Library Hijinks

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."

So, according to this email, maybe Hampton U. isn’t dissolving their cataloging department after all (thank you nice people at Kent State for this):

"I have
received from a number of colleagues a copy of announcement of the
closing of
the Technical Service department of the Harvey Library at
Hampton
University .  Harvey Library has no
plans to close the Technical
Services department.  Professional
cataloging of our resources will
continue in house.  Authority work will
continue.  We will continue to be
staffed by professional librarians in
the catalog department assisted by a
staff of qualified
paraprofessionals.  Cataloging of our ever increasing
complement of
electronic resources will still be necessary as with printed
and audio-visual
materials.

Frank B. Edgcombe, Acting Library Director, Harvey Library,
Hampton
University."

I said it before, and I’ll repeat it here–I have no idea how (un)true any of this is. But I would hope the catalogers keep their jobs.

An uplifting note about upstate New York is here, courtesy of Yahoo! News:

Literary Pilgrimage in Upstate New York

"AUSTERLITZ, N.Y. – Twin baby grand pianos stand in the living room of a
white clapboard farmhouse high on the Taconic Ridge on the border of
New York and Massachusetts. Here the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay
composed and played duets. The sculpted bust of the Greek poet Saffo
still dominates one corner, while a painting depicts Millay’s husband
and sister swimming naked in the outdoor pool, now filled with murky
water beneath a heavy canopy of trees."

It’s not the best written travel piece I’ve ever seen, but it’s worth a look.  Enjoy!

For the record, I agree with the sentiment that children and pornography don’t mix.  Heck, adults and pornography don’t mix half the time.  Having said that, I’m convinced there has to be a better method of keeping the two away from each other (kids and porn) than this.  (Dare I suggest more involved parenting?)

While we’re on the subject of Google (again), take a look at this relationship chart of the biggest search engines. It’s an interesting way to think of the gestalt of who pushes data to whom and for what reason. Not a bad way of getting an instant reality check on why some results appear more or less frequently than others depending on who’s pushing and/or paying for what. I put this one in the Reference Resources TypeList for safe keeping, so if you can’t be bothered to bookmark it, it’s here if you need it.

New projects are making their needs felt: I’m working on an article about the Academy’s Grey Literature Report and I’ve got a deadline that isn’t approaching too quickly, but it’s sooner than I’d thought (thank God for desktop calendars) so that’s being dealt with.  I’m also expanding the list of E-journals (a whole bunch of BMC titles and plenty more) into our Serials Solutions account, but that’s not as pressing.  And, I just did the quarterly batch activation of XML targets for Link Finder Plus, which means I’m going to have to spot test a few of them early tomorrow. (I like to wait a day or so just to make sure everything has passed through the pipeline, which is probably a tiny bit paranoid on my part.)  This all while keeping up with 4-6 MARC records a day to keep from either getting rusty or falling too far behind in the Grey Lit.

I’m back to work.

Congratulate me: this is the 100th post of the Rogue Scholar. (Yea!) I started this silly thing last year as a way to help me develop how I thought about library-type work and the issues that relate to it: it gets lonely in the back office sometimes, and it pays to put pen to paper to figure out what one really thinks of all this stuff that librarians have to deal with. A lot of it is busy work but some of it bears thinking about.  (Google, for one.)

I wanted to note that in 2005 this blog had 3,682 readers, which I find nothing short of  amazing.  People read, people commented, people forwarded a few articles to other people. It was insane. I expected this to have maybe a few hundred people showing up through the year, but . . . wow, was I wrong. (Wow, am I glad to be so wrong.)

We’re upgrading our ILS from Voyager 4 to 5 this week, so we’re losing all but our OPAC search capability. That’s throwing a bit of a monkey wrench into our usual workflow, since we’ll be receiving journals and other materials without the ability to note the fact in our catalog. Ultimately, we’re storing everything on back shelves until the acquisitions module comes back on line next week.  In the meantime, we’re also integrating the 280+ Lippincott title back files we’ve just acquired into our online access area, and I’m dealing with all the work that goes into that.  Finally, I’ve got the 200+ Ebsbo e-journal titles we just acquired tucked safely into our online catalog, but there’s still a bit of testing to finish up there.  Finally, LinkFinderPlus is giving us problems again. It’s a constant battle between requesting additions and upgrades to the LFP Knowledge Base and tracking the aggregators and other database providers who give us direct access so that they’re recognized by the KB. While this is going on, I’m needing to clear all the old and forgotten crap off my desk before the end of this week. So yeah, if my posts are a little more scattered than usual this week, now you know why.

Work, work, work. ("Ach . . . this is the life we chose!")

