I want a post-apocalyptic bookmobile!

Who wouldn't want to watch a educational sci-fi video series from 1985 about library skills?!

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/24/postapocalyptic-book.html

All videos can be accessed on YouTube. And there is more info on Wikipedia.

It is 2123 and everyone on Earth is leaving, in order to escape "the Wipers." All human knowledge has been collected (and organized) for preservation in the ultimate library (gee, the Dewey Decimal System really CAN catalog everything!). But one book has gone missing and Ms. Bookhart goes in search of it. Hijinks, suspended animation, and library skills education ensue.

"Put it on microfilm and file it..."

Geekery and an attempt at real-time blogging

I'm letting myself have a little non-job search fun at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, California, so I'm attending a session called Science Fiction and Fantasy: Looking at Information Technology and the Information Rights of the Individual. Just thought I'd take some notes on what was being said and discussed. Any errors or mis-perceptions below are entirely my fault. Enjoy!

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As I begin to write this, Cory Doctorow is standing not more than 2 feet from me, having a discussion with some friends about young adult fiction, especially young adult scifi.

Aww, his wife and 5 month old daughter are here. It's their 5-year anniversary. And yes, he spent the morning at Disney (I was told to ask him that, but I can just eavesdrop on him, instead. Heh). Wonder if The Haunted Mansion was actually open when he visited, unlike when I was there on Thursday. But I bet he didn't get to watch half a tree fall on a crowd of people. Damn, Disney has a fast response time to internal troubles!

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Short break to help someone with wireless connectivity problems. And he taught me about iwconfig (Linux-based). Ah, librarians and learning!
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Vernor Vinge
Spoke about the possibility of the coming Informational Dark Ages, the pie-in-the-sky idea of DRM that actually works, proprietary formats (and so-called open formats). Giving example of Charles Stross's Glasshouse plot: main character volunteers to take part in a "radical, isolated social experiment that will attempt to recreate the forgotten "Dark Ages", the late 20th and early 21st centuries." (Wikipedia entry)
[Sorry this was so sparse, my neighbor was using my Mac to figure out why he couldn't access the wifi]

Brandon Sanderson
He's the guy who is continuing/finishing the late Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Speaking on uchronias [and a mention of Steampunk. Woo! Must finish my bibliography...] and idealized scientific eras. Modern uchronic look at monarchy in politics. Lots of fantasy fiction in 1900s about one man bringing everyone together; warrior-heroes. Burroughs, Tolkein, etc. Start adding magician character as a scientific figure in later part of century (Harry Potter, among other characters). Wizard becomes more important than warrior; information as power. Infotocracy: rule by people who have the info.

"You want young people to love classics, first find them something, anything, they love in order to get them to read. They'll get there. Teach them to love information first!"

Eric Flint
Copyright terms are too long. Berne Convention is badly structured. Life +50 as minimum, drawback is that nations could lengthen it, but not shorten it. His own income relies on copyright, yet he thinks 75 years is ridiculous. Heirs should invest their money in something else anyway! 40 years is plenty long to support an author. Locking up information-as-property doesn't benefit the creators of that information and actually destroys writing. Most writing comes and goes (few Illiads out there). Just need enough copyright to provide a living.

His first book is still in print, still sells well, even though available online for free at Baen Free Library). Proves that the notion of "Pirating costs creators" is baloney [Halleluia!]. People want multiple formats for different uses. Book market too opaque. Advantage to e-publishing: allows provision of access, introduction for new readers. Battle is being slowly won. I sure hope so.

Cory Doctorow
Internet is good means for cheaper collective action, not copying stuff.
Storming Forming Norming.
Internet makes information a verb. "I just got this, how do I make it do that?"
Internet has given us conceivable universal access to human knowledge
Info not meant to be hoarded, kept from others.
Slow science if no sharing. Alchemist gets idea of publishing outcomes, led to Enlightenment.
"Universal access to all human knowledge is a feature, not a bug."
Worked with ALA/IFLA Access to Information Africa.
High-latency links to Internet (small info cafes, books and info on cds, printed materials from those cds), latency getting lower as time progresses.

One Laptop, One Child project, first great, now derided. But we forget how many steps it took to get to point of convincing everyone in world that having a computer is a good thing.

Fight for future of civilization. Fight over whether devices will control you or obey you.

Libraries may burn, but info about people has a longevity in direct comparison to how much it will embarrass them.

Mitch Kapoor "Architecture is politics." Our information structure will determine structure of society.

[So much data from Cory. Sadly, my typing was not up to speed.]

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Q&A

Cory talks re cctv cameras in London. Weapon you don't know how to use becomes an enemy. Criminal use of cctv, not solving crime. Use of cctv instead of people-presence, not a deterrent for many criminals (example of friend being stalked and killed by teens out to steal cell phones).

When is Cory's next book?
Cory: Out second-half of 2009 from Tor, Themepunks (working title?)

