Marilyn Johnson (1) (1954–)

One full star off for snarky reference to avoiding dog ownership and absence of similar judgment on cat-ownership's insanity.

I thoroughly enjoyed (most of) this book. It's true that I'm a recent re-convert to library usage, after many years of avoiding them because of one old prune-faced, pursey-lipped hag's humiliation of me: She wouldn't let twelve-year-old me check out Stranger in a Strange Land "because it has S-E-X in it" until my mother approved. Mama's rejoinder to that was, "Honey, show more so does life. If you're lucky." (Actually, she was middle-aged, plump, and wore a HUGE cross around her neck...when she was done with her mischief, I made my mother laugh by saying, "too bad it wasn't the crown of thorns.")

But the many and various challenges that libraries face are completely transparent to the public that uses them. We just expect that they'll keep on being there, checking books out to us, providing online resources for our kids and grandkids, being waystations for us when our own Internet connections go down or whatever. We're not fond of paying for the libraries, either, as demonstrated by the readiness of governments of all sizes to cut their acquisition, staffing, maintenance budgets to the bone and beyond, to the point of amputation.

Fortunately, The Librarian is a resolute and resilient subspecies of Homo "sapiens", and has cleverly disguised itself in some very odd places...Google "Second Life" sometime and go for a walk on the Weird Side! Lots of librarians talked to author Johnson, and told her tales of woe; but she heard paeans of praise and odes to joy, too, and reports each and all of these classes of utterance with clarity and asperity.

Libraries and librarians have moved onto the World Wide Web with verve and enthusiasm...but back in RL, things aren't so rosy. The New York Public Library's iconic building at Forty-second and Fifth will, for the first time in forty years, house a circulating library. It comes at the cost of the Asian and Russian collections, but what the hell...the money from redeveloping the Mid-Manhattan Branch's site into yet another hotel will do some good, too, right? But...and this is where I get madder than hell...can any amount of material gain make up for the loss to the culture of the world that two collections of rare, irreplaceable material objects (the papers of the Tsarist government! the contents of a monastery's library!) properly curated and indexed represent? I presume the fact that I bother to phrase the question tells you what MY answer is.

I said in another review that "{h}istory is the beautiful, brightly lit foam on top of the annihilating tsunami of the unrecorded past. History books are the spectrographic analysis of the light glinting off that foam." Yes, but I left out a key component: Without a library to house, organize, cross-reference, FIND that book, what good does the damned thing do?

Support your local library in a PRACTICAL way. And go hug a librarian. show less

With fascinating chapters such as "Information Sickness" and "Follow That Tattooed Librarian," Marilyn Johnson's This Book is Overdue gives the reader a quirky but informative look beyond the librarian stereotype. I am a reader who loves her county library - in fact we're on a first name basis, "The George" and I. I have always had a great appreciation for librarians, but This Book is Overdue has reinforced my belief that public libraries and the librarians who tirelessly work to bring books show more to the masses, are vitally important to the future of mankind.

Marilyn Johnson's This Book is Overdue illuminates the things today's librarians are doing to combat misinformation, to keep up with the latest trends in technology, to fight censorship, to make a difference in their communities, and quite literally, to change the world. There is so much to take in, so many aspects of libraries that I had never thought about before - the amount of information Johnson gives is a little overwhelming. Nevertheless, I think librarians could benefit from reading This Book is Overdue if only to search out new ideas to make their libraries better.

The only negative I have after reading This Book is Overdue is a lack of solid organization. With so much information and research, it is important to have a level of focus that was not achieved here. If the chapters had been tied together a bit more tightly, it might have made for a better book overall. On the whole however, This Book is Overdue is an extremely engrossing and thought-provoking look at the future of libraries and librarians. I would recommend it highly to anyone interested in the ways technology has shaped and changed the face of libraries forever. show less

For better or for worse, the study of archaeology will forever evoke images of a sweaty Harrison Ford in his iconic leather jacket and fedora battling Nazis, snakes, and other bad guys for all sorts of unusual and often valuable historical artifacts. However, what Indiana Jones does in the field is practically a cakewalk compared to the daily battles modern archaeologists must fight. Lives in Ruins brings the focus away from the idea of swashbuckling archaeology and presents the field of show more study as it truly is.

