TLA Preconference - RDA

In a word: Disappointing. Very long on theory (most of the morning), rehashing much of what I already got from my last RDA workshop. I found myself nodding off intermittently. I found the breaks in between sessions more informative, listening to colleagues chew over FRBR/RDA, many with their own private "WTF?" moments amongst themselves and their intimate colleagues. I made mental notes of who around me seemed to be having issues and philosophical objections similar to my own thoughts.

The morning session seemed devoted to a type of RDA cheerleading and futurist hype and enthusiasm. All well and good but I wanted to see the Demo and examples set for the afternoon, as well as the implementation guidelines. I walked down the street for lunch to the Home Plate Bar & Grill, right next to Minute Maid Park and grabbed a burger, fries, and a fountain drink. I skimmed my copy of Slow Reading by John Miedema while I waited for my food, and during the slower parts of the presentation, too, to be honest.

The Demo turned out to be merely more power point slides, this time of screen shots of what the working RDA Online product is supposed to look like; The actual database is still behind schedule, still not online yet.

The Examples were okay, but riddled with annoying typos and errors...some due to rule changes enacted after the packets were put together, but some just...ugh. Ms. Tillett apologized for the "minor typos", but I could only do a "facepalm" after awhile, since there are no "minor typos" in cataloging, only cataloging errors. As examples showing the difference between RDA and AACR2r2, they were inconsistent.

Some of the changes I have no objection to, like ditching the "rule of three" and listing ALL authors credited on a multi-author work. I can even (maybe) live with adjusting title punctuation to match exactly what appears on the item in lieu of time-honored AACR "Sentence punctuation" style. I'm less thrilled with ditching abbreviations. On the surface, to an English-only audience, this sounds like a great idea at first, but when you think about it in an international context, do we really want to deal with full phrasing in so many foreign languages, or a unified system of abbreviations that is truly international, especially the latin ones. I think this will make more of a mess of things than we currently deal with.

As one colleague summarized near the end of the day, this has always been about display issues from vendors and how much (or how little) of the encoded MARC data they use and how they choose to display it, regardless if the MARC data was input using AACR2r2 or RDA. I still remain unconvinced of the need for such a radical revision of the cataloging code if we're primarily talking about a display issue in OPACs that already don't take full advantage of what MARC can do now, informed by AACR2r2. But LC seems determined to push ahead come hell or high water and will implement regardless, which is a truly frightening prospect on some levels. OCLC is also on board, which will drag the rest of us along, ready or not. Ms. Tillett did confirm that "Work" level records would be treated as their own new kind of Authority record, managed by LC in cooperation with OCLC. Which I kind of suspected would have to be the case.

The discussion kind of bogged down in the afternoon. I still fail to see why authority controlled Uniform Titles as currently exist in AACR2r2 don't already meet the FRBR goals that everyone is so passionate about, which leads one to question the need for the theoretically problematic "work" level records proposed by a more strict interpretation of FRBR and realized by RDA. There was a lot of nice talk about resource sharing and cooperative cataloging and "future search tools" but not much substance at this stage. I'm glad LC is at least going to be testing this stuff before releasing it more generally. I have my doubts as to how thorough the testing will be, who can comment on the results, and if their comments will be given any weight, or if RDA will be implemented regardless of the results because it's "too big to fail", i.e. too much time and money and effort has been poured into this enterprise and there's too much psychology of prior investment to really let it go, as the Working Group Report as much as recommended some time ago (specifically it was counseled to "suspend work on RDA"), but which LC brusquely brushes aside as an unthinkable option.

I got the sense, too, that what's really driving this decision is the perception that this can make current copy-cataloging practices even more efficient and cost-saving by going with RDA by linking and by eliminating as much redundancy from the system as possible. Never mind that redundant systems are not always a bad thing--ask USAF pilots who fly the A-10 about that.

I'm writing this post only a few hours after the meeting broke up, while it is fresh on my mind. My opinions at this point are highly subjective, I'm just getting ideas down in pixel form while they're still percolating in my head. I may revise my positions later.

The afternoon Q&A after the "examples" session ran so long that we didn't have time at all to touch on RDA implementation recommendations whatsoever. That was really disappointing, though I do think the Q&A was valuable and important. I'm a little sour at their calling the "Demo" a Demo. It's not a demo unless it's online and live. What we got, in effect, is an artist rendering of a demo, not the demo itself.

I don't know that I'm any closer to writing a professional article, either in Cataloging and Classification Quarterly or some other related professional periodical; I still am acutely aware that I'm a lightweight when it comes to cataloging theory and practice. But I'm afraid I left today's session with yet more questions than answers about RDA. RDA = Resource Description and Access. Also known to some as "Retirement Day Approaches" or to us young'uns as "Real Disaster Ahead". It may be that it's pointless to quibble about the philosophical shortcomings of FRBR, as Ms. Tillett asserted that other nations had been successfully using the model for years (though I would have appreciated viewing some concrete examples of this). But with RDA, I still have a lot of misgivings and remain skeptical. I'd like to withhold final judgment until the RDA preliminary alpha and beta testing are complete and the results published and critiqued.

RDA's vagueness still leaves me ill at ease and in some ways seems almost to run against the logic of FRBR. In some ways, after it was explained to us, it seemed--at least to me--that SOME existing AACR2r2 practices come closer to the FRBR ideals than RDA does. I remain perplexed, sad to say.

It was worth attending this pre-conference, by all means, but I was disappointed by the actual delivery. Like I said, too much time spent on theory and rah-rah, not enough time on the demo, on concrete examples, and on implementation recommendations and planning. It's all so @#@$%! speculative still.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Interestingly, Aggie Librarian got to sit next to an actual Texas A&M main campus cataloger who was very nice and amiable. Quite pretty, too. I learned that TAMUG personnel are a back in Galveston and no longer in B/CS. So it seems they got back to Pelican Island on schedule. Well, good for them. I also heard that budgets are tightening at TAMU (as expected) and that most catalogers these days are focusing on archival materials, which is more or less the same story for me up in Denton, since, as with my TAMU colleagues, it's the main source of original cataloging that we have on hand to deal with. Unlike them, I still pitch in to do plenty my own copy-cataloging and re-cataloging, too. But thank goodness for unique archival materials to keep our skills sharp.

Copyright, Copyfight

One of my favorite tags on BoingBoing.net is "copyfight". I religiously follow all BoingBoing blog posts tagged with this. It's a topic I care about passionately, even if I don't always fully understand it and always feel like I'm playing catch-up.

As much as the Aggie Librarian hates to admit it, he stumbled into a copyright boo-boo when enthusiastically digitizing and uploading an old video yeabook project done by his High School graduating class of 1989. Being silly kids, of course they just added whatever audio content they wanted, mostly popular music of the reining Zeitgeist. It was a video made by friends, for friends, it was never intended for world-wide distribution. Enter the Internet, and the digital conversion of raw VHS footage into editible and uploadable .mwv format, and throw in social networking sites like YouTube and Facebook.

Long story short, my offending videos got yanked--eventually. MySpace is far and above the most rigorous; Facebook found the offending content eventually, and found it again when I tried using a non-descript title and vague caption description. YouTube took by far the longest to locate and disable the same video. MySpace notified me of my error immediately, as did Facebook, when they finally took action. YouTube, most distressingly, disable the video without so much as a peep...not an email, not a comment, nothing. It took me awhile to realize that video wasn't showing up on my channel and go digging for it and find out what the issue was (well, I kinda figured what it would be, but...); Anyway, I found it--this takedown must have been awhile back because current YouTube practice has been modified; now, YouTube will merely disable the audio, leaving you with a silent movie. This was kind of crappy, but at least you could, in theory, record your own voiceover commentary or something.

I had read only in passing about YouTube's "Audio Swap" functionality and assumed it meant you could use it to record a lame-ass voiceover or something and didn't investigate further. When YouTube finally disabled my offending video, I investigated the Audio Swap option because YouTube presented it to me as the only way I could get my video reposted again on my channel. Fine, I said, and clicked on the button.

I was surprised how sophisticated the choices were for Audio Swap. In short order I found a peppy Pop tune that I could use legally as a substitute audio for my video. Since the video contained lots of images of senior prom, I chose a song called "Beautiful People", since this seemed apt; a lot of the girls who went to my High School and were featured in the video were indeed hot. It wasn't the 80s classic tune that was our Class/Prom Theme song, but since that was under copyright and since the licensing fees to use it were outrageously expensive, the generic pop tune was the best compromise I could reach.

I soon realized that the "Audio Swap" functionality could be used for ANY video I had uploaded, not just my one posting with a copyright violation. I had a lot of content that was long and frankly not very interesting from an audio standpoint. I was involved in NJROTC in High School, and my mom videotaped a lot of our events, which I have subsequently digitized. Basically it is of our Male Armed Drill Team marching around doing Exhibition Drill, different meet after meet. If you can hear the commander at all (assuming he's not drowned out by construction equipment, or high winds), all you here is standard military cadence, and the relevant commands given to execute each move. It's interesting maybe the first 2 times you watch, but after you've seen one and enjoyed its nostalgia value, that's about it by way of interest.

I realized I needed to kick these videos up a notch, as the Cajun chefs say. I decided I needed music with a driving beat; I experimented with both Heavy Metal and Dance Electronica/Techno samples from YouTube's vast generic music files. YouTube lets you preview and sample various selections before finally picking on your ideal choice, so you can pick just the right music to synch up with the on-screen action. Once you've made your match, you click on a button to swap out the original audio for the music, and within an hour or so the audio conversion is done and you've got your newly minted music video...your image content happily married to YouTube-kosher audio content.

