Nor does the barrier-free access seem to have begun yet. Here’s a public-domain 1897 edition of MacBeth scanned from Harvard’s library. I can print it one page at a time, but I can’t find a way to print or download the full text.

Maybe things have changed since his post, but I found this copy of Macbeth with a full PDF download on the right side. Not only that, but more interesting are the various commentaries on the play, histories of Scotland and the Anglo-Saxons and other works from the 18th and 19th century. Nothing from the 20th, even outside copyright (isn’t it pre-1923?). Here is a search for “Macbeth” only in those books with full text available.

As I future librarian I hold reservations about giving one company so much power, but just the possibility of reading some textual commentary from the 19th Century raises more than a few good avenues for research off the top of my head and gives me academic goosebumps.

• From working all day Thursday,
  
• to travelling to my parents for a day an a half,
  
• to getting a call just as I was leaving that the library here at the university wants to interview me for a Reference Desk assistant position,
• finding out there is only one day of interviews,
  
• to getting up at 6 am, travelling back to Toronto, going to the interview, and returning by noon,
• going to the much loved Winona Peach Festival, where I enjoyed luscious home made potato chips from a truck (possible the best snack I have ever had, I’m sure XY will blog about it later.),
  
• having my brother take me all around Hamilton with XY on a nostalgia trip,
• coming home finally at 12 am on Saturday morning to discover that I have received a scholarship from the Faculty of Information Studies, covering almost all of my tuition this year,
• coming back to the city this morning and going right to work at 12 pm.

The award I received was the Florence Partridge Scholarship, bequeathed by the late head librarian at the University of Guelph to Toronto, where she did her library schooling. 

Ms. Partridge, a double graduate of the Faculty - Diploma in Librarianship ‘32 and Bachelor of Library Studies ‘39, worked as an academic librarian at the University of Guelph, culminating in a distinguished career as their Chief Librarian. She was also a tireless supporter of the arts, contributing significantly to the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre. This scholarship is awarded to a student with high academic standing.

I had to write a letter for the application, but I think I feel so much more grateful because of it. I’ve received small amounts of money in the past, but they were usually automatic, dependant on my GPA.  I think the fact that someone actually took the time to listen to my particular story, and that the money is coming from the estate of such a well respected woman, makes me appreciated it all the more.

The idea that, at the end of one’s career, that someone could reach back and give a wonderful hand to new librarians–it conveys a sense of community and idealism that I never experienced during my undergraduate degree, or even dealing with my brief flirtations with attending graduate school, while I was a member of the philosophy department.

From the beginnings of my first contact with the administration at FIS, to going into a meeting with the Assistant Dean to discuss my research and professional goals to today, I have never been made so welcome by anyone in education, even going back to when I was a child.

I think you could consider this the first activist or social justice writing. De la Casas was a contemporary of Columbus, and this 1552 work decries the slaughter of the Central and South Americans by the conquistadores. True, he was the Bishop of Chiapas, and thought that the Indians should have been converted to Christianity, but he also felt that the Spanish were quite unchristian by killing them by the hundreds of thousands, regardless of whether they heard the Gospel or not. There are some graphic descriptions, which are not really worth repeating, they are written again and again throughout human history. But I enjoyed this:

Once he [a minor Native Central American official] was tied to the stake, a Franciscan friar who was present, a saintly man, told him as much as he could in the short time permitted by his executioners about the Lord and about our Christian faith, all of which was new to him. The friar told him that, if he would only believe what he was hearing, he would go to Heaven there to enjoy glory and eternal rest, but that, if he would not, he would be consigned to Hell, where he would endure everlasting pain and torment. The lord Hatuey thought for a short while and then asked the friar whether Christians went to Heaven. When the reply came that good ones do, he retorted, without need for further reflection, that, if that was the case, then he chose to go to Hell to ensure that he would never again have to clap eyes on those cruel brutes.

And the non reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?”

So when I go to make comments on these books, you must realize that I haven’t read all of them, and may not for quite a long while.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. Vintage (used). There is another edition of this from Routledge, and I would have rather had that one in order to match my copy of On the Order of Things. On the other hand, this one matches my copy of Discipline and Punish, so what am I going to do? Have read half way through; I find Foucault can go off the rails on occasion, but you have to hold on to get to the good parts.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Confessions. Everyman (new).

I got this at overstock price, and it is wrapped in plastic, so I have been resistant in opening it. It matches a nice copy of The Idiot that Xuan-Yen gave me, although that one has a wonderful picture on the cover.

