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• Most libraries no longer maintained their own finding aid, the catalog.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• Most libraries no longer maintained the interface to their finding aid, the OPAC; that, too, was bought from vendors, most of which did not allow libraries sufficient ability to customize their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.

Central European melancholy

Three songs that go well together:

• “Vienna” by Billy Joel
• “Vienna” by Ultravox
• “Leipzig” by Thomas Dolby

What accompanies us

Among all forms of prehistoric religion, the strangest and most difficult to understand in our own day seems the cult of the dead, the constant presence of the dead in every aspect of life. To a prehistoric man, in contrast, our strangest and most mysterious form of worship would be our use of books. Yet these two forms of belief converge. Concretized as portable objects that accompany us—our parasites, persecutors, comforters—the dead have settled on the written page. Their power has never diminished, even though it has been wondrously transformed.

– Roberto Calasso (trans. by William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli), The Ruin of Kasch, pg. 330

Life after the end of sacrifice

In his book The Ruin of Kasch, Roberto Calasso argues that humanity lost an important outlet when we banned the ritual of sacrifice, because the craving to sacrifice now permeates life rather than being bounded and limited by the tradition of a ritual. The Aztecs killed a few to (as they saw it) appease their gods; the Khmer Rouge killed one in five Cambodians to (as they saw it) purify their society.

“In surrendering part of the world to the divinity, the sacrificer wants the divinity to surrender the rest of the world to him, and to cease intervening in its arbitrary, uncontrollable way. The sacrificer also wants the divinity’s permission to use the world. Thus, the first consequence of the eclipse of sacrifice will be that the world will be used without restraint, without limit, without any part being devoted to something else. But here, too, the end overlaps with the origin, like a reflection and hence reversed: once sacrifice is dissolved, the whole world reverts, unawares, to a great sacrificial workshop [...] [N]ow the world sacrifices, under other names, itself to itself, for the divinity has vanished.”

– Roberto Calasso (trans. by William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli), The Ruin of Kasch, pg. 138

The Shadow of the Golden Age

The years 1945 to 1965 were the Golden Age of the Golden State. The economy was booming and jobs were plentiful. A torrent of tax revenue (and the bond issues it supported) led to widespread expansion of the parks system, the university system, K-12 schools, and public works. In 1962, California passed New York to become the most populous state in the nation, but it long since passed it as the most envied and blessed.

But California has been haunted ever since by that Golden Age, as it has struggled to live up to the public expectations that were raised in happier times. The gold of California has hardly turned to lead, but the social upheaval of the ’60s, the inflation of the ’70s, the fiscal bodyblow of Prop 13 in 1978, the crash of the aviation industry in the early ’90s, the dot-com bust of the early ’00s, and the recent collapse of the real estate market have each made it more difficult to maintain the commitments the state took on when the future looked much sunnier.

From a distance, California politics look fatally split by the after-effects of the Golden Age.

On one side, we have the California Republican Party, whose voter base is people who mourn the passing of the Golden Age and hate the people who they think took it away. The children of the Okie and Midwestern migrants of the ’30s and ’40s refuse to pay for the schools and services needed by the children of the Latino and Asian migrants of the ’90s and ’00s. The California GOP committed suicide in the late ’90s to please this base, but will anything really make them happy?

On the other side, we have the California Democratic Party, which is committed to maintaining the full golden panoply of social programs in which Pat Brown clothed the state, regardless of its suffocating weight. Democrats have backed themselves into a corner with their own rhetoric, leaving themselves open to charges of being (at best) heartless and reactionary if they try to trim outlays to match sustainable revenues.

So we have a standoff in Sacramento between a party that is politically unable to approve of cutting programs and a party that is politically unable to approve of funding programs.

California has drifted from a Golden Age into a Silver Age and is now well into its Bronze Age. If California Democrats and Republicans — not just the parties, but the people in them — can’t find a common ground to work on, the Pewter Age is the next stop on the road.

Needs versus wants

On the one hand, I own enough already to keep me busy for the rest of my life.

On the other hand, I still want everything on my Amazon wishlist.

