Articles & Nifty Links

First, the good news (although it’s all good news from the Academy’s perspective): NYAM was mentioned in the NY Times this morning in the "Dining In" section, in an article titled "A Taste of Roman Cooking, Before Tomatoes". The story deals with the restoration of the Apicius, which dates from the ninth century and was acquired by the Academy in 1929.  In a word, it’s the oldest cookbook in the western world, and it’s available for viewing in our rare book room by appointment.

A slightly less mouth-watering article in the October 9 issue of the New Yorker (no link to this, apologies) mentions us in a story titled "The Score: How Childbirth Went Industrial" (p. 62, first column). The author mentions the 1933 study of maternal deaths in childbirth done by the Academy.

[Read more…] about NYAM in the News

A report from CNET news says that the most reliable search engine could be your librarian. At the risk of being obnoxious, might might say "no kidding," but in light of yesterday’s post I’ll try to behave today.

Not in the news but absolutely worth reading regularly is The Corpuscle, one post from which a co-worker literally just pointed out to me.

Two other articles which aren’t in the news (at least not that I’ve seen) but go very well with each other are this article by William Rivers Pitt and this article by Robert Harris .

And the most recent NYAM Grey Literature Report (Vol. 8, No. 5 ) is now available here.  Some of the more interesting articles referenced in this edition are "Older Americans Update 2006: Key Indicators of Well-Being," "Regulating Guns in America: an Evaluation and Comparative Analysis of Federal, State and Selected Local Gun Laws," and "Protecting Children from Sexual Violence in Disaster & Emergency Situations."

Keep in mind that all of the resources found in current and past Grey Lit reports are searchable through the Academy’s online catalog (remember to limit your search to Grey Literature).  To subscribe to the report, just complete the online registration form.

If you’re Jewish (like me), then tonight is the close of Yom Kippur, or "Day of Attonement". The idea is that you set aside the day to make good on your intention to be a better person in the coming year. You fast, you pray, you plan to make amends in the future, and you  regret your more pointed moments of cruelty, stupidity and envy towards those you harmed in the past year.  But it’s important to note that the Torah does not tell you to lament your human failings forever–rolling in the muck is not the best way to get clean. You make amends for your crimes and you move on. You have to.  It’s the law.

I’m not much for religion (I was raised by atheists) but I approve of Judaism’s structure. Its origins were more pragmatic than spiritual. I’m about half-way through The Bible Unearthed which is a brilliant historical account of the political reality that the kingdom of Judah faced roughly 2500 years ago. They borrowed a lot from the mythologies of their neighbors, made up a few things to fill in the blanks and the rest, to borrow from Robert Harris, is ancient history. Religions are like that–they tend to offer some kind of spiritual salvation in exchange for physical loyalty to mostly made-up rules, customs, dietary rules and ceremonies.  Spirituality, on the other hand, is a bit more open-minded.

In my experience, spirituality in general and the Ten Commandments in particular, when you distill them down their essence, all come out to one basic rule: "Do not be an asshat to those around you."  Granted, this is merely my reading of the Big 10, but it’s a rule that’s served to help get me through the wacky world in which I wake up every day.  One day I’ll not wake up in it, and there’s no way for me (or anyone else) to know just which that day will be, so I play the odds and figure that every day when I wake up here, I try to follow this one essential rule.

Hillel is supposed to have said it a little more precisely: "Treat others as you would wish to be treated by them.  Everything else is commentary."

So don’t be an asshat to those around you. That means when you’ve done something to hurt someone else, apologize and offer make amends.  If someone else shows you that same courtesy for past harm, accept their apology.  Don’t be lazy, either in the mental or physical sense.  Expect to work for a living. Expect to pay your debts and bills.  Expect not to buy more than you can afford.  Expect that the people around you regardless of distance are not slaves, servants, robots or possessions. They are people. Treat them as such.  Be honest in personal affairs and in business affairs. Accept that you too are human and will do stupid, nonsensical things for bad reasons sometimes.

The articles I’ve clipped beneath the cut say all this much more eloquently than I can at the moment, but they also illustrate the amazing capacity that humans have for being asshats to those around them.  Read the articles.  And let’s all try to fix what problems we have now and do better in the future.

