Modern Authors

Something that has been on mind for a few days now is that of modern authors. In recent years, I have started reading what I consider to be "popular" authors and books, with the excuse that "I want to know what all the hype is about". I have mixed feelings about them, thinking that certain authors are absolutely fantastic, whereas others are fly-by-night fads that will fade soon. However, that latter sentiment is only a hope, because these authors have become popular already, which to me implies that they will stay popular for a while. In the next few posts, I intend to discuss such popular authors as Dan Brown, Elizabeth Kostova, and Stieg Larsson, with perhaps a couple forays into Stephanie Meyer and J. K. Rowling, and maybe some reference back to Tom Wolfe. I have read all of Kostova's and Rowling's books, and unfortunately I've also read all of Meyer's Twilight books; the whole Robert Langdon series of Brown; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Larsson, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Wolfe. These authors are all ones about whom I have strong feelings, be it good or bad. I welcome any speculation about how I feel about each one, whether I feel like they are the fly-by-night that I mentioned or if I believe that they are actually contributing to the canon of literature. But in due time, I will reveal my feelings about each one, for better or for worse. So please, let me know how you feel, and we'll see if I agree or not.

Dan Brown

One of my friends recently read The Lost Symbol, which he called a "Waste of my life" in a text message to me. I almost completely agree with him. I replied with the comment "Where is the Dan Brown of Angels & Demons?" I read The Da Vinci Code in December of 2005, and I was decently pleased with it. Not a bad read, although it didn't quite live up to the hype that it got through the media. It was good enough that I decided to read the aforementioned Angels & Demons, which was actually a very good book. I was impressed by the ambigrams, which were pretty cool. And the plot was engaging, keeping me rapt from one page to the next, from the beginning of the book to the end.

But once the movies started coming out for these books, I started remembering the faults I had with these books. Angels & Demons was faultless for me, but The Da Vinci Code is another story. There were moments I disliked in it (but being 5 years since I read it, I can't remember exactly what they were), and the movie only served to emphasize them. Add that to the fact that Tom Hanks was not the man I would have chosen to play Robert Langdon, and I was not at all pleased. But that's beside the point. I want to talk about the books, not bad casting directors.

I intend the main points of these posts to be a discussion of why I think these authors have become popular. For Dan Brown, I have little doubt as to why he became popular: he offered an alternative view of history in regards to some of our most beloved symbols, or even in regards to the symbolism that doesn't even register when we see them (I'm thinking of the all-seeing eye featured on the back of the dollar bill). In particular, he offered an alternative view of religious history, which is almost always a surefire way to gain an audience.

Now, I don't believe the stories told by Brown in his books. There is a reason that we classify these books as "fiction". But just look at the hype that has come out of his books: I consistently see shows on the History and Discovery Channels about "the truth behind the Da Vinci Code" and similar topics. People, particularly those with vested stakes in religion, feel the need to dispel any sort of rumor that might hurt the image of the church. I consider myself a Christian, but not a particularly devout one or even one who buys into the dogma of particular religions. But I don't care whether or not the stories told in Dan Brown's books were true; if anything, I think Jesus would be more relateable if he had had relations with a woman at some point in his life, even if it was Mary Magdalene.

But I digress. The reason I think that Dan Brown is popular is that he knows how to play on people's most longstanding beliefs, such as religion or American history. Those with the largest stake in the matter react almost violently to his assertions, which in turn makes people (like me) who don't really care about the topic that much, to read the books to figure out just why everyone is so upset about the content. Despite his shocking content, the most disappointing thing about Dan Brown is his inability to tell a good story. His decline has been progressive: he had me engaged throughout Angels & Demons and through most of The Da Vinci Code, but by the time I was halfway through The Lost Symbol, I was beginning to ask when the story would begin. A tip to all authors, and Dan Brown in particular: SPEND MORE TIME TELLING YOUR STORY THAN YOU DO SETTING IT UP!!! The background can certainly be important to a story, but it should not take more pages than the story itself; in fact, if you go above a 3:1 ratio of story to background, I would say that you have gone too far.

So there are my opinions on Dan Brown. A bad writer who has the knack for making people react to his controversial subject matter. Despite this dislike of Dan Brown's writing style, I still intend to read the rest of his books and any more that may come out in the future. He knows how to create a good story, even if he's terrible at telling it. I have Digital Fortress on my bookshelf to read at some point, and I hope that it will involve better storytelling when Brown is not trying to upset the foundations of Christianity and democracy through one of his Robert Langdon tales.

Banned Books and Urban Revitalization

Unfortunately, I don't have much to say about urban revitalization. I grew up in one of the most rural states of the Union (I could easily go off on a tangent about Union/Confederacy and how West Virginia re-seceded, but I'll spare everyone the trouble), meaning that I have almost no experience with urban revitalization, homelessness, etc. I did, however, post about the exact same article as the group used, about the homeless and the downtown Madison library, on November 18th. So yeah, I think I will let that stand as my discussion of that topic.

Now for the other topic, that of banned books. Naturally, as an avid reader, I have much stronger feelings about banned books than I have about other topics. I don't believe that books should be banned, although I do believe that some books should perhaps not reach the hands of some people. One example would be that I would prefer that criminals not have access to The Anarchist Cookbook. Interestingly, I have reservations about letting children read books like Lolita or Anna Karenina, and yet having read (most of) Anna Karenina, I don't think that it would harm children to read it. I can hardly tell where the sex scenes happen, let alone do I think children would be able to. Madame Bovary is another example, which I read for my senior French thesis, and yet I hardly knew where the sex happened in that book, either. I in fact had to read some Cliff's notes to even point out the spots where it happened. Tess of the d'Urbervilles falls in the same category, that even after I was told where to look to find the sex scenes, they were impossible. I remember reading the introduction before I read the book (almost always a bad idea, but in fact absolutely necessary for reading this book, or else I would have missed the primary theme entirely), and it explained what was going to happen to Tess. Either I'm oblivious, or Thomas Hardy hides all of the sex very well.

Now, I realize that not all of these books have been banned. But they're books that stand out in my mind as possibly "offend[ing] the public morals" (the reason cited for originally banning Madame Bovary in France). I realize now that I'm in fact making the same judgments about Lolita that many censors often make about books they challenge: I, like they, have never read it. I've read the other three, and they're all definitely offensive (if you can get beyond the flowery language of the past to actually find where it's offensive). But as I said, children won't be able to flesh out those hidden nuances. It reminds me of when I read Gulliver's Travels. It was nothing but a fun read about an adventure a guy goes on. It had nothing to do with satire; in fact, I didn't even know what the word meant!

So, I suppose I should pull this all back in. I'm surprised at how much I'm actually leery of letting children read some of these books, but I also would have been offended as a child if there had been a book I wasn't allowed to read. Even now, the fact that a book is "off-limits" makes me want to read it even more. When the group presenting mentioned that book sales rise after a book is banned made me think of this very reason: people want to feel like they're doing something "rebellious", and this is an easy way to do that.