Of course, the coolest aspect of all this is the fact that of course none of this audio content was just created ex nihilo. No, these are pieces of music composed and performed by small, up-and-coming indy bands. They clearly enter into a special contract with YouTube to grant limited license use of their material for its customers; In return, YouTube supplies an automatic link to iTunes for viewers of the video to go and purchase the song if they like what they hear. YouTube does this automatically and the owner of the video content doesn't have to do anything, it's an automatic (required) feature of the "Swap Audio" feature.

What is hilarious about this is that newer bands are reaping the benefits of a new market that older, "established" musicians and mainstream record labels have stupidly priced themselves out of completely. This generic music isn't famous, but I'll tell you, it's not bad either...it's actually reasonable quality stuff and I really have enjoyed sampling the various tracks trying to find that perfect fit between my visual content and the audio content on offer. I feel like a professional videographer doing this sh*t. It's way cool. It gives the new band lots of exposure, and lets them "go viral" easily. If a lot of YouTube users like their stuff and use their music over and over in their home movies, the tunes will prove catchy and people will buy their downloads and CDs and forget about/bypass the major record labels with their old business models built on traditional, highly restrictive copyright. It's a win-win, it's a beautiful free market solution to a stupid situation that warms the heart even of this crusty old socialist.

Maybe someday the big stupid dinosaurs like the RIAA will catch on and start offering their content for limited online use at something like a reasonable rate...say twice the cost of a regular internet download on iTunes for limited exclusive use of their audio content on 1 social networking site at a time, just click a little paypal-type button and you're done. Hell, I ended up buying a digital copy of that mainstream tune that got yanked from my original video because I remembered how much I loved the song.

Some progressive recording artists are surrendering to the inevitable and creating their own free YouTube channels, like Billy Joel. He knows people want his content, so fine, he just puts it out there on his channel...not everything, but enough to hook you in.

The Audio Swap option, created as a lawsuit dodge alternative by YouTube is a compromise; You don't get the stuff you hear on the radio that everyone knows and has known for the past 30-40 years...but in exchange you get new and innovative stuff that NOBODY knows about but will positively LOVE once they hear it. I'm serious! My "view" counters on ALL my videos with "swapped" music audio have spiked since I successfully completed the swaps. People love this! It makes my videos more interesting and watchable, and it gives the bands in question great viral exposure to a wider audience that would otherwise not have been possible through more traditional means. It runs counterintuitively to the way copyright is supposed to work and protect artists and I absolutely love that.

Don't get me wrong, even these generic bands should have the right to sue the pants off of other bands that pirate their stuff and pass it off as their own. That's just not cool...unless they improve on it and do it better than you then hey, sucks to be you. Like people complaining about how Maldroid ripped off from Joy Division to do "He Said, She Said". And I'm like, so frickin' what? Maldroid did it better, end of story. Their song is just plain a better song, more listenable, etc. Joy Division has street cred, they've been around way longer and became the basis for New Order, yada yada, but on that one song, I'm sorry dude, but Maldroid wins it.

There is still a place and a role for copyright. I hate that the Japanese anime industry is suffering because of hacker fansubs that undercut their product; it also takes money from dedicated English dub actors, who are very cool people--definitely a bummer and not a cool thing to do. The Japanese studios should sue the crap out of the unscrupulous pirates. I love that they're doing more adult/mature content these days but maybe they need to re-diversify and capture back some of the kid market as well, to have solid footing. We adult Otaku love our stuff alright, but they need to keep their audience base wide and diverse to stay viable. Catering exclusively to Geekdom is a path to ruin, I'm sad to say.

Anyway, I've been eager to blog about this since last night; finally to commit this to writing.

FRBR really is FUBAR

I attended an informal local workshop on RDA this morning, and now I can more clearly say what I long suspected; FRBR is FUBAR, from the bottom up. I better understand now that FRBR is sort of Platonist in its view of the bibliographic universe, which explains my almost instinctual inherent dislike for it, since I myself am undoubtedly much more Aristotelian (and materialist) in my Outlook. FRBR insists on a Platonic Form-like Abstraction called "The Work", which then filters down from there to Expression, to Manifestation, to Item. As a good Aristotelian, I junk all this higher "form" nonsense out the window and start with as my starting point the real object in my hand or before my eyes, which can be apprehended by my six human senses. That's been the basis of cataloging recorded information for over a century. What good is an abstraction like "The Work" anyway, that isn't already adequately addressed by the feature of Uniform Title in AACR2r2? (answer: none)

One is struck by the irony that the name Resource Description and Access was chosen over AACR3 because the intent was to make it more "international" in scope, less explicitly "Anglo-American" in name; And yet by replacing standardized Latin abbreviations and other notation in AACR2r2 with full English phrases, RDA is in actual content far MORE "Anglo-American" than even the AACR2r2 it seeks to supersede.

I also find it laughable that bad RDA structure and bad writing can be excused with "but it's supposed to be hyper-linked online!", or that it will be better than the version of AACR2r2 that currently comes bundled with Cataloger's Desktop, pooh-poohed as "not user friendly". Fine, that's a programming issue that you can fix without revamping the entire cataloging code. Same with the abbreviations; a vendor could tweak programming to allow a user to "mouse over" those abbreviations and get a fuller explanation if the need it...the full latin words spelled out plus an English gloss (or other language depending on the main users' language needs) for the same. This can already be done in OCLC records to identify libraries by their 3 digit codes, and I'm sure an OPAC vendor could incorporate the same or similar technology.

Supposedly RDA is superior to AACR2r2 at handling electronic resources, but I've yet to see a compelling example that I find convincing. I laughed out loud and said aloud twice "this is supposed to be an improvement!?" The haphazard structure of RDA compared to the clean orderliness of AACR2r2 is simply laughable.

The lecturer today predicted that with RDA implementation we might expect 5-6 years of "happy chaos" before things settle down again. In other circles, this is colloquially known as nothing short of a revolution. It's the kind of comment that makes me want to grip my copy of AACR2r2, dig in my heels, and say, all Charleton Heston like "From My Cold Dead Hands!!"

But then, I'm a Texan...and we always like to re-fight the hopeless battles like the Siege at the Alamo. Though sometimes we win our San Jacintos against all odds, too.

But at bottom, it's the inherent Platonism of FRBR, which underlies RDA, that I have my issue with. There's no such thing as "The Work" in the abstract...and some FRBR proponents and theorists even agree with me on this point. Where we disagree is whether this abstraction is even useful or not. To the FRBR folks, it is. To me, it isn't. All that exists are individual, particular items. We build and share our cataloging upon that. Even Homer's Odyssey, in the original Greek, is based on some particular surviving manuscript *somewhere*, not just floating out in the ether somewhere. We deal in the subset of RECORDED information within the total information universe. If it's not recorded on some medium of some kind, it's irrelevant to us. Relationships are already established and traced in AACR2r2 by means of Uniform Titles, which are controlled and can be referenced. Restructuring via FRBR yields know advantages that I can think of, and is so vague and subjective it isn't "Functional" at all but rather Dysfunctional. DRBR is closer to the truth, if FRBR is forced on libraries. Dysfunctional Requirements for Bibliophile Rubes.

Oh, and the obligatory cheer-leading for the Death of MARC at the end of the talk that is of course par for the course. Ok, sure, maybe MARCxml will be a useful next step, but I don't see the core MARC standard ever going away completely. Just too cost prohibitive to shift on a worldwide scale.

These speakers even admitted that cost consideration was not within their purview. Well, ok, but somebody DOES need to consider that before going forward with implementation of this dreck. These decisions do have financial implications that aren't to be made lightly.

I left the workshop wholly unconvinced of the necessity of RDA, with a deeper understanding of its philosophical errors, and a more robust appreciation for AACR2r2. I remain a hopeless, book-bound Neo-Luddite on these matters, I suppose.
It provides some measure of comfort that my take on this is basically in line with senior catalogers on AUTOCAT whose opinions I hold in the highest regard but who are also largely ignored by the Joint Steering Committee, more or less.

I'm all happy for the info scientists to go develop new metadata standards for their precious electronic resources and digital images and whatsits...where I draw the line is when they go dicking around with the bibliographic control of monographs that is tried, true and tested and does not need to be f*cked with. First, do no harm, as another profession puts it. FRBR will actively wreak havoc and turn centuries old cataloging principles on their heads, and so will RDA.

For now, best to just batten down the hatches and ride out the storm. I think the other side will collapse from their own hubris and internal contradictions, but there's no guarantee. It may take an outside influence, like an energy crisis, to shock enough library leaders into reconsidering the all-digital future pipe dream.
Only time will tell.

That's all I've got for now, Aggie Librarian over and out.

Herding Cats, or organizing the unchurched.

I've been in this little college town for over a year now, and while I was initially encouraged by the existence of such organizations as the North Texas Church of Freethought, and the Free Thought Alliance (FTA) of UNT, I found that NTCOF, based out of Irving, Texas, was just a long darn way to drive, even only once a month. Same was true of many other atheist/agnostic/freethought groups in and around the DFW Metroplex. I found myself unwilling to drive out to Plano, or Arlington, or Fort Worth, or downtown Dallas, just to participate in these groups. It was all just too damned far from "Little d". Even here in "Little d", the UNT chapter of Free Thought Alliance, though I did enjoy attending one or two meetings and one or two parties, their limitations as a campus-based group--and not my campus--became readily apparent. They meet 5pm sharp, on the UNT campus, which is extremely inconvenient for someone who doesn't get off work until 5pm, and whose own campus isn't on the same side of town as theirs. The practical reality is I'd be 30 minutes late at best, each and every time, and that got old. They also hosted stuff on the UNT campus during the week and during working hours, which, while ideal for on-campus students, were impossible for those not attending UNT or working as a UNT staffer.

