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.

I’m about halfway through, and Clark does seem to be leading up to a link between intelligence and external knowledge, and in particular that our intelligence comes from the interaction between our brains, bodies, and our environment, but the first half of the book is stimulation enough.

The first models of artificial intelligence were based on the idea of the brain as a central logical controller. These systems were limited because they could only be intelligent about the information stored in the “brain”. A chess program is useless for small talk.

Clark writes about a present shift in the field of robotics (Being There was published in 1996), where robotocists began to design machines without central controlling systems, and instead programmed their individual moving parts to work independently and communicate with one another. These were sometimes called “mobots” for “mobile robots”.

For example, an insect robot could be programmed to walk by giving each leg a few simple rules, such as, “if the leg opposite of you goes back, swing forward”. If you’re reminded of the documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, good job - Rodney Brooks, the roboticist featured in that film is referenced heavily in this book.

This, also, is often how insects work together - each one gets the same job. When ants find food, they leave a strong trail so that other ants can follow it. The next ant that finds food in the same place builds up the trail, and eventually, all of the ants in Oregon know where your cat food dish is.

So. Libraries. How would we apply this idea? What do we do centrally that might work better if we each followed a few simple rules?

In the summer of 1995, I got my first job in a library, at the university library in the interlibrary loan office. I loved it, and it lead me into librarianship. I loved the reciprocity and I loved the processes and all the wacky rules and procedures.

For example, if someone requested a book, first we checked the three-college catalog, then we checked our filing cabinet to see if we had requested the same book in the past two years. We didn’t want to ask the same library for the same book twice in a two-year period, and keeping the requests let us track who we had requested from. In the spirit of reciprocity, we didn’t want to lean too hard on any other single library, and especially not one belonging to an institution more ivied than we were, or for that matter a public library anyone had heard of - those public libraries are just too busy. The next January, it was going to be my job to go through the drawer to remove and destroy the older-than-two-years records.

We filed away all of our article requests as well, and these took up the rest of the cabinet. Attached were not just the institutions we requested them from, but their holdings for the title as well. Nothing was worse than getting a request for an article in a volume of a periodical you didn’t own. It wastes everyone’s time. Besides, when a professor in the psychology department is angling for tenure and wants several articles from the same publication, it helps to spread the work around.

What made both of these tasks possible was the fact that my time, at $7.50 an hour, was less valuable than the interlibrary loan librarian’s, or his assistant, who spent hours at a DOS terminal connected to Dublin, Ohio on a dedicated line: the central brain.

But all this is just an excuse to talk about my first library job, I don’t actually want to reinvent interlibrary loan, though I think any system can always be improved. Besides, ILL has been reinvented enough; Docster is still my favorite.

Instead, lets consider collaborative virtual reference.

Today, there are few models for libraries to share virtual reference questions with each other. OCLC’s 24/7 Cooperative has everyone get in the pool together, then each library answers whatever questions they find in the sludge. Oregon’s statewide collaborative works much the same way, except we’ve got it set up so individual libraries can have their own pool that overflow into the big one when no one is paying attention. It’s just like Terwilliger Hot Springs.

We also collaborate with our sister service in Ohio, though instead of sharing a pool, we each have our own (like Bagby Hot Springs!), and the front end of our software asks a couple of questions in making a decision about where to send each patron: Is an Oregon librarian online? What day and hour is it?

I am still a huge fan of the 24/7 Cooperative, and cooperative reference in general, but the main problems are that librarians are assigned shifts on the virtual desk where nothing happens and that smaller libraries often end up picking up the slack for the larger statewide systems.

Could we avoid these problems if, instead of a central controller routing patrons, we had each library operate independently?

An example that comes to mind is Aardvark, a question and answer service which routes questions to experts, based on the subject and other parameters set by the experts (a ‘brain’). If an expert can’t or doesn’t want to answer a question, they can pass, making decisions independent of the central controller.

As a librarian, Aardvark befuddles me. I can answer questions about anything, ok? My two areas of expertise are regular expressions and /.*/. As far as Aardvark is concerned, they can’t believe anyone could be so arrogant. For mostly other reasons, I don’t answer questions through Aardvark, but I know someone who does sometimes.

So what would it look like if libraries answered virtual reference questions for each other, but without a central controller, not even in Aardvark’s style?

First of all, it could work independent of software. Virtual reference starts with HTML forms, and I could easily redirect my HTML form to any other virtual reference service.

So patrons submit questions using HTML forms and a controller program - can I call it a mini-brain? - makes a decision: do I answer this question, or do I refer it to another mini-brain? If it answers, a chat is initiated. If not, the next mini-brain makes the same decision.

Now, a couple of things here: a mini-brain has to know how to talk to other mini-brains, and it has to have some information to make its decisions: Are you there? How long is the wait? How long is the wait upstream? It also has to store this information for when another mini-brain asks it the same questions.

