Libraries - Don't even try to live without 'em!

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, libraries, librarians

In 2014 Kyle Cassidy was invited to a librarians' conference, where he photographed and interviewed a number of the attendees. A project was born. He went to more conferences and eventually obtained portraits and quotes from more than 300 librarians. This is What a Librarian Looks Like: A Celebration of Libraries, Communities, and Access to Information couples the photos and quotes with ten essays about specific libraries by Mr. Cassidy and a baker's dozen remembrances by authors and others who share how their lives were made or molded by libraries.

Spoiler (I suppose): Librarians look like everybody else. It is how they think that makes them different. Random quotes:

"Without librarians and instructors teaching students how to do research, many students never learn that there is a better way to do and learn things." —Lindsay Davis, University of California, Merced

"I want to nurture curiosity, feed knowledge, lay a foundation for information." —Katie Lewis, Drexel University

"Everything comes down to information. Librarians know how to use it, find it, and share it with the world, and they're ready to help everyone else do the same." —Topher Lawton, Old Dominion University.

"In the morning, I'm a rock star to a room full of preschoolers; midday, I'm a social worker assisting a recently unemployed patron in finding resources; in the afternoon, I'm an educator leading kids through an after-school science workshop. Librarians serve so many purposes and wear so many hats, but all of them change lives." —Sara Coney, San Diego County Library

My favorite quote about libraries is by Jorge Luis Borges: "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." In case, dear reader, you haven't run across an earlier mention of this: the Polymath at Large blog would not exist without libraries. To date I have written 2,075 posts. 55% of them are book reviews. Other than the ongoing series of presenting The Collected Works of Watchman Nee, I own no more than a dozen of the books I have reviewed. The rest were borrowed from one of a handful of local libraries.

When I was 19 years old, having just moved from Ohio to California, I went to the nearest library and began checking out books. At that time of my life I needed escape and I needed it badly. The library had all the science fiction books in one section, a large shelf section seven feet high. I took the first five books at the upper left and checked them out. A few days later I returned them and checked out the next five. For the next year or more I continued this until I had read the entire section of about 500 sci-fi novels and short story collections. Thereafter I slowed down and branched out. When the library began to mix fantasy in with sci-fi, and then horror (Lovecraft was popular at the time), I backed off the fiction and began reading mostly nonfiction, primarily in science (Dewey Decimal numbers 500-599).

These days, even though I am retired, I am sufficiently busy that I seldom finish more than one book weekly. Looking back at recent blog posts (more than 70% are book reviews for the past four years), I find that I average about five books monthly.

I don't use the library only to check out books, though that is behind 90% of my visits. I have attended lectures and programs; I took a guitar to their Poetry Night several years ago and sang one of my songs, which led to a special program featuring my music; the genealogy club meets there and I have attended from time to time.

During the last ten years of my career at Dupont, I was a kind of librarian. I transferred from IT to IS (info science) and I was put in charge of upgrading the software used to index and retrieve technical documents in the Electronic Document Library (EDL). For the final couple of years, we had an upper manager who thought "Google can do anything," and cut way back on the indexing staff. Indexing is the highly specialized craft of determining the major themes of an article or report, and devising an appropriate set of key terms to attach to it in a Metadata portion of its electronic version. Professional indexers (I became one) also determine when a new key term is needed in the controlled vocabulary we were using. Human indexing is still the gold standard, and no "search engine" can yet extract the right set of key terms from any document substantial enough to warrant storing in an electronic library.

When Dupont was "only" a chemical company, the term "rust" was unequivocal. It referred to an oxidation process that corroded metals, particularly iron and some similar metallic elements. But someone who was creating the earliest controlled vocabulary for Dupont was wise enough to realize that "rust" could have wider meaning, and thus an entry in the list is:

rust USE corrosion

Also, two companion entries can be found:

corrosion USE FOR oxidative decay
corrosion USE FOR rust

Sure enough, if you look up "oxidative decay" you will find:

oxidative decay USE corrosion

Wouldn't you know it: Several decades ago Dupont began producing crop protection chemicals, and some of its anti-fungal chemicals were aimed at dealing with various fungi called "rust" such as "wheat rust". Thus, some newer terms referring to fungi were added to the controlled vocabulary.

