The Mock Turtle tells Alice how he went to school in the sea, taking courses like Reeling and Writhing and Fainting in Coils. He means these to relate to Alice’s own lessons of Reading and Writing and Painting in Oils. Likewise, I blog while walking the shoreline between the humanity of art and the science of information. ucontent: new book on user-generated content
UContent: The Information Professional’s Guide to User-Generated Content by Nick Tomaiuolo
Experienced reference and instruction librarian Nick Tomaiuolo’s (aka the Web 2.0 Librarian) new book is a must-have for all librarians involved in digital content. UContent clearly describes various user-generated content (UGC) tools and how librarians can implement these in their library work and personal development.
UContent is targeted toward the beginner in UGC but tricks and tips will be welcomed by more advanced users. UContent isn’t pretty. It’s a bare-bones how-to do-it-yourself approach, but it works.
Since the content of the book can easily become outdated, Tomaiuolo has created an excellent website to accompany the book. The most important chapters are on blogs, audio and video services, social bookmarking, and Flickr.
Tomaiuolo provides an overview of the service as well as interviews with expert users or developers. Most importantly, he demonstrates how these services have been implemented by other librarians. This provides real-life demonstrations of the possibilities of UGC and acts as a jumping-off point for developing your own content. And, like any good librarian, he has a terrific bibliography for each chapter. UContent is sure to become a handy reference book for librarians as the enter the Web 2.0 world of UGC.
(I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review)
books for librarians
Some time last year my library acquired The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel. At the time, it reinvigorated me as a librarian. His ruminations and historical accounts had me considering the book as a precious community treasure.
During that time, I also attended the 2011 ACRL conference in Philadelphia. I attended a lecture by Jaron 
Lanier. Sadly, as it was scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday not many people attended. But for me his ideas and blunt honesty as a Silicon Valley insider really awakened me. He made mention that libraries and publishing (as we are today) are doomed. He suggested we stop trying to play technological one-upmanship and refocus on the ROMANCE of the physical – the library space and the book as object. He was slightly critical of librarians and our desire (stereotypical or real) to “fit in” with other academics. We tend to want to be considered intellectuals according to other intellectuals’ criteria. We never really created our own scholarship, in a sense. Lanier seems to be a “you’re doomed, but you can still have fun dancing around the flames” kind of guy.
I’m ok with that.
So, I got over feeling doomed and enjoyed the fire…temporarily. But about a year later I’m anxious about libraries and wondering why we seem so 19th century in our daily practices. Yesterday, while poking around my local library branch, I came across Manguel’s A Reader on Reading. This is a collection of essays in which Manguel poetically argues that reading makes humankind human. It’s a return to the printed word as a foundation of our evolution – and a bridge to our future. He considers Alice in Wonderland, Borges, Saint Augustine, and Judaism. Reading is the ultimate interdisciplinary practice.
Yet again Manguel is reminding me of the pleasures and responsibilities of being a gatekeeper to the book.
confessions of a former robo-reader
This week Barbara Fister of Library Babel Fish wrote about the robotic grading of research papers commonly employed for grading standardized testing. This is something I know about first-hand. I had been an essay grader for a to-remain-unnamed-large-educational-company before they shut down my campus in favor of robots. Fortunately, it was temp work and I didn’t take the lay-off personally. But replaced by a robot, well, that was embarrassing.
Fister cites Steve Kolowich’s Inside Higher Ed report on robo-readers. He discusses a study that found robo-readers scored essays very similarly to human readers. Mark D. Shermis, the dean of the College of Education at the University of Akron and lead author of the study, says, according to Kolowich, “that AES (automated essay scoring) software has not yet been able to replicate human intuition when it comes to identifying creativity.” However, creativity and original thought are not given much weight in standardized grading.
In order to grade an essay from a standardized test – say high school freshmen who were required to write an essay about a literary character overcoming adversity – we had to pass our own exam first. A day of learning the scoring rubric and practicing grading was followed by two, sometimes three, tests. We had to correctly grade the test essays according to the rubric in order to be assigned, and therefore paid, to grade the exams.
by brian j matis on flickr
In her article, aptly titled Robo-Research, Robo-Writing, Fister notes that ”making sense [in these essays] is not important, nor is building an argument with truthful information, so long as the sentence structure is correct; extra points for using a big word when a simple word would do.” This is true. Structure, grammar, and clarity of argument as developed in paragraphs and keywords rate higher than creativity and we, as human graders, had to be sure not to be swayed by clever insight or imaginative prose.
