The Rogue Scholar

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.

A Nation Without School Librarians

This map marks the cities, towns, communities, and states that have made the decision to either eliminate certified school library positions (indicated in blue) or require one school librarian to work with two (2) or more school library programs throughout the week (indicated in red).

Although hundreds of studies show the impact that School Librarians have on student achievement, these school districts believe otherwise. A particularly unpleasant surprise was the flurry of blue flags throughout state of Massachusetts. How is cutting school librarians going to send a greater number of over-achievers to Harvard or MIT? $5 to the person who can explain that to me without resorting to ideology or faith.

Let's compare the student achievement scores without a school librarian in a year or so to discover what thousands of library supporters already knew.

School Librarians DO make a difference!

Freedom of Information Day Action at SIBL

From the METRO-L listserv:

Freedom of Information Day will be observed at the Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) of The New York Public Library (188 Madison Ave. @ 34th St.) on Tuesday, March 16, with a presentation and discussion from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in Conference Room 18 on the lower level of the library. This year’s guest speaker is Heather Joseph, Executive Director, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, (SPARC), an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communications. She will discuss the growing momentum towards Open Access – the idea that society is best served when the results of research and scholarship are made immediately, freely available online to anyone who may want to access and use them.  The title of her presentation is: “Open Access, Open Scholarship – Open Future.” Established by a Congressional Joint Resolution in 1989, Freedom of Information Day is held on or near March 16, the birthday of James Madison, fourth President of the United States and primary architect of the Bill of Rights. The observance underscores the importance of freedom of the press, speech, information, and the public’s right to know.

Heather Joseph has served as the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) since 2005. In that capacity, she works to support broadening access to the results of scholarly research through enabling open access publishing, archiving and policies on a local, national and international level.

Ms. Joseph is also the convener of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of universities, libraries, patients’ advocacy groups, consumer groups, and student organizations who work to ensure that results of publicly funded research are openly accessible to the public. The group has been a leading voice on U.S. open access legislation, including landmark policy issued by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Prior to coming to SPARC, she spent 15 years as a publisher in both commercial and not-for-profit publishing organizations. She served as the publishing director at the American Society for Cell Biology, which became the first journal to commit its full content to the NIH’s pioneering open repository, PubMed Central, and subsequently served on the National Advisory Committee for the project.

Ms. Joseph serves on the Board of Directors of numerous not-for-profit organizations, and recently completed a term as the elected President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. She is a frequent speaker and writer on scholarly communications in general, and on open access in particular.

This event is free and open to the public. No reservations are required.

Sounds like the place to be.

A Bit About the Brooklyn Public Library

First there is this: a fast gander at the 10 most popular searches on Brooklyn Public Library's catalog:

1. Diary of a wimpy kid

2. DVD

3. Twilight

4. New moon

5. Push

6. Pokemon

7. Naruto

8. Harry potter

9. Princess

10. Star wars

I don't claim it's the the most qualitative reading list in the world--although I was glad to see Push getting some attention by the public (I just cataloged a volume for our library and it, too, has seen some flying-off-the-shelf action). To some extent (perhaps a great extent) this list came about due to the fact that the Brooklyn and Queens Borough Public Libraries are notorious for setting up patrons with books--any books--for the sake of keeping their circulation numbers as high as possible. Good business practice, not the best method for composing a Reader's Advisory. Beyond that, I'm glad to see the public making use of the facilities even if I shudder at their taste, by and large, in literature.

Second, there is the No Shush Zone, BPL's in-house blog, which shows that they are absolutely dedicated to serving their community. Read it often.

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.)