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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.)
In the interest of making genuine news available to anyone who wants it, I came across this article a short time ago and have decided to link it here. It’s not so much that I believe every word that Putin says, so much as I despise censorship and I haven’t seen this stuff anywhere locally.
The upshot: the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Russia is accelerating and the prospects for reducing it are grim. The transcript of Valdamir Putin’s interview is there, and it hasn’t appeared anywhere in the main stream media that I can determine (though a couple of nifty articles about how Russia is "planning to aim nuclear missiles at Europe" have been widely distributed.) I’m not here to analyze the contents, but you should read it and decide for yourself how close we are to actually seeing WWIII (in the now-oldskool MAD sense) in the next few years (maybe months, who the heck knows anymore?) Matt Savinar did post a fair analysis of his own here, and while he may sound alarmist to some, I don’t think alarm is unwarranted.
When I was a kid, maybe 9 years old, I sat and watched a movie with my parents one summer night. The name of the movie was "On the Beach," which was more or less based on the book of the same name written by Nevil Shute. The premise is grim: a full frontal nuclear exchange between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. wipes out the northern hemisphere and the fallout from all the weapons used wipes out all life on the planet. The book takes place in Australia and while everyone there is going about their daily lives, they’re really just waiting to die as the fallout clouds travel south.
Shute’s weapons were juiced up for the book, laced with cobalt to produce higher-than usual fallout content, which doesn’t work in real life. The point was that WWIII = the Death of Planet Earth. Even if the science was wrong, the image worked to communicate the message behind the words. And it was an image that most people involved in the arms race between us the the Russian subscribed to or at least had in the back of their minds when their words "nuclear war" came to mind. God knows that’s how we civvies thought of it.
Clearly that image is gone from the minds of those who hold the power these days. At any rate they are gone from the minds of those Americans currently running the show. And to my mind, that can’t be good for anyone, because if twentieth century history tell us anything it tells us that you can’t bully Russia. Stalin purged 30 million of his own people to satisfy his paranoid fantasies of assassination and later, his visions of an imminent invasion by Japan. Putin, an ex-KGB guy, has eradicated entire towns in Chechnya in the name of counter-terrorism. In the past we could trade with them, bribe them, and refuse to help at all if we thought we had nothing to gain, but we never actually bullied them. (I realize that putting our defenses on high alert after they’d done the same is something else.) The Russians are the ones who absorbed the bulk of battlefield deaths in WWII and kept on going despite shortages of literally everything, including hope. They are obstinate, observant, and fatalistic. Point a knife at one and he’ll laugh at you because he knows that even if you kill him, a half dozen of his friends will find you and kill you in return. Point 3,000 nuclear missiles at them and they’ll do whatever they think they have to just to make sure you don’t get to go the funeral. (I admit being married into a Russian family by way of my sister-in-law might be coloring my views.)
Anyway, read the transcript, maybe spare a few minutes to wonder what comes next, and perhaps take a few precautions and make a few plans. (I did.)
But if the world does not blow up in the near future, I’ll be starting as the new Tech Services Librarian at Metropolitan College of NY on Monday. Wish me luck!
Whether it made political sense for the Queen to elevate Salman Rushdie to knighthood at this particular time or not, I do not know. In one sense, this is like throwing gasoline on a fire. I do know that he’s been making the Imams in Iran crazy for over 20 years, which from a writer’s viewpoint, cannot be a bad thing. (You know you’ve hit the Big Time when someone wants you dead. Doesn’t matter who.) In college we English majors all dreamed to getting onto as many hit lists as possible because of what we’d written, drawn, sculpted or put on film. Rushdie was elevated to near-god status when his life was first threatened for writing the Satanic Verses. If nothing else, it spurred dozens of us to immediately run out and buy the book. Which is what I think you should do if you haven’t done it already. (Click here.)