“Truth and meaning are irrelevant and so don’t count,” Fister says. This is also true. Incorrect details about a story line in classic literature or misinterpreting an author’s meaning are not graded.
This is why I was replaced by a robot. I don’t argue that I shouldn’t have been replaced by a robot. It could easily do my job. What does worry me is that…it could easily do my job. Standardized tests graded by robots will not graded differently than standardized tests graded by humans.
Many of these tests must be passed by students in order to graduate high school and are then used as first-line determiners by college admissions. Perhaps knowing that a robot could be deciding our students’ futures will refocus attention on the problems of our educational methods.
afterlives of the saints
Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith by Colin Dickey (Unbridled Books, 2012).
Dickey’s latest work is an interesting selection of saints – famous and forgotten, martyred and disfigured, the academics and the ignorant. Afterlives is not a collection of biographies; it is much more a postmodern investigation of their lives. A foundation in Catholicism is less necessary than being well-read in Joyce, Proust, Borges, Flaubert, and Foucault. Because of this, those merely curious about the more strange and macabre saint stories will be disappointed. While Dickey’s examinations can be, at times, tedious and feel forced, they invite the reader to reconsider complex life stories. His insights on the lives of saints in contemporary culture and faith are a welcome perspective in the scholarship.
(I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review)
bookmobile
April 11 was National Bookmobile Day. Yes, really. I feel I’d take the opportunity to express my lifelong dream of having a bookmobile.
Or biblio-donkey.
Camel bookmobile in Kenya via Street Use
Or biblio-camel, as I discovered via ALA’s Pinterest.
It is such a simple reward of providing reading material to those geographically removed from libraries or physically unable to visit. For all the necessary services libraries, particularly public libraries, provide, I think there is something wonderfully sweet and potentially life-altering reading a book, propped between your own hands while sitting in your own home.
Wading to the Bookmobile via the Library of Virginia
To celebrate, here is a collection of links of bookmobile goodness:
The Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Services holds annual conferences.
Musician turned film-maker Tom Corwin is working on a documentary, Behind the Wheel of the Bookmobile. His website is a generally terrific source for all this books-on-wheels.
John Amundsen’s article for American Libraries, Bookmobiles: A Proud History: A Promising Future, is a nice tribute. For more articles, Google News (for the keyword bookmobile) demonstrates that the bookmobiles are still going strong and a necessary part of library services and access.
Awesomeness from Amsterdam; this one travels to schools with over 7,000 books!
Larry Nix, aka Library History Buff, created a Tribute to the Bookmobile.
Bookmobiles Parnassus on Wheels Flickr page for some images of the books on wheels, old and new.
If you haven’t read The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger, please borrow the copy from your local library!
theChive writes about artist Raul Lemesoff’s Weapon of Mass Instruction, probably my favorite bookmobile of all time.
Weapon of Mass Instruction via theChive
the little red guard
The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir by Wenguang Huang (Riverhead, 2012).
Huang tells of growing up in Maoist China with a careful blend of objective journalism and bittersweet memory. The focal point of his narrative is his grandmother’s coffin – a contraband object in a communist country that requires cremation. Huang’s grandmother clings to traditional beliefs of burial and keeping the family together after death so as to protect family members as they continue in life. The coffin becomes an object simultaneously uniting and destroying his immediate family, shaping the adolescent years of the author.
As a memoir of communist China, I became more attached to the characters in LuLu Wang’s The Lily Theater. However, Huang’s involvement in politics, as a young Red Guard and later active in the Cultural Revolution, is a refreshing new look at the complicated and delicate balance performed by citizens under Mao’s dictatorship. His enjoyable and easily read novel provides an open door for engaging in the history of a closed society.
(I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review)
miss peregrine’s home for peculiar children
Riggs, Ransom. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2011.
Ransom Riggs’ first novel blends fantasy prose, simple yet descriptive, with vintage photographs, the type of developed film mistakes we quickly and easily delete with today’s digital cameras. The photos are not compliments to the text; they are necessities for Riggs’ ultimate goal – that the reader believe every word is real.
Riggs has created a C. S. Lewis wardrobe for the 21st century – loopholes which lead to seemingly otherworlds that are really manifestations of our own. And, while Miss Peregrine’s peculiar children are not lions or witches, their supernatural talents only help to enhance their humanness. Easy to read, elements such as time travel, freak show oddities, and a lonely, bored teenage protagonist will appeal to young adult readers. Historical fiction, moral and ethical overtones, and a coming of age protagonist will keep more advanced readers interested. Some adults many feel bored by Jacob and his sixteen-year-old point of view, but I ask them to remember that the book was written for teens and didn’t we all feel like life was one long out-of-body experience at that age?