That is one illustration of a phenomenon that is common in human languages. Words have multiple usages, and their context may be clear to us but not so to software. Even now, no Google search, not even using the Advanced Search page (if you can find it), is able to robustly distinguish articles about rusting of metals from agricultural rusts.

A growing problem today goes by the misleading moniker Fake News (If it is Fake, it isn't News; it's just a Lie). Things on the Internet were bad enough when the main issue with material was ignorance on the part of the writers, the "creators of content". I think nearly any random adult knows that advertising is biased. Gather all the ads you can on toothpaste, for example, and it seems that there are at least five brands that are "recommended" by more than half of all dentists. No toothpaste ad will mention that the surveys used to gather such recommendations consisted of questions of this form:

Which of the following brands of dentifrice would you recommend (Check all that apply)?

□ Beaver Brite
□ DentiGood
...
□ Sani-Kleen
...
□ Yello-Gone!

There may be 10 or 20 on the list. So, of course, if you're selling DentiGood and 64% of dentists happened to check it, along with five or eight others, you can claim, "2/3 of dentists recommend DentiGood!", thinking that nobody will mind if you round 64% up to 2/3. Of course, you would never, ever mention that 3/4 or more of those same dentists also "recommend" Sani-Kleen!

But what do we do when a larger and larger proportion of the "news" is truly a pack of lies? When I was young it was clear that the news media were biased to the left. Now the majority of them are left-leaning with actual malice. So what can we do? I suggest: Ask a librarian how to do your own research, how to track down the source of a story. That will take more than just looking it up on snopes.com (staffed by a very busy couple who are really, really good at research).

One of the most helpful humanities courses I ever took, with a title I no longer remember, taught us how to determine the bias in any publication. We read a very wide variety of journals, from Commonweal and The Wall Street Journal to National Review and The New York Times. We were to find diverse articles about the same recent event and compare them. It was the best course in critical thinking I've encountered.

I'll avoid digging further into the fake news conundrum. We need librarians' expertise and tool set to learn how to know what we know and how to know if what we know is worth knowing. 'Nuff said.

Don't give up on your neighborhood library just yet

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, libraries, librarians, digital libraries

Clever geeks have been trying to replace people with mechanisms for a long, long time. "Artificial intelligence" didn't begin with Eniac in the 1940's. It didn't even begin with "The Turk", a chess playing automaton that was exhibited from about 1770 onwards, for more than 80 years. Even after it was revealed that a chess master hidden inside its cabinet was actually moving the hands, it remained a popular attraction. The earliest legend of a manufactured intelligent creature may be that of the Golem; the legends long predate the story of Rabbi Loew in the 1500's.

I have watched the hype intensify for the fifty years I have been involved with electronic computers. Marvin Minsky, in particular, made numerous predictions of things that computers would be able to do "in 20 years", "in 50 years", whatever. He was wildly optimistic. Eventually, though, humans have been bested at certain tasks we tend to associate with "intelligence," by computer systems: Chess, Go, Checkers and Jeopardy. That last, by the Watson system, required tens of thousands of hours of laborious work by more than a hundred computer scientists and database experts, and cost at least a couple of billion dollars (IBM has been coy about revealing the amount). Watson did indeed glean the highest score, but made a few silly mistakes.

During my last ten years working at Dupont, I worked with the Indexing group, spending part of my time reading technical reports—usually very quickly—and applying index labels to their metadata; and part of my time improving the computer interface used by the professional indexers. During those years, we were dogged by questions such as, "Why can't something like Google do this instead, for a lot less money?" Fifteen years earlier I had helped the Indexing group test and review software that was intended to produce the indexing labels automatically. There are a lot of "keyword generators" out there, but only one "Summarizer" seemed to produce any shadow of appropriate key terms lists. It was by far the best piece of software, but it seldom scored better than 50%, when compared to the lists of terms produced by the human indexers. I heard that, a year or so after I retired, most indexing was indeed handed over to software, and though the results are rather poor, they are indeed cost-effective, if one only thinks in the short term. Sigh.

