Jon Frater

First, wish MEDLINE a happy 35th birthday.

Now for some political resources, lifted in part from Resourceshelf.org (where would any of us be without these guys?):

Resources of the Week: Election 2006
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

"An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the
blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it."
-- George Bernard Shaw 

Be that as it may, the Tuesday after the first Monday in November is
coming up fast, and election-related information is a hot commodity.
Earlier this week, we highlighted one absolutely indispensable
political site, Project Vote Smart.

This amazing resource offers so much information that browsing here
can be like drinking from the proverbial firehose, but if you know
what you're looking for, it will save you a lot of time hopping around
the Web from site to site. Databases available here include:

* Biographical Information -- "Project Vote Smart compiles
  biographical details and contact information for over 40,000
  candidates and elected officials. We make every effort to provide
  these details for everyone who runs for President, Congress,
  Governor, and State Legislature in every state."

* Campaign Finances -- "Project Vote Smart provides detailed
  breakdowns of campaign finance contributions for your elected
  officials at the state and federal levels."

* Issue Positions (NPAT) -- "The National Political Awareness Test
  (NPAT) is a key component of Project Vote Smart's Voter Self-Defense
  system. Major leaders of the media, major parties and Project Vote
  Smart repetitiously ask candidates one central question: ''Are you
  willing to tell citizens your positions on the issues you will most
  likely face on their behalf?' The NPAT is administered to all
  candidates for presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, and state
  legislative offices."
 
* Interest Group Ratings -- "Despite their bias, special interest
  group ratings can help indicate where an incumbent has stood on a
  particular set of issues in the past few years. They can be
  especially useful when ratings by groups on all sides of an issue
  are compared. Web site links, if available, and descriptions of the
  organizations offering ratings are accessible by clicking on the
  name of the group."

* Voting Records -- "Project Vote Smart provides easy access to
  Congressional and State voting records and maintains a collection of
  key votes grouped by issue. Key votes typically include the initial
  passage of legislation and final conference report vote versions
  (the compromised versions of bills passed in separate House and
  Senate version)."

* Public Statements -- "Ratings. Our researchers collect public
  statements for the President, Vice President, Governors, all Members
  of Congress, and position papers for current candidates, who submit
  them along with their responses to the NPAT. Congressional floor
  statements, press releases, editorials, letters, columns, and
  television show and committee hearing transcripts are added daily."

The rest of the article is here.   (And while you’re into election resources, take a look at Andy’s columns from today and yesterday.)

After publishing yesterday’s post about tattooed/pierced librarians and other white collar workers, I went to the libraries community on livejournal.com and ran a very informal poll. (Very informal.)  Just to see how many librarians were into body art, you understand.

The post isn’t 24 hours old yet and I’ve gotten over 50 comments.  (Wow!)  The comments keep on coming, too (if you have an LJ account and are so inclined, you can add your comment here.)  Not to mention the traffic on this website spiking mightily in the past few days, partly from this, partly from a link to the anti-library post from Lawrence, Kansas, that appeared on LISnews.com to push this blog to the brink of 7,000  visitors.

Wow! And thank you.  And please come again.

On your way out, take a look at this truly uplifting bit that appeared in ResourceShelf.com this morning.  I guarantee at least a couple of well-deserved  feel-good moments.

I found this news bit on Yahoo! News this morning.  The article wasn’t written with libraries (or librarians) in mind in the strictest sense, but it’s interesting to me that the writer does in fact focus on a librarian in Kentucky with some very nice tribal work.  Personally, I knew a long time ago that if I was going to stay even marginally marketable anywhere outside NYC, I was going to have to "self censor" the tattoos I got (you won’t see anything on me at work, but I don’t generally wear anything more revealing than a polo shirt and dress pants either).  For that matter, I can point to a coworker who has a tongue piercing and a major tattoo, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she shows up to work every day.  But as I said, in NYC you can get away with a lot more than you might be able in, say Ohio, where I think they still have the death penalty for speeding.