As Ms. Johnson discovers during her research and as she humorously presents to readers, true archaeology is backbreaking work. Often, it means working in subpar conditions, fighting against time, weather, curiosity, greed, politics, and a severe lack of funding. Indeed, this lack of money is the common theme throughout the book. In fact, almost all of her research subjects do not earn a living wage. There are almost no permanent jobs, and funding for expeditions and for storage of the finds is quickly running dry. The story Ms. Johnson tells over and over is that no one will ever make money working in the field of archaeology.

While this may seem like a rather depressing thread about which to read, what Ms. Johnson does so well is capture the dedication and passion these scientists have for their chosen profession. Each scientist she interviews exhibits a fierce pride in their area of expertise and a complete unwillingness to walk away to move to a more lucrative field. They thrive under the stress and strain of such work and do so with smiles on their faces. Theirs is truly a labor of love.

They may work under the most dire of situations, but all of Ms. Johnson’s subjects maintain an amazing sense of humor about those self-same situations. Each one recognizes the endless work and time limits nature places on artifacts. They understand that luck is as much a part of a career-making find as it is perseverance and skill. They use humor to repeatedly pick themselves up after each disappointment. This is something about which Ms. Johnson is quick to capitalize. She injects her own sense of fun and humor into her reporting, layering it on to the individual quirks of her subjects to create a book that is much more hopeful than one might think given the immense odds that come with archaeology.

Lives in Ruins dispels the myth created by Steven Spielberg all those years ago, but one finishes the book with the understanding that the archaeologists of today are the true heroes of this tale. For, they work because they love it. They love it so much in fact that they are willing to put up with the scarcity of resources and political battles and flirt dangerously close to the poverty line for most of their lives in order to fulfill their dreams. It is as powerful an example as one will ever get of working for love and not for money. show less

In This Book is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybarians Can Save Us All (Harper, 2010), Marilyn Johnson writes that she got interested in librarians while working on her previous book, The Dead Beat; she found that librarians tended to have the most interesting obituaries. The book resulting from that discovery (which, I should note, mentions librarian obituaries more than a few times) is a paean to libraries and librarians in a digital age: as Johnson writes, "In a world where information show more itself is a free-for-all, with traditional news sources going bankrupt and publishers in trouble, we need librarians more than ever" (p. 7). "In tight economic times, with libraries sliding farther and farther down the list of priorities, we risk the loss of their ideals, intelligence, and knowledge, not to mention their commitment to access for all" (p. 8). "In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste" (p. 8).

Johnson profiles the intersection between libraries and IT, using the term cybrarian "to conjure up the new breed of tech savvy-librarians, part cyborg, part cat's-eye reading glasses" (p. 9), and also uses the book to write about the wide range of library bloggers, the Connecticut Four (those who resisted the Patriot Act's "national security letter" provisions), the generation of up-and-coming "hipster librarians", the library community in Second Life, various niche libraries in New York (including the American Kennel Club library), the NYPL's digital collections and the current transformation of the research library, and the recent struggle between archival institutions for control of major authors' collections of papers.

This was fun to read, and not just because Johnson heaps praise on my field of work (and actually seems to get it, too). She's a good writer, who captures her subjects nicely here as she did in The Dead Beat. And Johnson's humorous interludes were welcome and entertaining (my favorite came in a parenthetical aside: "Someday I will stop being surprised at all the things librarians read; they'll read anything" (p. 49). It's true (to a degree), and I hope many of them will read this book and recommend it to others. I know I will.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2010/03/book-review-this-book-is-overdue.html show less