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I was amazed and embarrassed to remember this late in the game that this is Banned Book Week. Luckily the ALA has full documentation of what’s on the ‘banned list’, what’s on the merely ‘challenged’ list, and whatever else you need. There’s lots more out there but these links should get you started.
Now read, damn you! READ!
I’ve been invited to write a few paragraphs about some cool electronic resource for the next edition of the NYAM Newsletter. And unhappily, I have a bit of a problem with that. Granted, I have the time and the talent and the motivation, but the problem persists and it’s been there for as far back as I can remember.
My trouble is simple: I can’t decide on just one thing to write about. The world is too big, and I’ve always been interested in, well, all of it. You can blame at least part of the attitude on Cerebus the Aardvark, by the way. When asked how much money he’d want if he could name any price for his services, Cerebus replied "All of it!" It’s a physical and economic impossibility, but it sums up how I feel.
So I deal with the limited time and space (mostly time) here by sorting through who knows how many blogs, web bites, e-mail announcements, and seeing how any given item makes me feel. I get really into some weird stuff that’s extremely useful in passing (Library Thing is a good example of that) but doesn’t warrant a lot of my attention. Something like George Ure’s website Urbansurvival.com is another matter–I’d live there if I could. Ure sees himself as a financial reporter with a website rather than just another blogger, and the attitude shows in his writing. He catches everything the mainstream media misses, and it misses, in my estimation, almost everything worth reading. Andy’s website is another one in that category although he’s more direct in his politics than Ure. Andy’s got my constant attention for a slightly different reason, however. First, he’s Treasurer of the DNC. Second (and more important to me personally) he has answered nearly every single e-mail I’ve ever written to him and he’s posted my comments a few times. To my mind, he’s a god. Mike "Mish" Shedlock’s not a god, but his economics blog is worth the time to read just the same (pay particular attention to the external link list on the right margin–good, good reading to be found there.)
And now, for something completely different: Doug Ritter’s Equipped to Survive website and blog and The Liberty Dollar website. The liberty dollar is just plain neat from an underground market perspective. I wouldn’t use it to invest in silver (not when silver coins are half the price of a single liberty dollar, according to Kitco.com, another good source of info on the gold and silver markets). I also don’t think it’s ever replace the greenbacks that you and I use for daily over-the-counter purchases, but, well, take a look if you are at all inclined.
Back to Libraryland: if you don’t subscribe to ResourceShelf’s weekly e-mail newsletter, you’re missing out on a ton of new items that are available from Gary Price and his editors. I’m also partial to Wikipedia as a place to go for general information on pretty much anything–it’s been rare that I typed in a reference to it couldn’t match with some kind of entry. Just be aware that some of the information contained therein is, uh, disputed.
So you see my conflict. I think it’s all interesting. It’s all worth knowing, or at least worth knowing about. It is, as I (and Cerebus) said, "All of it."
It’s been a busy week (last week, I mean). Article Linker works for the databases we’ve linked to it (so far, Ebsco, Ovid, Gale), and we’re jumping through all kinds of hoops working on linking it to PubMed. You have a choice–use a script to build a prepopulated ILL form on your server and access it as an Outside Tool, or use LinkOut–which would work (if we went that route), but would require us jumping through a rather different set of hoops. In either case, it’s time-consuming, and energy sapping. And we’re putting the next edition of the Grey Lit Report together next week, so we’ve a stack of pamphlets that nee to be cataloged as quickly as we can arrange–and when you’re busy catalogging, there’s a lot of energy that you don’t have to spend on other projects. Such as linking Article Linker to PubMed.
A cataloging note from this morning caught my attention: not only did NLM need four years (years!) to add "September 11 Terrorist Attacks" as a MeSH entry term, but "Adverse Effects" is not included among the qualifiers they list for use. You can choose "Classification", "Economics", "Ethnology", "Ethics", "History", "Legislation & Jurisprudence", "Prevention & Control", "Psychology", "Statistics & Numerical Data" or "Trends", but there’s no qualifier that deals specifically with the health problems that the attack generated. And I’ll tell you right now, we’ve cataloged several hundred items on that subject alone in the past four years. It makes no sense to me that "Adverse Effects" doesn’t fall under the same rubric as "Psychology" or any of the other choices. Was it an oversight? Did they consider it and deliberately discard it? If so, then why?