This comes from Bruce Mehlman and Larry Irving writing for the Sacramento Bee:
The exponential explosion of digital content on the Internet is
striking. YouTube.com alone consumes as much bandwidth today as the
entire Internet consumed in 2000. Users upload 65,000 new videos every
day and download 100 million files daily, a 1,000 percent increase from
just one year ago.
This explosion of new data comprises the "Exaflood" and we’d best start thinking about how to deal with it. Ultimately, however, they see it as generally beneficial:
The impending exaflood of data is cause for excitement. It took two
centuries to fill the shelves of the Library of Congress with more than
57 million manuscripts, 29 million books and periodicals, 12 million
photographs, and more. Now, the world generates an equivalent amount of
digital information nearly 100 times each day. The explosion of digital
information and proliferation of applications promises great things for
our economy and our nation, as long as we are prepared.
I don’t disagree with the idea or it’s logic. I do, however, question whether physical/social/economic limits to growth of the energy supplies needed to keep the infrastructure the exaflood would rely on will interfere with it’s coming about. I also wonder how effectively indxing engines and such will be able to manage the new material in such quantity. We’ll see. Here’s to hoping for the best.
There’s a maxim in life (the origin of which is in dispute) that you can never been too thin or too rich. In the world of IT, that maxim has a corollary: there is always someone out there who knows more (or less) about the subject than you do. And because there is so much to learn and so little time in which to do it, much of one’s high tech education happens on the job or in a continuing education classroom.
Much of my own career in this field (including my time in Libraryland) has centered around being someone who can bridge the communication gap between so-called normal (non-techie) folk and IT people in what is generally a non-techie environment. That’s a huge asset, because it’s gotten me the respect of my coworkers over the years, even if it sometimes seems to me like I’m the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.
A case in point is this gentleman from England who apparently recently asked what a "website" was. This is not usually a problem if one asks it in the presence of, say, IT people or family members. I bring it up only because the gentleman in question is a British High Court judge. Given this fact, I need to bring up two more points with a bit more substance. First, remember that no matter how little you think you know about your PC, I promise there is someone out there who knows less than you do.
A more worrisome prospect is that others of this judge’s level of knowledge will likely be making decisions about the legality of questions like this one. Is it legal/ethical/moral for Apple to encode your purchase and user metadata into the tracks you download into iTunes, for instance? Maybe. Maybe not. As a long time Mac freak I can tell you I am shocked and appalled at this kind of activity. (Shocked. And. Appalled.) But decisions like that aren’t up to me. I’d suggest that if you’re using P2P software to upload your song library to strangers, you might be putting yourself at some risk. Will that stop anyone from doing it? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m pretty sure I don’t make those decisions, either. (But click here to see a well-argued word or two of advice.)
It’s official: as of June 22, I will be leaving my post as the Digital Resources Librarian at the Academy to morph into the Technical Service Librarian at the Metropolitan College of New York. The move will involve more money, better hours (or more convenient hours, since my schedule must jibe with their vendors’, who are all on the west coast giving me some leeway in navigating the morning rush), and very different challenges. But there really was a significant amount of money involved.
Anyway, I’ve made a list of my current responsibilities that I now have to train the other two librarians in my department to do–this morning we’re producing the Grey Literature Report, which means teaching a non-techie some tricks involving Microsoft Access. But while I’m waiting for my coworker to get settled in, I thought I’d post this tidbit from the MEDLIB-L listserv:
Screening of Cuban Film Sets Off Firestorm
by: Kristin Boyd, Staff Writer (Princeton Packet, Princeton new Jersey)
Library Responds to Accusations that Human Rights Film Festival Distorts Conditions in CubaThe Princeton Public Library has inadvertently set off a firestorm of criticism involving Cuba, health care and human rights.
According to some critics, two of the 15 films shown during the
library’s annual Human Rights Film Festival last weekend are
"propaganda" and do not accurately reflect life in Cuba."I think it’s outrageous to have a film festival at a public library
that leaves out all the realities of Cuba, especially when you have
thousands of witnesses to the human rights violations," said Maria C.
