the cost of a book

A salty cataloger reminded me (and whenever I get intensive time with tech processing folks I usually leave the meeting awed by their focus -- they turn the volume up on geek so high that I find myself tapping my feet) that a book costs a lot more than its list price, if it's a library book. There's air conditioning, lighting, all the stuff that goes along with housing; there is staff time and knowledge and care. Weeding the items around it... ordering items that encourage its use. The longer the book is with the library, the more its value grows.

Consider a tree. Kew acquires a rare walnut tree that grows in Souther Staffordshire, because they've payed a farmer from Silverdale ₤15 for a cutting he'd managed to pirate and cultivate. Over the course of that tree's lifetime, from sappling to gnarly great-grandad of the garden, over ₤15 per day may be spent on fertilizer, mulch, pruning, mowing -- all that has to go into maintaining a healthy tree. The lifetime cost of the tree is much more than that first 15...

Books aren't simple items. To risk another metaphor, books and their values are fractal. Not just four-dimensional, but not quite 5-dimensional...

wrong tool for the revolution

Fledgling Rebellion on Facebook Is Struck Down by Force in Egypt

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 18, 2008; A01

CAIRO -- At 1:49 a.m. in an Internet cafe only then quieting after Cairo's daily rumble, 27-year-old Ahmed Maher worked at a computer. He wore the same shirt he had had on for two days. The essentials of his life on the run lay splayed out next to his keyboard -- car keys, cigarettes, prepaid cellphone.

Maher pursed his lips, typing intently. His dream of a people's uprising organized on Facebook was beginning to slip through his scrabbling fingers.

Worries about the risks of political activism in Egypt were spilling onto his screen. It won't work, one man wrote. The government's already infiltrated us, wrote another. This is stupid, wrote a third.

Since late March, 74,000 people had registered on a Facebook page created and run by Maher and a few other young Egyptians, most of them newcomers to activism. Even some of Egypt's older, more disillusioned proponents of democracy had let themselves hope that a social networking Web site created by American college students could become an electronic rallying point for protest against President Hosni Mubarak's 27-year rule.

But the experience of the Facebook activists showed the limits of technology as a means of organizing dissent against a repressive government. Maher would end up among what rights groups said were 500 Egyptians arrested during two months of political activism in Egypt -- and find himself stripped and beaten in a Cairo police station, he said.

addictomatic

Addictomatic: hexayurt.

Addictomatic story: InfoToday.

where my jetpack is

I used to be like hell yeah, brother! where's my jetpack?! too... Angry about the future. Angry about the lack-of-future. Angry about the present?

But I kind of like Bruce Sterling's answer to that question... "Are you Chinese?".

Or, better, "you're not payin' fuckin' attention... you're all disillusioned and you're not actually looking at what's really happening."

Aside, Doktor Sleepless as a reaction or embodiment of this angst and disillusionment is worth reading.

extropianism as literary movement?

News to me, but it seems transhumanism is now considered to be a literary movement. Philosophy, yes. Political movement? ...could soon be. But artistic school?

Check Warren Ellis' wikipedia page:

Warren Ellis
Born	February 16, 1968 (1968-02-16) (age 40) Essex, England
Occupation	writer
Nationality	British
Genres	science fiction, superhero
Literary movement	Extropianism, Transhumanism
Notable work(s)	Transmetropolitan Planetary The Authority Nextwave Global Frequency
Notable award(s)	Eagle Award
Official website

Genre, I could see... but literary movement? Any artistes out there want to weigh in on this?

powerset video

We're in deep now -- Powerset furthers the assumption that Wikipedia is factual.

Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.

be here at ref desk

Be here, be here now, yo?
A lower noise-to-signal ratio, please.
Light less mediated.


Info seekers need our presence.

Myanmar Cyclone Resources

STAR-TIDES working group for Myanmar:
http://star-tides.net/myanmar

Inundation maps on Burmese coast, Dartmouth:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~floods/images/2008052Burma.jpg

Addictomatic feeds for Myanmar:
http://addictomatic.com/topic/Myanmar

ICRC, Myanmar, [donations link].

Free Guptastan

You are lucky that he is on your side.

It only recently occurred to me that people don’t realize that I’m absolutely serious about starting a new nation state within three or four years if conditions are historically right.

library moment: grieg

This wonderful patron (an exuberant and adventurous Russian grandmother) who I get to help every two or three weeks rushes into my office, says, "Can you hep me?"

I say I can, and she has me pull up the Wikipedia page on Edvard Grieg, and play the .ogg there of the first movement of the piano concerto so that it will jog her memory. She thanks me profusely ("Thank you, thank you," she shakes her finger at me, "I like you so much!"), apologizes for her strong perfume, and rushes off to go to sing the piece in a performance. She said she'd been so nervous that she'd forgotten the music during her commute.

