I was on my library's chat reference service last week and was asked if I could help find videos on the Black Death. So I did a search of the library's catalogue to see what we had, the patron didn't end up sticking around on the chat after I said searching the catalogue was their best place to start, but I was curious about what videos we had on the topic so I decided to look at the search results. I started reading through some of the titles with my coworkers, because they were curious about what I was looking at. There was the usual stuff about religion, war, and famine...and then we got about half way down the first page of results, and came across this:
That stopped me right in my tracks, piqued my curiosity, that was not what I was expecting to come across. Gerbils responsible for the plague. I immediately had to know more. So I turned to Google for some news articles on the subject.
As you can see from those few results in the
above image, it turns out it's not so cut and dry, there's a lot of debate
about whether or not it was actually the gerbils or whether it was indeed the
rats like it has historically been attributed. The original study that inspired
all this gerbil related sensationalism is a report by Professor Nils Christian Stenseth and scientists
from the University of Oslo titled Climate-driven
introduction of the Black Death and successive plague reintroductions into
Europe. The
article from the Skeptics Guide, which was the top result in the Google search was actually
very interesting and does a really good job of explaining how the media took
the original report out of context for the sake of headlines. Alison Atkin, whose article Avoid Killer Gerbil Headlines Like a Cliche was linked in the Skeptics Guide article as being a good explanation of the chain of logic in the original study, commented on the article with a link to another of her articles, Blame The Gerbils? Blame The Journalists! which explores how the media blew it so out of proportion.
This is just another standard example of not taking everything the media tells you at face value, it's always a good idea to do some digging into the headlines.
-- Ren
Well, it's been a long time since I wrote a post. I have been very neglectful of this blog for quite awhile now. I managed to fall out of the habit of writing regularly and then avoiding starting up again became a habit. About a month ago I thought to myself that I missed writing and that I'd like to get back into it again, and a set of ideas for different themes I could use on this blog popped into my head. But then I just put it off because I wasn't in the mood to start writing/scared of starting again because I can be a real chicken about putting myself out there to be judged. My best friend Angie, who is my biggest supporter (along with my mother) and my biggest encouragement and inspiration, is doing a blog post every day this month. So after reading one of her posts earlier this week I told her how much I love reading her writing, and when I told her that she said she loved mine, and she's not the type of person to just return a compliment like that or to bullshit me so I believe her when she tells me my writing is good. So with that encouragement I thought, you know what, I'm going to do it too, I'm going to do a blog post every day from November 3rd to December 3rd to get back into the swing of writing. Well you'll notice it's November 5th now and this is my first post of the month, Tuesday night I got sidetracked by: CSI: Cyber, The Flash, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and Scream Queens, and last night I had a few errands to run, some volunteer work to do, and I was just really into the work I was doing on the house I'm building for Angie in the Sims 2 (which I was still working on again tonight as well) so I didn't end up getting around to writing any entries. I decided that tonight, no matter what I was going to start, so my month of a blog post every day starts now, with this post, and will last until December 5th. After December 5th I will try to blog as regularly as possible, whether that will be every day or not remains to be seen but I will keep it up this time.
As far as they ideas for themes I had in mind, I thought that, in keeping with the theme I have for this blog that I would write about:
- General reading/writing topics on Mondays
- Fun things I come across at work (I work in an Academic Library) on Tuesdays
- Comics/Comic TV/Films on Wednesdays (Mostly so I can geek out about The Flash and AoS which come on on Tuesday nights)
- Libraries and library associations on Thursdays
- Book reviews on Fridays
- And time permitting on the weekends I thought I'd post some creative writing in order to help me get back into doing creative writing regularly too
So since it's Thursday, I thought I'd end this first post off by talking about libraries. Specifically tonight I'm going to talk about something I love about public libraries. I love the reader's advisory service offered by public libraries. For those of you that don't know what reader's advisory is, I offer the definition from the Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science:
Reader's advisory is a service provided by experienced public services library staffers who specialize in the reading needs of the patrons of a public library. A readers' advisor recommends specific titles and/or authors, based on knowledge of the patron's past reading preferences/requests. This type of information is also provided by reference works such as Reader's Adviser: A Layman's Guide to Reading published by Bowker. For genre fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, romance etc.), the standard guide is Genreflecting: A Guide to Reading Interests in Genre Fiction (Libraries Unlimited, 2000) by Diana Tixier Herald. For online readers' advisory, try Find a Good Book: If You Like... from the Hennepin County Library, or Book Browser from Barnes & Noble. (Reitz)
Like I said above, and I believe I've mentioned before, I work in an Academic Library, I am a trained library professional. I've taken a course specifically geared toward learning how to do reader's advisory for genre fiction. I provide reader's advisory for friends, family and people I know on Facebook quite regularly. But reader's advisory is not what I do every day, I don't know all the tricks and tools and I am willing to admit that. Although in this instance it took me 4 days before I was willing to admit defeat and turn to the Waterloo Public Library for help, because I felt like I should have been able to do it myself. After finishing Colleen Gleason's The Chess Queen Enigma last week I got it into my head that I would love to read some steampunk that is set in Victorian Canada instead of Victorian England, so I started hunting for some. After 4 days of trying the only thing I found was an anthology of short stories that won't even actually be published until next April! (Sad face, I want it now!) So this afternoon I admitted defeat and emailed the WPL for help sheepishly. I was totally, absolutely thrilled and impressed when I got a response less than an hour later with 3 titles that they had found that fit what I was looking for! And the staff member who contacted me was even helpful enough to place a hold on the item they had for me, put in an Interlibrary loan request for the one that could be obtained through ILL and submit a purchase order for the one that couldn't be! So yes, if you're ever stuck trying to find something for you next read, or for a specific type of book you aren't even sure exists, ask the staff at a public library, they are really good at it!
Ren
Cited:
Reitz, Joan M. "Online Dictionary for Library Sience - R." ODLIS. ABC-CLIO, n.d. Web. 05 Nov. 2015.
