Jacob Nadal

Not because of last night’s trip to Bierkraft, where I did manage to snag a few bottles of Geary’s, from the state that my primary source has indicated to be Heaven on the Atlantic (a view that was pretty well confirmed in the New York Times this morning). Nor was it the recognition that I’m 2:3 with a malt beverage metaphor in the recent postings.

It was the realization that, shame of shames, I have to write about jargon. Here’s the buzzword: “Digital Preservation.” And, here’s the current effort to standardize the usage that I’m chairing. And here is this morning’s provocation for dragging you through the internet brewery tour and shamelessly plugging my ALA working group. Block-quoted for your consideration:

“We used to have a system in which we forgot things easily and had to invest energy in remembering,” says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Now we’re switching to a system in which we remember everything and have to invest energy in order to forget. That’s an enormous transformation.”

Let’s skip the close reading for now - I have to get to work on time; and besides, this is clearly digression, not criticism of the article itself. The key element here, for us preservation types, is that once again storage is getting conflated with preservation. Preservation and memory are active principles and storage is not. Preservation is what happens when storage meets a certain standard of quality and is coupled with a safe and reliable means of access.

It is implicit in the argument about data centers that their data is retrievable - this is what search engines do best. It is not implicit in many of the other conversations about backup and digitizing that get slapped with the “preservation” label.

Two provocative statements, first for your lunch hour and then after your next trip to Bierkraft, in homage of the Persian masters:

• Circulation can occur without preservation, but preservation cannot occur without circulation.
• iPhoto is not preservation, Flikr is.

“Guybrarian” has been submitted to Open Dictionary, for possible inclusion in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. I always thought the term was librorian, but what do I know?

Marc Meola has a post,”Free as in Free Speech?,” up on the ACRLog about free and open-source integrated library systems. He wraps up a number of important ideas and their thinkers and issues a few calls to arms:

It’s time for the library community to start looking not only at the practical aspects of free and open source software but at the ethical issues as well. For Stallman, the development of free software is an ethical imperative. Chopra and Dexter raise issues of academic freedom and social responsibility.

I don’ t think I’ve written about this on my weblog, but I think we’re essentially treading water until we design, build and operate our own ILS under our own steam. I think the same goes for learning management systems.

Consider how different your library school would be if it had a responsibility to train you to engineer and run such a system. Consider how different your library would be if, instead of asking when or if you were going to provide a new research tool, you set directly to work on creating it within the environment you owned and operated.

For that matter, I think we all ought to chuck Microsoft and run our operations on collaborative, networked office suites. Then we ought to offer those same services to our patrons as part of a natural tie-in to the systematic and ongoing human service and education programs we could offer in conjunction with the schools, religious centers, charities and city agencies that are all around us and need connections that the library is ideally placed to provide. But you know how it is, comrade.

For what it’s worth, for the last year I would not have been able to get my work done without tools like Zoho, WordPress and Backpackit. I could have ditched MS Office and Lotus Notes for any number of alternatives without missing a beat. (Notes, especially, but that way lies personal grousing and rants about usability and computer interface norms that you really shouldn’t have to hear). I’ve still never been able to get Pratt tech support on the line to get my account access figured out so that I can even take a look at Moodle. (And seriously, guys: Moodle? It just sounds bad. And I say that as a fan of Zoho.) But I betcha I’m doing everything any LMS in the world can do faster, cheaper and more in my control with free-as-in-free-beer web apps.

I don’t usually write on the deeply personal level in this weblog, but this important stuff. An amazing thing happened tonight: I came across Lofty Fake Anagram, in a newly double-issued CD with A Genuine Tong Funeral.

These are among the sacred four initial Gary Burton Quartet releases. For some background, check out this and this from The Mystical Beast. These are the albums, that, had Miles Davis not gone useless and invented jacuzzi jazz (or “fusion,” if you prefer) would have ushered us into an era of unprecedented exploration of the human condition. These are the albums that threw wide the doors of innocence and experience and cast the first light of the Dawning Age onto the land of what is and what should never be.

Do you remember Bill and Ted? Wyld Stallyns and the music which holds the key to world peace and ultimate truth? This is that music. Do you understand all this? Led Zeppelin? Posers. Gary Burton Quartet? Golden Gods.

