3/5ths Compromise

I've been reading a lot about social studies lately, because I'm in the middle of a class about social studies, and reading things like The Young People's Guide to American History by Howard Zinn, and trying to think critically about race.

The 3/5ths Compromise was a compromise between the North and the South over how to measure the population of slave states in order to decide how many representatives those states would get to the senate. Northern States felt slaves shouldn't be counted: they couldn't vote, after all, so counting them would ultimately increase the voice of the whites that were capable of voting. Southerners felt they should get the full count of slaves, since they were part of the population of the state.

Ultimately they decided to compromise slightly in favor of the South, meeting just slightly right of halfway between the two positions. In 1787, when the Compromise was passed, each Congressman represented about 34,000 people and there were about 700,000 slaves in the US, so slave states basically used slaves to increase the voice of their voting white men by an additional ~12 votes. In South Carolina, where slaves represented about 51% of the population, 60,000 white men found themselves represented 207,000 people with their votes.

A modern criticism of the Compromise seems to commonly hold that its framers viewed black people as 3/5ths of a person, and that THAT is monstrous. But it was white slave owners that were arguing that slaves counted as a person, purely for their own political benefit, while white non-slave-owners argued that they should count as zero... again, for their own benefit.. Nobody in this story is a hero, but the side I find myself agreeing with is also the side that would have counted black people as zero.

Which is a weird opinion to find myself having, after a critical examination of the facts.

Questions and Thoughts for 1/23 Readings

Munslow

1) Instead of beginning with the past, we should begin with the representation. Does this mean recognizing the inherent unreliability of contemporary narratives in sharing the "true events" of history, and should bear in mind that history, ultimately, is written by writers?
2) History is written by the winners.
3)

A) I like the interpretation of history as a class of literature. Given how difficulty it is for us to untangle what actually happened with things we actually experienced, delegitimizing history as being things that "actually happened" is pretty awesome.

Past Present and Future Conceptions of Adolescence
Nancy Lesko

1) Is the colonialist/ageist comparison valid, or are there just parallels that allow for likening two things, like apples and red spheroids? Does the savages as children / children as savages paradigm actually cut both ways? How is a teen distinct from a child for these purposes?
2)What the heck does she mean when she talks about teens trapped in time?  The abstract idea of teens is trapped in time because teen necessarily describes a series of ages. But the transitional barrier between "child" and "adult" appears nebulous and indeed has mutated somewhat since the publication of this paper.

3)

A) The expansion of dependency continues to happen as the necessary access to adulthood becomes more complicated: deeper and more complicated webs of accreditation is necessary to wield ever shrinking pools of qualification.

This appears to be an economic quality as well as a colonial conspiracy: a growing population overwhelmingly seeking high powered slots.

Class Struggle in the Avatar: Legend of Korra

The Equalists vs. Benders social conflict growing in Avatar: Legend of Korra reflects a pretty big question I had with Avatar the Last Airbender: how benders commanded no special apparent social standing in spite of their massive natural advantages. AtLA was very good at establishing that bending was a practical art and a form of combat. These powers are even casually introduced, with waterbending used for fishing, airbending used for flight (obviously) and earthbending used to (get this) deliver mail. They're useful and practical and they fit into the whole world, and it's easy to think that somebody who can move tons and tons of earth or water  with a gesture would reap benefits from the natural consequences of their inborne abilities. A master earthbender could gather a lot of wealth by doing in seconds what mundane people would need years to do, and even if no privilege is accorded, there has to be some wealth that accumulates, and all wealth eventually becomes privilege.

Anyway, that divide doesn't happen at all in AtLA, but it shows up centrally in LoK. Non-benders suffer in a million ways. The police are benders and answer to a council of benders that--even if they're elected--appear to simply represent the four bending nations, rather than any sort of geographic or culturally distinct group within Republic City. All the crime we see except for expressly Equalist activities are performed by benders. As Equalist activity begins to spread in the city, the council responds by cracking down on non-benders and five minutes in one episode is the closest we get to a relatable non-benders other than Asami.

