The Rogue Scholar

Peak Oil & Libraries 3.0: Collapse-Proofing Ourselves

I recently bought (pre-ordered) a copy of Reinventing Collapse : The Soviet Example and American Prospects by Dmitry Orlov.  Orlov is a Peak Oiler and his writing on the subject is easily distinguishable from his contemporaries because he spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union during its collapse from Socialist Superpower to Just Another Asian Country With Nukes and a Funny Alphabet.  In other words, he's seen the mighty fall and it wasn't pretty. His work can be seen at his Club Orlov blog and if you have time, I'd suggest giving it a good look.

Peak Oil & Libraries 2.0

First, a great big thank you to Tom and Phil of EscapingNYC for pointing out that Library Journal has finally published an article about peak oil and what libraries should be thinking about in terms of dealing with it. (If you guys ever do manage to escape, please leave a forwarding address.)

It's a good article overall, but I've got a few relatively tiny problems with it. The author has clearly read a fair amount of James Howard's Kunstler's work, which is great, he's a terrific source for this subject. But then she writes:

If grand-scale fuel conservation and creation of alternative liquid fuels had begun two decades ago, the results of the decline would have gone largely unfelt. The demand for oil would have been lower and the rate of decline in production slower.

Possible, but I think unlikely, if only because alternative-liquid fuels (biodiesel, ethanol and liquefied coal to name three)  are a scam and were just as big a scam then,  just less heavily subsidized scams than they are today.  Note that the term "scam" here means "requires greater energy input per unit of production than is contained within that unit of production."  Ethanol is a particularly cruel joke in this regard, as it's made from corn, which can be, I dunno, eaten by hungry people. (Do you think it coincidental that food riots erupt in 37 countries just as our supply of ethanol explodes? I don't.)

I think what we could very easily have done twenty years ago was refurbish, modernize and expand our rail and water-based transportation infrastructure. We also could have built better, more fuel-efficient cars and trucks, re-thought how electricity was generated and delivered, and not built more 3,000 sq. ft. houses than we could afford to buy.  Oh, and we could have not exported nearly all of our manufacturing jobs to the Far East. All of these points have been made by Kunstler in the recent past.

Oh, well. Pet peeve over. It is an excellent article, and you should read  it.

Stuff has happened since I first starting posting on this subject.  I'm told by friends who have relatives in the oil business that had you suggested even a decade ago, with oil at $12 per barrel that we'd see such a remarkably steep price curve, due to stagnant supply and climbing international demand more than anything else, you'd have been laughed out of the room. (For the record, some did, and they were.) And I don't think that Peak Oil means the end of the world as we've known it, or even the end of libraries. But I do think it means that our current model of converting absolutely everything to digital media will be more expensive to maintain and more difficult to implement, if only because if the increased risk of losing access to those collections due to--of all things--lack of electricity.

Electricity is easy: take a pair of magnets, wrap them with copper wire and spin them around each other, and you get an electric current. Simple. What's a good deal less simple is how to provide a particular type of electrical current--in the case of the U.S., 120 volts at 60Hz frequency--in quantities sufficient to power 150 million+ homes and their attendant gadgets, gizmos, and appliances in a consistent manner.

"Consistent" in this case means, "always cheap and always on," neither of which will be a given 10 years from now. (Heck, it's not always a given now.) In 10 years, the word may come to mean "10 consecutive  hours a day, Monday through Friday." 20 years from now the concept of a reliable civilian power grid could well be ancient history.  So imagining how to revitalize our electricity-based ILS's and OPACs using the assumption that we'll always have all the PCs in the library  at our disposal may not be the best use of our time.  Granted, such things will help our patrons  in the short term (if 10 years is a short term to you), but the real question is one that the author touched on in her article: you're maintaining a public library, and resources are short;  your computers are old, and getting older. They break more often and each time, it takes longer for someone to actually fix it.  Worse, the parts needed to maintain it are becoming more difficult to find at any price.  People will naturally move away from exclusive reliance on the PCs and  go back to the stacks where the "real" books are. Also the supply of brand new books will shrink as deliveries become less predictable (and the mass market paperback publishing industry goes belly up, one publisher at a time) such that donations become primary sources for our collection.

