Presentations, part 2

I had no idea of the depth with which libraries can contribute to urban renewal and gentrification. The presentation provided the right mix of pictures and facts to effectively communicate their topic's nuances. I have two observations: They should have emphasized the beehive like atmosphere of the Salt Lake City Public Library and its subtle cues to that state's predominately Mormon population. They also should have engaged the controversy of gentrification a little more heartily; I have little compassion for homelessness but only slightly more for people who object that wealthier Americans are buying cheap properties, fixing them up, and enjoying a bohemian bourgeois lifestyle in an area formerly populated by working class whites before industries moved outward/southbound/overseas and colored folks moved in. Yes, property taxes are going up. If you own your home, sell it. If you rent, do you really care where you live anyway? Madison living space ordnance prevents the building of new homes and flats downtown and compels developers to buy out entire blocks to construct massive apartment buildings and create such population density that it gets even harder to find a place to sit down on the bus. I'm curious if the compassionate souls fighting gentrification would prefer urban/suburban sprawl instead?

I have no comments about the banned books presentation except that time shortage compelled me to skip my unwritten (but still scripted) portions pertaining to the role of librarians better arbiters of fact and truth than a partisan educational body and that no one knows how to pass books along to the rest of the class. I got to look at Heather Has Two Mommies but none of the others because they were immediately passed back or, in the case of And Tango Makes Three, read by a single person.

By the time the Big Box Store/Coffeeshop segment came I was too anxious about their time crunch to pay much attention. Rachel was too dismissive of Coffman, as evidenced by at least two members praising aspects of his essay, and was too flamboyant for the time allowed. Even with Sara pushing her along after her PowerPoint mishap she kept going, and going. I've told her that she is wayyy too in to being Jewish. Her pronunciation of "Coffman" as "Kauf-munn" and "tawlk" instead of "talk" are just two examples of needless flourish that helped put their group past time. Granted they had only 35 minutes to begin with but they still went 5 minutes over their allotted time. The third to last presenter, if you include Rachel's allegedly abbreviated conclusion, was painful to watch as he struggled to communicate his topic. I'm still not sure what it was, actually. Their last non-Rachel presenter, just like Karl in Banned Books, was gracious and quick without sounding dumb. Clearly he had more to say but couldn't in good conscience subject us to a longer class.

I was very frustrated for the entire class because I knew we would run long or have to shorten our presentations. Three peers took Alan's call for constructive criticism to the Nth degree and held up class for another 7 minutes after everyone else turned theirs in. My attempts to guilt them to finish, namely shouting for anyone who cared to hear "Don't think that because you already presented you can hold up the rest of us," seemed to stall them further. Based on conversations with my classmates, I'm confident the surveys have a lot in common and therefore extra effort on their part meaningless. A less wasteful way to survey would have been filling out the forms during an extended break of 15 or 20 minutes rather than the 15 minute survey time and the 10 minute break we ended up getting.

Presentations, part 1

I know several of the members on the One City One Book team and so criticism over content would be more difficult than criticism on form. I will focus on form.

The use of that program allowing them to move across the country gave their presentation an original flair and was definitely relevant to their geographical emphasis, but the limited point-by-point access necessitated that salmon colored handout. I would have preferred a PowerPoint like bullet system. The handout was nicely formatted but two whole sections were incorrectly/poorly labeled. At first glance it is bizarre to put PROS second  and CONS sixth as these are good introductions which can be elaborated upon later. The group's concept should have been acceptably explained through supplementary material--if a library school student didn't know about it already--and allow a modicum of detail before they got into the nittygritty. All of their cons in the CONS section, which was named "Issues" in presentation but not the handout, were already referenced. They were also in the wrong order in the handout.

Had they done PowerPoint and spoke out of order rather than printed a handout I'm sure these issues would seem much less important. Instead they made the extra effort without quite meeting it.

My ignorance of E-Readers, such as what the heck "e-ink" is, makes that presentation much more interesting and enlightening. Since I don't get into the politics of being a librarian and I see myself more as an archivist, I have a hard time caring about reading disabled people. If a person has difficulty reading words or holding a codex, I hardly see it as their right that publishers and developers must bow to their wide ranging disabilities. Having never known, at least to my knowledge, any dyslexics, and as someone who has recovered without medication from alleged brain chemistry problems, I am skeptical of invisible mental disorders and wonder why we're handicapping society and encouraging people who can't rub two sentences together to enroll in college and press for their rights to have their books read to them. Be like the deaf community, the first group of citizens to latch onto and rely upon two-way pagers, buy an iPad that let's you watch TV. Meanwhile you can overcome your mental handicap as you sling coffee or bar tend for the rest of your life.

Perhaps I shouldn't write these when I'm already angry?