From Andy’s website:
"This terrific site
is running again. It has tons of election data (click successively on all the
icons below the map to see what is there) and a "nonpartisan" (but enlightened)
blog about the state of the mid-term elections. Click
on the "Previous report" link at the top of the page to see previous blogs. In 2004, I’m
told, this was the most popular election site in the country, pulling in 700,000
visitors a day."
The site in question is Electoral-vote.com and it was immensely addictive through 2004.
So, according to this email, maybe Hampton U. isn’t dissolving their cataloging department after all (thank you nice people at Kent State for this):
"I have
received from a number of colleagues a copy of announcement of the
closing of
the Technical Service department of the Harvey Library at
Hampton
University . Harvey Library has no
plans to close the Technical
Services department. Professional
cataloging of our resources will
continue in house. Authority work will
continue. We will continue to be
staffed by professional librarians in
the catalog department assisted by a
staff of qualified
paraprofessionals. Cataloging of our ever increasing
complement of
electronic resources will still be necessary as with printed
and audio-visual
materials.
Frank B. Edgcombe, Acting Library Director, Harvey Library,
Hampton
University."
I said it before, and I’ll repeat it here–I have no idea how (un)true any of this is. But I would hope the catalogers keep their jobs.
An uplifting note about upstate New York is here, courtesy of Yahoo! News:
Literary Pilgrimage in Upstate New York
"AUSTERLITZ, N.Y. – Twin baby grand pianos stand in the living room of a
white clapboard farmhouse high on the Taconic Ridge on the border of
New York and Massachusetts. Here the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay
composed and played duets. The sculpted bust of the Greek poet Saffo
still dominates one corner, while a painting depicts Millay’s husband
and sister swimming naked in the outdoor pool, now filled with murky
water beneath a heavy canopy of trees."
It’s not the best written travel piece I’ve ever seen, but it’s worth a look. Enjoy!
In 1990 I found a wacky (and vaguely depressing) manga anthology by Joji Manabe (whose work I love) called "Dora." One of the stories in it (actually the first few pages of one of the stories in it) contained the germ of an idea I eventually turned into a short story called "Norma" (no relation to Dora). A couple of years later I decided that Norma had a lot more to do and so I spent the next five years turning it into a massive first novel with the pretentious title "The Electric Gods." To this day I haven’t gotten it published, and considering the quality of the writing and the manuscript’s stupendous need for editing, that’s probably just as well.
Anyway, one of the things that Norma learned in her adventures in that (vaguely depressing) universe was that information has a way of osmosing from one place to another regardless of the efforts people and their machines put into restricting it. That’s probably a function of how we utilize the stuff–we tend to organize things into disjointed bits and pieces that we call "trivia", which is a distinctly twentieth century creation. In the nineteenth and earlier centuries, data were organized in rather more coherent forms. Little was truly disjointed, and details coalesced into a particular process. With the advent of assembly line manufacturing, you didn’t need to know the details of the process, just your little portion of it. That little portion, from the point of view of an earlier age, might have been essentially meaningless–trivial–but to the line worker, it was everything.
Eighty years later, we are walking data banks of trivia.
So it’s no surprise to see an article like this one: Don’t Keep Secrets on Cell Phones, from USA Today. People put what can be considered classified secrets (even just to themselves) on cell phones, and then tend to forget that they’re embedded on bits of silicon that can be mined by people who know what they’re doing. Random things: birthdays, addresses, phones numbers for cell, work, and home, as well as those for the spouse, parents, kids, coworkers, etc. Social security numbers. God alone knows how many e-mail addresses and whose. Work and home addresses, meeting schedules, date books. Bank accounts. Credit card numbers. Every one of which has potential value to someone who knows data systems and isn’t too scrupulous about selling that data to someone else.
