Sinners Repent! The End is Nigh!

After hearing about e-Readers, I've been trying to decide how badly I want one. The reading habits that spurred me towards librarianship in high school gradually evaporated as I began to turn towards graphic novels in 2004, and after four and half years of associating reading with school work and carrying my customary hatred of schoolwork over into my life, I'm criminally underread.

The biggest obstacle to returning to the literate fold is getting books. My apartment is tiny and I have almost no room for book storage. So getting an e-reader seems like a good idea. The logical next step, right? On the other hand, it's difficult to read things like the comic above and not find yourself smirking meaningfully. There is an assumed holiness about the codex, the book, that makes replacing it feel strange. It doesn't help that as an owner of books there is a lot to be said about the parallel economy one uses to move them back and forth long after they've fallen out of print, or that I distinctly remember passages from dystopian novels where characters would cradle computer screens and pine meaningfully for the days of paper books.

Even aside from any psychological or superstitious reasons to value books over e-readers (which are especially ridiculous from someone who claims that Content is king), the e-readers have the same practical problems that make me wary when it comes to other electronics. If I drop my book at the beach, I'm a little disappointed because my book is soggy. At worst, I have to replace it with another copy. If I drop my e-reader in the water, my whole library is obliterated. To paraphrase Jerry Holkins: "It's as if you murdered all your favorite authors." Obviously it's recoverable in theory, but that's what they said about my iTunes music before my laptop caught fire. My house is significantly less prone to catching fire and falling to ruin than any electronic device I've ever seen, and I've never accidentally mislaid my entire collection of A Series of Unfortunate Events while changing terminals at LAX.

My point is that all the convenience of an e-book, well sold to me by the group discussing it, vanishes with my proclivity for losing such an device. And the cost benefit isn't there--even if books were significantly cheaper with a Kindle, I simply don't deal frequently enough in them to justify the purchase of a $140 device. Ignoring textbooks, I have purchased approximately forty books for my reading pleasure in the last four years. Most of them were graphic novels, but all of them were purchased to be shared. Hell, when I was in High School I ran a small psuedo-library loaning graphic novels to friends.

So I think I'll stick to my codex for a while, thank you kindly.

Ruth Brown

McCarthyism is a weird thing to think about because the paranoia that's inherent in it seems so frivolous now, but only because we've seen it, experienced it. However, the belief that we've beaten it is pervasive and should be ignored--after all, with the Patriot Act I think we're still fighting Ruth Brown's fight.

I enjoy reading about spunky librarians that stand up for the freedom of their patrons and protect the information in their libraries, but hearing about it and the pervasiveness of anti-Communist actions in the States (and considering the ways that the Red Scare continues to influence public policy), I guess I'm a little curious about people who wouldn't get (and perhaps don't deserve) their own book.

The librarians who gave in and let their libraries open to the jackals. They definitely existed--after all, Ruth's story wouldn't be half as interesting if it was just a description of the behavior of librarians during the middle of the century. So what was going through these people's heads as they sacrificed their libraries to sickle-hungry jackal? Who were they? What did we lose as a result of their actions?

This warrants some investigation.

Better Homes and Libraries

I'm a Terry Pratchett fan. Not a big fan; although I've been familiar with his works for years I'd been exposed to several of his books unawares and I'm just now becoming familiar with the effect one of his books had on my developing sense of aesthetic. In the book--I don't remember which one--an early scene takes place in a library, with rows of books stacked across shelves so innumerable they may be quantum entangled with every other row of stacks everywhere in the multiverse. The power the books have is so strong it must be contained, and whispers along bronze chains. Libraries are described as places of supreme power, and this particular library has a collection whose knowledge generates tidal forces that shift reality unpredictably and have turned the local librarian into an orangutan. Undaunted by his transmogrification, he continues to traverse the vastness of his arcane pocket universe.

This was the image that rollicked through my brain when I first entered Memorial Library, and it's the reason that in my mind the musty book dungeon is the only proper library I've ever encountered. I swear the shelving rearranges itself while you're not looking, and the stairs don't always lead to the same floors. A narrow hallway becomes that much more vast when the walls are bookshelves.