Later, working as an indexer, I experimented with using the Summarizer: After I had gathered my own set of key terms, I would run it and it occasionally came up with a term or two that made me pause, and then add them to my own term list. With practice, and some improvements of the interface, I reckoned that an indexer might be able to save time by having the software display its list automatically after the human list was first created, because it takes no more than a few seconds to discern if any of the machine-derived terms make sense. We might have been able to save some time and also produced a little better results. But with software alone, there is no such hope, and there will not be for at least one or two (or three or more) generations.

This effort was part of the Library and Information Sciences division of the Research department. Librarians have long (thousands of years) been the keepers of the flame of knowledge. Now that "the Web" has become a ubiquitous choice for finding stuff, an index into a world-spanning online library, people are wondering, why keep our physical libraries around? Here is why. The PageRank algorithms used by Google, though they are being continually improved, actually leverage human intelligence! The largest factor in the PR ranking is still the number of pages that link to a page of interest, as a measure of how many people have found it useful.

I built a career in computer programming and information science spanning, so far, 48 years (I still work part time), based primarily on taking proper advantage of both human and machine abilities. I like to call it the Synergy of Mind and Mechanism. Some (benighted) people may think that "the internet" can replace all the functions of the 120,000 libraries across America, and the 350,000 or more worldwide. Actually, with the current flood of new information being generated, mostly by non-professionals and non-experts, the need for librarians is increasing.

All that being said, I find now a book that reaches a similar conclusion, from someone we might call a "partial insider." Though John Palfrey is not a degreed librarian, he was made head of the Harvard Law School Library, where he updated its workflows, reformed it mightily, and kept the best of its traditional "analog" character while adding great digital resources. His status as a "feral"—the librarians' derogatory term for "layman librarian"—has made many librarians look askance at his work, even though it is intended to save their jobs and even increase their numbers! His book is Biblio Tech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google (for non-francophones, bibliothèque is French for "library").

The book is not nearly as polemical as I expected. The ten chapters outline nine areas in which this digital age we are entering (we've only just begun) is a complement to the "analog age", not a replacement for it. Just because something is "old" doesn't make it "obsolete" or outdated. We are surrounded by "old" things that continue to function well and may never be replaced.

So it is with libraries. Documents were collected, not because people just like to collect (as indeed they do), but because there was value in having a place where every authorized academic or student could find the key documents needed to do his work. The primary innovation in libraries was not one or another technical improvement, but the opening of formerly closed collections to the public, which began no more than 150 years ago! Libraries and the networked communications of librarians were fundamental to the development of democracy.

I believe it is still true that most of us have a liking for the local library (some 16,700 branch libraries in towns and cities in the U.S. and nearly 100,000 in our schools). But Dr. Palfrey warns that nostalgia can only go so far. To date, nostalgia has not prevented the budgets for public and school libraries, in particular, from being reduced to half of what they were a generation ago, in real terms.

Call me a Luddite: I visit the local branch library at least monthly, and usually more frequently. I still prefer reading books printed on paper. I find that I can read from a computer screen, even the most "retina"-sharp, even the latest paper-white Kindle, no more than 10-15 minutes at a stretch. I can read a paper book for a practically unlimited amount of time. Sure, the under-30 crowd can focus on their screen the whole day long, but I suspect that nearly none of them spends long stretches of time reading an e-book. They scatter their attention, "multitasking". The "eye-unfriendly" nature of every kind of screen so far invented probably has something to do with that!

Libraries and librarians do their best work in a network. This has always been so, although there is a strong tendency toward hoarding within any "collecting" profession, including museum collections as well as libraries. I would never have finished graduate school without free InterLibrary Loan (ILL) facilities. Any book I could learn the title and author for, a reference librarian could find somewhere, and have it shipped to the library or even to me, within a week. The spread of digital technologies makes networking easier than ever. For those who like e-books, ILL can now take no more than a few minutes to find and deliver a document or book…for those items that are still lendable. Chapter 9 on Law warns that digital works are frequently hard or impossible for a library to loan out. The licensing contracts called "Digital Rights Management" trump copyright law, with its specific "second sale" provisions that favor library lending. Lending a hardcopy book is practically free. Lending an e-book often costs some small licensing fee for each loan, and those can add up in a hurry. So while  a $25 hardbound book may seem costly compared to the $12 license fee for an e-book (you never BUY an e-book, you license it), the residual lending-licensing fees can make an e-book much, much more costly than the hardback.

