Clwydshire

The New Des Moines Public Library and the Perils of Architectural Significance

2010-03-27T07:11:00.000-07:00

A new $32.3 million dollar Des Moines Central Public Library opened in April, 2006. Designed by British architect David Chipperfield, who had also recently designed a new cemetery for Venice, Italy, the building has been praised as a significant work of architecture. The snapshot to the right shows the exterior of the building. All of the library's external walls are of copper colored glass.

This new library has attracted a stream of librarians interested in (someday) bringing new library facilities to their own communities. Our (former) library director visited the facility soon after it opened, as did several other people from around the system, including our current library director. I made a very quick tour of the building myself in October, 2006. Unlike the Des Moines librarians, and unlike many of our own staff, I did not like what I saw.

As I ran through the building I kept thinking "we would kill for this...(fill in the blank)"
... for this space.
... for the computer lab.
... for the reference area.
... for the cafe.
... for the underground parking.

Yet, as attractive as these amenities are, they cannot compensate for flaws that result from the architect's excessive devotion to his design concept. The architect is a declared and vocal minimalist. The design concept for the library is one of undivided public space, there are no separate rooms, no nooks or architecturally separate spaces in the main public areas. The external walls, being entirely of a specially constructed glass, are intended to extend the effect of undivided space, and do so in different ways at different times of day, varying according to the natural and artifical light around the structure.

To the eye alone, this library is in many respects a beautiful building, but its interior spaces still seem uncomfortable. The architect celebrates his design as being more "socially and architecturally open" more "accessible" than more traditional designs. It seems to me that the openness that has been achieved here is a lot like the commercial openness of a big box retailer. This library will serve individuals as customers pretty well, but it is not community space in any sense: The absence of attractively laid out, small scaled, functionally diverse spaces throughout the library will mean that it will not be a very good place to find spontaneous conversations, hold small meetings, or organize group activities. The availability of study rooms, and a separate wing with meeting rooms (No design concept can be completely realized!) do not alter this conclusion.

I want to illustrate the building's faults with specific examples. We will begin with the youth services area. Coming down the north stairs, one of the two major stairwells in the building, you approach the rear of the "Childrens Library." That is what it says on the left edge of the green wall ahead of you. Let's ponder the snapshot I took as I came down the stairs. What is wrong with this picture?

To begin with, the stairs are a dark place. They are lined with black polished stone, black marble perhaps. I should have been able to tell what kind of stone that was; I have a degree in geology. Alas, although I had a magnifying glass in my pocket, it was too dark to tell. Dark staircases are a mistake in any public building, but are particularly bad design in an urban library, whose diverse clientele will inevitably include the mentally ill and the not infrequently incarcerated.

The green wall you face here is the wall of a small central kiosk that contains the children's restrooms and materials storage for the youth librarians. To the left of the wall, you see the ends of the shelving in the childrens area. All the openings here are blocked off by soft plastic barriers that have been laced to the shelves. The reason that these ad hoc barriers have been added is obvious, they block off a dark, lounge like area which is not in the direct line of sight of any of the youth librarians. The barriers are an open acknowledgement that the space is badly designed.

The barriers themselves are no doubt temporary, but the children's librarians are not well situated to maintain good casual supervision of the area. If, on exiting the stairs you turn right and continue some twenty or thirty feet, you come to the spot where I made this snapshot of the children's librarians at work. There are two of them in the picture, though you can probably see only one. Neither faces the collection, which is in the distance behind them. Consider the contrast with the youth services areas at our own two newer branches, where even a single staff member working at the desk can see anyone who enters the area. That same staff member can see about 75% of the youth services collection from where she or he sits and will notice if someone looks like they need assistance. The service desk seen here would not be badly placed if it were guarding the entrance to a corporate work area, but it is very poorly placed for public service to patrons actually using the children's collection.

This childrens area does not have a space or room devoted to childrens programming. There is a "story and craft room" at the other end of the wing. It is tucked into an area walled off and otherwise designated as workroom space. The design drawing in the Des Moines Register (Special Supplement, April 6, 2006) describes the room as "quaint," a very, very strange word to use in this ultramodern design context. It is the wrong word, too--the right word would be "cramped." Story Time audiences at our central library need twice the space on most occasions and sometimes more than that.

