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Moyers: Why Fund Libraries? Why Fund Anything?

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If you’ve read this blog for longer than 10 minutes then you know that I’ll repost news of anything Bill Moyers does or says.  And this post is no different: on February 7, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation presented Bill and Judith Moyers the first Frank E. Taplin, Jr. Public Intellectual Award for "extraordinary contributions to public cultural, civic and intellectual life."  My favorite tidbits of the remarks are as follows:

Critics said these programs taught no one how to bake bread
or build bridges. And they were right. Despite public television—not to mention
symphony orchestras, municipal libraries, art museums, and public
theaters—crime was still rampant, the divorce rate was soaring, corruption
flourished, legislatures remained stubbornly profligate, corporations cooked
their books, liberals were loose in the world doing the work of the devil, and
you still couldn’t get a good meal on the Metro to

Washington

.
Why persist, some members of Congress wanted to know, when there are so many
more urgent needs to be met and so many practical problems to be solved? I did
not have a tried-and-true answer for members of the committee. I could not hand
them a ledger showing that ideas have consequences.  I chose instead to
tell them what they could have learned if they had been listening to the people
who appeared in our broadcasts.

They would have heard Vartan Gregorian, then head of the New
York Public Library, talk about how “in a big library, suddenly you feel humble.
The whole of humanity is in front of you. It gives you a sense of cosmic
relation, but at the same time a sense of isolation. You feel both pride and
insignificance. Here it is, the human endeavor, human aspiration, human agony,
human ecstasy, human bravura, human failures—all before you. And you look
around and say, ‘Oh, my God! I am not going to be able to know it all.’”


The whole thing is well worth the read, but as you know, I’d link to Moyers’ remarks about the menu at the local steakhouse.

Too Cool for Words

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This is Lara (aka, Mrs. Rogue Scholar, MLS). Lara is a librarian at the NYC Dept. of Health Library. Before she started there, she worked at the EPA Library on Broadway, NYC.

This is Lara’s book, "Fat Chicks Rule: How to Survive in a Thin-Centric World." (I helped write the first chapter.)

And this is Lara’s book being brought into a debate on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Aren’t you proud? God knows I am.

Anyway, buy the book. Write to Senator James Inholfe, R-Oklahoma, and ask if he supports anti-size discrimination legislation. Or ask him why he hates libraries and the environment (although perhaps not in that order).

Are Librarians Obselete? Nyet!

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This enormously spiffy article by Will Sherman has been making the rounds across Libraryland and I figured I’d sock it away for future reference.  He asks "Are Librarians Totally Obsolete?" and then answers it with a big fat "No!" All 33 points why we’re here to stay are highly recommended if you’re one of the few souls who have not read them yet.

One of his main points–that the Internet is not a giant library database–comes to mind as we notes the passing of the world’s oldest newspaper into electronic oblivion, aka, digital press.  Granted, being a librarian who specializes in electronic resources, it might sound like I’m being overly dramatic when I phrase the on-line world as "electronic oblivion," but that’s how it feels sometimes.  The Internet is the world’s most amazing resource, just behind penicillin and chocolate, but it has problems.  Things disappear.  Content and metadata formats are misconstrued by various software platforms.  Packets don’t always switch on cue and some just die en route to their destinations.  Permanent storage ain’t always all that permanent.  And there is something inimitable about the tactile sensuality of holding a printed newspaper or book  in one’s hands.  I would never stand in the way of progress (whatever that means) but I think the loss to the world is real.

Calling Mr. Decimal

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If you’re looking to renew your knowledge of Dewey Decimal classification–which can be a drag, but plenty of libraries continue to use it and it’s a good skill to retain over the long haul–then you might want to take a look at the WebDewey Tutorial over at OCLC’s web site.  They cover Dewey in a fair amount of detail.  From the web site description:

WebDewey offers easy-to-use, World Wide Web-based access to the Dewey
Decimal Classification (DDC) and related information, with searching
and browsing capabilities; Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)
intellectually and statistically mapped to Dewey numbers; and links
from the mapped LCSH to the corresponding LCSH authority records. You
can also add your own notes to WebDewey and display them in context,
which allows you to both record valuable information about local
classification practices and have it available for ready reference.

The only problems that I can see is that the tutorial won’t work on any Macintosh or UNIX system and it’s selective as to which PC browsers it works with. You may have to tweak your preferences a bit.

Enjoy!

