[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is one thing that I was going to wait a while before we talked about. Maybe we'll talk about it now so you can think about it, because you all-- we all have to make some kind of plans for ourselves. It's a free concert from now on.
[CHEERING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with Fred Rascoe and Marlee Givens. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme, and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it. And on that subject, I want to say hi to Patty Calloway. Patty, thanks for listening and telling people that you like our show.
Today's episode is called "Free Cut!" with an exclamation point.
I heard the exclamation point.
Yeah, yeah. We've been doing that a lot this year. The count is now 11 question marks and two exclamation points in our show titles this year.
Nice. And we should not forget the subtitle-denoting colon in one of those titles this year.
Yeah, yeah.
Right. Titular colonost-- colonosity, right?
[CHUCKLING]
Fred.
Which leaves--
We are academics, right?
--16 unpunctuated titles so far in 2023. We need to up our punctuation game.
I'm kind of wondering now if we should include titles that have an apostrophe in them. That is technically punctuation.
At this point in our introduction, the listener might be asking themselves--
[LAUGHTER]
Why?
--why are they talking about punctuation in their show titles? And the answer is because today, we're talking about anything we want.
Right on.
This show is a free cut. And here at WREK, a free cut usually happens just once a shift when a DJ doesn't choose the song from the music director's curated collection and instead picks something out of the vault for their own enjoyment.
On Lost in the Stacks, a free cut means no show topic, no music theme.
So our songs today are about whatever they happen to be about. I'm not even sure what order they're in. It's a free-wheeling show today. We're going to keep the discussion real loose, so let's set the tone with our first song. This is "Loose," by the Stooges.
Oh, yeah.
Right here on Lost in the Stacks.
[MUSIC - THE STOOGES, "LOOSE"]
That was "Loose," by the Stooges. We are loose today on Lost in the Stacks. Our show today is called "Free Cut!", so we're just talking about whatever we want to talk about. CHARLIE BENNETT: I'd like to think that we're always a bit loose. Yeah, well, I mean speaking for me, I'm usually a little uptight.
Well, yeah. I mean not Iggy Pop in the '70s loose, but kind of loose.
I am too much of an introvert to be completely loose.
This is Lost in the Stacks. Our show today is called "Free Cut." Charlie, we're going to start this free cut with you.
OK.
What do you want to talk about today? CHARLIE BENNETT: The thing that's been on my mind that's library-related is book donations. Book donations.
Yeah.
Like donations to the Georgia Tech Library?
Yep. I know you all have thoughts on this.
We automatically have to keep them all no matter what they are.
Fred, you be careful about what you say. Let me tell you why I've been thinking about book donations a lot. The public policy department was housed in the DM Smith building. DM Smith building is being renovated.
So all of the offices in DM Smith needed to be vacated for the Rich building before the summer started, or by the end of the summer, something like that, which meant a lot of faculty members all left their offices at once, and a lot of them did not want to carry the books that were in their offices down to the Rich building. And so we got a department-wide book donation from public policy.
I have to ask how many stacks of National Geographics?
I have not found a National Geographic yet, but I did open a paper box and discovered that it was 17 to 22 years of Industrial Conservation or Conservation Biology, something like that.
Like a journal? CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, a journal. Yeah. Like, I had to ask one of our collections librarians are we filling in the gaps in print runs that we have some of? Is that something that we would do? And she wrote back we would fill in gaps in print runs. I was like, you asked for it! So there are upwards of 60 banker's boxes and moving boxes of books at the library record center, which is a warehouse in an undisclosed location. Known only to anyone who looks it up on the website.
Exactly, although it is hard-- I had to get the address so I could Google map my way over there, and it was much harder to get the address than it should have been. I'm an information scientist, and I was still stymied. Anyway, the point is that's a warehouse for records, and it was going to be office space for a couple of departments, and that didn't happen. So there's this wide, empty, open office plan space.
