The Invisible Library

Phil Maynard at the Guardian Blog thinks Harry Potter Must Die:

Ever since young lips were set a-wobbling by the demise of Dumbledore in HP6 (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) it seemed likely that the mighty author’s pen would strike further blows in the seventh and clinching episode (expected next year).

And so it seems: JK Rowling has let slip that the final chapter of the saga contains the deaths of more than one major character, stoking rumours that Potter himself may be bumped off.

The rumours alone of Potter’s demise, whether or not exaggerated, will be enough to bring the issue of mortality firmly on to the breakfast table where it will further loom over many a school run in the coming weeks and hype-filled months.

Children have to learn to deal with death sooner or later, it’s the reason they have hamsters for pets. Or so it was once explained to me one tearful morning when Hammy wasn’t on his wheel.

Link via Bookslut

Something is happening at the Library of Congress and Thomas Mann, Reference Librarian in the Library of Congress Main Reading Room wants to know what. He’s written an essay (PDF) outlining the shape of cataloguing procedures at the LC. And they don’t look very good:

There is substantive evidence, provided by patterns of statements both from LC  management and from the sources it relies on, that the Library of Congress is striving mightily to  get out of the business of providing systematic access to a large collections of printed books  through the provision of LC Subject Headings (in an online catalog that is not merged with  Google) and through the provision of subject-categorized shelving of actual volumes arranged  according to the LC Classification system. It sees the digitization of book collections being  essentially accomplished completely by Google’s Book Search project (and some others), in spite  of copyright restrictions. It also envisions keyword searching of these digitized book texts, with  computer-algorithm “relevance ranking” of the results (and Amazon-type reader-preference  tracking) as being adequate to meet the new goal of research libraries, which is simply to provide  something delivered quickly and remotely to “the user.” Questions regarding the quality of  resources made available on the Internet are all to be answered simply by digitizing everything–in  spite of copyright restrictions and in spite of the fact that Internet search mechanisms cannot find  the quality material, or adequately segregate it from the mountains of chaff, through keyword and  user-tracking softwares.

Now, none of these things is necessarily wrong by themselves. If the LC had decided to incorporate folksonomy and page ranking on top of the services they already offer, that would be one thing. But they aren’t. The powers that be at the LC have decided that the Google Model is good enough for everyone, including other libraries. Regardless of the fact that they’ve been presented studies showing that library researchers want the ability to browse actual books and sort through indexed records, not just Google for surface level info.

While all of this may sound a little technical, it’s part of a larger pattern. The LC higher ups, specifically Deanna Marcum, the Associate Librarian for Library Services, claim that they’re just trying to meet user needs, while staying within the boundaries of shrinking budgets. Fair enough. But why are the budgets shrinking so much that the LC has to cut services? And why, in the face of plenty of information to the contrary, has Deanna Marcum, decided that the Google Model will do just fine?

I know from inside sources that the LC has a hiring freeze on. That means that when librarians retire or move on, they aren’t hiring replacements, just assigning the workflow to the few librarians still there. This means one librarian attempting to do the work of two, sometimes three or more. Programs are being cut and services rigged to be either automated or maintained by bots and IT.

It’s no secret that President Bush is no friend of books. Some may even describe him as a functional illiterate man-child waging a personal war against the English language and any knowledge that wasn’t plucked out of thin air by late bronze age sheep herders. The GOP in general has, for decades, tried to kill federal arts programs and now it would seem that they’ve decided the world’s most advanced society doesn’t really need all them books anyway. And, as usual, they ply the same old tactics: starving programs to death, acting bewildered when they fail and then cutting them entirely. (Does Haliburton have an IT devision? Bet they do.)

This doesn’t mean that Dr. Marcum is another Heckuvajob Brownie. She could just be a useful tool. An enthusiastic supporter of emerging technology put in a position to reshape the Library of Congress in an exciting new way that just happens not to really help matters but may in fact make things worse at an already strained institution.