The book fetish is understandable amongst a group of people whose profession has long been guardians of those books, from a time when the book and its content were analogous. As that becomes less true, we see a shift towards digital content. Digital content means more freedom as works can iterate faster, can wheel more freely. In a profession obsessed with making information accessible, it seem strange that instantly searchable, broadly available digital documents wouldn't be welcomed. I'd expect them to be met as old friends, or likeminded allies, lionized and glorified in verse and song.

It can't merely be the aesthetic pleasure of creeping through a hallway densely packed with the desecrated corpses of trees, but still, the thought of libraries turning into rec rooms with goofy little furniture and "futuristic" decor that will look hopelessly dated in ten years feels adequately bleak, even as their ability to serve that patron increases.

Maybe my thinly veiled contempt for the masses who become patrons is coloring my vision a little.

Copyright Abuse

I've been known to get a little handsy with copyrighted material sometimes, I admit it, and I think it makes me a bad person.

Owning ideas is always problematic for me, because I consider myself a creator of sorts. It's weird for me to come up with an idea and find out someone already had a similar idea, because it automatically forces me to defend my creative output, even if my idea was completely independent of the idea I might be criticized for stealing. I'm still a newb, an amateur, too, so I value people using my ideas as long as I get to see them externalized. I want people to take my ideas, frequently because I have more ideas than I have the talent, ambition, or interest to execute. Just the other day I had an idea for an mp3 player shaped like a wristwatch, which I feel could be tremendously well received with the right demographic. Take my idea, please!

Of course, I'm examining this from the weirdest position, and the wrong viewpoint--that of an owner of an idea, rather than a lessee, or whatever the technical term would be that describes a librarian's relationship to information in his collection. Working in document delivery you'd think issues with copyright would be obvious to me, but our policies make things murkier. We're not allowed to copy whole books for patrons but we don't keep a comprehensive list of patron requests and our services are mostly free, so it isn't impossible for patrons to request and keep PDFs of whole journals if they wanted.

They'd be abusing the system, but that seems like fairly obvious (if slightly convoluted) abuse and I don't know how it works out.

Get off of my Intellectual Property

Oh man, the IP debate is a classic. Everyone on the Internet is constantly involved with it and most of them, myself included rarely have any idea exactly how accurate their own statements are in regards to other people's specific instances. I'm a pirate in the sense that any act of piracy brands one a pirate for life. In the last five years I've curtailed my pirate activities but that doesn't necessarily mean I've begun paying for music. What occurred to me after Wednesday's class was soemthing I do that I probably should have asked about.

I borrow CDs from libraries and copy their contents onto my hard drive. Copying library content is something I could always do, but the ease of making digital copies complicates the argument a little bit. I actually can't put a CD into my computer without it asking if I want to keep a copy of the information stored there. My computer effectively has a stronger instinct to pirate information than I do. So I make these copies of songs I get from the library, and I'm pretty sure this doesn't constitute fair use even though I only use them for personal stuff, occupying the long expanses on long car rides and the shattering the quiet moments at work.

A lot of this stuff is stuff I wouldn't buy even if I didn't have a free alternative to purchasing it, but it occurred to me that that might not be a good excuse. That it really isn't a good excuse.

Writing as An Unpleasant Experience

The idea of writing as an unpleasant experience is one I guess I can fathom, as I think about it. Reading is a passive, personal activity. Writing is a solitary task, but more than that, it's a creative task, and that engenders criticism. It's far more frustrating than reading and it requires more time and effort.

Even now, nearly two decades after I'm out of primary school, writing is a chore even though I consider it a favored hobby.

HeLa Good Times

I'll be honest saying I didn't expect a biography of the Lacks clan going into "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks". I was expecting something more medical and less human-interest. The irony, that I mentally divided "medical" from "human interest", is not lost on me, and that brought me back to our earlier concerns about the biased categorization.

