Library of Congress Thoughts

Jen and I are back from ALA, and I have a lot to share. I am working on compiling my thoughts about the conference itself, but in the meantime, I want to share with you a thought/idea I had this morning while reading a bit.

As you might have guessed, Jen and I visited the Library of Congress, the national bibliographic institution of the United States, to use MARC appropriate language. It was so busy, filled with people wearing their ALA badges (mine is pictured above) that it was hard to really get any sense of the institution at all. However, it was great just to be there, and I got a cool mug.

Anyhow, the Library of Congress is (I think) almost entirely devoted to the collection, organization, and preservation of the labors of the mind, so to speak. As you read last week, I am reading Empire of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood right now, and came across this passage on page 351 while reading this morning:

Although Jefferson was an aristocratic slaveholder, it was his political genius to sense that the world of the early Republic ought to belong to people who lived by manual labor and not by their wits. Cities, he believed, were dangerous and promoted dissipation precisely because they were places, he said, where men sought “to live by their heads rather than their hands.”

As you probably know, the Library of Congress was founded with the purchase of Jefferson’s entire library of 6487 books by the US Congress in 1815. It is an interesting contrast to me that the man who was so against those who sought to “live by their heads” ended up selling his collection to found an institution almost entirely dedicated to that purpose. I would like to think that his action was perhaps a tacit decision to acknowledge the importance of the labors of the mind, as well as the importance of working with your hands.

What do you think his founding of the Library of Congress says about Jefferson? Other thoughts?

ALA, 2010

Well, reader, Jen and I leave tomorrow for ALA in DC, and we sure are excited. If you are going/are in the area, let us know if you’d like to meet up. Meanwhile, just hold on to your britches for our return - hopefully I will have good stuff to write about, and I feel sure Jen will as well!

Summer Reading

It’s Monday night, and that means Jen is volunteering at Cook’s Hospital. I look froward to her return and sharing an evening with her, but for now, I want to tell you about my summer reading plan, reader.

I think most people try and read very light fare in the summertime, on vacations and visits to the pool and such. I think that’s great, but for me Summer has long been the season for heavy reading. Summer is always a time (because of the climate where we live) that one spends a good deal of one’s time indoors. In addition, summer is the season of a bit lighter and less demanding work (for me) and thus lends itself to more mentally challenging diversions.

This practice of reading lengthier and more challenging works in the summer began several years ago, while I was still an undergraduate at Hardin-Simmons. I would visit my grandparents in Indiana for several weeks at a time, and this gave me the ability to read practically uninterrupted for each afternoon. I think my first couple of “long” works were Ron Chernow’s biographies of John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. These were great, but my most memorable (thus far) summer reading bacchanal were the three volumes in Caro’s biography of LBJ. If you’re curious, I wrote about that previously here:

Robert Caro and Lyndon Johnson

Well, as I wrote about in January, (here) I purchased the first three (chronologically) books in the Oxford History of the United States. I finished the first book The Glorious Cause earlier this year, but my goal this summer is to finish the next two, Empire of Liberty and What Hath God Wrought. So far, I am doing pretty well, and as a matter of fact, I am off to read for a bit now. What are you reading this summer? What is your perfect summertime book? Let me know in the comments!

Death of the Inscription?

On Wednesday, I was reading this Times article:

Book Inscriptions Reflect Personal Histories, by Susan Dominus

In the article, Dominus highlights the idea that the inscription could go away if our society completely embraces digital books, and abandons physical books. She was thinking specifically about personal inscriptions - when one writes a note to a friend on the occasion of giving them the book, for example. I’d like to think of this in a bit different context: when the author signs or inscribes the book.

Both in our personal collection, as well as the collection of the Amon Carter, there are many signed books. One of the best I have seen at the Carter was a book about the photographs of Ansel Adams, inscribed to Laura Gilpin, describing her as a “very great lady of photography,” and it had a cool little doodle as well. (The Carter has the book as Gilpin donated her papers, prints, negatives, and library to the Carter on her passing.) We have several (12, I think) signed books, and they are among our favorites. How does one get the author to sign your e-book? Do they sign the reader? Type a note into the document?

I know it’s not exactly the most earth-shattering concept, but it is one that is important to me, as well as to many other folks out there. Would you miss inscriptions?

Favorites from the Commons

(Before I get started, I want to give a shout-out to the inspiration for this post, Allison V. Smith’s posting about the Commons. Thanks, Allison!)