You Can't Spell "Reaction" Without "React"

I'm glad that Robbins touched on the difficulties of contemporaneous empathy when it comes to the Cold War and anticommunism. Having been born in 1985, my real-world exposure to the Red Menace was limited to the gradual phasing out of school maps that still included the USSR. Our early education on the American Revolution referred correctly to our independence from "England", rather than the "United Kingdom" as it was called some time later, and adults often used them interchangeably into the present. The Russian SSR was the key member of the USSR and followed a similar pattern which continued to beguile us. Perhaps that contributed to my eventual sub-specialization in Russian studies which, together with my relative youth, allows me to see Russian communism more objectively. As an American patriot I believe our system is superior given its adaptability rooted in pragmatism rather than idealism, as a student of history I can see how the Soviet system was doomed for internal and external reasons, but I have great difficulty putting myself in the shoes of people who feared communists were under their beds or hiding in their closet.

The USSR were technically allies, perhaps better to say respectfully neutral and assuming the worst was to come, and Russian forces bore the brunt of wartime casualties in a bloody struggle which killed tens of millions while the other allies bided their time to invade North Africa, Italy, and finally France. Those members of the American Legion faced a smaller and weaker German army precisely because the USSR threw their lives into the conflict.

This anticommunism extends into the institutionalized racism of the US during this time. It's always disappointing that white settlers, introduced to punish the treacherous Indians, adopted and maintained a similar racism practiced by the slave holding Indians who were removed from their native lands so whites could grow tobacco, cotton, rice, and indigo. Society and individual behaviors feed off each other to create irrational manifestations of our hopes and fears but for the life of me I can't understand how people can justify certain actions. I cannot recall who uttered this in Dismissal... but one of the charges against Ruth Brown was that her media exposure threatened the progress of local Negros: I've heard this same claim made in my studies of civil rights in the 1960s.

Phrases like that should be dubbed "2/3s phrases." One-third of the population will hear it and know it's an out and out lie but say it to deflect criticism, another third will identify it as a compromise that will quell agitation and restore peace, and another third will realize its absurdity but be overwhelmed by the other two-thirds. A similar claim can be made about gay marriage. There will always be a segment which feels homosexuality has no Godly right to exist who will be allies with morally conservative people who don't want gay people to further dilute the permanence of unions.

Particular to Ruth Brown, the logic of the conservative -villers aggravated me to no end. Particularly on page 73 when, after saying she did not consider herself having committed great harm, was asked the loaded question "Miss Brown, if you remain here as a librarian would you agree to do nothing more that would harm Bartlesville?" This is what happens when ad hoc citizens committees which have little to no expertise mandate policies under the guise of public accountability. They were little more than a professional lynch mob by committee with the intention to subvert the autonomy of a public institution with an avowed professional commitment to grant access to more information rather than less and facilitate thoughtful questions. I'm not the type of LIS student who got into the school with a political ax to grind--I just really want to be an archivist--but this sort of behavior stems from public hysteria and irrationality. This shit continues to the present and usually the actions of conservatives who fear loss rather than liberals who dream what could be improved. Lefties possess some crazy and irrational ideas as well--but they are usually unrealized aspirations watered down by conservative circumstances rather than the established norm struggling for survival.

Reaction is rarely celebrated in history texts because it is often based on intolerance, prejudice, and comparatively has a clear and present enemy rather than a sympathetic victim so often the subject of social history. Just look at our fiction--even the 1950s era Captain America Commie Basher was rendered an imposter by the Marvel retcon because we like our creative works to, in some ways, reflect our ideals. Real-life bigotry at a substantial enough level conveyed to the reader beyond mere standard practice makes an unsympathetic character indeed. I'm glad Cap got frozen and stands up for America once again.

Litigiousness

In our politically charged environment when anyone who opposes a popular or, depending on your ideology, the morally correct opinion, it is pleasant to be occasionally reminded that law and governance, however impersonal, are still objective arenas of discourse. It's true that we're overly litigious, however. Briefly: A man sentenced to 10 years for DWI and vehicular manslaughter was sued by the victim's family. Not satisfied with a sentence that probably wouldn't go lower than five years with good behavior, they wanted damages. He counter-sued and claimed their teenage son's disobedience of bicycle helmet laws contributed to his death and his own jail sentence. Some in the media portrayed his suit as morbid but I believed it illustrated the neutered way in which society takes the little things that make up life and puts them under a magnifying glass whenever we get our panties in a bunch. The civil suit against OJ was bad enough but he was a free man and still had plenty of money--this guy wasn't going to be earning much money in prison. His suit put the absurdity of the lawsuit into the open and transformed the public's perception of grieving parents seeking justice to vengeful parents seeking a paycheck.

