Monocles, manacles, and yes, The New Yorker

When I unwrapped The Complete New Yorker this Christmas, I was so grateful to my sister. Here was a complete, 80-year archive of one of the few magazines I’ve subscribed to and avidly read down through the years. There is something so irrationally satisfying in knowing that you have full access to a treasure-trove like that — in believing that any half-remembered story, any quirky illustration, any lumbering old ad, any suburban-sophisticate take on a given 20th-century phenomenon is now all yours, just a few keystrokes away.

I couldn’t quite square this possessive exultation with the knowledge that any decent library offers its patrons access to an infinitely wider array of human expression and documentation, also just a few keystrokes away. I ended up chalking it up to the unique aura of The New Yorker — the illusions it has so longed sustained of subjectivity, possession, discrimination, privilege — an aura that had me maintaining my subscription even through the Tina years. Somehow, it seemed right that this content would be walled off from Proquestian aggregation, left a world unto itself and thus bestowed.

That said… The Complete New Yorker has proven to be one difficult world to navigate. Others have elaborately deplored its software: it inflicts an uncustomizable user interface, and seems hellbent on preventing you from doing anything with these files besides flipping through indifferently scanned pages. Thinking about extracting that poem by Louis Gluck? Think again: it’s forever pinned to that Peugeot ad. Wanting to finally read that long Rachel Carson essay? Quit hunting for a ‘printer-friendly’ version: there ain’t none. Hoping to play with a Charles Addams cartoon? Well, print out its page and color it in with crayons, because that’s about all you’re allowed to do. This lock-down of content into its original context might seem like an endorsement of situationalism, and might stoke some cultural studies, but it’s really about copyright law, and it severely limits the possibilities of this archive in a digital environment.

Worse yet, you can’t even load the whole thing onto your computer; the files cannot be copied to your hard drive — they’re stuck, instead, on eight DVDs. That means that if you wish to jump around chronologically, the search screen will constantly command you to insert a different disk. Put one into your trusty Powerbook, and sit back for a spirited little tune I like to call the Eustace Shuffle. You might wish to pour yourself a scotch while you wait. Roaming through The Complete New Yorker is indeed evocative of a bygone era, but that era is the one when you had to load several floppies sequentially to install a program, and who misses those days? It’s no wonder that information has started appear on how to disable this crippleware and actually get the files you bought (or, in my case, your sister bought you) onto your computer and freely accessible.

My biggest quarrel, though, is with the sad, sad search functionality. Let’s take a look at some of the “search tips,” shall we?

The search does not search the complete text of articles. I see. Really? Wow. That’s why my search for “Shelley Winters” today turned up exactly zero snarky Pauline Kael references. It did direct me (shuffle shuffle shuffle) to a long Renata Adler piece on Martin Luther King (and having glanced through that piece, I still have no idea why). And it did point me to a Talk of the Town about Yoo-Hoo, that sublime chocolate drink…. RIP, Shelley. You deserved better.

The New Yorker has been consistent in its keywording over the years, even as vocabulary has evolved. Therefore, articles about cars are filed under “Automobiles,” boxers under “Prizefighters,” and World War II under “Second World War.” Each article abstract will display the list of matching keywords as well. Use these exact words to search for related articles. You may copy these words from the abstracts and paste them into the search bar. Ok! Got it! I’m ready to punch my way through keywords like a prizefighter – so where is the thesaurus? I guess I should be assembling it bit by bit, noting matching keywords and painstakingly collecting them, like automobile rations during the Second World War.

The search finds all matching terms in an item’s abstract, keywords, and titles, and caption. It will not, however, search authors, departments, years, or issue date. Those may be selected in the windows above. Well, I’ll be hogtied and googled. Am I in the wrong field? Have I always been in the wrong field? Is an author name not a key word? Is that old hunt for Martin Amis screwing up my results down here? And about those abstracts — why do some items have them, some don’t? Why are they so, well, various? Some seem to be the first few paragraphs of a piece, others seem to be garrulous summations.

Search terms like “or” and “and” will be ignored. Quotation marks will be also be ignored. I see. So my query

“very” and “lame” or “incredibly” and “lame”

is out of the question. That’s fine — ignore it. Boolean’s so very … Atlantic Monthly ….

Yes, well, perhaps, and evidently: searching is destined to be a felicitous capricious fluttering business in the rich little world of The Complete New Yorker. Still and all, I’m glad I own it. You just never know what might flutter by.

