time warner rewrites the postal rates?

 

This morning’s Democracy Now  had a brief bit on the proposed changes to media postal rates.  In short,  the Postal Board of Governors have a plan on the table was apparently directly proposed by Time Warner, in which regressive rates  correspond to volume of publication, thus benefiting corporate mags and endangering smaller and independent publications. Which means serials budgets are going to have to take yet another punch. FreePress has an action kit up.

documenting tragedy on the web

Most librarians spend at least some part of their working lives in places that are to varying degrees, public, and I think it’s no exaggeration to say that faith in public spaces is an implicit part of the profession. In the wake of the events at Virginia Tech yesterday, it’s hard not to see the public spaces in the library and university where I work with a certain degree of weariness.

The public spaces on the internet served as the most important arena for exchange of information on the events yesterday. Almost every news story cited a Facebook or Myspace page or a livejournal entry as a source. The Wikipedia entry and discussion on the event hashed out validity of sources and the semantics of tragedy. And then the jarring cell phone footage on Liveleak was among the realest indicators that this gruesome event had actually happened. The events as documented on the social web became the authority.

MTV was among the first to track web reactions, and the Washington Post has a fairly full blog roundup. Mydeathspace.com, a site that tracks online profiles of the deceased, has links to Facebook and Myspace profiles for many of the victims at Virginia Tech. The New York Times is soliciting comments and photos of the victims. After 9/11, the print edition of the NYT ran photos and profiles of victims, which at that point felt immediate and personal- it’s clear now that rapid coverage is essential, and that anything not interactive would be useless. These past two days have made it ever so much more apparent that our social lives on the web are intractable, crucial, and part of the news and the historical record.

Released from the Vault

Since I know basically nothing about fashion and wear the same five things every week (thank god I work alone in a basement), I probably shouldn’t be posting about this, but Laura Ashley – a designer that seems to specialize in lacy kind of country gingham clothing, as well as poofy bedspreads and window treatments – has literally dipped into their design archive and released an all-things-old-are-here-again line in select stores and online this spring.

I think this is a nice idea, although I would personally look like an idiot in anything that was bright yellow, gingham printed, halter-topped, or all of the above.

quickstudy riffs on libraries, among other things

 

Scott McLemee’s posts on CrookedTimber and QuickStudy are some of the first things I read in my feeds, for their no-bs analysis of media, higher ed, punk, et al. Two great recent bits on libraries, via QS:

• Quoting Nick Reville: “If libraries didn’t already exist, there’d be no way they could ever come into existence now. Can you imagine telling the publishing industry that the government was going to pay to set up buildings where they gave away their product for free?” (Moreover, is it any more certain that our current government views unrestricted public access to a comprehensive body of information as the ultimate threat?)
• Quoting former Dallas Morning News book critic Jerome Weeks, on his departure from the paper and the current state of literate culture: “[R]eading doesn’t really sound like work to you. But it is. Otherwise, we wouldn’t pay researchers, law clerks, teachers or librarians. OK, so we don’t pay them much….”

Library as Fortress

What would you do if you were Harry Dean Stanton, it was 1997 (although it was really 1981), Manhattan Island had been turned into a no-rules maximum security prison, and you had to find a good place to live? Why you would figure out how to manufacture gasoline for The Duke (who is Isaac Hayes), and he would give you Adrienne Barbeau as a girlfriend and let you live in one of the best spots on the Island! And where would that be? The New York Public Library, of course. You even manage to strike oil in the reading room, so you can conveniently have your little oil rig right there. Also, your name is The Brain, so where else would you be living, really? Hopefully you can also figure out how to Escape from New York…

Some Considerations for the Home Library

When I first moved into a house with my dear friend Karen Longshore, she insisted upon organizing our bookshelves by cuteness. The cute books go on the shelves in the living room, while the uglies are cloistered in my bedroom.

Old Girl Scout Handbook, Intermediate Program: CUTE.

Pat Calfia’s neon orange and black Public Sex : UGS.

1965 edition of Sexual Inversion : CUTE.

Svenonious’s Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization: CUTE.

Taylor’s The Organization of Information: GROSS.