The panel on the use of the Kindle was more genial but reminded me of this case nonetheless. The first presenter walked the audience into their mind-set that the device was simply being tested, rather than mandated, and having no blind students, they could not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. Quite intentionally the coming lawsuit seemed asinine. Another example of overly litigious citizens using the state to lower standards to the commonest denominators to disadvantage the majority of Americans who have fully functioning eyes. But after another speaker described "print disabled" persons and attempts to ensure that these persons are not left out of the discussions which develop these paperless technologies and mandate accessibility, the frivolous lawsuit took on important symbolic meanings intended to increase awareness. Perhaps I run the risk of seeming prejudiced when I say that people with untreatable mental disorders that keep them from learning effectively without outside assistance should probably not go to college in the first place. People who are deaf or blind or have reduced use of their limbs can and should be reasonably accommodated--but only if their disabilities demonstratively limit their talent. Stephen Hawking stands out as an extreme example: A Brilliant mind trapped inside a nearly lifeless shell. Many persons suffering from retardation are given High School diplomas as more of a gesture but potential employers realize this. High School is no longer a "Secondary School" that only the most well off Americans completed but rather an assumed minimum educational qualification and it doesn't behoove America well to turn college into the new gold standard. This is not Harrison Bergeron.

The second video, save for discussions of the ways libraries can be more attractive to students with a coffeeshop like atmosphere, was much less stimulating. The southern woman's accent was one of the strongest I've heard from an obviously intelligent person. My experience has been that the strongest accents have the worst grammar and thus perpetuate the image of the ignorant southerner. This sort of spoils things for proud southerners who freely use "y'all", and English would benefit from a second-person plural, but refrain from double-negatives. Her frequent interruptions of other speakers irked me but she usually contributed to thoughtful discussion so she came out ahead--as far as I'm concerned.

It is a cliche but still no less true that libraries must re-invent themselves as their users change. I recall an anecdote of a campus which mandated laptops and, because the library did nothing to provide services and instruction to fit this new paradigm, eventually dissolved the library. While I prefer an actual coffee-house to a hybrid library, many of my peers don't and I recognize this must be exploited. This will become especially important as generations of children are given handmedown PCs and laptops and lose the physicality which gave birth to the terms "file" or "cut and paste."

The audience input was also quite fascinating. Not being a tech person I failed to understand, at least at first, why Google wouldn't want metadata for more complete and accurate searching. From my understanding of the subsequent discussion, the fault with Google's search mechanisms which allows Google Bombing would be exacerbated if they accepted metadata.

After these videos, however, I kind of want a Kindle for PDFs. Unlike most of my peers I don't print them but I don't like to carry my laptop everywhere. It's a heavy mofo and has destroyed two of the three zipper compartments in my expensive leather messenger bag. I still have no idea how much repairs might be... perhaps I should sue?

Conceptual Issues in Government Publications and the Coming Apocolypse

Perhaps because Nancy Mulhern, someone I've known for several years now, is leading the government publications discussion, the readings were a little heavy on conceptual matters. This heavy conceptual basis is the same for most of our class's readings but then again I'd've hardly appreciated an explanation of SUDOC classification and "Digital Democracy" covered the pragmatic side pretty well.

The CWD article approached information from an apparently unique perspective but, looking at them both, someone should consider the consequences of diminished government print documentation and the various information/citizen types many people willfully avoid or do not have reliable infrastructure for the computer and Internet access. My girlfriend's father lives in a cabin that's better than some proper homes I've visited but is completely off the grid. Until this year he didn't have running water and he relies on solar power to charge car batteries used for his radio, portable DVD player, and occasional amp. He'd need utilities hooked up in order to support a power sucking computer with a slow connection in order to view documents but he has no desire to do this. My suspicion that many of the types of citizens who believe the state is exaggerating the danger of CWD would object if a previously held privilege were lost. Surely they can use the computer at their local library but what if their budget is so low there's only one and its primarily for the catalog? Or, what if there's a half-hour limit and the citizens wants to write the treatise on some obscure act or law?

The Nerves of Government chapter was an interesting libertarian examination of government and communications and perhaps a uniquely American outlook. In the United States we're ambivalent to the dangers of powerful government: Democrats would prefer a government that assists political, social, and economic equality in the face of change and Republicans favor actions which spur development and growth but may leave some people out of it. We're not used to thinking about the government as a free speech agent because the first amendment is our guarantor and our history still convinces us that our government in small. We've never had, for example, pirate radio competing with the monopolistic paternalism of the BBC. Our version of this conflict is Clinton signing a law deregulating the commercial radio industry which allowed Clear Channel Communications to buy out practically any station it wanted.

Our government is actually quite large but it's federated so most of the control is local or state level but there's always a trace of "What if--" in the American psyche which usually leads to these types of discussions. What if the feds use the commerce clause to exercise total control? What if they control the means of communication? What if the Canadians invade? What if the Ruskies finally go through with it? We'd better stock up on every type of gun the liberal American weapons laws allow, and some they don't, build a bunker and stock it with dehydrated food. Down there, the Internet will just be a pleasant memory of naked women and eBay.

