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The story is here. I won’t make any jokes about how much room they’ll need to house both books, but I am wondering of the book about the pet goat will be part of the collection. I’m pretty sure that Richard Clarke’s book about what went on prior to 9/11 won’t be, but that’s the cynic in me talking. Again.
Ah, well. A new library is a new library I suppose.
If you enjoy the kind of non-partisan research on politics that Factcheck.org provides, you might want to take a good look at a new competitor, Politifact.com. They have a top notch research staff and a very accessible style of presentation. We’ll see how they evolve over time. In the mean time I’ll post the link in the sidebar as well.
I don’t think there’s anything to say about this story from Yahoo! News other than to suggest that it’s not good news for the future of the country:
"One in four adults say that they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works, and popular fiction were the top choices."
Not that there is anything wrong with "religious works", usually meaning the Bible in one form or another, or popular fiction per se (I admit to a guilty pleasure for Jeffrey Archer novels.) And I suppose something like the Left Behind books would qualify as both categories in one if you consider them religious works. (Surely they’re pop fiction.)
What worries me about news stories like this is not the normal "How could so many people read those kinds of books?" that you hear from the crowd that reads, say the NY Times religiously. Referring to the above mentioned materials with the word "those"–which is always spoken with a tone of extreme derision and disgust in such circles–denotes an episode of literary snobbery. The sort of person who would speak such a line without really thinking and with a straight face would rather die than voluntarily read a western, or a detective novel or one of those Left Behind books, or even admit they looked at the covers as they walked past the rows in the local Barnes & Nobel. Which is a shame because there are well written westerns and detective books out there. And, say what you like about fire and brimstone revenge fantasies like the Left Behind books but at the end of the day, boy they were fun to read (I got what I could from the library and bought the rest from used book dealers.)
What I’m referring to is the assertion that in a country of 300 million souls–out of roughly 200 million adults– 50 million did not read a single book for an entire year. 50 million otherwise decent Americans decided to do literally anything but read for an entire year. I’m stumped as to how that could be. Actually, I’m not stumped because I can imagine the life of someone who’s not a complete and utter reading freak–reading is time consuming, it’s not always easy especially if you’re not used to reading for fun, and a book can easily demand as much devotion as a mistress without providing the obvious benefits of one. Reading is tough! Worse, if you read you can’t be social. Reading is by definition a solitary activity. You have to enjoy being alone with a book a lot of the time.
The good news is (of course) that if one adult in four did not read even a single bo0ok last year, then three out of four did. And that, friends and neighbors, is reason to celebrate.
Today, I can limit my post to three words: "Moyers on Rove."
After you’ve absorbed that–and only after that–watch what Stephen Colbert has to say about Daily Kos, hate groups, and librarians here.
(All right, that was 39 words, shoot me.)
We’re officially beginning the migration of our catalog from a 13-year old in-house server whose performance can only be called "less than satisfactory"–I’d use stronger language considering what I’ve heard about the device’s past history both at the technical and political level, but I’ve only been here a couple of months (not even) and speaking ill of those no longer employed at MCNY seems rude–to a spanking new CMS account at SirsiDynix’s off-site servers. A proxy server will be brought online soon after and all operations should (I hope) be finished by the last week in August which would give us about a week to field test the new systems before classes begin after Labor Day.
At any rate, as I think about these things, it strikes me yet again just how much of our modern libraries’ livelihoods depends on resources we take for granted. Electricity is one. We don’t think about it much but so very much of our work depends on it being readily handy at the touch of a button or the flick of a switch. As an example of this we were emplored by the college president some weeks ago to please turn our desktop PCs off when we left the office at night. Doing so, she said, would save us roughly thirty thousand dollars a year in wasted energy. Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of electric power.
We don’t, granted, need electricity to run our libraries. But it makes everything infinitely easier. I mean, we don’t need XML or MARC or JPEG2000 or a million of the other modern tools we (all right, I ) use on a nearly daily basis. A case in point that’s been making the rounds has been the BBC’s recent story of the Bibliomulas, the book-carrying mules who are led through the mountains of Venezuela to promote reading to the country’s rural population. By the reporter’s account, people there seem to approve. People like to read, and they’re just happy that they haven’t been forgotten about.
Of course, in rural Venezuela, electricity is an option, and an expensive one at that. And I confess that I worry when I realize that I’m paying ConEd twice as much this year for power as I did last year without using twice as much of the stuff. And when I note that I note a major difference between the library here and the one I left at the Academy . . . MCNY doesn’t have a card catalog. A lot of libraries built after the 1980s don’t have them, either. Which means that electricity isn’t really an option anymore, it really is a necessity and we really do need it. I can’t pack our reserve and reference collection on the backs of mules to take them to students who might live in Brooklyn, Queens or upper Manhattan. The simple truth is that once power gets to be a certain price we’re screwed.
I’m not suggesting this is imminent but I do wonder sometimes if we librarians are as smart as we like to think we are (meaning smarter than me.)
At any rate, we’re migrating the catalog. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Sure you have heard of it by now, haven’t you? You haven’t? All right then, read all about it here. And let me know what you think. (I’m still deciding how I fell about it.)
(Thanks to Ian Fairclough for this tidbit.)