The Invisible Library

Like everyone and everything else in Iraq, the National Library and Archives have had a rough go of it since the Occupation:

The sacking of the library that began April 11, 2003, was a bad one. The current Director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive, Dr. Saad Eskander, estimates that over three days, as many as “60 percent of the Ottoman and Royal Hashemite era documents were lost as well as the bulk of the Ba’ath era documents…. [and] approximately 25 percent of the book collections were looted or burned.” Other Iraqi manuscript collections and university libraries suffered similar fates.

Since then, Iraqis have once again tried to rebuild their library. The occupying powers have played along, but like so much about the Iraq War, their effort has been marked by ineptitude, hypocrisy and a cruel disregard for Iraqi people and culture.

Early in the occupation, L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), demonstrated an unwillingness to provide the basic funds necessary for the reconstruction of Iraq’s educational and informational infrastructure. Dr. Rene Teijgeler, senior consultant for Culture for the Iraqi Reconstruction Management office at the American Embassy in Baghdad, left his position in February of 2005, not having “the supplies of ready cash that could be used to acquire something as simple as bookshelves.” His position was left empty.

When John Agresto, the education czar of the CPA, asked for $1.2 billion to make Iraqi universities viable centers of learning: he received $9 million. He asked USAID for 130,000 classroom desks, and received 8,000.

So the NLA staff have looked elsewhere, occasionally finding pieces of the old collection for sale there on Al Mutanabi street, home to Baghdad’s booksellers. In fact Al Mutanabi is the source of 95 percent of the books purchased to replace the looted collection of Iraq’s National Library and Archive. But Al Mutanabi was destroyed by a car bomb in March of 2007.

[…] Many dedicated people have offered important solidarity. In Florence, the city government underwrote construction of a conservation lab. The Czech government funded the training of Iraqi archivists. With the exception of invaluable training sessions organized by private educational institutions such as Harvard University, American support has been limited to a relatively small number of individual scholars, a few dedicated nonprofit agencies, nominal USAID support and the cooperation of a handful of private corporations. In 2005 the American Library Association issued a resolution on the connection between the Iraq war and libraries, calling for a full withdrawal of troops and a redistribution of funding but the conversation never extended much further than the bullet points.

The US State Department has created the Iraq Virtual Science Library, which provides access to a large number of health and science databases to institutions throughout the country. But Internet access, like electricity, is intermittent at best. Iraq is, after all, a largely collapsed society.

[…] It would be unfair and frankly absurd to blame American librarians and their shrinking budgets, rising legal costs and increasingly costly dependence on proprietary databases for the state of Iraq’s infrastructure. But the increasingly unstable position of American libraries is actually part of the same logic that produced that war. The disdain for cultural >institutions does not stop at the border–bombs there, budget cuts here.

This is a travesty, but one that was planned. New Orleans had problems in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, due to incompetence and terminal feet dragging on the part of the Government. But five years on, the INLA is run by a skeleton staff with next to no money or resources. And in typical US fashion, we decided to give them a big shiny Internet Database and not much else. The fact they still don’t have electricity is just one of those little oversights. We’ll get right on that, I’m sure.

As R.H. Lossin points out in the article, there’s not much help coming form US libraries and while that’s not entirely the fault of the libraries, as they are mostly underfunded and generally shit upon form a great hight by the Bush Administration as well, there are things we could do but simply aren’t. And there’s no excuse for that. The INLA, like the library of Alexandria, is part of the literary, scholastic and cultural fabric of the world, not just some low level agency in a neglected part of the world that just happens to sit adjacent to a large oil reserve. Until we readjust our perspective and start acting in a humane way, the Iraqi National Library and Archive will continue, like the rest of Iraq and increasingly, the infrastructure of the US, to slide into irrelevance and decay.

There was an interesting discussion over at Boing Boing earlier about libraries and how they handle books on the occult.

Cecile Dubuis wrote a master’s dissertation for University College London titled “Libraries & The Occult.” I’ve only read bits of it,but the challenge she identifies is that occult books are, by their nature, anomalous and hard to categorize, much like the phenomena discussed in their pages. As a result, they are often unsearchable in the context of traditional library classification systems.

Sadly, the discussion wandered off into weird, symbolic arguments about Remote Viewing and whether or not it can be scientifically validated (short answer: it can’t. Remote Viewing has about as much science in it as Voodoo Economics has dolls and magic potions).

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Greatest History Ever:

537 B.C.
The National Library of Babylon, finally switching to papyrus, ceases maintaining its clay tablet shelflist, but is unable to discard it for nostalgic reasons. Two years later, under seige by the Persians, the city finds a new use for the old tablets and manages to inflict severe losses on the beseiging army by pelting them from the ramparts with large quantities of shelflist tablets.

