nypl:
“When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church which belongs to God, and the public Library, which belongs to you. The public library is the great equalizer.”
— Keith Richards
The library … is no mere cabinet of curiosities; it’s a world, complete and completable, and it is filled with secrets. Like a world, it has its changes and its seasons, which belie the permanence that ordered ranks of books imply. Tugged by the gravity of readers’ desires, books flow in and out of the library like the tides. The people who shelve the books in [Harvard’s] Widener talk about the library’s breathing — at the start of the term, the stacks exhale books in great swirling clouds; at the end of term, the library inhales, and the books fly back.
Yes–our residents want eBooks. But does that mean that we trade away our core values and ethics to provide anything, under any terms? Does it mean that we spend our residents’ limited tax dollars on sub-par products with sub-par usage terms and no ownership or longevity guarantees? Or is the fact that people want eBooks from their libraries and we can’t get them going to turn out to be enough reason to stop the madness and engage in a massive national boycott of the societal conflagration that we are faced with for the future of digital information?
So why keep up the ruse that eBooks are in libraries and all is awesome? Why continue the whitewashing? I’m personally done with the whitewashing. I’ll continue to support positive steps toward eBook independence like Open Library, Gluejar, the Hathi Trust, DPLA, and projects like those undertaken at the Douglas County Public Library and Califa. However, I’m finished promoting an inferior eBook product to our patrons. I’m finished throwing good money after bad money. And I’m finished trying to pointlessly advocate for change when change has to come from places waaaaaaay above my influence level or pay grade.
(Source: thepinakes)
[In] a development that even just thirty years ago would have seemed like the most absurd science fiction, there are now far more books available, far more quickly, on the iPhone than in the New York Public Library.
[…]
This technology cannot simply substitute for the great libraries of the present. After all, libraries are not just repositories of books. They are communities, sources of expertise, and homes to lovingly compiled collections that amount to far more than the sum of their individual printed parts. Their physical spaces, especially in grand temples of learning like the NYPL, subtly influence the way that reading and writing takes place in them. And yet it is foolish to think that libraries can remain the same with the new technology on the scene.
One of the features we’re most proud of at Findings is our “find in a local library” tab, listed under the ‘read’ icon. We were shocked when we read a post on Huffington Post titled “Most U.S. Readers Unaware Of eBooks At Libraries” - yes, it’s true! The NYPL along with plenty of other major (and smaller) city libraries have an ebook selection. Consider this a Findings PSA to check and see if your summer reading list is available at the library, electronically.
Narratives in a Digital Age
“Ode to the Bookshelf”
This week, LJ Digital features essays from writers and readers, discussing stories about bookshelves.
My Wife Controls the Bookshelves!
By Jack A. Allweiss
My wife Patty controls the bookshelves, dozens of them throughout our home. It’s not that I do not read. I do but my wife has a special reverence for books. She grew up in a modest home, and in that home there were very few books. As a child she read one book over and over “Grimm’s Fairytales” because it was the only book available to her. After we were married and our economic status improved books quickly began filling shelves in our home.
Are bookshelves an economic or social status symbol? Maybe, but I remember being in many homes of very wealthy people and seeing few books. I also remember being in homes of people of modest means and seeing many books. I think bookshelves are more a love affair with books and my wife has carried on that affair since she was a child. I decided to confront her in her office; she was cornered and could not run away.
“Why do you have these books here?” I asked.
“This is my working library, I use these books every day” she said.
Patty was always interested in genealogy and in recent years it had become an almost full time vocation. I asked her: “How many of these books do you buy a year?”
She told me that up until about five years ago she bought about fifty genealogy books a year but it had now dwindled to five or six, yet she was doing more genealogy than ever.
What changed?
“The Internet, now I can get most of the content I need from the web. I still use books, but not as often.”
I looked at the first shelf; the first few books had titles like “Kings Daughters and Founding Mothers” and “Voyages 1615-1618.”
I asked her why she had those books on the shelf. “My family on my mother’s side came to what is now Canada from France in the 16th century. These books tell the story and have facts that I can use in my research.”
Moving down the shelf, the history of French Canada unfolds until we reach the 19th century, when suddenly we shift to Michigan Territory in the young United States. Newer immigrants from France bought land in Michigan, and some migrated from Canada, thus forming the core of Patty’s maternal line. Then suddenly the shelf shifts focus from the Midwest to New York, and a decidedly English name, Loomis. “My father’s side came from England and Prussia, this is the beginning of my father’s family history” the books on this family line spill over onto the next shelf.
I move over a couple of bookcases, the entire wall is bookcases with shelves full of books. This shelf starts with some books on worldwide immigration and then delves into specific countries, “In Their Words – Poland” and “In Their Words – Russian.”
