One more post, since I’m on a roll today. If you’ve been hearing a lot about Web 2.0 (or Library 2.0, for that matter), then you must see "Supermarket 2.0." I’m not quite geeky enough to get every single one of the jokes, but oh, the bottled water tagged "transparent" and "WYSIWYG," and the cashier who says "here, have a cookie," and the Quakr oatmeal!
(Via various people, but most recently Thingology.)
This quarter at Drexel, the class I’m excited to be taking is History of the Book. I’m already generating paper
topics. (I want to use the paper to explore one of my nebulous
future project ideas. Representations of opera in 18th century British
engravings? Maps in books? Stages in the development of indices and
tables of contents? I kind of want to dig up a topic on the Florentine Camerata, but I won’t know how feasible that’ll be from a book-history perspective until I do a little exploratory research.)
Anyway, one of our first readings, for next week, is a big chunk of
Bernhard Bischoff’s Latin Palaeography. It’s one of four books supposedly at the Drexel bookstore, but only three are on the shelves.
Guess which one is missing? And guess which one is checked out at
Drexel and Bryn Mawr, doesn’t circulate from Penn, and takes 1-3 weeks
to ship from Amazon? ABE Books looks better in terms of shipping times,
but I still can’t get it by Tuesday.
So my options for this weekend are: 1) brandish my non-Penn-student Penn library card and hope they’ll let me look at the
reserve copies, or 2) try to read the required 70 pages by fiddling
about with Amazon Book Search. The moral: Every so often, having access to the holdings of six libraries isn’t enough.
[Update: Ordered it from Alibris. Got the confirmation e-mail and everything. But then Alibris discovered that the book was "unavailable" and cancelled my frakking order — so Amazon it is, then. The textbook gods, they are laughing gleefully.]
The ACRL conference has been blogged exhaustively by the small army of official conference bloggers (note to self: sign up to be one of those bloggers the next time I want to go to a conference). So I’ll just distill the highlights into one post.
Luz Mangurian’s talk about learning and cognition was great: a neurologist’s explanation of how the brain learns things, and stores (or doesn’t store) new knowledge. The main point was that neurons connect with other neurons in networks, and associating concepts together literally makes new connections in the brain. If you keep using those neural networks, the knowledge gets stored as long-term memory. She had a lot to say about attention: we auto-focus on narrow ranges, and we can pay attention to, at most, about seven things at once, and not for very long. Which means that lecturing doesn’t work for most students — a point illustrated by an incredibly telling chart.
David Silver from the University of San Francisco media studies department talked about what he called "already existing information optimally uploaded," or AEIOU, and encouraged librarians to consider blogging as a means of sharing and recombining information that’s already available in other contexts (both digital and analog). I liked his emphasis on using online means of drawing students into the offline world, and the student projects he described that mingled blogging with some fairly extensive archival research at the library.
On Sunday morning, I was glad I got downtown early enough to take in Laurie Allen’s presentation on the very cool PennTags project, a kind of del.icio.us for the UPenn library catalog. I’d heard about PennTags, but hadn’t heard about the nifty bibliographic features they built into it, like the automatic capture of bibliographic citation information and call numbers, or the way it allows for really long annotations, so students can use it to build annotated bibliographies for their classes. It’s not open-source yet, but that’s apparently on their to-do list.
And it was also good to see the Aquarium again during the conference reception, and to commune with the puffins (new since the last time I’d been there), the tree snakes, and the stingrays.* And John Waters suggested two ways to get young people into libraries: 1) librarians walking around naked for two minutes at a time, and 2) "Good Parts Day," wherein all the naughty parts in library books would be marked with Post-it notes. He also spoke with amazement about the fact that his movies now show uncut on TV: really, what is the world coming to?
There were more panels that I went to, and some excellent posters (especially one on Google map mashups and one on librarians doing outreach to theater students by helping with production research for plays — which would be insanely fun to do). But those were the standouts.
* I didn’t take that puffin photo, Steven Bell did. I love their giant beaks.
I got back from my Baltimore trip last night, and will post a more detailed account of ACRL in a day or two. (Short version: learned some interesting things about cognition, the PennTags project, blogs in the classroom, and related topics; managed to bump into lots of people I hadn’t seen in ages; went to the National Aquarium for the first time since grade school; and nearly snorted iced tea out of my nose listening to John Waters’ keynote address).
But in the meantime, there was no resisting the Firefly Personality Test (via CultureCat):
Your results:
You are Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic)
|
You are good at fixing things. You are usually cheerful. You appreciate being treated with delicacy and specialness.  |
When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose powers the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every heath, and the young sun has run half his course in the sign of the Ram, … then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages. Only, these days, professional people call them conferences.
