The Invisible Library

Brent Bozell has a column at Townhall in which he takes us dirty hippie librarians to task for our censorship:

It is quite apparent who the ALA believes to be the heroes and villains of this struggle. There are the avatars of intellectual freedom, the brave souls who champion open-mindedness, and then there are the censorious busybodies. Some have made the obvious point that challenging libraries to provide titles they’re not stocking would turn the tables and make people realize that librarians can also be censorious in the titles they choose not to display. The mere act of selecting some books and excluding others is a “censorious” act.

Press accounts leave out that the ALA not only disdains the public “challenges,” it lobbies on the books’ behalf. In 2006, the two-penguin-daddy “And Tango Makes Three” was honored as an ALA Notable Children’s Book. The librarians’ group isn’t simply for “freedom.” It’s for sexual liberation, promoting the “non-traditional,” and it takes offense at the idea that parents might not want their children discussing homosexuality in kindergarten. Simon & Schuster, the publishers of “Tango,” offer discussion questions about the book on their website. One says: “Tango has two fathers instead of the traditional mother and father. Do you have a nontraditional family, or do you know someone who does?”

Already we can predict how the ALA next year will complain about any objection to a book called “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” the story of a young guinea pig who worries that her Uncle Bobby won’t play with her anymore after he “marries” his boyfriend Jamie. The book ends at the “wedding,” with Chloe as the enthusiastic flower girl. In other words, the ALA doesn’t favor open discussion and debate with parents — which is what the “challenges” represent. Its idea of “freedom” is emboldening librarians to be brave enough to indoctrinate children with what they really need to know, whether their parents object or even know about it. If public debate follows, it’s viewed as a distasteful and unfortunate bump on the road to enlightenment.

You keep using this word. I don’t think it means what you think it means, Brent.

First off, the ALA’s Most Challenged list is compiled to bring attention to books that people–specifically, people form the community served by the local library–want removed for ideological reasons. Promoting books that bigots and other non-elites* want banned is the exact opposite of censorship.

Secondly, promoting books with a minority viewpoint, such as And Tango Makes Three, while not promoting, say the Bible is not censorship either. The Bible, or to be less inflammatory, Doctor Seuss books, don’t really need promoting. Everyone already knows about those books and the viewpoints they express and knows that they can come into just about any library and find them. But people also come into libraries looking for other books, sometimes ones they may not even know exist but hope to find because they need information that isn’t contained in the usual books. Information such as how to handle introducing children to the notion of same sex parents. And because libraries serve everyone in the community, not just the privileged white Christian majority, they often carry and promote these books as well as the standard selections that won’t offend your lily white, antiseptic mind.

Also: if you don’t see the book you want on the shelf, you can always find the nearest librarian and request them to carry it. They’ll more than likely agree to purchase it, with the caveat that they may not be able to do so right away, since their budget has been cut by anti-intellectual shills for one of the most unenlightened and disastrous administrations in US history.

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Link via Mister Leonard Pierce at Sadly, No!

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* Thanks to the tireless efforts of Brent Bozell and the right wing clown car posse, everyone who isn’t a coal miner’s daughter or a member of the KKK’s noose tying brigade is now an “elite” which no longer means good, but has come to mean self-satisfyingly superior. Because why anyone would want to feel superior to mouth breathing red necks and lynch mobs in search of a body is clearly beyond the intellectual skills of Brent Bozell. These are his people after all.

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.

Emily over at Library Revolution brings up a point that relates, tangentially, to something I mentioned recently in regards to Michael Gorman and his fear of a user-contributed world:

My husband and I recently took our son to the Bronx zoo, where we were in for a treat – se got to see an Okapi up close and personal. Apparently, even in the zoo it is rare to see an Okapi up close – they usually hide in the back of the exhibit. But that day the Okapi was interested in being social and was right there up by the glass.
After talking to one of the zoo guides about this interesting and unique creature and the fact that it is unusual to get such a good look, I was curious. So when I got home I took a few minutes to look up the Okapi online. I just wanted to get a little bit information, so I ended up on Wikipedia, of course. There I learned a few facts about its habitat and behavior, including the interesting fact that they like to eat the burnt wood left over from a lighting strike.

