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EO 13233, is revoked

Posted on January 23, 2009 by tim

While the early press for the Obama presidency has largely centered on his order to close Guantánamo Bay and his de-authorization of torture, his repeal of Executive Order 13233 created a minor celebratory stir with librarians, archivists, and historians. Bush enacted EO 13233 in 2001 in order to restrict access to presidential papers.

Even though it was seen by many as an attempt to remove the transparency of the White House, the real problem for our profession was the damage it did to academic inquiry. As a research librarian who routinely requests documents from the Truman Library, the Roosevelt Library, the North Carolina State Library (home to many of Andrew Jackson’s papers), and the National Archives, it came across as an overreaching executive order that was ultimately unnecessary.

John Wertman wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post back in 2006 about the trouble this EO caused, and quoted former President Ford, who said:

“I firmly believe that after X period of time, presidential papers, except for the most highly sensitive documents involving our national security, should be made available to the public,” he said, “and the sooner the better.” He also told me that the researchers he’s talked to at his presidential library have been grateful that most of his documents were made available.

I would certainly echo those feelings of gratitude, as I’ve created entire sections of exhibits from presidential library documents. Needless to say, I’m rather pleased that Obama revoked this EO on his first day in office.

Posted in Librarianship | Tagged Archives | 2 Comments

Umbrella?

Posted on September 10, 2008 by tim

While I tend to support the Web 2.0 movement, I’ve not hidden my dissatisfaction with the majority of sites, and particularly the amount of redundant (and unnecessary) overlap of products. I do, however, occasionally come across a site that melds interesting bits-and-pieces into a usable, creative application. My latest discovery:

Umbrella Today?

This single page app asks for your zip code and then tells you with a definitive “Yes” or “No” whether you should take an umbrella. If you’d rather, you can enter your cell phone number and the service will send you a text message on the days you’ll need an umbrella. That’s it.

Posted in Weather, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment

Palin’s brush with cenorship

Posted on September 5, 2008 by tim

Having spent the better part of the last two months working on a program for Banned Books Week, I couldn’t help but notice the buzz about Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin, which surfaced during a recent Time article:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

While people often dismiss attempts to challenge (and remove) certain books from public and school libraries as “over-reacting parents,” it’s slightly more disturbing when it comes from an elected official. Even if they’re doing it on behalf of complaints from some of their constituents, it shows a lack of understanding for the ramifications censorship embodies.

Posted in Books, Librarianship | 5 Comments

Digital Literacy? :: electronic oxymoron

Posted on August 4, 2008 by tim

The New York Times ran an article last week on the changing face of literacy in the digital age. The column focuses primarily on the habits of teenagers, college-bound students, and how the Internet is impacting their reading.

Clearly students are developing a different set of skills than they would by reading novels, but it seems odd to hear some arguing for a new assessment of abilities when you consider the material. While a typical high school book (Candid, for example) might have an average readability level of 12.8 (with some chapters spiking at 15.3), this article’s primary subject — Nadia Konyk — comments on her love of reading sites like fanfiction.net, which boasts a 6.3 Flesch-Kincaid Grade (about the same as a TV Guide).

What I find even more troubling is the fallout from the lack of challenging contextualization that comes with reading Internet sites, which results in a lack of critical thinking even when attempting to distinguish the validity of discreet pieces of information.

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.

Despite my profession’s attempts to teach students how to judge authoritative from non-authoritative sites, the majority of students are still unable to distinguish between the two. The worst example I’ve seen recently came when a young college graduate submitted a writing sample (for a job) that included a citation from a White Supremacists’ website.†

Obviously, this is a single anecdote, though it’s something I saw regularly when I was still working as an academic librarian. In essence, the problem isn’t that students don’t read at all, it’s what and how they read that’s creating an impact on other factors, such as how they reason, think, and evaluate information.

Thanks to Kristen for pointing me to said article.

† Now couple that with “where” I work.

Posted in Books, Tech | Tagged literacy | 3 Comments

Web 2.0′s Catch 22

Posted on July 20, 2008 by tim

I’m sorry to say that not long ago, my personal life hit a Web 2.0 saturation point. Not because I’ve ceased to find interesting applications, but because there’s a finite limit to the number of things you can effectively maintain.

This seems to be the hidden cost that underlies Web 2.0 technology. As Dion Hinchcliffe pointed out two years ago, truly useful apps are few and far between:

Tons of new Web 2.0 startups are being released every day, I can’t even keep track of the social bookmarking sites alone (I came across three new ones yesterday, seriously). And some of the better Web 2.0 apps that are coming out are for laughably obscure vertical markets.

The biggest problem of course is that these services don’t actually talk to each other, which is kind of ironic considering that much of it is called “social” software. Even those companies who design apps to integrate with other 2.0 platforms, have yet to truly make the disparate parts communicate with one another.

For example, if you want to track you’re reading and share that with your friends, you might choose to join Goodreads. If you’re on Facebook, you could then add the Goodreads app that will pull your list of books into your profile. But if your friends are using LibraryThing, iRead, or Shelfari, then the only problem you’ve solved is displaying the results in a specific location. Facebook doesn’t allow any of these services to talk to one another, nor do any of them support a seamless interface with any of the other applications.

