The Invisible Library

An interesting article from the NY Times on digitization of library collections:

“There’s an illusion being created that all the world’s knowledge is on the Web, but we haven’t begun to glimpse what is out there in local archives and libraries,” said Edward L. Ayers, a historian and dean of the college and graduate school of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia. “Material that is not digitized risks being neglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users.”

To be sure, digitization efforts over the last 10 years have been ambitious and far-reaching. For many institutions, putting collections online, for both preservation and accessibility, is a priority. Yet for every letter from Abraham Lincoln to William Seward that can be found online, millions of documents bearing fine-grained witness to the Civil War will never be digitized. And for every CD re-release of Bessie Smith singing “Gimme a Pigfoot,” the work of hundreds of lesser-known musicians from the early 20th century are unlikely to be converted to digital form. Money, technology and copyright complications are huge impediments.

The largest impediment to getting most everything on line is money. We’re talking millions of dollars to get this far, which is just a drop in the proverbial bucket. That’s not saying it couldn’t be done. The Library of Congress and NARA could be made top priorities, if only they didn’t have their budgets routinely slashed and staff cut. And it isn’t just an argument of there not being money, either. For what we spend in Iraq in one hour, we could pay for everything at the LoC to be digitized and hire the people to do it. But the money isn’t spent in making the nation’s archives available to everyone everywhere, it’s spent blowing the arms off Iraqi children.

As I said, this is only part of the problem. Another is simply advertising. No one thinks to brag about what their collections have. In order to attract researchers who don’t know that you have the Steinbeck papers or Spanish Colonial records, why not have a blog? Even a weekly feature of of one item from your collection, using the power of the Internet to communicate it’s existence to a wider audience would attract some attention. There are thousands of librarians (OK, hundreds, maybe even dozens) who would be able to pas so the news that your library has genealogical information, if only they knew where to look. Making blogging and social networking acceptable practice in the Library field is another hurdle, but time will solve that one. As younger, technologically savvy librarian bloggers become more influential and the old dinosaurs who fear that Technology is killing the trade rather than revitalizing it (I’m looking at you, Michael Gorman) then the more likely it will be that emerging technology will be put to service in a library near you.

Then of course there’s the dirty secret of the library world: not everything is worth saving. while genealogical information and the history of Scott Joplin’s recording sessions are important, the napkins that Einstein scribbled his equations on are not. Knowing what is valuable and what is trash is always a tough call, as one person’s trash is anther’s dissertation topic, but still, it’s necessary to weed out the Danielle Steele Manuscripts from the Vonnegut first editions.

Thanks to Steve for the link!

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (vol. 1) tops the ALA’s list of the ten best Graphic Novels for teens. Warren Ellis is baffled as well.

CNN:

DALLAS, Texas (AP) — Negotiations to build George W. Bush’s presidential library at Southern Methodist University have divided the campus, pitting the administration and some alumni against liberal-leaning faculty members who say the project would be an embarrassment to the school.

Some professors have complained that the combined library, museum and think tank would celebrate a presidency that unnecessarily took the country into a war.
The fear is that the library “will continue to espouse the philosophy and practice of the Bush administration, which has seriously divided our nation and has brought the ire of other countries,” said William McElvaney, a retired professor at SMU’s theology school and co-author a November opinion piece in the campus newspaper titled “The George W. Bush Library: Asset or Albatross?”

SMU emerged as the front-runner in the competition last month when the library site selection committee said it was entering further discussions with the 11,000-student, private university in one of Dallas’s wealthiest neighborhoods. The project will be financed with a private fund drive aimed at raising at least $200 million.
Bush connections to SMU run deep. First lady Laura Bush is a graduate and is on the board of trustees. Vice President Dick Cheney previously served on the board. Presidential adviser Karen Hughes and former White House counsel Harriet Miers are both graduates.

SMU officials said the project is unlikely to be derailed by the faculty opposition, and said the professors opposed to it are in the minority.

Not mentioned in the article is why the President would want his library to be at a college rather than in his own library, like most Presidents. Given Georgie Boys fondness for self aggrandizement and spending taxpayer’s money, you’d think he would build a gold plated Taj Mahal with champagne fountains for his papers. But, Presidential Libraries, by their nature are public institutions. As such, they cannot have any restrictions put on access to the information in their collection, except where that information is classified or sensitive. If you go to the Bill Clinton Library in Arkansas, you can see everything, read all declassified papers and do research on the president’s term, using primary documents. They even have a section on the Lewinski Affair. But, by donating his papers to SMU, W., like his father, who donated his papers to Texas A&M, can put any restrictions on them he wants.