Werlau, executive director of Cuba Archive, an organization that
collects information about the country.Ms. Werlau and Princeton Township resident Fausta Wertz raised issue
with the documentaries "The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak
Oil" and "Salud! What Puts Cuba on the Map in the Quest for Global
Health Care."Ms. Wertz attended the festival; Ms. Werlau, a Summit resident, did not.
"To have a film that is clear propaganda and that is far removed from
the reality of the average Cuban seemed pretty outrageous," Ms. Werlau
said. "And to have a film festival that doesn’t address the blatant and
egregious human rights violations in Cuba seems really unbalanced."Leslie Burger, library director, said the film festival committee had
no intentions to glorify Cuba. "Salud!" and "The Power of Community"
were chosen because of the issues they addressed, not where they were
filmed."They felt it was unbalanced because there were two films that were
holding Cuba up as a model, and that really wasn’t it," Ms. Burger
said. "It wasn’t a Cuban film festival. It was a human rights festival.
The conversations we were trying to have were about education and
energy and health care and immigration and disaster relief."
You might want to compare what’s in this article to the recent hullaballo that appeared over the screening of Michael Moore’s new film "Sicko," about the Cuban health care system. Having no stake in this argument one way or the other I think I can safely say this is a political argument, not one of true substance. (If you want to see what Moore said about the situation, click here.)
I’m the first to admit that I don’t get what makes people nuts about Cuba. That’s not entirely fair–if I’d been chased out of my home by a hostile government (as many Cubans surely were), I’d be pissed off, too. There can be no arguing about that. (As it is, my mother’s mother’s family barely made it out of the Ukraine in 1926.) There’s also no way to get around the fact that Cuba is–compared to what most people in the U.S. are used to–a bit of a hell-hole in terms of quality of life. Clearly, the place is not heaven on earth, or any kind of paradise, Communist or otherwise. But it’s better than some places–Zimbabwe, Darfur and Iraq are three contenders that come to mind, if perhaps not in that order.
At any rate, the island has managed to do a few things that nobody else has: figure out what it takes to live without enormous infusions of cash from the USSR, for one. Threaten the U.S. with nuclear weapons (also from the USSR) for another. Provide a basic level of public health care to every citizen, for a third. Mostly, Castro has been very successful in one major respect: he has told the U.S. to sit on it over and over and over again and gotten away with it.
I think that is what people are most pissed about–on the political level anyway. On an economic level, there are nearly two million self-exiled Cubans living in Miami angry as hell that they had to leave their homes at gunpoint and waiting for the day when Castro dies or his government collapses when they may one day return (with U.S. military backing, no doubt) to reclaim their rightful places at the helm of their homeland. Well, maybe that will happen one day. They may want to consider that the folks who stayed behind might have something to say about that.
The fact that many of the folks who condemn the idea of lifting the ban on visiting or doing business with Cuba are the same folks who don’t think it a bad thing to take trillions of dollars from the Chinese and Vietnamese to help float what’s left of our economy. Both commie countries, both favored trading partners of the U.S. of A. Sounds like a double standard to me. I won’t even mention the fact that everyone else in the western hemisphere is perfectly happy to do business with Cuba if we won’t.
Anyway, my lousy two cents is to say "big deal." Back to the Grey Lit Report.
I’ve been away for a bit and it’s been amazingly busy at the Academy library, but in response to stuff like this and bits like this , I feel that I must respond by posting links to the full text of the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence (in that order). I chose that order for the simple reason that according to Google, more people do searches for the former (upwards of 38 million hits) than the latter (a mere 1.1 million) which is, in my view, a ray of sunshine in an otherwise depressing sea of current events ("Anna, Anna, ANNA!!!.") Yowza.
That said, the links I posted are to the website of the U.S. National Archives, which for the time being at least is still an amazing authority on the history of these documents and their online presentation is exceptional.
Enjoy! And enjoy the three-day weekend.