Today, my office looks like my brain feels...

This is how it all started. I needed a paperclip and the little magnet dispenser lid kept giving me the big ones or the colored ones. All I wanted was a regular, small, silver paperclip. The frustration won and I dumped them all out in my drawer. 

One sad mouse dangling by its cord from my file cabinet turned work bench.

My magnet board with my at-a-glance calendars that just remind me of how overwhelmed I am with all of my projects. Clearly the note to self reminding me to not start new projects isn't big enough. 

The storage half of my closet is actually surprisingly clean. There are a few things on the floor which are there to stay until I can get rid of a lot of dead equipment. CRT monitor, anyone? 

A box of documents I need to dig through. We're having a groundbreaking ceremony (for the second renovation to this building) in a few weeks. I wanted to find pictures from the previous building projects to use in a display. For as organized as librarians are supposed to be I was shocked to find binders and folders and stacks of documents all over the place in no particular collection. 

Maybe after this whole ceremony and Summer Reading Program kickoff party (that I scheduled on the same day) are over I can work on an archive of all of this stuff. Speaking of which, I need to break out the tiny post-it notes and get started so I know what I need to scan later. 

Libraries, a Passion for Some

An email from a friend:

Sara,
Someone sent this to me. Thought you would appreciate it! 

Trivia Question for you, What does the founders of Micro Soft, Goggle, and Face book all have in common? Answer: Passion for Libraries. Bill Gates won the summer reading program every year, Mark Zuckerberg would spend all his time in libraries reading about people who invented things, and the founder of Goggle met at the Stanford library.

My reply: 

I decided to look this up as I never trust random info that people (in general, not you specifically) forward via email. Also Microsoft and Facebook are both written as two words instead of one and Google is spelled Goggle so that made me think that the info might be lacking credibility. 

I suppose it's possible that the author of this statement meant that "the founders of Goggle" met (recurring) at the library to work as opposed to met for the first time. 

"It began with an argument. When he first met Larry Page in the summer of 1995, Sergey Brin was a second-year grad student in the computer science department at Stanford University. Gregarious by nature, Brin had volunteered as a guide of sorts for potential first-years - students who had been admitted, but were still deciding whether to attend. His duties included showing recruits the campus and leading a tour of nearby San Francisco. Page, an engineering major from the University of Michigan, ended up in Brin's group." 

I did find some interesting facts about Gates and Zuckerberg that are slightly library related. According to the wikipedia article for Bill Gates, “Among Gates's private acquisitions is the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci, which Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994." The source link in the article cites a biography of Gates, which I don't have right in front of me, but I did find, on the Microsoft website, a transcript of speech he gave at the British Library where he says,

"I feel very lucky that I own a notebook. In fact, I remember going home one night and telling my wife Melinda that I was going to buy a notebook; she didn't think that was a very big deal. I said, no, this is a pretty special notebook, this is the Codex Leicester, one of the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci." 

Gates is also known as an avid reader

"To get an idea of Gates's current reading habits, I leafed through Bill Gates Speaks, a compendium of snippets from Gates's interviews and speeches, as well as insights offered by friends and associates. Gates seems to be better read than most corporate titans. As a child, he poured over the usual adventure books, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan and Martian stories.

"He also devoured biographies of famous men, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Isaac Newton. He was fascinated (no surprise here) by Napoleon and learned everything he could about the French general. 

"But little material exists on the adult Bill Gates's taste in art and music. He loves Frank Sinatra, and the only painter he is quoted as liking is Edward Hopper -- a pretty conventional choice. But unlike many execs, he does read fiction. He lists as his favorite books The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and A Separate Peace. Among recent novels, he said he liked The Bridges of Madison County and The Shipping News. One senses his wife Melinda's influence here."

And he especially has a thing for the Great Gatsby, 

"...the following quotation is engraved on the ceiling of their home library: "He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it." Gates has explained that he and his wife saw similarities between Bill's wooing of Melinda and Gatsby's pursuit of Daisy." 

Now on to Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg excelled in classic languages. He also donates a lot of money to education. And according to CNN, 

"At Harvard University, which he attended for two years before dropping out to pursue Facebook, Zuckerberg 'was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as "The Iliad,' writes Jessica Vascellaro in The Wall Street Journal." 

I can't actually read the original article because I don't subscribe to WSJ but if CNN quoted it, that works for me. I think, in his case, it’s a stretch to say he has a “passion for libraries” although reading famous works of literature and caring about education may be close enough for some people.

---

The takeaway:

This whole situation irritated me a few reasons...

1. People are constantly forwarding emails to me with awesome "facts" that are untrue. I try to respond to them with links to credible sources that prove that the info is bogus, but the usual response is, "I sent it just in case!" They don't realize that spreading misinformation is a waste of everyone's time, it damages their credibility, it distracts people from the correct information and can actually do more harm than good. 
2. Does this friend not realize that he passed this information onto a (future) librarian? Of course he did but maybe didn't think that it could possibly be wrong, or that no one would question it. I feel like a good analogy for this is sending bad medical information to a doctor who is a friend of yours. I would think that my doctor friend should already know this if it were true so I wouldn't send it. 
3. I know a few actual librarians that would pass this along without a second thought. Obviously, librarians are feeling the pressure to reinvent the library, while at the same time, "do more with less." I'm afraid that because of this pressure they subconsciously want it to be true so it can be used as it as support for their cause. And so it goes... 
4. Why does no one else care about the truth anymore? They believe what they want to believe and it's almost impossible to change someone's mind once they've latched on to something that makes them feel warm & fuzzy.