So. Return with me to my younger days: a musician, a college student, broke, and addicted. It started in Django’s records in Portland, OR. That guy. Those mallets. And oh that music! That’s what I had to do. I had to learn to play like that. I was able to find Duster and Funeral on vinyl and I heard the live album once, though I never scored a copy myself. But the Lofty Fake Anagram eluded me. My own 33 and 1/3 rpm version of Lowry’s Yvonne or Durell’s Justine. It was probably for the best, too. If I hadn’t had this addiction already, who knows what I might have gotten hooked on?

It wasn’t easy getting clean, but the first step was taken by a higher power: New York. The metric ton of LPs I’d amassed during the years of musicianship simply couldn’t make the cross country journey. As man I must to put away childish things… and there’s nowhere to keep an LP collection in a 100 square foot, semi-legal West Village squat studio, after all.

I had to start rationalizing. I contented myself that there was plenty of Burton’s work on CD, especially once the Throb/Keith Jarrett double issue came out and Alone at Last and Paris Encounter were available. Plus he was doing all that interesting work with Piazolla.

So I was free from the hunger. No longer were my weekends going to be held captive to dingy record stores. No longer would I shuffle past the compact discs, muttering “stereo is for wimps” as I rummaged through bins of one-buck random vinyl, hoping for a mistake, a misfile, an oversight that would bring it to me: my own copy of Lofty Fake Anagram.

And that was good. I had a job and was showering and flossing my teeth and everything. I hadn’t had to sit in front of a microfilm reader in ages, and if not suffused with the ruddy glow of health, I no longer hissed or recoiled when I stepped into the sunlight.

So imagine the internal tectonics this evening, when I strolled through the jazz section of the Virgin Megastore. And there it was.

I walked away and hid in the Charlie Parker section. Walked back around and pretended to look at some Sibelius recordings. Sidled over and tried to catch it in the corner of my eye, the way you’re supposed to hunt for faeries.

It was still there.

Actually, there were three copies of it, just sitting there shrink-wrapped and ready to go. As if this was normal, that anyone with half an inclination and $21.99 (+tax) could just stroll in an buy themselves a copy. As if the very fabric of mortal life hadn’t been sundered. As if there wasn’t any need for me to have cast off my shoes and fallen on my faced and cried out, “Lord! What am I that I should hear this music?”

But fortunately you can get away with anything below 14th street, so I picked myself up and bought the album. Lofty Fake Anagram.

And now I’ve listened to it and you know what? Worth every year of waiting.

Keep on smiling, Gary.

Some colleagues just posted about this to our internal weblogs, but I feel it need to be shared. Click below for a hi-res version, and take a close look above Astronaut Clay Anderson’s head, on the right side of the image.

Did you see it? That’s right: The New York Public Library Book of Answers.

What? You think astronauts use Google or something? They have a Sun to not crash into, after all. They can’t use that low-grade internet information. They need the real, high-test, librarian-distilled brainiac super-fuel.

Image from NASA, of course.

God bless him, this is pure wit:

“This is the kind of project for which a major revival of monasticism would really come in handy.”

–Adam Kotsko commenting on an interview with Aaron Swartz about the Open Library Project

While waiting for the LIRR schedule to load this evening, I noticed the following at the bottom of the mta.info page:

Machine translations are imperfect. This service is intended to provide basic understanding of MTA website content, but the translation is literal and may misrepresent names and idiomatic expressions. More Info

It has a little set of flags of the world below it and you click on one to get a translation of the webpage. I was most curious to see Canada’s flag first in the list… but it turns out that’s the (ahem, only) option for getting a French translation. Viva el Quebec!

So, the target user here is someone who does not read English well. The assumption must be that they’ll click on their flag, or the flag of some other country that they happen to recognize as sharing a language (in which case, the actual French are so never getting a translated page) and then they’ll get this imperfect machine translation that misrepresents names and idiomatic expressions. But they’ll understand that because we wrote them a disclaimer… in English.

“Woopsie-daisy,” as they say in Milford. Or, “whaddya thinkin!?,” as they declaim in my borough.

But wait, you say: touche! This is cleverness in disguise: when someone finds and clicks their (or their linguistic neighbor’s) flag, the page will be rendered in their native tongue and thus the disclaimer itself will translated!

Except that the World Lingo service apparently does not serve up its own disclaimer on its translated pages. At least not in French and German, and not on the others as far as I can parse those languages.

Okay, but surely even non-English readers who are planning to visit and/or live in New York know enough to figure this out. Who doesn’t know the word “idiomatic” in six or seven different languages, after all?

I know, no one likes the chattering class. So here’s my constructive suggestion: wouldn’t it have been better to just write “translation” over and over again in different languages, each linked to its proper page?