Regardless of age, all readers will be coming back to Miss Peregrine’s home for much, much more.
(I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a review.)
maissa toulet
A more modern and edgy version of the 16th century curiosity cabinet comes from Maissa Toulet who lives and works in Paris. In her artist statement, Toulet refers to her collections as “miniature museums or ex voto shrines” and as “story prompters…inviting the viewer to create his own fiction, the keys to his own enigmas.”
She is attracted to cabinets of curiosities, she says, because of “their jumble and organized disorder of natural objects, so incredibly strange that they easily fall over into the realm of imagination.” She continues, “I retained the cabinet of curiosities, not the science, but only the curious and troubling aspect (interview with France 24).”
Le Menagerie (2011)
Her current studio practice includes working within a boxed structure. Of this she says, “I like frames, enclosures and cloisters…I need limits, borders: strangely, I feel inside freer.” Toulet uses glass to create her vitrines because it is protective yet fragile. Glass is both a barrier and a window. Her miniature worlds are organized and clean. And impenetrable.
Motycka-Weston reminds us that a driving force in the culture of curiosity collecting was “the rule of containment and encapsulation (43),” in other words, possession and objectification. Toulet’s dioramas reinforce both our obsession with the miniature and our continued desire to control, to contain, the natural world.
Echographie (2007)
Author of an excellent book on cabinets of curiosities, Patrick Mauries mentions them as “domestic decoration,” noting that they have inspired a great many everyday interiors, throughout Europe, since the 1970s (212). He concludes that the wunderkammer moved into the art gallery and then back into the home as the early twentieth century became obsessed with “unrestrained mania for bric-a-brac (214).” Toulet prefers to be at home and this likely influences her designs to feel at place in the home. In an article for France 24, Blade notes that there has been a “renewed interest in nature in recent years” and that Toulet’s work is prime for attracting designers and home shoppers. Praise for her work is often found on home décor blogs and news feeds.
Momies Bouteilles (2010)
“The animal became [a] decorative object,” he notes. In an era of animal endangerment, deforestation, and new ways of mining oils and minerals, work like Toulet’s reignites our desire for preservation. Toulet’s sculptures of taxidermy and garments straddle a fine line between adorable keepsake and morbid fascination. The new trend in collecting and displaying taxidermy, nature finds, kitsch, and other oddities (East) helps explain why Toulet’s curiosity cabinets and her hybrid sculptures are often praised by interior designers. They refer to the authenticity and anti-modern style of the 16th century wunderkammer yet maintain a clean line and post-modern bareness.
Blade. “The Spirit of the Cabinet of Curiosities.” France 24 02 May 2011. Web.
East, Elyssa. “The Stuff of Style.” The Philadelphia Inquirer 2 December 2011. Web.
Mauriès, Patrick. Cabinets of Curiosities. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Print.
Motycka Weston, Dagmar. “Worlds in Miniature: Some Reflections on Scale and the Microcosmic Meaning of Cabinets of Curiosities.” Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 13.1 (2009) : 37-48. Print.
as we may think (and controlled vocabulary)
Reading Dr. Bush’s article from 1945 is an interesting way to reflect on the development of technology and how it assists people. His description of a “memex” allows us to truly consider how much online catalogs, databases, and the Internet do for us (6). Gladly, in his attention on the future of mechanization, he differentiates between “creative thought and essentially repetitive thought” and focuses on aids that will eliminate the latter (3). But can we separate the two processes? Are they intrinsically linked, working simultaneously? If we mechanize the one, what happens to the other?
the memex
It seems often there is a fine line between rote and deep understanding. Bush is quick to note “that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record (1).” In essence, this has not changed. As Mann points out, we, in our research, often barely skim the surface of what is available on a particular subject matter. Bush is concerned with technological ways to access this material, in an effort to eliminate restrictions (“associative indexing (7)”), while Mann expresses the need for us to re-learn information seeking in more appropriate ways. Mann wants us to realize the full potential of the traditional library science model; to discover the successful foundations of the classification system, catalog, and published bibliographies and indexes.
