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First, the American Library Association Announces Literary Award Winners. That’s great.
Second, SirsiDynix’s server access has been in and out all morning. A brief e-mail from the company says that the problem has to do with network issues on IBM’s end, which literally filter down to us peons at the circulation desk who merely rely on these service to utilize our ILS on a daily basis. That sucks.
Oh well, Monday, Monday.
I remember indexing class at Queens College’s MLIS program: it was called "GSLIS 743, Indexing, Abstracting, and Other Access Systems," met for three hours a week and was filled with about 40 individuals who just wanted to get through the course and on their ways to more interesting things. Over the course of the semester we learned (or, more correctly, were exposed to) a ton of theory on the organization of text-based data, analysis of categorization techniques and pattern generation tricks for document analysis. And, there was a final exam in which we had to build a small database to include search terms for a number of disparate documents.
I did pretty well in the class since I had a bit of a leg up on the situation–I was already original-cataloging an average of six grey lit documents a day, so deriving search terms from content was easy for me. I do remember that most of the lectures focused on doing the work according to search terms rather than concentrating on the final product of the work, the index itself.
Which made me read this article, where Enid Stubin recounts her time in "Bartlebyland", a.k.a. Sydney Wolfe Cohen Associates, located in a warren of rooms on lower Fifth Avenue, with my full attention. It describes an aspect of the trade to those of us who concentrated on other things in library school and afterward that we’re unlikely to see in similar detail.
Thanks to LewRockwell.com for this link. Enjoy!
I came across this tidbit while looking over Andy’s website this afternoon. I’m not a reference librarian by training and my days as an English major are long behind me, so I thought I’d toss this out there to see if anyone wanted to chime in.
To wit:
BEWARE THOSE WHO
HAVE FOUND THE TRUTH
Ted U.: “Your correspondent Randy Wolman may
well be correct in attributing the quotation ‘Keep the company of those who seek the truth, and run from those who
have found it’ to Vaclav Havel. But a very similar line (‘Trust those
who seek the truth. Beware of those who have found it’)
is often attributed to Andre Gide, who, if that attribution is
correct, would have priority, and another (‘Grant me the company of
those who seek the truth. And God deliver me from those who have found it’) has
been attributed to a much earlier personage, namely,
Isaac Newton. I have not done any checking on the accuracy of any of
these attributions, but it would be interesting to know just which one (or
ones) are correct.”
Any takers?
Remember a few months ago when I suggested that reading was still a worthwhile activity for the American public? Well, this report seems to support that idea (as if we needed the extra confirmation, right?)
To wit:
Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s
book club aside, Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to
be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores
are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic
disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access
to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in
basic writing skills.Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s
book club aside, Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to
be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores
are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic
disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access
to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in
basic writing skills.
It gets worse:
Among the findings is that although reading scores among elementary
school students have been improving, scores are flat among middle
school students and slightly declining among high school seniors. These
trends are concurrent with a falloff in daily pleasure reading among
young people as they progress from elementary to high school, a drop
that appears to continue once they enter college. The data also showed
that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on
reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all.The study also examined results from reading tests administered to
adults and found a similar trend: The percentage of adults who are
proficient in reading prose has fallen at the same time that the
proportion of people who read regularly for pleasure has declined.
And the punchline:
In an interview Mr. Gioia said that the statistics could not explain
why reading had declined, but he pointed to several commonly accepted
culprits, including the proliferation of digital diversions on the
Internet and other gadgets, and the failure of schools and colleges to
develop a culture of daily reading habits. In addition, Mr. Gioia said,
“we live in a society where the media does not recognize, celebrate or
discuss reading, literature and authors.”
Nah, that would be too . . . French.
I’m the first to admit that reading is indeed a cultural activity. In the house where I grew up, books were things to be treasured, horded, read aloud when one was young and read silently when one grew older. My brother and I were reading The New York Times by the time we were three years old (so my mother says) and, unlike my math scores which teetered on grade level throughout elementary and junior high school, my reading scores in the NYC citywide tests were 12.9 by third grade and pretty much stayed there. The reason for this is mostly because my mother was raised in exactly that kind of environment–books were A Big Deal, plain and simple. It wasn’t until I was well into college that I began to realize that not every household was like that. I suspect the situation is worse now.