I think I’ve mentioned the Flickr Commons before. As a matter of fact, I have. Check this post out:

New Fun Photos from the Library of Congress

Well, it’s not just the Library of Congress sharing their images and such on flickr, 44 major cultural institutions are contributing to the Commons. You can see the list here. I love that these institutions are showing some leadership in digitization - and what a great way to digitize. All you really have to do is scan and upload, and flickr takes care of the rest.

And what advantage does this have over simply cataloging the images, you might ask? Well, it allows people to examine them and (in the case of the photos in the Commons as they are public domain) re-use them in different works. It gives people from far away the ability to view your library/institution’s holdings. However, following the idea of participatory librarianship, if one could track what people “do” with these images (if they reuse them, or adapt/incorporate them) what a wonderful way to show the relevancy of what it is that you are doing (digitizing and sharing) and how your collection is reaching a wider audience than those in the immediate geographic vicinity. Imagine if someone used one of your images for, say, a billboard in Miami? With the proper crediting, what cool exposure for your library!

Anyhow, here are some of my favorite images from the Commons, and pleace click on the image to see where I “got it” from. I made a “gallery” on flickr of them with my comments, and you can check that out here:

Best of the Commons, A Gallery.

Tools for Fighting the Information Flood

Obviously, I have been thinking a great deal about curating the content that you want from the vast seas of information available online. I think I was running an errand when a thought about digital curation occurred to me. As librarians in the 21st century, we are charged with helping people discern “good” from “bad” information, as well as the information they seek from the information that is unnecessary. If we cannot do this in our own (for lack of a better term) “information lives” then how can we be expected to do it well for others?

To this end, I want to share with you some of the tools and such that I use to see and use only the information I want to see online. If you want to know more, please let me know!

My first attempt at some form of digital curation was my use of Google Reader. It’s simply an online RSS feed aggregator that allows you to see all your favorite websites’ updates on one page. Here’s a screenshot of mine:



Of course, the problem with this is that one can add far too many feeds to the Reader, as I have done several times. If you consistently don’t read something (like news sites, for example) delete it! There is no point in constantly clicking the “mark as read” button if you don’t read the feed.

My next tool grew out of my deletion of my news feeds - the New York Times Editor’s Choice App for the iPad. I know I have mentioned this several times before, so I won’t harp on it here. I’ll just say that the app is my only source of news during the day, cutting down on my feeds and “website checking.” And, because I can, here’s a screenshot of the front page in the app from this morning:



Another relatively new tool in my toolbox is the app and service called Evernote. (Thanks, Sam!) As we go through information, how do we save the information we want to reference again? Web links are, frankly, unreliable, and it’s environmentally irresponsible to print everything out that one might want to save. That’s where Evernote comes in. And rather than have me blather on about the service, I’ll give you this nice video description:









http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlOLXWvaIy0












And here’s a screenshot of my Evernote, as of this morning:



It’s actually how I save most of the content I want to share with you on this blog, so it’s an integral part of that creation system.

Of course, you already know about my effort to cut down on the number of friends I have on Facebook, which is going well. Another suggestion is to use the “hide person from newsfeed” or “hide app from newsfeed” tool in Facebook. This helps my to have my newsfeed on Facebook cut down to the stuff I want to read from the people I want to know about. I tried making a screenshot of this, but once again, the video is better:








http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7wBqyw_LGs













I think that’s about it for now. I will be sure and share new tools with you as I use them! Any questions, please ask!

Just a Bit More

If you read my post regarding recommendations for alcohol consumption by women yesterday here is a bit more to go along with that.  I found this yesterday:

"The United States, as a nation, has great confusion concerning drinking. It does not appear to be able to come to a consensus regarding alcohol consumption or what constitutes moderate and responsible drinking. More awareness concerning the importance of religion in shaping aptitudes towards drinking may shed light on this ambivalence. Different religious backgrounds along with differences in cultural attitudes that originated "in the old country" among the ancestors immigrants of many Americans today, still shape every day thinking and assumptions concerning alcohol. Numerous studies from both the United States and Europe have suggested that Protestants consume less alcohol but perceived great problems with the substance. In contrast Roman Catholics consume more alcohol but do not perceived its consumption as problematic. The reason for this may be based in the distant past. Recent research (Engs 1991a; 1995) has suggested that in antiquity different drinking cultures developed in the Northern and in the Mediterranean areas of western Europe. This was due to a number of factors including the ecosystem, seasonal variations, climate, and socio-political structures."

http://www.indiana.edu/~engs/articles/cathprot.htm

Have a great weekend!  (wink, wink)

14 Months

Last night I thought to myself, “I wonder how long this (the Dean Files) website has been around?” So I looked it up, and it’s fourteen months. That’s pretty neat. I hope you have enjoyed some of my posts over that time, and stick around - as I will keep writing.