Jacobs, Jane. Cities and the Wealth Of Nations. Random House. (Used, first edition, my book looks much better than this picture, and I dislike when I can’t find a correct Amazon image)

I have a copy of her Dark Age Ahead, which was short and interesting. I’ve also read The Life and Death of Great American Cities, which I loved at the beginning but I felt dragged as it went on. I didn’t know this was a first edition when I bought it, but with what little bibliographic knowledge I have, it is hard cover, and there is only one printing listed, so I am pretty sure no one has read this since it was published.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins. (new)

What can I say? The book that started it all, really. I’ve read and own quite a number of his works, but I have always felt something was missing without this one. Even the Translator’s Preface, which I’ve worked through, was enjoyable. Although the real task lies ahead, which I approach with a little trepidation.

de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Perennial. (used)

I don’t know how I feel about this edition. I have a very old used edition of the first part of the work which I got free from discards of a book sale. I didn’t have an entire edition, but sometimes, you know, you get a book home and you dislike the smell of the pages—and this is how I feel about this one. Important book, though, good to know how much reading and political participation the average American was involved in.

Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva, Shambhala (used) The Diamond Sutra & The Sutra of Hui-Neng Shambhala (used) An exception to my above quotation about not reading books right away, when it comes to religious texts, particularly Buddhism, I always dive right in. I find I particularly enjoy reading Buddhism on the subway, especially when I read about the Bodhisattva, or the Buddhist saint. Hui-Neng was the Sixth Patriarch of Zen (Chan) in China. I had forgotten about him from my Chinese Philosophy class, and the stanza which won him the robe, begging bowl and the transmission of the dharma. His competitor had wrote:

Our body is the bodhi tree And our mind a mirror bright Carefully we wipe them hour by hour, And let no dust alight.

The Fifth Patriarch was less then impressed. Hui-Neng, a foreigner, was forced to pound rice and was not allowed to attend dharma teachings. In secret he wrote his own stanza on the wall:

There is no bodhi tree, Nor stand of a mirror bright, Since all is void, Where can the dust alight?

I think after reading Buddhism it allows me the opportunity to meditate at being content with my current situation, both personally and professionally.

I’ve been wanting to do the same thing for a while, but having some hosting space gives me the flexibility of installing my own software. I was looking at some, Mediawiki which runs Wikipedia for instance, but I don’t know if there is something that I particularly want.

What I would like is something that allows me to write or take notes, but then also allows discussion right within the page, not as in Wikipedia where the discussion is held in a separate page. This would give me the ability to have people annotate what I was writing as I was writing it.

I think the best I will be able to do is just have a section at the bottom of each page where I want comments labeled “Comments”, and make it clear that is where I want people to write. It would be good as well to have a mechanism for there to be citation links to my work as well.

It would be a lot neater if I could have come kind of two columned thing, with the writing on one side and the comments on the other (like the layout of GAM3R 7H30RY). Any ideas?

Aside from the hundreds of towns and villages in the British Isles that provided enthusiastic new readers, there are submissions written from would be volunteers living in Austria, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Holland, New South Wales, Indiana, Calcutta, New York, San Francisco, Ceylon, Arkansas, New Zealand, and Wisconsin

He didn’t mention Canada, but oh well.

It would be interesting to me to compare the lines of code in the Linux kernel to the amount of text in the OED. I wonder if the amount of work done for the Dictionary is the upper amount of work that can be humanly possible without the use of computer systems. In many ways the OED resembles the centralized and controlled chaos of the Linux kernel.

At the bottom we have the people who submit patches, equal to the volunteer readers. Next we have the people who are responsible for their respective sections, I don’t know, memory handlers and input/output drivers and such. They resemble the assistant editors whose job it was to take the quotations, sort them out, and make some sense of them regarding age of the quotation and reliability of the source. Next to last we have Andrew Morton, right hand man to Linus, who is represented by Henry Bradley, who himself was responsible for some sections of the Dictionary, working concurrently to Murray (and who in turn became editor when Murray died). And at the top, James Murray, who stood on the shoulders of all those who helped to make the final decision about what got in and what was kept out and how best to package the entire thing.

I mean, granted, it was Victorian England: most of the contributors were very learned and the women who did contribute were totally left out of being credited by name in the first printings. But, to do all that without even a typewriter is stupendous.