It's obvious that the architect's design concept could not allow for the need for an activities room in the children's area. Instead an inadequate and distant space was chosen because this need--the need, essentially, for space enclosed by walls--had to be hidden from view if the abstract conception of undivided public space were to appear to prevail.

Let's leave the childrens area behind, although in parting I would add that I did not like the flooring, the ceiling, the lighting or the color of the paint on the walls. The shelving, on the other hand, was nice and can be ordered from a catalogue.

The snapshot to the right here offers a view of a much used area, with video rentals, music CDs and PACs in the foreground, and the fiction collection in more distant stacks. In this view, facing back toward the main entrance from the childrens area on the ground floor, the impact of the architect's design concept seems fairly benign. The rough concrete ceiling and the minimal utilitarian lighting give the space the feel of a converted warehouse. Chipperfield wrote that he felt that "the old idea of a library as a sort of temple had to be challenged a bit." The warehouse look has been a popular way of "challenging" more complex ideas about space and functional needs since the 1960s. It is, quite literally, the cheap way out.

The warehouse look saves money on non-essentials. The choice in this design has been been to save on interior finish and spend more for sheer space and for the building's (very expensive) glass cladding. That is not actually a bad trade-off for the architect and his client to have made. In this case, however, the trade-off has resulted in a building that has dark reaches on a dark day, especially on the second floor where the ceiling is lower. With lower ceilings, there is less indirect lighting. The fixtures seem to be a bit closer together on the second floor, but dark areas are still noticeably darker than on the first floor.

The Special Collections area, on second floor, is hidden behind the stacks. The doorway to the area is, in fact, directly behind a shelf end on the narrow passageway next to the wall. The space is so narrow that it was impossible to take a decent picture of the door. The snapshot at right shows a Special Collections display case, seen through the stacks. The display case has glass on both sides, so you can see into the Special Collections area, which is a long, hall shaped space along one side of the building. The space narrows toward the south. There are shelves and limited workspace in the area, but no room for small gatherings or lectures.

The absence of group or activity space in this area may be a disadvantage for this collection. The Special Collections area holds a collection of Iowa authors, and just outside is a large Iowa collection that seems to focus on the kinds of publications that businesses need. Both these collections could be the focus of activities, gatherings or lectures that could help develop constituencies to support them, if space was available. Activities centered on a collection can help people in the community develop a sense of ownership. That opens the door not just to financial support, but to greater awareness of the resources and more extensive use of them by the community.

There is meeting space in the library, but it is sterile space. There are small conference rooms and study rooms on the north wall of the public areas of the library. There is a separate wing on the ground floor with a large auditorium (210 sitting, 500 standing) that can be divided into three smaller spaces. This is adjacent to the cafe. That wing, by the way, has its own entrances, so users don't even have to enter the library or walk past library displays to use the facilities.

It is entirely possible to walk casually through the new Des Moines Main Library and find it an attractive place. Everything is new. The reference area and computer labs are well laid out and generously sized. Some of the reading areas have very attractive outdoor views. The architect is a technical wizard who has achieved what he set out to achieve: The green roof is covered with vegetation that cuts cooling and heating costs. Views into and out of the building can be spectacular, especially in the evening. Yet the design as a whole is a painful failure. Its problems are sometimes glaring--those are problems I have paid some attention to here--and sometimes subtle. I mentioned the architect's stint as a cemetary designer at the beginning of this review partly out of frustration with that subtlety. This very expensive building is a corpse, deader than rational argument can convey in a few words.

It is, in fact, a modernist corpse in a post-modern world. The black, stone-clad spartan stairwells, the service desks, and the specially designed oversize furniture in lounge areas all have a rich, corporate look. Corporations operate in private, not public space. They like their buildings to protect their space and to suggest an aura of efficiency, solidity and control which may be a fiction, but is appropriate to their ends. Inappropriately transposed into a public building whose purpose is to accomodate and serve a complex community, these design elements, together with the warehouse like openness and sense of exposure, work against the public purpose. Libraries are not just warehouses for books. They do revolve around books, and around our common cultural history, but they serve the community best by supporting, through their materials and technology, diverse community needs for association, sociability and connection. This building will not serve such purposes well.