While my campus, TWU, has more Christian groups than I can count on both hands, I don't think they have a single atheist/agnostic/freethought type group of any description. Women, lamentably, tend to be more religious than men, which is especially unfortunate considering just how misogynistic the "Big 3" Abrahamic religions have been for most of their history. FFRF publishes a little tract detailing just how bad religion is (and has been) for women, actually...something I always remember when I see a spontaneous bible study either on campus or downtown...especially a group of women being led by a guy evangelist.

Anyway, more out of exasperation than anything, I decided to take the plunge and found my own Denton-centric "Meetup.com" group for Atheists. I didn't include Agnostics in my group description for a couple of reasons. One, because I once married a wishy-washy agnostic who ended up reverting back to something resembling the Fundamentalism of her youthful upbringing, making our already eventual difficult divorce that much uglier. Two, because a lot of people say "agnostic" out of a sense of politeness when "atheist" really is the more accurate word for their real worldview. Three, because technically speaking, agnosticism and atheism are not mutually exclusive positions. Case in point, I am myself an agnostic atheist. Meaning that sure, I don't know for absolute certain that there is no supreme being/god thing, but at the same time I lack any kind of active belief in such an entity. I'm skeptical of religious claims, critical of religious moral systems predicated on the necessary existence of a divine law giver, etc.

The stubborn, fence-sitting agnostic who feels superior to self-proclaimed atheists and believers alike is a confused, self-absorbed poser who I just have neither the time or patience to deal with. They're trying to maintain an artificial position of absolute neutrality that is simply untenable, in part because it relies on a distorted definition of what atheism is so that it can contrast itself with a straw man rather than the real deal.

I had to pony up a stiff start-up fee for a six-month run, about $72 bucks, so yes, I will be charging a minimal fee at meetings (one buck per person per meeting) until I recoup these costs. There seemed to be a core cadre of people interested in this meetup, and wanting it in Denton, but for months nobody (including me) was willing to pony up the cash and the organizational moxie to make it happen. Well, I finally stepped up to the plate and took a swing. It remains to be seen if I can hit a home run or I will strike out with this group concept. I emphatically do not want to steal any thunder from FTA over at UNT. I love those guys, and I think they do great work for their core base, but it just wasn't working out for ME personally, and I want to connect with other nonbelievers in similar circumstances to my own...working adults for whom UNT-FTA isn't practical, and for whom it's too far to go to Plano, Arlington, Dallas, etc. I've had one committed member join...from McKinney. Ok, not precisely what I was looking for, but if we're closer than any of his other options, he's welcome to come out here. I just really hope we get some actual Denton residents to show interest and more importantly SHOW UP. I'd like to see us patronize local Denton businesses wherever possible and avoid chain places. That has nothing to do with my atheism, of course, it's just good citizenship and keeping money in the local economy rather than sending it out of the community, something I feel is kind of important from an economic point of view.

I'm also founding this group because I've just noticed more and more bible studies popping up at local coffee houses that I haunt, and they annoy me. Around Christmas time a church group came around passing out pamphlets and claiming to want to sing Christmas carols, but printed in the pamphlets were none of the crowd-pleasing holiday favorites that everybody knows but rather all were explicitly Christian religious hymns. I thought this was supremely annoying and I made a point of utterly ignoring them and continuing to talk to my friend during their "concert", and to crack jokes poking fun at religion. If they'd stayed with mainly secular seasonal songs that are classic American favorites, even this crusty old atheist might've joined in, but their having to bash everyone over the head with overly religious songs...forget it.

There are few things as disappointing as seeing a really pretty girl out in public who you're moderately interested in pull out a bible while in a circle of her girlfriends and you realize it's a bible study group. This has already happened to me at least once so far. Even the same girl lighting a cigarette instead isn't nearly as much of a turn off as that. If the girl's pretty enough, and charming enough, I can forgive the smoking. I've kissed smokers, and yeah, it's kind of yuck, but it's still a kiss, and a prolonged, lingering kiss is pretty damn awesome, even from a smoker. But I don't care how hot or good looking a girl may be, if she's got religion on the brain she's damaged goods as far as I'm concerned. Hellbound, promiscuous sluts are way more my type. ;-) But only if they're bona fide atheists, not the "mad at God" emo-chick/faux "atheists"...I don't want a young lady to hop in the sack with me because she's mad at God for hating her gay male best friend or let her kid sister die of a horrible disease or in a car accident or something. Such people may call themselves atheists out of confusion, but such persons are just as likely to revert back to a modified theism as to really become a mature, rationally-grounded atheist. When I finally rid myself of any last vestige of the God delusion, I found myself incredibly at peace. If the world was f*cked up, it wasn't because of the will of some divine being, but because of the actions and inactions of ordinary people. Instead of waiting for holy deliverance, one had to get off one's duff and do something in the world.

I do have a close friend at UNT, who also works in the library world, and who is also an atheist, and we do hang out together a great deal, but at times it feels like it's just the two of us against the world, and I'd like to know there's more than just two atheists in this little college town for frak's sake. Also, I learned that UNT's FTA has "Officer's Meetings" which welcome general members which are held at a time and place that actually *does* work for me, so actually I will try to start showing up to that, and won't schedule my Meetup.com group to conflict with that. On my Meetup.com group, I specifically encourage UNT students to seek out their campus FTA *first* before joining my Meetup group. TWU students I tell to go ahead an join the Meetup.com group, because I don't think we have any similar campus group at all.

I thought about calling the group "Denton Secularists" or "Denton Secular Alliance" or some variation thereof to avoid the Atheist label, but then I said no, I want to go ahead and embrace the scarlet "A"; Only time will tell if this was a tactical mistake or a wise marketing decision or not.

Higher Ed bill in Texas that I support.

Here's a piece of legislation I'm keeping tabs on and that I would very much like to see pass, eventually if not this session:

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SB 1164 by State Sen. Jeff Wentworth (R-San Antonio)/ HB 1893 by State Rep. Joe Driver (R-Garland) Campus Personal Protection Act would repeal the Texas Penal Code ban for the possession of handguns by concealed handgun licensees (CHLs) on certain college and university properties currently prohibited by law. Individuals who have passed extensive state and federal criminal records checks, completed rigorous training requirements, and been issued licenses to carry handguns for self-defense by the Texas Department of Public Safety should not be prohibited from protecting themselves in so-called "gun-free zones" that currently exist around post secondary educational institutions in Texas. The House Law Enforcement Committee was charged with studying this issue over the interim, and their report is available at www.house.state.tx.us
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Current law says your CHLs is invalid on the premises of any school, including universities, and "premises" is defined as being inside any building. As a practical matter this means I'm barred from entering any building on campus if I am otherwise legally carrying concealed. As a matter of law, I could walk all around the campus with my permit and concealed handgun and so long as I never entered an actual building, I'd be obeying the statute. As a practical reality, when I do carry and am on foot, I stay away from campus entirely. Even though I would be perfectly within my rights driving through campus while carrying concealed, I tend to avoid it, obey the speed limit exactly, etc, to reduce the likelihood of being stopped by a campus police officer who may not understand the finer nuances of the CHL statute and what it allows and what it doesn't.

It means that I walk to and from work disarmed. I can and do carry everywhere else permitted by law, but currently work is not one of those places. I know I'm not the only library staff member who thinks this is nutty, but there's a marked reluctance to talk about this issue in any kind of organized way. Our student body is probably either too apathetic, or uninformed or mis-informed to organize around this issue. Our faculty, especially the nursing faculty, are openly hostile to such a measure, based on pacifistic and delusional attitudes all too common to the medical profession, sad to say. In sum, I don't think enough pressure can be mounted from below upon university administrations, but rather that their hand will have to be forced by the legislature.

Until then, I will continue to obey the law, however much I may personally disagree with it. I admit I was skeptical of concealed carry when it was proposed in the 1990s. But when Bush signed it into law and not only did the streets not turn into the OK Corral nor run red with blood and crime rates actually dropped, I reconsidered my position(s). In hindsight I think passing Texas's CHL statute into law was the only really good thing Bush did as governor, and the late Ann Richards's vetoing of the same legislation the one thing I can say I didn't like about her tenure as governor. I first started getting interested in firearms when I was a librarian down in Galveston, Texas, working for TAMUG. I purchased a Mossberg 12 gauge for home defense (which I still own and maintain for that purpose), and my first "deer" rifle, a .30-.30 Marlin levergun. It was on sale at Wal-Mart, which was preparing to get out of the gun biz at the time. Down in Galveston, though, I was still too chicken to purchase a serious handgun for personal defense, or unwilling to spend the money. At that time I'd only ever shot a .38 snub before, and mostly only my .22 LR Ruger Mark II. I had no experience with platforms like 9mm, .40 S&W, or .45 ACP; I was fearful of the recoil, etc.

I've come a long way since then, now owning at least one handgun chambered in the most popular calibers on the US market, both semiautos and revolvers. I've taken all of them to the range, become familiar and comfortable with their operation, and though it's not hard to do, I was only 2 points short of a perfect score on my CHL marksmanship test. Still looking forward to getting into more IDPA stuff this year, preferably close to Denton. I don't practice as much as I'd like to...I have debts to pay and ammo's not cheap these days.

Anyway, I've written to my state rep and state sentator in my capacity as a private citizen of the State of Texas, to urge them to support this amendment to the CHL statutes. I think it has a decent chance of passing, and Rick Perry has made noises in the recent past of being in favor of such a change to the law. I hope TSRA holds him to it when the time comes.