The Hertz Lady and a Poem

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I’m downloading version 4.2 of DiMeMa’s contentDM Acquisition Station to match our update of the online database to the same version.  It’s a sizable download and it’s taking a while.  But in the mean time I notice that I got a quote in to Andy’s website.  My quote is here–a story from my days as a software retailer– and the story I responded to ("The Hertz Lady") is here.

From George Ure over at the Independence Journal:

"Experts say this is the worst day of the whole year –
a sort of cosmic bummer when all the bills come in from the holidays
and more.

 

But not to fret – In the event you’re bummed, let me share this
short bit of poetry/advice from Poet of the Yukon,
Robert
Service – long one of my favorites – because it can really help:

 

The Quitter


When you’re lost in the Wild, and
you’re scared as a child,

And Death looks you bang in the
eye,

And you’re sore as a boil, it’s
according to Hoyle

To cock your revolver and . . .
die.

But the Code of a Man says:
"Fight all you can,"

And self-dissolution is barred.

In hunger and woe, oh, it’s easy
to blow . . .

It’s the
hell-served-for-breakfast that’s hard.


"You’re sick of the game!" Well,
now, that’s a shame.

You’re young and you’re brave and
you’re bright.

"You’ve had a raw deal!" I know
— but don’t squeal,

Buck up, do your damnedest, and
fight.

It’s the plugging away that will
win you the day,

So don’t be a piker, old pard!

Just draw on your grit; it’s so
easy to quit:

It’s the keeping-your-chin-up
that’s hard.


It’s easy to cry that you’re
beaten — and die;

It’s easy to crawfish and crawl;

But to fight and to fight when
hope’s out of sight —

Why, that’s the best game of them
all!

And though you come out of each
gruelling bout,

All broken and beaten and
scarred,

Just have one more try — it’s
dead easy to die,

It’s the keeping-on-living that’s
hard.

Source:
Gutenberg eText of
Service’s "Rhymes of a Rolling Stone"  And, if you don’t know about all
the fine works at the Project Gutenberg site, and you haven’t flashed them into
your head with a Vortex Reader from the
www.HalfPastHuman.com  folks (see the bottom of the page), you’re
missing a fine opportunity for self improvement."

Dawkins on Life and Death

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I admire Richard Dawkins’ mind very much.  His delivery, well, not as much. That said, this observation is sheer brilliance:

"We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are
never going to die because they’re never going to be born. The
potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in
fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.
…In the face of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our
ordinariness, that are here. Here’s another respect in which we are
lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a
comparable time, the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the
earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or
will be when its time comes, the present century. The present moves
from the past to the future like a tiny spotlight inching its way along
a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in
darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the
spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your
century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a
penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling
somewhere on the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to
be alive and so am I."

Read the interview here.

Remember Howard Beale

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This past Friday beheld the start of the third National Conference over Media Reform in Memphis. Bill Moyers was one of the main speakers, and being Moyers, he let the media establishment have it point blank:

Veteran journalist Bill Moyers on Friday challenged
3,000 progressive activists and communicators to take back the telling
of America’s story at the National Conference of Media Reform in
Memphis. He put his finger squarely on the deep vein of discontent with
the way mainstream media is ill-serving American democracy.

Moyers, who is president of the Schumann Center for Media and
Democracy, went through a sordid litany of corporate media malfeasance,
from the lackluster and largely non-skeptical reporting of the Bush
administration’s launch of the war in Iraq to the lack of attention
paid to a domestic landscape of increasing economic disparity and
racial segregation. Virtually uncontrolled media consolidation over the
past decade, he said, has meant a loss of independent journalism and
created “more narrowness and homogenization in content and perspective,
so that what we see on our couch is overwhelmingly the view from the
top.”

It is in this environment that the Bush administration can, for
example, can “turn the escalation of a failed war and call it a surge,
as if it were a current of electricity through a wire instead of blood
spurting from the ruptured veins of a soldier,” Moyers said.

On the domestic front, “the question of whether or not our economic
system is truly just is off the table for investigation and discussion,
so that alternative ideas, alternative critiques, alternative visions
never get a hearing,” he said.

“It is clear what we have to do. We have to tell the story ourselves,” he said.

One thing I noticed much further down in the article (the last paragraph, in fact) was a reference to Sidney Lumet’s Network, possibly one of the best movies ever made about the broadcast television industry:

The intense interest in this conference is a reflection of the
thousands of Howard Beales on the left who are as mad as hell and are
not going to take dumbed-down, homogenized, corporatized,
power-subservient media any more.