And I have taken one aisle of that and filled it with boxes of public policy donations. I've been going through them. I've been doing the first pass, which is vetting it for things that quite obviously are not going to go in the collection, like textbooks, or manuals on programs from 2003, or I don't think the SAGE Publications, those little blue floppy publications-- I don't know if you remember those-- I don't think those are going to go in the collection. And so you separate that stuff out.
Some of it's going to go to Better World Books, which is a donation and recycling service. Some is then going to go to the Technical Services department. We talked to Stephanie Galipeau earlier this year, and they're going to do a full check. Do we have it in the library? Do we have it electronically? Do other libraries in the USG have it, and et cetera. And it's been amazing to open box after box after box of books and not know what's going to come out of them.
Clearly, there's someone who specializes in sports. Someone does a history of sports in public policy class.
You're finding a lot of sports books.
Well, there was one section of books, one section of boxes, I mean, that every time I opened them, it was biographies of Babe Ruth. Because the boxes all came at different times. They're not marked by name. It's just a mix of donations from multiple offices, multiple faculty members.
It strikes me that all these books were in-- I guess there's dozens of faculty offices that were cleared out.
I mean, yeah. FRED RASCOE: Something like that. Just think about DM Smith, four floors of classrooms and boxes.
All these offices cleared out, they all had books in them, and rather than move the books, the faculty members that had collected these books over the years just said, eh, we can get rid of them. Which speaks to the purpose of their own personal office library. I guess it speaks to it in that there was none.
Well, they were given an excuse to weed.
There was at one time, yeah. Now, I'm very surprised though, Charlie, that you're not embracing your let's burn it all down philosophy more in this process.
Some of my liaison department faculty members might hear this, so I'm keeping it cool.
All right. Fair enough.
Although you make an excellent point, Marlee, there is a sense that why are we bothering with all of these books?
I'll tell you-- it costs money.
Well, it costs my time first.
It costs-- yours is probably the most expensive time in this process.
Maybe.
But it costs cataloging time. It costs all of that looking up. It costs repackaging and shipping to Better World Books. I mean, it's several years ago, I can't say how much, but it was more than you would think the cost to process a gift book.
Yeah.
So I'm going to break the rules if I keep going.
Yeah, it's free as in kittens, not free as in beer when people give a donation. There is upkeep, and processing, and effort required.
Is there any time that you've gone through this stuff and thought, oh, I'm glad I'm going through this because I found this, and this will be very interesting to add to our collection?
I mean, a little bit, but more I am delighted by this carnival of books that I am unboxing.
Do you know how many it is?
I don't know how many books. I know that it's upwards of 60 boxes of books, some of which are banker boxes, some of which are paper boxes, and a few which were moving boxes that you'd pack like kitchen stuff in. So it was a lot, and I very much enjoy the actual process of pulling the books out, and looking at them, and making assessments. The first, one, OK, yeah, that one goes over there. That one goes over there. Wow, this one is water-damaged, so I'm just going to throw that one away.
And the titles and all of the just possibilities in the books, but I also think here I am, another three hours in the LRC. I like it, but I don't know if our Dean is going to say that it's OK that that's the time I spent. So there you go. That was my free cut. This is Lost in the Stacks. We'll be back with more of our Free Cut thinkings after a music set. And you know what? I think I'll file this one.
Yeah, file this one. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, this is mine. File this set under HS845.R3A4.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That is "Super Stupid" by Funkadelic. And before that was "Manny's Bones" by Los Lobos, or as the Amazon voice assistant says, "lahs lah-bos." Those were songs about remembering the dead and their mistakes.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "Free Cut!" We're playing songs we like and talking about topics that have been on our minds. And it is Fred's turn.
All right.
What topic do you want to talk about?
So I've been thinking. I've been keeping a note of this for a while. CHARLIE BENNETT: And that's literal, because you have a handful of notes. I do have a handful of notes here, and I have been thinking off and on, is this a show? It's not a show, but it's enough for a 7-minute segment, so I'm going to talk about it here. So we've talked about Sci-Hub a lot on the show, the pirate site that makes a lot of academic journals, academic peer-reviewed articles, et cetera.
Arr!
Yeah. Available for free and online. It's illegal, but it's-- I'm going to editorialize and say it's a very valuable service.