This change, for me, has a higher priority than the more controversial proposals out there to go back to legal "open carry" for handguns, which hasn't been legal in Texas since probably the 1860s or so, and its prohibition is said to have played a small role in the final gunfight that fatally wounded Texas outlaw and legend Sam Bass. Still, Texas is one of the few states in the union that criminalizes the open carry of handguns. Technically you can already legally openly carry long guns in Texas, but its not a practice I would recommend. I could sling my Marlin .30-30 on my shoulder and walk to the grocery store; I wouldn't do that, of course, even though technically it isn't illegal in Texas. OC for handguns is illegal, and so is "failure to conceal" for a CHL holder; If your sidearm "prints" on your exterior clothing, for example, you could be cited for failure to conceal. This can be tricky in Texas in the summer, but not impossible to avoid.

While I'm not necessarily opposed to OC for handguns in principle, as a practical reality, even Rick Perry has cold feet on the issue. Its time hasn't come yet, I feel, and I'd rather see CHL expanded and improved first, as far as legislative priorities go. Even if OC were legalized and campus carry permitted *including* OC (and we're a LONG way away from that yet), I would still opt to go concealed rather than open as a matter of personal preference. I can be safe, and keep others safe, but avoid freaking people out unnecessarily. I can see why some business owners might like to be able to OC, just like gun store employees already legally can. And I think Texans would get used to it eventually. But until it becomes legal and then so commonplace as to scarcely merit a mention, I prefer to legally carry *concealed* where the law allows. It's working on expanding that "where the law allows" part that is of chief concern to me right now.

I did put in a good word for OC to my state rep and my state senator, but I don't expect much traction on that issue yet.

Currently reading...and a rant

Currently reading _The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable_ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and also Neil Postman's classic _Teaching as a Subversive Activity_. There's a nice confluence between where I am in Taleb's book and where I am in Postman's book, especially on issues about perception, knowledge and language.

Very cool stuff.

Been very busy, sorry for the long silence and dearth of recent postings.

Finally renewed my ALA, TLA, and PLG memberships, in that order.

Looking forward to TLA at the end of March/start of April. It's down in Houston this year, which means I can stay at Mom & Dad's place for free. Nice.

There's also an local workshop on RDA being done by UNT-SLIS on Monday. TWU has decided to let most of our small Tech Services Department attend as well.

I went out to UNT's Discovery Park to familiarize myself with the territory, as I'd never before driven out there before. The property used to belong to TI but was recently bought by UNT. Basically it is the home for the College of Engineering, but SLIS is now out there, too, evacuating their former home in the old ISB in the heart of the main campus.

The hype, of course, is to symbolize SLIS's growing technological and scientific acumen. Walking on the actual grounds you can see it for the sham it really is. While all the other departments in the building are clearly delineated and defined, with appropriate signage on their front doors, declaring their identity, the School of Library and Information Sciences, while it is identifiable (albeit spread out) on the building floor plan, is not at all readily identifiable just walking around on the 2nd floor. Especially amid all the impressive mechanical engineering equipment in and around the building, visible through Plexiglas walls, exposed pipes, etc, the SLIS department seems woefully out of place, seemingly stuck there as an afterthought. The "Information Scientists" rubbing shoulders with all those, ahem, real scientists, must get kind of embarrassing; maybe that's why SLIS doesn't label their front door like everybody else.

UNT SLIS, which exists to produce ALA-accredited Masters of Library Science (MLS) to become working professional librarians, and trains teachers to become state-certified School librarians...whose students are frequently non-traditional age students, even by grad school standards...who frequently work full time and attend classes in the evening, on weekends and online...many of the Library science books of the former SciTech collection have now proudly been moved out to Discovery Park, which has its own Library (curiously divided into two unconnected sections inside the same building)...that is closed on weekends. Way to foster that information access there, guys...at least OUR library science collection IS available on weekends in Denton, so teachers needing to come to check out books on weekends can at least come to our library with their TexShare cards and not be totally hosed. The callous stupidity of this just really infuriated me today. The image is more important than reality...the hallmark of the recently concluded G.W. Bush era, I should note in passing. Yes, yes, I know more and more information is available online, yada yada; Things were bad enough when I was in UNT-SLIS from 2002-2004. If I were just now beginning my MLS instead of working as a librarian, the current farcical situation resulting from SLIS's recent move to Discovery Park would have definitely helped me overcome my male ego issues and today I would be enrolling at TWU instead to get my MLS. I've always long had a preference for the way TWU-SLIS was organized, in its recognition of the humanistic aspects of librarianship, even going so far as to offer a longer degree program specifically called "Master of Arts, Librarianship" (MALS) that I think truly captures what is essential in becoming a librarian. UNT was already techno-fetish crazy in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but now...now they're plumb off the deep end into delusional fantasy land. I didn't think they could get much worse in the early 2000s, but boy was I wrong. The poverty of my imagination at that point, being unable to conceive how much more pretentious and silly UNT-SLIS could become is really unforgivable. I should definitely have known better.

Although I wish sometimes that I worked for a larger university, in a larger metro area with more culture, an abundance of foreign language departments, etc, I still love that I can walk to work. I still love that I work in a beautiful building that actually looks like a library is supposed to look. I love that every day I'm working to make its collections more accessible not just to its students on campus but to the world at large through WorldCat. I love that I sometimes get to tackle reference questions, especially surrounding cataloging & classification issues.

Hard to believe the Denton Arts & Jazz Festival will soon be upon us again, and after that the Texas Scottish Festival in Arlington, and Scarborough Faire down in Waxahachie. I enjoyed these last year and look forward to going back to these events again this year. Denton's a pretty neat little place, I have to say. I plan to stay put for awhile.

From this morning's Inside Higher Ed

A rare post wherein I agree with the Pope--sort of.

From the news in brief on this morning's INSIDE HIGHER ED newsletter:
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Pope Benedict XVI used a speech at the University of Parma Monday to warn students about the dangers of technology. According to Vatican Radio, “Pope Benedict said today’s younger generations are exposed to a double risk, largely due to the widespread use of new technologies: On one hand, noted Pope Benedict there is a danger that the students’ capacity for concentration and mental application on a personal level are reduced; on the other hand there is a danger that the students isolate themselves in an increasingly virtual reality.” The comments came in a speech on the reform of universities in Italy. The pope said that those efforts would succeed only if individuals involved first focus on “reforming ourselves, correcting that which could damage or obstruct the common good.”
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Benedict is certainly correct about a reduction in students' capacity to concentrate, especially the fortitude to tackle lengthy, discursive prose text. While Benedict would prefer students devote such concentration on, say, Thomas Aquinas, and I would recommend some Karl Marx, Baron d'Holbach, or the speeches of Robert Green Ingersoll, I think we would both agree that book learning remains a key element in maintaining learned civilization, whatever shape it takes.

As a Freethinker and Atheist, I couldn't help but note this little irony:
"on the other hand there is a danger that the students isolate themselves in an increasingly virtual reality"

Yes, including the "virtual reality" known as Religion. The "World according to Religion" or the Christian Bible, or the Koran, or the Torah, is the oldest "virtual reality" simulation known. The Enlightenment was a rejection of that and a return to the direct observation of the natural world propounded by the best of the early Greek philosophers. What's interesting about the Greeks are the structure of some of their arguments. The literal prognostications of, say, Democritus, are, as we now now, a little off; but the structure of their argumentation is remarkable in its close approximation of modern scientific understanding.

In one of my Introduction to Philosophy texts from long ago, I remember one of the pre-Socratic Greeks theorized that people came to be when their body parts, originally separate...eyes, ears, arms, legs, all started to work together cooperatively then eventually fused into one organism. This account seems laughably absurd on its face, but beneath the surface, it is not that far, structurally, from describing how current biological scientists today theorize the first single-cell organisms with their various internal structures working in concert came to be, and then eventually cells clustering together into colonies giving rise to multicellular organisms. The Greeks may have believed that the heavens were a dark curtain and the stars were holes in that curtain through which light shone through at night, but they were able to very accurately predict the circumference of the earth using direct observation of nature. Direct observation of nature tells us there's no way this planet was created in a mere 6 days.

Greeks like Epicurus, and later Romans like Lucretius, were, I think, beginning to lay the groundwork for a rational, scientific world view. Sadly, it was a project that would be put on hold for nearly two thousand years because of the distraction of the "virtual reality" of organized religion, which plunged humanity back into superstition and darkness, until the stirrings of the Renaissance, the emergent Scientific Revolutions of Western Europe leading up to the Enlightenment and the world-shaking political revolutions in America and in France in the 18th century, none of which would've been possible without the development of movable type and continued lowering of cost of production of printed materials. Sadly, the world has reached a point of diminishing returns in this respect. Whereas a political tract or pamphlet could help spawn a revolution in the 18th century, such an exercise today is lost amid the chatter. It's just such a busier, more bustling, more highly distracted world. And it wasn't the tracts themselves that stormed the Bastille, or stood up to the Redcoats at Lexington and Concorde, or stormed the Winter Palace, but flesh-and-blood human beings moved to action both by printed words and gifted oratory; usually oratory inspired first by wise and moving words in print.

One of my textbooks in library school opened with the following joke: "It used to be said that a thousand monkeys, typing on a thousand keyboards, could, given enough time, reproduce the works of Shakespeare; The Internet has proven this simply isn't true."

LOL, but the joke is on us.

Discovery Tool product pitch, thoughts on.

I attended a product pitch by a Serials Solution rep, touting their new “Discovery Tool” interface, which promises to take our basic catalog into Library 3.0 territory and giving users the web experience they truly expect nowadays. As Montgomery Burns once said about Marge Simpson’s portrait of him, “I know what I hate, and I don’t hate this.”