I asked Patty what these books are about and how they relate to genealogy.
“This shelf is about your family, how they lived in Eastern Europe, and how they survived the Holocaust to come to the United States.” There are some puzzling titles here. “Why is “DNA and Tradition” here”?
Patty said: “Many of the records for Jews in Europe were either destroyed by the National Socialists or were lost or simply do not exist, today we can use DNA with genealogical data to confirm family heritage.” Near the end of the shelf are books that are more historical and cultural in nature, such as Abba Eban’s “Heritage.” Patty told me those books are for perspective. The statistics of the holocaust can sometime be overwhelming and these texts put things into a perspective.
She had enough of me, and told me it was time to be on my way, she had things to do! I asked one more question, what were her feelings on the transition to electronic books and information?
“Mixed,” she said. “On the positive side, a wealth of information is available at my fingertips, indexed and cataloged. On the negative, there are still lots of books in old libraries and archives that are not scanned and indexed on the internet.”
“I am concerned,” Patty said, “that as libraries close, that information will be lost.”
In fact we have traveled to small libraries and town halls in the US, France, England, Poland and Russian simply because that was the only way to get the information.
My time was up, Patty told me “don’t you have something to do?”
“Yes sweetheart,” I said, and slyly sneaked away to begin writing this week’s Literary Journalism assignment.
Harvard is making public the information on more than 12 million books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more things inside its 73 libraries. Harvard can’t put the actual content of much of this material online, owing to intellectual property laws, but this so-called metadata of things like titles, publication or recording dates, book sizes or descriptions of what is in videos is also considered highly valuable. Frequently descriptors of things like audio recordings are more valuable for search engines than the material itself. Search engines frequently rely on metadata over content, particularly when it cannot easily be scanned and understood. Harvard is hoping other libraries allow access to the metadata on their volumes, which could be the start of a large and unique repository of intellectual information. “This is Big Data for books,” said David Weinberger, co-director of Harvard’s Library Lab. “There might be 100 different attributes for a single object.” At a one-day test run with 15 hackers working with information on 600,000 items, he said, people created things like visual timelines of when ideas became broadly published, maps showing locations of different items, and a “virtual stack” of related volumes garnered from various locations.
Harvard Releases Big Data for Books - NYTimes.com (via dwattersw)
LJ: Speaking of public records….
Narratives in a Digital Age
Behind the Story Sources: “The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement”
Author and journalist Miriam Pawel wrote a behind-the-scenes narrative account of the United Farm Workers movement filled with engrossing characters whose lives captured different pieces of a larger story that had not been told as honestly or comprehensively before her book came along.
Miriam was able to interview the characters who had been involved in the UFW, since many were still alive during her reporting. Yet in her book she also relied heavily on an array of historical documents to capture the era and key events in it, along with scenes involving the man that so many identified with the movement, Cesar Chavez. Some of Miriam’s primary sources are available on the book’s web site.
Publishers Weekly wrote of “The Union of Their Dreams:”
“Steeped in the recordings and primary source materials from these years, Pawel recreates the era-but with an awareness of the ironies and contradictions made plainer by hindsight. While noting Chávez’s instrumental charisma, she also records heretofore cloaked internal conflicts among disgruntled union leaders chafing under Chávez’s strict concept of sacrifice, his social conservatism and his adamant hold on power, which in the 1970s led to damaging purges of leaders he accused of disloyalty.”
Miriam shared a few key sources with us that were essential to her story:
1.) Court documents and transcripts from hearings.
“Court transcripts are really good for dialogue. You can quote from journals and letters. But it’s harder to find dialogue.
Dialogue puts you there. It helps set up the scene, and also as a writing tool the rule of thumb is that quotes slow you down, and dialogue speeds the story up. As a writing device if you can have dialogue it helps you move along faster as opposed to a block of quotes. It helps even to have little snippets of it.”
2.) Newspaper stories and radio or television shows, which often have live quotes from people interviewed by reporters. She was able to find clips from small newspapers in Oxnard, Bakersfield, and Yuma, some as far back as the 1930s. Many of this was accessible through public libraries.
“Hundreds of papers have been digitized — and it’s searchable.”
3.) Historical archives which kept audio tapes, among other records.
“I used the Wayne State Archives to get the reel tapes. It was labor-intensive and also somewhat costly because I had to get copies of them. The archivist there worked with me was very helpful in finding a place to send tapes to digitize them and make copies. I listened to hundreds of hours of tapes. In addition to allowing me to quote from dialogue, it helped me to get a sense of personalities and dynamics. It’s like being a fly on the wall in the room. Going from being a journalist to being a historian is like giving up the sensation of seeing things yourself and witnessing them firsthand, which is kind of odd feeling at first – but you have access to materials you would never have if you were covering it in real time. To be able to listen to all these discussions the inner workings, in some ways you can recreate a scene in even more detail than if you were there.
