"Queens‘ Biggest Cake" Marks the
Occasion; Time Capsule to Be BuriedQUEENS VILLAGE, NY, April
17, 2007–Library Director Thomas W. Galante, and a host of government and community
well-wishers joined to cut Queens‘ Biggest Anniversary Cake in honor of Queens Library’s 100th
anniversary of incorporation. The event was held at Antun’s in Queens Village."Queens Library is the busiest
library system in the U.S. We needed a cake this big to mark
the occasion," said Library Director Galante. He added: "We’re proud
to be one of very few organizations that can look back on more than a century
of service and honestly say, ‘people in Queens depend on us more now than they did
a century ago.’ A hundred years from now, people in Queens will still rely on their library
for education, information and recreation. We enrich lives. Today is National
Library Worker’s Day. The anniversary couldn’t come at a more apt time. Our
staff is the reason why Queens Library will continue to be relevant long into
the future."Queens Library was chartered from
several small, independent libraries in 1896, prior to the Act of Consolidation
in 1898, which made the five boroughs into New York City. Queens Library was incorporated on
April 17, 1907. Andrew Carnegie gave the nascent public library a
big boost by financing six stately buildings on the condition that the City
would pay ongoing operating expenses. Queens
Library, Brooklyn Public Library and New York Public Library were incorporated
separately. They remain independent of each other to this day.The anniversary cake measured 16
feet x 20 feet. It was baked by Junior’s. It used 1200 lbs. of cake batter, 500
lbs. of fudge filling and 500 lbs of frosting. Total calorie count defied
description. Most of it was donated to City Harvest.A follow-up event will be held on April
25, 2007. A
time capsule will be buried at the Queens Library at Queens Village. It contains items donated by
children from all over Queens to illustrate "The Way We Were in 2007." It will
be opened at the library’s bi-centennial.Queens Library is an independent,
not-for-profit corporation and is not affiliated with any other library. The
Queens Library serves a population of 2.2 million in the most ethnically
diverse county in the U.S. With a record 20.2 million items in
circulation for FY 2006, the Library has one of the highest circulations of any
public library system in the world. For more information about programs,
services, locations, events and news, visit the Queens Library Web site at www.queenslibrary.org or phone 718-990-0700.
Blog
Webbys, Google, and The Ultimate Computer
First of all, a major round of congratulations to FactCheck.org which has been nominated for a 2007 Webby Award (in two categories)! [APPLAUSE] They’ve made it to the finals, in fact, and the RS wishes them luck in nabbing that sucker. For what my opinion is worth (exactly what you have paid for it), I’ve been in love with this organization since they first appeared. They truly are impartial in the dirt they uncover both from left and right wings of the political spectrum, and their analysis is consistently thorough and well-researched. For that alone they deserve to win. If you feel compelled to help them out a bit towards said winning, go vote for them here. If not, well, I have another question for you.
Clearly, Google now believes that it can catalog books for the Library of Congress. Well, maybe it can. That’s unfair–of course they can. Should they, though? That’s a different question.
[Read more…] about Webbys, Google, and The Ultimate Computer
Kurt Vonnegut, RIP at 84
"Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies–‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’"
—from "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater."
There’s more to say and point to today–like this, and this and this–but it’ll wait until tomorrow.
The Rogue Scholar Wants You!
But be assured that I only want you for your mind. More importantly, I want you for your knowledge of and expertise with digital cameras, face-up copiers, flatbed scanners and digital data formats.
The project we’re talking about is funded by a grant from the New York Metropolitan Library Council and deals with original printed material from 1829 or so. The subject material is an original history of the case of William Burke and William Hare who were tried and convicted of exhuming corpses for sale to the University of Edinburgh for use in clinical medical study.
The work is paid, part-time and would last from April to September. If you are interested (or know someone who might be), the website to respond to is here.
Time is of the essence, so the sooner you respond the sooner your resume is likely to be looked at by myself and HR. We’re hoping to get someone into place in the next 2 weeks.
I’m looking forward to working with you.
What They Didn’t Teach Us in Library School
If you’re not in the habit of reading Tomdispatch.com on a regular basis, this is definitely the time to start. The reason being that Chip Ward has penned an excellent article for the site titled "What They Didn’t teach us In Library School: The Public Library as an Asylum for the Homeless." Now as a point of fact, my reference class at QC did touch on this point but more in a hypothetical sense, as a thought exercise regarding how libraries might be forced to deal with community issues such as (in this case) homelessness. No hard and fast rules were given to us as there are no hard and fast rules to such issues, but it’s something that I hear about more and more frequently in my own circles.
While you read you should probably keep in mind that the directors of public policy who have essentially created the myth that "homelessness has always been with us" (when in reality, chronic homelessness as a social phenomenon was very hard to find in the U.S. before the 1980s barring major economic dislocations like the Great Depression) and the public policy folks who fund public libraries tend to be the same people, or at least people who travel in the same social and financial circles. As Tony Robbins might say, "Hmmm. Something to think about."