Though this book has less of a "go do this" character than I expected, it does provide great resources for librarians and those who love libraries, and great ammunition to use at those public meetings where town and county budgets are discussed. The librarians are our friends, and they need our help. Has a library near you closed recently, or is one under threat? Get two copies of this book, one for yourself and one for your friendly local librarian, and then go together to budget discussions and enter into the fray of democracy, not just as a voter but as a participant. Perhaps a future generation will look back and thank us for keeping "physical libraries" from going the way of the Dodo.

A bibliophilic thriller

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, crime, books, libraries

The urge to collect is oddly human. Few other animals collect objects, and those that do, such as nesting birds, do not maintain permanent collections, nor become hoarders. What is the difference between a hoard and a collection? The index. Thus, libraries and museums result from turning hoards and accumulations into collections.

Huge industries subsist and even prosper from the urge to collect. Interestingly, the priciest objects, in monetary terms, are those that have no other value except as something collected. Fine art is at the top of the scale. A somewhat distant second is rare books and manuscripts. I wonder if the reason that a unique book sells for less than a unique painting or sculpture is that it has a use: you can read it, and the books that command the highest prices are those nobody would read. I just checked "first edition" on eBay and sorted by price. There are 7 items, out of about a million, with an asking price of $950,000 or greater. All for books you wouldn't be obtaining for reading purposes.

Even in bad times, collectors spend a lot, and in the worst of times, the wealthiest collectors continue to spend, unfazed by the poor economy. Some spend more, hoping for bargains as people who are running out of money auction off their treasures. Thus, the most lucrative period for book thieves was the Great Depression of the 1930s. A particular theft, of a nearly unread book, in 1931 led to a sea change in the attitude of librarians and law enforcement about book theft. Unraveling the case cracked open a ring of book thieves and crooked dealers, the most notorious up to that time, as chronicled in Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped it, by Travis McDade.


Edgar Allen Poe lived only 40 years, and was an active author for about 22 years: his first publications were poems, from 1827, and his first prose story was published in 1832. His second published poetry collection, a tiny volume really, was Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems, in 1829. The edition of 400 was poorly received, and most were discarded unsold. Fewer than twenty copies survive, but the most celebrated has come to be a copy that made its way to the New York Public Library, via the Lenox Library, upon its opening in 1911. Ignored for 20 years, and protected by security practices that were exceptional for the times, it was nonetheless stolen in January 1931, whence began a hunt that crossed several state lines, though the book itself did not.

The book itself is inconsequential. Thieves and crooked book dealers (in the 1920s and 1930s, that term was a redundancy) know that it isn't worthwhile stealing the rarest, most valuable books, because every copy is well known, so to whom can you sell it without being arrested? A book having between 10 and 100 or so known exemplars is a safer target, and worth the trouble of bleaching or otherwise erasing the library marks (there are always library marks, even in this era of electronic 'tattle tape' protection systems).

And why steal from libraries? It is a great deal safer than stealing from a personal library, because libraries are public! Turn-of-the-Century America was in the midst of a shift in rare book possession. Prior to about 1900, a bibliophile could amass a costly book collection, and might sometimes sell some, but more usually, his (very rarely, her) heirs would auction the estate through an established book house. The book dealers were used to selling and re-selling the same book as it passed from private collection to private collection. The notion of establishing a legacy, and of endowment, began taking hold in late Victorian times, however, and the book collectors' heirs were more likely to donate the books to a major library. Perhaps the collector, upon finding no heir who loved books as he did, would will them to a library. Once there, they were typically there forever.

Of course, libraries weed out their stacks periodically, but do not discard their rarities. Those are intended to remain for eternity, for the benefit of scholars. So by about 1920, book dealers were faced with a thinning supply of rare, and thus pricy, books. A few began to commission thefts. Other thieves took note, and got into the book "business". Before long, any dealer who remained in business had learned not to inquire too closely into the source of a box or bag of books at very attractive prices.