I feel as I actually get into my studies I can move more fully into the whole library blogsphere, without just lurking and reading along. Anyway, beyond one of my own posts that is there, you also read about the immensely fascinating science behind deciphering the Archimedes Palimpsest over at Living the Scientific Life.

ALA’s testimony emphasized that any diminution of the quality or quantity of cataloging provided by the Library of Congress will force the nation’s public, school, and academic libraries to take on this work themselves or abandon it altogether. “When the Library of Congress decides to cut cataloguing services to our nation’s libraries, thousands of Americans’ ability to locate and identify desired information is diminished,” Gorman said. The ALA requested that the Library of Congress return to its former practice of broad consultation with the library community prior to making significant changes in cataloging policy. Further, the association urged the Library of Congress to “re-dedicate itself to cooperative cataloging programs and cooperative standards efforts, in which both the Library of Congress and partner libraries can benefit from standards established together.”

Link (via Library Juice, again)

The uniqueness of Wikipedia is that, unlike the traditional models of creation, dissent is included in the presentation. That is, unlike a traditional encyclopedia which might frame a debate as entirely or mostly one-sided, the collaborative nature of Wikipedia illustrates how ideas work in the real world. Most topics, especially as you move away from the purely abstract to the purely concrete, don’t exist in a state of total one-sided consensus. If there is a heated debate surrounding a topic or issue, is that not in itself worthy of being known by the end user, by the very fact that it allows the reader to make an educated choice for his- or herself? Is it not information, part of the truth of the issue that such a debate exists?

While Britannica might make a note of the fact that “A certain minority of scientists disagree with the mating habits of the chimpanzee, and believe X opposed to Y,” a well-written Wikipedia article (and I don’t think this even approaches a majority) will have the same debate going on on a microcosmic scale right in the article and talk pages. A well-sourced article will have the sources for the debate right in the talk pages and the footnotes.

Again, I think at times Wikipedia is very bad, but when it is good, it is good in an entirely different way than the traditional model: not for its writing quality, but for its ability to allow dissent, not just with a single passing note, but within its very structure, within the structure of the article itself.

Bob writes:

The Wikipedia is a quite different sort of publication, which frankly needs to be read in a new way. Jaron focuses on the “finished piece”, ie. the latest version of a Wikipedia article. In fact what is most illuminative is the back-and-forth that occurs between a topic’s many author/editors. I think there is a lot to be learned by studying the points of dissent; indeed the “truth” is likely to be found in the interstices, where different points of view collide.

I agree to an extent, but I would frame it this way: it is not just that truth is found in the collision, in the “interstices” of the collision, but that the truth necessarily includes the collisions, as wholly part of itself, without assimilation, synthesis or aufgehoben.

I think this is somewhat of an enlightening notion, that we can go beyond the childishness of the debate to include the debate itself in our worldview

I don’t tend to comment on politics; it doesn’t really solve much, and in the current climate of debate you are either talking to an opponent who won’t see your side, or preaching to those with whom you already agree. Mostly, I am interested in political theory, from my philosophy background.

However, from Library Juice I got this report that Israeli troops targeted a Palestinian archive full of government records–passports, birth and death certificates, other identification documents–destroying the contents beyond recovery. Library Juice quotes the original article, and I am going to use the same quote because it illustrates the historical importance of the archive:

hundreds of thousands of file cases and documents — birth and death certificates, identification records, passports and other travel documents, ledgers of hand written information — a heritage of historical information about Nablus residents that covered more than 100 years of successive Palestinian occupations under the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, the Jordanian kingdom, and the current Israeli regime.

What strikes me is that, according to the article, Palestinian officials offered the keys to the archive to the soldiers, who were reportedly “searching for ‘wanted men’ for the purpose of ‘national security.’” Okay, let’s give the Israelis the benefit of the doubt: maybe there were bad men in the archive, and maybe the army didn’t want to risk soldier’s lives, so just used bombs to be sure they got all the “wanted men.”

Then what about this:

“They destroyed the building completely, but that wasn’t enough for the Israelis. They then used their Caterpillar bulldozers to churn up everything and mix all the documents with the soil so that nothing is able to be preserved,” [director of the Ministry of the Interior in Nablus] Ateereh said.

The records of a government are what give it legitimacy (good reading is the beginning portion of Derrida’s Archive Fever). These archives, going back 100 years, document the current and previous residents of the area, including now absent Palestinian refuges. Documentation is the source of these people’s claims, without which they become homeless and voiceless. Regardless of what side one takes, such destruction is illegitimate, and harms not only the people of the area, but our entire collective memory.