Normally when someone talks about how much damage librarians are doing the American Way of Life, you figure it’s just more talk radio hyperbole. Not this time. This time it comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

First, we have an article in the New York Times ("At FBI, Frustration Over Limits on an Antiterror Law") quoting one slightly over-sincere law enforcer as saying:

"While radical militant librarians kick us around, true terrorists
benefit from OIPR’s failure to let us use the tools given to us," read
the e-mail message, which was sent by an unidentified F.B.I. official.
"This should be an OIPR priority!!!"

"OIPR"  for you non-FBI types is "Office of Intelligence Policy and Review."  As a fast FYI, the "OIPR priority" the agent speaks of is congressional renewal of the USA Patriot Act, or as I like to think of it, "The Worst Anti-Privacy Law in American History Act". I’ve written my congressfolk about not renewing this abomination of the legal code, but they rarely listen to me . . . or do they? Hmmm? There must be some real opposition to renewal if it’s got the FBI that riled. Dare I be optimistic? We shall see.

More destruction at the hands of librarians: "Radical Militant Librarian" t-shirts are available from CafePress (cute and cool, no? Cute and cool, yes!) and Library Raid jackets are available, too  (these are awesome!)

I leave you with this lovely image.  Enjoy!

Update: I also found this article ("Radical Militant Librarians and Other Dire Threats") by William Rivers Pitt on Truthout.org. And when you’re done reading that, here’s a lovely article from the Sstandard times titled "Agents’ Visit Chills U. Mass Dartmouth Senior." (That last one is all over the listservs today.) And based on this sort of thing, I’ve decided that Russ Feingold is the only politician I’d consider voting for President if he runs in 2008.  He probably won’t which is all the greater shame, as the Dems have no real contenders for prez with a chance of winning–and the ones with a chance of winning are not the ones I’d like to see installed on January 20, 2009.  Oh, well . . . it’s a long way to 2008.  Let’s concentrate on getting a bunch of local victories in 2006 instead. That, I think we can do.

I found this article from Robert Ringer in my mailbox this past weekend and it’s ajust a short reminder that accidents do happen, both in libraries and in our personal lives. The moral is both concise and bears repeating: back up your data. Often. In a number of different media. In a number of different locations.

Disasters Really Do Happen

If
I’ve learned anything at all in my life, it’s that disasters really do
occur. I’ve always been amazed at how most people live their lives on
the assumption that worst-case scenarios haven’t yet been invented.

[Read more…] about Back Up Data Early & Often

The reference staff of the New York Academy of Medicine has its own blog, now, which I was just informed of. (Actually, I knew about this a couple of weeks ago but between spending most of last week in California,  and being swamped with testing/implementing LinkFinder Plus, I just got around to posting it now.

It’s mostly for internal use which means that you have to be invited to post to the blog, but anybody is free to read it. It’s got tons of info about items and projects that go on here, so I’d suggest you take a look through it if medical libraries are your thing. Even if it’s not your thing specifically, blogging seems to becoming more popular in libraryland by the hour, so why not us? I’m also kind of happy to see it since it means I’m free to not necessarily make every other post about NYAM, although I’ll still post links to features on our website from time to time.

The blog is here and I’ve also made it a permanent link in the typelist sidebar.

For those of you really into RSS feeds instead (or as well), Bloglines, which is a decent RSS reader can be found here. Also, a list of related feeds and explanations of what they are can be found at the University of Manitoba.  Good stuff, yo. Enjoy!

I know, I’ve been away for a while. Between work, sickness (both mine and in my family) and deadlines for delivery of a hellish number of catalog records to the National Library of Medicine, it’s been both busy and distracting.

But it’s important to have fun while you’re cataloging a document. It doesn’t matter what it is. An example from this morning:

It’s a bit of fun to catalog the following grey lit document: “Marijuana and Methamphetamine Trafficking on Federal Lands Threat Assessment” from the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center. I don’t have a template for this one so we go with a new “Books” workform in Connexion Client (which I’m still getting used to, although I’ve decided from the experience I’ve taken from it over the past three weeks that I like it.)

The local item number is easy, so that’s my 099 $a NQ 15732. No problem. The title and statement of responsibility is more tricky. There’s no actual author mentioned anywhere in the text, so I settle for a 245 0 0 $a Marijuana and methamphetamine trafficking on federal lands threat assessment / $c National Drug Intelligence Center, and then before anything else, I drop down to the bottom of the form and get my corporate name/added entry out of the way: 710 2 x $a United States. $b Dept. of Justice. $b National Drug Intelligence Center.

Okay, now what? A couple of general notes : 500 x x "Product No. 2005-Q0317-007.", and "February 2005." take care of that. Whoops, forgot my publication statement and physical description, so let’s do that now:

260 x x $a Washington, D.C.: $b National Drug Intelligence Center, $c [2005]

. . . whereupon it occurs to me that there’s no real way to be totally sure of any publication date when dealing with non-copyrighted works like anything the the GPO is going to produce. Ah, well. Now to the physical description:

300  vi, 14 p. $b ill., maps ; $c 28 cm.