That's a good reminder for me: to keep my door more open more often.














And a good reminder that sometimes granny knows just where to go for her collaborative media music archive resources without any input from you, brother.

Granny can surprise you.

Doctorow's Little Brother

Albert Hofmann gone now

Albert Hofmann, LSD inventor, RIP

Posted by David Pescovitz, April 29, 2008 11:23 AM | permalink

Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), has passed away. He was 102 years-old.

"I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonderchild." -- Albert Hofmann (1906-2008)

Link to Wikipedia article

=edit:=

Wasn't it Grace Slick who said she used to believe that if everybody dropped out and read a bunch of books the world would be a perfect place? But then we grow up and see that drugs do nothing but magnify our own psychosis (maybe peppering it sometimes with hints and glimmers of something magnificently transcendental), and that no problem is ever going to be solved, in this world or in the next, by the magnification of our own psyches. We get weary of drugs, weary of our own psycho-drama, and ready for reality (a reality more real than the daily-babble monkey-mind of our 'headache gray', fluorescent lit chattersphere)?

But that's not to disparage Mr. Hofmann -- he was a brave man, I think.

books are weapons in the war of ideas

Doesn't this mean that "books" as an idea are the right idea and that book-ism is situated somewhere opposite State-ism (or maybe particular species of facism or national socialism)? That would imply that State-isms of any kind are the idea-things that book-ism undermines and subverts; and this would (or could) potentially threaten even American-ism, or Liberal-ism, or any other idea-thing, or idea-culture-thing.

The idea that we will stand up for the idea that "we may disagree with your idea but we will die to protect your right to express it" (or Z) is dangerous to any kind of idea-culture-thing except for the idea-culture-thing that defends (or identifies itself as or with?) Z.

This is all in the realm of abstraction and ideal, of course -- making sense of the face of an idea-culture-thing that has been presented by its self through wartime propaganda.

What's missing here?

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.

Consider: Untitled 1

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/24/untitled-1.html

more information in fewer hands

Weekly News Digest from Info Today reports on the Thomson happenings:

On April 17, The Thomson Corp. announced that it had completed its acquisition of Reuters Group, PLC, forming Thomson Reuters, a provider of "intelligent information" for businesses and professionals in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, scientific, healthcare, and media markets. Thomson Reuters has more than 50,000 employees with operations in 93 countries on six continents and 2007 pro forma revenues of approximately $12.4 billion.

Update: it shouldn't go unnoticed that Thomson Reuters had to go through tough federal anti-trust scrutiny to make the merge. Librarians have a duty to develop collections of information from diverse sources... a few more major consolidations like this & there won't be any diversity of database sources to speak of. Buy small press (and build homebrew) while you still can. I'm not knocking the value of what Thomson Reuters has to deliver, but I don't like being forced into smaller and smaller cattle chutes to get at what I need.

--

Reading: Not Loompanics Press anymore. Don't forget the value of niche info.
Listening: "Nutbush City Limits"

gale, readspeaker

At Library Journal, Michael Rogers reports that Gale's going to add text-to-audio software into 6 of its databases (including Opposing Viewpoints!)

Hope the voices aren't super canned and tinny sounding like other such audio/text programs are, but even if they are robotic I'll be very happy to have this tool handy. Yessir.

ok, so i'm a copycat

I'm a copycat too.
But man, I love me some playlist.com... been waiting for a really good .mp3 search engine for a while now. Love it maybe just as much as I do Pandora...
Enjoy while you can, before the RIAA or the CIA or Hillary Clinton or some other finger shaker takes it all away.
(You know, we ought to shake our fingers too every once in a while...)

sphering the square

News on AOL's Sphere deal at Information Today's Newsbreaks.
Comments here...

tags, cois, library thing

communities of interest, where descriptors have to be specific, exact, unambiguous...
tags are lazy, sloppy, hasty. taxonomies are cumbersome (cheap shot), unintuitive... but also unambiguous.
how to make tags for c.o.i.s unambiguous, precise? reference to the schema needed to define terms. building better schema, yes, but also building better ontological tools, meta-schematic maps that define where the references are, what they refer to (and when), and the context necessary to decide on one over another.

much more to learn.

how can library thing help us to make one instance of "rock" mean stone, and another instance mean the music? are tags a black hole? and they, don't they, still ultimately depend on the occasional human pruning, picking the "fucks" and "goddamns" from the record page once LT is integrated into your ILS?

we need better tagging tools.

this whole thing -- it has to be a 'how can we make this work better for us and our patrons' thing rather than a 'ooooh, i du-nnnnnnnnnnoooooo, should we or shouldn't we even dooooooo this' thing.
yes,
yes,
and hell yes. we need to do this. but smartly.