RECENT ARTICLES OF NOTE
While I was taking a bit of a break by just cutting and pasting Gary Price's interview into place for last week's issue, I had a good two week's worth of really interesting, thought-provoking reading. That's a nice thing about self-employment: I can read in the middle of the day and legitimately call it "work" (Jealous, aren't you?). Here are some of the items I especially recommend to you:
In Michael Quinion's World Wide Words, http://www.quinion.com/words/, this past week, he noted the new phrase "data archaeology," explaining that it is a profession that deals with "data stored in old structures becomes progressively less accessible," recovers it, and translates it to make it accessible by current technologies. For those of us who have had to discard entire runs of periodicals preserved on microcards for which the readers are long-deceased, the fact that there is now a word for this is a promising sign that happily somebody out there is rescuing us from our own fecklessness in committing important files to transient technologies.
Chris Sherman, About.Com's WebSearch Guide has a five part series reporting on the the fifth annual Search Engine Meeting, at http://websearch.about.com/library/blsem.htm, well worth a look to find out what the new tricks of the trade are, and what the designers of search engines see as the future of end-user search technology.
Tim Wocjik, About.Com's Librarian Guide, offers a two-part report on "A Masters in Library Science:From a Distance" at http://librarians.about.com/library/weekly/aa041800.htm. Apparently most of the remaining library schools offer at least some of their course work in some electronic form.
As one who is committed to the notion of making our web sites accessible to the handicapped, I was taken aback by an article titled "Access Excess" in Reason Magazine, http://www.reason.com/0005/co.wo.access.html, in which Walter Olson argues convincingly that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines issued by the W3 Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative are far from a small burden on webmasters. Here's a stunning quote for you: "According to the tech-news service CNet, 98 percent of current Web sites are considered inaccessible to the disabled; indeed, an August 1999 survey found that 65 percent of 200 sites geared to disability issues weren't accessible (www.whitehouse.gov isn't, either)."
In an article titled "Freedom or Copyright?" in the May issue of Technology Review, Richard Stallman points out that the publishers of e-books are outlawing many current and standard rights of readers, including the ability to share a book we've bought with someone else. http://techreview.com/articles/may00/stallman.htm
I've previously recommended Jakob Nielsen's new book on web usability design, as well as his regular series of articles on the issue, Alertbox (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/. But if you don't have time to read the book, there's an excellent two part interview with him by in the e-zine Contentious. Part I: http://www.contentious.com/articles/1-5/qa1-5a.html; part II: http://www.contentious.com/articles/1-5/qa1-5b.html.
If, like me, you have fond memories of childhood visits to the bookmobile, or are even running a bookmobile yourself, you should enjoy the article by Angela Himsel titled "Book Mobility" in the May-June issue of Book: the Magazine for the Reading Life.
Of course, I still read books, too. I've just finished Barbara Kingsolver's collection of essays, High Tide in Tucson, which is wonderful; my cool quote for this week comes from an essay adapted from a speech she delivered at the American Library Association in 1993 in which she reminds us that sometimes librarians, like teachers, change people's lives.
As I've mentioned, I've been having problems with "mouse arm," newly diagnosed as inflammation of the muscles of the rotator cuff (my son is so impressed that I've got a pitcher's injury). One of the solutions I've explored is voice recognition software, which has turned out to be a non-starter. It's a fine note when one of the funniest columns I ever wrote is funny not because of what I said but what the computer wrote. You can see why at http://marylaine.com/myword/voice.html.
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IN PRAISE OF: THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
This week, which marked the bicentennial anniversary of the Library of Congress, seems a good time to honor its librarians for the splendid work they have done in mot only preserving our nation's intellectual heritage, but making so much of it available online to people who may never have a chance to visit it in person. (A good place to start to get an overview of the bicentennial celebration and of LC's vision of its mission is the homepage, http://www.loc.gov/bicentennial/.)
Let's look at the primary reason the Library was founded to begin with -- to provide research for Congress. The Congressional Research Service (http://lcweb.loc.gov/crsinfo/mission.htm) has produced thousands of reports, neutral, authoritative background research, on virtually every topic of interest to the public -- social security, AIDS funding, cancer research, health insurance portability, child nutrition issues, and so forth. While formerly the Service made these reports available to the public by way of depository libraries, now most of them are also available online.
From the point of view of librarians, of course, one of LC's foremost services has been to serve as cataloger-in-chief to libraries throughout the nation, supplying catalog cards and online catalog copy. It is true that LC management has from time to time failed to understand how important this part of its mission is, but swift and effective protest by librarians and library organizations has restored it to its senses. The electronic catalog copy from LC, combined with contributed cataloging by other libraries, distributed online through OCLC, has produced as close as the world may ever get to an ever-expanding catalogue of all the books held by all the libraries of the world. It has been my pleasure over 23 years in the profession to watch while that catalog has multiplied exponentially, as so many libraries have input their entire holdings retrospectively online.
The final jewel in the crown of the Library of Congress, though, is the American Memory Project (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html). I'm amazed at how early the librarians at LC grasped that the multimedia capabilities of the net would allow them to share bits and pieces of ALL of their collections not just with scholars, as in the past, but with the entire American public: its mammoth archives of photographs, recordings, films, documents, maps and manuscripts. The dead past comes alive with oral histories from the WPA, American sheet music from the late 1800s, selected Civil War photographs, historic panoramic maps, historic documents from the 1500's on up, texts of African-American pamphlets, the federal Theatre Project collection and so much more. The breadth of it reminds us of the astounding variety of the American experience, and that, whatever our ancestry, we are all part of the fabric of America.
I think of the information available from our government as not free, but simply pre-paid; it uses our tax money to produce and preserve research and history and offer it back to us. It's one of the best returns on tax dollars I know about. Happy birthday, Library of Congress. And thanks for the memories, that you, more than anyone else, kept alive.
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COOL QUOTE
A librarian named Miss Truman Richey snatched me from the jaws of ruin, and it's too late now to thank her. I'm not the first person to notice that we rarely get around to thanking those who've helped us most. Salvation is such a heady thing that the temptation is to dance gasping on the shore, shouting that we are alive, till our forgotten savior has long since gone under. Or else sit quietly, sideswiped and embarrassed, mumbling that we really did pretty much know how to swim. But now that I see the wreck that could have been, without Miss Richey, I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
Barbara Kingsolver. "How Mr. Dewey Decimal Saved My Life." In her collection of essays, High Tide in Tucson
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Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 2000.
