David McGee from the Burndy Library at MIT presented to us the manuscript of Michael of Rhodes, a unique look into the intellectual life of a fifteenth century commoner. Lost for 400 years, McGee exhibited the manuscript as the life’s experience of a common mariner who worked his way through the ranks from oarsman to the highest non-noble post in the Venetian fleet. And, in turn, that life explains some anomalies about the manuscript itself.

Filled with mathematical problems, tables of calendar dates, navigational calculations and ship schematics, the book contains much of the knowledge required to outfit and direct both individual ships and entire fleets. Curiously, however, the work lacks technical detail and contains errors in many places. McGee contends the work is not an instructional manual or a personal aid but was used to exhibit the seasoned mariner’s knowledge to the nobles, merchants, and important citizens of Venice. The highest posts in the Venetian fleet were won in highly contested elections and the manuscript was created to set Michael above similarly experienced Venetian citizens. The expense of such an undertaking illustrates the life-long zeal of a foreign commoner to insert himself into the highest positions of Venetian society.

Those attending were amazed by the condition of the manuscript, save for the final, well worn, page. Containing Michael’s illustration of St. Christopher bearing the Baby Jesus, it was often touched for luck on Michael’s long voyages around the known world.

I love that I have only taken a month of cataloguing and I can understand every single word in this paper. Not only that, but I found it really interesting. Maybe I am too Library 1.0?

Some great quotes:

Why is making a digital image of something already represented in the catalogue deemed a more worthy use of expertise, time and systems than adding to the catalogue items tdigitise, digitise.

AACR2 fails as a cataloguing code for the global environment. Although theoretically there will be consistency within the local catalogue, there cannot be in the global catalogue due to the use of options and varying interpretations. But right at the heart of the failure is 1.0D: “Base the choice of a level of description on the purpose of the catalogue or catalogues for which the entry is constructed”17 – a phrase unchanged from the 1978 second edition.

Now that we are moving to subject headings and leaving AACR2 behind everyone else in my class is ecstatic, while I think I am going to miss it and its soft and warm blanket of logical steps.

[How do we deal with the above inconsistency?] By dumbing down the resource description and the catalogue so that it accommodates the customer’s approach to information retrieval, by making our catalogues look and “feel” like a Web search engine when in fact they are far more powerful tools.

Abstract

The notion of copyright is deeply entrenched in the psyche of librarians, who remain one of the few groups who consistently support or uphold it. Given the growth of digital information and consequential change in the behaviour of information creators and users the paper posits that copyright administration in libraries has become a cumbersome burden whose “time has come”. Changes in information provision by libraries towards delivering more digital information have ironically highlighted the paradox libraries face between providing the best possible service and upholding copyright. The notion that there exists in the digital environment a “right to copy” is put forward. Copyright is legally complicated, controversial, subject to a number of misunderstandings and generally not fully understood even by the librarians whose daily tasks include administering it. To better understand the current status of copyright and its impact on libraries the notion of copyright is briefly outlined, along with what exactly copyright is, its historical roots and its suitability in the current environment. In examining the legislation the paper critiques its aims and how it fails in these; compares arguments in favour and against its retention, investigates how it serves to restrict creativity rather than encourage it and in closing suggests why libraries should abandon the struggle to uphold copyright. Examples from New Zealand, Australia, the US and the UK are used to highlight inconsistencies that support the argument that copyright in the digital environment is a nonsense that no longer works.

Staincliffe, Paul (2004) Has cataloguing become too simple? : why it matters for cataloguers, catalogues and clients. New Zealand libraries 49(10).

Abstract

Modern catalogues have become far removed from their original ideals, and cataloguing standards have declined. Nineteenth-century arguments about whether cataloguing is an art or a science have been overtaken by concerns about a “dumbing-down” of quality to meet the perceived needs of modern library customers, and by debate about the direction of resources towards digitisation in the clamour for access. Despite rumours of the impending demise of MARC, the format remains standard and is expected to prevail into the foreseeable future. This article has been adapted from a paper delivered at the LIANZA Conference in Napier, N.Z. in September 2003.

While I agree somewhat with what you have listed, was not the degree conceived as Library Science? Many of the things you have mentioned, at least in terms of having to teach or learn them, could be picked up with a few hours of an O’Reilly book. Am I paying thousands of dollars to evaluate URLs?

I came here after a year off reading about various theoretically works concerning the science of librarianship, and I am not discussing any of it. Ok, maybe I am too Library 1.0, but are not theories of classification, bibliographic control etc etc worth anything anymore?

Want to be 2.0? Can we judge folksonomies without having a solid foundation in taxonomy? Can we judge social networking without a solid theoretical basis in ideas at the confrontation of information and society? Is it sufficient to just create a web page, or do we need to ask what a web page means?

I know you are not suggesting what you have listed is just what we should be learning, but there are a lot of scholarly voices who sell librarians short because at their schools they learn about URLs, RSS and Wikis

Conclusions: The Past and the Future

As we can see from the above arguments, Crawford takes a necessarily balanced stance on Library 2.0, and rightly so. In situations were use of the term is beneficial and encourages debate and positive development, Crawford actively promotes its use. At the same time, those uses of the term which promote dissidence, extremism, and evangelism at the detriment of an entire class of library patrons, at the insult of generations of librarians who have promoted reform, and in ignorance of other mandates of the library as social institution, cannot be condoned. He writes that if you can agree that it is not the job of the library to be everything to everyone, at all times, in competition with information providers like Google, then you can be open to the possibility for discussion of the future of the library, and the future libraries needs, without labels and “bandwagons”: “I don’t believe [these] conversations are specific to Library 2.0 or ‘Library 2.0.’” In the end, his position is the most flexible, taking a “best of both worlds” approach to the debate surrounding L2, and in this way is quite forceful in its conclusions.

