Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

did I do something really nice in a previous life?

2014-06-27T18:20:18Z

Here is what I am currently doing for my job: an accessibility review of one of my favorite reference books, so my employers can know what needs to happen to make it more accessible.

I am making one of the best reference books more accessible. And in order to do that, I am having to spend a lot of time going to lots of pages on the reference book's website.

I don't know what I did to deserve this, but I want to find out so I can do it again and again.

#Yes, I have favorite reference works. That's how we librarians roll.
#Once a librarian, always a librarian.
#I've been spending enough time reading tumblr that completing a post with a series of rambling postscripts just seems normal now.
#But I actually use my tags for classification and discovery.
#Cf. above re: "librarian"
#So apparently I am fake hashtagging because I am a hipster.

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Slacktivist on the reality of what is and isn't online

2012-02-24T20:38:53Z

Fred Clark is a journalist who for years worked in newspapers. With his post "Screenwriters: No, back issues of The Small Town Gazette from the 1930s are not archived online", he addresses TV writers who are convinced that their amazing hacker can find everything online. (I believe that Alec Hardison can do anything with computers, but even Hardison and Chaos working together can't find information on computers if it's still lying un-digitized in a banker's box in the archives.)

I admit I am making allowances for Fred when he talks about "the musty, subterranean archives of the old library, lit only by the dim glow of the microfilm machine and a flickering fluorescent bulb down the hallway," but he is talking about photogenic TV-ready information gathering, so I suppose I will let it pass.

The larger point is what matters. Most information has not been digitized. Many newspapers haven't been indexed, so it's not just that you can't find the newspaper, you can't find any reference to the fact that such a newspaper exists somewhere and has an article about the person in question. You should push your local newspapers to manage their digital platforms and keep track of their old issues!

And while you should remember that the open web is great for Good Enough information gathering -- and don't get me wrong, I'm as much of a fan of web search and Wikipedia as the next person with a pulse -- if you are looking for something and you can't find it on the Internet, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Not only your local public librarian, but quite possibly your local university librarian, local university archivist, or local historical society archivist, will happily help you look for the information. Heck, if you think the information is somewhere that's not local at all, send an e-mail. Reference, in most archives and libraries, is free and open to the public.

... Good. Now I can close that tab which has been open since December.

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(1) digital discovery (2) meritocratic myth

2010-03-02T04:16:29Z

In "Descartes Letter Found, Therefore It Is", I learned that a long-lost stolen letter of Descartes' has turned up in my alma mater's archives:

If old-fashioned larceny was responsible for the document’s loss, advanced digital technology can be credited for its rediscovery. Erik-Jan Bos, a philosophy scholar at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who is helping to edit a new edition of Descartes’s correspondence, said that during a late-night session browsing the Internet he noticed a reference to Descartes in a description of the manuscript collection at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He contacted John Anderies, the head of special collections at Haverford, who sent him a scan of the letter.
...
Scholars have known of the letter’s existence for more than 300 years, but not its contents. Apparently the only person who had really studied it was a Haverford undergraduate who spent a semester writing a paper about the letter in 1979. (Mr. Bos called the paper “a truly fine piece of work.”)

Guys, this is awesome. This is why I do what I do! Putting collection guides online is a royal pain (ASK ME HOW I FEEL ABOUT THE EAD STANDARD), but this is the kind of story that makes it all worthwhile. Archival collections are full of hidden treasures the archivists themselves don't know about. It takes a dedicated scholar to find these lost and hidden (and rarely digitized) gems, and digital collection guides, followed up by e-reference, followed up by spot digitization, solved the puzzle.

Viva la Ford!

On a more somber note, from "Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business)":

Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. The first time I did this experiment, I felt a strange feeling of vertigo while reading the resume. “Who is this guy?” I had a hard time forming a visual image, which made it harder to try and compare each candidate to the successful people I’d worked with in the past. It was an uncomfortable feeling, which instantly revealed just how much I’d been relying on surface qualities when screening resumes before – even when I thought I was being 100% meritocratic. And, much to my surprise (and embarrassment), the kinds of people I started phone-screening changed immediately.

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question 2: can you think of a nerdier question?

2009-10-20T18:42:25Z

Over at the DCA blog (RSS/tufts_dca_feed on DW/tufts_dca on LJ), I've posted asking people for their favorite reference books. Come and tell us!

I was a little bit disingenuous over there when I said that the OED was my second favorite reference book. Really, the OED is my favorite reference book, because it is best for party tricks. I do love my Debrett's Peerage, and probably the only reason that DARE doesn't come first is that it is not complete. But where else but the OED can you easily find the connection between "cool" and "aftermath"?

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