Aggie Librarian returns from Gamecock Land.

I flew back into IAH from CAE yesterday on a bumpy regional jet, tired but profoundly satisfied with my business trip and glad to be home. The weather, actually, was beautiful for flying, both coming and going, but it's just with those smaller regional jets, you can feel even the slightest turbulence quite profoundly, and if you're like me, you're pretty much white-knuckling it shortly after takeoff until the plane hits cruising altitude and levels off, and also when you begin to start the final decent and bank hard to line up with the runway. Just unsettling--to me at least.

I don't fear flying any more than I fear driving, I just don't take any particular pleasure in either activity.

Anyway, the job interview went very well, and I guess I had rehearsed my presentation sufficiently, because it seemed to flow very smoothly, and was, per staff comments, "just right", timewise--neither too long nor too short. I also apparently inspired them with my ideas, many of them took careful notes and many agreed I touched on new concepts and ideas they hadn't considered before. The collection development library said out loud, "well, we have some posters to buy now." And the archives cataloger was really excited about my proposed use for the 653 field that I mentioned, and as he tells it, rushed over to tell his colleagues about it before coming back to the main library.

The staff, both the librarians and the paras, were very friendly, courteous, and knowledgeable. I did have to give a rigorously honest account of what went down at Texas A&M-Galveston. I owed up to what I did wrong, cited lessons learned, spelled out what I think THEY did wrong, and why I was glad to be outta there. I think I gave a fair and honest account, which they appreciated and seemed to accept. I had to tell the tale (with varying degrees of detail) a total of three times in fact...almost a ritual Mea Culpa, but good for the soul. Gets it out in the open and off my chest. My thanks to the search committee for asking that question first thing in the morning, to give me a dry run at it (they had to know it was going to pop up later from others).

It was a good, though tiring day. Aggie Librarian got to meet another former Aggie Librarian, too, who had worked on main campus (though not a TAMU alumna, whereas I am a TAMU alumnus). She expressed regret there was not better coordination between main campus at TAMUG during my brief employment there. I commented only that I was still grateful for MDW's workshop on NACO, which was positively excellent. This cataloger had also worked at the Naval Academy after leaving TAMU. Though she could not have been much older than me, I gathered she started out her library career much earlier in life than I did, and had a lot more experience to show for it, too. I admit, it took me a good many years to come to the decision on my own to go to Library school. The fact that mom is a retired school librarian (and was actually a working school librarian while I was in library school) did not make it easier to decide on librarianship as a career...if anything it delayed that decision and made it harder, as it was a path I had to choose for myself, to take ownership of, etc., and I had to be convinced that going for a Humanities PhD was utterly fruitless. So my thanks are also to Michael Berube and Cary Nelson, also, for unexpectedly nudging me in the direction of Librarianship, by first nudging me AWAY from the idea of picking up a PhD in either German Studies, Cinema Studies or Intellectual History along the way. I concluded (correctly, in my view) that Libraries were the best route to gainful university-level employment. A lot of unemployed PhDs are belatedly figuring this out as well, for good or ill.

Anyway, for now I remain an underemployed MLS working for a faceless corporation.
Come mid-May, everything could change, significantly and in a positive direction.

It's true that I once lived in Columbia, and on this trip I did go by my childhood home. My old Elementary school didn't look anything like it did in the 1970s, which is good, because in the 1970s it looked straight out of the 1950s.

I had a vague memory of the older USC Coliseum, where we used to watch a few Carolina Gamecocks basketball games (USC football in those days was utterly pathetic, nothing like the powerhouse it has become today). The Basketball team today has a new, completely modernized Coliseum, and the old Coliseum is used mainly for concerts, monster truck rallies (I shit you not), rock performances, etc.

Columbia is a nice, sleepy college town. It's laid back...maybe not as hip as Austin, but pretty darn good for South Carolina. The campus is a major part of the downtown landscape, and they definitely have "walkable communities" of the kind that the New Urbanist movement in architecture raves about (and which I am in agreement with as a desirable thing). If I end up moving there, I do plan to live downtown within walking/biking distance from work, driving only when I have to.

Columbia, SC is "Deep South", but it is just as profoundly "East", as in Eastern seaboard. It was one of the original 13 colonies, and this is unmistakable when you walk the city streets and absorb the history around you. It has a feeling of deeper tradition beyond Dixie that even Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana (and certainly NOT Texas) just don't have.