One [Insert Entity], One-or-So Book(s)

As soon as the group presenting on One City-One Book (OCOB) mentioned that 48 states have had OCOB programs, I wanted to know which two states haven't had similar programs. Upon asking one of the group members the same question, my suspicions were confirmed: West Virginia was one of those two states (Arizona being the other, as far as the group member could remember). Not surprising to me at all. In what is traditionally ranked as the 50th-least-literate state/District of Columbia out of 51 (we have a saying in West Virginia, "Thank God for Mississippi"), I'm not at all surprised that a literacy-promoting program has not been instituted there. And yet West Virginia managed to produce some of my favorite librarians of all times, the public and school librarians who inspired my love of reading through pre-school and elementary school times, on through middle school (probably my favorite librarian content-wise, because she knew exactly what types of books I liked and used that to introduce me to new books, including my now-favorite author) and even the grandmother of one of my best friends who was my high school librarian. But anyway, I digress for the sake of lauding some of my librarians, in contrast to the abysmal lack of literacy programs and even of literacy itself in West Virginia.

So how do I feel about OCOB programs? I'm not a huge fan, to be honest. I think the concept behind them is pretty good, to encourage discourse amongst community members, based in a common experience. But having participated in two years' worth of them here on campus, I have yet to experience that heightened sense of engagement. I mean, I may have enjoyed Henrietta Lacks because it was a pleasant read, significantly less academic than the rest of the stuff I was reading. And I may have felt passionately about Michael Pollen's In Defense of Food (I was the one on Wednesday night who rather loudly whispered "That books sucked!" when the OCOB group mentioned it. I don't like being told that everything I do is wrong, particularly when it comes to the love of my life, food.). But the extent of my discourse about that book was with my roommate, who thinks that Michael Pollen is a god (perhaps she thinks he is God? No, she's an atheist, but I think she believes he's as close as it gets), when I complained about his abrasive manner of presenting his arguments. And the extent of my HeLa discourse was limited to in class. I find this one more surprising, because with a science background, I would expect myself to engage more passionately in these discussions, but assigned readings just really don't do it for me.

e-Readers

I've been putting a lot of thought into e-readers recently, largely because I just purchased one myself and did a bit of market research before I decided which one I wanted to buy. I ultimately went with the Sony Touch for a variety of reasons, some of which Jason Griffey disparages in the article we read for class. I tried out the Kindle, the Nook, and a few e-readers that Borders keeps in stock. The biggest problem that I had with all of them is that they aren't intuitive. Quite the opposite, in fact; they worked against what I was trying to do half the time. Like Kindle having a page-back button on the right-hand side. Or making me use a D-pad as the clicker button, on top of the screen not refreshing fast enough for me to see when my cursor had actually moved. With the Sony Touch in particular, that's not a problem, because all you do is touch the screen to access the book you want. While Griffey is right about the overlay causing some "issues" with the touch, a little bit of glare is the only problem I've noticed (which is not one of the problems he mentions), and I haven't noticed any reduction in sharpness of my text. One other feature that could be nice would be wireless access on my device, but I'm perfectly fine plugging it into my computer if I need to download something.

One problem I had with the presentation on Wednesday was that the group presenting didn't seem to make the connection that Sony's "proprietary" epub format is not really proprietary at all, considering that it's becoming the de facto open source format. Speaking of formats, I think Amazon is rather ridiculous in their use of proprietary format. On top of a physical layout that defies all forms of logic, it also makes it nearly impossible to use the most popular formats without going through the rigmarole of e-mailing it to yourself or to Amazon to convert it for you. Further, I have no intentions of actually buying books for my e-reader. I mean, if it's a textbook that's significantly cheaper than the paper copy, then I might purchase it; but there are so many public domain books at this point (including many classics that have been on my reading list for years) that I see no reason to start buying e-books that actually cost more than the same book in paperback form. Plus, I have this fantastic thing called a "library card" that saves me from having to buy more than a few books each year. Actually, not one library card...I actually have four public library cards and three university library cards (Madison; Minneapolis; Lexington, KY; and North Central West Virginia. UW-Madison, Transylvania University, and University of Kentucky. I plan to get Bridgeport, WV, while I'm home for Christmas break, since my parents moved there last year). I'm not lacking for electronic reading materials, particularly free ones.

In Soviet Russia, Books Censor You!

I must say, I was really hoping to watch Storm Center in class. Partly because Louise's 450 class watched it, partly because I feel like I've already watched it through Louise's description in the The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown, partly because I graded something like 550 exams before coming to class and could have used a mental break, and partly because I just watched another Bette Davis movie, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, on Thanksgiving. It would be nice to see her in a less-creepy, not-so-evil role than that of a grown-up Baby Jane. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it, but brace yourself for some psychological horror. I tried to find as evil-looking of a picture of Bette as possible that also portrayed Joan Crawford as significantly more innocent, and the result is seen here.

But anyway, enough about Bette Davis. Back to the book in hand (well, not in hand, because I already returned it to the library at this point). I think the most interesting part of this book for me was the fact that Louise talked more in-depth about the McCarthy era than I've really seen in any other context. I know I studied the time period in my junior-year-of-high-school history class, but I remember focusing more on the Korean Conflict and not so much on the closer-to-home policies. I have trouble understanding how communism could have created such a scare in America, but I don't doubt that it truly did. It was particularly interesting to see in this book how the national scare of communism really managed to work its way into a small town in Oklahoma.

And now I wonder, how much have we really gotten away from the McCarthy era? How safe are we from censorship, especially as librarians? When I think about censorship in libraries, I immediately think of an article that I read sometime in the past year: Child protection or censorship? Library employees lose jobs over book. I think I remember it in particular because I spent four years of undergrad in Lexington, KY, fairly close to the town in question. What is surprising about this article is that it shows the opposite of what we expect: it's the "librarians" (you'll notice in the article that it makes a point that they're not librarians because they don't have the MLS degree) who are censoring materials, not the community. The ALA relies on its librarians to properly enforce the Bill of Rights and freedom of access to information, and these employees of the library clearly didn't do that. I can fully understand moving a book to another location, or keeping it as a reserve material, but only if the community at large truly deems a book to be inappropriate. It's not the role of a single library employee to decide what is or isn't appropriate for the public at large. The evidence from other area libraries (granted, Louisville isn't a particularly good example, as it's a larger city and as such traditionally much more liberal) just goes to show that it's possible to house the book and sill not cause an uproar. In fact, I don't think it was even causing an uproar where it was in the Nicholasville library; it was a single person who had a problem with the book. Moreover, even when she went through the proper channels, no one saw any problems with the book. So, in response to the article's title: it's censorship. In response to hero or villain: it appears she's much more toward the villain end of the spectrum. I doubt she meant any harm by her actions, but the broader impacts of her actions are what make it dangerous: if we allow one book to be censored by a single person, how far do we allow individuals to go in the censorship of library materials?