Thing #24, Tracking What Users Say About Your Library

2009-05-31T12:08:00.000-07:00

Using a Bloglines Citation Search, and Google Alerts, (I used Twitter Search as well, but didn't find anything of interest), I found some interesting things: A postcard of the Lincoln City Library in 1909, a pat on the back for our library for buying a book a patron asked for, a county in Montana that links to one of our library book lists that mentions that the cargo of the Steamboat Bertrand was bound for Montana, some critical reviews of the design of our library's web site (example) and some other stuff. If I had had more time and used more ingenuity, I might have found more.

Thing #23: Is this really the end?

2009-01-21T12:45:00.000-08:00

Well, its the end of 23 things, which I found to be a really useful roadmap to exploration. If the library commission started another such exercise, I would likely participate. Among the discoveries or explorations I found most useful were Delicious, Bloglines, and everything having to do with wikis. I'll probably even keep the blog, though I might take a couple of weeks break from blogging for now.

Thing #22: Podcasts

2009-01-21T12:08:00.000-08:00

I looked at podcasts in several directories and tried a search on Google too. There is a lot of stuff out there. I probably will not keep podcasts on my RSS feed, again, I have a cheap DSL connection at home, and bandwidth is still too much of an issue for me, so I would only use podcasts maybe for language learning or for some other special task. I listened to a bit of a comedy news podcast I got from the Internet Archive Podcast page.

Thing #21: YouTube

2009-01-21T11:15:00.000-08:00

YouTube is so demanding of bandwidth that I rarely use it at home, and even in the library, it often just sputters along. But it does have some interesting effects. It is allowing a kind of journalism to develop that evades the prejudices and self-censorship of our local newspapers and of the American television networks. We can see things the way the rest of the world sees them, and sometimes that is healthy. Here is a link to a long posting on the Israeli assault on the Gaza strip, replete with YouTube videos, on Juan Cole's Informed Commentary Blog, which I think, over time, has been one of the best news blogs on the Internet.

Thing #20 Discovering Web 2.0 tools.

2009-01-21T09:13:00.000-08:00

The object of this exercise was to look at the Web 2.0 tools on the Web 2.0 awards site. I enjoyed looking at some of the sites, especially self publishing site Lulu.com, which has some interesting titles. I don't see what is so "Web 2.0" about say, Biblio.com, ABE books was already doing this in Web 1.0 if you want to call it that, but the list is still an interesting one. I expect that Google maps and the hosted Wikis will be among the most useful tools listed for libraries. Another interesting guide to Web 2.0, if you are interested, is the Progammable Web site.

Thing #19: Online Apps

2009-01-19T08:31:00.001-08:00

I'm writing this in Zoho writer, which, IMHO, beats the pants off of Google documents, at least for personal use. I'm going to try to publish it to the blog, straight from Zoho, so if you see it, I've succeeded.
OK, it did work, though I am adding this as I had to edit the tag, which did not come out quite right.

Thing #18: PBwiki

2009-01-18T09:38:00.000-08:00

I added some favorites to the Nebraska Learns 2.0 wiki. It is not hard to edit a wiki.

Thing #17 Wiki wacky woo, or what's interesting about wikis, for libraries

2009-01-18T07:46:00.000-08:00

Or should that be Wookie wacky wig? I'm sorry, Wookie wiki wag! No! No! I meant Wiki Wookie wacky wag! What? No! Wookie whacky wiki wacky wiggy wag! Ugh! No! Wiki wiki Wookie whacky wacky wiggy wag! Thats it! No! Maybe! I'm not sure! I think I've forgotten it!

Wikis are great collaborative tools. Lincoln City Libraries uses several wikis for staff collaboration, and they work well. We don't currently have any public wikis, but I hope that we eventually will offer some. I have, myself, in the past, added entries to Wikipedia to link to some of our archival resources, and I believe this pays off in terms of increased interest.