43 B.C.
First attested use of an ISBN (for the special collector’s edition of Caesar’s Gallic Wars with an introduction by Marc Anthony): IXIVVIIXVIIIVIIIVIVII.
81 A.D.
Second gospel of the Christian New Testament becomes the first document written in MARK format.

Via Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light.

Via a commenter over at Phil Plait’s blog (where he’s discussing a wing ding of a doomsday prophet) I found this story of a Spooooky Library Ghost:

MOREHEAD CITY –There are strange things happening in the stacks of the Morehead City library.

Large books inexplicably leave the shelves and wind up on the floor. A light bulb fell from a fixture and landed upright, unbroken.

“It’s really interesting,” says Sandy Bell, director of the Webb Library and Civic Center. “None of the staff has felt threatened.”

Bell has no explanation for the incidents, but she says the building “does have an aura.”

According to Bell, a former library employee reported seeing spectral images of fishermen walking through as if on the way to the waterfront nearby.

She said unusual things seem to happen whenever the staff makes changes. For example, she said, she decided to move the children’s section from its longtime home upstairs to a new room downstairs. Soon after, she said, the staff left the library in perfect order and returned the next day to find large art books on the floor with the pages balled up.

“They were very expensive,” Bell said. “It was really kind of attention-getting when they started ending up on the floor with the pages all scrunched.”

Yeah, that is spooky. If by spooky you mean vandalism.

What is more probable: ghosts or some homeless guy who hangs out in the bathroom until everyone locks up and then makes himself at home in the stacks? Or better yet, absentminded librarians who just forget to put books away but swear they did, or at least meant to but maybe didn’t get around to it before quitting time?

As for the vandalized art book, having worked in an Art School Library for two years, I can’t tell you how often we find books with crumpled up or ripped out pages. It’s sad really because you’d think artists, or would-be artists would take care of expensive art books. And real artists do, because art books are expensive and most artists are poor. But the entitled twats who pass for students at our school can just get mommy and daddy to pay for it so whatever. Rrrriiiipppp. They at lea st make an effort to hide their vandalism, though.

Anyway, point is: There’s no such thing as a ghost.

Princeton is shutting down their ESP and Paranormal Reasearch program because after decades of inquiry, investigation and theorizing they’ve found… absolutely nothing. Which is good science. They gave it a fair shake, found no evidence to support the dubious claims and so are moving resources to more fruitful areas of interest. Maybe in a few years the gang at TAPS will catch up on the scientific trend and go back to being plumbers, which is at least a useful trade.

As for what these librarians are doing, well, they should be embarrassed. They’re making us sensible, skeptical librarians look bad.

James Grimmelmann has written a paper outlining a coherent information policy for Borges’ Library of Babel.(PDF version here) He compares it’s vastness and multitudes, which contain not just all books in the universe but all possible books (including impossible and imaginary ones) to the Internet. It’s one of those rare confluences between Library wonk and lit nerd that is intriguing and fun to read. If you’re into that sort of thing.*

Link via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Not satisfied with mangling facts and figures about Google, Information Retrieval Systems or the Internet in general, in his latest rant, Michael Gorman sets his sights on the big fish: Wikipedia. It’s really always been about Wikipedia for him. Trashing Google, bloggers, and Burst Culture is just a side project. He’s really pissed off about Wikipedia and what it does to authoritative credibility in general but his in particular. As his posts have been hosted thus far by the Britannica Blog, that’s no real surprise, seeing as how they’re primary competition comes form Wikipedia:

All the central institutions of Western society have responded in a similarly reactive and alarmed manner. Many of these institutions are driven by the middle aged and old acting in a domain that is widely perceived to be the province of the young. This discontinuity is not helped by reliance on a series of urban myths about the supposed uniqueness of the young generation based on the idea that its members have no useful memory of the pre-Web life. Let us leave aside the fact that the “uniqueness of the young” has been proclaimed every 15 years or so for almost the past century—from the energetic flappers of the1920s to the lethargic slackers of the 1990s.

He’s finally become that stereotypical cranky old man, ranting about young people on his lawn. And flappers. I’m not going to parse the rest of his two part rumination on why Wikipedia, and by extension the whole entire Web, sucks. And flappers. It’s more of what we’ve already seen: over simplifications, generalizations and straw men of unusual size.

Wikipedia works. This isn’t just a fan speaking, or some dirty webified Youtubian. I did graduate work on Wikipedia and found that it works pretty well, applying the peer-review concept on a larger scale. An article published in Nature two years ago reached the same conclusion: Wikipedia is just as good as Britannica in most places, better in some but could use a little more attention paid to the more complex, technical articles, a fact that Wikipedians have mentioned and addressed frequently. And, as we say on the Web, it’s just as easy to fix Wikipedia as it is to bitch about what’s wrong with it. But of course, Wikipedia won’t cut Gorman a check for his work, so why bother? No pay, no play for our Serious Academic.

