY! Actually this is a pretty common occurrence for me and I usually ask what their public library or university is and find out where they can borrow the books we do not have.

I had to consult a couple internetz sources like blogs, Goodreads and a website called Muslimah Media Watch but I got a list together and found all of them for her, either at her home library or through the statewide borrowing program, Michigan eLibrary. As always, it was interesting to see how many books about Muslim Teens, particularly Muslim girls were written by non-Muslim authors, which always run the risk of stereotyping out of control. If you have read my entry about my Sheikh Collection, you know that the issue of stereotyping, race and representation in literature is an important subject for me so I was worried about accidentally recommending books that were offensive.

Not every book needs to be about terrorism or Guantanamo Bay, similarly the book doesn’t have to ignore the fact that Muslim Teens go through some unique situations. The problem is that there are so few books written about Muslim Teens that each book is judged for how well it represents all the diversity within the religion, which is impossible to do. So while surely there are problems with each of the books on this list, it’s important to remember that they are not going to represent every experience.

If you’re interested, here is my list:

• Abdel-Fattah, Randa. 2007. Does my head look big in this? New York: Orchard Books.
• Abdel-Fattah, Randa. 2009. Ten things I hate about me. New York: Orchard Books.
• Budhos, Marina Tamar. 2006. Ask me no questions. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers.
• Fletcher, Susan. 1998. Shadow spinner. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers.
• Haswaréy, Shaylene. 2011. The hijabi club. Shelbyville, KY: Wasteland Press.
• Husain, Aliya. 2010. Neither this nor that. lulu.com
• Jarrar, Randa. 2008. A map of home: a novel. New York: Other Press.
• Kahf, Mohja. 2006. The girl in the tangerine scarf: a novel. New York: Carroll & Graf.
• Karim, Sheba. 2009. Skunk girl. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
• Mahmoodian, Maryam. 2008. Muslim teens in pitfalls and pranks. Tempe, Ariz: Muslim Writers Pub.
• Qamar, Amjed. 2008. Beneath my mother’s feet. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers.
• Robert, Na’íma bint. 2010. Boy vs. girl. London: Frances Lincoln Children’s.

Download the PDF of the bibliography HERE

It is always exciting in the AANM Library & Resource Center for one reason or another but on this day, it was VERY exciting! On Friday, March 9th the Museum and Library had a special visit by none other than George Takei! Depending on who you are and what your interests are, Mr. Takei could be best known for his time spent as Sulu on Star Trek or maybe his tireless activism for LGBT rights or in his role as a leader in the Japanese American community. Any way you slice it, George is awesome and he stopped by MY library! Not to mention the fact that I made it happen!

I had a few people ask me how I got Mr. Takei to visit my library & museum. On it’s face, it seems like a thing that doesn’t happen or something that takes an absurd amount of planning to pull off. Do you want to know how I made it happen? I sent an email. That’s it!

We all have a good time with the Sheikhs and what not but I thought I’d get Serious Business for a moment. I spend QUITE a bit of time thinking about how to present this collection, of Desert Romances and Thrillers, both to the general public and the researchers for whom it was developed for. I am torn between explaining exactly why they are being collected and making a judgement on the books, which goes against The Librarian Code. Often time, discussion of this collection leads to condemnation of Romance as a Genre which peeves me of, both as a librarian and someone who reads in the genre herself.

Originally this was called the Orientalist Literature collection but the name was changed for two reasons. A lot of people don’t know what “Orientalist” means and I would be making a judgement upon the books and possibly those who read them (librarian code). If we want to get real, that IS why I have developed the collection. They have stereotypes about Arabs, particularly Arab masculinity, in them. Which is a goldmine for people doing research on the subjects.

Those doing this particular research GET IT, they understand why these books are in the library because they’re collecting them as well. These are not the people I am worried about. The person I am worried about is Joe Public who sees these books in the museum library & thinks because we’re a museum we are endorsing their content. How do I explain very quickly that these books have some stereotypes in them without making it sound like he would be a bad person for reading them? I am also worried about people who are aware of Orientalist Tropes who see the books and think that I am just clueless or worse, promoting stereotypes because I think they are true. I feel obligated to bring people over to the area myself and give them a rundown of the collection, just to show them that it was collected with a particular research goal in mind & that I’m not clueless about Orientalist Tropes.

At the end of the day, these books and others like them belong in the library. They are valuable research resources on the subject of Arabs in America, which is the mission of our library and of the museum in general. While I feel it is against my principles as a Librarian to judge the material while it is on the shelf, I need to think of a way to properly convey the intention of the collection to all that see it. We changed the name of the collection from “Orientalist Literature” to “Arab Representations in Popular Fiction” and I created a sign that explained the collection thusly:

What does mainstream fiction with Arab main characters tell us about our society? What kind of messages about Arab culture do they hold? How are the Arab characters presented and what does it mean? This collection focuses on these works and the scholarly work being done about them for the purposes of researching these questions.

Vague enough so I’m not saying whether the books are “Good” or “Bad” but explaining why they exist. What do you think? Yes? No? Should I just come out with it and use the O word?

In a special library, the vertical file is an interesting and useful tool. Basically, it’s a lot of articles and small publications that are too small to put on the shelf and not unique enough to need archived. We have a physical vertical file in my library but recently I’ve been develping a virtual one as well, for all of the web articles that get published about a particular topic.

If you aren’t aware, the second week of December 2011, was a rough one for the Home Improvement store Lowe’s. They decided to cut their advertising from the Dearborn, MI based reality show “All-American Muslim”. A letter from a Lowe’s Executive Support staff member to the Florida Family Association stated that the show did not meet with Lowe’s advertising guidelines. A massive boycott of Lowe’s was called for by many different people, including celebrities like Russell Simmons and Kal Penn. I thought it would be important to collect all of the web news coverage of this incident for research purposes. It is important to see how people are portraying Dearborn, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans and the show in the media, in response to this incident. Naturally, the library at my museum would be the place to do it.

I decided to create a “stack” on the Delicious account I was currently using for our virtual vertical file to organize and curate these stories. Our archivist is also interested in collecting these links and archiving the stories using the web-service “Archive-It”. This way, we will have an organized resource for researchers looking into how Arabs & Muslims are portrayed in the media.

Stack is located here: Lowe’s and All-American Muslim Coverage

Even though I’m a Museum Librarian, I often get Public Librarian directional type reference questions. Usually these questions have an Arab/ Muslim American twist to them like, “What is the phone number to the
Islamic Superstore?” (real place) or “Where can we buy an oud in Dearborn?” However, the most common question I get is from our Museum patrons asking where to go to next. Sometimes it’s for food, sometimes it’s to see a different place but I usually send them to the same few places. Today I decided to create a Ready Reference map so we don’t have to keep doing through the Google Map rigmarole.

So if you’re looking for a Quick N’ Dirty map of Dearborn, MI with some common tourism sites listed, here you go.