All posts by Sumayyah

About Sumayyah

Sumayyah is an Information Assistant at the Vaughan Public Libraries. She's also a bookworm and author, constantly dreaming up a multitude of different stories and wrestling with finishing them.  |  Meet the team

New Year, Improved Me!

image-of-fireworks
Photo by Single.Earth on Unsplash

I’ll be honest folks; I’m tired. I miss the sun and being warm and am very much in need of a vacation. So this is gonna be a relaxed post featuring, unsurprisingly, resolutions. This year, I’m taking it easy with my aspirations. I’m making my goals small, simple, and (hopefully) achievable. Also, crucially, my list of resolutions is short. I’m not looking to revamp my whole self within a measly 12 months, but I am looking to build further on who I already am and improve my habits.

Which, coincidentally, is quite similar to what we’ve done with our reading challenge! The broad strokes are the same—read a certain type of book a month—but the prompts are different and, most excitingly, we are now offering a prize!

That’s right, if you take on the challenge and submit the log by email or in-person, you’ll be entered into the Grand Prize Draw: your choice of a private cooking session at VMC in the VSES Teaching Kitchen, or a guided maker session with one of our Creation Specialists at Pierre Berton Resource Library or Civic Centre Resource Library!

And actually, that ties into resolution #1: to read 12 books this year.

The twist is, they have to be books I own. Why? Because my personal library is 90% books I’ve never gotten around to reading. (Disclaimer: I got most of them for free, so I don’t feel too guilty about it.) And I do want to read them, but because I own them, there’s no sense of urgency to actually do so. Nobody’s waiting to borrow them and there are no due dates. Therefore, I’ve put it off and put it off. So here are three books I own that I’d like to read in 2025!

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‘Tis the Season for Gift Giving – A Secret Santa Shelf Pick

Happy December, happy holidays, and happy last month of 2024! (As delightfully kooky youtuber Jenna Marbles once said, this year felt both short and terribly and insufferably long at the same time.)

My fellow HOTS writers and I thought we’d switch things up a little this month. In the spirit of gift giving and shelf picks—which is a personalized reading recommendation service where library staff introduce you to titles based on your preferences—we thought we’d do a sort of Secret Santa exchange of recommendations.

And thus, this post is dedicated to Claire and what I think (and hope!) she might like to read and watch, in the event she hasn’t yet. I gotta confess, this was a nerve-wracking test of how familiar I am with Claire’s taste and preferences.

Aiming to not give a gift that sucks, I revisited some of Claire’s posts and took literal and actual notes, by hand, in a notebook, to then do research with. I’m hoping that paid off! I’m also hoping you—dear reader—will find this list of recommendations to be a gift as well (pun fully intended).

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An Archive of Librarian Lore

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Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash

A little while ago, my coworker Alison shared this list of top librarians in pop culture with the team and asked us who else we might add to it. Inspired by the resulting conversation, I thought I would compile everyone’s suggestions, along with my own, into a handy-dandy blog post on famous and infamous librarians, by librarians, as a sort of archive of librarian lore (hence the title).

(Shoutout to Adam, who has written about libraries already, actually! Our posts will therefore have some overlap…but can there possibly be too much said about this venerable profession? That’s a rhetorical question, and the answer is a cheerful ‘no’ from yours truly).

Before we dive into the list, let’s learn a bit about librarians and their libraries! So, what makes one a librarian, exactly? Do you need a degree? Technically, the answer is yes. To be a certified librarian you need to have completed a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. But not-so-technically, and to the general public, a librarian is what you might call any library worker.

Who was the first librarian? No one knows for sure, but the Sumerians (our earliest known civilization) may have been the first peoples to “train clerks to keep records of accounts. ‘Masters of the books’ or ‘keepers of the tablets’ were scribes or priests who were trained to handle the vast amount and complexity of these records.” And a king of Assyria named Ashurbanipal may have been the first person to make librarianship an actual profession, when he created a library in his palace in Nineveh and then hired clerks to look after it.

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