Everyone remembers Howard Beale telling people to stick their heads out their windows and scream their ire at the world, possibly because that scene happens early in the movie.  Nobody remembers that by the end of the film, Howard has become "the only prime time anchorman to ever have been killed over lousy ratings."  So my meager advice to those who would defend the world from the main stream media might be this: the machine is plenty bigger than you, has no morals whatsoever and has an enormous head start.  In other words, both strive for change and  watch your back.  Always.   

Democrats Push ‘Net Neutrality

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From Variety, the most hopeful news I’ve heard all year (the whole 10 days):

Democrats push ‘Net neutrality

Internet Freedom Preservation Act is introduced


WASHINGTON — Democrats, who all but sank major communications reform
legislation in the previous congressional session over the issue of
so-called ‘Net neutrality, marked the first day of the new Congress by
introducing a bill that will mandate ‘Net neutrality, which is intended
to guarantee the equal accessibility and flow of content over the
Internet.

The
Internet Freedom Preservation Act, sponsored by Sens. Byron Dorgan
(D-N.D.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), "would ensure that broadband
service providers do not discriminate against Internet content,
applications or services by offering preferential treatment," according
to a statement by Dorgan.

Without a federal mandate for ‘Net
neutrality, Dorgan said, broadband providers could be "gatekeepers
capable of deciding which content can get through to consumers, and
which content providers could get special deals, faster speeds and
better access to the consumer."

The bill "marks another step
toward ensuring the fate of the Internet lies in the hands of its users
and not the hands of a few gatekeepers," Snowe said in a statement.
"The tide has turned in the debate between those who seek to maintain
equality and those who would benefit from the creation of a toll road
on the Internet superhighway."

Last year, the GOP-controlled
Senate tried to move a massive communications reform bill that included
changes to national video franchising rules. Democrats tried but failed
to attach a ‘Net neutrality amendment to the bill while still in
committee. While some Republicans supported their effort, Democrats
took the lead in threatening a filibuster should the bill come to a
floor vote without any provisions for ‘Net neutrality. As a result, the
bill never made it to the floor.

Legislation requires broadband
service providers to operate networks in a nondiscriminatory manner,
while leaving them free to protect the security of the network or offer
different levels of broadband connection to users.

Consumer
groups hailed the bill. "This bill will help ensure that consumers will
continue to enjoy the competitive and affordable services that
broadband has brought them and that big telecommunications companies
cannot use their networks to hinder consumers’ access to those
services," said Jeannine Kenney, senior policy analyst at Consumers
Union, in a statement.

Opponents of ‘Net neutrality say a federal
mandate is a solution in search of a problem "that doesn’t exist," said
Peter Davidson, Verizon senior VP for federal government relations.

"Most
policymakers will focus on how to increase broadband deployment, and
wonder how ‘Net regulation advances that goal," Davidson added. "It’s
ironic that this bill is introduced at the same time the Consumer
Electronics Show is filling the news with broadband-enabled
innovations. There is a disconnect between consumers’ desires for new
products and services and the stifling effects of this bill."

Both
the Motion Picture Assn. of American and the Recording Industry Assn.
of America declined to comment on the bill. Officials at the MPAA have
said that member companies are still split over whether ‘Net neutrality
will be good or bad for business.

Co-sponsors of the bill include
Dem Sens. John Kerry (Mass.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), Tom Harkin
(Iowa), Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama
(Ill.).

A Very Big Deal indeed.  Call/write/e-mail your congressfolk and let them know you want them to support this baby.

News from the Human Genome Project

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See, here’s the thing.

The Human Genome Project is without doubt one of the most ambitious, important, and just plain  brilliant ideas put forth by the science establishment ever.  The guys over at the American Society for Microbiology explain why better than I can:

With the help of new techniques and powerful computers, scientists
have finally pieced together in order the entire human genome. This
means that they have strung together in the correct order all three
billion (that’s 3,000,000,000) or so biochemical rungs of our spiral
ladder-shaped DNA molecule. What we now have is the entire book of life
for making a human being.

This is a hugely big deal!
Why? Well, much of what happens in our bodies is the result of
molecules called proteins doing their thing. And proteins are made from
recipes called genes that are contained in our DNA. (The sum total of
all the genes in a living creature is called its genome <gee-nome>.)
By having all the genes spelled out in the right order, researchers
will now have an easier time figuring out which genes make what
proteins. This in turn will help in figuring out which genes are
responsible for or have an affect on different diseases when they get
messed up. That may lead to better ways of tackling some diseases.
Also, knowing the human genome sequence may help scientists figure out
just what makes humans "human."