The Project for Public Spaces (PPS) has a thoughtful page on "How to Make Your Library Great". Among the points they make are that great libraries, rather than thinking of themselves as one-way conduits of information, "foster dialog and exchange with their users." Public wikis offer the single most effective way for a library to move this philosophy onto the web, because the work you do on them, and the contribution the public makes, can endure and continue to help build community and serve other users over time. The Des Moines Public library, for example has a "Des Moines local history wiki" that registered visitors can edit. Its early days there, but it could develop into something really interesting. There are many good local history wikis on the web, especially in Great Britain and Australia, for some reason. As the PPS page also says, great libraries are appreciated as stewards of local history and lore, and this kind of wiki could be a great step forward in providing that kind of service. Since we are on a "W" kick, here is a link to the Wagga Wagga history wiki.

I also liked St. Joseph County Public Library's subject guide wiki. The library has succeeded in creating a flexible, well organized and rather portal like subject guide that works really well. I like that a lot.

It might also be interesting to experiment with offering a (public) wiki for library book displays, encouraging discussion of the books and the topic for the display. This might not work, but it might catch on for some topics, and again, it would foster dialog and build community at the same time.

Thing #16: Library 2.0

2009-01-16T10:33:00.000-08:00

The Web 2.0—Library 2.0 discussion seems to be providing many of the ideas that professional librarians are using to try to understand and plan for the future. For this reason alone, we will all have to try to follow that discussion and try to understand what it may mean for libraries in the long run.

The Library 2.0 discussion is about the way that technology and “Web 2.0” may shape or amplify social and cultural trends to disrupt and remake libraries' relationships with their patrons. It is about the way technology may mesh with administrative and economic imperatives to change the way libraries are supported, administered, and staffed. And finally, it is about how libraries will weather, if they can, the end of the modern world: Do they still have a job worth doing? How will they find their patrons, and the financial support they need to survive, in the storm of disintermediation, delocalization, and dematerialization that is gathering before them?

I surveyed the OCLC Newsletter on libraries and Web 2.0, read Wikipedia articles on Web 2.0 and Library 2.0, and looked here and there at the links and references in them, and tried to understand where the various bits and pieces of this discussion might lead. Here are some random responses:

Mash-ups and flexible, modular APIs allow you to imagine doing wonderful things with the library's online catalog, providing local tagging, patron reviews, and other things. Here are a few suggestions: How about being able to see current prices for the first edition on ABE books or ebay? That first English edition of Machiavelli's Prince is going for 17 or 18 thousand dollars? Maybe it is worth reading all the way through, after all! Or look up Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding and see in the margin that it was cited (say) in 200 books and 800 articles in the 1970s, but only in 20 books since 2000. We could provide a “thing” that patrons could put up on their own blogs or web pages that would show “what I am reading now,” a list of what they have currently checked out. Many patrons would love a “my library” page that could access a list of everything they have ever checked out. Many patrons just don't share the professional librarian's concern for privacy that leads us to avoid keeping such records ourselves. Those who prefer publicity over privacy should be able to have what they want, and vice versa.

A lot of these ideas are not that realistic, given current staffing and skills. “Perpetual beta” and quick turn around for projects sounds good, but thats not how it really works in our library, where the good virtual services people struggle to keep what we have up and going. Flexibility of the kind people are dreaming of in Library 2.0 requires quite an investment in skills and in experiments that may not always reap immediate results.

Some of the most realistic articles were about the way technology can promote cooperation and sharing of resources between libraries. This is, unquestionably, a good thing, opening the way to better and more cost-effective service. On the other hand? Its quite possible to imagine, further along this road, that something like the state library commission would run the ILS for all local libraries in the state, off of a single server farm, and that even the larger local library systems would need fewer technical staff. Perhaps cataloging and, for smaller libraries, even collection management would migrate in the same direction. “Local identity” for libraries would perhaps become more and more of a false front end. Such a monolithic service provider would capture its clientèle, and might in time become a profitable political target for privatization. Eventually, and this would become even easier as people demand everything on the Web, the whole thing could, even more profitably, be phoned in from a foreign country, where people are still paid a lot less.