I do think it’d be an amazing experiment–not that I know how to go about conducting it–to have a day where everybody in the world of work would just show off their body art–tats, piercings, what have you–just to see who was int he club and who was not.  How many doctors, lawyers, politicians, and undertakers would there be?  There’d a a lot of librarians, at least if my local sample is any indication (see previous note about speeding in Ohio).  And they wouldn’t all be weekend bikers, either.  How about plumbers, electricians, and IT people?   Housewives? (Househusbands?)  Preachers?  Writers?  Actors?  Butchers, bakers and candlestick makers?  PR execs (one of them made it into the article I linked to, so you never know)?

Maybe that’s the point.  You never know.  And, as long as the customer services is consistently good, does it really matter?

First, read this from Bill Moyers.

Then, check out the October issue of the NYAM library newsletter.
And after that, you should checkout the lastest (September 2006) issue of TechKNOW.
That is all for the moment, but if I come across something else worth reading I’ll put it up before the end of the day.

This article by Mark Hirschey appeared in the Oct. 2, 2006 issue of the Lawrence Journal-World. The title "Libraries Are Limited, Obsolete" describes it pretty effectively, but I think  it’s worth reading, even if you don’t agree with it. Perhaps especially if you don’t agree with it, since I’m not convinced that Hirschey’s point of view is all that uncommon.

And, I’ll be honest, my first instinct is to dismiss this guy out of hand.  My second instinct is to get royally pissed off, and my third instinct tells me to take a deep breath, actually read what he wrote and consider it. Think about it.  Write about it.  So I did.  My response to Hirschey’s point of view is behind the edit.

Some librarians will read that last sentence and imagine that I’m selling out by lowering myself to his level to respond.  I don’t think that’s the case.  Like it or not, libraries are service organizations.  Some make money from more specialized activities than others and most are supported by at least some public and private funds.  If the day comes that we are unable to defend our livelihoods to those who write those checks, then those checks will cease to be written. If we cannot convince people to actually come in and use the resources we have available, then we’ll have failed to serve those potential patrons in any meaningful way.

So with that in mind, I’ll point out that while  Hirschey’s argument is far from iron-clad,  it’s not entirely uniformed.  He’s right to point out that huge portion of our patrons come in to use our electronic resources rather than the printed volumes.  And he’s also right to point out that $70 million–a number I pulled from the comments beneath the article–is an enormous amount of public money to be spent on any kind of project (if it’s correct).  And let’s face the ugly fact that at least some larger libraries might do well to occasionally rethink who they are serving and how.

At any rate, I think that dismissing Hirschey and those who believe as he does is a mistake.  Let’s try to convince them that we’re worth keeping around.

[Read more…] about Libraries: Limited & Obsolete?

First, the good news (although it’s all good news from the Academy’s perspective): NYAM was mentioned in the NY Times this morning in the "Dining In" section, in an article titled "A Taste of Roman Cooking, Before Tomatoes". The story deals with the restoration of the Apicius, which dates from the ninth century and was acquired by the Academy in 1929.  In a word, it’s the oldest cookbook in the western world, and it’s available for viewing in our rare book room by appointment.

A slightly less mouth-watering article in the October 9 issue of the New Yorker (no link to this, apologies) mentions us in a story titled "The Score: How Childbirth Went Industrial" (p. 62, first column). The author mentions the 1933 study of maternal deaths in childbirth done by the Academy.

[Read more…] about NYAM in the News

A report from CNET news says that the most reliable search engine could be your librarian. At the risk of being obnoxious, might might say "no kidding," but in light of yesterday’s post I’ll try to behave today.

Not in the news but absolutely worth reading regularly is The Corpuscle, one post from which a co-worker literally just pointed out to me.

Two other articles which aren’t in the news (at least not that I’ve seen) but go very well with each other are this article by William Rivers Pitt and this article by Robert Harris .

