The Tale of the 26th Prisoner

I have officially arrived in the paraprofessional world.  "Paraprofessional" means I get paid about ten bucks an hour to do the same work it would take a pair of professionals to do. Just kidding. Actually, I love my job, with all its quirks. And on Tuesday, a co-worker and I went to a quirky workshop and I loved it.

The workshop was at KDLA in Frankfort, which stands for "Kentucky Dept. of Libraries and Archives. Vicki drove, because Frankfort is an hour and a half away, and given the state of my vehicles at the moment, there was every chance we would've ended up living there if I'd been the one to drive. Vicki driving meant I had to navigate, which is never a good thing, especially when I like the person I'm with and start talking too much to pay attention to the directions. We only got lost once, though, and in my defense, the turn we missed wasn't marked. Well, it was marked, just not with a green sign with a foot tall number "62" like I was expecting. At any rate, we didn't get very lost for very long, and Vicki didn't hit me with any blunt objects, and we'd left early-ish anyway, so we got where we were going just under the wire.

I didn't expect KDLA to be in such an idyllic setting. Frankfort isn't the largest city in Kentucky, but it is the capitol, so I expected it to be more... urban. KDLA, however, sits on a hill off to the side of the city, surrounded by wooded hills and parks, with a spectacular view of the capitol building on an adjacent hill. If I hadn't talked myself out of taking my camera with me just before I left in the morning, I'd have a better shot of that view, but here is the best that Vicki's camera phone could provide, and then a little bit better one from the web.

The KDLA building itself is an artistic looking block of concrete with three huge silos down each side that store, as I was told by the front desk attendant, sensitive documents that require climate controlled environments. And you thought librarians never did anything cool. Just inside the lobby, a visitor is presented with the Braille Library for the Blind stacks. To the right lie the Archives, ensconsed behind a guard's desk which I'll tell you about later, and a beautiful sculpture called, Kentucky in Woods, shown  at the top. This is what SLA Kentucky's newsletter says about the sculpture, "Located in the building’s main lobby is a unique sculpture by Bobby Reed Falwell. The monumental wood sculpture is made of 28 Kentucky woods and is an abstract representation of Kentucky, with the sunrise on the east and the sunset in the west. The woods came from the Estill County land of Dr. Thomas Clark, who worked with Falwell to locate each variety of tree needed for the project." That's cool, but mainly I just thought it was pretty.

The first half of the workshop was about the services offered by KDLA, most noteworthy of which is the Talking Book Library. Basically, what this program does is make audiobooks of books that mainstream companies wouldn't; i.e. a cookbook in audio form so that someone who has had a stroke and can cook just fine but can't turn the pages of a book can still try new recipes. The possibilities are endless. I love this program! Since I can't do it justice in this blog without writing a novel, I'll direct you here and here for details.

During a tasty lunch, eaten in Vicki's van to get out of the horrible cave the seminar took place in, we revelled in the wildlife experience of KDLA. No, I'm not talking about wildlife in the library/archives: they only let them in if they have all the proper forms of ID. But while Vicki and I were eating lunch, we saw a herd of five mysterious deer emerge from the woods to crop grass unabashedly by the roadside. They were mysterious because they didn't look like white-tailed deer, but my expert source, a.k.a. my husband, says there aren't any other species in Kentucky. Shortly after the herd made its appearance, it was joined by a flock of wild turkeys who I can only assume were having a last hurrah before the start of turkey season which was coming up the following Sunday. So fascinated were we by the view of distant critters that we took a drive to try to get a better look. Alas, the camera phone didn't have enough oomph to document that. I'm still kicking myself that I decided not to take my camera with me.

After lunch/safari, Vicki and I went back to the dungeon to take part in *booming voice-over* The Tale of the 26th Prisoner! This was a collection building/censorship excercise meant to illustrate the challenges that library "book selectors" face when chosing books for their collections. There were something like 80 of us library book slaves who took part in this training excercise. They split us up into six groups and we were given these instructions: You are a librarian who has committed a terrible crime. (Probably something to do with those five copies of Twilight that the library has been trying to get back since January...) Because your character has been found to be in all other ways irreproachable, you have been given a lightened sentence to serve as the librarian of a new prison island. This island is separated from the mainland by 75 miles of frigid water. You and the other inmates will be expected to be 75% self-sufficient. Two of the inmates will have children with them, because they have been found to be exemplary parents and their crimes were not violent: a nine year old boy and fourteen year old girl who have been tested to reveal genius level IQ, and one seven year old severely autistic boy who excels at art and music. The children must pass the same standardized tests as other children their ages or they will be put into foster care and their parents put in a maximum security prison on the mainland. One woman is pregnant. The other prisoners range from seven to eighty one years of age and represent all major ethnic groups and world religions, both genders, and all sexual orientations. You must select ten books to meet the needs listed above, but... The governor of the island will vet all books being brought in and will not allow any books containing violence, sexual descriptions or images, religious ideas, or any ideas deemed to be of an inflamatory nature. If the governor disallows more than three of your choices, you will be put in solitary confinement for life.

Needless to say, we should've just chosen one title and had done with it: Catch 22. That's obviously what the situation was: it is impossible to meet all the above needs without breaking some of the above rules. No history books: violence. But what about the standarized tests? No medical books: naughty pictures. But what about the pregnant woman? And you can just forget about any novels with the above rules... You get the idea. After the scrutiny of the governor, my group had only three books left, five out of six groups were in solitary confinement forever, and I was chanting, "Revolution! Revolution!" The presenters did tell us that we must be the good kids that our directors allow to leave the library because every other time they had led this workshop, at least one group said, "We want a book on boat building..."

After much hilarity and being shipped off to solitary confinement forever and ever, Vicki and I decided to stop in at the Archive room. Getting into the Archives is much like getting into Canada used to be: it can be done without a passport, but we had to have two forms of ID, sign away our firstborn chilren, and make extra certain to put our middle initials on all blanks asking for our names. Sheesh. All we wanted was to take a look at the portfolio of the Packhorse Libraries, which Vicki had read about in Down Cut Shin Creek.  The Packhorse Libraries were a program of the W.P.A. in Kentucky during the Great Depression. These intrepid librarians would take books in satchels on horseback to the remote settlements and camps of Appalachia where the poor families would receive them with great excitement. Because the culture of the area and time was such that these families didn't feel right about taking something without giving something in return for it, even if it was a loaned library book, these families would often give the librarians something of personal value, like a family recipe or a scrap for a quilt. The librarians then began to make scrapbooks of these items, which eventually became a highly valued part of their cirulated materials, passed on from family to family around the region. What Vicki and I were hoping to see was one of these actual scrapbooks, but either through miscommunication or because the scrapbooks are not actually kept at KDLA, what we ended up seeing was a folder of photographs of the Packhorse Libraries, a couple of which are  shown here. When we left the Archives, we were told that KDLA actually has a signature of Abraham Lincoln's, amongst other valuable articles. And the themesong from Mission Impossible started playing in my head...