Libraries, Who Needs 'em?

image from The Earth Story's Facebook Page

These are books. Very old books from a library in Timbuktu, a city in Mali on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. This photo and the accompanying article are from a page I follow on Facebook.

In 2012 Islamic extremists backed by al-Qaida took over the city of Timbuktu. They began a pogrom against people and thoughts that differed from their own, in this case specifically against the Sufi branch of Islam. They meant to eradicate not only the public exercise of Sufi traditions, but Sufi thought as well. To that end, they set out to destroy mausoleums, mosques, and the library.

Timbuktu's library contained thousands of books, ranging far beyond Sufi religious scholarship. Many were from the founding of Timbuktu's university in 989 CE. The library had survived centuries of comings and goings of controlling forces, up to and including French colonization from 1893 to 1960. Always adding to its collection.

Thanks to the courage of a group of people who understood the value of preserving these books, the books were smuggled out of the city and are being stored in safer areas until they can be restored.

For a more complete story about this click on Endangered library.

I have a cyber friend who lives in Scotland. She's a retired librarian and an active traveler and blogger. (https://anabelsblog.wordpress.com/) She recently blogged about libraries in England being closed because the economy there is on a downturn and public funding is tight. That got me to thinking.

I'm from Oklahoma so I know a little something about the vagaries of economies and public funding. Oklahoma is an oil producing state, so when oil is up, Oklahoma booms. People buy jewelry, hire interior decorators, and travel the world in style. When oil is down, as it is right now, pawn shops do well and interior decorators tighten their belts. People go to Vegas in economy class and Oklahoma holds its breath.

Oklahoma does its public libraries on a county basis, meaning that the libraries are maintained by county governments. The local public library has always been an important part of my life. Saturdays were for grocery shopping and going to the library -- gathering sustenance for the week ahead. And sometimes going to the movies.

When I worked at the Edmond Public Library, Oklahoma was in an economic state of equilibrium, not the best of times and not the worst of times. The Edmond Public Library is part of Oklahoma County's Metropolitan Library System which has satellite libraries scattered throughout the county. Not all of the satellites are open every day of the week. And not all have extensive collections in-house, but you can check out any book available in any of the public libraries in Oklahoma County and have it there within two or three days. Or you can check them out on-line and pick them up at your local library.

If the book is not available from MLS, they will help you do an inter-library loan. That means they can find the book (or documents) you want wherever it might be in the U.S., even in college collections, and have it for you in a couple of weeks.

When I worked there, the Edmond library circulated more items than any other library in the state, public or private. And we were busy from opening to closing.

People used the computers to search for jobs or to do research for the jobs they already had. They met in the library to quilt with their friends, to listen to representatives of government agencies explain programs and regulations. They attended book signings with their favorite authors and got help filing their income tax returns. There were Story Times for children and Read to a Dog sessions for young readers. (Dogs listen patiently and don't rush or correct a reader.)

Religious groups, political groups, hobby groups -- anyone could book a meeting room there whether they were politically correct or not so long as they didn't DO anything illegal or disruptive while in the library.

Personal privacy was strictly protected. All record of what you checked out of the library was deleted from any records connecting to your name when the item was checked back in. If it was checked in, no one could track your reading interests. Not the government, not your employer, not your insurance company, and not even your mother.

And we had everything from Manga to classical music CDs, magazines, newspapers, and of course books. Books about everything in the universe and by almost anyone who'd ever been published. And in other languages. And E-books complete with an e-reader if you didn't have your own. Yes, and even items about things that you might not want your mother to know you were interested in.

Research librarians didn't just sit at their desks and point you to the stacks. They were actually qualified to and enthusiastic about helping you find the information you wanted.

Libraries are our passport to the world, to the past, to the future. And public libraries make that passport available to us all whether or not we can afford to buy books or pay a monthly internet bill.

The First Amendment to the American Constitution protects freedom of religion, free speech (which includes the written word,) freedom of the press, freedom of peaceable assembly, and the freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances.

