My Word's
Worth:

a weekly column by
Marylaine Block


vol. 2, #20, November, 1996

FROM BOOKS TO BYTES
or
What's a Nice Old Lady Like Me Doing in a Place Like This?


You know, besides this column of miscellaneous ponderings, I'm running three other web pages--my personal page, my guide to the Best Information on the Net, and my web site about books--and when I pause to reflect on this, I can't help thinking "Huh? Me? This does not compute. Largely because I do not compute, at least not very well. I use these machines but I have only the foggiest idea of how they work.


You see, I grew up in a world where what you did in life was largely defined by whether you wore pink or blue booties when they brought you home from the hospital. The blue booties people did the gadgets, the machines, the engines. The pink booties people did the diapering, the cooking, the bandaging (the blue booties tended to break their heads open and slice their fingers while playing with their gadgets). I sometimes think of the defining difference between the sexes as being WD-40. No man's work area was without it; no woman had a clue what it was for.


I was a girl, so I got dolls and books for Christmas. My brothers got the electric trains and the erector sets and the things that went beep, and if I tried to play with any of these things I got bopped in the head.


I consider my revenge to be particularly sweet--I grew up to be the one who makes her living playing with toys--the worldwide web, the best toy ever devised by the mind of man--and in this case, I really do mean men. I tell people I have the best job on campus, because I am the only one who's actually paid to go and find out what's on the web.


Why? Because my job is to find information wherever it's lurking. In the past, that was in reference books, and circulating books and government documents and map collections and picture files. As librarians, we were taught the arcane secrets of the Library of Congress classification and subject headings, so that we could pry the books we sought out from the mysterious subject headings our catalogers had buried them under. We learned to play elaborate word games, knowing that if we couldn't find enough books about Stonehenge, we could also look under Druids, or the history of technology, or England-Antiquities. We knew how to sneak sideways into the system to find what our users needed. We manually searched through year after year of paper indexes, looking for articles, under every possible term our fertile imaginations could think of.


Then computers came into our lives, first to bring us database searching. What a liberation! Because we could do keyword searching, and find things no matter what the Library of Congress had assigned as a subject heading. Instead of looking under one heading after another, we could just type an elaborate "Or" statement--health or medic* or diet or nutrition or disease*. We could "and" things together into infinity. My favorite illustration when I was teaching Boolean searching was to describe the hunt for the perfect mate--start with, say, "Male." And "American." And, let's say, "Catholic." And "rich." And "good-looking." And single. (Too bad--John F. Kennedy Jr. just got married.) And interested in you.


There's always a catch, isn't there? Anyway, of course, the point was that there would come a time when you would "and" yourself out of any candidates at all.


Then we got hooked up to the internet and I discovered gophers. Remember gophers? It was only two years ago that I sat down and started clicking my way through "All the Gopher Servers in the World." One. At. A. Time. Before I had gotten through the A's, I felt like Columbus. Except that I actually knew I had discovered a whole new world. My reaction could be summed up in two words. OH, WOW!


There were all those documents--the full texts of fairy tales, constitutions of every country, treaties, speeches, statutes, regulations.


Our federal government, which is still bringing planes into our airports with vacuum tubes, was getting totally online. They put all the statistics they collected there--the County-City DataBook, census documents, financial series, virtually anything you might need.


There were all those frequently asked questions files--what a great place for someone to start when they knew nothing whatsoever about a topic!


More to the point, there were lyrics online for virtually every rock group who'd ever existed. Since I was then busy editing a quote book of great lines from rock music, I nearly swooned from the bliss of it all.


The crowning touch, of course, was that you didn't have to know anything about computers at all to access this stuff. I had at that time exactly two computer skills. I could point and I could click. And that is all I needed to know.


I realized almost immediately that nobody was ever going to be an expert on what was on the internet. There was just way too much there, and everybody was only going to learn their own little chunk of it. So what was obviously needed was a place to exchange information with each other about the neat stuff we had each found. So I started a little newsletter called the Gopher Broker, and distributed it around campus.


Then two things happened:



To which my reaction was: Yeah. Right. Me, running a web site? Get real, here.


And then one of our computer professors created a site on his computer for me, and had one of his students create a program that would write the mark-up language for me, and all of a sudden I was in business. It is fair to say I did not jump, I was pushed. But there I was, in the middle of the web. And I haven't recovered yet.


