The Rogue Scholar

NYTSL Event Calendar Update

Just a quick reminder that this Friday the 23rd of March will be the New York Technical Services (NYTSL) Spring Reception. The event will be at the Butler Library at Columbia University, Room 523 from 3pm to 5pm.

This is an opportunity for librarians, archivists, and information professionals from the metropolitan area to meet informally. It is also a chance for library school students to learn about the various professional organizations in the metropolitan area and to meet future colleagues and employers. Nobody ever lost a job by networking.

It's free and wine and cheese will be served. The only catch is that you must register beforehand. We have a few spots left, so if you'd like to register for the event, just drop me a line.

I hope to see you there.

Audrey Cohen, NBC, and the NYPD

 So the archivist at NBC is calling the cops on Lou, our director.

We have a VHS tape in the Audrey Cohen archive, a gifted video recording from over thirty years ago of Gabe Pressman interviewing her for NBC . We don't however have the necessary equipment or training to convert the material to DVD. Lou called the archivist at NBC to see whether they'd be able to transfer the video onto a DVD for us once we sent the tape to them.

I wasn't there for the conversation but Lou found it fascinating that the gentleman was apparently willing to call the cops to get that tape back. (This is the tape we were planning on sending them anyway.) I don't know what's going to happen next (hint: nothing!) but we agreed that the threat was a bit over the top, given the circumstances.

Personally, I wonder where that sort of reaction likely comes from. Anyone can have a bad day, and it might be the gentleman at NBC's turn. He might have gotten home last night to find the locks on the doors changed and his belongings strewn across the lawn. He might have opened a seemingly innocuous letter to find that his neighbors are suing him. NBC might have passed him over for a raise again or cut his department's budget for the third time this year. He might have opened his bag lunch--the same bag lunch he's been packing and eating every workday for the past 38 years (a tuna fish sandwich with lettuce and mayonnaise on wheat bread, with a baggie of baby carrots and a box of Welch's Grape Drink) to find that someone, perhaps his wife who meant well but just won't stop touching his stuff, had sent him to work with a roast beef sandwich on rye bread with mustard and Russian dressing instead, which completely threw him off his game because while he's okay with roast beef even through he likes tuna fish more, he hates Russian dressing, and who puts both Russian dressing and mustard on the same side of the same sandwich anyway? It's ruined! He can't even scrape the dressing off the meat because it slipped and slid around in the bag and now it's over everything. Lunch is effectively over for him and he's stuck in a little world of despair because the carrots and the juice box just won't fill him up the way the tuna fish sandwich would have, and now everything sucks!

And now the phone rings and he screams "Hello?" into the receiver and it's this person from MCNY who says he's the director and then says that he has NBC's property. What the hell did he think he was doing? The nerve! He's been hanging on to stolen property of NBC for 31 years? Is he insane? No, you can't have a copy made of the interview, sir, no, damnit, either send it back to NBC today or he's calling the cops.

The aggrieved archivist slams down the phone, picks it up again, dials 911 and then . . . nothing. The NYPD doesn't really do that. They didn't do that when the department was flush and they are far from flush now.

In fairness, there are copyright issues and permissi0ns involved. Also to be remembered is that both the interviewer and the interviewed subject are deceased. I don't think that Gabe Pressman would actually care that the tape he filmed is in our hands, although I allow that Gene Shalit, for example, might care had it been him.

In either case, it's interesting to imagine just what a scene from that alternate future would be . . .

A siren blasts down Canal Street and winds down and a police car screeches to a halt. Minutes later, a pair of giant NYPD cops barge through the doors of the MCNY library, guns drawn, one of them, the older one with a Sergeant's stripes on his sleeve and the voice of every Irish cop who ever walked a beat in any American city screams:

"All right, Director, where's that Audrey Cohen interview? Where are ye hidin' it?"

“It’s not in this cabinet!”

 “Ho-HO, it’s hiding in the cabinet, eh?”

 “Look, if that interview with Audrey Cohen was in this cabinet, would I turn on the gas?”

The cop stands his ground. “Hmm. You might, Director, you might . . .”

“Yeah? Well, if that interview with Audrey was in here, would I throw a lit match into it?”

Lou does. The cabinet explodes with a loud *BOOM* and a flash of light, but the weight of the director's body on top of it keeps the explosion localized.

The cops nods, and they holster their weapons. “All right, Director, you’ve convinced me. I’ll go look for that tape of Audrey in the Bronx . . .”

And like that.

I, for one, would pay real money to see that.