Digitization

Well, I'm not sure how to tie all of this week's materials together. Clearly, the video on Kindles didn't have the material in it that was expected when it was chosen (I think back to the article on Party Girl, when we were told that that article had very little to do with the topic for the week, even though it had all of the keywords we were looking for. I think this video is very similar, that it has all the right keywords, but still doesn't fit with the topic.). While accessibility is certainly an issue in libraries, I would hardly consider it as a subfield of "digitization". If anything, ereaders enable more readers to access texts, by allowing them to zoom in on the text (with limited capacity, of course, as I've seen from my own trouble zooming in on certain scanned images). However, the video focused only on the negative, that somehow ereaders don't accommodate those with disabilities. I still don't know how that's the case, but whatever. As I said, this clearly wasn't the content that was expected from the title, and as such, I don't feel like wasting more of my time discussing it on top of the hour and fifteen minutes of my life that I won't get back after listening to it. At least I was able to watch Wisconsin win a share of the Big Ten title while I was listening to it.

So now, to instead talk about the video that was more applicable to this week's topic. This video was mostly interesting to me because it crossed over significantly into the topics covered in LIS 644, Digital Tools, Trends, and Debate. Recently, we have been discussing digital preservation, which is a huge issue in libraries today, involving a broad range of topics: physical preservation (not letting CDs get scratched), format preservation (doc vs. docx file types, as a very simple example), data integrity (including topics like lossy vs. lossless compression, as well as making sure no ones and zeros get flipped in the binary coding of a file), and huge number of other issues. Some of these issues apply with physical materials as well, in particular that of physical preservation. Interestingly, digital formats can even face some of the same problems as physical formats in the face of malicious users: it's very easy to destroy a book, and in the hands of someone good with computers, it's also very easy to destroy a digital copy of something.

Another topic that I wanted to mention was that of eresources. The speaker in the video mentioned that we have adopted eresources very quickly. But what he doesn't say is that we haven't had a choice! Quite often, publishers realize that it's cheaper to issue digital copies of a journal than it is to print one, so they change to a digital-only format; subscribers have no choice but to adapt. The speaker does mention that we haven't had a choice but to license many titles, rather than purchasing them, but he still makes it sound like we've been on the cutting edge of eresources. True or not, it's only because we've had our hands forced, and we've basically been given a sink-or-swim option.

To put my own spin on things, digitization is a good idea. Digital formats can be at least as long-lasting as paper formats with the proper care, which may involve frequent (every few years or so) transition from an older file format to a newer one. Then again, that sounds like a possibility for paper copies, too, but the cost of making new digital formats is significantly lower than that for making new paper copies. The challenge facing us nowadays is coming up with new ways of describing these digital formats (metadata), so long as we also make sure that we're not letting files degrade or letting formats go extinct (think of 5 1/4" floppy disks).

Can a remodeled Central Library attract public and accommodate homeless?

An interesting article was sent to me yesterday by one of my friends, regarding the homeless population and the pending remodel of the downtown library: Can a remodeled Central Library attract public and accommodate homeless?

Government Documents, with a Focus on Chronic Wasting Disease

I'm sorry, but I really just don't find government documents to be that interesting. In fact, I don't know of very many people who do. What I did find interesting this week, however, was some of the information about Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). A large part of this was because I live/lived in two of the states mentioned as suffering from CWD, Wisconsin and West Virginia. What also interested me was that, after glancing at this week's articles over the weekend, I noticed front-page news in the Wisconsin State Journal on Monday about CWD: Politics, deer hunt tradition undermine fight against CWD, experts say. Some of the points mentioned in the newspaper article agree with Eschenfelder and Miller's article, such as the question of whether the government is supplying enough information for citizens to make informed decisions. At best, the newspaper article would indicate that Wisconsin is falling into the "attentive citizen" model, although the fact that public opinion doesn't figure into policy-making would imply that Wisconsin is more closely following the "private citizen" model. I doubt anyone would argue that Wisconsin is falling into the "deliberative citizen" model, because they clearly have an agenda about controlling the disease, and thus are probably withholding some of the information that they have, such as the debate regarding how dangerous eating the meat of infected animals is or whether one infected deer is likely to infect an entire herd. However, even with this skewed portrayal of the information, hunters are rejecting some of the policies in place, choosing not to hunt instead of dealing with policies that don't make sense to them. That in itself should be enough to suggest that hunters aren't being supplied with enough information. Why do you have to kill a doe before you can kill a buck? Is it because females become infected more easily than males? Or is it because they want to reduce the reproductive viability of the herd? I have a feeling that it's more the latter, but there could be entirely other reasons that I didn't even think of that is influencing the policy decisions. The American populace is a bit smarter than our politicians often believe, and we're not going to be happy when we're not getting the full story. CWD is an excellent case to examine, because it is a scientific problem, not a question of morals, and yet our government is essentially censoring information that it supplies to us. As librarians, we generally take a strong stance against censorship, and government documents are no exception. We should be providing our patrons with as much information as possible, good or bad, although it's important that we try to help them understand what is reliable information and what is just rhetoric. When the government fails to provide us with the information, we need to search it out elsewhere.

Intellectual Property and the Lab

Considering the title of this blog, I think you can guess that I'm going to focus mostly on McSherry's article (well, book chapter) about scientific research and intellectual property. But before I get into that, I naturally have a few complaints with this week's readings. Primarily, my complaint is that I didn't go to law school. Moreover, I don't go to law school, either. Therefore, having to read four different chapters out of law textbooks (or at least four chapters clearly written by lawyers) is extremely difficult. When I was talking with one of my friends about this, they jokingly asked "having trouble with the Latin?" I very honestly answered them that no, corpus is a word that I know; it's the English words that are causing me trouble. Pelletier had to establish a "boundary" for her case. So she's calling the county surveyor? Or is she Tom Sawyer-ing someone into building a fence? Fact vs. artifact? How does a gift even apply here? Sadly, this article and the Brown article on native art were the most understandable of any of the articles, but that still didn't make them particularly easy to understand. I know that I received a response to some of my earlier blogs that some articles are intended to be more challenging than others, but this week was absolutely ridiculous. Boyle has been around for a long time, and I would almost be willing to bet that he's published some articles on intellectual property (note: articles, not book chapters) that are actually written for the general public and don't require such a large degree of legal knowledge a priori. (See? Told you I know enough Latin to get by.)