As Michael Hirschorn theorized last April, “the third rail of social media may ultimately come down to that most old-media of issues: ownership.” For users though, it comes down to a question of manageability: how many services can you reasonably manage before they become a liability on your time?

My profession has been grappling with this problem for years. While all of us are attempting to plug our collections into various applications in order to get the most out of our libraries, if we’re asking our patrons to join (yet another) service, how likely are they to take the offer? And at what point does every user wind up hitting their saturation point?

Posted in Tech, Web 2.0 | 6 Comments

What does a librarian do?

Posted on July 9, 2008 by tim

Bobbi Newman, at Librarian By Day, noticed a search in her logs that read: “what is a librarian’s day like?” She writes:

I’m assuming it’s someone considering becoming a Librarian and I thought what an amazing opportunity! If I post about this and get others to do it too, it will allow librarians to share amongst ourselves (our positions are changing so rapidly) and also to let the public know what we do.

I can understand her impulse, as my most frequently visited post is How To Become A Librarian. In fact, it became so popular (so quickly), that I amended my tongue-and-cheek post with a link to real information on how to become a librarian. Since my job is a fairly unique one, I thought I’d share a little about what I’m doing, in the (similar) hopes that it might inspire others to pursue this rather satisfying, if unorthodox, occupation.

I should start with the basics. I’m a research librarian in a Holocaust Museum. I previously worked in different library environments — academic and public — before moving into this specialized library, where I act as a solo librarian.†

Today involved the following:

Completed an annotated bibliography for our Teacher Education Institute
As far as I’m concerned, the bane of library work is the annotated bibliography (clunky, time consuming, static, and out-of-date by the time they’re printed). Nonetheless, almost every course that’s taught uses a guide of recommended resources which is nothing but an annotated bibliography.

Searched for material to use in a Censorship Exhibit/Program
For the first time since I moved to the museum, we’re going to be doing a program for Banned Books Week. The program — a collection of dramatic readings by local actors/performers/poets — is already well into the planning stages, but I’ve just begun pulling together the material for the exhibit, which concentrates on the destruction of books and literature during the third stage of genocide.

Cataloged a small collection of children’s books
While cataloging was never my forte, you have to expect a healthy dose of it when you’re the only librarian. I’ve found that it’s easy to manage when you fold into a workflow that has a lot of variety.

Ordered $350 worth of books
Collection development has always interested me, and it’s something I’m always eager to tackle. This was a fairly light order, but there were two titles in my “cart” that I wanted to get as soon as possible.

Fielded a half dozen reference questions
Unlike cataloging, this is my forte (Jim Carmichael would be so proud). The average day is consumed with varying amounts of research, depending on the types of requests I get, and since I have a non-typical library, I tend to get non-typical reference questions. For example, I spent a large chunk of the afternoon attempting to determine if three Communist partisans were hanged in Kaunas (Kovno) on December 12, 1941.

That was what a librarian did today. Thanks to Lauren for pointing this out.

†A librarian who works alone and is expected to perform all the tasks that larger institutions divide among different positions.

Update: If you’d like a more detailed accounting of what a librarian does I would recommend buying Lauren Pressley’s book. You can find it in my Amazon recommended reading box on the sidebar.

Posted in Censorship, Librarianship | 5 Comments

Gardening on the Hill

Posted on May 15, 2008 by tim

Even though Church Hill has a well known community garden, I’m fortunate enough to move into a house that had an existing plot. Unfortunately, it wasn’t well designed.

Last year, I did a small experiment. I planted green onions and radishes to see what would happen in the existing soil. Both types of plants grew, but they didn’t do nearly as well as you’d want if you were hoping for a real crop. As near as I could tell, there were essentially three different problems with this garden:

First, the former owners neglected to create a bottom for this boxed garden. It looks like they tried to improve the soil by adding peat moss (or potting soil), but otherwise it was the same soil you’d find anywhere in Church Hill.

Second, the frame wasn’t big enough for traditional row gardening. This is the kind of gardening I grew up with, and I don’t have any real experience with other methods. In truth, I don’t have experience with anything under an acre!

Third, the garden is half covered by overhanging tree limbs.

Over the winter, I began doing some research. I knew I needed a solid (organic) reference source as well as a guide to growing in small spaces. Since the garden is a boxed frame that’s built into the ground, I knew I would have to work around the shade problem.

Thanks to Jessica, who talked to Holly, I found a copy of Rodale’s Gardening and Landscaping Techniques (all organic); a number of searches on gardening in small areas led me to Mel Bartholomew’s All New Square Foot Gardening. Based on their advice, I decided the best thing I could do for the soil is dig up about seven or eight inches of the existing bed, line the bottom with weed cloth, and replace the old soil with Mel’s mix.

After I’d done this, we planted a small crop:

Even though I’m rather skeptical about growing tomatoes in 6″ of soil, the Square-Foot-Gardening-crowd swear it works.

Thus far, everything seems to be doing well except the strawberries, which are being picked over by the birds. Otherwise, the first bean and lettuce shoots are coming up and the tomatoes and zucchini are growing nicely. If Stanley — the neighborhood hawk — would get off his lazy ass, I wouldn’t have to worry about the birds.

Posted in Outdoors | Tagged garden, gardening | 3 Comments