More thoughts / news later, perhaps.

Signing off for now.

A Library Vingette

scenes in my mind....

Reference Librarian: I told you to quit using all those complicated Cataloger terms!

Cataloger: "Authority Control" is a basic LIBRARY term, NOT just a cataloging term, you AIRHEAD.

Writer's Block & overcoming/brainstorming again.

I'm sort of stuck right now, have some vague ideas what I want to do with my power point presentation, but still haven't committed pen to paper, or pixels to processors yet. I know its my perfectionism flaw rearing its ugly head. I know what I need to do is just START, start & just say ANYTHING...just jump in and do it...it's always easier to edit and revise mercilessly later than it is to just get started. My mom the retired school librarian is anxious too and wants to help but usually ends up just making it worse. I'm craming a bit, doing some last minute research, devouring Michael Gorman's (2003) The Enduring Library, which is a damn good read, by the way, if your Library "faith" or inner fire is a dwindling down a bit. I also slogged through the cataloging sections of Whole Library Handbook 4, which I also recommend (the whole book, not just the cataloging chapter). I've also procrastinated by re-ordering my assorted Wish-Lists on Amazon.com; I think I'm up to four of them now. I used to have only one, but that got unwieldy. Then I created one for the stint at TAMUG, called "Maritime, Marine, and Naval Sciences", where I dumped all the collection development ideas in a common pot to stew over later. More on that in a bit. I also created a "Permaculture & Green-stuff" list, for all my ecology/permaculture related reading matter of interest. I also decided it was high time to create a separate LIS wish list, and so I did, to chuck all my directly-library related professional reading interests AND also any ancillary technology/social criticism books that are interwoven enough with LIS issues to be on the same list, like Theodore Roszack's The Cult of Information or Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet (about the rise of the telegraph and the hoopla that surrounded it, very reminiscent of the late 1990s Dot.Com era and our time as well).

While I was sorting through the Maritime, Marine & Naval Sciences list (mostly parsing out the permaculture stuff into its separate group), on a lark I jumped on OCLC's WorldCat to see how many of the books that I know I put in as suggested purchases actually DID get purchased and added to the collection after I got sacked. I was impressed that a fair number did actually make it into the collection. Not as many as I would've liked to see be added, but a goodly number, and I still think the collection is much better for it as a result of my singular efforts. Some of the areas of knowledge I added to hadn't been updated since the 1970s, for Pete's sake. I was disappointed more of my maritime heritage liberal arts selections didn't make it in, but I guess that was to be expected...it's such a sci-tech school anyway, you more or less should expect Liberal Arts to get the short end of the stick, even if it is falling within the narrow limits of their liberal arts vision down there, focused on seafaring cultures, etc. I had some really creative and interesting titles, few of which got selected, except for one on the history & culture of the societies bordering the Great Lakes of Africa, which DID get added, and I'm especially proud of that acquisition. There was a fascinating book on diaspora Jews in maritime port communities that I strongly felt SHOULD have been added, but wasn't. I'm sure that our Reference Librarian would've never thought of it in a million years. I still marvel at how often I got the impression that the print collection down there was outdated, neglected, etc. Not in all areas, no, but in many--indeed most areas on topics I knew a thing or two about. Their coverage of the modern Middle East, for example, was woefully inadequate for today's world. Fixing THAT oversight is I think my proudest achievement of all. Their library now has very up to date survey books on the UAE, Pakistan, Libya, and many other important Islamic/Middle Eastern countries, including guides to doing business in those countries. As we were ostensibly in the business of training Navy officers and Maritime businessmen, I thought it might be a good thing for them to--I dunno--know something about that part of the world--maybe? Call me crazy, but I think it was a good call.