[Read more…] about Yom Kippur 5767

Are you familiar with the term "Mouseprint?  Bob Sullivan is–or, he is now–it’s the fine print that’s so damn tiny only a mouse can read it.  Sullivan took a look at a website (appropriately named Mouseprint.org) that serves as a mouseprint magnifying glass , as it were, and it makes for fun yet grim reading.  Truth in advertising my foot.

Something else that’s kind of fascinating in the sheer potential for misinformation: Mr. Bush has just signed a law to "create an online database for  tracking about $1 trillion in government spending on grants and contracts." The ostensible explanation is to make the budget subject to greater public scrutiny, but depending on how it’s designed and built it could just be an enormous smokescreen; or, at least, a database with a strangely malleable content depending on such things as election year calendar or scandal gossip. (If they can falsify electronic voting, they can falsify this too.)  We shall see.

I’ve been invited to write a few paragraphs about some cool electronic resource for the next edition of the NYAM Newsletter.  And unhappily, I have a bit of a problem with that. Granted, I have the time and the talent and the motivation, but the problem persists and it’s been there for as far back as I can remember.

My trouble is simple: I can’t decide on just one thing to write about. The world is too big, and I’ve always been interested in, well, all of it. You can blame at least part of the attitude on Cerebus the Aardvark, by the way.  When asked how much money he’d want if he could name any price for his services, Cerebus replied "All of it!"  It’s a physical and economic impossibility, but it sums up how I feel.

So I deal with the limited time and space (mostly time) here by sorting through who knows how many blogs, web bites, e-mail announcements, and seeing how any given item makes me feel. I get really into some weird stuff that’s extremely useful in passing (Library Thing is a good example of that) but doesn’t warrant a lot of my attention. Something like George Ure’s website Urbansurvival.com is another matter–I’d live there if I could. Ure sees himself as a financial reporter with a website rather than just another blogger, and the attitude shows in his writing. He catches everything the mainstream media misses, and it misses, in my estimation, almost everything worth reading. Andy’s website is another one in that category although he’s more direct in his politics than Ure.  Andy’s got my constant attention for a slightly different reason, however. First, he’s Treasurer of the DNC.  Second (and more important to me personally) he has answered nearly every single e-mail I’ve ever written to him and he’s posted my comments a few times.  To my mind, he’s a god. Mike "Mish" Shedlock’s not a god, but his economics blog is worth the time to read just the same (pay particular attention to the external link list on the right margin–good, good reading to be found there.)

And now, for something completely different: Doug Ritter’s Equipped to Survive website and blog and The Liberty Dollar website. The liberty dollar is just plain neat from an underground market perspective.  I wouldn’t use it to invest in silver (not when silver coins are half the price of a single liberty dollar, according to Kitco.com, another good source of info on the gold and silver markets). I also don’t think it’s ever replace the greenbacks that you and I use for daily over-the-counter purchases, but, well, take a look if you are at all inclined.

Back to Libraryland: if you don’t subscribe to ResourceShelf’s weekly e-mail newsletter, you’re missing out on a ton of new items that are available from Gary Price and his editors.  I’m also partial to Wikipedia as a place to go for general information on pretty much anything–it’s been rare that I typed in a reference to it couldn’t match with some kind of entry.  Just be aware that some of the information contained therein is, uh, disputed.

So you see my conflict.  I think it’s all interesting.  It’s all worth knowing, or at least worth knowing about.  It is, as I (and Cerebus) said, "All of it."

Here’s an article written by Jeffery Beall for Library Journal (aka the general public), titled “Stop the War on Metadata.” Think of it as a counter to the news about Hampton University. (Thanks to Margaret Mauer of Kunt State for the link.) Excellent reading.

Enjoy!

My article on NYAM’s Grey Lit Report has been accepted for
publication in the Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical
Libraries! (Woot for me! Woot, I say!) This will be the first
library-based article I’ve ever gotten in print, and I’m really looking
forward to it. More as events unfold.  And second . . .

Click here and listen to what these incredibly creative guys have to offer.  Then click here and take a look
at who’s material they made available on the website ("About the
Authors").  I am in the company of David Brin and J. Steven York.  I
ask you, how cool is that?