One of my earliest posts was all about my favorite Shaker song. You can read about it through this link:

Simplicity (4-14-09)

At the time I originally wrote that post, a copy of the song I referenced was not available. Now it is, and so I share it with you here. The song starts about 46 seconds in.










http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0Jpsc6MZKg












I was thrilled to find this, and wanted to update the original post some. I thought I would share another song (and broader musical tradition) I find very powerful and interesting: Sacred Harp singing. Very briefly described, Sacred Harp singing is the oldest form of American music and uses shaped notes to assist singers in sight reading. If you would like to know more about it, here is a video, and under that is a link to a wikipedia article.












http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHUfHNEZDPc









(Wikipedia article: Sacred Harp)
So, without further ado, here is another of my favorite songs (I know, it’s kinda old fashioned, and I am not trying to be preachy!) and this one is from the Sacred Harp movement. It’s about 300 years old, and there is something really chilling about the song:









http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKzwqV0yOdU













What are some of your favorite (and kinda unusual) songs? I’d like to know!!

Syracuse University’s Bird Library

One of the articles I read in this month’s issue of American Libraries was an article about academic libraries and the trend toward moving items in the library collection to an offsite storage location (The Myth of Browsing by Donald A. Barclay). Highlighted at the very top of the article was the Bird Library, the library for Syracuse (where I am attending for my MSLIS).

For all of my Syracuse readers, skip this paragraph. For all of you who aren’t familiar with the controversy surrounding the Bird library, read on. Syracuse, and the Bird, wanted to move a significant portion of its low-use books to an offsite efficient shelving storage location, much like Harvard has done. This caused a massive protest from students and faculty - one which caused Bird to cease plans for moving to offsite. I think that’s about the gist of it. Please let me know if I got it wrong!

I can see and appreciate the desire to keep all of the library’s collection on campus, but I think librarians are missing a great opportunity to showcase what is really important about libraries: the librarians. Of course, the collections that libraries hold, organize, and preserve are important - but of what use are they without professionals to “maintain” the collection, as well as connect users to the information they seek?

I am reminded of another quote I read recently, this one in Harvard Magazine. In the article Gutenberg: Harvard’s libraries deal with disruptive change, the author has this quote:

“Who has the most scientific knowledge of large- scale organization, collection, and access to information? Librarians,” says Bol. A librarian can take a book, put it somewhere, and then guarantee to find it again. “If you’ve got 16 million items,” he points out, “that’s a very big guarantee. We ought to be leveraging that expertise to deal with this new digital environment. That’s a vision of librarians as specialists in organizing and accessing and preserving information in multiple media forms, rather than as curators of collections of books, maps, or posters.”

I think Bird should have highlighted this key idea: that the libraries of the 21st century are not about stuff, they are about people, Specifically, offering services to connect people to information they seek, and to help them utilize that information in a substantive way. Where do you come down on this debate?

Fighting the Deluge

As I told you yesterday, I tried an experiment seeing what life was like a bit more off the grid on the weekends. Honestly, it was pretty nice. So nice, as a matter of fact, that I am trying a variant of that same experiment in my online realm.

I read a great deal of information (and I wish I had a citation for you) about the deluge of information we as internet users are faced with every day. A cornucopia of choices, each with massive amounts of information presented each day. This presents me (and I presume, internet users more generally) with many choices. First, what sources of information online do we look at, or aggregate? How do we put these together in one place? How do we “keep” things we find to be significant, or important? And, how do we filter out the things which are, as Nero Wolfe would say, “pfui,” like he does here:














http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAKjT4GizS8







For me, I added far too much to my Google Reader to be able to digest. I deleted all of my news RSS feeds and now read the New York Times on my iPad. If it’s not in the Times that morning, I probably won’t read it. I think this is how newspapers can be relevant - their curation of news events. Picking out the key and significant stories from the flummery that fills up much of the news sites on the internet.