Not to say I don’t have complaints, but let me sing the praises first. One feature I positively loved is the Call number box that sorts a keyword string’s results into how the search breaks down by call number of books in the library. That is truly breaking new ground and I really like it. If we adopt this product, I would definitely want that feature activated. I also like the book jacket images, iconographic identification of format (book, sound recording, etc), links to Google Books where full text is available for older, out-of-copyright public domain items, regular links to ebook vendors’s Full Text Content for the E-resources held by the library, etc. It also has a tag cloud feature. I’m not very good at interpreting or using tag clouds, but one of my colleagues in ILL swears by them, so I’ll take her word for it that it’s a good thing and move on.

Grumpy cataloger that I am, I did have to ask if it allowed for call number browsing? No, it doesn’t. Ok, does it allow browsing by subject heading? Again, no. It doesn’t allow browsing by subject heading because it doesn’t *really* make use of controlled vocabulary per se, but rather, breaks down the subject heading into its component parts and uses them as a keyword string. The average user probably won’t notice or care, but this irks me to no end. Functionally, it does seem to still pull up items that share that subject heading, as it would if it really operated on a controlled vocabulary basis. But what this prevents you from doing is getting a bird’s eye view of the library’s holdings by subject, which is what you can get from a traditional OPAC display, and which has valuable uses to the research scholar. Likewise, I find call number browsing to be a very powerful tool, and indeed necessary for original cataloging since you have to be sure, when assigning a new call number, that it will actually fit in your current shelflist. You have to be able to call-number browse to be able to tell. It also is another way of accessing the information, allows you to investigate fine shades of meaning and difference just as if you were physically browsing the shelf, only remotely. But the Serials Solution Discovery tool doesn’t let you do this either. Why? According to the representative, “well, our user surveys showed that nobody really searches that way”. Resisting the urge to pound my fist on the table and say “I don’t give a sh*t if the ‘average’ (often clueless) user doesn’t do that”, what I did say was “look, I love all the new bells and whistles…you’ve got a lot of great new things here; but I don’t want to see you bend over backwards to cater to the most common denominator SO MUCH that you DUMB IT DOWN and really unintentionally hurt EXPERT users who actually know what they’re doing!!”. I did have to say the latter aloud, because I felt it had to be said (the former I said under my breath, but within earshot of a few colleagues). I did have the temerity to ask if many institutions keep their old OPAC display available as an option, if it’s possible to switch off all the bells and whistles and go back to bare bones bibliographic basics, i.e. just the books on the shelves and nothing else please. She allowed that yes, the majority of institutions still kept their old OPAC public displays available as a search option, “for recalcitrant older faculty, people still wanting to hold onto a security blanket.”; Or grumpy catalogers who think there are some redeeming features of OPACs worth preserving in the Discovery Tool that may not be supported by “user surveys” but remain important to Reference Librarians and Catalogers who know what they are doing. While Roy Tennant may cluck that only librarians like to search while everyone else likes to find, the better one is at searching in different ways, usually the better a librarian is at finding things faster than the untrained user, which is where we keep our edge and relevance, by knowing even obscure, seldom used methods that still yield results. My point is, user surveys can only do so much, and vendors who employ librarians (I hope) should fall back on their professional librarian know-how and preserve methods even if every user survey says “nobody does that”, if the librarian knows that there are expert researchers who DO, even if they are, in the words of the number-crunchers, “statistically insignificant”. While the Serials Solutions “Discovery Tool” is probably “good enough” for most users, it could still potentially fail or at least frustrate an expert user because of its total dependence on keywords underneath the hood. The main difference between this system and, say, Amazon, is mainly richer metadata, cannibalizing LCSH to use as raw keyword metadata rather than as true controlled vocabulary in a classic IR sense.

Extensive research would be needed to isolate and identify these stress points and weaknesses in the Serials Solutions Discovery Tool system. I know that I am always frustrated to find libraries that have pitched the OPAC altogether in favor of one of these “Discovery Tools”. Sometimes you just want to shut off the “bells and whistles” and enjoy the sound of silence, metaphorically speaking, and confine your search just to the books on the shelves in the building and nothing more. Libraries that disallow one to do this are NOT always saving the time of the reader. Controlled vocabulary serves to tune out excess noise and focus searching; Controlled vocabulary with copious “see” references are a godsend. Though sometimes the LC and OCLC gods fail, and it puts the onus on the conscientious cataloger to supply the “see” references that should be in the authority record but just aren’t.

I’m sure that Thomas Mann could offer a more cogent critique than I can; I’m still just a novice cataloger myself. I got into cataloging accidentally, sort of with the realization that nobody around me was interested and moreover that “f*ck, somebody’s got to do it!” and so at the last minute I did my student practicum in Tech Services rather than Reference work, and that decision has shaped my career down to this point.

I’m all for change that improves, that makes sense, that isn’t stupid. I’m against change that stultifies, dumbs down, downsizes, problematizes, and sacrifices quality for throughput speed, etc. I’m currently reading RADICAL CATALOGING, edited by K.R. Roberto, listowner of the RADCAT email list, which exists as an alternative forum to the stuffier, more formal AUTOCAT, to which I also belong as a professional necessity. There are a lot of great essays there, and I hope, someday, to make future contributions to a tome like this after I’ve got more work experience under my belt. I’m closing in on one year of full employment with my current library, and my performance evaluation went very well. I was very nervous going in, but pleasantly surprised at my good marks. I needed that after the ungraceful debacle and my first library employer’s. Ironically, with the latest upgrade to Voyager, it does actually have a “dumb down” feature I approve of, namely that you can force a record to overlay another by command, without relying on tripping the duplicate detection profile. If I’d been able to do that (and if I’d been able to print my own labels at my workstation like I can today), I would’ve been able to save/keep my last library job by freeing myself from utter dependency on my copy-cataloger and her lazy student worker; which I think she was afraid of. If I had become completely autonomous, I think my former copy cataloger was afraid my hyper-productivity would make her look bad in comparison, and to be fair it probably would have. Heck, last weekend I still came in on a Saturday to knock out some re-cataloging, mainly because I was bored. I listened to music videos on YouTube on my headphones while humming along doing the re-cataloging. It’s mostly pretty easy, straight-up copy cataloging, though sometimes I do hit some bibliographic snarls that make me glad I’m a professional librarian doing this and not a clerk. I have both the know-how and the authority to make judgment calls that a clerk wouldn’t be able to make. Still, this is a big project, and I’m looking forward to training one of our electronic resources clerks how to do basic copy cataloging, using the re-cataloging stuff as a good starting point before she tackles any new acquisitions. Even though it’s now possible to force a record to overlay by command, I still want this person to learn how to trip the duplicate detection, since there’s no way to know if other OPACs don’t still rely on duplicate detection profiles to overlay records. I’ve done the overlay by command myself, but I’m still not used to it, so I mostly still stick to tripping the duplicate detection, which is what I finally learned how to do here. It’s also possible to “merge” records now, so that you can keep the best of both (like a good 520 or 505 contents note, for example). I’ve also been more active at adding local 590 notes for things like bookplates and handwritten messages from the author, etc. Not the kind of thing you want to put on a universal OCLC record, but something that could be of interest locally, to your catalog users.

I guess I’m only really opposed to “dumbing down” when it hinders or eliminates a more sophisticated technique that was useful but obscure. Just because something is obscure, little known or little used, doesn’t mean it’s not a powerful way to do things that ought not be abandoned. I still believe in the old heresy of Bibliographic Instruction. I’d also like to see us get more vigorous in promoting the LC Classification System with the same vigor as public libraries promote the DDC. More posters, more bookmarks with the skeletal LC Classification scheme, etc. I’m embarrassed to admit how ignorant I was of the LC Classification system until I got to grad school the first time and learned that German lit was found under “PT” on the 2nd floor of Fondren Library. Oh, and as an undergrad, our professor told us the Russian History was “on the 6th floor” of Evans Library. It was under DK, but I don’t know if I clued in on that or not. Of course I knew how to write down a call number and go look for it in the stacks, and I guess I knew in the back of my head that the numbers probably also had to mean something, since by serendipity I always found such cool stuff in and near where I was looking that were on similar, but slightly different takes on the subject or subjects. I knew that I liked a lot of the books in the “H” and some in the “L”, too, but it wasn’t until library school that I figured out what these meant. I think people would be interested in this, if we would only take the time and effort to tell them. It’s too cool to leave hidden as a secret librarian code.

In my next post, I plan to ruminate on the ill effects of the business model on the way libraries are run, and how funding cuts and speed-ups that sacrifice quality can lead to a vicious circle…or rather a downward spiral of increasing “good enough” mediocrity. Unless I change my mind and decide to blog about something else.

Doors closing, Windows opening

The most recent issue of Texas Library Journal honors the libraries and library workers of the Texas Gulf Coast who bore the brunt of Ike's fury and helped and continue to help their stricken communities in the storm's aftermath. I bow my head in quiet observance of a moment of silence to honor those colleagues, especially those currently without a functioning library to call home, many of them close personal friends and recent associates.

The Aggie Librarian counts himself lucky that he is no longer a Sea Aggie. That problematic stint at TAMUG lasted only 6 months, and I felt on pins and needles the whole time I resided along Seawall Boulevard that Fall, Winter, and early Spring. I always knew in the back of my mind that an Ike was possible.

Ironically, with the latest upgrade to Voyager, EX LIBRIS has mercifully dumbed down and made much more intuitive the record overlay process such that it is actually a command now and not dependent on one's duplicate detection profiles, which was my utter nemesis back at TAMUG, when I didn't understand that until I attended ENDUSER 2006, which, by then, it was too late. I also now have sitting on my desk my very own label printer, and rather than an external program, we make use of Voyager's own label printing utility. Had I had this set-up back at TAMUG, able to print my OWN labels without dependence on our very unreliable student assistant, as well as a dumbed down Voyager allowing me to very very easily overlay records, etc, had I had those things in place, I would never have been fired, but I would now be sitting, if I was lucky, in a B/CS apartment with very little furniture, maybe a laptop, and trying to fit in and transition from being a Department head to being just another cataloger, and being very worried, uncertain about my future. The TAMUG website optimistically predicts a return to campus by this Spring 2009, but I am much more pessimistic, I think it will take at least 1 calendar year to recover if not more.