We may want to think about how we'll track our stacks materials and update our card catalogs under those conditions.

New Digital Collection at Center for Jewish History Now Online

Tony Gill, Director of the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory at the Center for Jewish History posted this announcement on the METRO Digital Collections Special Interest Group mailing list:

The Center for Jewish History recently completed a METRO-funded pilot project to digitize and make freely accessible online 40 Yiddish and Hebrew children’s books, many of which are richly illustrated, from the collections of two of the Center’s Partners: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Yeshiva University Museum.

The collection, which is still growing rapidly, can be found online.

The books were digitized and made available by the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory, the Center's state-of-the-art in-house digital collections-building facility. In addition to making the children’s books available through CJH Digital Collections, the books were also uploaded to the International Children’s Digital Library (www.icdlbooks.org), thereby making them even more widely accessible to current and future generations.

The Children’s Books Pilot Project at the Center for Jewish History was supported in part by funds from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) through the New York State Regional Bibliographic Databases Program. Thanks to the success of this METRO-funded pilot project, the Center has since received a generous gift from the Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund to digitize a further 50 children’s books.

Please let us know what you think of this new digital collection by completing our brief online survey.

Take a look at the collection and take the survey (I did.)  Enjoy!

"Google Generation" A Myth, Says New Report

This came in this morning from Gary Price over at Resourcesshelf.com:

"Google Generation" is a Myth, Says New Research
Google is in the title but that's an attention grabber. The primary focus of the report is about younger people and access to info.

"A new report, commissioned by JISC and the British Library, counters the common assumption that the Google Generation -- young people born or brought up in the Internet age - is the most adept at using the web."

The report, which Gary links to in his post, is worth a good, long look, especially if you are wondering why your bibliographic database instruction sessions don't go quite the way you hoped more often that you'd like.  The reason why kids today don't do much better at database searching than anyone else is a complicated one, but if I had to make a snap guess I'd say because kids today (in my experience, of course, as everything on this blog is in my experience) don't generally have much in the way of programming skills, or  very much skill with systems analysis, logic, deductive reasoning, or--perhaps especially--curiosity about how the darned thing works.

There's more to be said about this--a lot more, and I'd like to come up with a more substantial post regarding the whirlwind that's spinning around my brain right now--but read the report first.  Two things strike me as being worthy of further discussion: first, why some knowledge of cataloging can make a real difference in crafting top notch search strategies, and second, why ease of use does not necessarily imply usefulness.  More on those topic (I hope) tomorrow.

Anyway, read the report.  Enjoy!

NIH Open Access Mandate in Danger

This note came over the LITA-L listserv from Charles W. Bailey over at Digital Scholarship.  It's worth reading.  In the interest of getting this out to as many folks as possible, I'll just post the e-mail in its (slightly edited) entirety, active links and all:

Peter Suber reports that the NIH open access mandate may be deleted or weakened by last-minute amendments to the FY 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill.

Click here for Peter Suber's report

If you are a US citizen and you support the mandate, there is an urgent need for you to contact your senators by the end of business on Monday, October 22.

You can easily contact them using the ALA Action Alert Web form with my cut-and-paste version of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access' text about the amendments or you can use the same form to write your own text.

You can easily contact them using the ALA Action Alert Web form with my cut-and-paste version of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access' text about the amendments or you can use the same form to write your own text.

Click here for the web form

Not to push both my readers, but I think you could do worse than to forward this to someone.

The Open Library

Sure you have heard of it by now, haven't you? You haven't? All right then, read all about it here. And let me know what you think. (I'm still deciding how I fell about it.)

(Thanks to Ian Fairclough for this tidbit.)

More Awards and a Bit About the Iraqi NationalLibrary

Looking for a real challenge? Try being the Director/Head Honcho/Guy in Charge  of the Iraqi National Library.  This is not a job for the faint hearted.

In lighter news that's closer to home (for me, that is) the Academy has won honors for our website. In the words of our communications director:

"The Academy's website has been awarded the 2007 Cyber Space Award from the New York Society of Association Executives, an honor for which the entire staff should be proud. The award recognizes "outstanding immediacy of overview, ease of navigation, aesthetics, consistency, timeliness of content, internal search capabilities, usefulness, interact-ability, originality, and Internet vision."