Well, this caps it. The Brits have officially gone soft. According to the BBC:

UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

Nelson would have sent in the Badgers, blast them all, and he would have run across their backs to take the surrender of Basra and Nassiriya, too. Huzzah!

OSTA and Ecma International have announced an optical disk archival test standard. This is an industry standard for testing the lifespan of optical media, especially recordable and rewritable DVDs. Note carefully, though, that this standard will help manufacturers make reliable discs and help their customer select media life that will meet their needs. It doesn’t mean that any particular type of DVD is now a viable archival media, of course, only that there’s a method for evaluating them.

I started a series of posts a few weeks back with an observation that Pandora, the interface to the Music Genome Project’s work on matching characteristics of songs to one another, was able to understand the superficial aspects of a song, but nothing about the song as a whole.

In this case, my appreciation for the song was not because of its superficial musical characteristics, but almost in spite of them. I liked the way Jewel played off the gaudy facade of pop music against itself to lay the foundation of an album that was critical of the state of America in the early twenty first century.

The issue at stake here is the difference between describing and understanding. Pandora could describe the song, but not understand it. It would never connect it with Hail to the Thief, even though both came out at the same time and address parallel topics.

And for the record, Jewel kicks Radiohead’s artistic butt, to borrow a line from Adorno,* by taking the subject of critique and using it to deconstruct itself. And frankly, read the lyrics side by side. The music is the only thing that makes Radiohead’s lyrics useful. Jewel’s lyrics are strong enough on their own that her music can engage with them, intensifying, complimenting or contradicting them.

So you buy all that or not. The larger issue I promised to address is what that might have to do with the present state of librarianship. Fortunately, a few articles have appeared online that make the bulk of the case for me.

I want to start far out from the library proper. Dana Gioia addressed the graduating class of Stanford University recently, encouraging the class to “trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging ones.” He spoke about the changing face of the American media from the time of his childhood, pointedly observing that “[he didn't] think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a broad range of human achievement.”

He goes on to speak about the loss of humanity that comes when we cut off our interaction, civic involvement, and artistic awareness. Indeed, it may be a corrupting influence of the market that we can consider the point of arts education to be the production of excellent artists.It is most decidedly not. The mission statement of art education, indeed of a liberal arts education, has always been to develop excellent human beings. Most of these will probably work in the for-profit sector, but the hope is that they will enter their profession with the humanity that makes the criminal and unethical activities we see in modern business anathema to them.

Gioia targets public education for the task of reclaiming us, and by and large I agree. The common line is that educated people demand excellent libraries and educated people understand the value of good resources and good research, and I see no reason to reject that portion of the received wisdom.**

Michael Gorman also has some trenchant remarks on this subject. His second installment about the “Siren Song of the Internet” address two crucial issues for librarians in this century. First is relevance and recall rates of searches. Second is the two part perception that according to Gorman’s foils, “if it’s not on Google, it doesn’t exist” and according to Gorman himself, that these are found “only in those distant archives and dusty file cabinets full of treasures unknown.”

I don’t feel the need to give a dressing down about the problems of internet search - I think that theatrics and striving for elevated hit counts aside, competent librarians understand that it’s useful as a basic indicator of what is believed about a lot of topics and a convenient way to deal with ready reference.

For those of you visiting from outside the Isle of Emeless, ready reference is the provision of simple information, often factual. It was a job function that I encountered in library school and my earliest experience of the profession as a necessary bother. The sort f thing that a good librarian would tend to patiently, always alert for that patron in need of a more serious reference interview. For instance:

Patron: Where is the Isle of Emeless?

Librarian: It’s just northwest of Terabithia. It’s a lovely place, but its restrictive immigration policies require all citizens to hold an MLS, a Masters degree in Library Science.

Patron: Oh, cool. So wait, you have a Masters degree?

Librarian: Yes.

Patron. Huh. Can I sign up for a time on the internet?

Blogger’s voice (heard from off -stage in teh meta): You see how the patron had the last word? And it was about the internet?

The point of all that was that I don’t think it’s entirely inappropriate to be at least a little relieved that Google has taken this task off our hands. Remember Lorcan Dempeys’ observation that information is now abundant, but attention is scarce.

When they speak of the heady days of yore, I think librarians are really recalling a time when information was scarce.  If you talked to librarians back in the proverbial day, they were frustrated with that effort and grumbled as they created vertical files, ready reference collections and binders of frequently asked questions (what we now call a FAQ; attention scarcity, remember). They were just wishing something like the internet would come along so people could just ask the ether where the DMV was located and the library could get on with real reference.

