Guerrilla Librarian

by Bruce Jensen

Overview

In one of history’s most incandescent bursts of library-building, the post-revolutionary Mexico of the 1920s created some two thousand new libraries in less than four years. This project’s driving force was Secretary of Education José Vasconcelos, an intensely energetic idealist who combined political savoir-faire with a rare enthusiasm for books, libraries, and literacy. This text examines the important successes and shortcomings of Vasconcelos’s work, and traces its continuing influence on contemporary librarianship. Vasconcelos was not a trained librarian; much of his methodology was as technically faulty as it was sincere. Like his philosophical and autobiographical writing, his library work seemed disordered and divinely inspired. Vasconcelos’s iconoclastic, contentious outlook was powerful, maddening, and occasionally amusing, but at its core was an innocent faith in the redemptive force of the written word.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940011872310
Publisher:	SOL-PLUS
Publication date:	11/26/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	125 KB

About the Author

Bruce Jensen completed graduate study in library science at the University of California, Los Angeles where he delightedly pawed original copies of magazines published in the 1920s by Vasconcelos. Jensen has worked in public libraries in the US and Mexico, as a librarian at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, at South Texas College, and as a bilingual reference librarian with OCLC's QuestionPoint. He wrote reviews, articles, and blog posts for the magazine Críticas throughout its eight-year run; he's also published pieces in Library Journal, The Reference Librarian, and RUSQ, as well as the books The Changing Culture of Libraries, The Power of Language/El poder de la palabra, Revolting Librarians Redux, and Digital versus Non-Digital Reference. In addition to the MLIS, Jensen holds an MA in Teaching English as a Second Language (Northern Arizona University, 1993) and a BA in English (University of Washington, 1985). He has taught ESL off and on since 1992, working with immigrants, college students, and inmates in the US, Japan, and Mexico, and he has a pocketful of library cards from all those places.