New Orleans Restaurants

I have now written several emails about this so I decided to blog it. Folks who know me are coming to town, and looking for places to eat. So, I have decided to cut and past from one of those, the general information which I am sharing.

ALA's Annual Conference will be at the Morial Convention Center which is located in the area generally known as the Warehouse District. The Convention Center is a long building (not very deep) which runs along the river for over a mile.

Let me point you to a web site, and give you some neighborhood names. The web site lists all the restaurants in greater New Orleans which are sit down, and not fast food places. There are over 1100. The web site is done and reviews are written by the food critic for the Times-Picayune, Tom Fitzsimmons.

Here is the web site: http://www.nomenu.com/ For any of the restaurants reviewed, there is a link to Google Maps (you may have to zoom in).

Now for the neighborhoods:

Warehouse District - This is the area nearest the Convention Center. These are all definitely in walking distance from meetings

CBD - This area is a little further away from the river, and is between the Warehouse District and the French Quarter. Some places will not be open for dinner since they cater to the business day crowd.

French Quarter - This is the area most folks think of as "New Orleans." It is bounded by the River, Canal Street, Rampart Street, and Esplanade. Loads of places to eat, many will be pricey.

Marigny and Bywater - These are funky neighborhoods on the other side of the Quarter (downriver) from the Convention Center. It takes about 15 minutes to walk through the Quarter from Canal to Esplanade. There is the riverside streetcar which will take you close.


Lee Circle and the Garden District - these are a little further away (going upriver). If the restaurant is on St. Charles, then you can easily take the streetcar ($1.25 each way, exact change) which runs along St. Charles to Lee Circle, and then to Canal along Carondolet, and back to Lee Circle along St. Charles (one-way streets).

Uptown, Riverbend, Carrollton -- (that is the order you go through them going out from the City towards where I live) are all further away, but very accessible along the St. Charles Streetcar line.

Now, if you want to be really adventurous, you can take the ferry (free) from Canal Street to Algiers. Several times my wife and I have eaten at the Dry Dock Cafe which you can see from the ferry terminal. Oh, be sure to get on the Algiers Ferry not the Gretna Ferry. [There may be restaurants in Gretna, but I *really* don't know that area.]

Since I mentioned the streetcars, here is a link to the RTA site: http://www.norta.com/?page=home

Guest Post -- Paying your dues and collecting acronyms

I have not met Josh Hanagarne personally. Our contact has all been on the web, and probably pretty one sided, viz., I read his blog pretty regularly. He blogs as The World's Strongest Librarian. He is doing a "guest post marathon" and I invited him to post here.

He raises some interesting questions in his post, to which I will respond in a separate post (later in the week). Here's Josh!

Paying your dues and collecting acronyms

“Hi sir, how are you today?”

“Fine.” I was an hour into my 12-9 shift at work. I made the mistake of answering my phone on a break.

“I am calling to inform you that your ALA membership has expired and would like to offer you the exciting—”

I thanked him, said I wasn’t interested in renewing, said good-bye, waited for him to reciprocate, and hung up. I wondered if I had told him the truth? Was I really not interested? ALA certainly wasn’t on my mind, and I didn’t renew, so I guess that tells you where my priorities were. Out on the desk, where I then commenced a hectic, lengthy, shift.

None of the patrons seemed to know that they were dealing with a newly-minted apostate.

I appreciate ALA. I think. But exciting is really not the word I’m going to apply to what has mainly amounted to the expired membership card that is still in my wallet for some reason.

Can you really need something that you never use or had never heard of?

My early career as an Acronym Gatherer

When I became a circulation assistant about 5 years ago I quickly signed up for every professional organization in existence (I’m rounding up). ALA, ULA, and MPLA.

I did this because mentors told me it was a good idea to have acronyms on a resume. Not because it was valuable, or an opportunity to network, or because of the brotherly/sisterly kinship that I could feel with my libraryland siblings.

I got on the mailing lists. I was soon unsubscribing from everything because my inbox was full enough as it was and I never saw anything very interesting to me in those emails.

It certainly didn’t hurt to join. About 18 months after starting I was offered the job to manage a branch. It took a year as a manager to realize that I’m not a manager and I happily bolted back down the ladder to librarian when the chance arose.

What professional library organizations do

They advocate for library employees, principles, and funding. They offer professional conferences; they promote freedom of access, curiosity, and knowledge. Banned Books Week is a lot of fun at our library and for that alone I hope ALA keeps on truckin’.

These are all wonderful things, although I will admit to being bored out of, although I will admit to being bored out of my skull at the two ALA conferences I have attended (as part of the Emerging Leaders program). But I know plenty of librarians who live for those conferences and “exciting professional development opportunities.”

