People will shift away from keyboards to produce written words. We’ll speak into microphones, at first clumsily and eventually efficiently with our own individual shorthands. Words commonly mistransformed by software will enter formal and spoken language. Academic papers will be written about it, this time not without irony.

There will be backlash. Writing is a lost art, we will say. Anyone can put text on a screen, but real writing is done with fingers pressing on keys, with keys pressing back on fingers in kind but ultimately yielding. Our new writing, in contrast, yields to the computers representing it.

Then we will stop writing altogether.

What is the coolest library/info related book or article (or blog post, I guess) that you have read in the past year or so? Post something in the comments here – I am hoping we end up with a nice, interesting list. Feel free to paint outside the lines…

I kind of loathe end-of-year-lists, but I love reflecting, so set about picking out an interesting article to comment on. Unfortunately, Litwin’s post and another of his disappeared, but that’s okay, this would be a hell of a long comment. Most of this is culled from my del.icio.us bookmarks, though it would be heavy on internet-things anyway.

If you read (or have read) any of these, I’m always up for discussion, as well as suggestions for further consumption.

In no particular order, from the last year or so, here is what I’ve read that I found interesting for one reason or another:

articles, etc

Michael Chabon in the New York Review of Books, “Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood”

Some of my fiction-writer friends make fun of me for liking Michael Chabon. I haven’t read everything he’s written but I did enjoy Summerland, the comic book one and Maps & Legends, his collection of literary criticism. Here he says that as a whole, we are overprotective of children and in doing so we deny them the opportunity to discover the world for themselves through play. It resonated for me as a new parent, which comes with a loss of childhood.

danah boyd at the Personal Democracy Forum, “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”

boyd gives ‘em hell again. She shows that there are class differences between users of Facebook and users of MySpace. An organization that chooses one over the other is showing which type of people it thinks is important. She is talking about political engagement, but her argument could apply to any organization interested in reaching out to an online community, say, a library.

James D. Watson in the New York Times op-ed page for August 8. 2009, “To Fight Cancer, Know the Enemy”

Science giant James Watson is worried that too much research into cancer is controlled by big, and risk-averse pharmaceutical and biotech companies. I admit I don’t get all the nuances, but he says the National Cancer Institute should help fund the little guys and encourage firms to “take on the low probability-high payoff projects”. It’s probably the only article about medical research policy I’ve read that doesn’t have the words ’stem-cell’ in it.

Vivienne Waller in First Monday, “The relationship between public libraries and Google: Too much information”

Google’s methods are fundamentally at odds with Public Libraries’ mission. Here’s the entire concluding paragraph:

As publicly funded institutions, public libraries need to serve some conception of the public good. This requires that they be clear–sighted about the differences between what they seek to do and what the company Google does. Libraries need to reassert their identity as providers of balanced and significant information. Of course, this involves making subjective, value–laden judgements, the type of judgements librarians have always made in the past when selecting items for the collection. There should be endless and difficult debates about what is significant information for libraries, and what constitutes a balance. Without these debates, libraries will lose their bearings, swallowed up by Google (or Google’s successor) and spat out into a sea of too much information. They will take hopes of a healthy democracy with them.

Ramin Setoodeh and Andrew Romano interviewing Maurice Sendak, Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze in Newsweek, “A Talk with the ‘Wild Things’ Creators”

Where the Wild Things Are author Sendak and filmmakers Jonze and Eggers talk about their creative differences with their publisher and studio, respectively, and then digress:

Spike, did you have fights like that when you were making this film? With the studio, not with Maurice.
Jonze: Oh, yeah, definitely.

Eggers: No, there were no fights! [Laughter] No! Sorry, go ahead.

Jonze: Yeah. The big disagreement is that they thought I was making a children’s film and I thought I was making a film about childhood, and so, along the way …

Eggers: Keep dancing, Spike!

Jonze: I mean, I think it’s a film—I want children to see it, and it’s not like I made it not for children, and it’ll be on the video shelf under CHILDREN’S, but I didn’t come at it that way. I came at it from the inside out as opposed to the outside in. In the end, though, the studio let us make the movie we wanted to make.

Sendak: It’s really an American problem.

Sendak goes on to echo much of what Chabon says, above, but from a creative perspective instead of a parenting one. We try to avoid scaring children, and that’s terrible, he says. Even Mickey Mouse used to be dangerous:

Sendak: He had teeth.

Jonze: Literally?

Sendak: He had literally teeth.

Jason Scott, presenting at Arse Electronica 2009, “The Atomic Level of Porn“.