Patronage 2.0

My attention shifted today to a site guaranteed to warm — nay, torch — a librarian’s heart: Superpatron.

This is a blog written by Edward Vielmetti, an energetic and tech-savvy patron of the forward-thinking Ann Arbor District Library. As outlined on Superpatron, the courtship went this way: he suggested that the library build RSS feeds into its catalog, whoever responded from the library knew about Vielmetti’s interesting personal blog and complimented him on it, Vielmetti joined the library’s technology advisory board, and now here’s Superpatron.

Let’s sample a few of the notions recently blogged there:

1/4 – I was wondering the other day whether libraries shouldn’t start to keep special collections of books meant to be written in. There would be a special shelf for them, when you checked them out there would be a nice pencil or pen to go with, and maybe if you were lavish you’d bind in a few extra blank pages between chapters for extra notes or a pocket in the back to keep note cards.

1/3 – I’ve experimented at various times with posting lists of the books I’m interested in out of the catalog at the Ann Arbor District Library and into my blog. My latest effort is below. It uses a combination of Feedburner and its RSS-to-Javascript publishing services to take data from the AADL’s records for my hold list and format it nicely.

12/30 – I wrote a half dozen lines of not very pretty code and turned the Ann Arbor District Library‘s new holding lists into a wall of books display for non-fiction and for fiction.

The AADL is naturally moved to comment publicly on many of Superpatron‘s fine ideas. Best of all, a climate of creative use is being fostered: a library opens its resources up through blogs and feeds, and Web 2.0 mavens run with it.

A note about the word patron. It’s my sense, having just completed library school, that this word is out of fashion – one hears and sees user much more frequently, and even, from time to time, customer. Presumably, some notions about banishing old stereotypes and (patronizing?) approaches is behind this trend. But I’m against it; I like patron, and maybe power users of library services like Superpatron will help to revive this fine old term.

The OED’s definition of patron stresses “defender, protector” at the core of the term — it derives from padro/father & is inflected with religious use. User is so very dry and generic — equally applicable to dishwashers, screwdrivers, highways, and drugs. Patron actually restores the deference to a “user community” that libraries so often profess — and surely we can say the word without taking on the full baggage of patriarchy or ecclesiastical intervention or starving artist exploitation or what have you. Patron is compact and it correctly assigns ultimate responsibility for the life of a library.

As for customer — stop it, just please stop it.

It’s about time

Something about the enormous endless novel … I can’t quite figure out its spell. There’s the comfort of inhabiting (or being inhabited) across seasons and locations. There’s the marvel at Sisyphean endeavor. There’s the irrational exuberance of pushing through to four-digit pages. Whatever the causes, I rarely get through a short story, but give me a Clarissa, a J.R., a Ulysses, a Golden Bowl, a Tristram Shandy, a Remembrance of Times Past, a Dead Souls, even a Ship of Fools … and I’m caught.

A passage from my most recent ensnarement, The Magic Mountain:

A story whose contents involved a time span of five minutes… could, by means of an extraordinary scrupulosity in filling up those five minutes, last a thousand times as long — and still remain short on boredom, although in relationship to its imaginary time it would be very long in the telling. On the other hand, it is possible for a narrative’s content-time to exceed its own duration immeasurably. This is accomplished by diminishment — and we use this term to describe an illusory, or to be quite explicit, diseased element, that is obviously pertinent here: diminishment occurs to some extent whenever a narrative makes use of hermetic magic and a temporal hyper-perspective reminiscent of certain anomalous experiences of reality that imply that the senses have been transcended.

And so MM, an epic of disintegration, pursues a push-pull with time — inflating into vast meditations and then pondering its own rot. It’s a hypochondriac’s nightmare. It’s intoxicating, and of course that’s often different from comfortable. It’s also very funny. Towards the end of its degeneration (and we can only think of the book as an inexorably metastasizing disease — even its author can’t seem to wrest free of it), MM holds up a fun-house mirror to itself. This mirror is a drunken Dutchman named Mynheer Peeperkorn, of all things: a shambling “personality” who holds mysterious sway, deploying

a series of exquisite gestures that riveted his listeners’ interst — the subly nuanced, well-chosan, precise, tidy, cultured gestures of an orchestra conductor — a forefinger bent to form a circle with a thumb or a palm held out wide, but with tapering nails, to caution, to subdue, to demand attention, only to disappoint his now smiling, attentive listeners with one of his very robustly prepared, but incomprehensible phrases; or rather, he did not so much disappoint people as transform smiles into looks of delighted amazement, because the robustness, subtlety, and significance of the preparation largely compensated, even after the fact, for what he failed to say and produced a satisfying, amusing, and enriching effect all its own.