Careful with your calls to actions and your prices there, Fred.
Yeah, it's available to all. And my opinion on it is only my opinion.
There you go. Good job.
But I read a lot of popular non-fiction books. Well, I wouldn't say I read a lot, but that is pretty much what I do read. And last winter, I was reading a book called Beloved Beasts, Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction by an author named Michelle Nijhuis, if I pronounced that right. And after I got to the end of the book I always look to the acknowledgments because sometimes librarians and archivists show up in the acknowledgments. And so I'll read through there.
And I was reading through the acknowledgments, and I noticed that she had a little paragraph that started "for writerly solidarity and for crucial advice and assistance of many kinds, I'm grateful to" and she lists a few names. And then one name that pops up-- Alexandra Elbakyan, the person who created and runs Sci-hub, this pirate site. No more mention of it, didn't mention how she thanked, but I'm guessing because she was able to access a lot of things that she would otherwise have to pay for.
Do you feel pretty sure that it's not a friend group or a peer-to-peer acknowledgment, that it is straight up a Sci-hub acknowledgment?
I would think so. I mean, it was a popular science book, but and I thought, oh, that's interesting, being a fan of Sci-hub, as I just stated. But I filed it away. Then a few months later, I was reading a book called Unmask Alice, which is about the book Go Ask Alice that came out in the '70s by, quote, unquote, anonymous, but it was actually by a middle aged lady. CHARLIE BENNETT: That was a fake diary to keep kids from doing stuff. Right. Yeah, Beatrice.
It turns out it was Beatrice Sparks, and she had fake health professional credentials that she used when she interviewed kids and came up with these, quote, unquote, diaries. Anyway, the book was about that whole fake satanic panic, drug panic scandal. And in the acknowledgments after I finished that book, it said "friends, colleagues, and life support provided by," and a few names, and in that list of names, Alexandra Elbakyan. And so I thought, I wonder.
Google Books is a good tool for looking for a string of texts through lots of digitized copies, and so I found Alexandra Elbakyan is acknowledged a lot, and not just in academic works, just in like popular science type general readership type of books. A book called Explaining Life through Evolution by Prosanta Chakrabarty says "Alexandra Elbakyan, thanks for making many scientific publications available."
Yeah, that's specifically Sci-hub acknowledgement.
Let's see, another one called The Philosopher's Library, Books that Shaped the world Alexandra Elbakyan mentioned there, Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, History of Insulin, Ways of Being, Living as a Bird-- I don't know what that's about, but they thanked Alexandra Elbakyan. CHARLIE BENNETT: History of Insulin stands out among all the titles that you've mentioned so far. That's the only straightforward one that doesn't appear to have a political stance built into the title.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, what's the correct-- is that an ironic statement or what is it?
I am just feeling-- I'm being free.
Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: Being loose, Fred. Yeah, the free cut is the deepest. So I just-- I didn't even-- I went through the first like 8 or 9 pages of Google Books results, and I just noticed that there's an awful lot of acknowledgment for the work of Alexandra Elbakyan. And I don't really see her site Sci-hub mentioned much, but it is clear that that's why she's being acknowledged.
Did you also search Google Books for Sci-hub?
I did not.
OK, just curious.
Now you're--
My work is being checked live on the air.
You are a copyright librarian along with some other things under your scholarly communications umbrella.
Yeah.
So how do you feel about all this?
Well, I'm glad. I mean, I'm not necessarily on the librarian party line where I think all copyright is bad.
There's no party here, buddy.
OK, well, but I am a huge fan of Sci-hub and the work that Alexandra Elbakyan does. And I think it just is another way that it's highlighting the importance of making scholarly work available. So I will point out that these popular books, none of them were made available for free. They're all--
There's not a Creative Commons license for Sci-hub.
If I want to if I want a digital version of any of these book titles that I mentioned, I'm going to have to either pay for it or go to one of those nefarious sites to download it.
I mean, most of the people who wrote usually articles that are coming out of Sci-hub, they weren't paid for their work for those articles either.