So seriously! Read! Now!
I read something like this and I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry:
LOS ANGELES – The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum
can’t locate or account for tens of thousands of valuable mementos of
Reagan’s White House years, according to a published report.An audit by the National Archives inspector general concluded that the library in Simi Valley
was unable to properly account for more than 80,000 objects out of its
collection of some 100,000 artifacts, the Los Angeles Times reported on
its Web site Wednesday night.The audit was connected to an investigation into allegations that a
former employee stole from the Reagans’ collection of gifts from
foreign leaders and other dignitaries, but sloppy record-keeping has
hindered the probe, Inspector General Paul Brachfeld said"We have been told by sources that a person who had access capability
removed holdings," Brachfeld told the Times. "But we can’t lock in as
to what those may be."Part of the problem has to do with a lack of supervision and a "near
universal" security breakdown that may have left the mementos
vulnerable to pilfering, "the scope of which will likely never be
known," the audit found.
Considering that The Great Communicator was something of a prototype of the Dear Leader status the current government has been giving our presidents of late, you would think that they’d keep better watch over his stuff. You know that when George W. Bush’s library is finally built, it’ll probably have watch towarers, land mines, electric fences and a platoon or two of Blackwater security goons watching the joint from a solar dome on a platform in space. I’m not suggesting that we necessarily need to turn libraries into Fort Knox but would having consistent, measurable, and proven security systems for them hurt?
"Americans too often teach their children to despise those
who hold unpopular opinions. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in
aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our
democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and
out of place – the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s
keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan."
— Mark Twain
This note came over the LITA-L listserv from Charles W. Bailey over at Digital Scholarship. It’s worth reading. In the interest of getting this out to as many folks as possible, I’ll just post the e-mail in its (slightly edited) entirety, active links and all:
Peter Suber reports that the NIH open access mandate may be deleted or weakened by last-minute amendments to the FY 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill.
Click here for Peter Suber’s report
If you are a US citizen and you support the mandate, there is an urgent need for you to contact your senators by the end of business on Monday, October 22.
You can easily contact them using the ALA Action Alert Web form with my cut-and-paste version of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access’ text about the amendments or you can use the same form to write your own text.
You can easily contact them using the ALA Action Alert Web form with my cut-and-paste version of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access’ text about the amendments or you can use the same form to write your own text.
Not to push both my readers, but I think you could do worse than to forward this to someone.
Even if I were not already a hard core fan of the Economist, I’d think this was a Great Idea:
More than 160 years of articles from the Economist are set to become
available online with the launch of The Economist Historical Archive
1843-2003.The archive will contain more than 600,000 pages of the weekly magazine’s reporting and analysis.
It is a joint project between Gale – part of Cengage Learning – and the Economist.
"The Economist Historical Archive is more than a database – it is a
remarkable record of the most significant world events over the past
160 years through the unbiased, probing eyes of the Economist," said
John Micklethwait, the magazine’s editor-in-chief.
Here’s one for rare book collectors around the world:
Vatican Publishes Knights Templar Papers.
Enjoy!
The UK Independent says that the Only Copy of Magna Carta in Private Hands to be Sold in New York. I’m temped to say something truly obnoxious such as wonder whether the U.S. Constitution can be far behind, seeing as how the current regime in Washington D.C. has little apparent use for it, but I won’t. I don’t need to. (That’s what headlines are for.)
Everything is is chaos. If you own a house with a mortgage you may lose it if you’re not careful. The FDIC may not do much to preserve your bank account if push comes to shove. The financial elites are wrecking what’s left of the economy, the ex-spooks are suggesting that the rabble can analyze intelligence every bit as well (or better than) the CIA, and there are firm plans for the U.S Air Force and Navy to bomb the living crap out of thousands of targets in Iran. And, oh yes, all that jazz about eating locally is a pipe dream, although Suzi Steffen has put together a decent if small reading list on the subject to wade through.