George Bush Senior’s collection has its access restricted indefinitely. Any researcher wanting to so much as read his lunch receipts would have to get written permission form the president.

Just one more example of the Boy Who Would Be King telling all us serfs to stop asking so many damn questions and while were at it, why don’t we just fuck off and die.

Update: see Dr. Andrew in comments.

Lori Bowen Ayre over at Mentat asks the good questions:

What if the Library Worked Like Netflix?

NetFlix is easy, personal, fast, and convenient. It assists users in finding titles they will not only enjoy but titles that they are probably very excited to find because they are surprised that they could be found or they’ve never heard of them before. Their choices are not limited to the blockbusters of the day. NetFlix makes it very easy for customers to borrow and return titles. NetFlix is to movies as libraries should be to books.

She lays out a solid argument that I agree with a hundred percent. Too bad it’ll never work.

Some of the institutionalized policies that we librarians deal with are holdovers from the analog days of card catalogs and physical browsers (people looking at shelves) rather than OPACs and web browsers. But there are still enough old school librarians around who remember how things used to work and never wanted them to change to begin with and don’t want them to change too much, at least while they are still around.

A colleague from grad school was telling me about this recently. She had a great idea to streamline her library’s ILL procedures, and all it would have cost was a piece of software that was less than the cost of one month’s ILL shipping expenses. But the ILL Librarian there didn’t want to hear it. She had her paperwork and her forms and her filing system and her two to six week turn around time and that was that. Didn’t matter if the new system would save time and money and help people better. The Netflix model of patron service probably has merit. And public librarians could save thousands of dollars switching to Open Source, and maybe one day we’ll ditch Dewey and LoC and catalog with tag clouds. But not today. Or tomorrow.

We new school librarians can’t change the world It’s going to take time. Time to either convince admin to take a chance on new technology (regardless of how well it’s proved itself in other fields) or time to wait for the dinosaurs to die off.

Seems the cop that tasered the kid at the UCLA library has a bit of history:

The UCLA police officer videotaped last week using a Taser gun on a student also shot a homeless man at a campus study hall room three years ago and was earlier recommended for dismissal in connection with an alleged assault on fraternity row, authorities said.

UCLA police confirmed late Monday that the officer who fired the Taser gun was Terrence Duren, who has served in the university’s Police Department for 18 years.

Ursela K. Le Guin really likes libraries:

[…] I feel above all that I’m here as a proxy, a stand-in, for Literature. Literature is too busy to come collect her prize, and she’s too big to get into the building, even this building which was built for her. Literature is huge — they can’t fit her even into the Library of Congress, because she keeps not talking English. She is very big, very polyglot, very old, even older than I am by about 3000 years, and she weighs a lot. When we come to judge civilisations we see how heavy Literature weighs in the balance. Whole peoples are dismissed as ’savage’ or ‘primitive’, meaning they didn’t write things down, while others are seen as supreme because they left a literature. Take the Ancient Greeks. If it weren’t for Homer and Sophocles and Thucycides, all we’d know of them is that they were awfully good with marble. We wouldn’t know that they invented tragedy and democracy. We might not even know that democracy had been invented.
There have been governments that celebrated literature, but most governments dislike it, justly suspecting that all their power and glory will soon be forgotten unless some wretched, powerless liberal in the basement is writing it down. Of course they do their best to police the basement, but it’s hard, because Government and Literature, even when they share a palace, exist on different moral planes. Each is the ghost in the other’s bedroom. A government can silence writers easily, yet Literature always escapes its control. Literature cannot control a government; poets, as poets, do not legislate. What they can do is set minds free of the control of any tyrant or demagogue and his lies and disinformation.

Librarians like her, too. And librarians, for that matter. Alas, our library has none of her books. I’ll have to work on that…

link via Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny revolution.

Just in case you needed more proof that the Patriot Act was a bad idea:

UCPD officers shot a student several times with a Taser inside the [UCLA] Powell Library CLICC computer lab late Tuesday night before taking him into custody.

No university police officers were available to comment further about the incident as of 3 a.m. Wednesday, and no Community Service Officers who were on duty at the time could be reached.

At around 11:30 p.m., CSOs asked a male student using a computer in the back of the room to leave when he was unable to produce a BruinCard during a random check. The student did not exit the building immediately. 

Eyewitness reports claim that the officers continued to use the Taser on him after he was handcuffed and subdued and that they threatened bystanders who were looking a little too concerned. But hay, I’m sure he was really a terrorist, not just a swarthy student.