Library "security" practices, being nearly nonexistent, allowed a brisk trade in these moderately rare books. Only a few libraries made much attempt to stem the tide. NYPL was one, with an effective system. But the system did have a few tiny holes, and a certain book thief and two accomplices must have thought the stars had all lined up perfectly when they were able to obtain the library's copy of Al Aaraaf and two other books of similar value, and get them out the door (down 3 stories and across a large, crowded, echoing hallway). The 3 books were soon in a safe owned by Harry Gold, where at least the Poe book sat until its retrieval many months later.

I found it hard to figure out who was "the man who stopped it." I find it a tossup between G. William Bergquist and Felix Ranlett. Seems it took them both. Ranlett was in Boston, at the outskirts of the book ring's activity. In the juiciest sentence in the book, McDade writes, regarding a related theft in Boston, "In the grand tradition of library theft, a person with little prior experience in the subject was assigned to handle the matter for the [Boston Public Library]."

Once the action returns to New York, Bergquist is at its center, so I suppose he is the one. Certainly, he engineered the turning of a certain Babyface Mahoney into a cooperating stooge, and the arrest of a certain Harold Clarke and eventually Harry Gold, who were behind the Poe theft, though the thief was Sam Dupree, in their pay.

It has been written, most famously by Doc Smith who wrote the Lensman books, that what technology can create, technology can duplicate or defeat. Tattle tapes and other electronic measures are the current weapons of choice in the arms race to reduce library book theft. A recent estimate is that major libraries lose about 5% of their rare book collections annually. That is about half what the figure was a century ago. There is a trade-off between the cost of better security systems, and the cost of just buying replacement copies. Most first editions sell in the range of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Hiring armed security costs $100,000 yearly, or more, and you can replace a lot of lost books for that. The system most small libraries use costs $20,000 to install and set up, and a few thousand yearly to maintain.

Thieves is a joy to read. McDade has the rare talent to pack a book with facts and keep the writing enjoyable. The book doesn't look large, but it is densely set in 9pt type, so there is a lot there, backed up by about 400 notes and references. Well worth the reading.

A library is a kind of heaven

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, libraries, archival, information science

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library" – Jorge Luis Borges

Now that I am an information scientist, I work with librarians. They've become some of my favorite people. I used to travel a lot for my work, and I still take a business trip about every year or two. It usually happens that I have at least one free evening, and I always go to a library, whatever is closest to the hotel where I am staying. It beats watching cable TV in the hotel room, and I've always been more of a reader anyway. Usually I find the current issue of a journal or magazine and read a few miscellaneous articles, but if I have more time, I'll scare up a smaller book from the "recent acquisitions" shelf and read the whole thing at a sitting.

On a few occasions I've been in the middle of some research, and took advantage of the collection in a larger library that I happened to be near. Usually, though, for research I go to a nearby library that has what I am looking for. Books and collections about any subject are easy to find now that Google Books has a "Find in a Library" feature. That is how I found that the nearest library to my home with "Mayflower Families Through Five Generations" (I needed volumes 2 and 11, for starters), is at the Corbit-Calloway Memorial Library in Odessa, Delaware. That's a lovely small library with very hospitable librarians.

There are also numerous special collections of interest in the college libraries along "University Row", that stretch of PA Highway 3 that is anchored at one end by Drexel University and at the other by Westchester University, and has something like thirty small universities and colleges strung along it (including Villanova, which isn't so small). But lest I go on to fill a large post with my own library stories, let's get to the book.

This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson belatedly peers into the huge transition that libraries everywhere are undergoing, now that it seems everything is being put on the Internet. The title contains a double pun: "Overdue" is a self-reference, and librarianship is the art of saving everything and cataloging it so it can be found again.

What do librarians do when they are not checking books in or out and levying fines (and saying "Shh!")? A great deal more than people think. A library is a kind of museum. One could think of it as a museum of stuff you can read, and take home to read at your leisure. The cover of the book shows a librarian decked out as Supergirl, bursting out of a pile of books while grasping a Kindle™. This is only part of the message the author wants to convey, however, and by the end of the book she has circled back to a love of less virtual materials.

