I’m late for Friday cat-blogging, but so be it. It’s never too late for a spoiled cat or two.
Hereupon, the disgracefully spoilt Didi in her bi-level cat apartment:
And greedy Didi snorting the remains of my hot chocolate:
And from just this morning, Didi sacking out on my blue-fleece-robe–clad knees, with the chair’s green blanket on top:
If that isn’t disgracefully spoilt, I dunno what is.
The astoundingly useful LISJobs feed has moved to a new URL: http://lisfeeds.com/rssme.php?url=http://www.lisjobs.com/jobs/. I missed the move until Bloglines helpfully informed me that the old feed was dead, whereupon I went ferreting about for the new one.
Some interesting trinkets there at the moment, for one of my general bent. I expect to be sending applications to California, Montana, Nebraska, and Ohio as well as Wisconsin in the next few days. (Yes, something just opened up locally that I mean to try for. I suspect they’ve got an internal candidate, though, so I’m not pinning any hopes on it.)
If you were paying close attention to my to-do list from a few days back (which has unbelievably gotten longer despite my having knocked a couple of things off it), you noticed a vague resolve to start another blog for someone else.
(All part of my personal effort to give the entire world a weblog, don’t you know. We’ll take over the world yet. Mua-hahahahaha.)
The said weblog now exists: Beyond 360°. It belongs to my husband David, and I’m curious to see what he’ll make of it.
The design may change a bit (I’m not thrilled with the overly-blue color-scheme, though I quite like the map David picked), but it’s workable for the moment, and it’s there. Existing posts from David to CavLec have been transplanted over there, and I will shortly remove the byline from my template, as it is no longer even faintly necessary.
Please welcome David to the blogsphere!
So I’m all like, hey, what a cool book they’re reading! I want to read it too! Let’s see if the library has it.
Ooo, they’ve got it as an eBook! Yay! From NetLibrary. Boo. Oh, well, maybe OCLC finally fixed that brain-dead page-based interface, such that one can finally read a connected text as, well, a connected text.
Oh. I see. OCLC hasn’t fixed the brain-dead page-based interface.
Screw it. I’m not fighting with NetLibrary’s idiotic ideas about on-screen reading. I’ll have the p-book sent to the SLIS library.
$DEITY have mercy, no wonder people hate eBooks.
(Oh, and the actual design of the text on the “page”? I could do better after my first six months at Impressions. There’s no excuse for that, people, it’s just CSS! And text artisanry. Which NetLibrary never had, and OCLC apparently hasn’t given them.)
Bummer. Can’t check the p-book out from the library; it’s on closed reserve. You know what? Rather than use the clicky-clicky-clicky NetLibrary interface? I’ll wait. I’ll wait for it.
You know, I have a hard enough time evangelizing e-text. It just galls me when stupid design decisions and unwillingness to give text artisanry its due make my pitch that much more of a hard-sell.
Via Open Access News, this Kevin Drum post on the Google digitization project. READ THE COMMENTS. They are library debates in microcosm, just wonderful. Some ill-informed people (a lot of people have missed the bit where the libraries are hanging onto whatever files Google generates!), and some misconceptions, of course, but on the whole, it’s good stuff.
All I have to add is a couple cents’ worth about Michael Gorman. He has always been anti-digital (just read what I’ve written about him for details). His exception for reference books I believe to be of relatively recent vintage, and has always been extraordinarily grudging. He wouldn’t like me one bit (sorry, Walt, but it’s true), and I had to hold my nose to vote for him as ALA president because I disagree so very strongly with his anti-digital opinions.
When I saw that he’d written an op-ed, I rolled my eyes, because I knew what he’d say. I read it anyway. Turns out I could practically have written it for him, I knew so well what he’d say.
But, you know what? Even as ALA president, he’s pretty easy to ignore on this point. He’s not going to stop me finding a job and doing my text-artisanry. He’s not going to stop Harvard and Michigan and those folks doing as they see fit. So it’s all good; the egg’ll be on his face, in the end.
As I suppose could have been expected, some of the reaction to the Google digitization initiative amounts to people talking before they think. Forgiveable, but still.
I rolled my eyes when I saw somebody or other wondering about the selection criteria Google or the participating libraries were going to use to pick books for digitization. But I ignored it, until I saw the same criticism two or three more times. So I’m going to address it, perhaps rudely.
Jehoshaphat, think, people! The books in question are already in an academic library. They’ve been selected already! What’s more, they haven’t been weeded, which suggests (especially as regards the public-domain works, which are older) that they’ve passed a few more selection and use tests. If you’re doubting that this is good stuff, you’re passing negative judgment on the librarians who put it where it is and now keep it there. Is that really what you meant? Thought not.
And what selection criteria are you going to use, exactly, if you actually did want to winnow through those books? Audience? But the potential audience for the public-domain books is theoretically infinite (leaving aside digital-divide and accessibility issues) and likewise infinitely varied. How does one pull useful selection criteria out of an audience like that, one man’s poison being another man’s wine and so forth?
All “selection” would do in this context is reduce access to the “weeded” subset of books by denying them digitization. This is a good thing why?
Now, there’s another angle to this that the average librarian won’t have thought of. That’s okay; the average librarian isn’t a text artisan. But Harvard’s FAQ about this project, which is well worth a read in its own right, gives the game away (emphasis mine): “While the University hopes that the decision [about expanding the digitization project] can be made in the coming months, the larger project presents many complex issues that need to be evaluated, and the pilot may hold surprises and may uncover additional issues that will require time to understand and resolve.”
As I thought, Google doesn’t exactly know what-all it’s doing here, seeing as how they’re new at it. They’re smart enough to know, though, that however cool the new processes and procedures of theirs are, there will be kinks to work out of them. (Believe me, this is smart. I’ve known publishers to think a spandy-new process would work without serious testing and without hitches right off the bat.)
