secret library books
July 29, 2008 – 12:50 pm by anne-marieSo I’m really entranced by this idea I saw on this game design blog - books that you know in your bones are really about your thing, even though on the surface they claim to be about another thing –
I am building a list of the “secret” books on game design. These are books that are not explicitly written about games, but which any game designer who reads them just knows that they are really about games.
And I’m even more taken with the idea because Malcolm Ryan, the game design person, points to Scott McCloud’s fantastic book about reading comics as a game-design book.
I know that I have done this. That I’ve read something in another field, something that’s fiction, seen a movie and gone - “that’s about libraries!” or “that’s about information!” or some other version of “that’s about why what I do is important!” But I’m totally blanking on examples. This is why I don’t have a Ph.D — because when the chips are down I’m all “you know, it was that one book - it’s on the tip of my tongue.”
I was going to wait to post this until I had broken through this block, but then I thought - why. I’ll promise to update with an ETA when I come up with some ideas - but maybe this will resonate with some of you too - and a collective list would be cooler?
What are your Secret Books of Libraries (and Information Science)
6 Responses to “secret library books”
Gosh! I’m not so sure that libraries are as cool as games.
I definitely have moments reading where I go ‘aha! this has to do with my work’, but usually, the work is pretty explicitly about something that is not libraries. For example, William James’ essay, The moral equivalent of war is one way of thinking about organizational and cultural change.
Pretty much all of The best American essays of the century helps me understand my community, my co-workers and my country. I pick it up for a few weeks every couple of years and then I get interested in something else. I’m only up to 1949, but hope to finish it, and volume 2, by the end of this century.
Um, what else? Can I say Programming Collective Intelligence, or is that too explicitly about information? More on this soon, I hope.
By caleb on Jul 29, 2008
Well the gamers only have two on their list right now, so I’m not sure they’re so much cooler than us. I think part of my problem with this is that for me to connect something to libraries I would probably have needed to read it after becoming involved with libraries and now that I’m a librarian I don’t read as much as I used to.
A couple of things have come to mind, though - both pointed out to me (at the time, not now) by Shaun the non-librarian though:
Dogtown and Z-Boys. When we saw this movie Shaun turned to me after and said, “of course you liked it, the whole thing is about information dissemination, right?” Which of course it is. And which of course is one of the reasons I connected with it so strongly - in particular the pieces with Henry Rollins talking about the impact that having Skateboarder magazine with the stories about the Z-boys coming into his little community had on him — that resonates strongly as a thing that libraries do and are.
Brian Wood’s Channel Zero - a comic about a recent-past dystopian vision of Giuliani’s New York, and in particular what it would mean to live in a world without information. Jennie 2.5 is the info-fetishist for whom my other blog is named.
See also - public domain: a channel zero designbook (open access)
As you say - more on this soon… I hope
By anne-marie on Jul 30, 2008
haha, you are linking to librarything and i am linking to worldcat.
By caleb on Jul 30, 2008
Hmmm. I don’t remember saying that. I do remember thinking that it was a film about urban geography and particularly about cities and “public” space. In fact, I’m thinking of incorporating it into one of my fall classes as I write this. Interesting idea.
By Shaun Huston on Jul 31, 2008
I’ve started reading Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, and so far it isn’t about libraries, but it is totally about Innovative Interfaces, Incorporated.
It’s about the push and pull between “generative” systems - ones that encourage third-party development (PCs, the Internet), and “tethered” ones that do not (IBM Mainframes, the iPhone, um, III).
By caleb on Aug 1, 2008