I called my page Where the Wild Things Are, partly because I loved the Maurice Sendak children's book, and partly because that was how I saw the net--the place where all these fantastic things were lurking. It took skill to find them, of course, and coax them out of hiding, because the problem with the net is its vastness. The last figure I heard was 22,000,000 sites. And most of them the purest garba--er, perhaps I should say intellectually suspect. (Before I die, I plan to learn to be diplomatic.)


(Note: If you'd like to read the charming, though utterly beside the point, story about the dragon I used for the graphic for Wild Things, click here).


Anyway, once I had decided how to organize the files I found, and linked them in, I then started checking the announcement services on a daily basis, to find out what new stuff had come along that I might want to add. Which is how I discovered that the LondonMall was looking for an American correspondent, and I offered my humble self for the position of your columnist. Ernest Hemingway being otherwise engaged, I got the gig.


That accounts for two web sites. The head of academic computing decided that I should have a personal page, so he made one for me. It didn't sound very much like me, though, so of course I had to rewrite it--how could I have a page without rock music lyrics in it, after all?


The fourth site came about because a few years ago I worked with a remedial reading course. Now, the thing about poor readers is that they read one painful word at a time. By the time they get to the end of the sentence, they don't necessarily remember what was at the beginning of it. We who read well, of course, read entire paragraphs and chapters in one gulp . And the way to get poor readers to become fluent readers is to give them books that are so exciting, so interesting, so much fun that they just can't put them down.


I had created for this class a collection of annotated reading lists of books too good to put down--romances, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, humor, sports novels, etc. So I marked these lists up and put them on a page called BookBytes.


And that's how it came to pass that a book sort of person turned into a byte sort of person. The net just sort of happened to me. But I'm glad it did. One of these days I'm going to tell you about all the neat people who have come into my life because their web crawlers found me in one of theseplaces.

Dragon Story:

I needed a really good graphic for the page, preferably one that was not copyrighted. I didn't want just any wild animal (though looking through the Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia I was struck by some truly odd-looking creatures--have you ever looked up close and personal at a warthog?). I didn't want people to mistake this for a veterinary science site, after all. I wanted to suggest the scholarly nature of the hunt for the wonderful stuff on the net. Finally I decided I needed a dragon staring intently into a computer, taking notes, with stacks of books and papers scattered around.


You'd be surprised how few existing pictures there are of dragons staring at computer screens. I had to create my own. The problem here is that I cannot draw. I come from a family of accomplished artists, and I would swear that as a baby I had been switched in the hospital were it not for the fact that I inherited every bit of my family's artistic drive and impulses (and looked exactly like my aunt). I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to want to create art and have zero talent.


So I enlisted my brother Gordon to draw the dragon, and a delightful dragon he turned out to be. Then, when I put it on my page, I invited all and sundry to participate in a name-that-dragon competition.


I was toying with some ideas of my own already. I knew, for example, what species the dragon was--a nonce. This is because when my son was little, we used to work jigsaw puzzles, and when we were done, I would shove the puzzle board under the couch for the nonce. Nonce is a pretty 19th century sort of word, meaning "time being"--but my son thought it was the name of a mysterious beast that lived under the couch and ate jigsaw puzzles.


Also, I thought the dragon's name should suggest both something scholarly and something related to computers. I thought about Negroponte, after Nicholas at the M.I.T. Media Lab. I thought about Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Godel, Escher, Bach and columnist for Scientific American. He was, after all, one of those men who seemed to know everything. For the computer part, I settled on Minsky. So the dragon was becoming, in my mind, "Minsky Hofstadter."


Except that every time I tried telling people his name, it came out "Minsky-Korsakoff." Hey, it's not like I actually TRY to create puns--this is simply what my mind does to me. (I have an embroidered sampler hanging on my wall that reads "Incorrigible Punster. Do Not Incorrige.") It's all I can manage to keep myself from doing this kind of thing around important people--donors, priests, bishops, vice-presidents, and such--to do a kind of 5-second tape-delay.


But the simplest, most obvious, pun did not occur to me---I am way more dense than I thought. It came from my "Name that Dragon" competition. Of course, what else could he be but drag.net?

Return to the actual point of this column


If you have any interest in knowing how I went about deciding what would go onto Where the Wild Things Are, and how I organized it, click here to read an article I wrote about this for Ariadne, a British online journal of librarianship.



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NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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