John Gibbs

Retired Special Projects Librarian, Music Library
University of Washington
Email -- gibbs1377@gmail.com

"When, During World War II Winston Churchill was asked to cancel funding for the arts, he replied "Good God, No, what do you think we're fighting for?"

"...a librarian is like a Google that actually finds what you're looking for and never clutters your screen with porn." Meryl Rothstein. Esquire Nov. 2008.

"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game - and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams."
Jacques Barzun

"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours that's relativity." -- Albert Einstein

"Das Beste, was wir von der Geschicte haben, ist der Enthusiasmus, den sie erregt." [The best that history has to give is the enthusiasm it arouses.]
Goethe

"It is wise to ask someone what you are looking for before you begin looking for it."
Pooh

"Where's the wisdom we have lost in knowledge,
Where's the knowledge we have lost in information?"
T.S.Eliot The Rock

"With so much information now online, it is exceptionally easy to simply dive in and drown."
Alfred Glossbrenner
"Like missile defense, leading-edge library automation is a money pit."
Nicholson Baker
(New Yorker article, 24 July 2000, p. 42)
"If you want to get laid, go to college, but if you want an education, go to the library."
Frank Zappa

"Music expresses what one cannot say, but about which one cannot remain silent."
Victor Hugo

"Show me a computer expert that gives a damn, and I'll show you a librarian."
Patricia Wilson Berger
(Quoted in Chicago Tribune article, 29 June 1990, Tempo section, p. 1)
"Musicology is for musicians what ornithology is to the birds."
Charles Rosen

CONTENTS

Discography and Sound Recordings
Ethnomusicology
Recording Preservation and Restoration Bibliography
Offenbacher Mozart Collection
Mose Tapiero Ocarina recordings
Music Fiction Bibliography
The original root of the word "information" is the Latin word informare, which means to fashion, shape, or create, to give form to. Information is an idea that has been given a form, such as the spoken or written word. It is a means of representing an image or thought so that it can be communicated from one mind to another rather than worrying about all the information afloat in the world, we must ask ourselves what matters to us, what do we want to know. It's having ideas and learning to deal with issues that is important, not accumulating lots and lots of data. Theordore Roszak

See the Music Library Home Page for additional links.

You see, I don't believe that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, and that's been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians. Monty Python
"Burnout for librarians seems to me both foolish and unnecessary. . . . Work hard, work well, work effectively. Work until quitting time. Then go home and enjoy the rest of your life. If that leaves an unsolved problem, tell your boss on the way out the door or write the boss a note."
Herbert S. White
(At the Crossroads. Libraries Unlimited, 1995, p. 210)

"More people should use their library."
Regis Philbin
(Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, 2 May 2000)
"What can I say? Librarians rule."
Regis Philbin
(Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, 17 February 2000)
Our whole American way of life is a great war of ideas, and librarians are the arms dealers selling weapons to both sides.
James Quinn
(WESTPAC/NOCALL joint meeting, 1990)

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge. --John Naisbitt
Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth, truth is not beauty, beauty is not love, love is not music. Music is the best. Frank Zappa

"A Library that is not accessible out of business hours is of as little value as gold horded in a vault and withdrawn from circulation."
Alexander Graham Bell (letter to Mabel Hubbard Bell, 17 November 1896)

"Blaming the library for exposure to pornography is like blaming the lake if your child walks up to it alone, falls in and then drowns."
David Sawyer (Spokane Spokesman-Review column, 18 December 2000)

"Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly."
Roger Ebert (Yahoo! Internet Life column, Sept. 1998, p. 66)

"I really didn't realize that librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group. ... You think they're just sitting at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. You know, they've had their budgets cut. They're paid nothing. Books are falling apart. The libraries are just like the ass end of everything, right?"
Michael Moore (BuzzFlash interview, 13 March 2002)

"If you didn't want them to think, you shouldn't have given them library cards."
Robert Kaufman (Getting Straight, dir. Richard Rush, 1970. Line spoken by Elliott Gould as Harry Bailey)

"It's one thing to be in a bookstore. But to see your book in a library, to me that really means something."
David Sedaris (Public Libraries interview)

"Librarians are librarians: they are not caregivers, nurturers, social workers, surrogate parents, welfare agents, or therapists. When all is said and done, their role is straightforward: they gather stuff, impose some order on said stuff, and make the stuff available to the public."
Blaise Cronin (Library Journal column, 15 May 2002, p. 66)

"My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid."
Joan Bauer (Rules of the Road. Putnam, 1997, p. 142. Props to The U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D Librarian)

"That's what the library is: a government-funded pathetic friend. And that's why everyone kind of bullies the library."
Jerry Seinfeld (Seinfeld episode, 1991)

"The librarian told us that we were six or seven years too late. The library had removed all the Zen books from circulation because nobody checked them out anymore."
Daniel M. Pinkwater
(Young Adults. Tor, 1985, p. 91)

"We must conceive of the library as a channel through which books pass on their way from the publisher to the incinerator."
G. Hardin, 1947
(As quoted in New York Times article, 26 October 2002)

"Every library should be a mixture of the practical and the marvelous. It is the place where we begin to get to know ourselves."
- Luis Fernando Verissimo

"You know the republic will survive when there is new money for libraries."
Denis Hamill
(New York Daily News column, 3 December 2000)

"Exit in case of Brahms" Philip Hale's proposed inscription over the doors of Boston Symphony Hall

"He has an enormously wide repertory. He can conduct anything, provided it's by Beethoven, Brahms or Wagner. He tried Debussy's La Mer once. It came out as Das Merde."

* Anonymous Orchestra Member on George Szell Someone commented to Rudolph Bing, manager of the Metropolitan Opera, that George Szell is his own worst enemy. "Not while I'm alive, he isn't!" said Bing.

"One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend hearing it a second time."
Gioacchino Rossini

"I liked the opera very much. Everything but the music."
Benjamin Britten on Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress

"Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them."
Richard Strauss

"You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow."
(Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket).

Rev. 22 Aug. 2011
John Gibbs gibbs1377@gmail.com