Bill Moyers and the Memory Hole

If you've spent any time here at all then you've probably figured out that I'm a complete and utter Bill Moyers freak. So that's one reason that I decided to link to this keynote he delivered to the 2011 History Makers convention. The bit that hit me hardest was this:

George Orwell had warned six decades ago that the corrosion of language goes hand in hand with the corruption of democracy. If he were around today, he would remind us that "like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket," this kind of propaganda engenders a "protective stupidity" almost impossible for facts to penetrate.

But you, my colleagues, can't give up. If you do, there's no chance any public memory of everyday truths - the tangible, touchable, palpable realities so vital to democracy - will survive. We would be left to the mercy of the agitated amnesiacs who "make" their own reality, as one of them boasted at the time America invaded Iraq, in order to maintain their hold on the public mind and the levers of power. You will remember that in Orwell's novel "1984," Big Brother banishes history to the memory hole, where inconvenient facts simply disappear. Control of the present rests on obliteration of the past. The figure of O'Brien, who is the personification of Big Brother, says to the protagonist, Winston Smith: "We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves." And they do. The bureaucrats in the Ministry of Truth destroy the records of the past and publish new versions. These in turn are superseded by yet more revisions. Why? Because people without memory are at the mercy of the powers that be; there is nothing against which to measure what they are told today. History is obliterated.

The thrust of Moyers' speech is that facts matter. Events matter. People, places and dates matter. Information and data matter. They can be twisted, turned, framed, or forgotten, but they still matter. They matter because they are real. They fly in the face of politics. Politics hates reality.

One reason why we're here, why we decided on librarianship as a career rather than say, accounting (other than the fact that not all of us are good with numbers) is that memory hole. Librarians hate that memory hole every bit as much as politics hates reality. Librarians are guardians of the stacks and the ideas contained within the volumes that populate those stacks. Yes, we're keeping the books and full text journals and e-Books and God knows what else warm for our patrons, but there's something else going on here.

A book exists. It contains content, therefore knowledge. Granted, that knowledge was filtered through a human being, and probably a great number of them if the book was the product of a publishing committee, as is often the case with reference books. It has value to the author, therefore a similar value to the reader is implied.

Orwell understood how the memory hole operates. It's not a small effort; in fact it takes an entire department of the Ministry of Truth to keep it active. If you want to wipe out an idea, you need to find the book/novel/article that articulated it; round up and destroy all copies in print; erase all electronic versions of it on all hard drives, e-readers, etc. everywhere; then you need a team of people who are able to track down every single reference to the contents of the source in question and wipe it out, or at least rewrite it such that it points to a reference that changes the meaning of the article.

Or, as Moyers says, you can just distract people and encourage them not to learn anything, ever. Science says that's the simpler objective, so it's the one that the real Powers That Be utilize.

Let's not help them succeed.

"Just a Bunch of Library Talk"

So you think we should be archiving all students' CAs* every semester. Hmmm.

Do you have any idea what you mean when you call this idea of yours an archive? Do you? Really? Really? Because I think we’re talking past each other here.

Okay, back to the beginning: I like the idea. There isn’t a week that goes by when a student doesn’t come to the library and asks to see a sample of a CA. They get this forlorn look on their faces when I tell them that no, we don’t have copies of past CAs on hand to show them. And they could probably use the assistance that such a resource would offer—everybody likes to have an idea of what’s expected of them, especially students. Queens College library school, for example keeps a few examples of similar projects on hand in a box in the library school's main office. It's not much more than a cardboard box with maybe three dozen papers lying in it under the secretary'd sesk but they do have it. If that was what I thought you were sugegsting I'd be on board all the way.

But what you seem to be suggesting—that we archive every CA produced by every student every semester—is impossible. I don’t like using that word—impossible—but this time I think I have to, and here’s why.

First let’s define what you want. What you’re describing is not really an archive, it’s more like a depository. Depositories are great for storing vast quantities of material but they’re not exactly an accessible, searchable, medium. It’s not like you’re scanning each paper—yes, I know you said you wanted all this stuff to be scanned, but we’re not there yet. I’m getting to all that.

   A depository is like a bank vault. It stores absolutely everything in a designated collection. The only records you generally create indicate who owns the stash, what the stash contains, and what manner of access is required. That’s the simplest form of this exercise. In this case, I'd think the easiest way to go about it is to take the hard copy produced by each student and catalog it by the student's name, by the subject head appropriate to the paper itself, and index according to class number and semester. Each student would get their own file devoted to their work. Each new paper each student produces during their time here would be placed in their folder. That's maybe nine hundred papers per semster to be filed.