This virtual spring cleaning extends to my email inbox as well:


See that? Nothing in my inbox. My aunt told me long ago about paper mail that you touch it once. You reply, file it, or throw it away after you open it. This is perhaps a bit utopian, but I try and apply it in my email inbox, and tends to work. However, the last few weeks have been very busy, and so mail accumulated in my inbox - requiring me to sort through the messages and deal with them appropriately. I have also been proactively unsubscribing from distribution lists, as well as postal mail catalogs.

And finally, this spring cleaning applies to Facebook as well. If you are reading this and are no longer a friend of mine on Facebook, feel free to send me another friend request. However, if you were deleted, it means we had no contact over the past year, so please do make an effort to keep in touch. This part was brought about when I was reminded about Dunbar’s Number, which I read in one of Malcolm Gladwell’s writings. Dunbar hypothesizes that we can only really “know” 150 people (or so) and so I wanted to reduce my friend list on Facebook to meet that number. I’m at 121 friends now:


So if you made “the cut” thanks for being a good friend and keeping in touch. If you didn’t, let’s try and catch up!

The Experiment

Readers,

As you might have noticed, I was online less than I normally have been this previous weekend. Well, let me tell you that I made a special effort to not be online at all, but that didn’t work out well! I needed to look some things up and contact some folks, so my no iPhone/online effort failed, and turned into a limited iPhone/online weekend. I don’t really have a definition of “limited” but I did give my phone to Jen and had to ask her to use it. We had an awesome weekend, part of which I might attribute to my limited connectivity.

Why would I choose to do this? I felt that I was becoming more and more distracted by the deluge of information that comes at me every day, between emails, general internet items, and social networking. The urge to check on these notifications and updates can be overwhelming - to the detriment of one’s connection to the “actual” world. I am so connected during the week that having limited connectivity on the weekend is really refreshing, and gives one a chance to reconnect with the world around you.

Interestingly enough, the New York Times published an article today about the very same topic (electronic distraction). First, I’d like to ask the Times to get out of my brains, and second, here is the link if you are interested in reading the article:

Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price, by Matt Richtel.

So, if I didn’t reply to you quickly, or not at all, I apologize. Just know my wife and I were enjoying one of the most awesome weekends we have spent together since, um, ever. It went so well that I imagine I will be doing the same thing over the next few weekends, and so if you want/need to get a hold of me, give me an old fashioned phone call.

Carter New Books

It’s the first of the month, and that means it’s time for the new books report from the Carter. Check out all the maps on the top of the report (that was me doing those!) We had many great books come into the collection this month, and I hope you can come in and check some of these new books out:

May, 2010 New Books Report

Yale Library Studies

Among the books I read last month, I completed the annual issue of Yale Library Studies. As it dealt with library design and architecture, my interest was especially piqued to read the issue, and I was not disappointed. Wonderfully illustrated, with many great articles, the issue had a great deal to offer. Over the coming weeks, I will discuss with you some of the things I took from my reading of the issue, but for now, allow me to leave you with this quote which I feel is applicable to all libraries:

A question that has exercised more than one University Librarian, however, is how far that truth so evident in stone and metal and wood manifests itself in the interior life of Yale. To what extent do the Library's many buildings embody the ideals and aspirations of the University? Do the scholars and students who use these buildings find in them not just the books and collections but also the environment the need to help them teach and study and learn? And what, in a twenty-first century library system, is the relationship between the virtual environment found on the computer or handheld device and the physical built environment?

I know I already posted this, but I would like to hear your thoughts before I move forward!

Cool Library Promotion

Check out this very funny video below. I really enjoyed when the ghost gets out his laptop and uses the dictionary:











http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKB7zfopiUA










When I first watched this, I thought “man, that’s funny, and its in the gorgeous NYPL reading room.” Then I saw the credits for the library at 3:24 and I wanted to share it with you all. What a great way to promote not only your own library, but libraries in general. It was nice how NYPL not only promoted themselves specifically, but they promoted libraries in general. Maybe some effort should be made to advance the cause of libraries through viral videos (like the one above). (Hello ALA, are you listening?)

And I appreciate these folks’ effort, but the few seconds of library advertisement above are far more effective, I think, than this whole video. Or, maybe it’s that I don’t like Lady Gaga. Either way, here is the other video:









http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_uzUh1VT98













To be frank, this is the only Lady Gaga song I have heard anywhere that I like (meaning this specific version):








http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vEStDd6HVY








Sorry if that’s too many videos. Have a great Tuesday!