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?