— David Lodge, Small World, chapter 1
I’m off to Baltimore for the ACRL conference, with a side trip down to Charlottesville to see old friends at UVa. I’ll be back later with summaries of the sessions I went to and any swag I manage to accumulate in the exhibit hall. More next week, when April actually does arrive with shoures soote and all that.
Rachel Singer Gordon at The Liminal Librarian has a meme for library bloggers: Post five non-library blogs that you read. I’ll bite! Here are mine:
Apartment Therapy: I visit AT at intervals when I’m feeling the need for home-decoration wish-fulfillment, voyeuristic gawking at other people’s apartments, or advice on finding furniture. Or when I just want to say "Ooh. Pretty."
dykestowatchoutfor.com: Alison Bechdel’s blog, with her fabulous cartoons. I started reading Dykes to Watch Out For, the comic strip, at least a decade ago, and I hope I’ll still be reading it years hence.
if:book: The blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book. Lots of really interesting observations about textuality in the digital age.
indexed: I’ve mentioned it before, but I can’t resist mentioning it again. Life explained through graphs, charts, and Venn diagrams, all hand-drawn on 3×5 index cards. Come for the hilarity, stay for the strange allure of data visualization.
strange maps: A coworker introduced me to this blog, and I’m so glad she did. It’s entirely devoted to (as the title suggests) out-of-the-ordinary maps. I love maps, and these are fascinating.
New York was lovely, even though my hostess and I had to fight our way through a stinging, heavy mixture of snow and sleet to get to the opera on Friday night. But we had a great time at The Pirates of Penzance, and then there was all manner of cooking and roaming around SoHo and Strand-browsing the next day. (We gave the St. Patrick’s Day parade a wide berth, much as we’ve studiously avoided Times Square on several past New Year’s Eves.)
I even squeezed in a brief but excellent blogger meetup with the redoubtable Jane Dark shortly after I got off the Chinatown bus. Ah, spring break. Why go to Cancun when you can go to icy sleety New York?
The last assignment has been turned in (at last), the bag is more or less packed, the opera glasses have been stashed, the iPod has been loaded up with P.G. Wodehouse audiobooks for the bus trip, and I’m off to New York for a whirlwind weekend trip. There’s Gilbert and Sullivan in my immediate future. Catch you all next week!
For every school assignment (and probably every other task, really), there’s a point where you decide that it’s good enough as it is, and you could continue to tinker with it, but that would probably drive you crazy without really making it much better. So you declare it done, turn it in, and hope for the best. I’ve been rediscovering this ever since I started taking classes again. This quarter, I caused myself a lot of probably undue stress over where the "good enough" point was for the grant proposal I wrote for one of my classes. I’d never written one before, so I wasn’t sure where to set the "good enough" point; plus it was 40% of my grade.
But I just got the grant proposal back, and apparently I shouldn’t have worried, because the professor liked it. And now I’ve hit an unmistakeable "good enough" point for the one remaining assignment of the term. All it needs is maybe an extra paragraph and a last look-over, and then it’ll be good to go.
Now that I think of it, the good-enough point is a pretty good illustration of satisficing, a concept that’s now entered the vocabulary of everyone in my classes. ("Yeah, I found a few more articles that looked on target, but I would have had to wait for ILL to get them to me and there’s no time, so I totally satisficed and went with the ones I could get.")
The best thing about satisficing? I can now go to bed and get a good night’s sleep. Hooray for the good-enough point.
Ages ago I wondered about the tendency of novelists to subtitle their books, redundantly, “A Novel,” as if the reader is incapable of picking the book up and looking at the back cover, or the blurb on the inside front flap.
I’ll never complain about that again. Why? Well, try doing a ton of author searches in WorldCat for writers who write in multiple genres, and then try to figure out from the record list which books are poetry, which books are fiction, and which books are something else again. See if you can count the ways in which literary genres are cataloged: in the Notes field, in the subject headings, or most commonly, not at all. “A Novel” starts to look like a welcome bit of metadata rather than an annoyance. (For extra added bonus fun, see if you can spot how many books subtitled “Poems” have been assigned a “Fiction” subject heading. Go on. I dare you!)
I can already tell I’m going to have a lot of questions whenever I take Cataloging…
This post brought to you by the last stubborn pages of the paper I’m procrastinating writing. But after Thursday the quarter’s over, I’m going out of town for a couple of days, and life will be blissfully homework-free for two weeks.