Angry preservationist and historian of old computer crap Jason Scott discusses the history of computers, telecommunication and erotic images. He covers teletype, ham radio and video games. Someone else could do the same presentation on sharing files over old-timey networks and leave out the sex, but somehow I don’t think it would be as good.

Paul Ohm, “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization“, a “University of Colorado Law Legal Studies Research Paper”.

Ohm establishes that “anonymizing” personal information, such as in health records and search engine data is largely a myth. He cites several studies in computer science that prove that many individuals can be identified even from anonymous data. From there, Ohm suggests that gross changes are needed in law and public policy to protect privacy.

Eric Brasseur, “Gamma error in picture scaling“.

In an article from 2007, Brasseur explains why software for scaling images often distorts their color. When the size of an image changes, colors for each pixel need to be re-calculated. Most scaling software (at least up to 2007, I don’t know the state of the art today) ignores the fact that colors and greys are calculated logarithmically. Here is the quick example:

This picture shows all 256 shades, from 0 up to 255:

255 divided by 2 equals 127. At first thought you would believe that gray number 127 has half the luminosity of gray number 255 (=white). That would be a “linear” scale. Actually, the gray that shows half the luminosity of 255 is gray number 186. This is due to the “exponential” scale being used.

Amy Karol in her blog, Angry Chicken, “book copying“.

Karol’s daughter makes copies of her favorite books, changing the story along the way. “She usually adds a sibling and sometimes changes the gender.” Here is a take on one of my favorites:

“Oh child-brain–I love you!”, writes Karol. Me too. In my adult-brain somewhere there is a connection between this and Anne-Marie’s discussion of Emily Strange last year. Wait, why isn’t that post in this list?

Anne-Marie Deitering, in her info-fetishist blog, “comics & copyright, but not comics-specific“.

Deitering illuminates a conversation about whether a phenomenon called Emily Strange violates the copyright of a children’s book called Nate the Great. While the lines of influence seem pretty straightforward, the question of copyright is anything but.

Paul M. Aoki and Allison Woodruff in the Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Portland, OR, Apr. 2005, “Making Space for Stories: Ambiguity in the Design of Personal Communication Systems”

Aoki and Woodruff’s research suggest that personal communication systems (such as instant messaging and walkie-talkies) should build in the possibility for people to lie to each other. A communication system that always accurately tells you whether or not a person is available and receiving your message leaves little room for social ambiguity. Rather, communication systems should allow people to save face.

sources

I have a number of new sources for feed-reading this year.

Bruce Schneir writes about all facets of “security” in Schneier on Security. He is sparse on commentary and big on filtering the interesting links.

Wayne Marshall writes about ethnomusicology and “global remix culture” at Wayne & Wax. Besides sharing some of my roots, I find Marshall interesting because he highlights how audio, video and communication technologies are being used around the world as part to create and share culture.

Roger Sutton blogs at Read Roger, and as the editor of a magazine dedicated to reviewing children’s literature, The Horn Book, is often hilarious and insightful on topics of literature and the newfangled-book-technology.

Tavi Gevinson is 14 and blogs about fashion and she’s awesome (thanks Sara!); Style Rookie’s take on high fashion is mostly out of my league, but there is are healthy amounts of nostalgia (for Sassy in particular) and a kid being a kid. Plus lots of things that look cool.

My other fashion reading is Hel Looks, a Helsinki street fashion blog. Some of the clothes are great just for being great, and the statements by their wearers always make my day.

I am now reading and enjoying Achewood (thanks shinylib!); more comic suggestions are always welcome.

Finally, Nicholas put me onto the RSS feeds for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s MediaBerkman podcast/vodcast/radio show. Shows are generally an hour and fifteen minutes, and deal with anything having to do with internet technology and law or policy.

That’s what I’m reading lately.

The problem was that the North Central Regional Library District filtered things that people wanted to look at, like Women & Guns magazine. The challenge was that such filtering is illegal under Washington State free-speech laws.

There is nothing good about internet filtering on library computers, let me get out of the way. Sarah Houghton-Jan did a piece on this topic late last week and she says it well with a ton of data and invective to back it up.

The idea with a case like this is that if he law was successfully challenged, no libraries in Washington State would be allowed to filter, hopefully setting up an awkward conflict with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, a federal law can demand that libraries do (filter).

All three opinions in the case compare the internet to a library collection. For the majority and concurring opinions, the library selects materials, so it should select websites as well. The dissenting justice opines that the library has selected the internet and shouldn’t refuse to circulate certain sites.