Surely that is an extreme scenario, you say? Well, surely it is. But it does capture something indefinable about Web 2.0. For all the celebration of its social side, on-line communities and the like, Web 2.0 now plays a role similar to that played by advertising in supporting corporate capitalism in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It offers a pleasant and superficial patina for deeper, and potentially more disturbing, developments. Behind every Web 2.0 application, without exception, as far as I can see, there is a huge database. Your data in that database does not belong to you.

I seem to notice that the people who write the more “cheerleading” kinds of essays about Library 2.0 are not very interested in books. For various reasons, I am personally pretty optimistic about the survival of book culture and about the way way libraries and book culture can sustain each other. Those Library 2.0 cheerleaders are also culturally passive; strikingly so, in having so much to say about how libraries should change to adapt to the “new” culture and absolutely nothing to say about any role libraries might play in shaping that culture.

Nobody has fully understood the impact of disintermediation on libraries. One of aspect of disintermediation is that libraries become publishers. Libraries become publishers when they allow their patrons to tag and review their books. How do they then deal, one article asks, with insulting ethnic tags? Or a problem review? Do they let these things stand as expressions of the real world we live in? They are more likely to need to edit them out according to some standard of what is and is not appropriate for a public institution to offer. Libraries become publishers when they digitize pictures or texts and put them on-line, when they put up podcasts of book talks or story times. Libraries become publishers when they begin to offer more “portal-like” pages to introduce their books and on-line databases to patrons in a more interesting and integrated way. They face the same design and presentation issues that say, an on-line magazine publisher might face. And they are likely to need to meet the same standards for design, reliability, and quality of content. Otherwise, in time, other kinds of providers will win their on-line audience away.

Who should know, better than librarians, that information has its own ecology. Its availability and quality reflects the economic, social, political, and scientific environment of some particular place and time. Some is copyrighted and some is not, some can be freely accessed, some cannot. Some communities can afford to buy licenses to access certain kinds of information and some cannot. Some information that is available on the web is here today, but will be gone tomorrow, as governments or businesses remove it from circulation, or begin to charge for it. Librarians do their jobs well when they help their patrons understand that ecology.

The two cheerleading articles that open the OCLC Next Space Newsletter on Web 2.0 appeared to me to promote an emerging “Web 2.0 reality” as a kind of self-sustaining narcissistic illusion that ignores that ecology of information. Because information has contexts, it will never be pushbutton simple. Libraries will always be about educating their users. As I read the essays (and it is possible to get a much larger dose of Michael Stephens with a Google search), I had the feeling that they were trying to promote a kind of “technological correctness” for librarians, quite unconnected with the values and community service libraries and librarians have stood for in the past.

Thing #15: Presentations go social

2008-12-27T17:04:00.000-08:00

Here is my favorite design slideshow from SlideShare, Paper Art by Peter Callesen:

Paper Art

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: art paper)

Part of the 23 things exercise is to establish an account on SlideShare, mine is here. I guess there is shareware to convert other file formats to ppt files, so who knows, I might use it sometime.

Thing #14 Tagging and Social Bookmarking

2008-12-27T10:50:00.000-08:00

For me, this has turned out to be a very useful "thing." I was already using my personal google documents account to, rather awkwardly, "archive" my links and make it possible for me to get at them on different computers but the delicious.com site is much better suited to the purpose. I have already uploaded browser bookmarks to delicious and I imagine I will continue to use this tool frequently in the future.

For my own use I might tag the NebraskaAccess site as research_tool, Nebraska, full_text, virtual_library, database_access, govt_provider, and, learning from others tags, also as statevirtuallibraries.

Thing #13 What are you wearing right now?

