Articles & Nifty Links

This appeared on Eric Alterman’s  blog at MSNBC today. I am reproducing it here it in its entirety:

Mr. Alterman:
I have been
reading media and legal materials (including your piece, “Think Again:
Signing the Constitution Away,” at the Center for American Progress), here,
about the unitary executive and the Bush administration’s use of
presidential signing statements.  I think this is an important topic.

Therefore,
I have collected all presidential signing statements from January 19,
2001, through June 12, 2006, and posted a temporary webpage that
provides full text of all the bill signing statements issued by
President George W. Bush.  By setting out the full text of the signing
statements, this Web page should remedy complaints that the statements
are difficult to find.  To help readers verify text, the Web site also
provides links to the full text of the same documents at the White
House and Government Printing Office (GPO) Web sites.

The Web site also provides links to the full text of the laws that are the subject of signing statements.

I
am contacting law schools, scholars, attorneys, and commentators,
hoping to find a permanent home for this Web page.  Please feel free to
pass the URLs to others who may be interested in either: (1) giving
this information a permanent home on the Web, or (2) using the
information (including stealing and distributing it).

The main URLS are:

• Full Annotated Text of all PSSs
• Full Unannotated Text of All PSSs
• Index to PSSs

I
hope that the Web site will: (1) help scholars and commentators write
intelligently and authoritatively about presidential signing statements
and the unitary executive, and (2) save attorneys a great deal of time
rooting these statements (and the laws to which they apply) out of the
GPO and White House websites.

The site is not pretty, but it is useful.

In sum, I want to give this information to someone else.  My offer is free to any taker.

Thank
you for your time.  I enjoyed your article and have linked to it on my
site.  I appreciate your writing well on such an important topic.

—Joyce

The Morgan Library got some very spiffy coverage in the Music section of the NY Times this morning, and that’s extremely cool.  But what was even cooler to me was clicking on my daily dose of LRC and finding this article on online libraries by George Giles. Giles is a libertarian (as are many who post on LRC) so his politics may not be to your liking, but the sites he links to seem quite substantial and cover everything from math to science to the goings on at Oxford and MIT to Marxism (I personally didn’t know there was a Marxists.org but i can’t say I’m surprised.) And I’m heartened to see he listed WebMD and the NIH among his selections. It’s all worth looking at in some detail.

I taught my class on E-Journals this morning at the NYAM Library Open House (and got a great reception from the 10 people who showed up–yea, me!) so I thought I’d devote today’s space to something genuinely nifty if not exactly library-related.

Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log on MSNBC.com is too cool to not be part of any science freak’s daily reading (weekly reading at the least) and since today’s post is all about the Science of Superman, there’s even less reason not to visit today. There are no doubt more hard-core websites on both these subjects (of science and Superman) but this one is eminently accessible and fun to read, which makes it okay in my book.

Meanwhile, I’m bumping up against my deadline for an article on the Academy’s Grey Literature Report, which is one reason I’m posting here so seldom just lately.  My absolute drop dead delivery date is July 10, so I’m hoping to get a real draft complete by June 30. Wish me luck!

This piece by Kate Wittenberg from EPIC at Clumbia U. is definitely worth reading.  It’s titled "Beyond Google, What’s Next for Publishing" and does a fine job of discussing how online environments are affecting (and being affected by) the publishing industry.

Here’s an excerpt to get you started:

"While we have been busy attending conferences, workshops, and seminars
on every possible aspect of scholarly communication, information
technology, digital libraries, and e-publishing, students have been
quietly revolutionizing the discovery and use of information. Their
behavior, undertaken without consultation or attendance at formal
academic events, urgently forces those of us in scholarly publishing to
confront some fundamental questions about our organizations, jobs, and
assumptions about our work.

Most students today arrive at college assuming that a Google search is
the first choice for doing research, that MySpace is the model for
creating online content and building peer communities, and — perhaps
most important — that multitasking with various electronic devices,
often from remote locations, is the traditional way to do class work.
The implications of those changes must transform our publishing
strategies.