The justices aren’t the only ones robbing this train of thought. In Library Journal, Washington State Librarian echoes the same sentiment, saying “public libraries have long enjoyed broad discretion to select materials for their collections, and it makes sense that the same discretion would apply to the vast amount of materials on the Internet”.

Here’s my problem: the conversation here is about libraries as repositories of information, and their mythical role as gatekeepers to same, and it doesn’t serve us at all. I see a parallel here with OCLC’s 2008 study, From Awareness to Funding, that says “transformation, not information drives financial support”. In both cases, framing the library as only a provider of content or information hinders our ability to help our communities thrive.

Let’s pretend the problem is only about people looking at pornography on library computers. Porn is bad, right, and kids can’t have it, they’re too young. It’s misogynist too, so long as we’re taking the moral high ground, because pornography is ultimately about male fantasies and dominating women. So what do we do about it?

Lawrence Lessig, in Code gives four techniques for regulation: law, markets, architecture and social norms.

Internet filtering uses architecture to regulate. Filters put physical and logical constraints on what people can look at. Houghton-Jan does a great job describing how poorly this works and has the data to back it up.

Markets regulate through pricing structures and through supply and demand. If there weren’t free porn sites, the market would be a good regulator here. So would getting rid of net neutrality - it would be a lot easier to eliminate nudity on library computers if those sites’ bandwidth was squeezed out by more moral sites like foxnews.com.

Social norms regulate by having a community of people establish proper behavior. People who act outside of the norms are ostracized.

Law regulates by making it against policy, for example, to look at pornography on library computers. The law doesn’t do much on its own. It only works if the law or policy is enforceable.

Houghton-Jan reports that internet filtering doesn’t work:

it’s consistently found that 15-20% of the time, content is over-blocked (e.g. benign sites that are blocked incorrectly). And 15-20% of the time, content is under-blocked (e.g. sites deemed “bad” gets through anyway).

Could we do better with some other regulation techniques?

Here’s an example from a library I have been known to work at:

We patrons over a certain age the choice of filtered vs. unfiltered internet when they sign onto their stations. Unfiltered access isn’t a free pass, there is still a policy that says you still aren’t supposed to look at pornography or other sites that bother the person next to you.

The way it works is that if you are a patron and you are sitting next to someone and you think they are breaking the rules, you tell the nearest staff member. That person calls someone else, who asks the person stop and often to log off.

So this library regulates pornography through a combination of architecture (you can choose filtered internet access) and law. I would also argue that social norms play a regulatory role as well - using the internet at the library isn’t exactly private, and anyone sitting next to you or walking by can see what you see. Patrons are less likely to visit pornography sites in a public setting.

I’m not exactly sure how many computers we have in the building, but we report 483 in the whole system. I work in the big beautiful building that has a lot more space than the others, so call it 60 public computers, very conservatively.

Patrons are limited to an hour a day, and the big beautiful building is open 57 hours per week. Lets say they’re in use 80% of the time, which is also very conservative, so at minimum, 2,736 patrons (57 x 60 x 80 percent) use the internet at our big beautiful building every week.

Over the course of a typical week, patrons get asked to stop viewing “objectionable material” around 5 times. That’s my experience. I’m sure it is under-reported. Some patrons may not care what their neighbor is peeping at, and others may be intimidated or unwilling to give up a few minutes of their precious hour a day of internet to tattle. Let’s say that only 1 in 10 cases of gets reported, or 50 of 2,736 patrons are breaking the rules every week.

Rounding up, 2% of patrons are looking at “objectionable material” every week. Again, can I stress that I am erring on the side of “bad behavior”?

So in this case, the strategy of combining choice for patrons, library policy and social norms is at least 98% effective against pornography, if that’s really the goal, and as a bonus, never overblocks non-pornographic sites. It is far more effective than filtering.

Now, there are all kinds of problems with my anecdote. What I consider conservative estimates about computer use and “mis-use” might be dead wrong. These social norms might only apply in the library with the big room full of computers. Looking for information in a public space may constrain the freedom of inquiry we are trying to enable. And did I mention we have security guards who sometimes help enforce library behavior policies?

But the point is that the conversation about pornography and other “objectionable material” in the library should center on behavior, not content.

She’s Mayan. Her face, and the face of her child, are variations on the iconography in Mayan glyphs. She’s in a factory - some raw materials are being processed. I’m not sure what’s in her basket, but political posters are on the wall: Viva Felipe Carrillo, perhaps something about a Mayan cooperative, and one other I can’t decipher at all.