Public libraries give us access to learn about all these things we have the constitutional rights to do. And a safe place to do them all.

Sometimes the library is the only place to go for peace and quiet when your house is chaos and you just want to read the local paper or the New Orleans Times Picayune or maybe just take a little nap.

To endure, a free and democratic nation needs a well-informed electorate. Libraries provide access to information for us all.

Who needs a library? We do.

Support your local library.

Self-Publishing, Two Steps Forward

 by pinstriped briefs

I’m ready to upload my manuscript to CreateSpace and make a book out of it.

First they ask for the title and information. I fill in the appropriate boxes and save.

Next comes ISBN and copyright. Now it’s time for me to do some research. They provide information and discussion on both subjects which I read. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. It is a number that is unique to a book’s title, that book’s binding, edition, and publisher. It is not unusual to have vastly different books with the same title, but each will have its own ISBN. Libraries use that number as the identifier for each of their books. If you’ve ever had reason to have your library request a specific book on inter-library loan, they’ve used that number to get exactly the book you want.

Now I had to do some decision making. Bowker is the official ISBN agency for the United States. Bowker also offers a self-publishing program. Hmmm. But I had already decided on CreateSpace, and since Amazon is sort of the 21st Century’s Sears Roebuck Catalog, I’m sticking with them. At least for Murder on Ceres. When I get rich and famous I might want to move on up.  

Considering cost and marketing possibilities with Amazon, I chose the free CreateSpace assigned ISBN. I guess that time I worked in the Edmond Public Library has forever warped my perception of books. All of a sudden my book having its own ISBN made it seem more real to me than all those pages of text and that beautiful cover. Kind of like seeing your baby’s official birth certificate for the first time.

Now comes the question of copyright. Okay. All the books I read have the copyright listed above the ISBN. I checked out the information and discussions CreateSpace offers, then went to copyright.gov to see for myself. For a single author, same claimant, one work, not for hire, the current online registration fee is $35. That is doable. The current processing time is, however, three to five months. And I want my book now, or at least sooner than that. The good thing is an author has up to five years to apply for the copyright certificate. And the even better thing is a work has automatic copyright beginning with the date the author can show they wrote it. The certificate itself is useful in court should the writer feel their copyright is being infringed.  

Are you glassy-eyed yet from this bureaucratic maze? Ready to pitch your book to that nice agent again? No, I’m not. Okay, we’ll move on.

Now we come to the Interior. You know, your story, the whole reason for this exercise.

CreateSpace gives you choices. What size book you want to have. They suggest that
6 x 9 is currently the preferred size. I know it will fit nicely on a library shelf. I choose that size and watch CreateSpace’s video on formatting. I follow the instructions, save my document as a pdf, and upload it.

They have a free service called Interior Reviewer. It’s great. It finds errors in the text. Errors I didn’t think about. Certain things don’t translate for them. In my case I had used a symbol, the Greek letter Sigma. If you’re more adept at this than I am, you can do what is necessary to embed your non-True Type symbol. Me, I just made a quick rewrite in those two particular locations.

Did I say “quick rewrite” limited to those two sites? I lied. While I was fixing them I noticed this and that and fixed them, too. Then I realized there were extra spaces, not extra lines denoting space-breaks between scenes, but extra spaces before a sentence or between words. You know when you turn on Word’s paragraph function and it shows all those dots. I couldn’t let it go out with all those. So several hours later with only one Frappuccino, two cookies, and a yogurt I finished. By that time I couldn’t tell if it was a dot on the document or a speck on my screen.

I uploaded it again. Ran the Interior Reviewer and was satisfied that all was well. Then came the cover. Thanks to Grace, I have the cover art. But CreateSpace wants to know if I want the cover to be matte or glossy.

Matte or Glossy? I don’t know. They do offer to send me, for a nominal price, an example of each.

Okay. Send me an example of each. It’ll be here next Thursday.

Good.

I need a break.