If "digital natives" are the next audience for our scholarly resources,
shouldn’t we be thinking about new ways to organize, store, and deliver
our content? In fact, is content even what we should be focusing on for
this next generation of users, or are the tools, functionality, and
access built on top of the content what are of real value?

As publishers, we are going to have to adapt quickly and creatively if
we wish to remain true to our missions as information professionals and
yet be relevant to users. Are we ready?"

Well, are we? Get thee now to the Chronicle of Higher Education and read! Read!

From today’s New York Times (links & excerpt):

Four Librarians Finally Break Silence in Records Case

Four Connecticut librarians who had been barred from
revealing that they had received a request for patrons’ records from
the federal government spoke out yesterday, expressing frustration
about the sweeping powers given to law enforcement authorities by the
USA Patriot Act.

The librarians took turns at the
microphone at their lawyers’ office and publicly identified themselves
as the collective John Doe who had sued the United States attorney
general after their organization received a confidential demand for
patron records in a secret counterterrorism case. They had been
ordered, under the threat of prosecution, not to talk about the request
with anyone. The librarians, who all have leadership roles at a small
consortium called Library Connection in Windsor, Conn., said they
opposed allowing the government unchecked power to demand library
records and were particularly incensed at having been subject to the
open-ended nondisclosure order.

From this week’s BusinessWeek (link & excerpt):

The Library: Next Best Thing to an MBA
Across the country, public libraries are giving would-be entrepreneurs a helping hand with resources and expert guidance…

Five years ago, Farid Ali was a Web designer for a
Manhattan law firm when a friend, George Constantinou, suggested they
open a restaurant together in Brooklyn. For Ali, however, there
appeared to be a couple of small hurdles. First, his entire restaurant
experience amounted to a brief stint as a busboy some 20 years before.
Second, he had never owned his own business.

"I had always worked for other people," he says. "To
become an entrepreneur was very challenging, I wasn’t in that mindset."
So he enrolled in an online workshop for budding entrepreneurs and came
across a librarian who told him about the resources available at the
public library.

For the next two years, Ali spent three hours a
day, four days a week, poring over reference material, databases, and
digital tools at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Business Library.
Constantinou joined him frequently. Together, they learned how to write
a business plan, create a Web site for their business, and, as Ali
says, "open a restaurant." Moreover, he says, "I realized by scanning
the shelves that owning a business takes a lot more than just raising
money and finding a location."

I found this project by David Plotz on Slate.com this morning (I’m already behind the curve as he started this weeks ago), but it’s interesting to me since I started reading The Bible Unearthed by Neil Asher Silberman and Israel Finklestein over the weekend.  The Old Testament (as you non-Jews call it) is not history . . . but it is, sort of. On the other hand, it’s not mythology . . . but it is, sort of. And it’s not rules and regulations on how to be a decent person (but it is, sort of.) And the archaeological record deals with all of it, but not in the way the raw text of the bible leads one to expect if one takes it as a completely reliable history book.

I’ve started to read the Torah portions at home on Shabbat, like a good Jew is supposed to. Technically, I’m supposed to study with a group, but I haven’t gotten to that point yet. But all things in time.  And it’s interesting to me to do this because it’s the first time I’ve actually sat down to do this, so I see where Plotz is coming from in his own research. It’s especially interesting having grown up the only believer in a family of Jewish atheists. However one feels about religion in general, I think the bible is still a powerful cornerstone to Western Civilization (notice the capitalization there) and it’s worth a read. That is, the bible (as we Jews call it) and Silberman and Finklestein’s book on the archeology of ancient Israel and Judah are worth a read.  I find it’s handy to keep the bible nearby as one goes through the other book too; that’s a trick I learned dealing with Joyce in college: when reading Ulysses, have a copy of the Odyssey handy.

Updates as they happen.

