libraryofthemuses

[libraryofthemuses]

Toni Morrison? Alice Walker? Zora Neale Hurston? Ralph Ellison? James Baldwin? Lorraine Hansbury? Maya Angelou? Octavia Butler? Langston Hughes? Bell Hooks? Many many many many others? Go fuck yourself you lazy, anti-intellectual asshole

#literature

[libraryofthemuses]

Public Access Museum Collections

Just because I think y’all should know, the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities literally has their entire collection available for an online viewing for free, both on their website where you can search for stuff, and on google street view. You can literally digitally walk through the museum and look at everything and they even have extra meta info on their objects in there.

Please have a look through, it’s really fun!

#museums

[libraryofthemuses]

WE decided to jump on the current Barbie trend for some fun!

#greek mythology #barbie

[libraryofthemuses]

Has anybody explored Persepolis through the Getty experience??? Because oh my god

Such a well done project, with very nice details!!!

high-key want to use the last one as my new desktop background

#egyptology #getty museum #ancient history

[libraryofthemuses]

so this is an extremely cool resource

the JSTOR article by Catherine Halley

a list of series at Reveal Digital

#library #books #online library #archives #lgbtq

[libraryofthemuses]

AYO??? 👀👀

#tin can brothers #spies are forever

[libraryofthemuses]

It’s not hard to understand. If a person has a biology degree but works as a music producer, they’re not a biologist, they just have a biology degree.

If someone researches a subject but never got a degree in the subject or research in general, they are a hobbyist, not an academic.

Hey, thanks for coming here and providing this stone cold take!

See, if a person has a degree in a topic, despite not working in the field, they are, by definition, an -ist/academic of said field. A doctor, after all, doesn't stop being a doctor or lose that knowledge just because they teach biology for a few years. I became an Egyptologist when I was handed my degree the first time, and I'm an Egyptologist every time I answer an ask on this website. I also worked as an Egyptologist for a time. I take it that me no longer being paid just means they revoked my title? That's not how it works!

An academic, by dictionary definition, is someone who is related to education or scholarship or someone with an academic viewpoint/scholarly background. If someone devotes their time to scholarship of a certain field, then yes in one way it is a hobby, and in another way they're an academic. It is elitist to state that people who have great knowledges of subjects from their own careful research cannot be considered in any form 'academics' simply because they do not possess the bit of paper that says 'I studied this for 3 years at university'. University academics would not have half the knowledge they do have if it wasn't for non university academics. We work cooperatively, sharing the knowledge that we have. Is the hairdresser who showed university academics how she'd worked out the method for styling Greek and Roman hair not an academic? No, she didn't have a degree, but she worked on her hobby of a love of hairstyling through history and that became academic knowledge. She then shared this with university academics, who recognised the academic scholarship and took her research forward. She is, by definition, someone with academic knowledge of the history of hairstyling, and her contribution, due to lack of formal degree, should not be dismissed as merely 'hobbyist', because that is grossly elitist.

The fun thing about 'academia' is that it's flexible, despite what most people think. More people are academics than you might imagine. Doesn't mean you have to take all their word as gospel, and you have to be careful about what information they're giving you and the inherent biases therein. However, you have to do this same process with someone with a degree in a field too. We are not immune to being biased or presenting incorrect information by purview of X number of years at an academic institution, nor is anyone who is paid to be an academic exempt from this. It's about critical assessment of the information presented to you. Those who know what they're talking about present themselves in ways that aren't shouty and flashy. I know instantly when I'm talking to someone who's spent time doing research into a topic, whether formally or as a hobby, because of how they present themselves and their research. You can peer review a person and their knowledge by how they demonstrate it. Trust me on that. Other academics can tell the difference between a person who is 'I read a few books on this once' and one who is 'I have spent years of my life looking over different things and comparing them critically.'