We’re getting very close here to defining the spell of these monster books. As I was reading a recent rueful meditation on David Foster Wallace in Poets & Writers, and thinking back on Infinite Jest — that great & purposeless three-tent circus of tennis, addiction, and popped U.S. culture — Mynheer Peeperkorn kept coming to my mind. He is, indeed, a riviting personality, even if his words trail off into nothing. You have to keep attending such a force, and wondering at its monumental incapacities.  You have to keep biding its time.

Looming clouds

Last summer (yes it was once summer) I wrote a bit about TagCloud — a nifty folksonomy visualization tool. When the MetaMuser mentioned this app recently, I took another look and decided to see how websites I visit might cloud together.

Which is a convoluted way of announcing ClayfoxClouds – wherein three groups of RSS feeds (library-related feeds, news feeds, and blogs-I-like feeds) converge into 75 tags each. Here’s a picture of tonight’s harvest:

The library-related and news-related tags (top, middle) do tend to group up a bit, while the blogs-I-like tags (on the bottom) tend to straggle individually — a reflection of the scattered nature of my recreational surfing, perhaps. In any case, automated harvesting is hardly a science; since TagCloud is not drawing from any standardized metadata, the occurrence of certain terms can seem arbitrary or trivial. Or unnecessary … pizza queen, anyone?

I’ll add more feeds into the mix as I run across them, who knows what tags will emerge — or, once clicked, where they will lead. If they lead nowhere, keep in mind that TagCloud is beta.

So go ahead, head into the clouds.

In the meantime

It occurs to me that I haven’t highlighted pictures snapped along the way lately, and that’s just not right – it’s been a vivid if peripatetic season. Ranging over the last two months and stepping backwards chronologically, I’ve been most thankful for San Francisco:

…after drinking up kulcha at the Met like a good New Yorker:

…after wandering and wondering around Harlem:

…after drinking up kulcha on the Lower East Side:

…after getting used to being back in New York in the first place:

Now that we’ve returned to Maine, my camera battery is too frozen to function. For the time being, you’ll have to imagine an icy Portland for yourself, or see what more intrepid shutterbugs are seeing here.

Pro bono

Inevitable? Sure. Useful? We’ll see. Wikilaw, an open-content legal resource, is up and running — soliciting off-the-clock, copyleft work from the million lawyers running around the U.S.

At least one or two of them must be frustrated graphic artists – imagine if tort reform could be similarly explained:

Wikipedia is abandoning the anonymous editing model, after being beaten up in the press recently for defamation; but Wikilaw, for the time being at least, is allowing users to weigh in anonymously.

So here’s a suggestion for faceless counsel: there’s an immediate need for guidance on the Communication Decency Act – authoritative guidance, please.

Plugging in

A year into it, about 11% of browsing is now being done with Firefox; it’s been downloaded over 100 million times. Though not impervious to security problems, Firefox is a safer bet than wretched old IE. Besides, fear isn’t the only reason to pay attention to differences between browsers. Faith and serendipity still count: open-source Firefox inspires nice little plug-ins.

A visit to the sprightly Shifted Librarian today alerted me to a good example: a plug-in that helpfully installs a library search engine right into the Firefox browser. Here’s an example: after quick installation of a plug-in, a search field for the Ann Arbor District Library catalog lives right below the search engines that come loaded with Firefox by default:

The Ann Arbor District Library already offers nifty RSS functionality. Now, thanks to a volunteer programmer, users can track the library’s holdings in another convenient way. The AADL search plug-in sticks to keyword searching, and tucks that Google-like simplicity into a user’s own (Firefox) browser. Since the plug-in is open source (of course), it can be tweaked to work with any number of other library catalogues. In fact, of course, many other libraries offer their own version of this Firefox search plug-in.

And how does it work in practice? I installed the AADL search plug-in (a one-click process) and searched the library catalog for good old “Lord Byron”:

The results were underwhelming, to say the least: sound recordings of gospel singing beat out anything by or about our famous poet, merely because of accidental proximity in contents listings (“The Presence of the Lord” by Byron Cage). But such are the perils of swampy, flat ‘keyword’ fields. It would be churlish to blame the creator of this plug-in for this particular OPAC’s wheezy treatment of keywords. He’s made a ‘last mile’ connection to the user, and it puts new pressure on the library to make its keyword search more relevant.