So, now let's talk about intellectual property and the lab. I'm just going to put it out there at the beginning: while I don't agree with bringing issues like this to the courts, I agree with most of, if not all of, Pelletier's claims. I've spent about two years total in graduate-level research labs. I was entrusted with quite a few processes, techniques, and research paths that would be considered "trade secrets" within the community, because it's stuff that we in the lab wanted and needed to know, but that we didn't want others outside the lab knowing. With that being said, in most of the labs in which I worked, we really didn't care who knew what we were doing. In my most recent position, we were working with complex intermetallics (quasicrystals is the word that is most often associated with the field, but that was only a small portion of our group's work). Within these intermetallics, I personally was working on finding balances between simple structure types and complex structure types. I won't go into details of what these are, because I have a feeling no one reading this blog is really going to care/know what I'm talking about. But the point I'm trying to make here is that I can basically tell anyone what research I was doing because no one else is doing this type of research. Sharing this "proprietary" information doesn't hurt the lab at all, because there are extremely few people in the entire world who have the equipment to reproduce our experiments and even fewer who have the interest in doing so. Now, I realize that this is a public blog, and as such I'm not going to go into details of exactly what ratios of elements I was mixing, or of the specific structure types that I was pursuing. Compare the publicness of this blog with the publicness of the chemistry department at UW-Madison. It's very different. I could and did discuss with my classmates exactly what I was doing in the lab, especially because I thought it was really cool that I was working with gold and platinum (I held several ounces of platinum in my hand at one point...very awesome). I had no worries about them using my information, because they didn't have the equipment to do so. Further, there was an unspoken agreement that they weren't going to go talk with one of our few competitors across the world and tell them what I was doing. It was quite interesting that I didn't have reciprocity with some of my classmates. One of the main reasons was that they had colleagues in the same building who were in fact competitors for their research, working on similar projects. I suppose all of this boiled down to a question of how much harm it could do in sharing our information, and whether it could fall into the "wrong hands".

Now, who did I care about getting access to my information? Believe it or not, the technicians who installed the x-ray diffractometer in our lab. These technicians traveled to all sorts of other institutions to service their diffractometers...including the labs of our competitors. How does this relate to the case talked about in the readings? Well, this would be like giving our information to someone at a business, who is interested in making money. Our competitors may not be interested in making money, but they're definitely interested in beating us to publishing something. Plus, we were doing something completely novel to the field, so we didn't want to give them any hints about what we were doing until we had time to make sure it was going to work and publish our initial findings. Why do we care about this? For the very reasons cited in the paper: publishing your work first really does afford you more prestige within the field.

One last comment about Pelletier's arguments: I too was doing crystallography in my work. However, mine was with metals. To form crystals with metals, all you have to do is cool them down slowly from a molten state (circa 700 or 800°C). With proteins, however, the crystallization process is orders of magnitude more difficult, so I applaud Pelletier for her ability to do so. Her comment that ammonium sulfate is only one of a large number of options to aid crystallization is also very true. It's not in the first 5 salts I think of to try; it might show up in my first 15, but that's only a maybe. Mostly because sulfates tend to precipitate things, and even though precipitation produces a solid, it doesn't produce a crystalline solid.

I apologize if I waxed too scientific here, but I think I expressed my point. The value of scientific data (or techniques) rest in keeping them secret until you're ready to publish them. They shouldn't be shared with just anyone, and those people with whom they are shared are under an unexpressed understanding that it's not to be shared freely with other people. Pelletier may have pursued an unusual path to get her problem resolved, but she brought up some very good points about "ownership" of scientific information and its value.

A Reference Question Answered

I know this has almost nothing to do with copyright law (except for the fact that I had to log into UW from off-campus in order to access campus resources), but I had a friend ask me to find an article for her tonight. It was an example of a known-item search, because she and I both knew what an image looked like on the cover of the article and she remembered what journal it was found in. I thought I remembered a general time frame in which it was published, which was actually misleading for a while.

So, this is going to be a little funny, but this was a chemistry article in which the cover figure looks like a penis inserting into a vagina. Ridiculous, but it's the closest the chemistry world comes to something "viral" (disregarding the biological sense of virus, of course). Well, I began my search by logging into the American Chemical Society (ACS) database, which covers all of its proprietary titles, which are most of those that are important to chemistry. I started with a few keywords, such as "insertion" (a very popular term in chemistry, believe it or not, but it has more to do with inserting an atom into a bond and less to do with the "insertion" that the image looks like). When I realized that I had nearly 6000 hits to sort through, I limited my timeframe to August 2008-November 2008, because I knew that I first saw the article somewhere in that time frame (my first semester in the inorganic chemistry department at UW). When still too many hits remained, I limited myself to the journal Inorganic Chemistry, which is the journal in which my friend told me it was published. I looked through about 60 citations and didn't see the image, so I went back and refined my search. I had found an image of a key going into a lock on one article, which seemed quite similar to the image I was looking for, so I tried using the "find articles similar to this" link. No luck at all, seeing as I again had almost 6000 articles, but I did see the word "click" in the title. "Click chemistry" sounded about like what I was looking for, so I tried a new search similar to the last one, but this time leaving out the time frame because there were only about 60 articles total published in Inorganic Chemistry that use the word "click". Again, no luck.

At that point, I started wondering if maybe she had the journal title wrong. I glanced through the journal titles that ACS covers, and there was one journal that I'm very familiar with that didn't show up in the list, Angewandte Chemie (pronounced ahng-guh-von-tuh ki-mee), but that covers very similar topics to Inorganic Chemistry. Unfortunately, the search feature on Angewandte doesn't show images with their results, so I started flipping through the issues from Fall 2008, but to no avail.

At this point I moved to a regular search engine, both the images and the regular search through Google. I searched for things like "ridiculous chemistry images", incorporating "penis"*, "scorpion", and "llama" into my searches at various times, because I've seen journal figures that superimpose a molecule onto an image of a scorpion and another onto a llama, so I thought maybe someone would blog about the suggestive and/or stupid images that they've found. No such luck.
*Note to the user: I do NOT recommend conducting this search yourself. Some of the images that you will find are quite disturbing.

Return to Inorganic Chemistry. I decided to try a completely new approach, short of flipping through individual issues like I did with Angewandte. It was at this point that I noticed a link for "most popular articles" by month and by 12-month. I thought this might let me look back to 2008, because I knew that article was extremely popular then, having been shown to me both by my classmates here at UW and by friends who were still at my undergrad. Unfortunately, I was wrong about the ability to look at previous years' most popular articles, but I flipped through this year's most popular articles anyway. And, suddenly, there was my image! I found the article I was looking for because, even six years later, this image of a molecule-penis inserting into a molecule-vagina remains a highly-accessed article. I successfully used a variety of search techniques, progressively eliminating search terms and limitations in order to broaden my search, and ultimately found the item I was looking for, even if it was by a roundabout route that didn't actually use my search terms at all. Persistence pays off again! (I spent about an hour conducting this search, but it was well worth it in order to flex my reference muscles.)

And now, the image:







{trans-1,4-Bis[(4-pyridyl)ethenyl]benzene}(2,2‘-bipyridine)ruthenium(II) Complexes and Their Supramolecular Assemblies with β-Cyclodextrin

Sergio H. Toma, Miriam Uemi, Sofia Nikolaou, Daniela M. Tomazela, Marcos N. Eberlin, and Henrique E. Toma

Inorg. Chem., 2004, 43 (11), pp 3521–3527

DOI: 10.1021/ic0352250

Literacy and the WLA Book Cart Drill Team Competition

Considering that I found this week's book, Literacy in American Lives, to be one of the driest books I've read in a long time, and really couldn't find any pieces that were terribly relatable to my personal life, I want to tell a little story about a little girl's introduction to literacy (well, to the library). Note: this little girl is completely fictional, but she was the character used in our Book Cart Drill Team performance at the Wisconsin Library Association convention yesterday, and the story I'm about to tell is the story that we told in our performance.

