This Book Is Overdue!

As a devout library lover in my youth, though finding very little reason to visit in my older years (and actually feeling sad about this) due to largely to lack of reading time... this was a fun book to read. It does its job of making libraries seem exciting, and full of awesomeness. The writer expresses the loves that are close to all library-lover's hearts: books, collecting books, organizing books, reading book, knowing about books and the stuff we found in books -- oh and all that other media and stuff as well. She expresses this while describing the struggles, experiments, and changes made in libraries in these internet times.

As a fairly adept computer/database programmer and all-around "IT" guy, and developer of a web site that currently gets about 500,000 unique visits per month, I felt that she could have used the thing she stresses many times in the book that libraries need now: competent computer/IT consulting/staff. Pretty much every library computer/web interface I've seen (in Canada) has sucked extremely badly. Excusing this by saying these companies who supply these systems (and horrifically expensive prices) were the only ones capable of handling such large collections at the time is just ridiculous to those of us who have some knowledge of these things. Excusing great mystery of the missing holds as finally (after how long?!) as being not the fault of the software, but of the librarians, equally misdiagnoses the problem. Were there no simple audit trails? Do the developers have no respect for data integrity?!!! Excusing this on having to interface with or work on top of legacy systems and structures, while certainly a consideration and a constraint, does not seem credible to me.

It's truly broken my heart to see the crap my beloved libraries have installed, and tied themselves to. And continue to. The IT consultants they seem to end up with these days seem more to be sales people --- selling them a bill of goods. A short term we-want-to-be-hip-and-up-to-date solution tied to specific devices, or pathetic DRM schemes.

And the length of time the author spends in Second Life is, to me, also rather startling. She does mention the lag and glitches. But she doesn't mention the relatively steep learning curve and hardware requirements just for entry. She describes the scenes she participates in that world with beautiful imagination: the (virtual) reality is vastly (if not infinitely) more clunky. Yeah, it's interesting and fun that a group of librarians have gravitated there and done interesting things... but Second Life is rather rather old technology by this point, which never really took off as expected: it's a niche of which you can say at least it did better than all of the other "revolutionary" virtual reality environments that were supposed to change the way we interacted with computers. Admittedly it's been years since I looked at it, and frankly I felt like I had entered a time machine and gone back about five years to hear such glowing reviews of it in this book. Five years!

I was more interested in the social activism side of librarians; and some of the history of library initiatives was quite interesting.

Lately, though I have no "information systems" training, I have found myself helping a local non-profit organization (for free) get their old, approximately 2000 volume, card catalog into a computer. I set up Koha for them (an excellent, free, open-source, library software -- even if it feels a bit hodge-podge) and wrote up documentation on the cataloging process, and circulation. Actually I've ended up doing the input for 1500 of the volumes myself in my spare time over the last year. I've become very familiar with MARC (in it's various flavours), Z39.50, worldcat, and related things.

I've also become rather intimate with the blessed cards, and all their peculiarities. Notes written on them by librarians 20 years ago which are now indecipherable. At several points the cart catalog was gone through and a system of small lines, dots or checkmarks were added to the corners of cards indicate some sort of status. No one really remembers what the marks meant -- and what they do remember no one knows if the information is still valid. There are professinionally printed cards with LCC numbers. But most of the cards are manually typed: I am amazed by the skill of the old typewriter formatting! So much time and love went into these cards. Little details. They were lucky to have had a real librarian labouring with love on these. Some cards are hand written...
the physical cards themselves are a treasure which in some ways I hate to supplant.

Perhaps we will image them, and add the card catalog as an item to the online database as a curiosity. (Most are already photographed as part of our digitizing process.) Some amateur librarian in the future who cares about this little library may like to just randomly flip through some of the card images -- for some nostalgic fun, and inspiration.

Anyhow, it was interesting to read the author's own, non-techie, struggle with the simple (yet so complex) business of saving web pages for herself. And it was nice she gave a vigorous and insightful nod to the importance of open source software in cataloging and storing information for the long term (even if it what she meant was "open formats").

I just wish i had more time.

Given that this book has been hyped by a good number of librarians in Librarian Blogsville, I resisted picking it up. I am not much into reading stuff that seems to be over-hyped. In the end, I picked it up because I saw it in the new books shelf of my local public library, so I figured it would be a low risk reading. The book does not even live up to the hype.

When I started reading, I noticed right away that it has a fanboy tone to it, and I am not using the term in a good way. The book seems to be written more for non-librarians and people outside the profession. Those of us in the profession already know most of what is in the book. I wanted to think that it was a good thing that someone would write something positive about librarians in this age when governments and communities want to cut library funding left and right while people think everything is online (it is not, contrary to a lot of wishful thinking, nor will it all be online anytime soon). If nothing else, the book is a pretty quick read. If you are a librarian, as I said, you probably know a good amount of the material, so you can likely skim parts of the book without feeling you missed anything. For instance, if you are a librarian blogger, or you at least follow library blogs, you can safely skip the chapter on librarian bloggers. There is nothing new here that you have not seen before.

The best parts of the book, at least the ones that resonated with me, were the chapter on Radical Reference, the one on the Connecticut Four, and the profile on the New York Public Library. The Radical Reference folks are a good example of what librarians do best in terms of helping a community right at the street level. The Connecticut Four chapter is a must read if you do not know who they are or what they did to fight for your right of privacy. They fought a government more than willing to set aside the Constitution and your rights for the sake of security. What was that thing Benjamin Franklin said about those who are willing to give up their freedom for security? These guys were not willing to give up their freedom, and they fought and won. Be sure to thank a librarian for they are one of the few folks these days willing to stand up for your rights. Finally, the NYPL piece shows a real tragedy, in spite of the good work this institution does, in terms of forsaking specialized, often unique knowledge and resources, for the short term chimera of more foot traffic. Folks may try to spin it, but that is what it boils down to.

In the end, the book has a good moment or two, but overall it just tries too hard to promote the hipster librarian image a little too hard. Sure, we are trying to get away from the shushing librarian with a bun image, but this book goes to the other extreme. I feel the book could have been more, but it failed and took an easy route. I think some people should read it, to get a sense of some of the good things librarians do these days, but be careful not to fall for the excessive hype and attempt to be too cool. If you have to keep proclaiming how cool you are, you are not.