Woot for us! [APPLAUSE]

Calling Mr. Decimal

If you're looking to renew your knowledge of Dewey Decimal classification--which can be a drag, but plenty of libraries continue to use it and it's a good skill to retain over the long haul--then you might want to take a look at the WebDewey Tutorial over at OCLC's web site.  They cover Dewey in a fair amount of detail.  From the web site description:

WebDewey offers easy-to-use, World Wide Web-based access to the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and related information, with searching and browsing capabilities; Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) intellectually and statistically mapped to Dewey numbers; and links from the mapped LCSH to the corresponding LCSH authority records. You can also add your own notes to WebDewey and display them in context, which allows you to both record valuable information about local classification practices and have it available for ready reference.

The only problems that I can see is that the tutorial won't work on any Macintosh or UNIX system and it's selective as to which PC browsers it works with. You may have to tweak your preferences a bit.

Enjoy!

EPA Libraries and Public Access

This article comes out of of today's edition of the Christian Science Monitor:

As EPA Libraries go Digital, Public Access Suffers
By Mark Clayton

For a new Democratic Congress facing big environmental issues from global warming to dwindling fisheries, the first step may be keeping the nation's top environmental libraries from closing - and saving their myriad tomes from ending up as recycled cardboard.

To meet a proposed 2007 budget cut, the Environmental Protection Agency has in recent months shuttered regional branches in Chicago, Dallas, and Kansas City, Mo., serving 15 states, and has cut hours and restricted access to four other regional libraries, affecting 16 states. Two additional libraries in the EPA's Washington headquarters closed in October.

Until these closures, the EPA had 26 libraries, brimming with a trove of environmental science in 500,000 books, 25,000 maps, thousands of studies and decades of research - much of it irreplaceable, experts say.

EPA officials say the closures are part of a plan "to modernize and improve" services while trimming $2 million from its budget. Under the plan, "unique" library documents would be "digitized" as part of a shift to online retrieval.

But while electronic databases are easy to access, they could end up being more costly to use - and thousands of those "unique" paper documents may now sit for years in repositories waiting for the funding needed to "digitize" them, critics say. Meanwhile, the closings are proceeding so quickly that key materials are likely to be lost or inaccessible for a long time, EPA librarians say.

The rest of the article is here.  I'm not sure what I thinkof the words unique and digitized being in quotes in the fifth paragraph--they're both accepted terms in Libraryland these days.  I'll be nice and assume the writer and maybe his editor were not aware of that.  Doesn't matter, it's still worth the time spent reading it.

First, Re-Open the Libraries

This article from Kelpie Wilson hit a particular note with me because until 2 years ago my wife worked as a reference librarian at the NYC EPA Region 2 library on Broadway.  She watched for 3 years as a staff of three librarians, one media specialist and one tech services paraprofessional were relocated, outsourced or just plain let go.  There may be one librarian there now--there were two the last time I checked, about a year ago.  Here's an excerpt--the rest of the story is here.

    First, Re-Open the Libraries
    By Kelpie Wilson
    t r u t h o u t | Columnist

    Wednesday 15 November 2006

    It never got down to actual book-burning, but the Republican choke-hold on government would clearly have taken us there. In August, under the guise of fiscal responsibility, the Bush Environmental Protection Agency began closing most of its research libraries, both to the public and to its own staff.

    The EPA's professional staff objected strongly, insisting that closing the libraries would hamstring them in their jobs. In a letter to Congress protesting the closures, public employees said, "We believe that this budget cut is just one of many Bush administration initiatives to reduce the effectiveness of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and to continue to demoralize its employees."

    The EPA's precipitous move to close the libraries was based on a $2 million cut in Bush's proposed $8 billion EPA budget for 2007. EPA bureaucrats did not wait to see if Congress might restore the funds or shift budget priorities in order to save the libraries; it acted immediately to box up documents for deep storage, and shut the doors.

    While the official EPA line is that all of the documents will be eventually be digitized and made available online, this will cost money that the agency does not have, so for practical purposes, all of the thousands of reports and maps that now exist only on paper or microfiche will be lost to the public and to agency scientists. They might as well just burn them.