And what of that creator? Turns out he’s a high school student named Matt Hampel. If Firefox can leverage budding talent for non-commercial, communally-oriented ends, isn’t that enough reason to switch?

So we gather

Fresh outta Norway, here’s an intriguing marriage of wikis, folksonomy, and metadata harvesting: meet Collib, an experiment launched by a student at the University of Tromsø.

The idea here: records are harvested from OAI-PMH-compliant repositories and brought into the wiki. Users – now end-users of these records – then ‘tag’ them in the wiki. Presumably, discussion can ensue – though in my tour of the wiki today, I’m not seeing such discussion.

Let’s take a peek at a tagged record:

The record is in the middle of the screen, and Collib user tagging is on the right. Note that further tagging is always possible, ala Flickr. The original record and other indexing services are also linked (no guarantees, though, that you’ll find the item actually indexed elsewhere).

In the nav bar on the left: “Untagged records” are helpfully grouped together, awaiting end-user angels to tag them. The relationship of “Subjects” and “categories” is a bit of mystery to me. And I wonder who gets to stipulate which repositories are being harvested.

What an undergrad wants

The attempt to present services to students is a matter of much hand-wringing in academic libraries. “They want Google!” “They need databases!” “Convenience!” “Depth!” “Hopeless!” “Infinite!” & etc.

In my informal tour of various library interfaces today, one presentation has really stood out: The University of Minnesota’s Undergraduate Virtual Library. Take a look:

We have an OPAC search bar right up top, but we also have, clockwise from the top right, a ‘full text finder’ (and you know the kids are crazy for full text); a ‘top five’ list of applications that, presumably, you could get help using in the library; the ubiquitous ‘quick links’; a list of recently updated blogs (nota bene – this university library actively promotes and supports blogs across the campus); and, rounding back up top, immediate access to research guides, broken down by subject.

And now to the middle: a big button inviting students to a personalized ‘my library’ space – not an easy sell to undergraduates, unless well integrated and promoted, as this essay about NC State’s service suggests. And finally a cute application called the Assignment Calculator:

…wherein you enter a start date, a due date, and a step-by-step roadmap gets generated, linked to guides to such matters as defining a topic, formulating a thesis, conducting research, reserving lab time, revising, writing instruction support, and RefWorks tutorials – all listed under the assurance that “you can beat the clock!” One can even ask for email reminders of various tasks.

Grad students have a similar “dissertation calculator” available on their own portal page (if I had had such a tool, surely I would have shaved years off the process…). In general, Minnesota has set up service pages for a range of user categories, demonstrating thoughtful envisioning of needs – and perhaps even collaboration along the way. A giant “feedback” button (not pictured here) lives at the very top of the Undergraduate page, inviting a click.

As a 2003 NSF-EU DELOS Working Group Report puts it, “Personalization is required to make an increasingly heterogeneous population of digital libraries accessible to an increasingly heterogeneous population of users.” Minnesota’s custom response to the real-world needs of that fitful and sometimes panicked user, the college student on deadline, meets that requirement with (let’s hope infectious) creativity.

From browser to collector

Of the several new tools under development discussed at ARL’s lively symposium on Managing Digital Assets in Washington last week, none seemed simpler in concept, or more likely to be popular in practice, than “Firefox Scholar,” an IMLS-funded initiative underway at George Mason University (details here).

The idea is to grab metadata for digital resources with a single click in the browser; this metadata can then be stored, annotated, manipulated in whatever way is useful to the user. It’s now a truism that user-driven organization is an important component of what too many people are calling the Web 2.0. Much of this involves using the web as a platform for personally mixed components – bringing recontextualized assets into what 2.0-ers like to call “rich play.”

Firefox Scholar takes it as a given that most research is happening in browsers (that would be less controversial if we amended their claim to most electronic research), and the browers should be the place to grab and store citation metadata and make annotations – rather than standalone applications like MS Word or EndNote. The hope is that converging the spaces of discovery and note-taking will “greatly enhance the usefulness of, and the great investment of time and money in, the electronic collections of museums and libraries.”

What’s particularly promising about this is that all of this metadata harvesting and self-cataloguing happens on the client side. It’s easy to then imagine peer-to-peer interactions, based on similarly tagged items or asset-based subscriptions.