But that's not important right now. What is important is the nature of the book: I'm not entirely certain how to describe its method of story telling. It's one I see often, a sort of semi-autobiographical research journal where the act of finding is as much a part of the story as what is found. The book is almost more a book for researchers on Ms. Skloot's research practices. As she briefly biographes Dr. George Gey and the research universe he created, or details the jaunt to an insane asylum where Henrietta's oldest daughter died, or describes the application of the cells, the reader develops a sort of understanding of the web of information Rebecca navigated and the forks she took. It's almost as much a book about Rebecca as it is about Henrietta.

With regards to the title, well, I like awful puns, and this one seemed better than "Henrietta Lacksidaisical".

Sensemaking and The Librarian-Teacher

Perhaps this isn't the appropriate stance for a prospective librarian to be, but I feel like we're more embedded in the "information as a thing" school, rather than the "information as a evolutionary process" school. Obviously a person coming to us trying to use information to grow, reassess old information and provide pathways to new information would come to a librarian. Regardless of what we do, we direct that evolution in the method we use to help them get their information, which information they get, and which information they don't get.

It's a problem I met when I was working on my circulation building exercise. I found information I considered to be not merely irrelevant but dangerously erroneous, and could I really be considered to be informing them on Islam if I gave them a book titled "How Islam is Destroying America" full of fearmongering and deliberate misinformation?

Working in a library, the question asked most often of me (as a glorified receptionist) is "I don't know what I need to know". This is also the question I remember asking a lot as a kid, and even trying to do research projects. A patron trying to build a bridge may not know what a bridge is, so to speak.

Of the three methods laid out in the "User Centered Information Service" article, I think Cthulhu's method is the best. Kulthau, I was close. Morris describes it as the most specific, and it is, but as an overarching methodology (learning how to draw a cat by watching Kulthau draw a pony, metaphorically) learning to recognize different stages in your patron's research and help them accordingly strikes me as the most valuable, and not merely because it was the only one I could easily understand.

Adam in the Garden of Information

There are certain things that I suppose I take for granted. That my vocabulary might be irregular, for example, or that it is somehow racialized, localized, or privileged. Given the pride Wisconsinites take in their easy-to-understand dialect peppered with impenetrable slang (have a drink from the bubbler-ed.) this perhaps shouldn't be surprising, but still, it is.

Systems work the same way, and I feel a bit foolish now and then when I sit in my favorite chair and it suddenly occurs to me that as surely as someone built this chair, someone designed the systems by which we organize information and libraries, and in doing so left the personal fingerprints (vocabularyprints?) in the systems they crafted. The symbols they chose have meaning to people like them.

Contrariwise or perhaps speaking as someone of like mind (if not like type), I rather like the arbitrary system. Taxonomies start somewhere, and they are always arbitrary. The bias inherent in the system is regrettable and it is changing, but in the past from which Dewey and Cutter are writing, being able to serve a hundred people at the expense of one strikes me as a fair trade in the absence of a system that can account for the peculiarities of the one.

Of course, this stems from my own organization practices: break things down into broad categories, then specialize. Perhaps I am simply coming at this the wrong way, since I can't figure out why "women" being promoted as the top of the hierarchy over "wimmin" is bad. Even if it is bad, the machines are getting smarter, and pretty soon that degree of arbitrary hierarchy won't be necessary.

This Is My Private Life

An informed public is necessary for a functional democratic government, and glasnost is necessary for an informed public. Therefor, glasnost is necessary for a functional democratic government. It stands to reason, then, that the public should have some access to public records. The private information that is contained therein adds some context and utility to the public records, and should probably remain part of them, but it would perhaps be nice if individuals were totally conscious of the extent to which their private information goes into these public files.

So I'm curious about the degree to which public officials are required to make private citizens aware that portions of public records may concern them or contain their private information. Even if the private data is redacted or records that might contain it are legally sealed from public access, it would be interesting to know who, if anyone, is keeping track of where this private information ends up and who has access to it, whether the public does or does not.

On another note, the tone of the "Access to Online Local Public Records" is humorous--in particular the author's hope that the fraudulent tax sleuth be incarcerated with some of his patsies (and presumably suffer violence at their hands). Who writes academic pieces like that?