Girls School
Two great book titles today, one of which is an actual non-fiction tome and the other is . . . not. Here’s a fast quiz, choose one:
"Teen-Aged Dope Slaves and Reform School Girls"
"College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now"
If you chose the first one as being the comic book, (ahem, graphic novel) then you win. Congratulations. And yes, it is a real comic, published by Eclipse in 1989 and written by Dead Mullaney. I confess I never had the time or inclination to pick it up, but what a title.
College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now, by Lynn Peril, I also have not actually read (again, what a title) but Caitlin Flanagan has, and she’s written an excellent review of it for the Atlantic Monthly brought to you care of Powells.com’s Review-a-Day column. It’s definitely worth looking at.
Post 9/11 Archived Material Removed En Masse
I think this fits in the "Not Good For Anybody" Department of government policies and procedures:
AP: 1M Archived Pages Removed Post-9/11
By Frank Bass and Randy Herschaft, Associated Press
government documents — a stack taller than the U.S. Capitol — have been
removed from public view since the September 2001 terror attacks,
according to records obtained by the Associated Press. Some of the
papers are more than a century old.In some cases, entire file boxes were removed
without significant review because the government’s central
record-keeping agency, the National Archives and Records
Administration, did not have time for a more thorough audit.
swapContent(‘firstHeader’,’applyHeNone of this is to say of course that one should be able to, for example, look up a complete plan for the culturing, weaponization, and delivery system of smallpox plasma, for example. It is to say that too much of anything, even secrecy (perhaps especially secrecy when we speak of government) is not necessarily, well, necessary.
The rest of the story is behind the cut. Enjoy (well–yeah, just read it.)
[Read more…] about Post 9/11 Archived Material Removed En Masse
The Awesome Story of Medieval Helpdesk
Behind this link is an amazing story of tech support in Medieval times. As you watch, consider whether all our fancy newfangled text storage systems are actually better than the books, or merely more complicated. (Y’all already know what I think–that there is no more reliable or easier to use system than a bound sheaf of double-sided printed pages with numerical labels, plus table of contents and index–but that’s just my two cents in a very large and potentially pricey debate.)
Enjoy! (And have a great weekend.)
A Medically Disliterate Culture
This bit from today’s Independence Journal caught my attention:
I’m starting to refocus on developments in
what seems like a battle over money between the pharmaceutical business
and food supplements crowd. What got me started was the recent
headline on Reuters "Suspected
steroid ring to stars busted". The story centers on allegedly
illegal sales of growth hormones, but I read it as only a skirmish in a
much broader battle between big pharmaceutical companies on one side
with compounding pharmacists, life extension advocates, and natural food
advocates on the other.
As I’ve advised you many times, to get the
big picture, it’s easiest sometimes to follow the money – and in
this case, there’s been lots of money to be made in natural compounds
approximating the FDA-blessed lab rat-tested chemicals, many of which
try to mimic the natural effects of naturally occurring chemicals in the
first place. For example, some women I know swear that certain yam
compounds are much better/less dangerous that manufactured chemical
treatments (synthetic estrogen) for menopause. But I have no idea
and make no claims not being a medical professional and such. I
just follow money around.
What does comes into focus are a couple of
main points:
Big
pharmaceutical companies have lots of money to throw at statistical studies,
which can be used to amplify even small condition changes.The
pressure has been turned up on pharmacists to only dispense what comes from
a drug company with FDA blessing. Local compounding is almost a lost
art. Liability issues abound. Is a compound a "medicine" or a "food
supplement?"And
as one source told me: "big Pharma have been agitating for years to halt the
private medical care practiced by doctors of conscience and their methods
which have been driving patients away from the overpriced new
drug-of-the-week television advertisements (in 2004, drug companies were
spending $4 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising, making them the
largest consumer advertiser on TV), directing patients instead to safer and
more effective therapies such as nutritional therapeutics and bioidentical hormone replacement therapies, employing the best of the most innovative
medical approaches from around the world."I am
personally amazed every time I turn on television and I see commercials telling
me to "Tell your doctor about xxx" or "Ask your doctor is xxx is good for you."
Ad agencies have escaped the wrath of the FDA – they’re on the side with the big
bucks. But why isn’t direct-to-consumer advertising illegal for all drugs?
Not just nicotine, and highest octane alcohols? Answer: $$$
Big $$$ at that.