In the end, the name we give to our constant evolution is not important. Furthermore, those who push to have L2 a banner over all improvement and development, and would class librarians such as Walt Crawford as ridged, backward, outdated and “roadblocking” innovation, seem to forget the history of librarianship, and in two ways. The first Crawford has addressed, the ignorance of previous evolution of libraries. The second ignores the library as an institution of public memory. The beauty of the library is that it exists between two poles. The one has always adopted the newest technologies, from codices to card catalogues to OPACs. The other has always looked backwards to the past; much of our own practices have come down straight from the librarians in the Middle Ages and earlier. Loosing those practices would be loosing much of our definition of “Library”, regardless of the number affixed. The strength of Crawford’s position is that he successfully navigates between these two poles, calling for change as well as remembering the way we have came.

Yet, what if I am in the wild and I need to listen to music? I could just copy all my tracks to my laptop, but what an unnecessary use of space. I could cue up VLC to send music, but that would take too much configuration each time.

Enter edna, the simple MP3 streaming server. A small Open Source python script, after a one time configuration it sits on a port and waits. When you point your browser to the server and port, you get a nice HTML list of all your directories. If you place albums in directories as I do, they are playable with one click. Clicking opens a m3u playlist file depending on what subset of tracks you selected (one track, one directory, multiple recursive directories; ordered or random). Then your default music player opens and plays the tracks. [I had a edna screenshot here but removed it for plausible deniability.]

If that wasn’t easy enough, enter Songbird. Songbird is an Open Source music jukebox (like iTunes), actually based on Firefox. While it is still struggling to reach a good level of stability and responsiveness (although it is totally usable now), what it has that iTunes lacks is a web browser. Big deal? Well, whenever you browse to a website, Songbird cues up whatever MP3s it finds there and puts them on a streaming playlist (with an option to download). While it comes with a directory of preloaded sites, music stores and music blogs, what happens if we point Songbird at edna? That’s right, it is as if my library were right with me. All the tracks get loaded automatically and I just press play. It’s all self-contained, don’t even have to open Firefox if I didn’t want to, and I don’t have to deal with another media player. If I had to recommend one, edna is the most wonderful of the two. Songbird is great, and getting better, but edna is just pure simplicity: it does what I want, does nothing else, and does it rock solid.

[I've removed the address to my computer in the screenshots. Sorry if you wanted a test]

However, by 1967 AACR allowed for a “modified rigid” approach: each person was alloted one name, but that name could be a pseudonym if it was the most commonly known one. Now AACR2R recognizes that individuals can have many “bibliographic identities.” Contemporary authors even get a heading for every single pseudonym that they use. What a totally “postmodern” conception (a word I use only for convenience because I want to get back to studying and not spend time defending whatever the hell it means).

Is this a little bit of the “Death of the Author”? I love when I find little gems of philosophy in this science. In a sense it is like an art, it is governed by cultural trends.

1. Everyone is extremely nice. The professors are wonderfully approachable, as well as the staff. There isn’t really any competition going on between students, which is great. And all of this is such a relief from my undergrad. However, it also means that I don’t really engage in any interesting conversation with my classmates. I would be nice to start a Philosophy/Critical Theory reading circle just so I have some discussion at a higher level. Which leads into my second point…

2. The classes are so tedious. Apart from my joint Book History class which includes MAs and PhDs from other departments, all my classes are taught at such a slow theoretical level that I am starting to become dissatisfied. I know I have some really bright professors, I get glimpses of their insight from time to time. However, the lectures and the level of discussion in class is so elementary. I am not saying I even know anything about LIS, but I expected that as a Master’s program there would be some kind of rigor and critical debate. Maybe my expectations were too high?

3. To go along with that, my assignments are all busy work, at least right now. There are term essays which I haven’t begun to think about, but my current work seems more like a test of whatever we have learned in class + “discuss the positive/negatives” tacked on to make the work 500+ words. “Describe work using AACR2 and discuss” “Solve this organizational case study using a management principle and discuss.” I was reading Crooked Timber this morning and they were talking about Hegel, and I actually miss doing that. I know I was not good enough at it to make a living talking about Hegel, but I did get into some Philosophy Master’s which I decided against, so when these classes are so much fooling around I miss talking like that.

For instance, yesterday we discussed, briefly, classification and its relation to society for “Information and its Social Contexts.” All I wanted to do was go down and get a copy of Aristotle to study why we/the West categorize things the way we do. I know I can’t expect everyone to think like that, but shouldn’t we be challenging people?

1. TAs? It seems that all these introductory classes are too large for the teacher to mark all the work, so for the first time since second year undergrad I have a Teaching Assistant. What’s up with that? Is this the best way to judge student achievement, or would it be better to have smaller classes? My past experience with TAs is that, while well meaning, they have their own set ideas about what is good writing, as they are deep in their own style of writing, which can cloud their judgement of the content. A Russell scholar in Philosophy doesn’t really like when you use the mental tools of a Heidegger and vice versa; a Social Scientist doesn’t like when you write like a Humanities student. It is a frustratingly necessary evil.

If you haven’t realized, I am in a bit of an academic rut. I know that the work for my class is taking up only a small fraction of my time, and I should use what is left to start my own research. But the Catch-22 is that I am not really learning anything new in my classes, except for specific things like learning AACR2, so I don’t know if I can gain any new inspiration right now.

Except for Book History. It is a full year course, so it is moving a little slower. Buy maybe I need to look on it for solace. More on my thoughts of it as it develops.