       

Which makes it all the more interesting when I read something like this in what appears to be a rather (ahem) different conclusion:

Scientists Find Extraterrestrial Genes in Human DNA

It looks like a real article.  It feels like a real article.  And it goes a few places I just do not want to follow for purely emotional reasons, one of which being that for the past 20 years, I’ve been making enormous fun of people who swore we were bred from aliens.  I can’t find any other source for this discovery, however that doesn’t mean it’s not real, just that there have been no responses to it yet.

If it turns out to be true, I’ll apologize to the people I made fun of.  And wonder if our DNA was in fact crafted by some unknown (and perhaps unknowable) intelligence somewhere in the universe I’d like them to explain why they did such a crappy job of it.  I mean come on, we can’t hear, we can barely see, we can’t smell anything.  We’re amazingly vulnerable to viruses and bacteria of every size and description, and worst of all, we are prone to malfunctioning outside of a very narrow range of temperatures and atmospheric content. Not exactly Timex watches, are we?  The only reason we’re still here as a species is because there are so darned many of us–it takes a lot more to wipe out 6.7 billion people than it does 500 million, and there are times during past ice ages where there were decidedly fewer than 500 million human around.

Oh well. I’m waiting to see what kind of response this announcement induces.  There may not be one.  I hope there is, though, because if it’s true then this is a Very Big Deal.  We shall see.

Never Too Late to Return Books

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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Overdue_Book.html

Sunday, January 7, 2007 · Last updated 7:12 a.m. PT

Library book returned _ 47 years overdue

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HANCOCK, Mich. — Robert Nuranen handed
the local librarian a book he’d checked out for a ninth-grade
assignment – along with a check for 47 years’ worth of late fees.

Nuranen
said his mother misplaced the copy of "Prince of Egypt" while cleaning
the house. The family came across it every so often, only to set it
aside again. He found it last week while looking through a box in the
attic.

"I figured I’d better get it in before we waited
another 10 years," he said after turning it in Friday with the $171.32
check. "Fifty-seven years would be embarrassing."

The book,
with its last due date stamped June 2, 1960, was part of the young
Nuranen’s fascination with Egypt. He went on to visit that country and
54 others, and all 50 states, he said, but he never did finish the book.

Nuranen now lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches seventh-grade social studies and language arts.

The library had long ago lost any record of the book, librarian Sue Zubiena said.

"I’m going to use it as an example," she said. "It’s never too late to return your books."

The Changing Role of Librarians

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Two articles that are making the rounds this morning are from the NY Times ("Lock the Library! Rowdy Students are Taking Over") and the Wall Street Journal ("The Changing Role of Librarians".)

I’ve put the Journal article behind the cut.  I think it’s worth reading if only because it validates something I’ve observed in the years since I got my MLS: librarians are leaving the public sector for the private sector.  That makes sense to me.  In the private sector the money is better, the work might be better tailored to an individual’s interests, and talent and exprience generally find rewards.  That’s not always true in the public or non-profit sector.  But the article doesn’t say much about the 60+work weeks private enterprise sometimes demands of its employees, nor what kinds of benefits those fancy higher-tech jobs have to offer prospects.  (In a few cases, only the truly ambitious or masochistic need apply.)   Still, the WSJ is still an 800-pound gorilla in the business world, and maybe library directors will read it and think of ways to lure and keep talented librarians on staff.

I’m less sure of what to think of the Times article.

It’s easy to see it as a rant about how the nasty librarians can’t control the kids in the library–or, if you’re a librarian, as a rant about how the nasty kids won’t just shut the f&%k up in the library–but if you dig down a couple of layers, the writer does point out (near the end) that this happening in a well-to-do suburb and these kids have literally nothing else to do in their area except hanging out at the library. Are there no parents in suburbia? Youth centers? Anything? Hello?
Maybe growing up in the city spoiled me as a kid (I don’t know) but library visits were a big deal in my family. We were taught to revere the places–heck, libraries were much holier than Shabbat services at the synagogue. Raising your voice was something we just did not do. Ditto talking back to librarians, running around, etc. Clearly I’m part of an older generation. Maybe we were too polite for our own good. We had good libraries, though. And parents who taught us to care about them.
Well, what do I know? Read the article. Let me know.

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