Expanding Literacy

I've always been somewhat aware of literacy on the periphery of books, being that I was a voracious reader of novels in my childhood (so much so that it inspired me to want to become a librarian), but my interest in books flagged. I've since mended my ways and returned in some respects to reading books, but that does not stop me from finding reading material on the internet and reading it, as well.

Several authors whose work I enjoy can only be found online, and while they for the most part are not necessarily intellectually stimulating they're reading material that I read daily. I read several dozen webcomics (of varying intellectual value), blogs, at least three articles, world news, video-game specific news (Kotaku.com)--technically speaking, I might read several dozen pages every day, even when the things I read aren't printed on the disfigured corpses of trees.

I even read short stories and novels that are published on the Internet, such as Rob Balder's novel/webcomic hybrid "Erfworld" and Jerry Holkin's "On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness: Part 3". I mention Jerry in particular because I'm fond of his works and the Internet's self-publishing freedom allows works that would be editorialized into nothingness see the light of day sundered directly from their creator's smoking brainstem.

Sometimes even older works exist online; I found an unabridged copy of The Wizard of Oz available on a website and out of curiosity labored to read it cover to virtual cover. Technically speaking, I didn't read a book, in that the "book" as an artifact was never involved, although I did read a book in the sense that the thing being read is typically described as a book, even when read on media that aren't necessarily books.

Catherine Ross's In the Company of Readers examines a behavior of terror from educators/authors/shrill literati who talk about the death of reading as though reading only counts when the words are written on paper. It's vexatious. Of course, all of this really just relates to what a librarian should be doing for their patrons--since free internet access is just one of the many valuable services offered by many libraries.

Libraries in the Great Lakes State

Like everywhere else, the stress of the recent economic downturn has affected libraries in Michigan. The first article I came upon was an article from a local newspaper detailing the closure of four libraries in Isabella County, Michigan. They weren't part of a nearby library district, and lacked the funds to stay opened. Funds are a problem, because apparently Michigander librarians take most of their funding from local sources. An estimate by a branch librarian, Janet Silverthorn, put the funding estimate at 70-80%. On the bright side, however, local voters in the Coe township passed a ballot measure to pay an additional $1.75 million in property taxes to support their local libraries.

http://www.themorningsun.com/articles/2010/09/23/news/doc4c9a5e78376c9096361406.txt

The next article also appears to double as an attempt to publicize the numerous services libraries offer. In addition to the standard fare of free-to-rent books, many libraries (everywhere, obviously, but for the sake of this article Howell County District Library) offer DVDs, audiobooks, CDs, even free internet access, fax machines, and scanners. It highlights a big problem: librarians might not be sure how to market the services they offer outside of books. Valuable services that could bring in many new patrons are virtually unknown to the public (this is a problem in most communities, I find).

http://www.livingstondaily.com/article/20100916/NEWS01/100916003

Another article offers news on the University of Michigan Library, which also serves as the state's historical library and archive, and discusses briefly its history.

http://www.annarbor.com/news/bentley-historical-library-celebrates-75-years-as-archive-of-state-university-of-michigan/

So libraries in Michigan are suffering from the same crisis of identity seen everywhere, I suspect, and adapting their business model in order to best serve their clientele. While books are still part and parcel with libraries (and the reason I decided to become a librarian), they're not the whole deal as they once were--libraries in Michigan seek to serve the community by providing a huge variety of services, even as budgeting problems force individual libraries to close their doors.

Manipulating Your Words

The context within which something exists is important; context shapes perception. What confuses me, however, is how the archivist separates the context of the object from themselves. I've never been to an archive, although I have been to museums. Even there, the description of the object fails to make me appreciate it--and after reading the article I guess I become suspicious even there. Is it a stone ax, or is it an ancient golf club? How could one decide if it's either? The question of "what" is the first obstacle between contextless truth and just the truth.

What am I looking at? Apparently some would posit I was looking at children being hurled overboard (with a why provided without evidence). This question of what is troubling.

Here it is.

Fifteenth in line of the blogs I've created. Although lately it's been vogue for me to complain that I've been sick and thus denied access to the deeper reaches of my vocabulary, seeing what my tongxuemen have written has inspired me to try and put a little pepper on this.