It's hard to sympathize with benders, too. Amon's little junta somehow goes off without (apparently) killing anybody at all, but every time a bender loses their bending everybody reacts like their were brutally murdered and their corpse desecrated in the street. I understand that it must be culturally appalling, like a roving female circumcision gang or something, but at the same time the bulk of the Avatar's world are non-benders who seem to survive just fine except for all the cultural oppression they suffer at the hands of benders.

The show even takes some effort to sort of hide the inequality they wrote into their own script: rather than an angry mob of non-benders sympathetic to Amon's cause, aggressive acts by Equalists are with like one exception carried out by  uniformed Equalist footsoldiers. The entire thing is framed as a squaring-off between the plucky hero and a military force, but the plucky hero is a tool of the establishment looking to maintain the status quo. Think about that for a minute. Realistically the Equalists look like a popular movement--all those footsoldiers aren't professional soldiers, they're freedom fighters.

Korra kind of sucks as the avatar, too. She is briefly faced with the reality that benders have privilege and threatens to punch the guy who tells her. Watching one episode, her rage for the injustice of imprisoning non-benders is there, but it doesn't look like she'll do much until her bender friends are arrested, too.

Cultural Intolerance

Recently I was accused of being intolerant of "Arab culture" on the basis that I believed that honor killings are wrong. Typically speaking, an honor-killing means murdering a young woman who violates a cultural taboo, such as wearing forbidden clothing or talking to a boy from outside her family. They're apparently very common in the Middle East and there is a fear that they're becoming more prevalent amongst the Middle Eastern diaspora.

I was surprised at the allegation, and immediately had to analyze it. Now, the offenses that typically lead to a woman being targeted for death are not just commonplace, they're almost natural. Expected. Part of healthy social immersion. Some of the "crimes" didn't just seem out-of-place, but the seemed patently unfair. I remember a news report from my childhood where a woman was raped and her family retaliated by killing her. One man explained simply: she shouldn't have been raped, and if she was raped, it's her fault.

The victims are exclusively female; because the rules are gender dimorphic, it is impossible for a man to commit a crime with an honor-killing as its sentence. That was offensive to my sensibilities right out, and I was given pause. Of course I'm going to disagree with someone being punished for something I consider to be a normal human activity, but then, I'm also going to insist that someone doing something I consider to be a crime be punished.

In one breath, I'm accusing the woman of being innocent and the killer of a crime. What they consider execution and thus an act of justice, I consider a murder. Now, it helps that I believe all forms of execution to be murder and that only the most exigent of circumstances could possibly pardon any form of killing but defense of the self and the explicit and immediate defense of others.

But what makes my cultural assumption (that killing a child for talking to a boy is wrong) any more accurate than the assumption that not worshiping Jesus is wrong? How do I weigh my personal intolerance against a broader scope of intolerances? The answer came in the best way I could have hoped for: an evolving liberal culture that frowns on honor-killings. That way, I can dismiss the honor-killing culture as a negative offshoot, a rotten branch of individuals to be weighed against the virtuous culture that I happen to agree with.

But at the end of the day, I decided that I just had to weigh the facts and decide when it's okay for me to be intolerant. This is one of those times.

Christmas Horror

I was thinking of Halloween scares. Around Halloween, everybody has the same ideas. Werewolves and zombies and mummies, oh my! Halloween things aren't terribly scary because they're known quantities. You can rattle off a number of facts about any of them.

People fear the unknown and the unexpected. Which brings me to what actually got me thinking about Halloween the day after Christmas: Santa Claus. I owned an animatronic Santa Class that would pretend to read from a book while the tape deck in his grandfather clock played. The tape is replaceable: you can install whichever tape you want.

Recording his regular tape with a little extra screaming would be a great Halloween trick. A room in a Haunted House, decked out in complete Christmas gear, but with some disturbing juxtapositions. Plus, it ruins Christmas. Good times!