Right. And in the case of these works, the authors actually have financial benefit. The copyright remains with the author, but usually it's tied up in an exclusive contract with the publisher. But the author does benefit from it.
Fred, I think this might be a show. I think you underestimated it.
Maybe. I suppose so, but we'll see. I'll do like Marlee says, and I'll search Sci-hub as well, and then we'll see. CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we'll continue our "Free Cut" on the left side of the hour.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hello, good people. You are lost in the stacks with Ian MacKaye, here on WREK in Atlanta.
Today's show is called "Free Cut!" In it, the show breaks format or at least some part of its format. The skeleton of the show, which goes like this-- cold open, opening song, talk segment, music set, talk segment, this mid-show break, music set, talk segment, outro, and closing song remains stable. But we've used it now to give structure to a different kind of body than we normally do.
Instead of a single uniting theme, like artificial intelligence in the classroom or cataloging philosophy, we have simply "Free Cut!" whatever you want out of all the stuff in the vault, the vault in this case being our heads, our professional lives, and even guess our enjoyment of music. So why do this? Well, like our Christmas episodes and our occasional sound collage episodes, testing the format will let us understand better what we do each week.
I think of it like travel to a foreign country that allows you when you come back to understand your home a little bit better. Although the metaphorical travel for today's show I guess is more like a short jaunt to an American territory, where your money's still good, and everyone speaks the language, but the scenery and the food are different. I mean, that's pretty easy travel compared to what can be.
Like there's this one time I was stranded in a train station in Napoli listening to garbled announcements in Italian, which I do not speak, trying to figure out a way to get to Sorrento before--
Charlie.
Sorry, getting a little lost there. What was I saying?
Free cuts are good for the soul.
Better said in fewer words. You can't beat that with a stick.
Che figo. File this set under duress.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It's all right. Wow, by the Cherry Orchard. Before that, "She is Beyond Good and Evil" by the Pop Group. Those are songs about-- I think they're about acknowledgment.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Fred, your set was so loose and loungy, and yet also evil.
Nice.
This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "Free Cut!" We're playing songs without an overall theme, just ones we like, and we're talking about anything that is important to us right now. Marlee, you're up. What would you like to talk about for your free cut?
I want to talk about mentoring.
I should have known.
And I think we only have about three or four minutes. So.
Oh, it's a free cut, though. So we can just cut into that.
All right, all right. So this is all going to be a discussion in the form of questions.
Oh, Socratic.
Well, mostly because I really want to get at your experience, both of you. So, Fred, you've been a mentee.
Yes.
In the library's formal mentoring program.
The one that existed about eight years ago.
Yeah, about eight years ago was the last time we did it. And then, Charlie, you're currently a mentor.
I am.
In the refashioned-- you are. You are technically that. So I really just want to talk about what your experience is like on both sides of those things. So as someone who has never really participated in a formal mentoring program, I don't know if I had some-- if I just thought that's not necessary, if I just found my own way, if I never had the opportunity, but for whatever reason. And I know that there's pluses and minuses to both of those things.
So, Fred, I was wondering if you would just share a little bit about your experience as a mentee.
OK, so when I was a new employee and the mentoring program got started again, I'd been here about a year or two, I guess. And the librarian for architecture, who has retired since, but her name was Kathy Carpenter, she was assigned to be a mentor for me. And what that involved was basically meeting her for lunch once a month. And the first time I went, I brought my CV. I really didn't know what to expect. I didn't know what I was supposed to bring into this discussion.
And really, I don't think she had too many solid ideas herself, but it started a relationship where we just met once a month for lunch, didn't discuss my CV very much; just discussed the library. And I just benefited from her years of experience and knowledge working in an academic library because I, at that point, had only a couple of years of experience in an academic library. So I think the advantage for me was it helped me plug into the academic library mindset.
All right. Does it feel a little bit more structured this time around?
Oh, it feels very structured. It feels very thought through. I've been delighted by it. I would not do it if it weren't highly structured. Because if ever I feel imposter syndrome, it's when someone says why don't you impart some of your experience and help this person learn? I can teach, but the mentor label I really get squirrely about.
Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: But my mentee and I have discussed what we're going to try and do. And we're going to have two coffees a month and just talk about whatever is on the mentee's mind. And I think there will be a lot of questions answered because I've been here at Georgia Tech for 10, 20, 32 years in various roles. And so I have a lot of institutional knowledge, much of it outdated.
And so talking to them about what it's like here, so that they can feel a little more connected and a little more armed with knowledge when they approach the organization or the larger Georgia Tech deal. Yeah. So in all that time, those 32 years, have you ever had a mentor yourself?
I've never had a formal mentor, but I've been taken under the wing by a few people. I didn't know it a couple of times, and I knew it a couple of times. I've been mentored. It is never good in my mind when it is structured in the actual conversation, and it can get loose and disappear if the meetings and the timing of it is not structured. It's a very fine line.
It's a fence that you have to balance on to get a good mentoring going that doesn't turn into I guess we should fill out the form and talk about something.
Yeah.
Let's get a good mentoring going. That sounds like a t-shirt right there.
It does.
A boring t-shirt, but it does. Why are you interested in mentoring?
Oh, gosh. Well, I mean, this all goes back to when I was president of the library faculty organization, and we had just had this large cohort of librarians that had all started to get-- librarians and archivists that had all started together and broke a previous hiring freeze. And they were all-- they seemed-- just having so much trouble and felt so much pressure and stress going through the promotion process for the first time. And I thought it should not be this hard.
We should be better preparing people so that they don't feel like they're going through this alone. And so one of the ideas that came out of that was let's get back to having a mentoring program in the library. And so I went through a program run by Faculty Affairs. And part of the agreement for joining that program was that I would turn around and do something with mentoring in the library.
Yeah, you had a good idea, so you had to do it.
All right.
That's how it works here. This is Lost in the Stacks. Today is a free cut show. Let's play some more music that we chose just because we like it.
File this set under M1258.T.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You just heard "I'm Free" by The Who. And before that, "Song for Sue" by The Betrayers. CHARLIE BENNETT: Somebody is loose today. Songs about the range of human relationships.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks. Today's show was a free cut. We played what we liked. We talked without a formal theme. I had fun. But I guess next episode we should probably get back in our regular groove.
Yeah, we discovered you like structure.
I do like structure.
Well, you know, Charlie, we've got one more free cut to work in.
Oh, hit me. Yeah, let's keep going.
Well, our show co-founder and deeply missed colleague, Ameet Doshi, recently crossed the threshold.
Did he die?
No, no, no, no, no. Not the Rainbow Bridge. He is now a full-fledged academic.
Oh, no.
That's right. He got his PhD. He is now a Georgia Tech alum from the School of Public Policy.
What a crazy thing to do.
Yeah, and speaking of acknowledgments, he gave Lost in the Stacks a little shout out in his thesis. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, that was nice. He may be anti-internet, but he is pro-podcast.
Congratulations, Ameet, Dr. Doshi. We miss you. CHARLIE BENNETT: Roll those credits.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens.
Legal counsel and a box of books. Come on, Phillip--
Oh, man.
--were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
Special thanks to our listeners. That's right, all of you, and in particular today Sherry, Patti, and why not, Alexandra Elbakyan.
I wonder if she's listening.
And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to the podcast feed, and a web form if you want to give us your own free cut.
Next week on Lost in the Stacks, we will introduce you to one of Georgia Tech's newest librarians who recently made the jump from staff to faculty.
It's time for our last song. I certainly enjoyed hearing everyone's free cut music picks today. It's nice to let our hair hang down once in a while. CHARLIE BENNETT: Easy there, tiger. We don't all have hair to hang. Well, it's a metaphorical hair, Charlie. So let's keep that wild-haired feeling going to the end of the show and on into the weekend. This is a song by a 1970s Vietnamese singer called Thanh Mai and their song whose title translates to "Long, Uneven Hair."
I'm not going to attempt the actual Vietnamese there. Have a great weekend, everyone.
Let down your hair, Fred.
[MUSIC PLAYING]