I had about 800 hours of tape. I listened a couple hours every night. I would just get absorbed in listening. I took notes as I was sitting in front of computer.”
4.) Photos, which aided Miriam in capturing scenes of Cesar Chavez speaking, what he was wearing, what the room looked like, as well as the people in it. She was able to view hundreds and hundreds of photos since many photojournalists had documented the era, and many of these photos were available online.
“Photos help you describe things, like the march up Highway 99 to Sacramento in 1966. Looking at pictures of people spread out was very evocative.”
5.) Going to the place and taking tours with people who lived through the times and can recollect. Miriam spent time hanging out with people who would, “drive me around to where UFW office was, where they marched.”
“I went to a lot of places in the book, to see them. It’s important to do that to write about place. Oxnard and Salinas, to a jail that had been boarded up now, but was still there.”
Getting source documents is not easy. In some cases it took a tremendous amount of legwork just to track down the documents, Miriam explained. Once you have the information:
“The tricky part is balancing the rich amount of detail with being careful about still being factual.”
She added:
“Because I had people still alive, I used interviews to flesh out some of the color. I was pretty judicious in what I used. Ultimately you decide who you think is credible and whose account checked out against primary source documentation.”
Narratives in a Digital Age
“My Life in Books”
This week, LJ Digital features essays from writers and readers, discussing stories about books that impacted their lives.
By Betty Liao
I used to define my life by the books I read.
As an extremely introverted child with few friends, I lived in the quiet fantasies printed on pages of books. I don’t remember when I began frequenting the Los Angeles Chinatown Library with my mom and sister but my earliest memories of the dimly-lit public library tucked away in the back of Castelar Elementary School was from before I started preschool.
The old library had only one window, in the very back room where the children’s books were. I always made a beeline to the back, careful to dodge old Chinese immigrants and the large dark wooden tables where they sat reading the Chinese newspapers, zigzagging down the little ramp to the lower level with the window opening to the view of the elementary school playground.
My mom picked out bilingual children’s books featuring Chinese folk tales to read to my sister and me. We left the library with a stack of ten thin hardcovered picture books, ten being the most a person could check out at once.
My mom would read one book a night before tucking my sister and me into bed. Not knowing English, she read the Chinese side of the books, showing us the colored drawings depicting pale characters with small slanted eyes wearing colorful long robes as she read. The tales always end with a moral. I can’t recall most of the stories, but they were my only education in Chinese culture until I began learning Chinese at UCI.
I do remember one tale, though. It haunts me with shear ridiculousness. It was a tale of a lazy woman whose husband loved her very much and fed her until she grew fat. He fed her in bed and she never had to do any work. But one day, her husband had to go away on a long journey for a number of days and he worried about his wife not being able to feed herself. So he made her a gigantic bread ring shaped like a bagel and put it around her neck so she could eat at it until he returned. But when he returned, she was dead, starved because she was too lazy to turn the bread ring around. I remember the picture of the obese woman reclining in bed with a partially-eaten bread ring around her neck, looking as if she could be asleep.
One day, when I was still in elementary school, the library told us we had not returned a book. We went back home and searched for the book but could not find it. My mom was angry and I was angry and scared. I don’t know if the problem was ever settled, but for a long time we stopped going to the library. It wasn’t until my sister started high school in 2001 and decided to complete her volunteer hours at the library that we returned to that dark place of my childhood where my fantasies first began to bloom.
Then in 2003, the library moved to a bigger brighter location and I got my own library card. I took the bus there every Saturday, and poured over the young adult fantasy section where one entire wall was a window opening up to the small parking lot. I read tales of fantasies and daydreamed that I was a character in the stories, wished that I would magically be whisked away to another world. The new library was inviting and I walked every corner of it, spent hours combing the shelves for books on arts and crafts, origami, astrology, and even magic. I would straighten the books on the shelves and even put books back in order because I knew the Dewey Decimal System intimately from my time volunteering at my elementary school library in 4th grade.
(Chinatown Branch Library: http://www.lapl.org/branches/Branch.php?bID=63)
Although the idea that books will be replaced entirely by e-books pokes at the back of my mind, I do not believe the library will become obsolete with the rise of e-books. The library’s biggest advantage is that it’s free while e-books and e-readers cost money and is therefore a luxury many cannot afford. Even though I have given in to e-books for this class and find the portability very seductive, I remain a fan of the physical book. I cannot imagine how different reading children’s picture books with e-readers will be, how joyless the lack of turning a physical page and watching the colors and pictures distort and change would be.
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