I’m not trying to knock modern medicine. I like modern medicine. (As an asthmatic, I really need modern medicine to keep plugging along.) Just the same, IP has a great point that can be proved by going through any decent serial. Take a look at a recent issue of JAMA or New England Journal of Medicine and marvel at the sheer number of ads you find as you breeze through the pages. There are considerably more of them now than there were in, say, the 1990s. Advertising of what MeSH calls "Pharmaceutical Compounds" is up, and since we know who the primary audience for these journals is, we can imagine that pharmaceutical firms are using the same selling techniques that consumer marketers do. The purpose might even be the same, namely, to sell you stuff you don’t particularly need to be paid with money you don’t have. The analogy works even if (perhaps especially if) you consider just how much of the drug industry is underwritten by the federal and state governments via Medicare and Medicaid (which is being funded by how many trillions of dollars of U.S. debt?).
Dr. Jeremiah Barondess, former president of the Academy, said it very well at his retirement party last year: "We don’t live in a medically illiterate culture. We live in a medically disliterate culture. There is no other reason for those ridiculous commercials the drug companies put on television at dinner time."
MS Access and the 2006 Darwin Awards
Busy, busy, busy . . . I’m slowly and painfully working my way through Microsoft Access and SQL, and have the basic skill of modifying queries and building reports, but there’s a long way to go. The most immediate trick was to nudge one of the existing queries (the Bib-level "s" item data) to produce a dump of all serial level print holdings to include journal title, ISSN, and start and end dates. The data are intended for Serials Solutions so I can throw it into a spreadsheet and mail it to them to include that data to display in a print holdings section of our E-journal portal.
But, things being what they are and the fact that my PC takes a while to produce these reports coupled with the fact that the reference staff started alerting me to the fact that print holdings in the E-journal portal would be nice weeks ago, forced me to start a lot smaller than I’d have preferred. So, the data I sent the nice folks at SS only include holdings that match current E-Journal titles and ISSNs. That gets us started and buys some time to include additional upgrades over the next couple of months.
In the meantime, the 2006 Darwin Awards are out. It’s worth a look to remind ourselves that we as a species are not quite as smart as we like to think.
As Ezra says, I’m back to work.
It Serves Us Right?
I’m out for most of this week, but something that did catch my eye was an
article the Matt Taibbi wrote for Rolling Stone (located by way of Alternet.org)
on the subject of the White House’s 2008 budget proposal. His main point is
maybe it serves us right if we’re footing to bill for egregious corruption and
more and insider gain at public expense:
Even if you’re a traditional, Barry Goldwater conservative, the kinds of
budgets that Bush has sent to the hill not only this year but this whole century
are the worst-case scenario; they increase spending generally while
cutting taxes and social programming. They commit taxpayers to giant subsidies
of already Croseus-rich energy corporations, pharmaceutical companies and
defense manufacturers while simultaneously cutting taxes on those who most directly
benefit from those subsidies. Thus you’re not cutting spending — you’re just
cutting spending on people who actually need the money. (According to the Washington
Times, which in a supremely ironic twist of fate did one of the better analyses
of the budget, spending will be 1.6 percent of GDP higher in the 2008 budget than
in was in 2000, while revenues will be 2.6 percent of GDP lower). This is
something different from traditional conservatism and something different from
big-government liberalism; this is a new kind of politics that transforms the
state into a huge, ever expanding instrument for converting private savings
into corporate profit.That’s not only bad government, it’s bad capitalism. It makes legalized
bribery and political connections more important factors than performance and
competition in the corporate marketplace. Beyond that, it’s just plain fucking
offensive to ordinary people. It’s one thing to complain about paying taxes
when those taxes are buying a bag of groceries once a month for some struggling
single mom in eastern Kentucky.
But when your taxes are buying a yacht for some asshole who hires African eight
year-olds to pick cocoa beans for two cents an hour … I sure don’t remember
reading an excuse for that anywhere in the Federalist Papers.
In a way, he has a good point. We The People elected these cretins, one way or another (yes, I know, there are plenty of people who insist they didn’t vote for these guys and they didn’t actually win. Fine. While they’re technically correct, they also did not take to the streets with shotguns and torches when the Surpreme Court made its decision. If the system has been gamed , it is because lots of otherwise intelligent people have allowed it to be gamed.)
At any rate, read the article in its entirety here. And think about just
how much public funding goes into keeping hundreds of libraries in this country
open. Then imagine how many of them would stay open without it.
As Tony Robbins might say: “Hmmm. Something to think about.”
Middle East = Real Estate
Way back when I was returning to college after a year’s hiatus, I took an ancient history course. The teacher’s name and most of the historical details I learned have been forgotten or misplaced in that murky swamp I call a memory. But our professor said one thing that stuck with me through the years. "The Middle East," he said, "is real estate. Everybody makes the same argument, that my ancestors were there. And it’s true, their ancestors were there. But the problem is that everybody’s ancestors were there at one time or another. The history of this part of the world is the history of real estate trading hands, that’s all there is to it."
This short flash animation illustrates the concept better than I could. Enjoy!