Any digital democracy model must find a place for Americans like my girlfriend's father and the conspiracy theorists or else they may start another Whiskey Rebellion.

As the World Turns

I suspect this week's readings are right up Alan's alley but, with the exception of a few portions in each article, they were predominately at the cross-roads of law and economics--two subjects I don't care to study. The soap-opera like conditions in Telling Tales Out of School were a useful wrapper in the discussion of ownership in corporatist universities but at times reminded me of Henrietta Lacks, Revisited.

While I knew something about the ways in which copyright law has evolved over the centuries, the long quote in Intellectual Property and the Liberal State reminded me how irrational it sounds to justify a decision, any decision really, by claiming it will undermine a whole host of related activities. That an author loses all control of their work as it is disseminated was covered in a previous reading, which one I am unsure, but that only considered the intellectual component. Perhaps the Labor Theory that incorporated millers and printers into a book was relevant in a time when books were still something of an art form in an age of poor literacy relatively poor rates of reproducibility. As more people have the intelligence and leisure to read books and printing is less arduous the financial incentive increases with this new capacity. It seems....

I also enjoyed the nuances of the Cultures and Copyrights article which elaborated on the creolization of copyright law in Australia. The author claimed that sacredness was being injected into copyright law but I feel the case was reasonably made by Intell Prop in Lib State when it argued that the romantic idea of authorship, mainly inspiration and originality by using community resources like language, culture, etc, injected sacredness into copyright law quite some time ago.

Revising Copyright Law for the Information Age made an interesting and admittedly flawed argument in favor of vernacular laws based on common sense in an age of wide dissemination. Too often our societies can't deal with problems of such a scale because any sweeping action would instigate large and powerful groups and change our very conception of, in this case, copyright law. In politics these are called "Third Rail" issues. President Bush knew Social Security had problems and proposed a privatization scheme which may have alleviated the coming crisis but is instead a signature domestic failure for a president who will probably be remembered for foreign policy. Health care is a similar third rail. By the author of Revising Copyright Law looking at the problem and proposing solutions, he's assisting the necessary dialogue as the controlling means of information are lost or disseminated. I doubt much has or will come of it, however. Greed and shortsightedness are fairly common attributes of agents whose primary concern is profit.

Negro Views

Deborah Brandt is right that we take literacy for granted but until this book I simply hadn't considered the innate differences between learning to write and learning to read. It wasn't until my early adulthood that I realized exactly how a person could read a foreign language without speaking it and it naturally follows that a person could learn to read without being able to write effectively. I found the chapter "The Sacred and the Profane" illuminating in the small-p politics of conflict surrounding them.

But indicative of my internal issues with race, "The Power of It" profoundly annoyed me with its emphasis on civil rights and church. Brandt was documenting people as she saw them, so she can't be faulted for working with what she found, but it's annoying that the black image hasn't gone past this yet. The reminders of injustice and exclusion of the not-so-old South always make my blood boil but the non-believer in me abhors the extensive use of the Bible as a reading primer and dominance of the church in black life. Were I a former slave, or the son of slaves, who took the time to consider which religion to choose, I hope I would refuse the one of my masters and tormentors. Use of artifacts, like that three year old who loved a particular pen, were touching anecdotes but nearly the entire chapter had racism and slavery looming in the corner. I enjoy feeling angry but only about certain things which are arguable.

Heirs of Plato

One of the reasons I enjoy Robert Heinlein is that he makes no bones about his belief that certain folks just aren't cut out to do certain things. As I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks I am bombarded with spirituality and superstition with a huge dose of ignorance from poorly educated people and it annoyed me to no end. Naturally there are plenty of legitimate reasons for the Lacks' general state of education and I'm not claiming they have no right to privacy because of their mother's involuntary contribution to medical science, but transcribing that ignorance is incredibly embarrassing and only reinforces my latent belief that some folks don't have the right to hold an uninformed opinion.

Although I agree with author Rebecca Skloot's editor that the chapters devoted to the Lacks' personal history be pared down or cut altogether, she paints an intriguing human portrait of the racial undercurrents in the frontier of biotechnology. The fact that her husband was a rake and passed horrible diseases which directly contributed to her developing a virulent form of cancer diminishes the chance that a wealthy white woman would have been the progenitor; had this happened the story wouldn't have been as compelling. With the shadow of the Tuskegee Experiments in the near past, the history of slavery reparationism to fall back on, and a colorful cast of characters to give the story some flavor, a lot of humanity is injected into this atypical magical negro story.

Mysticism is inexorably connected to Henrietta from the opening pages onward. Fateful, often portentous, contradictory actions are referred to by family as acts of Henrietta in the same manner others speak of God and His work. Perhaps its my lapsed Catholicism which never stressed the sort of engaging worship and belief common for the souls of black folks and my general distaste for the spiritual that make me loath to read those passages. I don't mean to knock religion in general: I happen to think Protest-ants have it dead wrong, at least from a humanist perspective, when they claim that man is redeemed by faith alone no matter how loathsome you are as a human being.