Cue music: Star Wars. The scene: four librarians, checking their books to make sure that everything is in the right place. Enter: little girl, approximately age 8. Librarians realize that this is their chance to introduce a little girl to the library and books of all sorts.

Music change: Superman. Librarian 1 hands little girl a book on superheroes and puts a cape on her. Little girl flies like Superman (belly-surfs on a book cart) around the library with the librarians watching over her. She has discovered stories about superheroes.

Music change: E.T. Librarian 2 hands little girl a book about aliens and puts a blanket over her head, like E.T. wore in the movie. Librarians fly girl around the library like E.T. riding a bike. Little girl discovers story about aliens.

Music change: Jurassic Park. Librarian 3 hands little girl a book about dinosaurs. As little girl reads book, librarians swirl around her in fantastic pinwheels. Little girl becomes a dinosaur (puts on a dinosaur mask) and scares the librarians.

Music change: Hook. Librarian 4 hands little girl Peter Pan and sprinkles her with fairy dust. Little girl "sails" around the library on a book cart and sword-fights with librarians.

Music change: typical John Williams finale. Librarians wave good-bye to little girl, who takes her books home with her. Upon her exit, librarians rush to put on costumes and play for a little while longer.

Well, now that I've given a brief narrative of our championship-winning performance at last night's WLA (see the video at the bottom of this post), it's time to tie it in to libraries and literacy. I joked as we were preparing this performance that it's every children's librarian's fantasy, to take a child on a whirlwind adventure in the library, to help them learn to love books and the stories contained within. And really, if our librarians could take children on these true adventures, I have a feeling that children would much more easily develop a love of reading, too. Unfortunately, the problem lies in the fact that many children don't quite have the literacy skills to read books very quickly, and as such they get frustrated with books much sooner than they discover the wonder and adventure contained within. I don't offer any suggestions here of how to improve literacy among children (if I had a solution, I would already be very rich), but neither does Deborah Brandt. She's only exploring how people achieved literacy, and I believe this performance represents an event that would stand out in any child's mind about how they acquired literacy. If libraries helped a child act out what they're reading, that child would almost certainly remember the activity (especially if it involved flying, as our performance did).

Pearl Growing

I know that this post is going to be a bit different than most other this week, because I'm not going to write directly about Henrietta Lacks. Instead, I'm going to write about an information-gathering technique that is much more broadly applied than it would seem in library literature, that of "pearl growing". Now, stick with me, because this actually does apply to Henrietta (or at least to the book). Pearl growing is a term using in reference services for the process of finding a paper applicable to the topic you're researching, looking at the keywords assigned to that paper, and conducting searches based on those new terms. You may only start with one or two words that explain your topic, but through pearl growing, you get a wide vocabulary and a broad base of searchable terms to help you find additional applicable resources.

Now, how does this relate to Henrietta Lacks? Well, I'm taking a bit of artistic license and expanding my definition of pearl growing. If Buckland can classify an antelope as a document (and no, he can't; a document is a VERY strictly prescribed in its sense, as far as this future librarian believes), then I can classify Rebecca Skloot's technique as pearl growing. Skloot goes about gathering information regarding HeLa in a method very similar to that of a reference librarian. A reference librarian may only have books and articles available to him or her to answer the question posed, whereas Skloot is mostly using people and interviews, but nonetheless Skloot uses each interview, telephone call, and medical record as a method for adding words and people to her search. From reading medical records, she gains the names of doctors involved in the medical procedures on Henrietta. From the doctors she finds there, she finds the names of other doctors and the identities of professional organizations concerned with HeLa. Skloot is almost explicit in her use of pearl growing when she talks to the owner of the convenience store in Virginia, who was the proprietor of the to-be HeLa museum and who took her to the cemetery where Henrietta was buried. I don't know that Skloot would describe her technique as pearl growing, but I don't know how we can deny the fact that she adds people and search terms to her repertoire every time she meets another person or reads another person.

So, one may ask the question of why we read the Henrietta Lacks book for LIS 450. Considering that one group in the class is exploring the topic of "One City, One Book", we can certainly argue that we read for similar purposes: reading is a social activity, we glean much experience out of everyone having read the same book. However, I believe that HeLa offers us further insight: the process of interview-based research is not terribly dissimilar [please excuse me, George Orwell, for such an anglophonic (yes, I coined that word) phrase] from that of library research, and we as librarians should keep in mind that the marriage of library and interview-based research can often be quite complementary to one another.

nacre (ˈneɪkə) -n
	the technical name for mother-of-pearl

I have to give a shout-out to Rex Parker, my favorite blogger. Rex Parker daily solves the New York Times crossword puzzle, giving explanations of many of the answers in the day's puzzle. I only comment on his blog today because nacre is an extremely common crossword puzzle, and is related to the growing of pearls. Click on the picture of the crossword to access Rex's blog.

Reference Services

First of all, I want to say that I was a bit surprised by the topics of the readings this week. I had originally thought that the week's focus would be on collection development for two reason: one, we were told in the first week of class that we would cover collection development the week after we did our collection development exercise, and two, with Cat Smith as the guest lecturer, I naturally assumed that she would talk about collection development, since she teaches that class. I could see the connection in that Cat also teaches 451, but I really don't feel like I have closure on my collection development exercise.

With that being said, I suppose I have to talk about reference services (user-centered services), as that's what the readings focused on. I'm mostly going to ignore the Enola Gay article, because it was largely disconnected from the other articles that we read this week. The one correlation I can draw between it and libraries is the desire for censorship by some of the public, and the long-standing tradition of librarians to preserve freedom of speech. Librarians would most certainly want to display the Enola Gay, because it's information, but I'm not sure how they would feel about the "speech" that was written to go along with the display.

Anyway, reference services. I mostly want to focus on Morris's article, because there was a section the "Reference Interview" that stood out to me. First of all, from 451 last year, I remember reading an article in one of the first weeks of class entitled "The Myth of the Reference Interview". I had no idea what a reference interview was at the time, but I quickly discovered that there is a long-standing tradition in libraries of trying to teach about the "reference interview", a scripted, often very long, interview that the reference librarian conducts before trying to find the information that the patron wanted. In short, the interview is highly inappropriate for most reference interactions and is rarely used in practice. At one point, there was some reasoning behind the reference interview, such as when you're trying to find high-level references, such as when someone is trying to write his or her dissertation (still a valid use of the reference interview today), or the fact that the cost of searching was exceedingly high. Reference librarians would narrow down the searcher's topic as much as possible, so that they were querying the database as few times as possible, thus saving the library's time and money. Nowadays, however, database searching is much cheaper, and is rarely limited by either amount downloaded or time spent using the database, effectively eliminating the argument of cost from the equation (ignoring the cost of employing the reference librarian). Second, the reference interview is really only useful for in-depth queries. Typically the patron is either going to ask a simple question ("ready-reference", as it was called once upon a time, such as a state capital or some other factoid-type question) or ask for general information on a topic. Most reference questions, from what I've been told, are for school projects or for medical topics, which generally means that these questions do not go nearly as in-depth as the reference interview would require the librarian to go.

