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.