So who is Felipe Carrillo? Felipe Carrillo Puerto was Governor of Yucatán from 1922 until 1924, when he was assassinated, apparently for political reasons. The Mexican Revolution is a really confusing series of events for me, and I’ll have to read up, but he is still celebrated as a hero and a martyr today. Wikipedia doesn’t say much else I can verify, so I turned to my library catalog.

Which gave me ought, so I tried WorldCat, and found his subject heading, “Carrillo Puerto, Felipe”. Nice!

I was intrigued that one of the titles that turned up is in Mayan, for Felipe Carrillo Puerto u kuxtal yetel bix u k’a'ajsa’al tu kaajil Muxupip, only WorldCat includes a record that says it is in Malay.

Catalogers!

I checked which libraries laid claim to this record, and found 6, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, Harvard, The New York Public Library, and Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, affectionately known in my family as “Yuc U”.

So which library put in the wrong country code?

You can usually find MARC records in library’s catalogs because librarians sometimes find them useful to look at. MAchine-Readable Cataloging was invented to transport information about books between libraries, so that they could save on labor costs. Unfortunately, it isn’t very HUman-Readable, so there is a movement afoot to remove MARC displays from library catalogs.

But I’m a librarian, so I went looking for the MARC record to see what I could see. Inconveniently, both Stanford and UC Berkeley are among those taking the newfangled approach of providing HUman-Readable catalog records only. Luckily, my third try, UC Riverside came through:

008    930331s1992    mx a          000 0 may d
040    NYP|cNYP|dOCLCQ|dMXYUC

Here field 008 shows the incorrect language code, ‘may’ (instead of ‘myn’), and field 040 shows, I think, that the New York Public Library created this record, making the mistake theirs.

I checked to see if other libraries copied NYPL’s mistake but haven’t found any yet. Harvard’s catalog includes that both are in Mayan, and Yuc U’s record doesn’t use a language code as far as I can tell.

Google Books has a copy also, and we may yet get to pay to see it what language they think it is in.

In the meantime, I requested two titles on the man via interlibrary loan, Carrillo Puerto, iconografía, which may be hard to get since so few libraries have it, but sounds really exciting to me - iconography is where I started this search from, and maybe it will tell me more about this piece - and Peregrina : love and death in Mexico, the autobiography of Carrillo Puerto’s lover, Alma Reed, an American on assignment from the New York Times to cover Mexico.

Here’s where the story gets incredible, as in, maybe this isn’t credible, but the University of Texas Press says that Reed’s manuscript mysteriously disappeared “immedaiately after her sudden death in 1966″, and it was rediscovered in 2001 inside “an abandoned apartment in Mexico City.” That’s 35 years later. Incredible!

While I wait, I’m reading Reed’s 1923 sensational and sardonic missives on Mexico, which ran weekly in the New York Times Magazine from March 11 to April 15, with two additional articles running May 20 and June 23 in the Sunday Times. Thank you, public library and New York Times Historical.

For the mystery that shrouds the sepulchre of the Conqueror is today the vitalizing spark of Spanish nationalism in the Republic of Mexico. It glows with the high pride of the past, the brooding challenge of the present, the quite but unswerving hope of the future. It is the holy of holies in that temple of memories and issues and traditions wherein colonial aristocracy finds refuge from “expropriated” haciendas. And the billiard players of the Casino Español are its high priests.

Some of these books are easy to spot on the shelves. A solid-colored buckram spine with a stamped-on call number tells you the book has been rebound. For most, pull them off the shelf and you’ll find a repeating geometric or floral pattern adorning the cover. Many also are plain, and I find more than a few strikingly beautiful.

I’m starting a collection. My favorites so far contain intricate symmetries.

Or they have singular designs.

Or they just look cool on a book.

Based on the evidence I’ve collected so far, decorated buckram cloths were used starting in the late 1950s up until the mid 1980s.

I’m not sure that these books tell a story besides the ones between their pages, but there are at least three stories I think you can tell and include these books.

One is the history of the local library and the book trade. Certainly the Library Association of Portland didn’t operate the only bindery in town. There are binderies operating today. What happened to the art and craft of binding in the 20th century?

Another is simply the story of the designs themselves. There is geometry here, but also Art Deco, flowers, and an echo of Mayan glyphs.

The third story is the shift in library policies and values from preserving a bruised book to replacing it, and even sometimes replacing it with a different book on the same subject. I don’t know that one is always better than another, and there is something painful and messy about seeing the stitches in a rebound book.