Most of the book chronicles the rapid changes to libraries as everything goes online. Gone are the banks and banks of card catalogs, where you could search by author, title or subject. I can search the online catalog via the local library's web site (or any library's web site). The space thus saved is taken up by extra tables to hold computers for public use. In some libraries, certain older collections have been discarded in favor of paying for access to online databases that contain most (but usually not all) of the same material in virtual form. And if a book is available as an e-Book, you don't even need to check out a paper book. If you don't have a Kindle™ or similar device, or a PDA or phone with a reader app, you can download to your computer and get an add-on for your browser that displays e-books.

Virtual access doesn't cover all the bases, not by a long shot. Most e-books are black/white only, so color illustrations lose a lot, and if care was not taken during scanning to de-screen photographs, the resulting aliasing can make the images undecipherable. Then there are books with "nontraditional" content: scratch-n-sniff panels, pop-ups, and fold-outs come to mind. Overdue! contains one long chapter on zines, particularly zines produced by librarians. A zine is a self-published magazine, typically issued as just a few hand-produced copies (we used to call this samizdat). Many, and particularly those produced by librarians, contain items you can't scan: buttons, pop-ups, stapled-in pressed flowers, upholstery or even carpet samples…

This brings up a side story I just have to tell here. The research department libraries where I work issue laboratory notebooks to scientists, where they enter their results, have each page dated and witnessed, and return them to the library periodically to be microfilmed. This is important for evidence in patent disputes that can arise years later. The advent of cheap printing and cheap copying has resulted in some issues that cause our microfilmers fits. Some scientists seem to think they need to squeeze all the results of a whole year, or even their entire career, onto the pages of a single 156-page notebook. So they print everything rather small and tape these little printouts, dozens to a page, in overlapping fashion. I have seen notebooks that started out 7/8" (2.2 cm) thick with the binding stretched to accommodate five or six inches of content. To microfilm the book, each taped-on printout has to be filmed, so it can take an hour to film one "page". This is a significant reason that research departments everywhere are introducing electronic lab notebooks and requiring that all content be rendered in PDF form; PDF format is the new "virtual microfilm".

And this points up matters taken up in the latter part of the book. A collection of someone's letters can be a pain to archive and curate (I know; my parents' letters during WWII take up twenty binders). But how do we preserve the e-mails of someone, particularly if they tended to delete a lot? And with MS Word or Word Perfect being used to write and edit manuscripts, how is a later student to know the creative process behind a writer's book or article? Time was, you had a series of drafts, but unless a writer has saved intermediate versions of a word processing file, the only item in existence is the finished product, in .doc or .pdf form. Now what?

By the end of the book, Ms Johnson has become jaded with the thrill of the digital takeover of our libraries, and is clearly longing for the feel and smell of paper-based collections. Research libraries everywhere still collect the tangible memorabilia of memorable people. I visited the Ronald Reagan library in Simi Valley, California a few years ago. I looked at some of the items on display. While I might be able to read this or that old letter just as well over the Internet, there was something about being there, in the presence of a paper that the President labored over as he wrote to someone, that the Internet cannot provide.

I have a semi-famous relative (a cousin of my grandmother). Last year I contacted the library where her letters are kept, wondering if they might have correspondence from my grandmother to her, when both were young women. They didn't have anything quite that old, but perked up quite a bit when I remarked that I had letters written by her when she was 18 or so. Eventually, I produced good scans of the letters and sent them color prints and a DVD with the images. They are really hoping I'll pass along the originals some day, which I expect to do if it happens that none of my grandmother's great-grandchildren want the materials. There is a bit of a thrill in handling and conversing over such artifacts. This is why I call libraries a kind of museum.

Love your local library. They are changing a lot, but the fundamental stuff of being a librarian is not changing: they want to help. And they can help. They have resources, with which they are very familiar, that we can seldom imagine. If you have an interest in something, anything, go ask a librarian about it. Chances are, you'll learn something new, something surprising, even something quite satisfying that you could not have found any other way.