Every item needs to be indexed according to whatever search medium you want to utilize. Beyond that, everything has to be sufficiently labeled and only a qualified archivist should have ready access to it--that means closed stacks. If a layperson mishandles an item--replaces it in the first convenient shelf hole rather than where it was taken from, then it's gone forever. No one will ever find it again because no one will know where to look for it.

For that matter, where and how will this stuff be stored? If you’re talking about archiving the output of an entire school—even a relatively small one—then you’re talking about a thousand or so papers each semester. An average document size of fifty pages means roughly fifty thousand of pages every semester. That’s a lot of volumes. Think of a phone book, then think about how you’d house fifty or sixty of them. Each year, you need to find space for another fifty or sixty. Yes, I’m serious. That's the appropriate magnitude and scope of what you're describing.

It gets worse. If you’re going to make the catalog searchable online, each item needs its own MARC record as does the collection itself. You want to look at the items online? Great, that means scanning the pages. If you’re going to scan it, then that adds a level of complexity to your project. Heck, that's a full time job in itself. You need a scanner, someone who knows how to run one then each page converted and joined into a PDF. That electronic file then has to live inside a server somewhere or be scanned onto some form of permanent media like a CD-ROM or DVD—which may not be in use in say twenty years. Now that it’s a computer file you may need some additional metadata to define it so that a library computer can see it much less deliver the file online. Then there’s the—

Okay, I’m going to overlook that. I know this stuff is unappetizing but dismissing it as “just a bunch of library talk” isn’t going to help. You want to make a collection available and I want to help. I just need you to meet me half way.

Like how? Well, you need a full time archivist. A pro whose job entails sifting through mountains ofl discarded, disorganized, dissolving manuscripts, and coverting them into useable data. A librarian, ever a Tech Services liberarna, really can't do that. I'm not trained for it. You need a pro, and she needs to be on staff all the time. I mean this is an ongoing project, right? Every year, more CAs to archive. That’s a lot of work. A lot of man-hours and a lot of money changing hands.

Finally, you need to figure out whose documents will go into this thing. Everyone’s? A representative sample from each class? A representative sample from each department, or maybe from the school as a whole? Transfer of copyright waivers are a must if you don’t want to get sued at some point for theft of intellectual property. How are you going to document the transfer of material? How about permission forms? Opt-in forms? Opt-out forms? Actually, I take that back—this is the first thing you should be thinking about, not the last.

If this sounds like a gigantic hassle, well, maybe you should have asked what the project entailed before you asked the Dean to fund it. If you want to do this properly, I’ll be happy to discuss it with you. If not, I will wish you luck and wave bye-bye.

You’re welcome.

 

*CA = Constructive Action, which is the big research paper our students produce at the end of each semester.

Utilizing LC's Controlled Vocabularies

I found this e-mail from Margaret Mauer's TS-LIBRARIANS listserv in my mailbox recently:

I have been experimenting with the newly opened ID.LOC.GOV web service this evening as I am thinking about pointing it out to folks via TechKNOW. It’s pretty cool. LCSH is the first controlled vocabulary that LC is opening up. The goal of the service is to “enable machines to programmatically access data at the Library of Congress but the web interface also provides simple user access…” at http://id.loc.gov/authorities/search/.  Type in a term like “retrievers” select the term “retrievers” and then go to the visual interface tab. It provides you with a data map of how the term “retrievers” connects to other terms in the controlled vocabulary. The search mechanism is sort of rudimentary, but the concept is terrifically interesting. Here’s the link to the about page for the new service:  http://id.loc.gov/authorities/about.html.

 I’ve been saying for a long time that we under-utilize our controlled vocabularies. Perhaps this will start to change this.

I've taken a look at the service she describes and it is indeed pretty cool. The "details" tab of the results page for any given query offers a metric ton of raw data: the URI and heading type, as well as a variety of live links to related, broader and narrower search terms. Besides that it also gives you any and every source it located the query string in, and lists those for you. Finally, you get the date the item was created and last modified and the LC classification data. Most of the data is available in multiple formats (generally including RDF/XML, N-Triples and so on). The "visualize" tab for the results gives the 2-dimensional relational  map for the term. 

Enjoy!

Sexual Abstinence and MeSH

There does not appear to be a MeSH heading for "Abstinence Education."  I'm not sure how I feel about this, seeing as how I seriously disagree with the need to catalog anything with that subject heading. But on the other hand, I do have to catalog something like that, so I'm conflicted.

