2010 reading list, a year end summary

Posted on by jessamyn

I made an effort to make time for reading this year. The combination of this and a lot of airplane time meant more good books read. Here are previous year end lists: 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. My booklist lives in a separate blog and it has its own RSS feed.Here’s the wrap-up of what I read in 2010.

number of books read in 2010: 48
number of books read in 2009: 39
number of books read in 2008: 31
number of books read in 2007: 53
number of books read in 2005: 86
number of books read in 2004: 103
number of books read in 2003: 75
number of books read in 2002: 91
number of books read in 2001: 78

average read per month: 4

average read per week: .92
number read in worst month: 2 (Jan/June)
number read in best month: 7 (July)
percentage by male authors: 73
percentage by female authors: 27
fiction as percentage of total: 60
non-fiction as percentage of total: 40
percentage of total liked: 90
percentage of total ambivalent: 9
percentage of total disliked: 1

I read a lot of books on a few topics this year: art history/theft/discovery, cybercrime novels and a few victorian mysteries and some graphic novels. Still not really on the ebook bandwagon. Still enjoying reading paper books in bed. Still finishing a few books I started in 2010, I expect this trend to continue. Wish me luck, and happy reading in 2011!

Morris Cohen – spitfire legal librarian, RIP

Posted on by jessamyn

I first became aware of Morris Cohen because he has the same name as my grandfather only spelled slightly differently. We exchanged emails a few times and I finally met him at Yale when I was in town for the Reblaw conference. He went out of his way to find a time we could have coffee and chitchat about quasi-radical librarianship and he made an impression on me as both a deeply principled and interesting person as well as someone who cared about mentoring and passing on his legacy. I was saddened to learn of his passing this week. There are good obituaries available at the New York Times and Library Journal.

Google Books ngrams – on Hegel and Hitler and OCR

Posted on by jessamyn

So hey this is interesting. I’ve skipped a lot of the Google Books ebookstore stuff lately because I’m honestly not sure what to make of it. And I don’t buy books anyhow. But a friend mentioned this Google Labs Ngram viewer, a fun tool that lets you search the full corpus of the Google Books databases. Here’s a New York Times article about it and data geeks should read the article Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books (free reg. required – click for PDF ILL) or nose around in the datasets. I did my own dopey search pictures above – Hegel vs. Hitler. And here’s what’s interesting. The big jump in the late 1940’s is fairly predictable, but who was talking about Hitler in 1620?

I clicked through and poked around some and here’s what I found. No one was talking about Hitler. OCR is, as you know, imperfect. So the words that Google Books’ optical character recognition thought of as “Hitler” were actually words like “Ruler” and “bitter” and “herbe.” How about that?

“You May See an Increase in Patrons” – IRS kicks paper tax filers out of the nest.

Posted on by jessamyn

We can talk about whether there’s really a problem with people not knowing how to use a computer in the abstract. I think my life is enriched by having access to and knowledge about technology, but it’s tough to make the argument that lack of access/knowledge makes other people’s lives worse. That is, until people suddenly need to find a way to get tax forms so that they can file their mandatory tax reporting, or they need to learn to do their taxes online. That is, if they know how to use a computer. The IRS sent this update in September (pdf). I don’t know about your library but many of ours don’t get paper forms either. Brian talked about the hilarity that is the IRS’s understatement “You May See an Increase in Patrons”

With the continued growth in electronic filing and to help reduce costs, the IRS will no longer mail paper tax packages that typically arrive in January of each year. If you still wish to use a paper form, the IRS has several options available to help you obtain paper copies of individual forms and instructions, including:
● Accessing our forms and instructions online at IRS.gov. You can quickly download the latest products from our site.
● Dropping by your local IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center.
● Going to your local post office or library (if they participate in the federal tax products program) [emphasis mine.

So hey, 2011 is around the corner. We should probably get ready for this.