Doing more with less

Andrew Pace notes the perils of “doing more with less”.

A related question: If someone is saying that a public agency should do, say, 110% of its previous work with 90% of its previous resources, then who is getting that 10% of the resources that has been taken away, and why?

Capitalism and politics

“A capitalist society needs a political system and a set of political values that can accommodate the clashes of opposed interests without blowing up. That is what a party system provides. If the Irish dominate the city under the Democratic banner, the Italians can organize as Republicans and carve out a niche. Industries that benefit from protection can struggle peacefully against industries dependent on free trade. Class tensions can be ventilated and adjusted; after a Gilded Age of robber barons, a progressive income tax can, if the majority wishes, redress the social balance.
 
“A capitalist society that does not have a viable party system is a crisis waiting to happen. It is like a crab that cannot grow unless it throws off its shell from time to time. Social conditions and power relations are changing, but there is no way for these changes to work their way slowly into legislation and reform. Pressure for change builds until it becomes irresistible, and change when it comes can be abrupt and destabilizing.”

– Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pg. 309.

The good old days

“Today we reel at the speed of globalization and long for the placid, pastoral times of, say, Edwardian Britain in the years before World War I. Yet people living in those times did not think their lives were placid or that the pace of change was slow. As suffragettes chained themselves to the fence around the House of Commons, as Lloyd George took on the House of Lords, while revolution brewed in Ireland and the ominous German naval buildup relentlessly continued across the Channel, the Edwardians longed for the pastoral, peaceful days of an earlier time–when the pace of change was slower and society was more stable. They might long for the peaceful tranquility of Jane Austen’s England–forgetting that Austen wrote during the Napoleonic Wars, when the world seemed on fire to those who lived in it.”

– Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pg. 286.

The limits of Stewart and Colbert

“Political jokes were not a form of resistance. They were a release valve for pent-up popular anger. People told jokes in their neighborhood bars or on the street because they coveted a moment of liberation in which they could let off a bit of steam. That was in the interests of the Nazi leadership, no matter how humorlessly they may have portrayed themselves in the public sphere. Many Germans were conscious of the dark side of the Nazi regime. They were also annoyed at laws forcing them to do this or that and at party bigwigs who treated themselves to lives of luxury while making arbitrary decisions about the lives of others. But that didn’t translate into anti-Nazi protests. Those people who let off a bit of steam with a few jokes didn’t take to the streets or otherwise challenge the Nazi leadership.

“Conversely and significantly, the vast majority of the joke tellers who were denounced and brought before special Nazi courts received a mild punishment, if any. Usually they were let off with a warning. ‘Whispered jokes’ were a surrogate for, and not a manifestation of, social conscience and personal courage.”

– Rudolph Herzog (trans. by Jefferson Chase), Dead Funny : Humor in Hitler’s Germany (Brooklyn : Melville House, 2011), pgs. 2-3.

Mathematics

“Reducing discovery to the act of making logical deductions from a set of axioms is what makes mathematics different from science. [...] [Greek mathematicians chose] to begin their deductions from a set of axioms whose truth was not open to question. These axioms cannot be proved within the confines of the subject because they define what the subject is. If we change the axioms, we change the subject.”

– John Tabak, The History of Mathematics: Numbers, Revised Edition (New York : Facts on File, 2011), pgs. 160-61.

Amy Winehouse, 1983-2011

In the wake of Amy Winehouse’s death, many people (intending wit, I suppose) have said that she should have gone to rehab. They miss the point of the song, and miss it in a characteristically American way. In the United States, we see problems as fixable. But many problems cannot be fixed, they can only be borne. And sometimes they become unbearable.

A toast in gratitude and sadness to the memory of Amy Winehouse.

Un-making a connection

[U]nderlying each connection are the core beliefs that the parties about to communicate hold about each other. These colour the whole relationship. If you think a person is incompetent then no matter how much you try to mask that belief it percolates as a subtle energy through the relationship, informing the feeling and nature of how you connect with the person. If you hold a person as creative, resourceful and whole [...] then this also impacts on the energy of the relationship.

– Anthony Eldridge-Rogers

The breakup of the old library, Part 3

(Previous posts: #1, #2, #3)

After 20 years of steady but containable erosion of the library’s customary position as an institution that controlled everything within itself, the final (and ultimately fatal) blow came in the mid-1990′s: The World Wide Web.

As the Web grew from a promising novelty into an ubiquitous part of American life, the traditional structure of the American library made less and less sense:

• Libraries no longer selected all of the content that patrons came to the library to use, and the content they did select was steadily becoming a smaller part of what patrons were coming there to use.
• The content that patrons used within the library could change or disappear without librarians knowing or being able to bring it back.
• The main finding aid for this information was no longer provided by librarians, but by search engines. Attempts to stretch the library catalog to include Internet content had only minor successes.
• Patrons could use library-provided content without ever setting foot in the library.
• The case for intellectual freedom became more complicated as libraries had to move from defending the rights of patrons to access materials selected by trained librarians to defending the right of patrons to access any legal material on the Internet.

In short, patrons were more and more going through the library rather than going to the library. The days of the self-contained and self-controlled library are over. What can replace it? And who can make that replacement succeed?

The soppy mush of feeling

But he became most furious when he read the poet’s nostalgic invocation immediately corrected for reasons of prudence and opportunism: “Ah with what warm heart would I stay with you . . . with what warm heart! But, little cypress trees, ah let me go . . .” Really and truly scandalous, was his comment. “It’s as if I were to say, ‘Magris, I’m going to Paris; shall I call in on your grandmother?’ – ‘Oh, that would be splendid. Poor old dear, she’ll be so pleased.’ – ‘But, you know, I’m only there for two days, and I’ve a lot to do, and she’s out in the suburbs, I’d have to change trains three times and then take a bus . . .’ – ‘Oh go to hell then, who asked you for anything!’”