Local or regional organizations have managed to feel even less relevant to me. I’m mildly glad to know they’re out there, but don’t really know what else to say about it.

I just don’t feel like I have needed any of them to help me do my job better, find new opportunities, or as an advocate for me as a librarian.

I have committed my life to libraries and I work here because I am part of something that matters to me. I don’t feel like my commitment is diluted in any way because I don’t care to pay for a new membership card.

So a couple if questions to start a discussion:

Do libraries suffer when I/you/we don’t pay my/your/our ALA dues?

How much bargaining power do they have?

Are you a member? If so, will you renew?

In your opinion, what is the greatest benefit of joining a professional library organization?

About the author:

Josh Hanagarne is the founder of World’s Strongest Librarian and runs a dandy online book club. This is, to his knowledge, the first time he has ever typed the word dandy.

Links - April 2011

A great idea from the Librarian in Black: a day against DRM!

Here are some cogent thoughts from one of my favorite library bloggers and library writers, Karen Schneider, they were written in reaction to the presentation at Penn State by Jeff Trzeciak of Macmaster University in Canada.

The digital divide continues. Here is a link to Jessamyn West's presentation at SXSW on a topic on which we share concern. My original concerns originated in my urban roots. How many inner city homes even have land-lines these days. My exposure to the rural situation has been broadened by my Wisconsin and now Louisiana experiences.

Jessamyn also links to a nice article about SXSW.

Links (or not) and the Harper Collins Fiasco

I have not posted much lately. Life has been busy.

My feed aggregator is full of saved links, mostly to the HarperCollins fiasco. For a while I was going to post them all as links, but then the number of links and comments which I saw got completely out of hand.

Part of my reason for posting links here is to have a place for me to be able to find links which I may want to use/see again. Does it work? Well, for the most part. I know I get traffic, even if the commenting is pretty sparse.

So....I'm going to clean out most of the links in my feed aggregator, and post only the most important ones here.

Eric Hellman does some nifty analysis of book use (which he calls "physics of book use"). I have to admit that my calculus and advanced math is rusty enough to not quite get all the implications...And then there is the response from a statistician which he also posted. (Eric is good at clever naming, not the least of which is the name of his blog!)

Get off my lawn! Those new kids and reading

Well, maybe the title exaggerates a little bit... I was reading the latest (April 2010) Cites and Insights by Walt Crawford. His "Perspective" piece this time is about reading. ("Writing about reading" is the title.) I admire both Walt's gathering of viewpoints and his analysis. I was moving along just fine, until I got to his discussion about a piece by Barbara Fister and the reading styles of the current college student crowd. Barbara's article is called "Reading: Outmoded or a la Mode?" It is in her column called "Peer to Peer" which appears as part of Library Journal's Academic Newswire. (It took me a moment or two to find it.) It is dated October 28, 2010. Both talk about the "myth" of non-readers and short attention spans among the "next generation." First of all, let me say that while there are probably some generational differences (and certainly frames of cultural references), like Walt, I am not a fan of overly broad generalizations. Barbara notes early on in her article: "You know how kids today don't like to read? Can't focus for more than five seconds? Are so intent on multitasking, visual stimulation, and interactivity that they turn their noses up at books?" She then goes on to later reveal "So my youthful and avid-reader colleague Julie Gilbert and I did something radical: we decided to ask students what they think. ... The student made arrangements to administer it anonymously in dozens of classes spread across the curriculum from first through senior year, collecting responses from a sample that is representative of our student body, and then we crunched the numbers. ... A whopping 93 percent of our students reported that enjoy reading for pleasure. All kinds of reading: books, magazines, newspapers. Reading on the Internet (though that scored lower than reading in print)." One of the most salient points (that I can even see in my personal life) is that it is sometimes hard to find the time to set aside to read. After more discussion and surveys, Barbara found out that "the problem is that students have piles of assigned reading to complete and very active social lives and more often than not a job as well as athletic and music commitments, not to mention that often significant relationships are developing—that's what you do when you are starting adulthood—and they say, with good reason, they simply don't have time." Towards the end she tells an anecdote about a recently retired English professor who now had the time to read for pleasure. That is echoed in Walt's comment "I'm reading more books now than I have in a long time..." I certainly see that in my life. I have maintained a reading log since sometime in the 1980s. (It was recommended by Joyce Sarricks to help with readers' advisory work.) If I look at various times when I read more and when I read fewer books, there are life events related to them. Even now, I listen to more books than I read because I can do that during the 3+ hours each day that I spend commuting. Bottom line...KTD (kids these days), do like to read, and do it when they have the time. Those of you who think otherwise: Get Off My Lawn!