And that was enough for me. It’s all I wanted or needed to know.

So when I have conversations with librarians concerned that people are using the internet to get fast, basic information instead of coming in to the library for “real” research, I have a hard time thinking that is always a bad thing.

Don’t get me wrong. Students need to use good, reliable sources for their research, and a quick Wikipedia reference just isn’t going to cut it. Medical questions, financial questions, and other really important topics should be handled carefully and researched in much more depth. There are plenty of times when there is just no replacement for good, solid library research with the help of an information professional.

But this wasn’t one of them. And there are lots of instances when basic information gained quickly is more than sufficient. I didn’t need (or want) to delve into great tomes of zoological knowledge to learn detailed Okapi facts. I didn’t need to access scientific journals via complex databases or double check the citations and cross references for multiple sources.

This is an important development that often gets overlooked, not just by librarians but by most people in general when discussing the web: people know how to use it to find basic facts and figures that they otherwise wouldn’t. They may not be expert searchers but– and this is the real kicker– they don’t have to be. 9 times out of 10, people use the Internet to find out some basic info on Okapi, or the name of that actor, the one who plays the Lead Tenor in ‘Springtime for Hitler” in the Producers. He looks really familiar, but what’s his name? It’s easy to find out– grab the laptop, jump on line and go to IMDB. (He’s John Barrowman, better known as Captain Jack Harkness from Doctor Who).

Ten years ago, this answer would have been a lot harder to find out. Sure, you could wait for the credits to roll and pause the VCR, squint and go, “John Barrowman? Well great, I know his name, but what else has he been in?” You would have then had to have gone to the library, asked for a movie guide and hoped they had an up to date one, which they probably didn’t. Now, a few clicks of the mouse and you’re informed. Maybe it’s trivial information but you now know something you didn’t before and more than that, you know where to find information like that, again. Most information needs are like this, which is the dirty secret reference librarians don’t tell you. I do five hours a week on the reference desk and most of my questions are: Can I borrow your stapler? Where are the periodicals? and Why doesn’t my login info work on this computer? Every once in a while though, you get a meaty little research question. I had one recently that made my pulse jump because it was actually interesting: Are their any manifestos about Earthworks and nature installations? A student was writing a paper on Earth Art, like the Spiral Jetty or the Gates and wanted to know if there was any document that laid out the reasons and theories that motivate artists to create these works. She was interested in the history of them as well but wasn’t sure where to draw the line. Did Earth Works go back only to the Sixties or should she include ancient works like the Nazca Lines or Stonehenge? This is the sort of question that involves doing complex searching on databases and looking for books on the topic, a job that requires searching skills. Finding out about John Barrowman’s acting career? Not so much. Knowing the difference between the two types of information is important but recognizing that most people these days can find the easy stuff on their own — that’s huge.

Good friend and regular reader, Andrew sent me this link to the Eugene Weekly, about Wizard Rock:

What you may not know, however, is that within the last couple years, an entire music subculture has been spawned from the world  of Harry Potter: wizard rock. More than 200 bands have come up with clever names (The Hermione Crookshanks Experience, for example) and written rock ‘n’ roll, punk, acoustic and even dance songs about everything from going to Hogsmeade to saving Ginny Weasley from deadly basilisks. There is an engaging purity to the music these bands make since the often campy songs ooze with absolute joy and silliness. These folks genuinely have fun mixing their love of music and Harry Potter.

The best part is, several of these bands make regional tours playing in library’s and chanting slogans like, “Fight Evil, read books.” Good stuff all around.

