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.

Ohio library brouhaha

Breda is out rallying the troops, God bless her. She “gets it” on guns…but like most conservatives, she doesn’t “get” AmSoc. And she sees a nice juicy piece of Loin of Breda there in the Cannibal Pot, and it’s hers, damnit, and she’ll fight off anyone who dares to dip their ladle anywhere near. I’m sympathetic; I’d “like” for cuts to come from some other program, and even though I don’t directly use public libraries and work for a private college, this still affects me because of OhioLink. But that preference doesn’t mean I have a right to ANY of it.

I called her out in her comments:

I’d be a lot more sympathetic if I heard protests from patrons rather than library staff and administrators, or if they weren’t wringing their hands over peripheral services like materials for the blind or Internet access for “urban outdoorsmen”. Fact: there will be cuts. Certainly, library cuts should be proportionate to everyone else’s, and they aren’t. Anything that will cut OhioLink services hurts me personally.

Personally, professionally, I think that libraries are one of the least cuttable things. But we’re all standing around the cannibal pot, and once we’ve accepted the premise that “what’s mine is yours” (which IS the premise behind taxpayer funding of libraries), we don’t get any more say than anyone else. And who are we to say that reading books for free is a more important service than paying for cheesesuckers like my common-law-stepdaughter-in-law to download Child #5 (as she just has), or making sure that Portage Co. is meth-free, or or or… It’s all stolen money, and every public librarian is IN PRACTICE a socialist. If you wonder why so many people in our profession are leftists, it’s because they’re honest enough to admit who butters their bread. How bad would it be if people had to throw a quarter into a turnstile to enter the library, or pay a buck to borrow a book? “Free” public libraries aren’t a right; they’re something instituted by a rich bastard steel magnate, because he thought thats where his excess money would do the most good.

Academia is lost

…or at least the concept of property is lost in academia. Yesterday we had somebody turn in half a dozen miniature scores upon which every library ID marking (including the barcodes we use to check them in) had been covered over with permanent white labels. This included in one case an old embossed stamp which was in the content of the score (thus the label covered up the notes). I have no idea why, unless it had to do with a competition. He’s being charged for the items. Then last night in the book drop, a grad student left another half-dozen books full of underlinings and markings in pencil. He might have gotten away with it had he not left a paper tab in a marked page, with writing on it that matched the annotations. I checked the items back out to him and “invited” him to erase the markings before I would take them off his record (unless he wanted to take the other option, which would be to pay the University-default $115 per item.)  He sent me a polite email accepting my invitation, but defending himself:

I was unaware of how much this practice bothered the library …. I used to always erase my markings. The reason I leave underlinings and comments is due to some advice from a Medieval Studies professor. He once said that we should all perform glosses in modern texts by leaving our notes in their pages, just as medieval scholars did, because it gives other current and future readers insights into what others thought about the text. In fact, one of the books I was underlining in spends several pages discussing marginalia written in modern books…

Gloss away, in your own books. I’m cool with that. But tell me…when you buy used textbooks, do you prefer the clean copies, or the “value added” copies? What do your fellow students prefer?

A library is not a commons. These are not “the students’ books”.  They belong to the University, which in exchange for a bundle of bucks allows you to read them.  That bundle of bucks does not buy personal copies of commonly used books, for you to treat as your own property. If we had to do that, our purchases of real scholarly works would be minimal. You could forget things like the Margaret Bent commentary/facsimile of Bologna Q15 that’s sitting in my office waiting for a shelf label. And we wouldn’t be buying so much popular music studies and “gender studies” crap either, unless required for a course, in which case we’d be buying the umpteen copies to mark up.

There’s a missing concept here: “property”. And it’s being anti-taught by some Medieval Studies prof somewhere.

Who needs Dewey?

Leave it to an upscale-ish college town like Berea OH to dump a century of subject analysis and arrange their books into “neighborhoods”, so they’ll be more like Borders : i.e., so you won’t be able to find anything unless you ask a librarian with multiple piercings who won’t be able to find it either.

The neighborhoods collection was inspired and guided by a celebrity librarian, Nancy Pearl of National Public Radio. She visited Berea and attended the first few meetings to plan the collection.

“Celebrity Librarian?” Never heard of her. “Radio celebrity“, perhaps. And the idea of getting an entire city to read the same book at the same time strikes me as being Orwellian, and certainly not part of the “value of diversity” we both imbibed at the University of Michigan.  There’s an interview here with a recurring motif which gives me the willies: “People need to believe that they can find themselves or a version of themselves on library shelves.”  I guess that might work in this narcissistic culture. I’ve always read to escape myself, whom I know all too well, and to learn how the world works, which is necessary to my survival. And I wanted to know and hang with cool people, even if only between the covers. (That’s why I can’t abide to be in the same room as Desperate Housewives; those people are disgusting!) However, the idea of a librarian action figure opens many possibilities. One might even make a better range accessory than the Ted Strickland “Read” poster.

To be fair, they haven’t totally dumped traditional shelf classification, even within the “neighborhoods”. But I really don’t see the fundamental relationship of foreign languages, travel, and US History (Oddly enough, foreign history is not included, even though it has a more intrinsic relationship to foreign languages than US history does.) Will anyone else?

Good librarian karma

It’s so nice when you can make somebody’s day.

This kid came in, all pissed off. “There’s something I want to listen to at CIM, and they won’t let me do it because I’m not a music major.”

“That’s right. They only serve Case music majors there.”

“Well, how do I change that?’

“Well, what do you want to listen to? Maybe we have it here.”

“It’s by somebody named Dvorak? Op. 90. We heard it in the listening session, and it’s really cool.” [Oh thank God, it's not something rare.]

I look up a copy we have onsite, but then I ask, “Do you live in a dorm, or at home?”

“At home, but I have VPN” [Even better, I don't have to do the VPN talk.]

So I showed him Naxos Music Library. and there’s at least a half dozen recordings of the Dumky trio. I showed him how it works, then I showed him Classical Music Library, DRAM and Smithsonian Global Sound, and how to get to each. He’s on his way to the candy store now. I also told him that CIM kids can’t use OhioLink, which was just the frosting to his cake of happiness.