CO judge fired over teen arrest for overdue DVD

A combination of trigger-happy and bad record keeping/communication.

If that’s the way teens are treated in Littleton CO… maybe Klebold and Harris were right!

The stuff I find helping patrons with research

Some of my stories about [Julius Eastman] I can’t use in my liner notes, like the time at New Music America 1980 when I unwittingly let him lead me into a gay bar in Minneapolis – it took me a moment to figure out why all these burly men were wearing midriff shirts, but I kept calm, stayed 15 minutes before excusing myself politely on account of other commitments, and thought I handled it pretty coolly for being only 24 and very inexperienced. He used to try to talk me and Peter into trying out gayness in that mellifluous deep bass of his. He griped at us for using deoderant, saying, “Only straights use deoderant these days,” to which Peter would yell, “Julius, whaddaya think we are?!” —Kyle Gann

God, I love my job!

I’ll never complain about patrons again

We academic librarians have it pretty easy compared to public librarians. This librarian needed a gun…but probably wasn’t allowed to have one:

“He just started singing loud, singing rap songs and cursing,” says a witness who did not wish to be identified. “And the librarian just walked over to him, and she asked him not to be so disruptive, that he couldn’t use that kind of language in the library.  And he said, ‘Okay.’”

Officers say Harper got louder so the librarian asked him to leave. Instead, he punched the woman, threw her to the ground and stomped on her, according to the witness.

H/T: Breda

Cataloger rant

We just got in a crapload of rock CDs, which I am now copy-cataloging. And I’m seeing all these 520 fields, like this one for My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless:

520 This 1991 release is as heavy as it gets in the alternative world. The unbelievable hard arrangements, strong vocals, and unprecedented guitar architecture received much critical acclaim in the ’90s

Now, a 520 field is defined as “An unformatted note that describes the scope and general contents of the described materials. Use for an abstract, annotation, review, summary or a phrase describing the material.” They’re usually used for videos, as a summary of “what the movie is about”. I’ve never seen them used on CDs before today. This may be an “annotation” or “review”. It reads like something a 16 year old would Twitter. It certainly doesn’t offer any really useful information to our patrons, but I’m also not sure they’re worth the trouble to strip out.

520s for videos, OTOH, can be fun: “Poor soldier with malnutrition-induced psychosis kills common-law wife in a jealous rage, then drowns.” (Wozzeck) It’s a challenge to get the essence of a work into a sentence or two. It doesn’t sound like the essence has been captured here, and I’m not going to listen to find out.

Like, “Why aren’t you in jail too?”

This afternoon, Dr. Eduardo Torres Cuevas. the director of the Cuban National Library will be speaking in NYC, and Robert Kent suggests a few questions that could be respectfully asked of him.

Chanta Claus came to town!

Sr. Mary Electa (Madeline Columbro) is going to Rome and has things she can neither leave here nor take with, and since she got her doctorate here, we were gifted with (last week) a number of microfilms of early manuscripts and early music dissertations, and (today) books on and of chant. This is one of the 3 shelves in my office…a crappy picture taken with a crappy camera by a crappy photographer. The chant books go as far back as 1853. Most so far are only held by a half-dozen or so institutions (mostly Catholic), though I’ve found one unicum so far. 1 1/2 shelves are chant; the books are generally cool things that we already own. I’m hoping this will not only be of use to early music people, but to Catholics, once we get them catalogued and on the shelf.

Google Books: a cataloging disaster

The subject of this post is :
650 b0 Metadata|xErrors of usage

Evidently, the metadata cataloguing of Google Books is a train wreck, particularly regarding dates of publication and subjects:

Do a search on “internet” in books written before 1950 and Google Scholar turns up 527 hits.

But whether it gets the BISAC categories right or wrong, the question is why Google decided to use those headings in the first place. (Clancy denies that they were asked to do so by the publishers, though this might have to do with their own ambitions to compete with Amazon.) The BISAC scheme is well suited to organizing the shelves of a modern 35,000 foot chain bookstore or a small public library where ordinary consumers or patrons are browsing for books on the shelves. But it’s not particularly helpful if you’re flying blind in a library with several million titles, including scholarly works, foreign works, and vast quantities of books from earlier periods. For example, the BISAC “Juvenile Nonfiction” subject heading has almost 300 subheadings, including separate categories for books about “New Baby,” “Skateboarding,” and “Deer, Moose, and Caribou.” By contrast, the “Poetry” subject heading has just 20 subdivisions in all. That means that Bambi and Bullwinkle get a full shelf to themselves, while Schiller, Leopardi, and Verlaine have to scrunch together in the lone subheading reserved for “Poetry/Continental European.” In short, Google has taken the great research collections of the English-speaking world and returned them in the form of a suburban mall bookstore.

To be fair, Jon Orwant replies in the comment about Google’s procedures, and you feel some sympathy. They’re getting in a lot of metadata from disparate sources, and let’s face it, there’s a lot of sucky cataloging out there. Geoff Nunberg was not entirely convinced by the arguments, though:

I simply assumed that this mistake must have been the work of a program, rather than a human — I mean, could someone really misread that ad as providing a publication date? The answer, according to Jon, is, well, actually, somebody did. Which only goes to show that the Turing test can work both ways: do something dumb enough, and it’s hard to tell you from a machine.

How cool is this?

The British Library has put its sound archives online

It’s mostly folk and traditional music, mostly from the UK and Africa; the classical things and some folk are UK-only (thanks in large part to barbaric US copyright law.) But it’s great to hear real folk music sung by real folk. There’s lots of other weirdness (speeches, sound effects etc) too.

NE prep school commits suicide

…at least I wouldn’t send my kid there. They’ve gotten rid of their library books. And, apparently, their reference desk, which is being replaced by a $50K coffee shop.

Tracy and other administrators said the books took up too much space and that there was nowhere else on campus to stock them.

They’re taking up space already allotted to them. You want newer books? Weed the old ones then. I do it every year, and it hurts like hell, but if nobody has cracked the thing in a decade, it either belongs in off-campus storage or outta here entirely.

It’s doubtful if the students will miss them:

Tia Alliy, a 16-year-old junior, said she visits the library nearly every day, but only once looked for a book in the stacks. She’s not alone. School officials said when they checked library records one day last spring only 48 books had been checked out, and 30 of those were children’s books.

These are the people who are going on to Harvard and Yale. These are the leaders of the future. Be very afraid.

Nice stat

The library distributed a questionnaire to faculty about journals.

Number returned:

Music: 9 (near 100%)

Chemistry: 4

And there are a lot more chemistry profs, and their journals cost more. I guess when you see faculty every day, they start taking “their” library seriously.