2008-12-27T09:44:00.000-08:00

I have experimented with twitter. I can see how using it to microblog could be useful to support a common effort, like sharing alerts about useful resources for a class, for example. Twitter is also presented as a way to sustain connections between people, as a friendship tool, so to speak. I'm more skeptical about that--or maybe type of people who twitter a lot about themselves are just not very interesting. Most of the tweets I encountered were pretty banal (and I would not claim my own were any more interesting). Even the tweets from the Nebraska Library Camp in Lincoln were, I thought (sorry people!) mostly just useless chatter.

I mentioned Steve Talbott in an earlier post. A phrase of his came to mind as I was lurking and scanning through what people have to say about themselves: "The technical opportunity to become friendlier is also an opportunity to become unfriendly at a more decisive level."

Thing #12: A thing about LibraryThing

2008-12-22T06:55:00.000-08:00

I got a Library Thing account some months ago. I added some books right then (Link), and I did find some interesting things by looking at the lists of others who have books I think are good. Nevertheless I did not keep adding books, mostly because of time issues. Bluntly put, while I think Library Thing is a neat idea and really works well, to contribute much to it, I would have to take more trouble than I am willing to. I rather spend the time reading or writing. I have a fairly well established routine for consuming a book, and taking a note about it if I think its worth it, and that doesn't include Library Thing.

Thing #11: We all blog about technology

2008-12-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

I've already been blogging some about technology. Most entries in this blog that are not specifically addressed to the “NLC 23 things” are about the way that digital technology has led to a new struggle about what is in the public sphere, as a variety of economic interests attempt to privatize ideas, information, and works of art, literature, and science that were formerly considered part of our common cultural heritage. My shorthand index term for these entries has been “digital enclosure,” a term that others use as well, as you can see if you follow the links in those entries.

Much of the discussion of the social, economic and cultural effects of digital technology seems shallow--in the “gee whiz, isn't it great!” and “ZOWIE guys!!! Get with it or Drop Dead!” mold. But there are exceptions. Here are some links to work that seems to me to offer intelligent, historically informed commentary on the influence of digital technology in today's world.

The first (and easiest to understand) is Dion Dennis's article The digital death rattle of the American middle class. The article is as much about the future of American education as it is about outsourcing and economic prosperity, as such. I particularly like Dennis's last two paragraphs. I have a feeling this piece, written in 2003, may age better than you might think, despite recent changes in political life due to the economic crisis and the 2008 election. Dennis is describing an ideology and a set of interests that are deeply rooted and influential in both political parties.

The most wide-ranging and sophisticated cultural critic of the way we are handling our new digital tools that I have encountered is Steve Talbott.

Here is a good on-line introduction to his approach. This includes, in a part titled “Hold a blossom to the light,” a very fine description of why an enormously skilled Waorani blowgun hunter in the Amazon rain forest really prefers to use a shotgun, although shells are expensive and hard to get, and although the gun does not serve his purpose (he knows this, too) as effectively as the traditional blowgun.

Its all about technology and how, at any level of sophistication, we can be attracted to tools that are culturally destructive.

I recently read Talbot's Devices of the Soul: Battling for Ourselves in an Age of Machines, (O'Reilly Media, 2007), and I would like to cherry pick a couple of points he makes that I especially liked.

He asks and answers the question, how much of myself do I put on the line, how much do I really commit, when I venture onto the internet? The answer is almost nothing. This is the beginning of a devastating critique of utopian visions of on-line community, though that discussion is strung out throughout the rest of the book.

He shows how we sometimes use technology to evade a true conversation with the natural world, as with each other, and describes the result at one point as “a mad, free associating soliloquy.”

Talbott draws on Jane Healy's Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds—For Better and Worse. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), and pays close attention to how children and adults are made fit for their social world. His appreciation of the role of place in sustaining a healthy culture leads him to the conclusion that “to be a keystroke from everywhere means being nowhere in particular, and this means that making the Internet a healthy place for children is not for the time being a realistically achievable goal.”

Talbott is not a Luddite, he has been employed as a software programmer and technical writer, and through this connection, his book came to be published by O'Reilly media, a technology publisher who brings out some of the best books on computer programming.