Different mini-brains - okay, I better just call them nodes - could be programmed with different logic, but basically, it will forward the question to the node with the shortest wait (or shortest upstream wait). If a node is not available, it can still forward questions to the next one.

    Z   E
    |   |
B - A - C - D

So, node A gets a question, but is busy. It asks nodes B and C for help. Node C has a shorter wait time, so the question goes there. Node C checks in with nodes D and E and decides to answer the question. All this happens in microseconds and the patron doesn’t know, or care, what is going on.

There’s a problem though, if one controller-mini-brain-node initiates a disproportionate number of questions, then it’s neighbors will see heavy traffic too.

One solution might be just to do nothing. As the questions come in, the availability and wait time locally will change, and questions will be routed elsewhere.

Another solution is the dosey-doe. The dosey-doe rule says, “after forwarding a question to a node, change places with it”. After node A sends it’s question to node C, node A would be connected to nodes C, D and E. Node C would be connected to nodes A, B and Z.

Square dance aficionados will note that that this is not what ‘dosey doe’ means, and contra dancers will insist on spelling it differently as well, but here’s the diagram after the switch:

    Z   E
    |   |
B - C - A - D

If a new question came to node A right away, it would be unlikely that node C was available or less busy.

In this way, libraries could provide collaborative virtual reference independent of software, with no need for scheduling, and be able to distribute traffic equitably without a central, controlling system.

I just may love to hate this guy, but he reads a lot of interesting stuff and talks about it, so I was intrigued by his comment that “Andy Clark points [out] in a book called Being There … that our species externalizes consciousness. Take away a physicist’s whiteboard, and she can’t do her work.” He is also referencing Marshall McLuhan and stating that the web has brought “epochal change”. I immediately related to the quip about externalizing consciousness because I use writing (e.g.) to help organize my thoughts.

But I shudder at Weinberger’s use of “species” - isn’t what he describes a cultural, learned behavior? Substituting nature for nurture is a rhetorical device that bugs the hell out of me. I care enough to ILL Clark’s book to find out the deal. It looks like it was on cognitive science, was published 11 years ago and may be a little dated.

I think this means that I’m either crawling under a rock or coming out from one, but at least now I can recycle this magazine!

A few weeks ago - no - a week? I don’t know.

Recently, Twitter started letting you make lists. I sort of wondered, why?

Well I guess we all have different strategies for monitoring our social networks. I have a friend who only follows 50 people on Twitter. I’m not one of them, and the hell with him anyway. Personally, I use a handy desktop application to group together the people whose twits I don’t want to miss.

But other folks apparently were creating multiple Twitter accounts to group their friends. So, lists.

The thing I don’t like about making a list, and making it public is that it feels a lot like middle school: someone else is always telling you what group you belong to.

Which is really opposite from how other popular social networks work. You join groups. Clay Shirky says so. I am not so much of a group-joiner, but I do count myself as a subscriber of many things.

Anyway, I think there’s a big difference between deciding what groups you belong to and having someone else tell you.

So I started making Twitter lists. I mostly know about librarians, so I made lists of those. There are 50,000 librarians on Twitter, and I needed to narrow it down some, so I decided to focus on male librarians. My first impulse was to group together the cool kids, just like middle school.

I started grouping male librarians into a list of interweb guybrarians. But that was silly. Male librarians on Twitter didn’t seem distinctive enough. So I narrowed the list to male librarians on Twitter who make lists on Twitter, and added myself, since I was now making a list. Now I felt less guilty about throwing random strangers in with some people I have met and admire.

And I started looking at what kinds of lists they made:

The most common kind of lists that librarians make is of other librarians:

• Mark Dellenbaugh’s “library-folk“
• Bill Drew’s “librarians“
• Brad Czerniak’s “librarians“, “librarians2” and “librarians3“

This seems pretty utilitarian, but I can’t imagine trying to keep up with 100 or 1,000 people chattering away about mostly the same thing.

Other folks made multiple lists for different groups of followers. Andrew Finegan makes list of tweetups, real-people, writers, comedy, cabaret and librarians.

Exploring further, I was finally able to confirm my middle school thesis (ok, it was more of a topic sentence) in David Lee King’s list “cool-peeps“. My take is that David has a lot of followers, and follows a lot of people, and that he probably wanted to focus on the people he is really interested in hearing from, and that’s fine. But to make it public, and to use a value-based label? It makes me want to spend recess listening to my walkman with the girl with purple hair and clothespins all over her body.

Part of the problem here is the way people are encouraged to follow each other as part of a reciprocal exchange of social network capital. I don’t know if this is really what is going on, but if King didn’t feel the need to follow 1,700 people in the first place, there would be no need to narrow it down. And note, I’m not saying it’s his fault. It’s peer pressure!