A common feature in the Lovecraftian horror sub-genre is the idea that there is some class of knowledge that Man Was Not Meant to Know. This usually involved some mind bending aspect of the cosmos that turns our psyche inside out if we were to perceive it, or a race of semi-tangible aliens who resemble pineapples with bat wings that turn out to have genetically engineered us as at some distant point in the past because they liked the taste of our brains. This information is invariably located in a book with a tongue twister for a name kept handily on the shelf at Miskatonic University’s Library, albeit in the closed stacks, though pretty much anyone could get it if they just asked for it. A recent poll by the Pew Research Group confirms that a surprisingly large number of people actually think there are books that contain Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, and that they are in our school libraries:

Since 1999, support for the idea of banning “books with dangerous ideas” from public school libraries has declined from 55% to 46% and has now fallen to the lowest level of support of the past 20 years, in contrast with the modest increase observed in concerns about pornographic material in magazines and movies.

The fact that the number of people who would ban books form libraries has fallen to 46% is bothersome.

Hat tip to Emily at Library Revolution.

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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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.

An update on yesterday’s post: it looks like Bush’s bid for Kingly privileges with the Constitution will not pass.

By lopsided bipartisan majorities, the House passed bills March 14 to reverse an executive order issued by President Bush allowing presidents to withhold their records from the public and to require donors to presidential libraries to identify themselves.

The Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007 (H.R. 1255) would rescind an executive order issued by President Bush in 2001 allowing incumbent or former presidents to prevent the release of their presidential papers. At that time, critics said the order reversed the premise of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which called for the release of presidential papers 12 years after a president leaves office.

The White House issued a statement saying that the bill was “misguided, and would improperly impinge on the President’s constitutional authority, in violation of settled separation of powers principles,” the Washington Post reported March 14.

He’s threatening to veto the new bill, which will reascend his executive order but he’s only used that once, to discard frozen embryos that would otherwise go to good scientific research, and given his problems with Gonzales and the  Capitol Hill Eight, it looks like he’ll have other things on his mind, like ensuring that he has a legacy to whitewash.

Not content with bending the constitution over the Lincoln Bedroom divan and having his way with it fortnightly, The Boy Who Would Be King has decided that not only does he get to decide who reads his papers, but so will his children and grand children:

As professors at Southern Methodist University have mobilized against the plans to build President Bush’s library there, their focus has not been the library, but a policy institute to be affiliated with it that would have as its mission promoting the Bush philosophy.

Such an institute, with an explicitly ideological identity and reporting to the president’s foundation instead of to the university, runs counter to academic values, the critics have said. Many times they have attempted to contrast their dislike of the institute with the library itself, which could be a valuable source of documents on the Bush administration — open to scholars with a range of views. And SMU officials, in defending the library plans, have stressed the scholarly value of the archive.

But with opposition to the SMU plans growing, national groups of archivists and historians are trying to broaden the debate. Weeks after 9/11, President Bush signed an executive order giving presidents and former presidents much more control over their records — and extended that right to a family member when a former president dies. While there have been periodic disputes over how much control presidents should have over their papers, the Bush order goes beyond the control asserted by any president since Nixon (whose efforts to control his papers led to various laws to promote access).

Basically, what this provision means is that not only can GW keep Reagan’s paper’s locked up and out of the reach of researchers for longer than the usual 12 years but he’ll be able to look up his own papers, and his daddy’s, for however long he wants– even after he’s dead. He can grant his children and descendants the power of sole ownership, meaning that if you want to view his paper’s fifty years from now, you’d have to buy Jenna and Barb a drink and even then, maybe they’ll let you.

W keeps saying that no one can judge him now, that only history can do that. What he isn’t saying is that he’s going to do everything in his power to ensure that the only history involving him that you get to read is written by his loyal true believers. No one bothered to teach hi the difference between hagiography and history, but then, he’s always held the view that their was one set of rules for him and different, more stringent rules for those not chosen by Jesus, God and the Easter Bunny, that is, everyone else.