I didn’t have kids because I grew up with my Mommy Dearest constantly reminding me how much of a pain raising kids is. I don’t want to be anyone else’s Mommy Dearest. Therapy has helped, watching my friends raise their own kids kindly has helped.

Listening to myself chide my deaf dog for his accidents has also helped (it feels safe to tell him “honey childe, you done fucked up again” in a gentle tone, in a way that wouldn’t be fair to a human child that could hear and understand me, and listening to myself repeat things I heard as a child reminds me that some of my programming is still fucked up.)

At my college, at least, we’re very undergrad-focused. So the professors tend to request things that are good for those sorts of classes. There’s about 3,700 academic libraries in the USA.

We also subscribe to some large collections of ebooks, which we don’t individually curate. We have the ability to add on individual books to our ebook collection, but most come in, say, the EBSCOhost eBooks Academic Subscription Collection. I have Opinions about ebooks vs physical books in a library setting (mostly, I don’t like renting books and prefer something a publisher can’t take away on a whim). But ebooks sure are convenient for students, especially if they’re taking classes remotely. COVID was a push towards ebooks.

Mini rant: our physical book collection needs weeding, but we don’t have the budget we’d like for new books. Whenever I pull together a display for, say, LGBTQ Pride, I have to decide whether to include a copy of “Poetry of Sappho” from the 1930s that looks like it’s from the 1930s[derogatory]–no dust cover, just blue paperboard. No young adult’s going to walk by a worn blue rectangle and say “yes, I want to pick that up and read it”.

I want to put together an attractive display and a lot of my options are ugly.

And weeding’s complicated, too. You can’t just say “oh, this is 30 years old, get rid of it”. That tends to work in Science/Tech/Medicine, but a 30-year-old biography might be the only one written on a person. Is there a newer one we should get? Is the older one bad for some irredeemable way, or is it bad in an interesting way? (example: written by someone super biased in favor of the subject, but the author’s biases are intriguing, or they’re the only biographer to actually talk to the subject, that sort of thing)

That’s how it ought to be done in academic libraries. It does take a lot of librarians. You have a librarian for each subject area, which can be pretty granular depending on the size/budget of the library. My academic library has a business librarian who focuses on acquiring and weeding the business section. She has an undergrad degree in something businessy and an MSLis.

Now, my academic library has been subject to funding cuts and so we don’t do everything we ought to do, especially in areas that aren’t major majors at our school, which is frustrating AF. We rely more on professors suggesting acquisitions.

Public libraries have a broader remit, so often can go with purchasing what’s requested by their patrons and what’s on lists of good new books. They still have to know their subject matter to weed properly, especially in the nonfiction areas. Fiction tends to be weeded based on condition and circulation stats, especially in public libraries. (weeding is getting rid of books that no longer suit the collection. Easy examples: children’s book that was dropped in the mud. children’s book that still lists Pluto as a planet).

Oh! As a librarian, you can also get pre-release versions of books to evaluate for your library. It’s a nice perk to read things months before it comes out. (you have to request them from the publisher, but publishers like sending these to librarians because librarians buy lots of books and talk to other people that buy lots of books)

In the linked article, the dog isn’t circled. My guess is someone wanted a photo of “generic street dogs” and someone else made the assumption it was the same dog, then it got fixed after the circled-dog image was cached on Lemmy.

part of librarianship is knowing how to evaluate various books to determine if they’re worth acquiring for the collection. So, you’d look at book reviews by experts, ask the professor that teaches that subject if there’s anything they’d suggest. You research the author, find out if they’re involved in any scandals w.r.t. their research, if they have undisclosed conflicts of interest, what have you.

Yes, that sounds trivial, but there’s a lot of things that go into it. Librarianship is mostly knowing how to find, store, and make available information.

Yes, but you can work in a library without being a librarian. Check out code4lib. It’s a (free online) techie conference with associated slack channel, and it’s for folks that, roughly, code for libraries. Tbh, I think the techie route to working in a library is easier than the master’s degree. Source: engineering undergrad, have my mslis, work in a library, current position doesn’t require an mslis.

Yeah, no, the dog with the white scruff is a different dog from the video in the linked article.

She’s wet?

70% autistic, 20% German.

I’m still disappointed at the guy that said he’d sue me and everyone else on the council I was on. It’s been years and he never followed through on his threat. Why would someone lie like that? /s

My college dorm was full gay couples. Some were even in thruples!

I’m really sorry for your loss. That’s awful.

It sucked being the kid at summer camp that never got mail. I figured jail was similar, so I made sure he had mail. I didn’t always have much to say, so often I’d send a greeting card filled with writing or sometimes just a post card. The act of sending/getting mail was the important bit.

Back when my brother was in jail, I was personally boosting that percentage by writing to him every week. Sometimes, he’d even write back. (some/most jails are wicked restrictive on correspondence and Internet access, and a letter is much cheaper than a jail phone conversation.)

The other day, I heard “PDF file” as a substitute for “pedophile”. I kind of liked that one.

edit: it was in a name-and-shame video, discussing someone’s poor behavior. The suspected pedophilia was just part of the concern regarding the person’s behavior.

My local ace is friendly. They have a store dog, too. It’s great.

You also need the equipment at hand. I have one friend that grew up without a refrigerator.

For myself, I went through a couple months when I was taking care of a partner after surgery, working full time, and handling pet care. You better believe we relied on ready-made meals and paper plates during those months.

Even when I had the spoons to cook, there was no guarantee I’d be able to focus on anything complicated without interruption. Pasta and steamed vegetables were about my limit: things that could be abandoned while taking care of more pressing needs (like changing bandages or cleaning up a mess that comes with having an elderly dog).

My mom is such a martyr. Smartest one in any room and the most willing to let everyone walk all over her for the sake of group cohesion, especially when she’s not the one that bears the weight of the group. (that is, she’ll volunteer her kids for duties, give their stuff away, and take risks with family health in order to not rock the boat. Why yes, I do blame her for getting my immunocompromised dad sick. She should not have gone to that “mandatory unmasked work Christmas breakfast potlock” in December 2020. It couldn’t have been too mandatory if she retired 2 months later.)

“You’re putting it all in me, but you had a hand in this, too.” Yeah, no, I never said I blamed her for <incident that broke the camel’s back>, just that it was a really bad experience and one I didn’t want to repeat.

Thanks :) I was worried I’d have to start fitting the stereotypes of a different generation.

My technique is “balance three pills on my right thumb, grab his snout from above with my left hand, put my thumb and pointer finger into the gaps in his teeth so he opens his mouth, and shove my pill-thumb down his throat.” Then he gets a treat to make sure he actually swallows it.

We’ve gotten pretty good at it over the years. Old dog needs his meds and he seems mostly resigned to it. Like, he’ll waddle away slowly until I catch up to him. He’s a good boy.

And yes, I do find pills in his beard later sometimes.