So how does all of this tie into user-centered services? Quite simply: users don't want to spend an hour with the reference librarian, going through a formal reference interview, just to get information for a 500-word school paper or to find out the capital of Arizona. A user-centered service would only involve asking the patrons enough questions to find out what they want to know, and also guiding the choice of subsequent questions by the patron's responses, rather than following a scripted interview. User-centered: gauge what your patron wants. Most likely, it doesn't involve a long, drawn-out reference interview.

The Power To Name Miscellaneous Things as Information

I want to preface this week's readings with a bit of difficulty with the readings primarily this week, but also from previous weeks. The readings so far seem to be written more for people who are already familiar with the topics contained within, rather than serving as an introduction to the topic(s) of the week. Hope Olson's article this week assumes we're already familiar with the Dewey and Library of Congress systems; another article that stands out is the first week's article on archives that just seemed entirely out of context, probably because it tried to show a real-life application of archives, whereas most of the class (myself included) is probably still struggling just to identify what archives and archiving are. I like to think that I'm fortunate to have already taken a couple library classes last year and to be enrolled in such a course as 551 this semester, to provide me with the background knowledge to know where Olson is coming from in her article. However, there are quite a few students in the course who aren't library students, who are probably only marginally familiar with cataloging, and as such are probably having more trouble than even I am understanding some of these articles.

Now, with that out of the way, it's time to discuss this week's articles. I want to focus primarily on the Hope Olson article, because 1) it evoked the most response from me and 2) I think I'll be doing my book report on Everything Is Miscellaneous. So, before I get to Hope, I'm going to discuss those points about Miscellaneous that drove me absolutely nuts. First of all, the book doesn't read as an argument with supporting evidence; rather, it reads as if David Weinberger is trying to defend his position from any possible criticism that one might have of his ideas. This defensive position is only the first of many things that makes this book a difficult to get through. The text itself is really quite simple, but it is the presentation that caused me to take nearly three weeks to read the whole thing. My second complaint is that Weinberger frequently re-uses examples. I'm sorry, that's a bit unfair; he uses, re-uses, recycles, uses again, and then for good measure, he uses once more his examples. Just look at the index: Linnaeus shows up four times, the Linnean Society one additional time outside those four, species three additional times, and insects and invertebrates each shown up scattered throughout these same pages many other times. Photos and digital photos are listed ten times and Flickr is listed nine times. I could go on, but I think my point is made: the repetitive nature of the book made it an exceedingly dull read when I found myself reading the same examples for the third, fourth, or even eighth times. Lastly, Weinberger has a way of making huge leaps near the ends of his chapters in order to tie back in the "miscellaneousness" of everything. I cannot remember exactly which chapter it happened in (another unfortunate side-effect of over-repetition of examples: I cannot distinguish one chapter from another), but I remember reading an in-depth example of something that Weinberger considered miscellaneous, when suddenly I was reading the chapter's conclusion which was completely disparate from what he had been talking about just moments beforehand. Suffice to say, I was not a fan of the Miscellaneous, and the failings of the writing style made me probably miss some of the points that Weinberger was trying to make.

Now, to talk about Hope Olson. This article definitely evoked the most response from me of any article we've read so far this semester. In particular, I wanted to address the point that she made about not being able to represent a black Roman Catholic middle-class male youth in Dewey. First of all, I was surprised that Dewey limits the use of Table 1 (I'm not sure what all is contained in Table 1, but it appears that it's a problem if you're trying to classify someone who fits in several social groups. However, her point that "[p]eople of African descent are diasporized throughout DDC by more than just geographical factors" (p. 655) is a problem that simply lingers from the era and location in which Dewey made his initial cataloging scheme. He created the system at Amherst, essentially WASP central, which would indeed put favor on the white, upper/middle class people. However, at this point, to change this system would require a complete revamping of Dewey. Just imagine the man-hours required to completely re-classify, re-label, and re-shelve all the books affected by this change! At this point, I think a more reasonable approach would be for librarians to place "see also" signage on the shelves, and possibly in the catalog, indicating where other books on the topic might be found. That brings me to another point: while some patrons will take the approach of shelf-browsing for books on their desired topic, others will consult a librarian, all of whom (should) know the work-arounds for Dewey, and how to find similar topics, even if they're not adjacent on a shelf. I suppose this ties back into a point made by Weinberger: with the limitations of physical space, each book can only be put on the shelf in a single place, thus requiring that we choose a "main" entry, or subject, and shelve the book there. Web 2.0 certainly offers alternatives to Dewey-like single entries, but most libraries are still not digital, Dewey's most certainly was not, and as a result we are still subject to the laws of physics. As such, Dewey is a good start to classification and the Library of Congress is a little better, but we clearly still have some room to improve.

Privacy Concerns

Let me begin this week by saying that I once again feel like I read these articles in the wrong order (although this time I followed the syllabus's order, not just the order they were posted on Learn@UW). Even though I have a science background, I felt like the Streiffer article was both too complicated in its technical jargon, but also much more focused on the forms for gaining consent than on the ethical implications of omitting any of these data fields on said forms. I suppose the focus this week was on privacy (or "two facets of privacy", according to the syllabus), but honestly, what is the drive behind privacy? Fear, to put it simply, but fear about what? Personally, I have trouble rationalizing fears about my cells being used for scientific research, but I think that's because, as I've already said, I have a background in science, and I can see the potential value behind using these cells for research. Some may have religious convictions about having their cells used, so I can fully understand reservations coming from there. But what about the people who just have an all-out fear of all that is scientific progress, particularly that involves testing using human cells. I have often heard arguments about the possibility of being denied insurance coverage if the insurance company was able to find out that we were genetically more likely to get a certain disease, but those arguments hardly seem founded when we're talking about cells that are, for all intensive purposes, completely anonymous (yes, the DNA still exists in the cell, but how many people have been genetically mapped so that they could be matched to their cells' DNA?). With this level of anonymity, why not let science progress with our cells? As I've said, and I don't want to belabor the point, I honestly can't fathom the fear that most people have about allowing their cells to be used in scientific research. So with that, I look forward to hearing the class discussions about these points.