Michael Gorman is still showing his ass to the world over at Britannica Blog. This time he demonstrates that he hasn’t got a clue how Google works:

Information retrieval systems have been studied for many decades. In the course of that study two important criteria have been developed to evaluate such systems—those criteria are recall and relevance. The first measures the percentage of pertinent documents retrieved from a database (for example, if there are 100 documents on Zambian agriculture in a database and a search on that topic retrieves 76 of them, the recall is 76%). The second measures the supposed appropriateness of the documents that have been retrieved (for example, if you retrieve 100 documents when searching for Zambian agriculture and 76 of them are actually about Zambian agriculture, the relevance is 76%).

Information retrieval systems achieve high recall and relevance rates by the use of controlled vocabularies (indexing terms, etc.) and present the results of complex searches in a meaningful and usable order. By any of these criteria, Google and its like are miserable failures. A search on those engines on anything but the most minutely detailed topic will yield many thousands of “results” in no useful order and with wretched recall and relevance ratios. However, even when the documents retrieved by a search engine are on the subject sought, the quality of the material - often community-generated material that pops up high on a hit list because the material is free and easily accessible — is shoddy or irresponsible.

Let’s unpack some of the misconceptions that Gorman is, once again spreading heedlessly.

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Updated below.

Michael Gorman, self appointed Poobah of the Kranky Old Geezers of the Library World * has a new rant up about how the Internet and blogs are making us stupid at, of all places, the Britannica Blog. He starts off with a straw man so huge, the denizens of a small island off the coast of Scotland have already gathered around it, stuffed it with Edward Woodward and are fetching the torches as we speak:

The life of the mind in the age of Web 2.0 suffers, in many ways, from an increase in credulity and an associated flight from expertise. Bloggers are called “citizen journalists”; alternatives to Western medicine are increasingly popular, though we can thank our stars there is no discernable “citizen surgeon” movement; millions of Americans are believers in Biblical inerrancy—the belief that every word in the Bible is both true and the literal word of God, something that, among other things, pits faith against carbon dating; and, scientific truths on such matters as medical research, accepted by all mainstream scientists, are rejected by substantial numbers of citizens and many in politics.

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s Dr. Nathan Null, “a White House Situational Science Adviser,” tells us that: “Situational science is about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by facts.” This is satire, of course, but hardly too broad in a time when school boards aim “intelligent design” (creationism with lipstick on) at the minds of schoolchildren and powerful interests deny the very existence of catastrophic human-caused global climate change. These are evidence of a tide of credulity and misinformation that can only be countered by a culture of respect for authenticity and expertise in all scholarly, research, and educational endeavors.

For a man opposed to Burst Culture, he sure doesn’t waste time with any long winded preambles. But take a gander at that frame: it’s so gaudy it should be around a Da Vinci painting. “Citizen Journalists” (us bloggers) are in the same category as Barber Surgeons, Flat Earthers and Creationists. Nice, huh? How he thinks Bloggers or the Internet are to blame for Intelligent Design/Creationism or the popularity of Alternative Medicine is a mystery, one he doesn’t bother to explain. These have been around far longer than the Internet, as long as his beloved “Expert Culture” has, if not longer. If the freekin’ Enlightenment didn’t drive them away what makes him think the Internet can? Or that it should?

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So, librarians at the Sacramento Public Library are circulating a petition to have a Vote of No Confidence for their managers, because their shelves contain 10 copies of Jackass 2 and 6 of the Paris Hilton biography. But, as John Blyburg points out, all those copies are either checked out, on order or missing, meaning that they don’t have enough copies of Jackass 2 and the Paris Hilton biography to meet patron demand.

Quality control is one thing but Democracy, as we are told, is untidy. Sometimes, instead of hunkering down with War and Peace and The Ten Commandments, people would rather read or watch something, well, fun. And as any librarian will tell you, dictating fun is not our job. Dictating is not our job. We just provide people with the information they want. If they want lousy info, (or books or movies), well, we just smile, hand it to them and then make fun of them after they leave.

Link via Librarian.net.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, Jessamyn at Librarian.net has a video of her installing Ubuntu Linux onto three computers at a small library. This comes fast on the news from last week that Dell will be offering Ubuntu as an alternative Operating System to Windows Vista. After years of quietly percolating in the background, Linux is finally catching on in the popular imagination as an alternative to the ham fisted monopoly of Microsoft and I couldn’t be happier. That it’s Ubuntu that is making the noise is even better. It makes me almost want to buy a PC just to help the cause. Maybe I can convince my parents to switch? That might be a nifty little series, following the procedures, from talking my parents into the switch, all the way through the install process… hmm, yes…