I've never read Plato but I'm told he advocated, at least as mental exercise, a benevolent dictatorship which would consider the interests of the people as a whole. Henrietta's cells were taken when medical law was in its infancy and by the time the Lacks' learned of their actual use the infrastructure for the manufacture and use of them was too large and too complex to legitimately sue for damages decades later. Like slavery and slave owners these doctors and scientists (generally) operated in legal and ethical standards of the day. We look back at slavery and wonder how on Earth anyone could be a partied to it and think themselves righteous, just as doctors and researchers lied, mislead, or caused irreparable distress for the Lacks. Comedian Chris Rock claimed that slavery, while certainly wrong, let the descendants of thousands of Africans live in a generally better place than the one they came from; he likened it to an uncle who molested you as a kid but paid your way through college. Without slavery the Lacks' family wouldn't be here and without Henrietta the Magical Negro's cancer cells medical science would have slowed to a relative crawl and many millions more people would have died. Next to all this, the drama of a poor family from Baltimore seems insignificant.

The Act of Referring

The readings this week concerned users and how information professionals react or regard them in their professional practice. They were a tidy mixture of one short and humorous looking into personal information economy, a different article that was a narrative for a Museum controversy I've read about in past history classes, and two conventional articles that were tied to the reference desk.

After reading an article in 818 that misrepresented the Galileo Affair and even placed Copernicus, a Catholic priest, after Galileo, it was refreshing that the author avoided the erroneous claim that the Enola Gay bombed Nagasaki even though her crew did. Perhaps that plane, Bock's Car, was even less noteworthy and faced the scrap heap or was sold to de Gaulle before the 'Bomber Gap' began. The article rightfully pointed out administrative errors that exacerbated an almost inevitable problem but it rankles me when groups, whether they be veterans or museum administrators, refuse to let facts get in the way of their beliefs.

Perhaps because of my limited reference experience, or past readings on its effectiveness, but I have very little faith in the reference interview. The cognitive theory certainly has a place in reference and discussion can only enhance service but patrons will rarely sit for the whole spiel, especially the exit interview, when they are there with a specific purpose and won't see the advantage to themselves and others if they spend a few minutes telling the librarian what they did correctly. Furthermore, staff might be chained to their desk with patrons in person or remotely. Speaking of being chained...

 The Elmborg article struck an interesting chord about the similar aims of composition instruction and research but neglected the significance of instructional context. Composition instruction, and research instruction for that matter, either in a writing center or a coursework dedicated class, have students locked in their seats for a set period of time. Some compositional instruction is one-on-one but this often includes a finished product that needs touching up. For guidance in basic composition, or basic research, it may be quite wasteful for a qualified staff member to give instruction that universities give to competent bachelors and masters students.

Meta-muscle

My head aches from the near incessant discussion in all my classes about everything that is behind what librarians and archivists do to manage information. Perhaps because I've been reading Everything is Miscellaneous for several weeks now I'm ornerier than usual but frankly I'm sick of seeing "meta-" anything.

That being said I enjoyed feminist article. I've waited for something Sandy Berman-esque to pop up since I've always enjoyed breaking down social precepts. The analogy of the great Sex-Race-Class sort is really illustrative of not only how sorting can arrange containers of knowledge but what that says about base assumptions.

That, together with the remarks about bell hooks, reminded me of Weinberger's annoying use of the hypothetical person as "she" or "her" throughout. It's something of a starting gate equality issue but I don't think using "she" in every instance is going to somehow strike a blow for equality. He obviously made a conscious effort to be inclusive--and that's fine--but alternating would accomplish the same goals better especially if he used sex stereotypes against themselves. Have a "The woman is the doctor" scenario but without the twist ending.  "Anyone can post anything she wants" (pg. 189) irked me to no end since it struck a blow against gender neutrality. While perhaps not grammatical, the trend is to create a singular-hypothetical "they" to accomplish the linguistic hurdle required to prevent the transition from the ambiguous-neutral "anyone" to the specific-actor "he" or "she". Yes language can be intellectually oppressive but do you know what else is? Slavery. Women don't deserve reparations either and we should instead strive for a more equal society.

That issue with bell hooks essentially losing her name through authority headings gets little sympathy from me in part because it isn't her real name and this is more of a language issue, of which classification systems and subject headings must exist within, and people who go out of their way to defy basic precepts should accept a loss of message. If I decide to name my child after the linguistic character of a schwa, little more than an upside down lower-case "e", it is just as invalid. When Prince adopted the unpronounceable symbol in the 90s, promoters and record stores had to devise a way to place him and if their decision made him lose part of his identity he would have no right to complain.