He wanted to teach us to despise the soppy mush of feeling, the false generosity that for an instant, and in all good faith, promises the sun, moon and stars, convinced of its own generous impulse, but that for all sorts of sound, valid reasons draws back when it comes to the point.

– Claudio Magris (trans. by Patrick Creagh), Danube (New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), pgs. 228-29.

 
I am reminded of something I did about six years ago that I will continue to remember often and continue to feel every bit as sad about every time.

The breakup of the old library, Part 2

(Previous posts: #1, #2)

The second crack in the century-long stability of American libraries began to arrive in the 1980s: Online databases.

These databases vastly expanded patron access to periodicals without requiring an equally vast building program. The percentage of library collection budgets spent on these databases has steadily increased during the last 30 years.

They also continued the breakup of the old, stable model of how libraries worked:

• Databases did not remain as physical items housed within and controlled by the library (remember CD-ROM towers?). To access most databases, patrons no longer even have to go to the library.
• Databases were not stable. Vendors often added and dropped titles, complicating efforts to maintain the accuracy of the catalog.
• Libraries did not control database finding aids. Each database had its own interface and thesaurus (and interfaces sometimes changed). Librarians had trouble maintaining mastery of all of them (if they had achieved that mastery to begin with).

Automated card catalogs and online databases were two notable cracks in the old library bottom line: That the library controlled everything within the library. The third and final crack, though, would be the one that finally brought the structure down.

The breakup of the old library, Part 1

In my last post, I described the characteristics of libraries during the century before 1975. During that century, libraries faced no fundamental changes and were fully in control of how they presented themselves to patrons. That stability and control have now been shattered. Why?

The first crack came with the automation of library card catalogs in the 1970s and 1980s. Though a positive change on the whole, automation had three negative effects on libraries:

• Most libraries no longer maintained their own finding aid, the catalog. They continued to provide the content, but the actual software was bought from vendors.
• Most libraries no longer maintained the interface to their finding aid, the OPAC; that, too, was bought from vendors, most of which did not allow libraries sufficient ability to customize their OPACs.
• The new OPACs did not work well with the old subject headings, which had been designed to be browsed in a card catalog. Even after 30 years of development, OPACs do not enable patrons to easily browse traditional subject headings, thus crippling one of librarianship’s three canonical means of bibliographic access (those being: by author, by title, by subject).

Automation of the card catalog had great benefits for libraries, but it was also the first crack in their century-old enjoyment of stability and control. There would soon be others.

The old library

Until recently the online catalog continued to contain records only for items physically held by the library system. As libraries have entered into cooperative relationships, this principle of telling “what the library has” has eroded. In union catalogs that contain records from libraries of more than one institution, the concept was expanded to “what at least one of the cooperating libraries has.” More recently, the addition of Internet records has meant that a number of catalogs now contain records for “what the library can give access to,” including “what the library has.”

– Arlene G. Taylor, The Organization of Information (Westport, Conn. : Libraries Unlimited, 2004), pg. 8-9.

 
The library of (let’s say) 1875 to 1975 looked like this:

• The library would buy discrete and unchanging physical items to become part of a coherent collection.
• The library would catalog those items to identify their physical and intellectual characteristics and determine what library patrons would want from them.
• The library maintained a finding aid for those items (the card catalog) and the interface to that finding aid (the layout of a catalog card).
• The library would select every item in the library and controlled access to those items.

The bottom line for the libraries of 1875 to 1975:

• THE LIBRARY CONTROLLED EVERYTHING WITHIN THE LIBRARY.

That would change.

How other people organize libraries

[W]e have all kinds of tools that are organized to aid in the process of finding information that we need: telephone books, directories, dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographies, indexes, catalogs, museum registers, archival finding aids, and databases, among others.

– Arlene G. Taylor, The Organization of Information (Westport, Conn. : Libraries Unlimited, 2004), pg. 2.

 
Before reading this passage, I had never thought about how little of the organization in your average library is done in-house. Most of the information resources we provide have been structured by other people. The overall classification of the books comes from
OCLC or the Library of Congress. The records for the titles we buy are usually provided by OCLC or a vendor, and then edited to match local standards. The article and citation databases we subscribe to are designed by their vendors. Libraries do have some leeway to arrange their fiction and non-book collections, and can sometimes get creative with their websites, but the core of the organizing is brought in from somewhere else.

Libraries: The original mashups.

Why we organize

We organize because we need to retrieve.

– Arlene G. Taylor, The Organization of Information (Westport, Conn. : Libraries Unlimited, 2004), pg. 1.

 
Leaving aside the folks who organize because of OCD…

Is there a good study out there about the range of ways that library patrons use to retrieve? Librarians organize for patrons, yet it seems to me that we rarely talk about how those patrons approach the task of retrieving, and whether our methods of organizing serve their ways of retrieving.

What Americans expect

When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect—we even demand—that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house not only to shelter us, to keep us warm in winter and cool in summe, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not to rock the boat or take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion, yet not to think less of others for not believing. We expect our nation to be strong and great and vast and varied and prepared for every challenge; yet we expect our “national purpose” to be clear and simple, something that gives direction to the lives of nearly two hundred million people and yet can be bought in a paperback at the corner drugstore for a dollar.

We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for “excellence,” to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to a “church of our choice” and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God.

Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

– Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Atheneum, 1987 [1962]), pgs. 3-4.

 
I agree with all of the above, and yet I also have to say that part of what makes Americans exceptional and great is that by expecting the seemingly impossible, we sometimes achieve it.