How To Write A Comedy Article, According to Someone Who has Never Written Comedy

So you want to write a comedy article? Break into the glamorous lifestyle of an internet comedy writer, maybe to impress the ladies, maybe to make a little scratch? Holy shit, that's actually a good idea. I mean, seriously, ladies love funny guys, right? And nothing beats a little scratch. Like, right between the shoulder blades. Well, as long as we're talking about what a great idea it is

Brainstorming

When you're looking for something to write about, high school English teachers, laid-back college professors, and Robert Brockway all recommend the same thing. Write what you know. Find something you know a lot about, that you care about, and write the shit out of it. That's great, and ordinarily I'd agree, but writing is a lot of work. Do you really want to taint something you love, something that fills the dreary hours on your endless slog towards your inevitable death, by associating it with the self-loathing all forms of employment create? By turning this beautiful, pure thing into a job? No way, man, fuck no. So you have to write about something you hate. That's the only way to ensure you never associate the pleasure of thinking about Pokemon with the agony of your editor burning you with cigars for not handing in your article on the mating habits of Pikachu on time. Unless you're into that, I guess, but I don't think that guy is going to appreciate you getting off on his cigar burns. Plus, if you want somebody to listen to you on the Internet, hating everything they love is probably the best way, and any press is good press, right?

Research

Why do you have to do research, again? I thought I told you to write about something you hate. How can you hate something if you haven't already researched it properly? To truly hate something, you should know everything about it, so you can properly appreciate how it's terrible and inferior to whatever it is you love. Well, I suppose if you really have to write about something, and you think research is absolutely necessary, I would recommend a library, I guess? You might remember them from grade school, those fear-scented places where elderly women would extort your allowance because you supposedly didn't return your books on time, even though they said they were "Free, to take home and everything." Don't go to your grade school library, though. You're writing Internet Comedy and I'm pretty sure it's illegal to smell like a brewery on school grounds. No, you'll have to go to the public library. If you don't know where it is, I'd recommend following a homeless guy that looks like he needs to go to the bathroom.

Libraries: They're like if Wikipedia and a music festival port-a-potty had a baby.

Haha, holy shit, you actually followed a homeless man? He probably went down to the trainyard to eat beans over a burning oil barrel or something, right? I'm pretty sure that's what homeless guys do. Wait, do they even have trainyards still? Is that a thing? Just a sec, lemme Google the nearest trainyard.

Oh! Shit, right, Google. If you want to do research, Google is your guy. They have everything on there. You probably could have just gone on there right away, instead of following a penniless indigent down to his bean-eatin' hole.

Boners
You knew it was coming to this. You're writing a comedy article, not an article for National Geographic. Boners are the wellspring of comedy, and any aspiring comedy author should be able to appreciate them and manipulate any paragraph to accommodate at least one reference to them. In fact, truly talented writers will spend anywhere between three and six hours just manipulating paragraphs every day. Talk about dedication. Also, balls. My sources tell me there is nothing funnier than describing something with an apt testicle metaphor, so try to work them in too. For maximum effect, I find that describing them as being dangerously swollen and also made from some sort of industrial metal works nicely.

Writing

This is easily the least important part of writing a comedy article. Having selected a topic you hate, and learned all the possible reasons to hate it, draft up an outline. It doesn't have to be complex. Mine was just a drawing of a writer I made with some spilled scotch on the back of my riding lawnmower. Once your outline is finished, work from it directly and don't ever change it, whatever you do. This is your baby, and changing it is a sign of weakness and also possibly sobriety, and you didn't write this article while drinking scotch on the back of a riding lawnmower to look like a sober weakling, did you? Plus, changing things is a lot of work, and I don't think anybody got into writing to do a lot of work.
Next, you bring living, breathing sentences into the world. Every single word is like a baby. No, wait, I said "sentence", so I guess a word is like... an arm or something? Anyway, it's a part of a baby, that you're birthing. It's your art. Your art-baby. Remember to read your outline while you're doing it, so you know what to do next. You better do it fast because scotch evaporates really fast and you're going to be thirsty before you finish.