The same goes for the movie "I [heart symbol] Huckabees" on Wikipedia. Although it is information by community editing and allegedly superior in many ways, Wikipedia's excuse for keeping the symbol out is that even though they are capable of expressing the symbol in a title is that not all browsers will recognize the symbol and thus the title will be distorted. bell hook's pen name is probably indicated as she prefers in the MARC record and I doubt catalogers are personally editing the author biography to unwitting patrons aren't confused by the difference.

New Information Frontiers

For several years I've remembered a side remark by a Canadian author who described the work of a historian who theorized that the discrepancies between US and Canadian settlement of the West was due in part because the US, even after the Civil War, were more still a league of self interested states whose emigrating population settled and established new states of order whilst Canada's commercial frontier and missionary work combined with exploratory policies of a distant imperial government established order before the people arrived. The city of Deadwood as captured in the eponymous TV show, a town that had no right to exist under Federal treaty law, simply would not exist in Canada since the Royal Northwestern Mounted Police would have established an outpost across the river and was ready to enforce the laws of parliament. US authorities have a track record of ignoring abuses, at worst, and improvising incomplete solutions, at best.

Here on the frontier of information, stored in genomes rather than books, and increasingly accessible online instead of a library or archive, the national government, in league with state and local governments in the tableau that is the US Federal government, is generally letting the states do as they choose when deciding what constitutes privacy. Under a libertarian interpretation 14th Amendment Congress could enact a privacy or consent laws while maintaining transparency and accountability in local and state records that do not move inter-state, but unless there is a great impetus its reluctance falls back to a strict (by virtue of neglect) interpretation of 10th Amendment and Article IV which inherently muddle the legal environment.

I am unsure how other countries have dealt with this problem but since the wealthier ones that can support vigorous stem cell research are likely in Europe where the parliamentary model prevails, the practical dictatorship of party that occurs after each election is an effective way to create sweeping legislation like a national privacy law or sane stem cell informed consent policies. The American republic is simply too cumbersome and individuated to fix this comprehensively.

This US model has its merits in some arenas, however. The Senate, formerly appointed by the states, encourages only sustained public pressure for changes and is potentially keeping the Democrats in control until 2012 when the cognitive dissonance of the Republican tax policies relative to the Keynesian Democrats is revealed as the greater evil. Unfortunately it might cost Russ Feingold, a far more deserving statesman than the lethargic Herb Kohl, his job simply because of bad timing. The federated approach is what lets 12 states have medical marijuana laws in an affront to national law. These eventually atrophied the Justice Department's in-state enforcement into 10th Amendment Land where it belongs. Too often the constitutional nuances are neglected when these problems are considered and I can guarantee states will chafe under any attempt for comprehensive privacy laws if for the only reason being an eradication of case law.

I am not appealing to the Constitution for the sake of legal nuance. I don't find legal squabbles as an aesthetically satisfying sign that our country is doing well but this systematic problem is a symptom of what makes America great. It will be solved as it always has--piecemeal until the various parties involved have assembled and had a chat about what's important to them and why. There's nothing unconstitutional about the states getting together to create a and agree upon an amendment to the Constitution should something be important. Until then defenders of privacy and public accountability or researchers should work within the arenas available and of which they have local control to make effective policy that satisfies them in part because they created it themselves.

It is also the responsibilities of the citizens to appraise themselves of laws before they act. Ignorance of the law, at least now that Miranda v. Arizona has been neutered, is seldom an excuse. Last year a man in his early 20s had sex with an emotionally fragile 17 year old girl in the High School where he worked because he looked up the age of consent laws but failed to consider that persons in authority are treated distinctly. This ignorance on the part of the genetic donors is inexcusable and the clinic, being the party that has an obviously greater interest in this narrow aspect of state and federal law in addition to professionally adopted practices, bears the greatest responsibility to provide information and receive consent. Just don't expect the national government to come up with something comprehensive.

Use-full Theory

At last a thorough examination of users in a practical setting was given to us in the Week 4 readings. As an archives student the articles did not speak to my interests as well as I'm sure it did others, but never before have I read such detailed descriptions of not only the motivations of users and non-users but also how they interpret/read what they see on the page or screen. The closest my studies have come to this sort of thinking were reference essays and a term paper about remote reference. All of these however dealt with figuring out patrons' indirect questions by wading through their self constructed but undefined mindscape.

Having just started to think about these sorts of things I can't say whether the Market and Resistance models are horribly deficient to explain reading behaviors but as a bachelor of history I agree it's critical to consider how libraries have come between producers and readers and shaped the development of literacy before a sound theoretical model can be found.

The Ross piece was a refreshing reminder that formats and readership have changed over millennia. Whenever people bemoan the poor quality of education of youth today I remember a patron at the Historical Society who was examining century old public school curricula and loved to point out how intelligent the teachers needed to be for such rigorous coursework. What does it matter?, I would ask him, when teachers have specific subjects as you reach intermediate and secondary schools? The sheer numbers of students would make all these specific teachers generalists, rather than lower the total number of teachers, with an increasing level of demand on their intellect. The curricula he examined were for a largely rural state without large schools like the 1500 student High School from which I graduated and therefore it was best to have the history teacher handle geography or Greek or Latin or anything else he was competent with. He utterly refused to believe that changing standards for teacher qualifications from a one room classroom era to the present had any bearing on the quality of education.