I felt my librarian sensibilities deeply compromised. Before moving in with Karen, I lived alone and had my own Anne Simmons system of arranging things loosely by subject and personal association, like FICTION or UNDERGRADUATE BOOKS. Despite a reverence for aesthetics, I felt that having the books in order created its own beauty, even if Suze Orman rested next to Ed Tufte (AUTHORS WITH SEMINARS). Alas, when one finds oneself at the intersection of professional proclivity and home decorating, it is often useful to ask “What would Martha Stewart do?”

Not only is Martha Stewart the pinnacle of stern lovliness–a quality many a librarian seeks to embody–she also has a lot to say about libraries (did anyone see when NYPL’s LeClerc was on her show?). In her latest reference work, Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook: The Essential Guide to Caring for Everything in Your Home, she devotes an entire chapter to the keeping of one’s home library. The chapter is divided into two sections, “Layout Basics” and “Repairing Books.”

Her tips range from the mundane (a “do:” “Use bookmarks. Don’t lay books face down.” a “don’t:” “Don’t write in your books.”),

to the unexpected but helpful (”Stack large or heavy books in piles, don’t stack them so high, however, that reaching for the bottom books will cause the pile to topple”),

to Florence Flood-style absurdity, (”If books are muddy, hold them closed and rinse them”).

And check out this good thing I saw on her site: Linen Dust Shields. A technique used in old Swedish libraries (what is it with Swedish Libraries?) which, in addition to protecting volumes from dust, gives a “neat appearance to uneven volumes.” Oh dear! Even on the cute shelves my books were uneven. Now that I know about Linen Dust Shields my library can have the utilitarian off-site-storage quality its been missing. Thanks Martha!

sunday tidbits

One of my favorite feeds is the NYT Obits. Yesterday’s crop included that of Elizabeth Kals Reilley, librarian, scholar, and collector of horticulture. Read this and tell me her legacy isn’t ridiculously glamorous, exciting, and inspiring. And yes, she held an actual MLS.

I was familiar with Good magazine through Gawker’s borderline-obsessive coverage, but hadn’t actually seen it until someone (with outside income?) left it around the library breakroom. The winter issue had this piece on the ARChive of Contemporary Music, which mentioned that the impetus for its founding was the fact that no established archive would take his massive and valuable record collection. (He’s since entered negotiations with Columbia.)

ArchivesNext had this post last week that asked why archives weren’t part of popular culture. Maybe it should start with more archives (and not just EMP and Bowling Green and a handful of other designated Pop sites) learning to understand and handle products of contemporary culture. Besides, it’s also an emerging workforce issue, because I have firsthand data that says that a large fraction of the white girls flocking to library school these days have current or prior experience as “record nerd girlfriends”, “movie nerd girlfriends”, and even “comic nerd girlfriends” and thus have been lectured extensively on proper care and handling of such materials.

Fiction–see cartoon

Check out Bruce McCall’s page-sized illustration in this week’s New Yorker’s “The Reading Room: A seasonal look at books?” In it he has envisioned the wackiest library ever. If one were to squint, it would look like your run-of-the-mill vaulted reading room.  Like many a spread in Highlights, however, it is actually a Hidden Pictures Playground. I don’t want to ruin your morning bus ride fun by picking out all the incongruities–but cell phones and iPods are strewn about, and there’s funny signage like, “Bums Only,” “Books on Cell Phone,” and “Autobiography see Myspace.com.”  There is also a victim. A white haired granny (with cane) being manhandled by a head phoned security guard for–get this–READING. Beyond the physical violence to which she is subjected, she’s further alienated by a ghastly combination of technology, ambivalence from fellow library users, and architectural grandeur.

The image left me feeling a little sour. I suppose one should expect this kind of old-fashioned Libraries These Days attitude from the New Yorker. Maybe I was just dazed by the Prince article a few pages earlier…

accessories vs. accessions?

A Myspace debate: Marc bags vs MARC records.

librarians and cats: a million dollar prospect

Iowa librarians get $1.25 million advance for a cat bio. The book, tentatively titled Dewey, a Small Town, a Library and the World’s Most Beloved Cat, tells the story of Dewey, a cat who lived in their library for 19 years. Makes me think that the bio of the surly homeless dudes who live in my library isn’t such a bad idea.