If the names Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs and Cassady don’t ring an immediate bell with you, go and read this article by Donald W. Miller. Actually, even if they do ring a bell, read the article anyway; it’s a nicely organized, compact overview of some of the Beats’ better (and lesser) known history. You’ll notice at the bottom of the page, Miller notes that the article is adapted from a longer paper presented at the Fellowship of American Bibliographic Society’s Annual Symposium this past week, which makes me want to write to him to see if that paper’s to be made available anywhere any time soon.

Personally, the heaviest work I’ve ever done on the Beats was in college when Prof. John Tytell presided over the 1992 English Honors seminar, which I took. (Took it? I was at the meeting that chose his proposed seminar out of eight or nine others.) The seminar’s thrust wasn’t to the Beats particularly, although he did spend a big chunk of his life researching them (Ginsburg in particular). 

Now that I think of it, that was a pretty decent seminar: it was titled "Some American Antinomians" and spanned three hundred years of American literature.  ‘Antinomians’ in this  sense being those who go against generally accepted moral law. We covered Melville (Billy Budd, Bartleby), Emerson and Thoreau, Pound (of course–with Tytell everything comes back to Pound sooner or later), The Beats, both as a group and individually, and I’m likely forgetting bits and pieces of other worthwhile writing. But those were the biggies. The antinomian aspects of any of all these folks are debatable, but it wasn’t a bad seminar.

This entry has been waiting to be posted for over a week so I’ll hit the publish button now, but I promise I’ll write more about the seminar itself at some point in the future.

If you’ve been involved with collaborative web projects you’ve probably heard of "wikis." If not, a "wiki" is a shared website that’s generally devoted to informational projects. Anybody can post, within certain limits, anything they like as long as it’s topical. The idea being that one person rarely can know everything about a subject, but get a few thousand knowledgeable individuals together in collaboration and you will end up with a very complete information website indeed.

With this in mind, enter the Wiki of Wrongdoing. People for the American Way, a political action group that would like to see regime change in the U.S. in 2008, has implemented the same technology that Wikipedia utilizes to come up with a definitive encyclopedia of George W. Bush’s administration’s legal, ethical, moral and competency shortcomings.  If you’re into this sort of thing it’s definitely worth a look.

Two things worth investigating if you’re so inclined, today:

COinS in WorldCat: 

"OCLC has added COinS to its Open WorldCat Web pages. COinS, or
Context Objects in Spans, is a standardized way to invisibly embed
bibliographic metadata into a Web page’s HTML, using the OpenURL
metadata. This allows other tools, such as Web browsers, to identify
citation metadata in Web content and automatically generate links to
appropriate resources in a user’s own library."

There’s more to it than that, obviously, but I think you get a gist of it.

Next, this came in this morning:

The May 1, 2006 edition of the "Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information" is available at:

http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/SUBJIN_A.HTM

The page-specific "Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information" and the accompanying "Electronic Sources of Information: A Bibliography" (listing all indexed items) deal with all aspects of electronic publishing and include print and non-print materials, periodical articles, monographs and individual chapters in collected works. This edition includes 2,300 indexed titles. Both the Index and the Bibliography are continuously updated.

Introduction, which includes sample search and instructions how to use the Subject Index and the Bibliography, is located at:

http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/SUB_INT.HTM

Again, check it out if you are so inclined and have the time.

Finally, may I humbly point out the best website on the subject of electricity I’ve encountered in a long, long time. Read this for ten minutes and you’ll come away with more knowledge on the subject than you have ever wanted.  Remember, folks, lack of education is no shame; never allow yoursel to be intimidated by this stuff.

I’m not going to comment on the new Judas Gospels other than to say that I think this is the coolest historical find since they located the Dead Sea Scrolls. And, of course, to point people to what resources I found on the subject:

From the NY Times: Judas, minus the betrayal. Here, too. Also, yes, the document is genuine, but is the story true? And, of course, excerpts of the text itself (I have a copy of this on my iMac.)

Better stuff from National Geographic.

Enjoy!

It’s probably not wise for a bibliophile to admit, but I’ve never been much of a fan of Dorothy Parker or Lillian Hellman. That said, this article by Marion Meade in the latest Book Forum was fascinating all the same. Enjoy!