Examine your own biases here; a) your comments aren't even what the original post was about, and b) your definition of what constitutes an academic is extremely narrow, so much so that it excludes a multitude of people, to whom academics would say 'they are one of us'.

#library #librarian #academia

[libraryofthemuses]

If any of y’all didn’t know, there’s a free online library, aka

https://openlibrary.org/

and I found like, twelve ebooks I’ve been wanting to read on there, and blasted through like three of them during the course of a boring-ass shift.

#library #resources #online library

[libraryofthemuses]

BOOK OF KELLS BOOK OF KELLS BOOK OF KELLS BOOK OF KELLS

#book of kells #history #books #illuminated manuscript #ireland

[libraryofthemuses]

Guide to Figuring out the Age of an Undated World Map.

#history #maps #cartography #geography

[libraryofthemuses]

i’m watching this documentary about halloween and there’s a part where they’re explaining that ghost stories got really popular around the civil war no one could really deal with how many people went off and died and

the narrator just said 

“the first ghost stories were really about coming home”

fuck 

#history #u.s. civil war

[libraryofthemuses]

So I’m at a library in a town I don’t live in to spend time with my nieces and I go to the bathroom and see this sign.

They turned their old card catalog into free supplies people can discretely take on their own.

This is the coolest thing ever, a great way to help people without making them ask, and an amazing reuse of a the card catalog. I’m seriously about to cry I love it so much.

#library #public library #card catalog #upcycling

[libraryofthemuses]

Helpful Library Resources

These are all sites, pathfinders, research guides, and more that I made during my LIS coursework...plus a few sources that I reference or find interesting for my professional library work and personal research!

Pathfinders and Research Guides

Teaching Mythology Through Modern Literature and Beyond

A pathfinder for teaching various world mythologies to middle school age students using modern YA literature and videos catered to a young audience

Maus by Art Spiegelman

An exploration of the seminal graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman, focusing on how this moving Holocaust survivor’s tale has stood the test of time and has become an icon in both autobiographies and graphic novels

The Troubles: Conflict in Northern Ireland

A pathfinder for digital resources about The Troubles, the era of political conflict and violence in Northern Ireland; sources include videos, audiobooks, podcasts, music, databases, and more

So, I Read This Book...

A guide on movies and television to watch next based on what YA book you just read (aimed at teen and YA readers)

Explorations of Librarianship Disciplines

Classics Librarianship

Professional resources helpful to librarians and library professionals considering a career or just doing research in Classical Studies

Linguistics Librarianship

Professional resources helpful to librarians and library professionals considering a career or just doing research in linguistics

Other Useful Resources

Worldcat.org 

A worldwide catalog useful for seeing what is available in other library catalogs

Banned & Challenged Classics

A list from the American Library Association detailing the most commonly banned or challenged literature

The Big Five US Trade Book Publishers

A neat graphic categorizing book publishers under the 5 main trade book publishers: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette

#library #librarian #research guide #pathfinder #mythology #classics #book publication #banned books #ya literature #northern ireland #the troubles #maus #linguistics

[libraryofthemuses]

so this is an extremely cool resource

the JSTOR article by Catherine Halley

a list of series at Reveal Digital

#JSTOR #lgbtq #queer history #publications

[libraryofthemuses]

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.

like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.

here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.

TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.

Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”

all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that

I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.

But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.

In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.

On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”

like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

#literature #tropes #tv tropes

[libraryofthemuses]

utterly losing my mind that literally right as i was putting up our display for banned books week coming up in september, my boss got a call saying that the county higher ups have declared that we’re prohibited from saying “banned books” in association with any library programs or materials. “freedom to read” is okay apparently, but the phase “banned books” is, well, banned. if i tried to publish this scenario in a novel, my editor would probably send it back with a note saying that the irony is a bit too on the nose & that i need to tone it down a little. we have censored the discussion of censorship. i cannot handle how hilarious this is

#banned books #library #censorship

[libraryofthemuses]

#greek mythology #the odyssey #classics