Okay, so that day came… a few years back.

It’s disappointing that we can’t summon the wherewithal to agree on something productive to do with our new found freedom. Of parallel concern to me (a preservation librarian, in case it’s been lost in the last month or two of writing) is this “dusty and distant” perception.

For one thing, if people took the time to read even the modest selection of books that are clean and near to hand, I think their minds would be better for it. But more significant is that our lackluster attention to our collection’s condition is impairing their ability to become visible in a networked world.

A book or archival file that’s in good condition and well-cataloged is an easy digitization project. This is our base, our core value. In the parlance of the business sector, these are our assets, our capital, and we have to be ready to leverage them.

Furthermore, despite the notion that everything is miscellaneous (and yes, expect a book review here soon), it is more accurate to say that useful miscellany depends on order. Less jargonsom: unless there is a stable and identifiable resource (no matter it a catalog record, archival file, web page, or book on the shelf), there is nothing for the folksonomy and tagoshpere to connect to. I think our job is to create the anchor points for the internet.

And why? Because that begins with description: here is a resource with these APIs that pertains to these subject headings from these vocabularies that cites these works.

And it enables the transition from that description towards a discussion: She tagged this book that this blog said it was really good but she observed some inaccuracies that she pointed out to her friend and he said she should look it up in Wikipedia so she did but that had the same problem so she found something published by this author that proved them wrong and posted it here with a link to this other book she thinks is better.

And that discussion enables understanding. Among its participants, certainly, but with reliable resources to form the foundation of that discussion, it can sustain a pathway towards understanding for those who come along later. Someone entering from the periphery of internet searches might find those tags and conversations and follow one or two of them back to the source. Our responsibility of keeping the evidence intact and accessible has not changed. The means by which to do this, and the potential for that evidence to propagate have changed.

So how is that done? What can we really do to play in this space. I have a few suggestions to wrap this up, and to build on in the future:

1. Respect the artifact: we shouldn’t believe for a moment that the books itself is or will be passé. Books and people are part of the same order of being - middle sized objects fixed in space. We’ll always relate to them differently than we’ll relate to digital resources and they’ll always be fixed, reliable and predictable in a way that the majority of web resources will not be.

2. Reverse the “last, best copy” talk. This follows on the first. What we really should strive for is more physical copies, with better distribution. ILL should develop a method to ship more books to more people more faster. Look to Bittorrent and Netflix for some initial inspiration.

3. Following on that, change the “last, best copy” idea for actual books to a “single, best copy” of a digital resource. A single collaborative edition that would bring together the contributions of every library to provide a rich point of entry and make visible the interconnections of each book to every other.

4. Get thee to a computer. We have to play in the network space and we have to participate in making the internet useful. Where there is a question asked in cyberspace, there librarian, is your calling. Note: this will not look like library work from 30 years ago. Note: it is not 30 years ago.

5. Get thee to a computer, AGAIN! We have to make our own digital effort more comprehensible and accessible. If we’re not invited to the mashup, we’ll never get a chance to bring the gravy.

Blogger: See, by gravy, I mean our awesome research prowess. And I used “mashup” to evoke potatoes and a party (by which I mean the internet). Because without research prowess, the party is a drag. Seriously, they all dig awesome research prowess.

Patron: Dude, who is that?

Blogger: Really, they do. I say “syndetic structure” and the women swoon. Swoon, I tell you. I was telling this one girl about search satisfaction error and she was all…

Librarian: Sorry, it’s the internet. It’s everywhere these days.

Patron: Oh yeah, can I sign up for a time on that.

Blogger (drifting into the background): …I tell you these rumors of people nodding off while I yammer on about the impact of facile index post-coordination are greatly exaggerated. Or if not greatly, they at least are the sort of thing that shouldn’t get spread around or posted on the intern… oh, drat.

Librarian (a wily grin blooming on her features, the expression of someone about to do something unreasonably nice for someone else): Sure, there’s a spot open in half and hour. Did you need anything else? Maybe I can help you get started while you’re waiting?

———-

* Adorno may not have actually said this. It’s also possible that I have made a joke in questionable taste.

** It is important to acknowledge that the greatest beneficiaries of libraries are the uneducated, undereducated, and those who know and understand the least about the world. I don’t think this has been separate from the demand of educated people for libraries. Indeed, it is very much within the Carnegie model that the one class builds the library for the sake of the other.