A large chunk of my reactions this week came from the Byrne article, possibly because he reached more personal levels of talking about identity theft and "Level 5" threats like revealing our social security or bank account number. Most of these reactions came because it was reminiscent of both some of the reading we did in This Book Is Overdue and also regarding some of my comments from last week's Pawley article, or at least made me think once again about patrons' library records. From the Pawley article, it was mostly the fact that historians are using postal records from the 19th century to track reading habits, something that I find similar to today's attempts by the FBI/CIA to track patrons' reading habits with their "security letters", and I always operated under the assumption that the postal service was both anonymous and private. As for TBIO, many of the librarians in TBIO stated that their library records are destroyed after X days, which ensures a level of anonymity for their patrons (I am thinking in particular about the computer sign-up sheets that the librarian couldn't provide to the FBI because they're shredded each night, but also about patron records in general). How identifiable do we become with our library records? What would someone be able to figure out about me if they looked at my history of book checkouts? Assuming no distinction between my public library account and my UW account; I go where the books are available, regardless of what location I get my books. In the past year or so, I have checked out a fictionalized account of the Vietnam War (Going after Cacciato); two classic teen books about the French Revolution (from the series by the Baroness Orczy); a nonfiction book about sex (Bonk! The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex); several books that were assigned for classes (mostly library-based, such as TBIO and Everything is Miscellaneous, as well as two for Collection Development); Dan Brown's latest book, The Lost Symbol; a new thriller, The Thirteenth Hour; The Disappearing Spoon, a book about fun facts about the elements; a book about Gilbert Lewis and Irving Langmuir, two pioneers of chemistry from the early-to-mid 20th century; an audio tape of the seventh Harry Potter book so that I could listen to it on a long car trip; and probably a few others that I can't even think of at this point. Could someone identify me from these books? If not, could they identify me if they knew what I was reading out of my own collection, assuming that I would have had to check those out of the library, too? Honestly, I clearly don't have much shame about reading a book about sex (hey, it was about science, too!), but would I want the government knowing that? With this strange of a combination of books, which seem rather heavy on the chemistry and library books front, could quite possibly pick me out of a crowd; how many people would really read about librarians and chemists both? Anyway, I return to the question at hand: what could people find out about us if our library records were made public? Thankfully there are people like the Connecticut Four who are fighting to preserve that privacy.

"Reflecting on Reading"

First of all, I want to start off this week by saying that Pawley's article was DENSE! I fought my way through it and ultimately read the whole thing, but not without difficulty and likely not with the depth of understanding that I should have had. That being said, I very much enjoyed the Ross article (for the most part). My basic reactions to the article center on the final section, "Reflecting on Reading" (hence the title of this post). I did have some interesting recollections regarding the point Ross made about young readers needing to be encouraged to read, as I was quite the opposite. At the end of the school year every year in elementary school, teachers would encourage students to read over the summer, in hopes that they would maintain the skills that they had gained through the school year. I remember very distinctly my parents talking to my teachers after this speech, telling them "Please encourage John NOT to read!", mostly because I would spend hours upon hours reading, with absolutely no desire to be outside, even on the nicest of days. My parents finally came up with the plan that, if I was going to read, I had to be outside to do it. I hated them for that fact, because the indoor furniture was much more comfortable and didn't have as many bugs as the swing in the backyard or the picnic blanket that they set up for me under a peach tree. I still feel much the same way, that I would rather be indoors than out, and that I would much rather read than exercise a lot of the time. I do have to admit, though, that the requirements of reading for class have significantly dampened my love of reading, so that I often spend leisure time watching TV or browsing the Internet, though by no means has it been crushed altogether. So anyway, now that I've finished that tangent, my main point was that I've always had my own motivation for reading, so much so that my parents had to try to discourage me sometimes.

Now to respond to some of the questions posed in the final section. I find it very interesting and in fact a little disturbing that I actually can't identify my "earliest" reading memory. I think that's largely due to the fact that I've been reading for longer than I can remember, both reading along as my mom would read aloud to me and later by myself. I suppose my one significant reading memory was being allowed to pick books off the "sixth-grade shelf" while my classmates were only allowed to read at the "appropriate" second-grade level. Of course, it was around second grade that I discovered the Hardy Boys, which long remained as some of my favorite readings (fiction!? in a series!? the horror!). While fiction remains my strong preference in reading materials, with the great satisfaction of finishing a story, I have actually read a few nonfiction books (for pleasure) since I got to graduate school. Granted, they were mostly related to chemistry in one way or another, but nonfiction is a genre that I wouldn't have touched in my teenage years. Thus, I wouldn't say that my reading interests changed as an adolescent, but rather changed as I reached my 20s. I have trouble responding to several other questions in the list, too, such as a book/story that stands out in my memory. When asked my favorite book, I readily have the answer: "The Ruby in the Smoke" by Philip Pullman, which I first read in early eighth grade on the recommendation of my school librarian. Pullman quickly became my favorite author, but was replaced later by Diana Wynne Jones because Pullman doesn't write enough. Now ask me the plot. Well, it's about a girl named Sally Lockhart whose father has recently died. There is a large ruby that factors into the story (clearly, from the title), and the Smoke is that generated in the opium dens of 19th-century England. I know that there was something to do with the shipping industry in the Orient. I remember a line from the first page: "Her name was Sally Lockhart, and in fifteen minutes she was going to kill a man." Beyond that, I can tell you almost nothing about what happened. I was SO wrapped up in the story, reading it so fast, that I can't even remember half of the plot. It's that engagement that makes me love a story, the ability to "lose myself" in a story. So that kind of tells you something about me: books don't make a big impact on me, at least not in a sense that I can recount everything that happened. I'm much more likely to recount something from a book I hated, like "Walden", where Thoreau is quite hypocritical about his explanation of "isolation", where he lives alone but daily travels into town to catch up on the latest gossip. The worst part, and the icing on the hypocrisy cake, is that the then slips out the back way for fear of having to talk to some of the townspeople. That's just what gossiping is! But I digress. Either way, I think I've made my point about reading for me: it is a great pleasure for me, but specific books don't necessarily make an "impact" of affecting my life in any realizable way.

One last point to make before I wrap this up, responding to a bit of the Pawley article. It tells us that the reading habits of many 19th-century people can be tracked using their postal records. Does this not sound like a major invasion of privacy? In this day and age of fear about having our identities compromised, I find this to be an extremely hypocritical method of gaining information, even if it's long after the people in question are long dead.

Marginalized Groups and Libraries

After my rant late last week about Roma Harris's awful article, I progressively worked my way through the rest of this week's articles, which seemed much better researched, presented, and in general much better academically. I was particularly interested to find a reference to Hope Olson in Christine Pawley's article, which is not altogether surprising, as Hope Olson was a graduate of SLIS a few years ago and is now Interim Dean and Professor in UW-Milwaukee's School of Information Studies. Hope Olson was the main contributor to my project for 451 last year, about marginalized groups and their representation in the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Hope became our standard go-to whenever we couldn't find any more articles on a given subject: we would look at one of her articles, find one of the keywords she used, and be off on a new search.

