Articles & Nifty Links

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.

This made it into today’s Metro (the free NYC newspaper, not the library group) as well as theglobeandmail.com:

Vienna’s public library raises cash with erotica hotline

Associated Press

May 8, 2007 at 6:12 AM EDT

VIENNA — This isn’t the typical whispering you might expect to hear at a library.

Vienna’s City Hall has launched a “sex hotline” to raise money for the capital’s main public library, officials said Tuesday.

It’s unusual, but it’s not particularly raunchy: Callers pay the
equivalent of 53 cents (U.S.) a minute to listen to an actress read
breathless passages from erotica dating to the Victorian era.

City Hall set up the hotline earlier this month to help the library
raise cash for planned remodelling and expansion, Austrian media
reported.

Anne Bennent, a famous Austrian stage and film star, reads passages
from the Vienna library’s collection of 1,200 works of erotic fiction
from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, the library said.

Officials said the hotline would be operational through May 31.

The Ladies Home Journal from December 1900,
which contained a fascinating article by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. “What May
Happen in the Next Hundred Years”.

For the complete story, click here.

Two personal favorites:

Prediction
#4:  There Will Be No Street Cars in Our Large Cities. All
hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city
limits. In most cities it will be confined to broad subways or tunnels,
well lighted and well ventilated, or to high trestles with “moving-sidewalk”
stairways leading to the top. These underground or overhead streets will
teem with capacious automobile passenger coaches and freight with cushioned
wheels. Subways or trestles will be reserved for express trains.  Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.

Prediction
#16:  There will be No C, X or Q in our
every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by
sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a
language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more
extensively spoken than any other. Russian will rank second.

"Queens‘ Biggest Cake" Marks the
Occasion; Time Capsule to Be Buried

QUEENS 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 100^th
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.

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

More than 1 million pages of historical
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

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.

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.”

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!

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.

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.

Very likely the entire planet has seen this already but on the slim chance that you have not, here’s something I found courtesy of the TSLIBRARIAN listserv, which pulled it from the Library Link of the Day website, which is now in the Library Resources TypeList to the left.

At any rate, here is More on What is Going on at the Library of Congress, by Thomas Mann.

Enjoy!