Anyway, it was interesting also comparing the WorldCat bib records with Amazon's own item records. Amazon is starting (slowly) to incorporate seemingly more LCSH into their subject offerings--more so than when I first compiled my collection development list for TAMUG, that's for sure! It's not as robust as a well-done OPAC, but it's a surprising and welcome improvement over what they had before. Don't get me wrong, I freakin' LOVE Amazon.com, and sometimes their "if you liked this you might also like" is like a godsend when doing bibliography work. But when you're using Amazon for collection development in an obscure field like Maritime & Marine Sciences, well beyond my narrow expertise (ha!) in Naval Science, the usual features..."those who liked X also liked Y" and their already anemic "subject cataloging" starts to break down, and you are pretty much limited and stuck with hit-or-miss keyword searching, and it really starts to feel like you're panning for gold. Feels great when you find a nugget or two, but you have to sift through a lot of sand to get there after a time. Some of the books I selected were rare enough to pop up in WorldCat in only 4-5 libraries WORLDWIDE. So not likely to have made it on to anyone's LISTMANIA or anything, either, we can safely assume.

One of the talks at EndUser 2006 that impressed me the most was about "hacking the OPAC" to add some nifty "Amazon" features to plane-jane bib-records and really sex them up. It was actually pretty cool, what they were doing at this particular library in New Jersey, but I was shocked they DIDN'T incorporate what stands out to me as their PRIMO feature that is most valuable to libraries and library users....I refer specifically to their SIPs and CAPs program which is part and parcel of their "Look Inside" feature; it is basically automated indexing that parcels out Statistically Improbable Phrases (as compared to the rest of the books in the Look Inside program) and Capitalized Phrases. What I love about it is how this so readily captures bleeding-edge trendy buzzwords and current talking points that people are using in conversations about current issues today...and captures them and indexes them and makes them searchable and usable....terminology that it will take months, even YEARS to worm its way into controlled vocabularies like LCSH, if they ever do. This to me is valuable metadata worth purchasing for integrated library use, and I'm not sure Amazon quite fully appreciates just what a good thing they've got going, and what a valuable service this could be to libraries (and enhanced profit to them!), if they partnered with libraries to enhance bib record displays in OPACs in this way. I'm not enough of a tech head to know the ins and outs of how this would be done, but I know with Voyager it would mean tweaking WebVoyage at some level...I'm not technology savvy enough to do that myself, but there are plenty of IT/Systems people out there who are and can do this. The demonstrated Amazon "hacks" were cool, but they are also not sanctioned by Endeavor Information Systems; What I'm talking about would be a purchasable, fully supportable add-on to existing bib records, and obviously it would be limited to those items held by any library in particular that is also a participant in Amazon's Look Inside program, but considering the main objective is to nab up-to-date buzzwords and the like and make them searchable/indexable, etc, it's not a big deal that older records wouldn't have this feature the way many new books (though certainly not all) would have. Of course, in more obscure areas--like Maritime and Marine Sciences, for example, many of those books were new/contemporary but NOT in the Look Inside book program, so no SIPs and CAPs to be had either.

I've also been browsing/reading/re-reading LC Librarian Thomas Mann's most recent articles, more brain fodder for me. In the next day or two I'll need to sit down and really synthesize Gorman/Mann plus my own ideas and be able to talk at length (45 min) on a coherent theme in cataloging/metadata of interest to the search committee over at USC. Got my work cut out for me. Wish me luck.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Rest in Peace

Sad News for the World of Letters today (actually late yesterday)

Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041207K.shtml

By Ron Jacobs
We Join Kilgore Trout In Mourning: Kurt Vonnegut Moves On
Remembering Kurt Vonnegut
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ron_jaco_070412_we_join_kilgore_trou.htm

The Aggie Librarian read Slaughterhouse 5 while studying abroad and finished it sitting in an outdoor cafe in Dresden, Germany, appropriately enough. While employed at TAMUG, he read the unabridged audiotape edition of Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye, Blue Monday, and loved it. Through the years Aggie Librarian has read Vonnegut's assorted interviews and articles, too, and all that was enough to appreciate the magic and genius of this man. He is truly the 20th Century's Mark Twain reborn, or perhaps its Ambrose Bierce.

Reading Slaughterhouse 5 was a moving experience for me, and from it, I moved on to Joseph Heller's Catch 22; the irreverence of both of these books, their exposure of the insanity in the heart of so-called civilization, helped restore me to some measure of sanity, and to lift up my spirit and keep me going...helped me shake off a long funk of dark depression and loneliness I was experiencing while living abroad in Germany, and made me feel ok about being an American again. Vonnegut's writing was so...out there, but so damn good. Funny, insane, wild-eyed...yet wracked by self-doubt and self-deprecation, as reflected in Vonnegut's doppelgänger, Kilgore Trout, the washed up science fiction writer. This was Vonnegut's real image of himself, I think--a talentless hack and a failure. It is a tragically sad flaw of so many great men, that they view themselves essentially as failures. Vonnegut was anything but, but no one of this earth could probably have convinced him otherwise.