Editing and Spellchecking

It took about six hours of repeating "editing and spellchecking" while rubbing my chin pensively in the doorway at Bookworld, but eventually I learned that this is "the process of correcting and revising a text", and that it is possible to pensively rub a beard right off. Also, that clerks at Bookworld will do anything to get someone with a bleeding chin-wound out of their doorway. And I mean anything. Anyway, I'm pretty sure they have people for this. People whose entire job, in fact, is to edit things. So make sure to make a ton of spelling mistakes and stuff. These people depend on writers like us to make mistakes for them to correct. Now that I know about this, I've gone back and peppered my article with spelling and grammar errors, just to let them know I care. A couple well-plaecd spelling errors should ingratiate you with these editor guys, and they'll be so grateful they'll definitely ensure that your work gets published.

Enjoying your Internet Fame

Now that you've been published by a reputable vendor of Internet Comedy, it's your job to take that check for $50 and turn it into more comedy. Many creators may recommend that the surest paths to Internet comedy are alcohol and unique pornography, but that's too passe. Some fringe guys might recommend upping the ante with hard drugs and anonymous sex, but anyone can do those. You want to be a unique, shining star, right? I would recommend upright sobriety and clean living. Shave every day, and only have sex in the missionary position. Trust me.

Terrorists

Recently I watched an episode of a teevee show where a military operative is gathering intel in Yemen. He is targeted by a terrorist and his wife and young daughter die in the attack. Fueled by rage, he spends the next decade desperately hunting the terrorist down. Finally, he's about to exact his revenge when his plan goes awry and he's captured. In a terrorist... prison thingy, he discusses the difference between what he's doing (in order to get revenge for his family) and what the terrorist is doing (fighting for God's will). Of course, the terrorist quotes the Quran and is corrected by our hero. Finally, he's freed by an ally, and desperate to exact his revenge he concocts a suicide mission that involves stabbing his target to death in an airport (an act that will definitely get him killed by airport security).

His plan is foiled at the last minute, and I assume the ironic notes in his path for vengeance were intentional. I mean, entering a foreign country in order to kill a citizen, being waterboarded, and then attempting a suicide mission? No, that has to be a move to deliberately reverse the characters arc, and get us sympathizing with someone who is, for every single intent and purpose, a terrorist.

I should clarify that. He's going to stab someone to death on a plane, and clearly his goal isn't "terror", but revenge. However! Imagine if the situation were reversed. An Arab's family is collateral damage. He spends years tracking down the American officer who ordered the attack, and when he's just about to take his revenge, he's foiled and waterboarded. He escapes and returns to his mission, eager to do whatever it takes, even die, to get revenge. He goes onto a plane, and he murders someone. Honestly, I find it hard to believe that they could make him a sympathetic character in the States. After thinking about that, I found myself thinking about every scenario where terrorists are used as stock villains.

The scene in Iron Man where terrorists kidnap Tony Stark and force him to build a bomb for them, bearing in mind that Tony develops weapons. Now imagine he's a wealthy Saudi blasting his way out of an American prison. The irony is that I couldn't even bring myself to give him ties to a terrorist organization (to match Tony's role as an arms dealer), because even as I was thinking it I realized he wouldn't be sympathetic. He almost couldn't be.

It would be interesting, though, to see how it played out. I think it's understandable that we don't necessarily appreciate the goals and motives of people with outlooks so alien from our own (especially when we are personally singled out for victimization). Still, though, I'm reasonably confident that transplanting goals that American moviegoers have identified as profoundly sympathetic (the grieving father exacting revenge) into a non-American and then using Americans as the Big Bad would not be well-met. Especially if the avenging character exacted the same merciless, pitiless tactics that are so favored by our imaginary elite agents.

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.