De Lange, Day 2

From start to finish, truly excellent presentations all around. Good overview of Creative Commons licensing as a partial answer to knotty copyright problems, bad court decisions and Intellectual Property run amok.

The bulk of today's talks had to do with the information explosion and management problems associated in the natural sciences, particularly in Astrophysics and other related fields where they do REALLY big calculations of large, chaotic data sets, that, until computing power caught up to these problems, were basically insoluble. And pointing out, yes, that Libraries are increasingly not the repositories of these mass quantities of data, and modeling created from that data, etc.

It was all terribly fascinating, but well beyond any of my expertise. I have a strong layman's interest in science, thanks to having a dad who was an Earth Sciences primary school teacher for many many years during my formative years, and watching lots of Carl Sagan's COSMOS as a kid, and spending a lot of quality time down at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

But I did appreciate one librarian sticking up for the humanities in the Q&A and pointing out the remaining, sustaining centrality of the printed book to most of the deep work in the Humanities, and that brick-and-mortar may give way to clicks-and-mortar, but it will not go all-digital, all the time. The Medium is the Message--still. The Library of Congress on an Ipod is not the totality of LC. The Map is Not the Territory.

It's still distressing at times as a mostly humanities person to see SLA-type libraries, and hyper-digitized disciplines like Law, Natural Sciences, etc, and the types of library-services that exist (mostly digital) in support of those disciplines having an undue warping effect on the perception of ALL library services. And maybe we Humanists are fighting a losing battle here, but I still think it's a battle worth fighting. If we loose the library as a physical space with books, serving as the anchor for Humanities work, the Humanities themselves will go not long after, and how much poorer off we'd be as a species if that happened.

I know I got into Librarianship as a way to stay connected to Humanities work in Academia without actually having to scrounge together a loose semblance of an academic career with part-time teaching gigs, no job security, no reliable benefits, etc. I mainly want a rewarding job that will afford me enough disposable income to just keep learning as many foreign languages as I can. I don't want to be a formal linguistics scholar, nor do I do much lit.crit anymore...I just enjoy learning, speaking, exploring foreign languages and helping others to do the same. My main interests now are in Intellectual and Social History, Political Economy, Cultural Criticism, Philosophy, etc. I also still have a love of Cinema (Studies) and a love of the visual arts, especially in Turn-of-the-Century Vienna and also in the Weimar Republic era of Germany, and also in the arts & culture in early days of the Soviet Union before Stalin.

I would be deeply saddened if Librarianship in support of the Humanities truly is doomed to obsolescence, or will in future be restricted to only an elite few who live on trust funds but do Librarianship only as a hobby. I sometimes wonder if if Ray Bradbury's bookless world of Fahrenheit 451 might yet come true...not by Orwellian means as Bradbury envisioned, but rather through Huxleyian means a la Brave New World...Shakespeare and Thomas Jefferson drowned out completely by the Ipod and American Idol. The crass superficiality of such as society as depicted in the film version of Fahrenheit 451 seems all too closely familiar at times.

Anyway, the conference concludes tomorrow, and I am looking forward to it.