It was quite a shock and blow to loose my then job at TAMUG in the early Spring of 2006. For a time I was uncertain if my library career prospects would ever recover. But looking back, I am so grateful to have been let go from there before Ike finally came. I was sitting in Denton, Texas when Ike came, and Ike veered off before it ever reached my humble town. It brought only a few light rains, and more importantly helped lower our temperatures to give us our first taste of real Fall weather this year; while my parents sweltered for 42 hours without electricity, I enjoyed some of the nicest, coolest weather we've had in many months.

I'm currently working on multiple projects, but the most fun has been recataloging a subset of old books that somehow got lost in the shuffle, and were hastily added to the catalog from card data, with the intention of being overlaid later with fuller records. However, this was never re-visited by anyone in a systematic fashion until me. OCLC must be wondering why our collection is growing so unexpectedly, and why we seem to be adding so many antiquarian works. Of course, we're adding nothing, really, just making visible what we've had for years and years that sadly have been off OCLC's radar until now. By attaching our holdings to OCLC, we make these older, sometimes rare works visible to the wider world, accessible via ILL, and by downloading and overlaying the temporary bibs with full LC-generated cataloging in many cases, we provide fuller bibliographic accesses, with richer records at not only the local level but also the WorldCat level. This project itself was spun out of a Name Authorities control project, which we will now be turning over to a 3rd party vendor to finish, while I stay focused on the re-cataloging project. I am going to have this vendor help in identifying these records, all of which will be lacking an 035 $a field; they will either have an undefined $9 field, or no 035 at all. Once we have a better handle on the scope of the problem, I can ascertain if I need to enlist the aid of my copy cataloging staff; I suspect that I will, but for now this remains a solo project.

On the occasions when new books DO arrive, I set aside the re-cat project and attend to the new materials right away. I catalog them, affix bar codes, and turn them over to our student assistant for quick end processing and to get these material onto the library shelves, available for checkout, as soon as humanly possible.
The new books always have top priority.

The new books always had top priority at TAMUG, too, but because I was never able to get myself set up to do proper, independent cataloging and processing, I was always at the mercy of someone else, which got me ultimately terminated in the end. My copy cataloger at TAMUG viewed me with suspicion, and I think she was afraid that I would do my job too well and take her job away. I do believe she passively sabotaged my position there, though perhaps it wasn't even a conscious act. But I do believe it was an act of perceived self-defense, however factually wrong it was.

In any case, I am doing my best to make myself valuable to my new employer, and I feel markedly more secure in my present job than I ever did back at TAMUG. I never felt comfortable living on Galveston Island...I always felt like my life could be washed away without warning. Luckily that happened to me metaphorically first before it had a chance to happen to me literally.

Still, I bear them no ill will. I hope the Jack K. Williams Library survived with only minimal damage, and I hope the collection itself survived without water damage...hell, I helped build and enhance that collection, dammit. Of course I want it to survive. I know that the Rosenberg Library, Galveston's public library, was much harder hit and sustained considerable damage, though at least it to is still standing. I know that the bridge to TAMUG was damaged, and the road leading to that bridge was washed out, so the only way onto and off of Pelican Island right now is probably by boat. Until all of that basic infrastructure is repaired and power restored, those books will have to go into remote storage to protect them from the elements, lest humidity and heat take their toll. I would not want to change places with my former director for even double her current salary. Of all the staff, I would probably have made the transition to B/CS the easiest. I know it must be a real hardship on the remaining staff, with so many so close to retirement. My thoughts are with them. If TLA sets up some kind of fund for them, I would probably donate something.

I also look at the metaphorical storm clouds on our economic horizons, and I don't see much cause for hope regardless who becomes president after the November elections. I'd like to believe I'd be the "last cataloger standing" in the event of any downsizing, but it's not a theory I'd like to put to the test by any means. I'd certainly feel overwhelmed if I lost my 2 copy catalogers. If the economy continues to crash, and if we have students needing to drop out to work full time just to feed themeselves, enrollment will drop, funding will drop, and salaries will be cut back for those not made redundant outright. I plan to start buying MREs and beef jerky at the next couple of gun shows I attend, if any are to be had. I'm content with my current personal arsenal, so at least I'm not jonesing to make a firearms purchase at any of the recent gun shows I've attended...though I was tempted by a pre-ban Norinco Tokarev TT-33 re-chambered in .38 Super, and by an M-1 Garand that was going for a mere $579 (one day special). Those were very tempting, but they are not practical purchases but collector's luxury items. Besides, I'd rather have a TT-33 chambered in the original 7.62x25 Tokarev round. .38 Super is just as hard to find as 7.62x25 Tokarev ammo. And I've already resigned myself to having to wait a long time before I can ever afford an M-1 Garand, and maybe I never will be able to. Doesn't matter. I'm happy with my SKS/WASR-10 combo, and my AR-15/Mini-14 combo.

Owning guns and knowing how to operate them is going to be increasingly a necessity as civil order breaks down in the wake of economic collapse and decay. That's just reality. Libraries ought to stock up on how-to books on Permaculture, gardening, recycling, capturing rain water, etc, even academic libraries.

Once upon a time the students of the then Texas State College for Women (TSCW), now TWU, raised crops and chickens. They were partially self-sufficient with respect to their own food supply, even incorporating agricultural rituals into the school's traditions, with such yearly events as the "husking bee", to coincide with the corn harvest, etc. Call me crazy, but I predict that within our lifetimes, some of these traditions will, of necessity, be revived. The A&M of Texas A&M will cease being a meaningless signifier as it currently is, and will in short order revert back to the original meaning of Agricultural and Mechanical. It will do so because the people of Texas will NEED it to do so in order to survive. The exportation of our industrial base abroad will prove a near fatal error in the end once globalism dies for lack of cheap energy to make it run efficiently. The local and communal will re-assert themselves in competing (successfully) for our attentions, and the world will become once again the truly big place it actually is.

I try not to think about these things all day...but rather just try to keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep on cataloging the books, new and old, as they come across my desk, and just try to stay focused on doing a good job. My next task is to acquire emergency food rations and continue servicing and paying down all outstanding debt. Eventually, if I can pay down my debts sufficiently well, I can begin thinking about long term investment in tangible wealth like gold and silver. The stock market is going to be a boondoggle and basket case for a long time to come until the economy settles back down and starts accepting physical reality and reforming itself, so that it no longer postulates infinite growth on a clearly finite planet. Until we change the way money works, we really change nothing.

The longer we push Suburban sprawl, the more resources we squander, the more pollution takes a toll on the environment, the more erratic and violent earth's weather patterns become, etc. All one vicious cycle after another, spinning faster and faster in a death spiral. While I don't think humans will die OUT as a species, some degree of die OFF is probably not avoidable, as a mater of nature and population pressures. If economics calls itself the dismal science now, just wait until the Long Emergency stretches on past the lives of the current generations.

The Dumbest Generation will prove utterly not up to the task, I'm afraid. Fewer and fewer people remain alive with a living memory of the last Great Depression and the skillsets learned to survive it. We are in for a rough time ahead, we X'ers and Millenials both; We're both unprepared, but we X'ers at least grasp HOW unprepared we are, I think...or at least some of us do.

Belated Book Review: M. Bauerlein's THE DUMBEST GENERATION

This review is rather delayed, and I apologize for the long silence between posts. The Aggie Librarian has been busy re-cataloging lots of books that have been sitting in our collection without holdings affixed to OCLC, an oversight that was to have been corrected "someday", and that "someday" just happens to coincide with my becoming the Catalog Librarian at my institution. I've also goofed off a lot on weekends, watching oodles of Japanese anime, and gone to the occasional gun show here in North Texas (Fort Worth, Dallas, Mesquite--the 3 biggest), dragging along a colleague from a neighboring institution.

Anyway, without further delay, I provide for you my review of Mark Bauerlein's THE DUMBEST GENERATION, which I had the pleasure to read just before school started back up.

As a 30-something, nominally Gen-X, somewhat traditionalist Librarian (Cataloger), weary of repulsing time and again the charge of the All-Digital Brigades proclaiming Lib/Web 2.0, or by now 3.0, ad infinitum, there is much in Bauerlein's critique here that is music to my ears, and I appreciate his compilation of statistics aimed at deflating the hype of Web 2.0 enthusiasts.

However, by about the middle of the book, Bauerlein's own ideological biases begin to overshadow the book, and it's clear he's got his own axe to grind. Like other Right-leaning intellectuals before, he is out to demonize the 1960s, which for him are the habitat of the Ur-Dumbest Generation, i.e. 60s Youth Culture (an estimation I emphatically do NOT share). He casually cites Leo Strauss without further attribution or explanation, which set off immediate alarm bells for me. I know damn well who Leo Strauss is, and while the quotation Bauerlein cites from Strauss is not objectionable, the corpus of Strauss' philosophical work is, in my view, quite odious and not at all in harmony with the American Democratic tradition that Bauerlein expresses such sympathy for elsewhere in his book. He similarly casually mentions David Horowitz without giving much background or context to this highly controversial turncoat ex-Trot.

While Bauerlein and I might agree in common on the philosophical outlook and valid cultural criticism of Neil Postman, he would probably balk at further mention of heroes in my pantheon, men like Paulo Freire, Michael Parenti, Peter McLaren, Richard Brosio, or even James Loewen.