This is a GAO booklet, with the main entry of 245 0 0 $a Abstinence education: $b efforts to assess the accuracy and effectiveness of federally funded programs.  It's a government sanctioned document--and it's public knowledge that this administration is all for abstinence education in public schools--so why not add a MeSH term for it?  Hmmm.  Maybe the NLM didn't get the memo.

At any rate, the search term "abstinence" gave me things like "Natural Family Planning Methods-->Periodic Abstinence" and "Sexual Abstinence-->Postpartum Abstinence", but that's about it.  Not a lot to work with there.  At the other end of the spectrum, the search term "sex" produced about a million responses, roughly half of which are biomedical terms for genes and proteins.  So I guess I'm combining "Natural Family Planning Methods" with "Sex Education" and hoping for the best.  The things we catalogers go through for the geeral public . . . my stars.

Cataloging 9/11

It's been a busy week (last week, I mean). Article Linker works for the databases we've linked to it (so far, Ebsco, Ovid, Gale), and we're jumping through all kinds of hoops working on linking it to PubMed. You have a choice--use a script to build a prepopulated ILL form on your server and access it as an Outside Tool, or use LinkOut--which would work (if we went that route), but would require us jumping through a rather different set of hoops. In either case, it's time-consuming, and energy sapping. And we're putting the next edition of the Grey Lit Report together next week, so we've a stack of pamphlets that nee to be cataloged as quickly as we can arrange--and when you're busy catalogging, there's a lot of energy that you don't have to spend on other projects. Such as linking Article Linker to PubMed.

A cataloging note from this morning caught my attention: not only did NLM need four years (years!) to add "September 11 Terrorist Attacks" as a MeSH entry term, but "Adverse Effects" is not included among the qualifiers they list for use. You can choose "Classification", "Economics", "Ethnology", "Ethics", "History", "Legislation & Jurisprudence", "Prevention & Control", "Psychology", "Statistics & Numerical Data" or "Trends", but there's no qualifier that deals specifically with the health problems that the attack generated. And I'll tell you right now, we've cataloged several hundred items on that subject alone in the past four years. It makes no sense to me that "Adverse Effects" doesn't fall under the same rubric as "Psychology" or any of the other choices. Was it an oversight? Did they  consider it and deliberately discard it? If so, then why?

Cataloging Katrina 1 Year Later

As you know if you've been listening to the radio or watching the tube or glancing at the newspapers this morning, it's been one year (as of yesterday) since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita smashed life, limb, and property on the Gulf Coast. Mayne people are doing many things to remember this tragedy--I for one, can think of no better way to remember it than to take a look at what the government has learned from it (or not), and then catalog it.

So here we go (the full MARC record is behind the edit.)

What did the government learn? That they need a better system of evacuating nursing homes and planning for such emergencies in the future. Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen. You'll notice that I avoided a 505 field on this one--the tables of contents was there but was so brief I didn't see the point. You'll also notice I limited myself to only two 650 fields here, mostly because there wasn't much to add in the way of MeSH tracings.

I could say more on this but I think the point has been made. BTW, if anyone wants me to link to similar (hopefully better) resources on the subject, send them along.

Russ Feingold in MARC

This might not be perfect, since it's been some time since I did any original cataloging for web pages, but here it is (apologies in advance for the MESH).  Suggestions are welcome. One hopes you click on the link below to read the actual statement, too.

100 1     Feingold, Russell D.
245 10  $a I strongly oppose Patriot Act deal : $b statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold as prepared for delivery from the Senate floor, February 15, 2006 : [$h electronic file]/ $c  Russ Feingold.
260 00 $a [Encinitas , CA]: $b Truthout.org, $c [2006]
300        $a World Wide Web Page [1].
500        $a Wednesday, February 15, 2006.

530        $a Available via the World Wide Web.
538        $a System requirements: Internet Explorer or other web browser.
650 12  $a Federal Government $z United States.
650 12  $a Terrorism $x prevention & control $z United States.
650 12  $a Terrorism $x legislation & jurisprudence $z United States.
856 41  $u http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021506R.shtml

Cataloging Manga & Anime

The December 2005 issue of TechKNOW (care of Kent State U.'s TSLibrarians listserv)  is out. (It's actually been out for a while, but the hyperlink I had only started working a short while ago--it's fixed.)  This quarter Jeanne Poole covers cataloging cleverly selected bits and pieces of the wacky (and not entirely consistent) world of Japanese anime and manga. We get a brief history of the art form and a bunch of well-formed MARC records to boot.  Good stuff, folks.

(Why can't I write articles like this?  I own manga and anime; I'm friends with the Editor in Chief of Media Blasters, for corn's sake.  Grrr...)