Author: jessamyn

late to the book meme bandwagon

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m late to this meme but I always think it’s important to not only stress our librarian skills with computers, and our facility with people, but also the fact that many of us read, a lot, an awful lot. So with that in mind:

Total number of books I’ve owned: My books are spread out over three houses and two states. While I try to get rid of books I’m done reading, I don’t always do this. I also have some encyclopedia/dictionary sets [is the OED 20 volume set one book, or 20? do bound periodicals count?] that I feel like I need for reference purposes. My ballpark estimate is somewhere between 500 and a thousand, but I haven’t visited a lot of them lately.

Last book I bought: We went to the five college book sale in Hanover and I came home with a bagful of books for about $8. One of them was called How to Shit in the Woods. One was a nature guide to trees. One was Moving Mars. One was a John Grisham somethingorother. I find that with good libraries and a strong network of book-loaning friends and family, I almost never have to buy books. I can’t remember the last full price book I bought, I think it’s been years.

Last book I read: As if this writing it’s The Secret Life of Bees. By the end of the day it will probably be American Gods. This page is the final arbiter.

Last book I finished: I’m not sure why this is different than the above question, there are very very few books that I read but do not finish. The last book I didn’t finish was a book about the Slow Food movement, I think it may have lost something in translation.

Five books that mean a lot to me: this is a static respresentation of a shifting list
The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers [librarian love story written for smart people]
Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder [Tom West is my dad]
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin [my intro to magical realism]
Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book by Shel Silverstein [an early book I enjoyed when I may have been too young to fully appreciate it, with some delightful subversive humor]
Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins [whimsical and poetic, gave me the strength to go on and get out of high school and the wretched suburbs and live the way I wanted to live. I use some parts of this book in my technology instruction to this day]

Five people I’d like to see do this as well: Greg, Dawn, Kate, Peter and Maryellen, Cathy

revisting relevance

Posted on by jessamyn

I was poking around on Amazon.com today and noticed two things

  1. They have changed my name from Jessamyn Charity West to Jessamyn West which means that clicking on my name gets you all the books by the other Jessamyn West. I can only imagine why this happened and, to be fair, they would be changing it back to how it was before. I complained and they changed it, but not before telling me that this sort of munging of author names was “a feature” of their system. The change is recent, the Google cache still contains my full name.
  2. Amazon’s Statistically Improbable Phrases which is a whole new approach to the sticky issue of “aboutness” Add ot this the existing tools of concordance and readibility and you’ve got two things 1) strong “keeping up with the Joneses” pressure to submit to the Inside the Book program 2) the beginnings of cataloging by robots.

This all came to me a day after getting a fat envelope from Sandy Berman which included, among other things some articles he had written about “bibliocide by cataloging” where subject headings assigned by OCLC or LoC or OCLC member libraries and passed down to thousands of libraries via copy cataloging are so vague as to be essentially useless as finding aids. Do these Amazon features solve this problem or compound it? Eli also expands a bit on what I said about Google a few days ago; these issues are not disconnected.

“Why catalog in-house? Why catalog locally? And why not outsource the whole operation? Because critical, creative catalogers within individual systems are the last and only bulwarks against the often error-laden, access-limiting, and alienating records produced by giant, distant, and essentially unaccountable networks and vendors.”

threats to digital information

Posted on by jessamyn

JD Lasica’s list of Top 10 assaults on digital liberties could just as easily be titled “Top 10 assaults on digital libraries” as diglet rightly points out. Of particular note to libraries is #10. I’ve been hearing more and more about libraries being strongarmed into consortia that requires them to forego IT and filtering decisionmaking, independent collection development and in some cases even in-house cataloging staff. Keep your eyes open to changed in your digital information environment, and the legislation that constantly surrounds it, so that you can be an advocate for access by your patrons.