We often physically browse the shelves: once we find a title or subject heading in the catalog, we leave the computer terminal and head for the stacks without using the controlled vocabulary available in the catalog. We are happy with the sources found next to one another on the shelf because our expectations for our search are so elemental (42). However, the controlled vocabulary available with the record for each book is so effective that it makes “virtually every entry in the catalog a source of cross-references to other, related entries (39).” Mann notes that we have been poorly taught our research skills and this is why we stick to the stacks and literally scanning row by row for what we want. But is a lifetime of bad library skills lessons to blame for our simplicity?
Bush assures us that “the world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it (1).” Notice he doesn’t write something good is bound to come of it. Just something. And so, I wonder often about that question, perhaps unanswerable: how much information is too much information? Are we able to digest all the resources available to us? Would knowing all that has been written on a subject encourage us to find the best sources among that grouping or cause us to shut down with the worries about lack of time and intellectual inabilities? Will we take pride in our efforts or be mentally drained and perhaps even confused? Knowing that the specific answer to your specific question is out “there” is great news. To find it, we likely need to rely on Bush’s “new profession of trail blazers” which means there will be work for all of us new librarians, right (8)? But I tend to believe that most wisdom is received when you are lost on your way to somewhere important.
Dr. Bush makes reference to two types of selection: simple selection, where one looks at the larger picture and then refocuses given a set of characteristics that he/she defines, and one more complex, like dialing a certain telephone number to reach a certain person. I truly see the value in the ability, aided by technology, to find “just one of a million possible stations (5).” I suppose I worry that its ease and quickness will encourage us to look for ways to eliminate simple selection, those processes of berry picking and browsing. The library has a difficult task: it should make suitable resource location and selection simple enough for the average user (with as few steps as possible) while allowing for the non-linear creative practices that can occur when a subject keyword search brings up unrelated results. Perhaps the fact that most of the dictionary was written by a madman should suggest we cannot always rely on the rationale of words to move forward.
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, 176, 101-108.
Mann, T. (1993). Library Research Models: A Guide to Classification, Cataloging, and Computers (pp.25-56). New York: Oxford University Press.
madeline von foerster
Redwood Cabinet, 2008
Inspired by the Old Masters, Surrealists, alchemy, and folklore, Madeline von Foerster paints wonder. She uses religious imagery and iconography to elevate the conversation on contemporary topics, most notably environmental destruction (Direct Art). Of her influences, she says, “I was trying to bring the reverential, hushed mood of such works into a completely different context, a different mythology, in fact.”
This mood is fostered by reliquary chambers she visited in Germany; since then, the chamber has become integral to her work, framing the objects within literally and figuratively (la Morte). “I wanted to correlate two things,” von Foerster says, “the cabinets of curiosities of the Enlightenment era and also the reliquaries and saint statues that were their medieval antecedents (white hot).”
Also highlighting the sacred aura of collected objects depicted is the actual painting process. von Foerster uses a 15th century technique developed by the Flemish masters, oil and egg tempera. A time-consuming process, the final layer of paint glows, revealing new shadows and emphasizing detail. But what is of most interest to me is the artist’s use of the cabinet or the chamber to emphasize relationships between selected objects. “These cabinets keep coming up in my paintings! I’m kind of obsessed with them,” she says in an interview with blogger JL Schnabel. “I feel that they say something about how we humans relate to nature.”
Rhino Reliquary, 2010
Von Foerster’s use of the cabinet or frame to contain her painted objects is appropriate. Consumer behaviorist Russell Belk reminds us that “collected objects take on a non-utilitarian ‘sacred’ status (317)”. Museum Studies professor Susan Pearce agrees, stating “the container (whether it be envelope, box, or room) chosen to house the collection defines a sacred space (320-21).”
Ex Mare, 2010
Each reliquary or cabinet represented in a painting is an actual tree species and the plants and animals depicted are those dependent on the tree, indicating a connection between the container and the contained. Of this, von Foerster says, “we have this desire to festishistically collect and display things, take them out of their place, and somehow understand them by doing that, but in a way, they are totally better understood in their own environment (white hot).” In this manner, von Foerster is putting the nature collection back in its original cabinet, the environment, simultaneously critiquing our habits of ecological destruction and obsession with possessing nature.
In a review of von Foerster’s work, Schnabel comments, “focusing on the convergence of man and nature within the framework of collected relics and natural specimens the work is imbued with a sense of a lost, otherworldly era, while bringing current anxieties about the future to the surface with a beautifully subtle approach.”
Bufo Periglenes (Golden Toad), 2011
Belk, Russell W. “Collectors and Collecting.” Pearce, 317-326.
Pearce, Susan. “The Urge to Collect.” Pearce 157-159.
Pearce, Susan, ed. Interpreting Objects and Collections. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.