Bauerlein insists on a CAUSAL connection between radical 60s youth culture and the techno-addicted Dumbest Generation of the present moment. While I will agree with Bauerlein on the general sequence of events, I dispute strongly the causal connections that he asserts. He seems to be of the opinion that radical 60s youth culture imploded from within, and that its radical rejection of the past (as if alternating iconoclastic/iconodule dialectics aren't a common feature of cultural history) is what ultimately doomed its ability to continue, thrive and reproduce itself.

He approvingly cites such "voices of moderation" as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Irving Howe...voices urging the US to stay in Vietnam, mind you. Yes, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later rationalize arming the forces of Usama Bin Laden in Afghantistan, to use radical Islam as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and raise the stakes in the Cold War by giving the USSR a taste of the Vietnam experience...regardless of the potential for Blowback that eventually contributed to Sept 11, 2001.

So, it was the 1960s young intellectual's own fault that they allegedly did not endure...As if, say, the sheer exhaustion of the American body politic in the aftermath of the Agony of the Vietnam war, the heightened cynicism about government in the wake of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate cover-up scandal, the general malaise of the later 1970s, and the gathering Right wing counterattack that blasted into the open with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980—As if none of that might also have had an impact on the long term viability of 1960s radical intellectual culture, which came under withering backlash assault from the mid 1970s onward. Regretfully, thus, Bauerlein is long on assertion but short on evidence in these final sections of his book. He detests the internet-addicted "Dumbest Generation" that is the object of study in the first part of the book, and also detests 1960s youth culture...and desperately wants there to be a connection, but I don't find his arguments for causality even remotely convincing here.

I also felt he undermined his general case against the so-called "Dumbest Generation" proper by focusing in on and excoriating a young artist for failing to bow down and worship at the altars of the great artists of the past. While I myself deplore the ignorance of basic history among all Americans, and have a healthy respect for the intellectual history of our reining political philosophies and their detractors, in the realm of the Arts, the Artist, it seems to me, is always under the burden to make something new, to be distinct, etc. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. Abtract Expressionism claimed to be taking on Michaelangelo; And I agree with art critic Robert Hughes's sucinct prouncement on that artistic agenda: “You lost.”

Still, the Dada movement in Germany and Switzerland of the early 20th century, or the Wiener Sezession before them in the Fin de Ciecle of Emperor Franz Joseph's Austria-Hungary were no less rejectionist of traditionalist “academic” art, yet no one today would deny their greatness in hindsight. Sezession artists were quite scandalous in their day, the blatant depiction of sensuality scandalized the Vienese burghers while thrilling the Parisian art scene. Dadaists, in a flush of furious creative impulses, proclaimed a doctrine of Anti-Art, by which they meant Anti-academic, anti-stilted, hidebound traditionalist art which they felt was tainted by association with the corridors of power which unleashed the calamity of the Great War. French Impressionism, so beloved by contemporary middle class Americans today, was itself profoundly radical and controversial at its outset. Of course one must learn the basics of painting, of color, of contrast, etc. But artistic taste is highly personal. I do enjoy visits to museums, and as the saying goes, I may not know much about art, but I know what I like, and what I like less. I respect the technical talent of earlier realist painters, but their works don't move or speak to me very much. So where Bauerlein sees impudence, I see independence that, in an artist at least, we should recognize, respect and nourish. Would it be too scandalous to bring to this youth the art of the Harlem Renaissance of the 20s? Something with which, as a young black American, he might more easily relate to than Rembrant? He might reject that, too, but no artist can expect to make a name for himself merely aping the style of what has come before.

I don't disagree with Bauerlein's general thrust in what he is trying to argue, but I do strongly deplore his selection of the visual arts as a forum to bolster his case, which I think falls flat at this weak point. Perhaps I err in showing preferential, even deferential treatment to artists and artistic temperments. So be it; I admit I am guilty of these biases.

I think Bauerlein is also willfully blind to the wider political economy implications of cultural production, the increasing corporatization of the University, the growth of (mostly right-wing and well funded) Think Tanks creating an quasi-alternative, policy-driven intellectual world that seeks to supplant the traditional academy. Bauerlein buys completely and uncritically the right wing canard, promoted by hacks like Roger Kimball, and Horowitz, et. al. about the campus being utterly dominated by the Left. Even when discussing the real, existing Left-leaning professoriate, He seems not to know either Cary Nelson or Michael Berube or their promotion of community outreach as a legitimate exercise for professors to engage in apart from basic research and which ought to count towards tenure considerations. He claims to see redemptive value in the Culture Wars but can't seem to name the major players on the side opposite his or describe many of the recent events in those struggles. No discussion of Stanley Aronowitz, or even Alan Sokal. Where Bauerlein wants to grill 1960s youth culture, my own inclination is to lob grenades at the wayward excesses of relativizing, irrationalist Postmodernism. I happen to think George W. Bush is the most vulgarly Postmodern President in US History. Frederic Jameson identified Postmodernism as the cultural condition of Late Capitalism, and I believe that point still stands. It's sobering for me to realize that the landmark motion picture THE MATRIX came out nearly 10 years ago, yet still seems like it was released only yesterday. But at least Bauerlein and I can agree that, while both of us know these names and the ideas behind them, we are correct to fear that many of our readers, both of his book and this review, won't have the foggiest idea what either one of us is talking about, and we can agree that THAT is a deplorable state of affairs made ever worse by the distractions of the technophilic, neophillic, multitasking Infotainment screen-media culture.

A personal favorite Genre of Music.

I'm a big fan of Celtic music, Traditional and New Age. I love Fiona Ritchie's Thistle and Shamrock NPR's radio show, the Irish Aires show on KPFT, and the Celtic-themed editions of Hearts of Space by Steven Hill. Unfortunately, in Denton, on radio, all I can get is Ritche's show on KERA 90.1 FM (the greater DFW Public Radio station). I can get Irish Aires online, from KPFT's website. Much new Celtic music is going increasingly online.

And as I've expanded into playing around with MP3s and players like the iPod, I've discovered great resources like the website Songhenge and this podcast by Marc Gunn:



Great stuff! When I was a graduate student and recently graduated alumnus of Rice University, I did my turn as a bartender in the graduate student pub on campus in the basement of the old Chemistry building. Before they got all hi-techy and computerized their sound system, we used to have a CD player hooked up to the speaker system, and I would go visit Houston Public Library downtown and go select 3-5 new Celtic music CDs from various artists I had yet to listen to and then inflict these tunes upon my bar patrons. More often than not it was a success and patrons really liked the music. It transformed the whole atmosphere from an ordinary basement bar into something more like a cozy Irish pub, if only for the hour I was on duty as a bartender. I think our Guinness sales went up slightly when I was on duty, too. I think technically what I was doing was in violation of traditional copyright law, as we, the volunteer staff of the place, did not have the "performance rights" to the songs, but this to me is one of the more dick-headed perversions of Copyright law. Promoting such non-mainstream music in such a venue is only likely to pique interest and INCREASE music sales, but intellectual property lawyers don't give a sh*t about such cultural enhancements that improve the community even while they skirt the law a tad. I frequently had bar patrons come up and ask to see the album cover and sometimes the liner notes, which I gladly provided. This was admittedly back in the mid 1990s, when the Celtic New Wave was roaring at rip tide (it has subsided a bit since the early 2000s). I still love it, but my family origin is Scottish, so I have personal reasons to stay connected to this music.

Special Hell

If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater. — Shepherd Book (from the Firefly Episode OUR MRS. REYNOLDS)

...or people who steal shiny new books from Libraries.

We recently goofed and slotted for "Main Reference" a new (2008) GRE Prep book that actually needed to be sent to our Main Reserves, where we can control the use more tightly. These are evidently high demand items, and all the previous GRE Prep stuff is in Main Reserves. But, it came from acquisitions flagged as "Main Reference", so I (copy-)cataloged it, my student assistant did the end processing, and off it went to Circ, from thence to Main Reference, where it "sprouted legs" and walked out the door never to be seen again. Painful lesson learned, and that some people are just ruthless sh*ts. Yes, you to belong in that "Special Hell", if it existed, my dear Library thief.

We would've lost more of them if not for the fact that the copy records in OCLC are lacking 050 fields and my ClassWeb access is STILL down (2 weeks now) and I was too lazy to go poking around on LC and elsewhere for older editions from whence to crib a suitable call number.

I'm also taking my time cataloging a 2 volume set of American Women writers. I'm doing an original record that piggy-backs on an existing record for Vol.1 which has an extensive 505 field contents note. I feel obligated to supply an equally exhaustive 505 for Vol.2, but it's taking a goodly bit of time to transcribe page after page from the TOC in Vol. 2. I may also be fudging the rules a little bit in the 245 field, since thought the set has 1 main editor, the secondary editors differ from vol.1 & 2; I combine the statements of responsibility into one with an [and] between the incongruous names. The 505 transcription is even more tedious work than my ongoing NAF project, or at least it feels that way. I'm also progressing my way slowly through an online course designed to teach me how to catalog Integrating Resources (and how they specifically differ from serials). This past Friday I spent all day with an AMIGOS trainer learning the basics of ContentDM. It was okay, and good to play around with training software where I couldn't do any real lasting damage while I learned to set up a hypothetical digital image collection, etc. Much of the controlled vocabulary for images comes from LC-TGM (Thesaurus for Graphic Materials), since the "subject cataloging" for images tends more to be an extension of descriptive cataloging. More "what is" than "what it's about", per se.

