DIY Librarian

Gina Barreca writes about bad books about writing, and generates some discussion of good books in the comments at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm. Not just for professional or aspiring writers, the list includes a wide variety of books, from those focusing on fiction to grammar and punctuation. Useful for all of us who write, whether poetry or library blogs.

Ron Charles, a book critic for the Washington Post, has become disenchanted with Harry Potter – both the books and the cultural phenomenon.

I see a lot of parallels between book critics and librarians in this article. Charles writes about being told, “Imagine being able to sit around all day just reading novels!” He laments the fact that fewer American adults are reading novels, and very few are reading anything but bestsellers.  He worries about the future of his profession, with dwindling newspaper book review sections. He wonders whether the “long tail” will ever really appear.

Constraining Public Libraries: The World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services, reviewed in the April 15 Library Journal, cautions libraries about applying business models, fees for services, privatization, and outsourcing in light of GATS. While reviewer John Berry says that “some readers will find this book alarmist,” he concludes that the book “provides an increasingly rare and thoughtful discussion of certain aspects of library management, such as the tendency toward privatization, to which the profession should pay more attention.”

On ACRLog, Marc Meola points to a discussion of tags vs. subject headings at Thing-ology, Library Thing’s blog. The discussion is interesting, and not just because it seems to come to the same conclusion that I did (that both tags and subject headings are useful and interesting, and that an ideal system can make use of both). I find it interesting because it involves, as far as I can tell, both librarians and non-librarians. After all, we certainly don’t have a monopoly on classification (think of biology!) or on a love for books (first lesson in library school: when you go to an interview, the answer to “why do you want to work in a library?” is not “because I love books!”). We are trained specialists in the organization, preservation, and retrieval of information including books, and we can certainly learn from others with similar interests, including our patrons.

Walt Crawford writes about the appeal of bargain DVD “megapacks” and what makes them possible—namely, the combination of movies that are in the public domain or can be licensed cheaply, and minimal production costs. Before the advent of DVD, we had a cheap mono VCR and a few videotapes, plus a collection of MST3K taped from television. We resisted buying a DVD player for a long time, because most of the time we’d rather watch a bad movie on MST3K than any of the stuff that Hollywood puts out these days. When we finally succumbed, however, we realized that we had started developing a massive collection of DVDs. These are mainly things that were never available on VHS, like foreign movies, underappreciated movies, movies of questionable quality, and old TV series. As Walt writes:

They’re great cheap fodder for film studies, understanding the culture, and—well—making fun of the bad’uns.

CD has already done this for less mainstream music. And what about books? The (paper) format is already perfect—I expect electronic formats will make rare books and special collections more accessible, but I don’t want to do my reading for pleasure on a screen. The big bookstores don’t typically stock things that they don’t expect to sell, but libraries keep them. Amazon and other online booksellers can stock all kinds of bizarre titles, and online used booksellers have made tracking down out-of-print titles much easier.

Truly, life is getting better for those who appreciate the cultural fringes.

A post on altered books over at Library Stuff reminded me of a book I recently checked out of the library. A previous reader really went at it with a purple highlighter. Fortunately, the copious notes are mostly scribbled on Post-It notes, which appear on almost every other page. I’m building a collection of them inside the back cover. Sometimes particularly important notes (or notes perhaps written during a Post-It note shortage) appear in the margins. One reminds the reader the Miss Smith, introduced mere pages earlier, is the consulate at the American embassy. This saved me the trouble of turning back a few pages, where the entire conversation with Miss Smith has been colored like an Easter egg.

I’m pretty selective about jumping on new technologies. I caught on to email very quickly, because it’s usefulness was immediately apparent to me. I held out on getting a cell phone for a long time, though, and I still don’t use it that often. While I do blog, I haven’t really explored social bookmarking or wikis yet. When I discovered Open WorldCat, though, I immediately had an “Aha!” moment. I think it was because I discovered it by accident while doing a web search.

I discovered something odd, though, when I searched for a book that I know Penn State’s library owns and entered the zip code for Penn State. The first library that shows up is the Mercer County Library in Lawrenceville, NJ, which is probably about a 5 hour drive from Penn State. ricklibrarian writes about how Open WorldCat may be failing rural America. I’m not sure it’s just rural America, though, because while this area is rural, Penn State is no small library. In fact, Open WorldCat recognizes that I am on a Penn State network, and displays a link that will search the Penn State catalog for my book. I wonder if the problem is that Penn State has libraries on multiple campuses, and so it isn’t associated with any single zip code?

I had started to write a post about Thomas Mann’s Library Journal article, Research at Risk, in which he argues that keyword searching is a poor substitute for librarian-created subject headings, and Clay Shirky’s paper, Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags, in which he argues that library subject headings are obsolete and the future of content organization lies in social tagging. I never got around to finishing it, and I scrapped the post. As it turns out in this case, good things come to those who wait, because the Inquiring Librarian has written a response to another similarly-themed Mann paper, Will Google’s Keyword Searching Eliminate the Need for LC Cataloging and Classification?, making the point that keyword searching and subject headings can work together. I would take this one step further and say that keyword searching, subject headings, and tagging can work together. If an item (say, a book) has searchable content, has been cataloged by a librarian, and has been tagged by users, why not search all three? [Inquiring Librarian link via Carnival of the Infosciences #6]

In his Chronicle of Higher Education column Saving Secondhand Bookstores, Thomas H. Benton laments the replacement of secondhand bookstores with online vendors:

Paradoxically, that means I now buy fewer books because I don’t feel the need to buy in anticipation of future needs. I know I can almost always get exactly what I want online within 48 hours.

Previously, Benton noted that online library catalogs and databases similarly take away from the serendipity of browsing a library collection.

I don’t necessarily agree that electronic sources prohibit browsing. Serendipitous discovery is different in the electronic world, to be sure, but it does exist. And I certainly don’t want to advocate for decreased availability; there is something to being able to get the information you need when you need it, and I imagine Benton is grateful for it. But, were it not for a chance encounter in a secondhand bookstore, I would not be reading the book I’m enjoying immensely right now.

Several years ago, my husband and I happened across a copy of Dave Marsh’s Louie Louie in a bargain bin at a bookstore near Pittsburgh. Yes, that’s right, an entire book about the song “Louie Louie”. We He thought it sounded weird, too, so one of us he bought it (probably my husband, but I couldn’t say for sure). For the last several years, and through two or three household moves, I forgot about the book. Then, recently, I was looking for a book to read and stumbled across it on our bookshelves. If, at the time, we he had thought to ourselves himself, “This is interesting, but we can always get it from Amazon later,” I would not be privy to the sordid story of “Louie Louie” (which, by the way, is a tale of intrigue, copyright, and censorship—perfect reading for librarians).

[update] Paragraph above edited after consultation with my husband, who actually has a memory.

From Mary Minow’s interview with David Dodd, librarian and author of The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics:

This is my third book, and each has carried with it a greater or lesser degree of do-it-yourselfness. … You don’t just sign a contract, turn over a manuscript, and sit back and wait for the book to appear.

That actually makes the process sound more appealing to me, except for the copyright permissions, which do not sound like fun.

[via librarian.net]