Long ago the German writer Ernst Jünger suggested that “Our technological world is not an arena of unlimited possibilities, instead, it possesses an embryonic character which drives toward a predetermined maturity.” For Jünger this meant, in part, that technology reshapes the world only as a reflection of the human will to power. Leader of a German assault troop on the western front in World War I, wounded some 23 times in action, Jünger found great beauty in the amorality and spectacle of industrialized warfare. Jünger affirmed change, and greeted the chaos of two world wars and the rise of dictatorships in the twenties as small steps along the way to the transformation of the earth into a totally administered technological wonder, a work of pure art. His aesthetic appreciation of these changes grates on modern sensibilities. (We Americans like our history to be a moral homily, however shallow.)

Still, it is hard not to think of Jünger again: Where-ever you look at digital technology, whether at the more “populist” end of video games and on-line communities, or at the possibilities for information gathering and administrative control this technology offers to governments and corporations, or simply at the way technology enables what Steve Talbott calls “vacant efficiency,” and transforms economy and society in ways we don't anticipate, there is something embryonic in its appearance. What seems chaotic and free on the surface and at first glance, seems much less so with closer observation. As we look on, behind the chaos, bright surfaces of connective tissue self-assemble, curving back on themselves beyond our vision. Will this thing be beautiful, or a horror, or some deep hybrid of the two?

Thing #10 Play with image generator

2008-12-15T13:08:00.000-08:00

Using piZap I created this image with a scan from Shaw's Zoology (circa 1812):

I had to trim the image in a desktop application though, because piZap left a black border on it that I did'nt like.

Thing #9: More uses for Flickr

2008-12-15T09:34:00.000-08:00

I found this animal photo mashup site on www.programmableweb.com, which in turn is a good guide to finding mashups and even to making mashups of your own. If the question is how useful images you find on Flickr might be for library projects, the most difficult problem with using such images will always be copyright issues. This particular photo mashup only includes photos that are under a creative commons license, so you could, in theory, print some off for a related book display of some sort.

Thing #8: Discover Flickr

2008-12-15T09:14:00.000-08:00

I surfed around on Flickr for a while, and found this photo of monkey skulls arranged by the Dogon. The photograph reminds me of ornament on the Kapuzinergruft in Vienna. In fact, the monkey skulls are somehow more impressive.

The digital redefinition of childhood? Another kind of digital enclosure?

2008-12-14T14:58:00.000-08:00

Here is a link to a story about how certain words are being removed from Oxford University Press's young people's dictionary, to be replaced by others. The story's title is Words associated with Christianity and British history taken out of children's dictionary but as Michael Gillelan notes in Laudator Temporis Acti
the words removed include many terms used to describe the countryside: Acorn, ash, sycamore, beech, chestnut, dandelion, holly, ivy, pasture, primrose, willow, and walnut among them. New words in the dictionary include blog, broadband, MP3,chatroom and voice mail. If you've read Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, or Steve Talbott's Devices of the Soul: Battling for Ourselves in an Age of Machines, you'll be as horrified as I am.

Thing #7: Finding Feeds

2008-12-14T10:44:00.000-08:00

I have found some feeds with Technorati, but I definitely like Google's blog search the best of the tools listed. Searching per se may not actually be the best way to find the most interesting feeds, the best way is probably to follow well done blogs that are close to your own interests. For news, I have followed The Agonist for several years, and have found other useful feeds over time from there. If you find a blog you like, you can see what other sites link to it by entering that blog's URL into Touchgraph's Google Browser. This last is a very useful visual tool, if you have time to play around with it.

Thing #6 RSS feeds

2008-12-05T12:33:00.000-08:00

I think RSS feeds are really useful, but maybe more for following a peripheral interest than an central one. Some people do go back and re-edit older entries, which, given the way I use the feeds, I might miss. Also, you might miss the advertising... which can be interesting on a book blog.

About Instant Messaging: Thing #5

2008-12-05T11:45:00.000-08:00

I will probably continue to mix something of an attempt with a real blog with the 23 things posts for the NLC Nebraska Learns 2.0 posts. I have now signed up for instant messaging with Yahoo and had a short exchange with Christa at the Commission. It might be a useful tool at work, though I personally think e-mail works better for most purposes.