I have read one economic (slightly off the wall) theory that says that money has a natural tendency to pool where it will do the least good to the fewest number of people. There may be a similar theory of information that says that information tends to pool in places where it will do the greatest harm to the largest number of people (Total Information Awareness, anyone?) Or maybe this is just the result a crapload of trivialities finding critical mass.
Anyway, read the article, and fry your cell phone before giving it away.
Here’s an article written by Jeffery Beall for Library Journal (aka the general public), titled “Stop the War on Metadata.” Think of it as a counter to the news about Hampton University. (Thanks to Margaret Mauer of Kunt State for the link.) Excellent reading.
Enjoy!
As you know if you’ve been listening to the radio or watching the tube or glancing at the newspapers this morning, it’s been one year (as of yesterday) since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita smashed life, limb, and property on the Gulf Coast. Mayne people are doing many things to remember this tragedy–I for one, can think of no better way to remember it than to take a look at what the government has learned from it (or not), and then catalog it.
So here we go (the full MARC record is behind the edit.)
What did the government learn? That they need a better system of evacuating nursing homes and planning for such emergencies in the future. Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen. You’ll notice that I avoided a 505 field on this one–the tables of contents was there but was so brief I didn’t see the point. You’ll also notice I limited myself to only two 650 fields here, mostly because there wasn’t much to add in the way of MeSH tracings.
I could say more on this but I think the point has been made. BTW, if anyone wants me to link to similar (hopefully better) resources on the subject, send them along.
My article on NYAM’s Grey Lit Report has been accepted for
publication in the Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical
Libraries! (Woot for me! Woot, I say!) This will be the first
library-based article I’ve ever gotten in print, and I’m really looking
forward to it. More as events unfold. And second . . .
Click here and listen to what these incredibly creative guys have to offer. Then click here and take a look
at who’s material they made available on the website ("About the
Authors"). I am in the company of David Brin and J. Steven York. I
ask you, how cool is that?
First, the good news: Lily the NYAM Special Projects Librarian has let it be known that the presentations from the 2006 August RLG Members Forum are now available as MP3 files. The talks include The Future of MARC by Bill Moen and Sally McCallum, and and topics such as Folksonomies, visual resource cataloging, and describing and sharing digital images in a musem setting. Good stuff.
Now some bad news for those of you who, like me, work in the world of Technical Services: I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the following e-mail. It was forwarded to me by a coworker, and apparently appeared on the AUTOCAT LIBPROC-LIST listserv of SUNY Buffalo. The list owner says that the poster requested anonymously, and that he has no further information.
I’ll say this once more: I have no idea of this email is authentic, or if it accurately describes the situation at Hampton University. I hope it doesn’t–the administrator who thinks that merely converting the collection from print to electronic resources absolves them from having to keep a TS department on hand including catalogers who are familiar with such materials is likely in for a rude awakening at some point. On the other hand, neither do I doubt that such people exist and it’s something we’re going to have to deal with at some point as catalogers. That said, the email has been posted in its entirety behind the edit.
This just in from the Academy’s Office of Programmatic and Academic Affairs:
The New York Academy of Medicine invites you to attend the 2006 Medical Student Forum, Thursday, Sept. 14, 5:30-7:70 pm. The Keynote Speaker will be Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, MD, MPH, Commissioner, New York City Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene, "Take Care New York: Acheiving New York City’s Health Potential."
Registration information is behind the cut.
This just in:
OCLC acquires DiMeMa, developer of
software
for digital media management
CONTENTdm Digital Collection
Management Software
key component of OCLC digital solution
set
"DUBLIN, Ohio, August 15, 2006—OCLC Online
Computer Library Center has acquired DiMeMa (Digital Media Management), the
organization that developed and supports CONTENTdm, the leading digital
management software for libraries distributed by OCLC.
CONTENTdm software
offers a complete set of tools to store, manage and deliver digital collections
such as historical documents, photos, newspapers, audio and video on the Web.
OCLC has been the exclusive distributor of CONTENTdm software to libraries,
cultural heritage organizations and other nonprofit organizations since
2002."
The full press release is behind the cut. Enjoy!