With reading its "own material logic and encourages its own particular relationship between readers and their books" and a "revolution in electronic text will also be a revolution in reading". Great quotes that one can use for madlib templates.

Ease of Access, Quest for Content

I was prepared to log-in to my madcat account and search LexisNexis and track down serious news articles about libraries in the the United States of America's first state to accept the US Constitution--Delaware. Much was my relief when I discovered that I had to provide links to the articles and thus exempting me from a thoughtful search through proprietary databases in favor of the short-but-sweet articles typically found online. Delaware is one of the least populated states and as such library activities in Dover, their capital and a little over twice the size of Middleton, affects much the rest of the state.Wilmington, the largest city, is part of the megalopolis that runs from Richmond, Virginia up to Boston but is still less than half the size of the City of Madison so it too has a comparatively small town feel.

The first article is a terse account of the Greater Dover Committee pledging their "support" for an under construction public library on Loockerman St. This 20+ year old committee of business executives has charged itself with no greater a duty than to "improve the quality of life for the people of central Delaware" and considers this library the perfect sort of expenditure for them. Going back into early modern Europe it has been customary for the wealthy and privileged do donate a portion of their wealth to the betterment of their community. A Marxist would say they are simply diverting attention from their disproportionate possession of wealth while producing nothing meaningful for it. A Libertarian would see this as a model for what should be privately funded libraries across the country and install coin slots for story time. And a Tea Bagger forgets that a progressive income tax let's them write donations off whereas a flat tax wouldn't. Those who would like to be involved in the library committee are asked to call the director, Margaret Cyr. Yes--a woman in an administrative position.

For the sake of discussion I'd like to say that while state lines are convenient to understand what citizen is entitled to what rights and laws, the meanings of borders in megalopolises like on the eastern seaboard is relatively meaningless. I mean, Joe Biden commuted to D.C. when he was a senator. If someone can go from D.C. to Wilmington like you hop on the bus, flu shots in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Delaware County immediately north of the largest city in the state should count for something. These last three sentences do not count towards the 750 word minimum. (But that one, and this, does)

The third (or second) article concerns the discovery of 81 images by photographer Earl Brooks in the Delaware Museum Archives. Perhaps bespeaking of localist keywords and signs known to natives but not us (read: Traces) the article cautions the reader that no landscapes were found. Unlike Wisconsin's own H.H. Bennett this fellow Brooks does not have his own Wikipedia page. Also found was a portrait of a member of the DuPont family. Wilmington has a long history of corporatism since it usually had the laxest business laws and the DuPonts gave them a chemical support industry as a legacy. When better living through chemistry was all the rage I suspect that suited Delaware just fine.

On Wednesday September 22nd the University of Delaware will hold a workshop "Transition to RefWorks 2.0" to train patrons on the use of RefWorks, the reference manager that allows people to easily control their database work and facilitate easier research, but unfortunately it's only for people already familiar with RefWorks. Classes "Introduction", "Citing Using APA and RefWorks", and "Beyond the Basics" will be available over the next month and be taught by various reference personnel. As basic information is readily available on the Web and more people believe that everything is on the Internet it is imperative that librarians display their expertise as information specialists even as many people joke that books will go the way of the steamcar and the evening newspaper. Ignoring the idealistic duty that librarians have to those who can't afford a Kindle or Internet access, they have a legitimate claim to drudging through the informational muck that greater access has created. The Harris article about cataloger de-skilling made a remark of coming changes for reference personnel but their longevity increases the more they remind users they don't innately know this field better than someone who does it for a living and provide useful services like reference control.

Sadly I found no easily attainable articles on minorities and libraries but I suspect the reason is that the Internet news is not a suitable medium for a discussion of racial disparities in arcane library literature. A third of the readings (at least in part) concerned racism. A fourth discussed sexism. Just under half the total articles so far were hard to relate at a meaningful level to the news bites available on websites with linkable pages.

Week Three's Perception Problems

On the whole week three's readings were about perception: As has been a complaint about library literature for quite some time, these cross-disciplinary examinations of gender and race were often couched in technical and administrative contexts that, while perhaps intellectually accessible to the general public and contributing to the cross pollination of LIS with other disciplines, have a rightful place in professional discourse.

The Radford piece about the Parker Posey movie Party Girl was an excellent framework to consider public perceptions and (stereo)typing with a limited theorist vocabulary, the Musmann article on racial library history pairs nicely with the Pawley theory-heavy article about the invisible benefits and assumptions of whites and the underlying mission and attitude of multicultural rather than its physiology.