So Google emphatically does not want anybody monkeying with their book sample, lest somebody eliminate the one book that teaches them something they need to know about their process. They want to take a whack at anything and everything. This is eminently wise, believe you me—never, ever pilot a complex project on the simple stuff, because the complicated stuff will catch you unawares and eat you for lunch!
The lack of user-oriented selection based on library-sanctified collection-development techniques, in other words, is wholly intentional—and in my opinion, entirely warranted given Google’s technical goals.
I’m still not seeing the evil, people. Just not seeing it.
My pal Kevin pointed me to this post from danah boyd in which she explains why she doesn’t patronize the library buildings in her vicinity.
I use the word “buildings” advisedly, of course, because as any academic must, danah uses library services, and she says as much. She also recognizes the value that libraries (buildings and services) provide to their patrons and their communities, which is going pretty far for someone who doesn’t use the buildings, and I’m happy to see it.
For what it’s worth, there are good librarians and bad librarians, and the public librarians danah ran into as a kid strike me as pretty lousy librarians. It’s worth thinking, though, about the roles that public librarians and public libraries have been expected to serve vis-a-vis children. Not a few parents would have read danah’s librarian the Riot Act had she not yanked V.C. Andrews out of danah’s young hands, because some parents think (erroneously) that librarians exist to be in loco parentis. It’s a hard, hard place to be in, and I can’t tell you how glad I am that that’s not my niche in librarianship.
I don’t know how old danah is and won’t dare speculate, but I will say that the atmosphere in public library buildings, especially in children’s sections, has changed a lot in the last decade or two, to the point that every other letter-to-the-editor in American Libraries is some yobbo whinging about how loud libraries have gotten, and isn’t it a librarian’s job to shut everybody up? (More of the in loco parentis bushwa, I guess, except now librarians are everybody’s mommy or daddy. Bah.) I think danah might be pleasantly surprised at what her local public library building is like these days, if she got up the courage to go back.
I understand fear and loathing of academic library buildings, though. I truly do. My dirty little secret is that I don’t like them very much either and never have, and I’ve been tooling through them since my early teens.
Librarians have been clinging like grim death to the physical lately. The physical building. The physical book. The physical presence. As usual, the easiest way to figure out why is to follow the money: librarians are so strongly associated with the physical building, the physical book, and the physical presence that they are deeply and justifiably afraid that as information purveyors continually lose more physicality, they will be swept away.
Some responses to this have been useful; public and children’s librarians aren’t driving away the young danahs of this world quite so often any more. Some, not so much with the useful, I’m afraid—and I suspect everybody here knows where I’d go with that if this post weren’t already long enough.
It would be worth a paper, visibility and in- in library service. We hang some of our dirty laundry out there for everybody to see (as I’ve remarked about OPAC design already), yet much of what we do is still so invisible that people have to ask me what on earth I study in library school.
Personally, I’d like to see some of that change. Part of the change, however, would involve changing the way librarians view themselves and their buildings and their systems, so it’s not something I can exactly force. Even so.
Libraries are unbelievably complex systems. I love a good system, myself, and I can lose myself for hours or days contemplating the gears and pistons that keep libraries running. Librarians have spent a lot of time trying to convince people that libraries practically run themselves, though, mostly so that people feel more comfortable inside them.
C’mon, though. People aren’t stupid. They sense we’re holding out on them. (”Hit control-C twice, click the Thesaurus link, type your query, then select from the list… wasn’t that easy, now?”) So maybe it’s time we stopped? Yes, it would mean admitting that maybe we haven’t built the world’s best or friendliest information-access systems. (Past time we admitted that anyway, but you all knew I’d say that, right?) Yes, it would mean admitting that library buildings can be scary places. Yes, it would mean admitting that librarians don’t always have all the answers. Yes, it would mean admitting that our selection heuristics aren’t perfect just because we have MLSes.
But it would also mean humanizing our profession to our patrons, and broadening their awareness of who we are and what we do. How can that possibly be bad?
In my referrer logs today is this gem of a search: “what+if+i+am+not+accepted+by+grad+school”
The world will end if you are not accepted by grad school. You will end up toothless and cold under a bridge with passersby spitting on you from above. Your life will be empty and meaningless.
Sheesh. If you don’t have an answer to this question, you don’t have any business applying to grad school.
An email conversation between David and myself, in which we both regress to the approximate age of eight:
David: Come home and squee! We have a thing!
Me: A… thing? Wot thing? o_O
Him: Well, it’s a Box, with Stuff inside, and along with the Stuff is a Thing.
Me (thinking perhaps somebody’s sent me a plush Shoggoth to go with Mighty Plush Cthulhu): Ohhhhhhhhh. A Thing. Does it have eyes? Lotsa eyes?
Him: No, it doesn’t. It’s got spikeys and it’s sort of round and it’s larger than any Thing of smaller dimension that I’ve seen, but no eyes.
I still have no idea what this can possibly be. But it’s apparently not from Li and Alisa, sorry, gals.
Addendum: Heh. Figured it out. The very nice people at Kurtti-Pellerin sent us the boffo Platinum version of the extended Return of the King. Which includes a small model of Minas Tirith. Spikeys and sort of round, indeed.
My ex-employer Impressions’s website now carbon-copies to their buyer. Here, see for yourself.
I gotta say, I mean, I just gotta say. After the buyout stories I’ve heard? The buyer has got unbelievable nerve listing “human dignity” as one of their core values. Human dignity was repeatedly trampled on and left to rot in that buyout.
No library I’m working in is going to contract with these people without a loudish earful from me, that’s what. In my opinion, they’re slimy, slimy, slimy.