Whole chapters of contemporary history are disappearing into the ether as e-mails get trashed and webpages are taken down and people die without sharing their passwords.
One graduate student told me, When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts, and I promptly added her to my address...
It’s almost impossible to teach that sort of writing except by pointing students to a stack of clips and telling them, 'Inhale these.
Though I loved the wired world, the new-wave librarians, the avatars and activists, I turned into a dinosaur in that library. I couldn’t help it; I was an old-fashioned writer who loved the ancient bo...
We are all living history, and it’s hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing’s certain, though: if we throw it away, it’s gone.
We were bleeding information from the nose and ears, though dazed and disoriented was not how I experienced it. Most of the time, I felt like I was three years old, high on chocolate cake and social n...
Maybe it begins the day you pledge allegiance,face the flag and suddenly clutch your left claviclebecause you find a tender puff of breastwhere yesterday your heart wasOr maybe it happens later when y...
Agate, population 70, is one of those towns that people describe as ‘blink and you’ll miss it.’ Lois A. Engel loved living in the blink.
Writers seldom just stop writing. We're like serial killers in that way. You have to stop us, because we cannot stop ourselves.
Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don't fit our categories?
They to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after , was --for their patrons and themselves.
One of the advantages of living in the Ice Age would be that there are not very many people around. You’re constantly moving, and you have to live by your wits. You can’t just have fifteen different k...
In tight economic times, with libraries sliding farther and farther down the list of priorities, we risk the loss of their ideals, intelligence, and knowledge, not to mention their commitment to acces...
I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, commu...
Yes, librarians use punctuation marks to make little emoticons, smiley and frowny faces in their correspondence, but if there were one for an ironic wink, or a sarcastic lip curl, they'd wear it out.
In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.
It seems there was a custom in Ireland at this time of showing obeisance to your king by sucking his nipples. No nipples, you could not be a king.
I understood—I thought I understood—then things changed, or I learned the next thing that made everything I knew before obsolete.
You can tell the archaeologists, of course, by their photos. The tourists’ photos feature people in front of mountains, terraces, stone structures, sundials. The archaeologists wait until the people m...
So when I hear this snarky question (and I hear it everywhere): Are librarians obsolete in the Age of Google? all I can say is, are you kidding? Librarians are more important than ever. Google and Yah...