The reputation of the reporting news agency aside, two words fit here: no kidding.  (Buy the book.)

I like the idea very much. It’s the execution I have doubts about. I mean, the human brain is hands down the best computer ever to see the light of day. The one thing that mechanical brains have on us is speed. But in terms of managing disparate, highly variable (and varied) inputs, people win every time. A human driver can get out of most problems that he gets into without resorting to calling police or actually damaging the car, himself, or his passengers.  But historially robots are not great at that particular kind of problem solving. For it to work propoerly, a robot needs to exist in a very specific environment: a clean, clear hallway with an evenly tiled floor, as opposed to a typical city street. I can see a robot car following a highly distinctive pattern of starts and stops, for example, a tram that goes in straight (or mildly curving) lines down a number of streets in sequence and never does anything else, stopping at predetermined points along the way for a set time to pick up and drop off passengers. But such a system requires that the track never break, the passengers never dawdle or crowd each other, and the position of the stops never change. But the world, outside of very highly selctive environments (say, the monorail at Disneyworld or a internal track at an airport passenger terminal), does not generally work that way.

So, yes, I like the idea. I have questions about the feasability and expense. And the necessity, for that matter. Why not just reinstate the public transportation systems many cities in the U.S. abandoned in the 1930s and 40s? It’s the same basic idea.

On to library stuff: the latest edition of the NYAM Grey Literature Report (vol. 4, no. 8, July 2006) is now available here.

As the headline said:

Worldcat.org is now available (yea!)

Very little to write about today, as we’re in the process of picking out shelf list cards and processing the tomes we unearthed from MLCNY last year, and there are quite a lot of them. I’m told that NYPL is taking some of them off our hands, but there are more available. On the chance that you may be interested in acquiring some of this material, I invite you to email me. I’ll make sure your request gets to the correct people.

In other news, my crash course in reference training is about donbe, so I’ll start doing shifts on the desk next week.  (Yea me!)

Just a couple of articles from picked from OCLC Abstracts this morning:

OCLC, LIBER Exchange Bibliographic records to Support Digital Preservation Efforts

Google’s Anti-social Downside

Enjoy!

The good news is this: an article discussing the peer review process in Nature.

The bad news is this: your tax dollars are being used to roll back the Freedom of Information Act. Granted, it’s at the research phase right now, but I find it difficult to believe they would have funded it had they not a strong wish to actually go ahead with it. Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

‘Tax Dollars to Fund Study on Restricting Public Data
by Richard Willing, USA Today

Beginning this month, St. Mary’s University
School of Law in San Antonio will analyze recent state laws that place
previously available information, such as site plans of power plants,
beyond the reach of public inquiries.

Jeffrey Addicott, a professor at the law school,
said he will use that research to produce a national "model statute"
that state legislatures and Congress could adopt to ensure that
potentially dangerous information "stays out of the hands of the bad
guys."

"There’s the public’s right to know, but how much?" said Addicott, a former legal adviser in the Army’s Special Forces.’

How much, indeed?

I’m putting the finishing touches on my article for the Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries’ eJournal  Forum and the deadline is Monday, which means that before then I need to actually finish it, then send my proof to the other co-authors to see what needs fixing, and then over the weekend finish the second draft. (Wish me luck!) That done, I might actually post here two (even–dare I say it? three) times a week.

While that’s going on, if you care about the possibilities of practical space travel for those of us without $20 million to spend on a ticket to the stars, take a look at Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Blog.

And when you’re done with that, you can take a look at this. This bit was written by Chip Ward, who is the assistant director of Salt Lake City’s public library system on the subject of the Pentagon’s intention to set off what might be the biggest fertilizer bomb in history as a faux nuclear test in an area that has seen continual nuclear testing since the 1950s. I don’t understand the logic behind the government’s plans to do much (that goes double, nay, triple for the Pentagon) but the article is worth a read.

If, on the other hand, you want a proper window into anything the Pentagon has in mind, do a fast Google search for anything written in the past few years by Karen Kwitakowski, a retired Air Force Colonel who use to work  there, and now writes for Military Week.