I have a collection of Vonnegut novels which I've yet to wade through, but I treasure them all the more today. He was a great ally in the cause of human dignity, and human community against the forces of Imperialism, crony Capitalism, technological de-humanization, War, stupidity, and the Powers that Be. He will be sorely missed.

May Libraries across the land institute a READ VONNEGUT month in his Honor!

ACRL's Top Ten, and Aggie Librarian's reaction.

from ALA's web pages:

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The ACRL Research Committee developed the top ten assumptions after surveying member leaders and conducting a literature review. A panel representing community and liberal arts colleges, research university libraries, as well as an observer of the higher education environment reacted and commented upon the assumptions at the ACRL National Conference.

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So shall I, here, presently.

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“These assumptions underscore the dominant roles that technology and consumer expectations are increasingly playing in libraries,” said Pamela Snelson, president, ACRL and college librarian at Franklin and Marshall College. “The underlying trends offer new opportunities for academic libraries and librarians to embrace the future.”

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What about opportunities to ENGAGE and SHAPE the FUTURE....?

Anyway, on to the top ten list...

1. There will be an increased emphasis on digitizing collections, preserving digital archives, and improving methods of data storage and retrieval.

...all without much thought given to the consequences of doing so or the propriety of doing so for long term preservation issues, which remain problematic as ever.

2. The skill set for librarians will continue to evolve in response to the needs and expectations of the changing populations (student and faculty) that they serve.

Translation: get high tech, or get the hell out, you book nerds and sentimental reading advocates. Heaven forbid you forget the "customer is always right" and you darn well better obey the unquestioned law of "give 'em what they want".

3. Students and faculty will increasingly demand faster and greater access to services.

And will resent the hell out of anyone who tells them to slow it down and be a bit more reflective and contemplative and maybe engage in some meaningful dialogue.

4. Debates about intellectual property will become increasingly common in higher education.

And will get increasingly ridiculous as Freemarket Fundamentalists continue to try, in the words of the late Bill Hicks, to "stick a fucking dollar sign in front of everything on the goddamn planet."

5. The demand for technology related services will grow and require additional funding.

Perhaps to the point of starving, crowding out low-tech resources, including the human kind, in a mad scramble for an ever smaller slice of funding pie..?

6. Higher education will increasingly view the institution as a business.

Who increasingly pays the piper calls the tune I guess. I for one do NOT view this as a good thing; and moreover this is not a future trend, it's right here, right now. Remember that until the major land-grant institutions, like my Alma Mater, a University education was the exclusive purview of the wealthy and well-to-do upper middle class. History Lesson, Aggies--that's why we call 'em T-sips!! "State" schools have gone from "State funded" to "State supported" to "State-repressed", some would say. Their tuition certainly keeps spiraling upwards and out of the hands of the ordinary citizens of merely ordinary means they were created to serve in the first place.

7. Students will increasingly view themselves as customers and consumers, expecting high quality facilities and services.

You get what you pay for...either collectively or as an individual. Caveat Emptor.

8. Distance learning will be an increasingly common option in higher education and will co-exist but not threaten the traditional bricks-and-mortar model.

At least the digital barbarians have scaled back their ambitions a tad, perhaps. Though part of me says "traditional face-to-face instruction for the wealthy, let the rabble eat the pixels and bytes of online education", which will be the only "education" we permit them by ratcheting up their weekly workloads just to make ends meet.

9. Free, public access to information stemming from publicly funded research will continue to grow.

Well, I sure hope so, at any rate, though the trend has been to privatize this kind of crap...socialize risk, privatize gain are the operant ideologies at work here...I'd love to see that trend reversed, I just don't see any evidence to bolster that expectation beyond pure hope.


10. Privacy will continue to be an important issue in librarianship.



You bet it will. Privacy will continue to be an important issue in all facets of human life, but especially in the library context, as it goes so much to the root of our timeless library ethics.
Good luck to all RML's out there who keep passively resisting and fighting the good fight on this one.