Faced with all this mishegoss and woe, I did what any red-blooded patriotic American would do. I made beer. More on that in a bit.
But first I made sure that SirsiDynix actually migrated the catalog properly. (It did.) Then I did a check on whether the proxy server was tested on time (it was not). Worst of all, in the time I originally wrote the previous paragraph and the time I now resume writing, the proxy server situation has deteriorated to the point where beer news seems far more important to me as opposed to IP addresses, EZProxy configuration and authentication permissions and a lack of access to a number of electronic resources.
(I know, I know . . . nothing is more important to the library or its patrons then access to the necessary resources. All true. But the IT department is aware of the problem, I am aware of how to contribute to its solution and we’re doing what we can as quickly as we can to get things back to normal. In the meantime, I made beer.)
I’ve written on this subject before (here and elsewhere) and I don’t think I have anything genuinely new to say on it, so I’ll stick to the things that are old but still true. The "Still True Today" category is a new one that I blatantly stole from Matthew Miller’s book "The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways That Liberals and Conservatives Can Love." Miller’s idea about raising the awareness of the typical American about things that are problematic for 21st century U.S.A. is to imagine what it might be like if every newspaper had a weekly or daily column titled "Still True Today" in which would be presented a salient fact such as "47 million Americans still do not have health insurance," or something similar. And since I don’t see anything like it in any newspaper I read, I figured I’d go ahead with the idea here.
So, it’s been six years since we lost the World Trade Center and as events would have it, the 11th once again falls on a Tuesday as it did in 2001. Some related bits and pieces that are Still True Today include:
3,000 American victims of the events of that day are still dead and are still missed terribly by their families and friends. And certain politicians (*cough* Giuliani *cough*) are still reminding us of the fact on national television for the sake of getting you to vote them into power and privilege. And for the most part, it’s still working.
This is not to avoid the fact that at least 70 thousand Iraqis remain dead since "major combat operations" ended in 2003 and they are terribly missed by their families and friends. And that is not to detract from the fact that nearly four thousand American servicemen and women are still dead from action in Iraq since 2003. They are missed as well.
However, let’s not lose sight of the fact (unpublicized but still a fact) that the attack was committed primarily by Saudis, not Iraqis. We’re still buying Saudi oil as fast as they can pump it out of the ground, and we are still selling them expensive weapon systems. Unfortunately we’re also still beating the living crap out of the folks in Iraq and we’re still fighting in Afghanistan as well. And despite the noise coming from congress, we’re still not planning on leaving either country any time soon. (And Osama bin Laden is, we are told, still alive and supposedly making new video tapes.)
On the subject of Afghanistan, opium is still the most profitable crop grown there, and the Taliban is still in control of a big chunk of the country. This despite an American military presence there since 2001.
To backtrack a bit, there are still an uncomfortable set of questions about the events of that day which have never been adequately addressed in the public arena. And one still need not resort to conspiracy theories to describe what can still be explained by pure human fuckery, greed and ambition.
Worst of all considering our current leadership, the Doomsday Clock is still set at 5 minutes to midnight. It could be worse–three minutes or one minute, or the stroke of midnight itself–but it’s not likely to be set back in the near future, mostly owing to a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons that are still set on hair-trigger alert all over the world.
But there’s good news, too. A lot of people are still refusing to give in to the anger and fear that seem to be the standard (read, "conditioned") response to today. You’re still far, far more likely to die at the hands of Planet Earth herself (or an auto accident) than from a terrorist plot. And you’re just as likely to get home safely today as you were yesterday, and the day before that (and the day before that.)
Additionally, Ann Coulter still has not convinced anyone to blow up the NY Times. And notwithstanding six years of threats, warnings and concerns from the government there still has not been a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
So, my advice to people remains what it was six years ago: kiss your significant other, play with your kids, tell your family and friends that you love them and enjoy what you have. Heck, remember what life was like in NYC on that day six years ago and be nice to total strangers for a day. All of them.
P.S.: Purely for the heck of it, I’ll point out that the National Review has still not replied to my open letter. Oh, well . . .