And the most recent NYAM Grey Literature Report (Vol. 8, No. 5 ) is now available here.  Some of the more interesting articles referenced in this edition are "Older Americans Update 2006: Key Indicators of Well-Being," "Regulating Guns in America: an Evaluation and Comparative Analysis of Federal, State and Selected Local Gun Laws," and "Protecting Children from Sexual Violence in Disaster & Emergency Situations."

Keep in mind that all of the resources found in current and past Grey Lit reports are searchable through the Academy’s online catalog (remember to limit your search to Grey Literature).  To subscribe to the report, just complete the online registration form.

If you’re Jewish (like me), then tonight is the close of Yom Kippur, or "Day of Attonement". The idea is that you set aside the day to make good on your intention to be a better person in the coming year. You fast, you pray, you plan to make amends in the future, and you  regret your more pointed moments of cruelty, stupidity and envy towards those you harmed in the past year.  But it’s important to note that the Torah does not tell you to lament your human failings forever–rolling in the muck is not the best way to get clean. You make amends for your crimes and you move on. You have to.  It’s the law.

I’m not much for religion (I was raised by atheists) but I approve of Judaism’s structure. Its origins were more pragmatic than spiritual. I’m about half-way through The Bible Unearthed which is a brilliant historical account of the political reality that the kingdom of Judah faced roughly 2500 years ago. They borrowed a lot from the mythologies of their neighbors, made up a few things to fill in the blanks and the rest, to borrow from Robert Harris, is ancient history. Religions are like that–they tend to offer some kind of spiritual salvation in exchange for physical loyalty to mostly made-up rules, customs, dietary rules and ceremonies.  Spirituality, on the other hand, is a bit more open-minded.

In my experience, spirituality in general and the Ten Commandments in particular, when you distill them down their essence, all come out to one basic rule: "Do not be an asshat to those around you."  Granted, this is merely my reading of the Big 10, but it’s a rule that’s served to help get me through the wacky world in which I wake up every day.  One day I’ll not wake up in it, and there’s no way for me (or anyone else) to know just which that day will be, so I play the odds and figure that every day when I wake up here, I try to follow this one essential rule.

Hillel is supposed to have said it a little more precisely: "Treat others as you would wish to be treated by them.  Everything else is commentary."

So don’t be an asshat to those around you. That means when you’ve done something to hurt someone else, apologize and offer make amends.  If someone else shows you that same courtesy for past harm, accept their apology.  Don’t be lazy, either in the mental or physical sense.  Expect to work for a living. Expect to pay your debts and bills.  Expect not to buy more than you can afford.  Expect that the people around you regardless of distance are not slaves, servants, robots or possessions. They are people. Treat them as such.  Be honest in personal affairs and in business affairs. Accept that you too are human and will do stupid, nonsensical things for bad reasons sometimes.

The articles I’ve clipped beneath the cut say all this much more eloquently than I can at the moment, but they also illustrate the amazing capacity that humans have for being asshats to those around them.  Read the articles.  And let’s all try to fix what problems we have now and do better in the future.

[Read more…] about Yom Kippur 5767

Are you familiar with the term "Mouseprint?  Bob Sullivan is–or, he is now–it’s the fine print that’s so damn tiny only a mouse can read it.  Sullivan took a look at a website (appropriately named Mouseprint.org) that serves as a mouseprint magnifying glass , as it were, and it makes for fun yet grim reading.  Truth in advertising my foot.

Something else that’s kind of fascinating in the sheer potential for misinformation: Mr. Bush has just signed a law to "create an online database for  tracking about $1 trillion in government spending on grants and contracts." The ostensible explanation is to make the budget subject to greater public scrutiny, but depending on how it’s designed and built it could just be an enormous smokescreen; or, at least, a database with a strangely malleable content depending on such things as election year calendar or scandal gossip. (If they can falsify electronic voting, they can falsify this too.)  We shall see.