How to teach persistence of information to kids who don't care?
Brandon: Fiction can be very didactic. Tell a good story first; teach second.
Cory: Facebook, MySpace, are Skinner boxes that reward disclosure.

ALA Stacks pass [swipe card that vendors use]: what did you do with yours? (Hee!)
Cory: Maybe we should swap with each other? No easy mechanism for people to read what is on the cards they carry, would be good development. RFIDS, toll cards.

Thoughts on the "Universal Identifier" of the future?
Vinge: Pessimistic. Stasi-heaven. But Internet will help unbalance the Stasi.
Cory: Biometrics. Can't change your fingerprints. But can lift them!
Eric: Put things in historical perspective. We are nowhere near Medieval-era levels of control. Fallacy [I spelled this "phallacy" before the spellchecker caught it] of the Stasi: person collecting info is likely to be underpaid, not do good job. Don't overestimate inefficiency of Big Brother. Not that it can't be misused.

User-privacy, opt-in.
Vinge: Belief cults. [sorry, lost track of convo and missed his answer]
Cory: Zero-knowledge protocols. Cryptographic systems, the need for more widespread use.

....
This panel was great! Wonderful selection of speakers. Got all four of my books signed and found out from Cory that yes, the Haunted Mansion was open for business again. Sorry I missed it!

A job for me?

I'm starting to keep an eye out for job possibilities, since I may actually be graduating this May. Well, as long as I get my incomplete classes out of the way, that is. Right now I'm torn between moving elsewhere and starting my "professional" life and staying in Champaign-Urbana and working on a "Certificate of Advanced Study," which is sort of a PhD-lite degree. It would be 40 more credits, but no qualifying exams, and a thesis instead of a dissertation. Sounds fun to me!

But then I run across job titles like this one, and think "maybe I should go the job-route, with such interesting positions!"


Coordinator of College Liaisons
Colorado State University, Fort Collins


Aren't librarians supposed to stop students from having sex in the stacks? Librarian-pimp was not one of the positions (har!) I thought I was qualified for....

Why I am a librarian

Because I am too much like Dewey to be anything else:



Be sure to read irresponsibly in celebration of Banned Books Week! W00t!

Banned Books Week on Flickr
Buy schwag!
Read a banned book!

(and I am appalled that ALA doesn't have Banned Books Week featured more prominently on their website)

I {heart} my local library

You know, finishing up an incomplete paper at the library is not so bad when you:

1. Have a sizeable table next to a window and an electrical outlet
   
2. Have free wireless
   
3. Have a cafe where you can get a hand blended pomegranate soda, a lemon madeleine, and a Ritter Sport marzipan chocolate square

Guess which of those is keeping me coming to the library to write?

Furry bookmobiles

Okay, this is both realy cool and really cute. There is a university in Venezuela that is using pack-mules (bibliomulas)to carry books to remote communities around the area.

Venezuela's Four-legged Mobile Libraries

Reminds me of the pack-horse librarians of Kentucky, started by the WPA in the 1930s. There's even a book about them called Down Cut Shin Creek. And here's a nice interview with the author of the book.

I hope the bibliomulas project is successful.

I like driving, but...

Seen on this week's Chronicle job listings:

Position: Digital Projects Librarian
Salary: Unspecified
Institution: University of Alaska at Fairbanks
Location: Alabama
Date posted: 6/11/2007


Now *that's* a commute! No wonder they don't specify the salary.

Cataloging geekery

I've mentioned before that I really love the game "God of War." Well, yesterday I got to do something really cool. At least I thought it was cool. I got to originally catalog (catalog from scratch) the first copy of God of War II to make it into the OCLC database. Here's the WorldCat record. I even added a subject heading for Greek mythology fiction, for users searching desperately for games on that theme. :-)

Everyone in the known cataloging universe will be deriving their records from my work! Bwah hahahaha! I rock. And I'm a geek.

Google buys OCLC!

It's finally happened. Hell has frozen over.

Google buys OCLC, announces new products

As of today, WorldCat has been renamed "Google Library," and every work ever published is now available for full-text searching in the system. Publishers are already crying foul and their lawyers are furiously filing lawsuits, but our reading of copyright law and the fact that Google has added the name "library" to the product means the lawsuits will ultimately fail.

I...I can't believe this. What will Google take over next? I guess I should start working on my resume now, since we're all going to be working at Google in a short time. I might as well get ahead of the rush.

From Hectic Pace:
A source at Google who did not want to be identified said, "We're looking forward to finally having enough librarians on staff to catalog all those web pages."

Nooooo!!! I hate cataloging electronic resources! I don't wanna be a cataloger any more!

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April Fools! See, librarians *can* be funny. And I'm gullible. You don't want to know how long it took me to remember today's date.