This madness has got to stop and unfortunately, I have serious doubts as to weather the new Democrat-controlled Congress will have the balls to challenge the constitutionality of the patriot Act. Which means we librarians are going to have to find ever-elaborate ways to protect our patrons (and ourselves) from the more inane and despicable aspects of this fruitless law.
Hat tip to Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Making Light.

A surprisingly wrong headed op-ed from the New York Times was the hot subject of the Comics scholars listserv today. I thought I’d share it and my commentary, with the class:

New York Times October 11, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
No Undergrad Left Behind
By EUGENE HICKOK
Richmond, Va.
LIKE it or not, the No Child Left Behind Act passed under President Bush has transformed the conversation about American public education.

Already, we’re off to a roaring start. Suck it you liberal whiners! It’s the law!

The law has its flaws, but the nation has benefited from its focus on results and its willingness to confront gaps in educational achievement.

Not that he’s going to give us any statistics or hard evidence for this but hey it’s an op ed, so he’s free to just throw his opinions into the ether. It’s a sweet gig, paid for by the NYT, no less. Wonder how I could get my biased and completely obtuse opinions on the internet…

Now the administration has extended the discussion into what has long been considered sacred ground in Washington politics: higher education. Recent studies have highlighted higher education’s skyrocketing costs, uneven quality and poor graduation rates. Even more disturbing are reports that reading competency and comprehension are declining among college graduates — as if there should be any question about the reading skills of people with college degrees. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has addressed these and other concerns by embracing reforms that could strengthen higher education and improve access and opportunities for America’s students. Among her commission’s recommendations are heightening fiscal and academic accountability, improving access to financial aid and assembling accurate data on the performance of students and institutions. While no one seems to be saying that No Child Left Behind policies should be applied to the country’s colleges and universities…

Until now.

… it does make sense to consider how some of the program’s underlying principles might help to ensure that higher education in America remains higher education. A college degree provides Americans with a competitive edge on the job market. But what is coming under increasing scrutiny is whether a college degree is truly proof of a college education. It is time for colleges to develop accurate measures of student achievement, and of the value institutions of higher education provide. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute recently released a report from the National Civics Literacy Board, on which I serve, showing what sort of information the public needs and why it is so important that it be available. The study tracked student knowledge of American history and civics at select colleges and universities, with the goal of determining how much students learn in these subjects over four years of college. They measured the change in knowledge by evaluating freshmen and seniors. And the results were appalling: college seniors failed the civic literacy assessment with an average score of 53.2 percent.

How this is the fault of colleges is beyond me. Basic literacy (civic or otherwise) is taught in grade school, you know, where NCLB and its glorious effects are in full swing.

This sort of information is important for tuition payers, policy makers and institutional leaders to have when trying to determine the difference a college education can make. Institutions of higher education need to report an academic bottom line. While they’re at it, colleges and universities must make it a priority that their students graduate. While most tuition payers assume a baccalaureate degree takes four years to complete, the truth is it takes typically more than six years. In 2003, only 34 percent of graduating students had completed their degree in four years or less. There are reasons for this, some of them understandable. But in far too many institutions, the emphasis is on enrolling students, not on graduating them. And far too often, that includes enrolling students who are not adequately prepared for higher education, and who therefore drop out after one or two semesters of struggling, or else spend most of their time in remedial or developmental courses that are not really college-level. Behind the impressive numbers of low-income and minority students enrolled in higher education are grim statistics regarding completion for a degree.

Nice. You college kids these days can’t read and if you can’t read good, you won’t graduate! So let me attach that idea to, ” the impressive numbers of low-income and minority students enrolled in higher education” and see if I can’t subliminally point to what we here at the Heritage Foundation thinks is the real problem, all you minority kids dragging the poor white kids down. It takes years of higher education, fed through the GOP spin machine to be able to throw a nice conservative curve ball like that out there.

Americans should have more information about higher education curriculum and teaching. Higher education in this country differs substantially from elementary and high school education, most obviously in what is offered and how it is offered. The academy responds to the demands of disciplines and faculty. It is a culture that cherishes independence and freedom. And it is a culture seriously out of touch with much of America.

Faculty members decide what they want to teach and when they want to teach, if, indeed, they teach at all. This is particularly true regarding undergraduate instruction, which is something of an afterthought on many campuses. Faculty members typically spend fewer than 200 hours a year in the classroom. That amounts to just five 40-hour weeks.

Right there in the emphasized line is where Eugene leaves planet Earth entirely. He was in a low degraded orbit before, but now he’s headed for the Moon. Faculty members don’t just scribble ideas for a curriculum on the back of some strip club napkin as Eugene dreams they do. All courses have requirements based on accreditation and all courses have to be approved by the board of trustees, at least at colleges here on planet Earth. Maybe things work differently at Mars U, which is obviously where Mr. Hickok went to school.

