Jon Frater

  • Gun Toting Librarian

    Just for the sheer heck of it (and to respond to the underrepresentation of liberals who enjoy guns in the general media), I’m putting up this picture of me at the West Side Rifle & Pistol Range behind the edit. Enjoy!

  • Good Luck and Happy May Day

    There are many ways of celebrating May 1 (also variously known as May Day, Beltane, and International Workers’ Day), some of which are rather more risque (and fun!) than others. A less fun option is bellowing about one’s favorite cause on the Internet. Two groups in particular drive me nuts: the Socialists and the Capitalists. …

  • The Perfect Library, From The Telegraph

    Rejoice, for the weekend is nearly upon us.  (Yay!) If you have some time for reading this weekend, you might take a look at the UK Telegraph’s  list of "110 Books: The Perfect Library."  I’m sort of disappointed that Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash did not make the list, but I approve of what science fiction…

  • Lara Frater, Author, Librarian, & Fat Chick on NPR Today

    From WNYC’s web site: Anna Kirkland, assistant professor of women’s studies and political science at the University of Michigan and author of Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood, and  blogger Lara Frater, author of Fat Chicks Rule!: How To Survive in a Thin-Centric World,  look at the legal question of discrimination against the overweight.…

  • NY Public Library Sells Out for (Not So) Big Bucks

    I’m the first to admit it: I am a big, fat, wallowing cynic and have been since I was about twelve years old.  So news items like the following headline from Alternet.org don’t surprise me. They should–I would dearly love them to–but they just don’t and that  is likely to say a lot more about…

  • Deep Captured? Something to Think About

    Now that the weekend is upon us, I present you with some reading material.  No introduction for this article, except to say that if you are (or have been, or plan to be) heavily invested in "the market"–by which phrase we generally mean the financial institutions in which we park our life’s savings in hope…

  • It’s Been a Rough Few Weeks . . . Can You Tell?

    "The only kinds of fights worth having are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to…

  • How Our Parents Shopped and Other Tales of the Recent Past

    I know, I know, I owe you a discussion on how some knowledge of cataloging can help you refine your OPAC/web search strategies.  The article was begun and then put aside as the Art Institute donated 4 boxes of new books that need to be cataloged, processed and moved to the library. That will take…

  • Back on Track and On-line

    SirsiDynix’s hosted account servers are back on-line and we’ve had nothing but consistent access to our catalog and ILS all day. The explanatory e-mail that we received from their tech people said that IBM, seeing a weakness in BellSouth’s service conduits, allowed their primary service system to fail to bring the secondary into play. That…

  • A Good Index is a Thing of Beauty

    I remember indexing class at Queens College’s MLIS program: it was called "GSLIS 743, Indexing, Abstracting, and Other Access Systems,"  met for three hours a week and was filled with about 40 individuals who just wanted to get through the course and on their ways to more interesting things.  Over the course of the semester…