Koha-ing the day away

I'm working from home today because I'm not feeling great (nothing serious, just stomach issues) and I'm saving my strength for class this evening. Normally, I'd be at the Family Resiliency Center (warning: really annoying background music) working on setting up their library. But today I'm installing Koha on my Mac so that I can play with settings and then later transfer them to the FRC setup, thereby saving some time to focus on how to catalog their collection instead of poking at Koha the entire time I'm there. They'd like to have everything ready to go by April 25, but I really doubt that's going to happen. Anyway, I need to start keeping better track of what I'm doing in Koha, and my blog is a natural space, so expect more posts about Koha and setting up a brand new library. I'll probably even have some retroactive posts thrown in.

Today
I'm working from this lovely document. Otherwise I would be totally lost.

So many little things to install before I can install Koha: Xtools (which takes up 2.8 GB installed and required me to register myself as a "developer" with Apple and is still installing itself as I type this), MySQL (version 4.1.x, which is old, but actually will work with Koha), and Apache (which was incredibly easy).

At the FRC I had them install Koha (Windows environment on a network) instead of trying to figure it out myself. Better use of time and resources. Although it has taken some work to convince their IT guys that I'm not just setting up a database containing titles and authors. Once again, no one realizes the work that goes into cataloging a collection.

Cata-wha?

Another cataloger burns out...

Dewey Decimal System Helpless To Categorize New Jim Belushi Book

DUBLIN, OH-Members of the OCLC Online Computer Library Center's Editorial Policy Committee, which oversees the Dewey Decimal System library...

I'm feeling a little bit this way myself. Why do I always choose "challenging" things to catalog for my assignments? Back to Advanced Cataloging homework.

Awww, man....

I'm nowhere near ready to start looking for a job, but damn, this one looks potentially fun:

College Librarian - Culinary Arts
The Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago (CHIC)

Phooey.

Librarian heroes

From Overheard in New York:

Thug teen: I wanna take out this fuckin' book.
Librarian: Okay, well, go to the check-out desk.
Thug teen: I got to go to the other fuckin' desk, mothafuckah?
Librarian: Yeah, motherfucker. The other fuckin' desk.

--Brooklyn Library

Gee, sounds like some of my Public Library experiences. And Undergrad, on some evenings.

Everything has just clicked into place

On the LiveJournal "The Society for Librarians who Say Motherfucker" I came across the following reply to a post:

A wise librarian once told me there are two types of patrons: those who use the library to look at naked people and those who try to censor naked people in libraries.

The world makes so much more sense now.

Enforced procrastination

You know, my (required, and therefore hated) LIS 501 class is making it very hard to focus on our database assignment. We are "reverse engineering" LibraryThing, creating entity-relation diagrams and a paper explaining it all. And this requires me to poke around LibraryThing in order to figure out how it works.

Do you know *just* how many books I've either ordered or put on my "to read" list or gone to Wikipedia to read more about, just today? Gah! I really want to sit down and catalog my personal library (I already keep track of what I've read using LT, but haven't gotten around to adding in books that I actually own), but it has to wait until the semester's end so that I can get this project (and others) done!

And to boot, I actually like creating and playing with databases and was looking forward to this assignment. Hell, I get paid to do that at work. But I really don't think that LibraryThing was a great example for the poor people in my class who have had little or no previous experience with databases. I mean, I consider myself an intermediate database creator and *I'm* having problems with the assignment.

This class really is a bonding/hazing experience for all of us proto-librarians.

The 'rents

Just got off the phone with my parents. They're coming to visit, which is nice, except for the fact that they are visiting the week before Thanksgiving. Why? I have no fucking idea. I tried to gently suggest that maybe Turkey Week was a better time, due to the fact that I won't have SCHOOL and WORK that week, but that was shot down. At least they are staying in a hotel and they are *not* bringing my sister with them, which is always a recipe for pouting (on her end) and a fight of some kind on everyone's part). No, she's not a teenager, she's 31. And still lives at home.

And every time they call I get the same thing:
"What are you up to?" Homework. "Still?" Well, it doesn't really end, I just have other assignments to work on. "What else are you doing?" Working, or other forms of schoolwork, mostly. Sometimes I actually go someplace other than campus, but not often, lately. "How much longer do you have until you are done with school" [gritting my teeth at this point] Well, I just started, so probably another year or so. "And then you'll get a job?"

That's when I start crying (no, not really).

They don't really get this whole "grad school" thing. I've dealt (still dealing with) the whole "you have to have a degree to be a librarian?" thing, but it was hard enough when I was "just" getting a Bachelor's degree. They really couldn't understand why I didn't magically get job offers stuffed under my door after graduation. Well, a BA in Anthropology just doesn't get you very far. Much less apparently prepare you for having to explain to the family every holiday just what anthropology is (professional people watching) and what kind of jobs anthropologists get (none, which is why I'm heading into Library-Land). Of course, none of this is helped by the fact that I've been working in libraries for the past decade or so. "So after you get your degree...you'll go back to your old job?" Oh, hell no.

Back to that thing I'm always doing.