Gotta make sure the fixed fields match all that of course. No sweat. Okay what next? I’m still looking at the bottom of the page so of course I need an electronic resource trace:

856 41 $u http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs10/10402/10402.pdf (yes, that’s a live link)

followed by a 949 which I’m not going to put here (it’s on my constant data list anyway) and scrolling up to see what else needs to be here, I notice I still need a bibliographic resource statement. That’s easy, because it’s just one short page of (poorly cited, IMO) ‘sources’:

504 x x Includes bibliographical references (p. 13).

And a brief table of contents entry:

505 0   Executive summary — Background — Marijuana — Methamphetamine — Sources.

I miss the Clinton bunch–those guys could write heavy duty bibliographic reference lists. They loved research, they produced tons of it over eight years. This current bunch writes position papers that sound like they’re talking to a bunch of friends in someone’s living room–Sources? We don’t need sources. Those are for that reality-based crowd, you know like that asshole Ron Suskind talks to. Cretins.

Okay, after I save this to the local file, I have the real fun open in front of me. How to figure out what the heck MESH heading I can use for this.

Hmm. Marijuana seems pretty straightforward: "Cannabis" is all I get for the substance itself, although if people were smoking it, addicted to it, or dealing with the chemistry of the plant I’d have more choices.  "Pot" doesn’t work (I get thousands of responses all with those three letters in them); neither does  "reefer". "Weed" gives me a choice between "Dill weed", "Jimson weed", "Mayweed, Crown", or "Pineapple weed", which is instructive but not really helpful.  "Grass"  and "Herb" gives me every kind of plant known to modern gardening but no drug references, so I stick with what I have.

650 12 Cannabis $z United States.

I’d stick a qualifier in there if I could find one that had anything at all to do with moving the stuff from place to place. Actually, while I’m on the subject let’s stick 650 12 Federal Government $z United States in there as well.

Now for the second major subject:  "Methamphetamine"  is a MESH heading in its own right, but "Crank" is not (go figure.) Neither is "Crystal", which gives mostly chemistry terms, and "Meth" gives the same list as the full term. Still no qualifiers having anything to do with moving the stuff.

But . . . "Trafficking", it turns out is a valid search term but the list doesn’t give me anything I can use (I get twenty or so types of protein transport terms though). "Drug and Narcotic Control" helps a lot and it’s a valid search term. I think we’ll stick with that.

That’s a half hour out of my morning. I need seven more of these things to hit quota, after which I get to work on the serials databases, which is good, because there’s a few problems with the XML file that Serials Solutions is supposed to send us that need to be resolved. Work, work, work.

[Read more…] about Cataloging Grey Lit In the Trench

Things are someplace between late and never today. While not one to place blame on the tools of the trade, my PC at work was laid low by the RBot-I virus (I think), which worked its way through our branch of the internet this morning. Sophos caught it, but not before this thing had crawled deep into my hard drive, infected 10 different files, and froze my CPU almost solid.

Part of the problem (our very capable IT folks told me) was that the macro that usually updated my Windows 2K service packs had been shut off for some unknown (and, damn it, unknowable) reason, so the security upgrade I should have gotten last week never arrived. Which meant—in that cascading way that PC networks tend to follow—that the one hole in my security was exactly the one that the cretin who sent this bomblet my way was hoping to exploit. I’m not suggesting this jerk had me specifically in mind . . . mine was the only PC in the Technical Resources department to get swiped, but one in Access and two in the Rare Book Room got hit as well.

Anyway, Sophos lit a red flag at around 9.30 this morning, and work on the machine started shortly after. By that time my machine was badly infected and any work that had to be done on it (substantial to say the least) took several times as long as it might have on an uninfected PC. By ten o’clock it was clear that the security updates hadn’t arrived as expected . . . the IT guys I spoke to finally decided to delete the previous service packs and reinstall the newest one. The entire process of deleting the old files, downloading the upgrade, and installing the new files lasted until well after one in the bloody afternoon. (Say goodbye to the morning, Gracie.)

At half past one or so, I restarted the machine and it worked well enough. Then the IT guys logged into my PC by remote control and set Sophos scanning the hell out of my local hard drive, which took until just before four o’clock, whereupon 10 infected files were identified and killed. By that time, I’d passed up any opportunity for real work here . . . although I did have the chance to update about ten volumes of the New York City Rules & regulations: unlike 90% of what I do on a daily basis, like cataloging, serials management, or database management, replacing pages of the NYCRR takes only patience, attention to detail, and a bunch of trips into the stacks.

A word to the Wise Librarian . . . make sure your system service packs and virus definitions update regularly and on schedule.

And yes, this is why I haven’t updatted anything of worth today. But the weekend approacheth and with it, some free time. Tomorrow, Civil Liberties for sure . . .