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New Digital Collection at Center for Jewish History Now Online

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Tony Gill, Director of the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory at the Center for Jewish History posted this announcement on the METRO Digital Collections Special Interest Group mailing list:

The Center for Jewish History recently
completed a METRO-funded pilot project to digitize and make freely
accessible online 40 Yiddish and Hebrew children’s books, many of which
are richly illustrated, from the collections of two of the Center’s
Partners: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Yeshiva
University Museum.

The collection, which is still growing rapidly, can be found online.

The books were digitized and made
available by the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory, the Center’s
state-of-the-art in-house digital collections-building facility. In
addition to making the children’s books available through CJH Digital
Collections, the books were also uploaded to the International
Children’s Digital Library (www.icdlbooks.org), thereby making them even more widely accessible to current and future generations.

The Children’s Books Pilot Project at
the Center for Jewish History was supported in part by funds from the
Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) through the New York State
Regional Bibliographic Databases Program. Thanks to the success of this
METRO-funded pilot project, the Center has since received a generous
gift from the Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund to digitize a further 50
children’s books.

Please let us know what you think of this new digital collection by completing our brief online survey.

Take a look at the collection and take the survey (I did.)  Enjoy!

How Our Parents Shopped and Other Tales of the Recent Past

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I know, I know, I owe you a discussion on how some knowledge of cataloging can help you refine your OPAC/web search strategies.  The article was begun and then put aside as the Art Institute donated 4 boxes of new books that need to be cataloged, processed and moved to the library. That will take some time, and no, I’m not suggesting that the entire job must be completed before I get back to work on the article. But it will take a bit of time to get something worthwhile written and posted.

In the meantime, I did spy two very nifty posts on the differences between daily life in 2008 and, say 1948. The first by Charles Hugh-Smith is titled "A Great Depression, or Simply a Return to Normal Life," and the second by "Protagoras" is called "How Our Parents Shopped."  Both are excellently written and  a bit of an eye-opener for those of us who don’t remember a time when "getting out of the house" and "going to the mall" weren’t considered synonymous.

Enjoy!

“Google Generation” A Myth, Says New Report

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This came in this morning from Gary Price over at Resourcesshelf.com:

"Google Generation" is a Myth, Says New Research
Google is in the title but that’s an attention grabber. The primary focus of the report is about younger people and access to info.

"A new report, commissioned by JISC and the British Library, counters the common assumption that the Google Generation — young people born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most adept at using the web."

The report, which Gary links to in his post, is worth a good, long look, especially if you are wondering why your bibliographic database instruction sessions don’t go quite the way you hoped more often that you’d like.  The reason why kids today don’t do much better at database searching than anyone else is a complicated one, but if I had to make a snap guess I’d say because kids today (in my experience, of course, as everything on this blog is in my experience) don’t generally have much in the way of programming skills, or  very much skill with systems analysis, logic, deductive reasoning, or–perhaps especially–curiosity about how the darned thing works.

There’s more to be said about this–a lot more, and I’d like to come up with a more substantial post regarding the whirlwind that’s spinning around my brain right now–but read the report first.  Two things strike me as being worthy of further discussion: first, why some knowledge of cataloging can make a real difference in crafting top notch search strategies, and second, why ease of use does not necessarily imply usefulness.  More on those topic (I hope) tomorrow.

Anyway, read the report.  Enjoy!

Back on Track and On-line

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SirsiDynix’s hosted account servers are back on-line and we’ve had nothing but consistent access to our catalog and ILS all day. The explanatory e-mail that we received from their tech people said that IBM, seeing a weakness in BellSouth’s service conduits, allowed their primary service system to fail to bring the secondary into play. That done–and the plan seems to have worked–they’ll take a good long look at the server to see what happened.

Huzzah!

ALA Announces Book Awards

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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.

A Good Index is a Thing of Beauty

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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!

A Question of Attribution

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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?

Seriously, Read! Now!

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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!

Reagan Library Can’t Find Items, Says Report

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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?

Wisdom from Old Sam Clemens

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"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

NIH Open Access Mandate in Danger

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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.

Click here for the web form

Not to push both my readers, but I think you could do worse than to forward this to someone.

Economist to Put Archive Dating Back to 1843 Online

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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.

The rest of the article can be read here. Enjoy!