Favorite songs of 2007, #1-25

To continue listing my favorite songs added to my iTunes in 2007…

25. “Kick Out the Jams” by The MC5
24. “Time and Tide” by Basia
23. “Green Tambourine” by The Lemon Pipers
22. “Draggin’ the Line” by Tommy James
21. “East Bound and Down” by Jerry Reed
20. “Dizzy” by Tommy Roe
19. “1st Things 1st” by Phantom Planet
18. “Condoleezza, Check My Posse” by The Majestic Twelve
17. “Five O’Clock World” by The Vogues
16. “All Those Years Ago” by George Harrison
15. “She Bangs the Drums” by The Stone Roses
14. “Windy” by The Association
13. “Long Distance Runaround” by Yes
12. “Goodnight Vienna” by Ringo Starr
11. “This Never Happened Before” by Paul McCartney
10. “16 Military Wives” by The Decemberists
9. “Getting Away with It” by Electronic
8. “Don’t Shoot Me Santa” by The Killers
7. “The Road to Morocco” by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope
6. “God Bless the Absentee” by Paul Simon
5. “Sentimental Lady” by Bob Welch
4. “C’est si bon” by Eartha Kitt
3. “Somewhere Only We Know” by Keane
2. “This Town (Mint Royale Extended Remix)” by Frank Sinatra
1. “Any World (That I’m Welcome to)” by Steely Dan

Favorite songs of 2007, #26-50

Because I was on a blogging hiatus a year ago, I never posted my year-end favorite songs from 2007 (these are songs that I added to iTunes in 2007, most of which were not actually released that year). Here are #50 through #26:

50. “The Vex” by Black Tie Dynasty
49. “Forecast Fascist Future” by Of Montreal
48. “Empire” by Kasabian
47. “Steady as She Goes” by The Raconteurs
46. “Brighter Than Sunshine” by Aqualung
45. “Love is Alive” by Gary Wright
44. “Count on Me” by Jefferson Starship
43. “I Don’t Believe You” by The Magnetic Fields
42. “Commissioning a Symphony in C” by Cake
41. “A Fifth of Beethoven” by Walter Murphy
40. “Jeepster” by T. Rex
39. “Blue Morning, Blue Day” by Foreigner
38. “Both Sides Now” by Judy Collins
37. “The Twentysomething” by Simple Kid
36. “Turn Down Day” by The Cyrkle
35. “Gore Vidal Gomez” by The Hochimen
34. “Simple Twist of Fate” by Bob Dylan
33. “Omorfi Thessaloniki” by Vassilis Tsitsanis
32. “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight?” by Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart
31. “We’re An American Band” by Grand Funk Railroad
30. “A Question Mark” by Elliott Smith
29. “You’re a Wolf” by Sea Wolf
28. “Davy Jones” by Echo Helstrom
27. “Vertigo” by U2
26. “Space Cowboy” by The Steve Miller Band

Favorite songs of 2008

These are my 25 favorite songs that I added to my iTunes collection in 2008 (almost all of the songs were released before 2008), limited to one song per artist:

25. “Angela” by Bob James
24. “Gold Dust” by The Hochimen
23. “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” by Sarah Vaughan
22. “Ace in the Hole” by Ella Fitzgerald
21. “Until Tomorrow Then” by Ed Harcourt
20. “Arrow Through Me” by Laurence Juber
19. “Torture” by King Khan and the Shrines
18. “Three Girl Rhumba” by Wire
17. “The Last Time I Looked” by Scritti Politti
16. “Summer Spiders” by The Demigs
15. “Sea of Love” by Tom Waits
14. “Keep on Truckin’ (Pt. 1)” by Eddie Kendricks
13. “The Fairest of the Seasons” by Nico
12. “Brimful of Asha” by Cornershop
11. “You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie” by The Submarines
10. “Hey Joe” by Johnny Hallyday
9. “My Doorbell” by The White Stripes
8. “Oh Conspiracy” by Flat People
7. “Dry the Rain” by The Beta Band
6. “A Bushel & A Peck” by Perry Como and Betty Hutton
5. “Tusk” by Fleetwood Mac
4. “Hummingbird” by Seals & Crofts
3. “Josie” by Steely Dan
2. “Blind Willie McTell” by Bob Dylan
1. “Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!” by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Changing the world

Some book and media titles from the Multnomah County Library:

50 Aircraft That Changed the World

50 Battles That Changed the World

50 Companies That Changed the World

80 Days That Changed the World

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

Bridges That Changed the World

Five Equations That Changed the World

Great Scientific Ideas That Changed the World

The Gun That Changed the World

The Invention That Changed the World

The Machine That Changed the World

The Map That Changed the World

On the Dot: The Speck That Changed the World

Paintings That Changed the World

Photos That Changed the World

Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World

The Ship That Changed the World

Six Months That Changed the World

 

And my favorite:

Atlantic Ocean: The Illustrated History of the Ocean That Changed the World

 

Is there a book called Cliches That Changed the World?

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Cute.

And funny.