There isn’t a whole lot you can tell from the covers themselves, but the longtime staff have been nice enough to explain where to look for markings and stamps in the books that indicate when the book was bound. For example, the book’s acquisition date was often stamped or written on the page after the verso (I don’t know what its called), and the bindery date was stamped on the verso itself. Sometimes you’ll find a bindery number instead, and this can also be on the title page.

In this example, the book was acquired February 18, 1958 and visited the bindery just 27 months later.

You really can’t know why the book was rebound - was it so heavily used it fell apart, or was it shoddily put together in the first place? “c.1″ in a call number today would suggest multiple copies and high use, but in 1958, it may have just meant that extra copies were only anticipated, and cataloging staff put it in the book in the first place to save the trouble of having to add it later.

I don’t know. But I love these books, and I am going to keep trying to find out about them.

It’s a meta-book, about books, and the title promises to make an argument for why they are important in the present age. Judging a book by it’s cover, I’d say we are going to talk about books that are plugged in - based on the white cords, perhaps an Apple Tablet, excepting of course the three USB ports. I grumble, but I can’t resist either.

Robert Darnton is author of many books, professor of history, and director of the Harvard University Library. The Case for Books collects essays and speeches on his area of interest, books, that were published between 1997 and 2009, with one exception which dates from 1982.

Rather than making a sustained narrative argument on “the case for books”, The Case for Books acts more as a case which contains books, or at least essays, and we are all better for it. The theme is that the best way to understand what is happening with books and publishing today is to look at their history. Each chapter is thoughtful and relevant and no one tries to tie them together with any supplementary text.

There is a lot to I could babble about in this book, so I’m just going to highlight the one thing most on my mind right now. This book is overdue.

In the late 90s, Darnton and the American Historical Association conceived of Gutenberg-e, a project designed to both enable newly minted PhDs to publish their theses and reinvent the genre of scholarly monographs at the same time.

As they conceived it, an electronic book didn’t have to have use a narrative approach because you can reorder the pages on the fly. A reader might choose to read an e-book more or less in-depth in different sections - say you are really into a research project’s methodology and the data produced, but you want to draw your own conclusions about the results:

The readers will download [the e-books], search the texts for whatever needs to be studied, print out the relevant sections, bind them in a machine attached to the printer, and take home for reading in the form of a custom-made paperback.

OH

This idea reminds me of some of the arguments I read last year about literacy, education, and the role of libraries. Michael Gorman, in The Enduring Library argues that more and more books are published each year, and Gunther Kress in Literacy in the New Media Age points out that many books being published are not meant to be read as narratives. Textbooks, children’s books, reference books, guidebooks, Books for Dummies, all are “books” but do not represent the kind “sustained reading of complex texts” that Gorman values.

One of Darnton and the AHA’s early challenges was that even if an academic press was willing to put out an e-book, authors and thesis advisers were reluctant to stray too far from the traditional form. Tenure is competitive, so don’t risk it. Dynamic hypertextuality is a great idea, but it makes your scholarly opus into something other than a book.

I am only a lame non-ebook-user, but it is my impression is that of the “real” e-books we read today on our Kindles and iTouches and Sony Readers, the genres most suited to the format, whether for ease of marketing or ease of reading, are narrative ones: fiction, literary non-fiction - and thinking of Nicholas and Anne-Marie’s presentation today, perhaps scholarly communication as well, at least for now.

this is a problem for libraries and for commercial publishers. for content creators and consumers, is it a boon?

I’m not terribly impressed with it - the opening chapters make weak and culturally biased arguments about the importance of alphabetic writing, and the brain science after that is a little dry. The good part is part three, where she summarizes a century of research into the biophysical basis for dyslexia.

She loves the Ancient Greeks, and especially Socrates and Plato. Socrates the great orator, and Plato who wrote it down. I was never clear on this - wasn’t Socrates, as Plato wrote him, partly the invention and voice of Plato? Again with the cultural bias: writing is not necessarily the definitive version.

But anyway, Wolf compares Socrates’ concern that literacy will corrupt young thinkers if they learn to read before they learn to think to modern day concerns about young people having access to the internet. She is validating Socrates’ concern vis a vis the Internet, which I disagree with, but also sets off a light bulb moment for me on page 221:

Throughout the [written] story of humankind, from the Garden of Eden to the universal access provided by the Internet, questions of who should know what, when, and how remain unresolved.

Intellectual freedom, filtering pornography, information about birth control, the bombing of Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War - all of these things touch on this question, and it struck me that my particular brand of librarianship answers it in the exact same way every time: everyone has the right to know everything, now.

And Socrates? I can’t think of him without thinking of Saukrates.