Wednesday, April 30, 2008

information decay

like when you let your records go to seed, and the OPAC gets cumbersome; the interface is brittle and bright. A broken bureau-asthetique, a little red and yellow grave for books and mags and The Journal of Noospheric Phenomena & Neuro-Christology. A $15,000 so-what. Shelves sagging, homebrewed references crookedly photocopied onto acidic 2lb LaserBrite, and glum librarians staring lustily off toward retirement. Bad records getting worse. Truncation and limiters splintering into arbitrary chaos, returning a search for "teen suicide" with nothing but Carl Yanni's The Architecture of Madness, claiming it's shelved somewhere between the book on medieval Italian crown-mold milling and that dusty box of realia that some bigwig on 'the board' must've once given to some middle manager as a thank-you, back before The Cosby Show wowed us all on Thursday nights.

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