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An Owensboro Community and Technical College Library Newsletter |
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Where information is always on! |
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Tell us how it was when you first arrived at OCTC. Well, most of us were strangers, but we came together as a team busily working together towards a goal. We didn’t take time to verbalize our goals much until a little later, but we all knew where we were going so we were very goal and student oriented. We got acquainted pretty fast and I think grew into a good working team. My first day on the job, I didn’t have an office, a desk, a telephone, or even a pencil. I walked around and when someone got up from their desk to go somewhere, I would sit down and start calling for catalogs and things I needed to get started on the library—and then went from there. It has been a great challenge—and great fun! What were some of the challenges for you as head librarian? The first challenge was just as I stated—and then how to provide for those first classes starting with nothing. It did come together. We rented space in the basement of the public library and started ordering books and other things we needed. Later challenges included keeping up with our wonderful growth curve, planning for our new library building, making sure we were meeting student and faculty needs, and our first automated library system. What do you feel are some of your greatest accomplishments at OCTC? To me, my greatest accomplishments are having had a small part in people’s lives who are growing and changing their lives for the better. I feel wonderfully blessed to have spent twenty years having even a small part in that. What have been some of the most exciting times for you at OCTC? The beginning was very exciting. The move onto our new campus was exciting as well as our first full accreditation. I am equally excited about our new Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP). If you could have one wish for OCTC and the library after you leave, what would it be? Without a moment’s hesitation, I wish for the overwhelming success of the QEP, including, of course, the Information Literacy Expectation for the library. If the college can follow through with this plan, I believe it will change more students’ lives than we can imagine. I wish the college well, and I almost hate to leave now because I would like to be part of it. What are your plans after retirement? I’m following Dr. Addington’s example and going to live near three of my grandchildren in California. I have another one but she lives in Philadelphia, and I can’t solve that dilemma. |
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Retiring Library Director Fran Davis - We’ll miss you! |
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A look back with Fran |
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Vol. 1 Issue 1 - Spring 2006 |
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Gary’s Corner: |
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There’s a lot of buzz about libraries of the future being “bookless.” That means that books will be replaced by computer databases. Bookless libraries, future utopias or apocalyptic wastelands ruled by mutant monstrosities? Now before you dismiss this as the rantings of a lunatic book geek, maybe we should hear what Winston Smith, Helmholtz Watson, and Guy Montag have to say about a world without books. Smith inhabits the dark nightmare world of George Orwell’s 1984, where the government of Big Brother rules all facets of people’s lives. Here, “thought crime” is the greatest offense. The party slogan, “who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past” shows why books especially have to be controlled. In order to control the past, everything written in the past had to be, not only rewritten, but continually rewritten. But once written, a book stands alone like a light house shining its beacon to anyone willing to look. Books have no place in the oppressive world of 1984. Helmhotz Watson lives in Aldous Huxley’s less frightening, but nonetheless totalitarian Brave New World. Here books too are banned, but ironically they need not be. No one cares to read them. There are no libraries in this brave new world, but if there were they’d be deserted. Social stability is of paramount importance to the government, and that has been achieved through conditioning (from embryo to late adolescence), endless entertainment, sex, and the wonder drug, Soma. But books threaten that stability, and anyone who insists on reading the “old” and banned books must themselves be removed from society. As Watson soon learns, it is Huxley’s vision rather than Orwell’s that Neil Postman, in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, thinks is the more insidious and the one that we are most in danger from. Postman blames television for a great deal of the harm already done. He sees it as having truncated our attention spans and vitiated our intellects to the point where we may lack the ability to think clearly and well enough to survive as a free people. And looking at the some of the world’s great books languishing on library shelves unread, he might be right. And then there is Ray Bradbury’s heroic fireman, Guy Montag of Fahrenheit 451. In this future world, firemen are truly “fire” men. They burn the books (banned as dangerous to society), the houses they are found in, and sometimes even the owners who refuse to abandon them. And like Watson and Smith, Montag learns that the siren call of books carries a high price tag. Soon he is running for his life having lost wife, home, career, and standing in society. On the run, Montag, finds that he isn’t alone. A rag tag group of “walking books” finds him and he joins them. These people store the books inside their heads where no one can burn them, looking forward to the day they can be written again. Of course it hasn’t come to that in our society, and it may never; but a world without books? Does it really seem desirable to replace good old fashion friendly paper with cold impersonal electronic blips on a screen? Who curls up with a good computer screen on a long winter night for a good read? Who sits out under the shade tree in the lazy days of summer reading electronic blips? A world without books? Allow me to paraphrase a famous organization: they can have my books, when they pry them from my cold dead fingers. |
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OCTC Library Main Campus 270/686-4590 Downtown 270/686-4466 Southeastern 270/686-4689 |
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A World Without Books By Gary Wagner |
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Remember the library is open during the summer and you can view and renew your check-outs online at www.octc.kctcs.edu/library. ————————————— Featured website: Huge gallery of photos |