It was a good way to spend Friday as our ILS was totally down (even on the user side) because they're upgrading to a new server. The ILS will probably remain down through a goodly part of Monday, which means I can't make any progress on the NAF project, so I'll resume the 505 transcription and re-save the bib workform in the save file. I'm over halfway done, but it's just such a tedious slog, can't be done in one sitting. I'll also log in to the online course and get caught up on the next module, etc.

Mein Foto

Photo added to blog (with paint/digital filtering), proof that yes, I was indeed an Aggie. Once an Aggie, always an Aggie. This photo was taken my fish year, at Parent's Weekend, way back in the Spring of 1990. I was a young 'un then, and had no idea about wanting to one day become a librarian. When this photo was taken, I still had my heart set on becoming a Naval officer, my coke bottle thick glasses eventually dooming that prospect, but I didn't know that then. Back then, I had a tentative offer of a 3-year NROTC scholarship and was wrapping up a successful if otherwise unremarkable freshman year in the Corps of Cadets. There was still a Cold War on, as far as we knew, because there was still a Soviet Union and Gorby was still the man at the helm over there. That summer I would journey to Germany for a 5 week trip (2 weeks classroom instruction, 3 weeks travel around German-speaking Europe). By then I had already switched my academic major to German, along with History as a double-major, the disapproving frowns of my Naval Science advisers notwithstanding. I eventually was NPQ'd for the scholarship, returned to life as a civilian student, then went on to grad school, first for my MA in German Studies at Rice U, then eventually to UNT for my MLS, and the rest is history.

My first academic major at TAMU has been Political Science, but after my first Poli-Sci class, which was deathly boring, I dropped that major like a hot rock and became a History major. I added German later. I might've been happier had I done my MA in History rather than German Studies, but c'est la vie.

Back then, TAMU was using the NOTIS system for their OPAC interface (not that I would have known the term OPAC back then). It was an amber screen, menu-driven system. Although my High school still used a card catalog and the Dewey Decimal system (which I confess I never really learned all that well), I really didn't find the NOTIS system to be all that difficult to use. I may not have known what the call numbers meant, but I was able to find my books fairly easily. I did eventually learn the Russian history books were in the DK's up on the 6th floor of Evans Library. When I got to Rice U, I learned the German books were in the PTs on the 2nd floor of the Fondren Library. I found that I liked hanging out in the H's a lot, too, and sometimes the DD's (German history). I now know the basics of LC fairly well, at least what the leading letters mean, at a glance. I know some parts of DDC, but not the whole thing in any case, not from memory anyway. I still find DDC to LC conversion tables helpful where they exist.

Rice U. had a primitive web-based OPAC called, I believe, WebCat. It worked fairly well, and was certainly more aesthetically appealing than the old Amber-screened NOTIS system at Texas A&M. I don't know if they still have it, but when I was a graduate student, the Fondren Library had retained its card catalog, but hadn't updated it since 1986, according to the signage at the time. I don't remember if Texas A&M in those early days still maintained a physical card catalog anymore or not, but I'm thinking probably not.

I really wasn't an avid library user as a kid; I do remember attending a kind of summer camp activity thing at the Walter branch of HPL back circa 1978 or so...little did I know then that the HPL Central branch had just opened a scant 2 years prior. During High School mom would sometimes take me to HBU's campus library to do research, but she understood the library search tools better than I did...good ol' Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, etc. I just know I enjoyed pulling the bound periodicals from the shelves and reading things like Life Magazine from the 1950s and 1960s. I thought it was so cool that somebody kept these old magazines around like that so many years later.

I didn't really become an avid library user until I got to college, as an undergraduate. My library use expanded in Grad school, as I became more aware of the overall layout of the collection as ordered by LC classification. Before I went to library school, I once had an apartment that was only 5 or so minutes from HPL Central downtown. I practically raided their media library for the best of the best in documentaries, educational films, etc. I checked out and read books avidly, audio books too. That period in the late 1990s, circa 1998-99 was my heaviest period of personal public library use, when I really fell in love with HPL central, and to a lesser degree Harris County Public Library's West U. branch.

I've yet to visit the main Dallas Public Library, but have been to Fort Worth Public Library's main branch. While at UNT, I did sometimes go over to Denton Public Library. It's ok, but just can't compare to HPL's offerings, nor even Fort Bend County Library system's offerings for that matter.

Now I work in a library. At long last, I feel like I have a job with a real future, not just marking time and paying the bills, like at my last corporate gig. It was fun there, but it was ultimately a dead-end job. Which I didn't care about in my mid-to-late 20s, but as mid-to-late 20s became mid-to-late 30s, it was clear to me it was time to move on, and Libraries was the best way I could figure to get back into Academia some way, some how. It seems to have worked. I feel like I'm making a difference here, enhancing scholarship, contributing to the greater good. It's a good feeling. Signing off again, la la land calls. ZZzzzzz.

Another AV review (brief)

Just a quick shout out to note I really enjoyed another title in the Portable Professor series from Barnes & Noble, specifically Deborah Tannen's He Said, She Said, which is a lecture series based on her previous books and academic research on the different linguistic speaking styles of men and women and how they communicate (or fail to communicate) with each other. It was very eye opening to me and I had lots of "aha" moments all throughout, remembering past incidents with my ex-wife and ongoing dynamics with my mom. Sometimes Dr. Tannen's research leaves you feeling a little despondent, like there's no way around the impasse, but I do think she's right that at the very least it's better to understand what's going on than to not understand it. It makes a Meta-critique of the language act(s) possible, though it's not always possible in the heat of the moment. It's also much easier to catch other's faux pas ("oh, that was really insensitive") than it is to catch your own, but I guess you learn with time, and even learn to think of better things to say that are more productive responses than the "typical" response one would make, as influenced by one's gender.

Tannen was recommended to me by a library colleague at a neighboring institution, who had read her books and found them very helpful and revealing, and this is a guy whose advice I trust when it comes to reading material. That advice was solid gold in this case. I downloaded the contents of the entire lecture series from its component CDs onto my old iPod Nano (1G) and listened to it the whole drive down to Sugar Land, Texas from the DFW Metro area, roughly a 6 hour drive, depending on traffic. My only complaint about that is that when the tracks were downloaded into iTunes, the naming conventions of the different chapters were inconsistent, and so I had to be vigilant to make sure I was listening to the lectures in their proper order. At least the lectures were internally consistent with each other, so no problem at that level, but because of the naming conventions used, Lecture 10 would line up in sequence before Lecture 7, for example. I would wait until I had open road ahead of me to hop around the tracks to get the next lecture set lined up properly and started. If I could, I would try to time this with my rest stop breaks, with the car fully stopped. If I was in the middle of heavy traffic, I'd just pause my iPod and either go silent or punch out the adapter from my tape deck and listen to the radio softly instead.

This would be a handy method for "reading" library books-on-CD as well. Library audio content that is already in MP3 format typically does NOT work with the iPod but will work with any other MP3 player. I resisted going to iPod for some time until I realized I could download podcasts of foreign language news content, especially German material, with better audio quality (and later video) that short-wave radio broadcasts on Deutsche Welle just couldn't match; their own Podcasts over the web were that much superior, and since I was listening asynchronously, I could listen at my own leisure, when and where I wanted to, and I still do. My bigger iPod (8G) is what I use for this now, since the video content (RTL news, Tagessschau, and other nightly news broadcast video from Germany) takes up a lot of memory, much more so than mere audio content.

I liked having the whole lecture series compacted onto my iPod Nano, because it was a lot easier to scroll through the iPod menu than it would've been to constantly be swapping out physical CDs into and out of my CD adapter/player, which plugs into my tape-deck. I use the exact same pseudo-cassette adapter thingy for both devices and it works just fine in each. I also have some spare computer speakers that I have set up on my nightstand so I can plug in either iPod and simply listen to the content aloud while I'm getting dressed, doing chores, surfing the web or whatever (it's easier than sticking in ear buds when engaged in physical activity). This is a much cheaper work-around than getting an expensive docking port w/ speakers for one's iPod, or more sophisticated adapters that broadcast your iPod to the car's radio on an open channel (which is what you'd have to do if you had only a CD player and no tape deck). I like my low tech work arounds, personally.

Well, time to sign off for me. I managed to stretch this post longer than I thought I could. I'll sign on again, as I feel like it or have something to respond to or get off my chest, and as always I'll pledge to try to keep it Library related, or at least Higher Ed related. If I don't keep my blog(s) semi-topical, they get too unfocused and end up going nowhere. This blog was built on the ruins of earlier abandoned blogs and even earlier abandoned static websites, now lost to the mists of ancient cyberia.

Fun philosophical fisticuffs...

Currently participating in a rather fun bit of philosophical fisticuffs on AUTOCAT between a Web/Libr 2.0 true believer and the big guns of AUTOCATland. I normally sit on the sidelines, or toss a grenade and run. I guess I sort of provoked our interlocutor to wander into AUTOCATland, sort of like a military reconnaissance scout launching a feint attack on a larger force, which gives pursuit and is lead into an ambush as they cross in front of our biggest guns, which open up on the invader. After the initial salvo, I swung back around and made a strafing run. Ah, such fun. I've been getting off-list private messages of support, back slaps, etc. Our interlocutor is a prolific poster, however, so it may have to wait until the weekend for me to respond at length over there.

I will probably be able to attend to this blog more now that I have a working Desktop PC at home in my bedroom and don't have to rely on my laptop. I love my laptop, but damn do I hate laptop keyboards. If I have to type anything over a paragraph on one it's just plain painful. The conflict averse are playing kissy-make up on AUTOCAT right now, with the list traffic slowing up a bit, but I'm not ready to make nice. I do think I've made most of my major points already, but half the fun is responding to the overblown rhetoric of my opponent. I don't have time to go into the details here, but it may be fodder for future postings.