Michael Stephens, another internet guybrarian has a similar number of followers as King (minus 1,000), but follows only 194. His list, “lis768” has only 13 people, and from the title, I’m going to guess they are students in one of his classes. I can’t think of a more perfect opportunity to make a public list. You’d like to communicate with a group and encourage the group to communicate with each other, and it is just small enough that it might actually work.

To be sure, there are other kinds of lists. John Kirriemuir’s” men-with-beards” is a prime example.

When I decided on the final criteria for interweb guybrarianship, I had to remove a bunch of non-listmaking male librarians. What to do with them. Inspired again by Jason Scott (aka Sockington, I decided to classify them as “library-hunks“.

As it turns out, at least according to my schema, male librarians are way more likely to be hunks than interweb guybrarians.

The fallout so far is that I’ve gained a few followers from the second list and I don’t think any from the first. I feel like a middle school tool, getting attention any way he can. I’m really sorry about that.

If I’ve put you on either of these lists, it doesn’t mean I think you are particularly attractive, or geeky, it just means that during the 20 or 30 minutes I spent making them lists, I happened to find you, probably from someone else’s list of librarians.

Some searches I have going on in the background of my Twitter client tell me that I made a few people’s day by putting them on the library-hunk list, and one person was excited to be an internet guybrarian, and seeing that feedback might have made it all worthwhile.

If you withheld feedback, I probably think you’re great. If we’ve met in person, I probably like you. if we haven’t met, we should get together. To hell with lists, I’ll keep them up for another week or month then zzzt.

The most compelling bit of the book is the introduction, most of which is available in Google Books, where he argues that people writing blogs, tweeting and posting their photos and videos online are motivated by stardom.

All this is why I, for one, had no quibble with Time’s choice of “You” as the person of the year [in 2006]. Indeed, I will happily put “You” forward as the defining person of this whole random decade, which our hordes of cultural critics have redefined so often and so variously that it lacks an identity or even a name (the Zeros? THe Oughties?). But make no mistake: I am on to You.

…

You blog and photograph and record precisely so you can be read and heard and seen by others. You monitor and you scheme and you promote, just like the hit-addled corporate culture has been teaching you for years. Because when your words or actions or art are available not only to your friends but to potentially thousands or seen millions of strangers, it changes what you say, how you act, how you see yourself. You become aware of yourself as character on a stage, as a public figure with a meaning. You develop, that is, the media mind. You know exactly what you are doing.

(p. 12-13)

Part of his point is that people seek to be stars within their own subcultures, and it is easy for me to find examples of the same phenomena in different groups: a small group of people is at the center of the food blogging community in the same way a small group of people were at the center of the library blogging community. But both of my examples are of subcultures with a heavy publishing component: librarians for scholarly and professional communication, and foodies for cookbooks. I think the ‘cool kids’ dynamic would exist for us without the internet.

But the internet is what make’s Wasik’s book work, and what it is about. He talks about internet memes, and indie rock, and politics, all of which I consider to be subjects engaged with almost exclusively by internet users. On the one hand, it is refreshing to read about what happens on the internet as sort of closed system, as opposed to the usual theme of how much it is changing our lives. At the same time, meh, there is so much more to the world.

This actually turns out to be Wasik’s limp conclusion: that we need to “unplug” in order to keep “viral culture” from taking over our lives. I think he means I should swear off the whole genre of books-that-explain-the-internet for a while. I’m going to try.

Eileen O’Keeffe McVicker’s memoir, (with Barbara J. Scot) Child of Steen’s Mountain (OSU Press, 2008) humanizes that story for me. McVIcker grew up poor, though she didn’t know it, on a sheepherding homestead on Steens Mountain, outside Fields and almost all the way in the southeastern corner of the state.

I caught a glimpse of the Steens on a visit to Burns. It was far away.

This passage recounts when the O’Keeffe family moved closer to Burns so that McVicker could go to high school. This is the early to mid 1940s:

It should have been easier to get to high school with a school bus making the route instead of the old Studebaker, but somehow we were always in trouble with the principal for being late. In fact, we were late so many times that he kept a special book for our excuses. “Well, which was it this time?” he would say. “High water, a runaway horse, or you got behind a bunch of cattle being driven somewhere and couldn’t get through the road?” I’m sure we were a legend in the teachers’ lunchroom.

It isn’t like the school bus actually came to our house. We rote our horses down our extremely long lane and left them in a corral by an abandoned house. When we got to the old house, we took off the saddles and tied the horses to the manger Dad had built there and fed them hay for the day. Then we changed out of our jeans, put on our school clothes and walked about a quearter of a mile to the blacktop highway to catch the bus. If we were late we had to go home, but sometimes if the bus driver saw us he would wait as we ran down the rest of hte lane. I think he felt sorry for us, to tell the truth, and sometimes when we got off the bus at the end of the day he would slip us each a candy bar as we left.

McVicker is scorned, and she is pitied, and she knows it, and still she manages to give us the gift of empathy.