But anyway, enough about the wonderful Hope Olson. Another line in Pawley's article (on page 157) reminded me of something a friend of mine posted on facebook recently: "In the post-civil-rights era, despite the legislative gains of the 1960s, racism has persisted through continuing residential segregation..." A man named Bill Rankin took the 2000 US Census and made a map showing the racial distribution in Chicago. The results were either very surprising or very unsurprising, depending on how segregated you think Chicago really is. I won't post here the map of Chicago; but another man named Eric Fischer took up Rankin's original task and started making maps of various metropolitan areas and their racial distribution. I include here links to the maps for Madison and Milwaukee, as two examples that I assume most people in the class will be most interested to see. Madison is rather unsurprising in its distribution: largely white, with pockets of Asians in Eagle Heights and a racially-diverse neighborhood on the south end of town. Milwaukee was rather shocking to me, because I'm not terribly familiar with the area, but it is definitely very residentially segregated. This all calls back to racial segregation of libraries: people visit their local libraries, which means that certain branches of a library are going to have a more racially-diverse clientele than others. Does that mean that we should tailor our book selections to those particular races? I won't even attempt to answer that question here.

On a completely different subject, after reading the Radford and Radford article about Party Girl, I felt the need to watch the movie, which is partly why I'm posting this so much later than I'm supposed to (whoops). I was most fascinated with the aunt's character, who only portrayed a portion of the stereotype that we all know so well. When she was dealing with Mary (Parker Posey's character), she was always very unfriendly and unhelpful, characteristics that I would say we hope do not represent a librarian. I suppose I did have some experiences in my childhood with that kind of librarian, such as one library that I begged my parents not to take me to, partly because they had so few books that I was interested in (how can a public library operate without a good children's section!?!?) and partly because the librarian (the one male librarian I ever had real experience with) was SO unfriendly. That story follows with the librarian at my high school prior to my stint there, who my mom quotes as saying "But if the students check out my books, they won't be on my shelves!" I'm not sure where these two librarians got their ideas of patron-oriented service, but I at least have exemplars of what NOT to do once I become a librarian.

I'm not sure that I've really addressed any of the pertinent topics for this week's readings (I find that's often the case, that the things I want to talk about after reading don't match whatsoever with the popular opinion/intention behind the readings), but as I said in Friday's post, I'm really through with these discrimination articles. No matter how well they're written (which thankfully some of this week's articles were), there's only so many times you can hear the same thing before you become numb to the information. With that being said, I as always welcome comments.

West Virginia Libraries

Libraries in West Virginia seem to be doing pretty well for themselves, despite the possible negative consequences of the economy. After some frustrating attempts at searching various West Virginia newspapers (In particular I refer to The Dominion Post, a newspaper in Morgantown, WV, the home of West Virginia University, which makes its newspaper archives accessible by subscription only. This is the same newspaper that I had the misfortune of growing up with, because the journalistic quality is often poor at best, and now they keep it behind Internet lock-and-key. As a result, I had to resort to other methods to get information on academic libraries in West Virginia.), I found some good information about a variety of types of libraries in the Mountain State. So, since I’ve already mentioned academic libraries, I think I might as well go ahead and discuss those. West Virginia University (WVU) is the state university of the state of West Virginia, so it makes sense that I was able to find the most information about their libraries. Currently, it appears that there is a big push toward technology in the WVU libraries. WVU libraries have worked in the past year to improve their eReserve services; to allow access to library services from smartphones; to introduce E-ZBorrow, a “self-serve version of interlibrary loan”; and to introduce the Naxos Music Library, an online music library. More tangibly, WVU finished a renovation of its Evansdale Library earlier this year, introducing a new color scheme (in the school colors of blue and gold), access to a snack area, and the addition of eleven more computers for student access. I consider all of this to be rather impressive, especially the renovation of one of the campus libraries, in light of all the current talk of downsizing libraries. I suppose what one must still ask is, what was sacrificed in order to provide all these new services? Were jobs eliminated? Unfortunately, I didn’t find any articles discussing library jobs one way or the other, and as such I can only remain skeptical about the funding sources for these new services.

As for school libraries in West Virginia, one of the stories that I found was similar to those I found about WVU libraries, whereas the other was a bit more dismal in its report. Addressing the bad news first, the St. Albans high school library has had to face a problem that could hit any library: mold. Due to a faulty heating and cooling system, too much humid outside air was getting pumped into the library, where it encouraged the growth of mold. Workers are trying to combat the mold with bleach and water, but I think we all know how well bleach, water, and books interact. This news follows at least two other reports of mold in school libraries in the past two years, one coming from Lakewood Elementary School, also in St. Albans, and another from Andrew Jackson Middle School in nearby Cross Lanes.

As for the much happier news, just like WVU’s Evansdale Library, Philip Barbour High School has undergone recent renovations. These renovations purposefully incorporated student suggestions in order to provide students with a library that they would like to use. One student referred to the new library as “Starbucks without coffee”, a description that appeals to high school students in West Virginia. After the county superintendent asked the students for input on how to make the library a friendlier environment, she had them make a presentation to the county school board, which was approved. The board then provided $21,000 to supplement a technology grant, which together went to both renovating the library and providing a big screen TV and video cameras for use in student projects. I found this all particularly impressive, because St. Albans is in a traditionally more affluent area of the state (just outside the state capitol of Charleston), whereas Philip Barbour High School in Philippi is located 45 minutes to an hour away from the nearest large town, Clarksburg.

Public libraries in West Virginia seem to be succumbing to the economy more than the other types of libraries I looked into for this project. One article I found on public libraries addressed the fact that they are becoming more technology-focused, providing Internet access to many residents who would otherwise not have access to Internet or often not even to computers. The director of the Bridgeport Public Library even says “We’re getting less and less books nowadays”, because many patrons choose instead to get materials online. However, this turn toward technology hasn’t come without a price. Due to budget cuts and the reallocation of funds, West Virginia libraries are having to look into cutting staff and/or services, something that the librarians say will most hurt those residents who are the most in need of said staff and services, including people without access to computers or the Internet, students without the resources to complete school assignments at home, parents who bring children to the library for reading programs, and sight-impaired people who need access to large-print books. So all said, while some libraries are remaining successful in the current economic situation, others are suffering, and in turn causing difficulties for some patrons.

Lastly, an interesting bit of news I came across, was that the world’s only digital bookmobile visited Huntington in late 2009. The materials available through the digital bookmobile cater to a wide range of users, from “elementary children downloading a Dr. Seuss book onto their iPods [to] someone…blind and unable to read a regular book”. The focus of the digital bookmobile is on downloadable audio books, and it travels around the US and Canada, “bringing enlightenment and education” about this new trend.

All-in-all, it appears that West Virginia libraries are doing fairly well for themselves, including several remodels and innovations. However, the public libraries do seem to be suffering more than any of the other types of libraries that I looked into, a fact that is already proving detrimental to those who are most in need of the services that public libraries provide.

Links:

Cutting library services to hurt residents most in need

Internet transforming modern-day libraries

Students can make a difference

Mold invades St. Albans High library

Digital bookmobile visits Cabell County Public Library

Evansdale Library renovations impress students

E-ZBorrow upgrade coming

Streaming music to your desktop

Library resources now available on phone

Improved eReserve services launched