A new book on the digital enclosure trend.

2008-12-03T14:25:00.000-08:00

A new book, James Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind is available for free download from Yale University Press.

Technology and data loss

2008-11-30T09:35:00.000-08:00

In the lastest Fall/Winter (print) issue of the American Archivist, Robert Dorman has an interesting article titled "The Creation and Destruction of the 1890 Federal Census."

As Dorman points out, both scholars and the public, historians and genealogists, are painfully aware of the loss, due to a fire in January 1921 and the fire's aftermath, of the only copy of the returns. For every preceeding census, and every later one, multiple copies were made of the returns. Dorman shows that the choice to create only a single record of returns for the 1890 census grew out of the "pervasive fiscal conservatism" of the government, an unprecedented bulkiness of returns due to a broader set of questions being asked than ever before, and from "bureaucratic hubris over the first use of the Hollerith electrical tabulating machines."

As Dorman says, all the statistical data from the census was extracted and published before the 1921 fire. What was lost in the fire were the names of the people, and with that the ability to tie the data to individual households. The names were not transferred to the punch cards used to enumerate the census. Having transferred data to punch cards, the bureaucrats argued that further copies, and even the binding of the returns as in previous censuses, was unneccessary. Both of these choices played a role in making the 1921 fire the disaster that it was. With family names, an important source of information about the last great era of immigration has been lost, as have the possibilites of aggregating data differently for different scholarly purposes.

Digital Enclosure again

2008-11-08T13:22:00.000-08:00

Library Law describes how state archives' acceptance of "grants" from Ancestry.com may hobble people's ability to access archive materials on-line for the long term. Even the submitting of index materials to Google will be restricted, limiting people's ability to even find the materials. Restrictions will last for the life of the copyright on the digitized materials.

2008-11-08T13:12:00.000-08:00

A blog devoted to open access journals... http://periodiques.wordpress.com/

2008-10-31T14:41:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of ways that digital technology seems to change scholarly research methods. The service that librarians have provided has been to offer a map of 'what is there' based on their knowledge of how knowledge is produced, recorded, and stored. So keeping up with such changes is necessary, as we try to understand how the library's intermediary role is changing or, as some people believe, dissolving.

2008-10-30T14:07:00.000-07:00

I will be using this blog to track my progress on the Nebraska Library Commission's "23 things" program. This is the first post for that.

Digital Enclosure

2008-10-11T13:52:00.000-07:00

Noted in the German archivists' blog Archivalia, a study that takes note of the process of digital enclosure:

The public domain is a rich resource and an essential foundation for the Internet public library. It includes centuries of great literature and is a chronicle of civilization and learning. Before the Internet, there was little argument over what people could do with public domain works. They could do anything. But technology makes it possible to impose new technical and contractual protections that can be applied willy-nilly to in-copyright and public domain works alike. The lawyers and economists call this the “enclosure” of the public domain and it looms large as the future of the Internet public library plays out.

http://www.blc.org/news/BLC_summit_white_paper_9-29-08.pdf

Nonsense words and seven and a half things

2008-10-09T15:21:00.000-07:00

New nonsense:

Consporgulation: The application of Inter-forward Programming to maximal efficacy in customer management functionalities.

Thingwally: Thinggummy's nemesis.

Its an easy transition from this nonsense to the "seven and a half habits of highly successful lifelong learners." I have always been puzzled by the American tendency to present ideas about learning as if a therapist on Valium were speaking to an audience on Prozac. I can think of some fairly chaotic and nasty things to say about this, but as criticism of a superficial little slide show, it would be a waste of time. Be a little more frank? --If you don't continue to learn you will be either brain-dead or a serf with a big screen TV? I laughed especially hard at the notion of a written contract, which I suppose is just a nice, well-intended, middlebrow thought experiment. While I was trying to speed-up my trip through the site, the words of an old song that was popular in the early seventies came to me, the one about "all the little houses made of ticky-tacky." And inside them, how about all the little minds, "filled up with nicky-nacky?" Little homilies turn me off.