Several times I was reminded of a conversation (ok, argument) I had with a friend's father whom I had just met. Whenever I repeat this story I must insist that I'm not creating a straw man out of him and that these paraphrases are 100% accurate because it is too implicitly classist and racist to believe: All human beings in this country, regardless of the conditions they were born into, have an equal chance to succeed and make a fortune. I probed deeper throughout our dinner as his wife and daughter gently tried to steer the conversation away from this subject but I sooo wanted to convince him he was wrong. I likened his position to social Darwinism--something I thought even the most conservative Republicans wouldn't dare admit to believing. Twins separated at birth, one placed in a wealthy family and one placed in a poor one, will achieve the same level of success? Apparently yes. So a smarter person in Ozarks or the Hood will achieve more than a mediocre person with family connections and collegiate legacies? Apparently yes. Mind boggling.

I am half black with a father and grandfather who come from a long line of Uncle Tom's (if you're mean about it) and have rarely felt my race. With few exceptions I don't fit black personality stereotypes and am often annoyed by ghetto behaviors from my all-black brethren but to pretend differences do not exist, as some would have us do, consigns us to a perpetual cycle of ignorance. Is it racist to speculate that the reason there are so many black men with fat white woman is because they're extroverted and hit on more women than timid white males and these women are unaccustomed to attention? Probably--but refusing to even consider more pertinent questions about race and professional disciplines is de facto prior restraint on knowledge.

Some of the scholarship behind those who deny the Holocaust, that is the systematic slaughter of many millions for genetic/social conditions, is devoted to people who delved deeper into the numbers and believe the tallies of those willfully killed might be one or two million lower. One foreign scholar visiting Austria was jailed for a year not because he said the Holocaust didn't happen but because he questioned the number of millions and whether the Nazis would have used precious fuel oil to burn Jews. That historian is lumped together with people who claim it never happened, that all the deaths were from unfortunate food and medical shortages, or that Jews had swimming pools, etc.

As an aspiring archivist with a BA in history I found the historical articles especially useful and informative. I particularly enjoyed it when these two interests merged in reflections on the historical record's gap and efforts to glean information. One of my classes readings from last week claimed "records are never innocent" since the influence of the creator always exists and actions committed usually allow conjecture for actions omitted. Implicit assumptions about race from a moderate librarian attempting to maintain segregation say as much as a Klan diatribe and give us a well rounded picture of where librarians have come from and how we may better ourselves. Intellectual completeness is essential to the profession but the perception of stereotypes shouldn't be discouraged unless they inhibit other goals like access or community service. For all the shushing and meticulous behavior of librarians in the media is really an acknowledgment that they're there to ensure equal access to the information civilization produces and that includes the often routine, mundane tasks for the benefit of society.

First official blog of life--

Like many trends that have cropped up in my life, I independently came upon the concept of blogging via my "Massive e-Mail Madison Review" (MeMMR) which was sent to friends and relatives to chronicle my adventures out of my social and semi-geographical hermitage in southern Minnesota into long term residence of a large city. Much like the human brain a city contains far more capacity than is needed to function or the person to navigate and utilize resources but each new restaurant, store, library, and person adds to the texture or quality of the capacity. Naturally this diminishes the further they get from the interests of the agent, namely myself, but contributes to the quality of others who in turn intersect with myself and eventually Kevin Bacon: Madison is not a large city to me any longer but I ask myself whether I need something the size and complexity of a New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles which contains too much for me to possibly use. So too the Web contains capacity I may never partake and, for the sake of my health, never witness.

My MeMMRs were a proto-blog of my brain-fill and growing appreciation of new complexities but in a much more tangible way than a blog. The links and avenues of connectivity in this blog world are garish and decadent in the same way that repels me from facebook's myriad uses and applications but for the purposes of LIS 450 I must tell the Internet what I think in hopes I will be read rather than tell you all my opinion in person. It begins...

I read Week II's assignments amidst two, theory heavy archival courses. One of which I was preparing to lead a group discussion on legal/ethical issues and the other on archival appraisal and accessioning which would inform my considerations for a 20 page term paper I must develop a proposal for by September 23rd. Very immediate concerns made me view what I feared would be rudimentary readings of concepts I am very familiar but I found other reasons to be frustrated. Much like studying a language you already speak I read a sausage making like analysis of facts I'd taken for granted and concepts I've felt but never heard articulated. There were enough new or intriguing materials that compelled me to read rather than skim despite my homework time-line and I was rewarded with a synthesis of theory from my archives readings with the general practice and definitions contained in 450. For example this let me view the Saracevic reading differently as her(?) definition of "information" as basic phenomena was different from another reading which distinguished information as something constructed and "archive" as un-constructed (and I'd add ambivalent) communication. Information (communication) is something that exists because we generate it merely by existing just like gravity exists because mass does. We're not sure why--but we can try to get a handle on it.