Take a look at what passes for subjects of scholarly and instructional focus on campuses. Should taxpayer dollars really go to underwrite courses in such things as the history of comic book art? Policy makers and tuition payers need to be made aware of what sorts of courses institutions consider appropriate to fulfill core academic requirements, if anything resembling an academic core even exists. And there needs to be a greater emphasis on teaching students what they need to know, rather than what faculty want to talk about.

Ah, now he’s hitting me at home. I have a four year, accredited degree in Sequential Art. That’s right, my undergrad was in Comic Books, both the history of them and how to make them. And cultural studies apparently have no place in Mr. Hickok’s dream University. All the students at Mars U read Sophocles in the original Latin and they like it that way! Never mind that I went on to get a MLS and now catalog comics as a librarian for one of the largest art schools in the Southeast. Good to know my professors wasted their time and education and that my career is an aberration in the eyes of… the Heritage Foundation. Speaking of wasted educations…

One of No Child Left Behind’s hallmarks is transparency. Today parents know more about the performance of their children’s schools than ever before.

Transparency and performance, like a hamster wheel.

This same principle needs to be applied to higher education. Colleges and universities need to be able to explain why they charge the tuition they charge, what their graduation rates are, what they feel constitutes an educated person and how they propose to get first year students from here to there. The various college rating systems and publications are entertaining and interesting to read, but they don’t provide the sort of objective data tuition payers need to make informed decisions.

For generations, a college education has been a big part of the American dream. Much of the world has come to America to get a higher education. But nothing guarantees that this will be the case in the future. Indeed, for more and more American citizens, that dream is coming into question. It is time for serious reflection and reform in higher education — before it is too late.

Perhaps if the ever-present fear of having our jobs shipped overseas where some Indian or Chinese Grad student will do it for a quarter of the wages were taken out of the equation, that four year degree might mean a hell of a lot more.

Eugene Hickok, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, was a deputy secretary of education during President Bush’s first term.

Emphasis added, which explains everything.

Pam over at Pandagon beat me to the story about the Gerogia Mom who wants to ban Harry Potter books in school here because they indoctinate kids into Wicca, cause school shottings, and acne:

A woman who maintains that the Harry Potter books are an attempt to teach children witchcraft is pushing for the second time to have them banned from school libraries.

Laura Mallory, a mother of four from the Atlanta suburb of Loganville, told a Georgia Board of Education officer that the books by British author J.K. Rowling, sought to indoctrinate children as Wiccans, or practitioners of religious witchcraft.

Referring to the recent rash of deadly assaults at schools, Mallory said books that promote evil - as she claims the Potter ones do - help foster the kind of culture where school shootings happen.

That would not happen if students instead read the Bible, Mallory said.

OK, I made up the bit about the books causing acne, but its just as plausible. This woman wouldn’t know a Wiccan if one walked up to her and said “Merry meet”. She probably head the word somewhere and learned that it was the modern religion of “witchcraft” and flipped out like all these ditzy Georgia soccer moms do. A couple years back the local paper advertised a Harry Potter book burning just across the border at a church in South Carolina. That’s the mentality we’re talking about here. Wicca, Satanism, school shootings, they’re all related in her twitterpated little mind. Harry Potter is just the most recent and convenient icon for religious nuts to attach their ire to. Before Harry Potter it was Marylyn Manson, and before that it was Ozzy, and Kiss and Led Zeppelin, preceded by Elvis Presley, then Swing Music, then Ice cream parlors and the evils of the zipper. And flappers. let’s not forget how flappers (and bobbed haircuts for girls) were supposed to drive us all to Hell in a merry little handbasket.

None of this nonsense addresses the real reason school shootings happen, though. Most of the kids who have gone into their schools and shot people did so because of the stringent enforcement of cultural and social conformity. These kids were outcasts, bullied and made fun of for years until they couldn’t take it anymore.

As for the guy who shot up the school last month and the one who shot up the Amish school last week, they were severely disturbed men with violence issues and a pedophilia streek a mile wide. if they hadn’t have shot up schools after raping girls, they would be running for Rep. Foley’s seat in Congress.

So yeah, there are weirdoes and disturbed individuals with easy access to guns and internet porn out there. They are a real problem. But so far, none of them have had dogeared copies of The Prisoner of Azkaban in their pockets. And they didn’t listen to Kiss records either.

Here’s a list from the ALA of the most challenged and banned books in the country. Bet you can’t guess what the most banned book is. Hint: it’s about a boy with glasses who goes to a special school.

What’s your favorite banned book? Let me know in comments.