It'll all end in cheers

It's not often I find something to agree with on the opinion page of the Melbourne Age, which increasingly resembles a cross between the campus newspapers of my youth and Green Left Weekly, but today was an exception.

The writer makes the point that increased ease of communication is paradoxically leading to a decline in the basic skills of written communication. I see this all the time at work, where it's not uncommon for me to receive an email enquiry which is so garbled, ungrammatical and a-syntactical as to be literally incomprehensible. I often have to write back and say, as politely as possible, What the hell are you asking me? And these emails usually come from people who went through school before the education system fell apart, and who often are holding down professional jobs.

Unfortunately I'm not in the lucky position of the person who told me he automatically deletes unread any email that begins with 'Hi' or ends in 'cheers'.

My own suspicion is that the real problem is simple selfishness, which we used to try to minimize by teaching people manners. Why bother to write legibly? If someone can't read you, that's their problem. You know your own phone number, so of course you're going to gabble it at top speed when leaving a message on my phone. So I have to play the tape three or four times over to reconstruct the message, like some CIA agent manning a wiretap operation.

Somewhat related is the near-extinction of the salutation 'Dear...' I suspect that most modern illiterates consider this either overly familiar or effeminate.

Cheers!

Race to the finish

Okay, the pressure is on to finish the '23 things' agenda. So let's see:

Number 16: Wikis. I'm sorry to say that I didn't seem to find any "innovative ways libraries are using wikis". All I can see is that some librarians are using wikis to replace online bulletin boards and discussion lists, which is hardly a quantum leap.

Number 19: Explore an award-winning Web 2.0 site. I checked quite a few sites from the list, and didn't find any of them interesting enough to "play" with. I looked in the toybox and what I wanted wasn't there. By the way, wouldn't you think a site as successful as Craigslist wouldn't be quite so, well, ugly?

Number 20: Discover YouTube. Done, long ago. Here's a favourite.

Number 21: look at a tool for finding podcasts. I did, put in "Glenn Gould" and got no hits. I put in "Glenn Miller" and got no hits. I put in "Glenn Campbell" and got no hits.

Number 22: Look at the World eBook Fair site. I did. The really scary thing is the number of amateur writers self-publishing on the Net. As the old saying goes, Everybody has a book inside them, and in most cases, that's where it should stay.

Number 23: summarize my thoughts about the programme. Here goes:

Firstly, I have to pay tribute to the considerable amount of work which obviously went into planning this programme, so full credit to the organisers.

A few thoughts about possible changes: make it shorter. I found my interest, and that of others, petering out by week 5-6.

Ditch the "play" angle. Most of the people doing this programme are middle-aged, with at least two degrees, a mortgage, and a few decades of mostly unfashionable life-experience. They can learn things without it needing to be made 'FUN' and 'PLAY'.

Ditch 'Library 2.0' as the overall label. One of the things I learned in this course is that there is no such thing as Library 2.0 It's a marketing term that works very well for people like Stephen Abrams, and has about as much meaning or validity as "NEW, IMPROVED!". By all means include it as one of the elements of the course: just because you don't believe in the tooth fairy or flying saucers or astrology doesn't mean you don't need to know about these things. (And I swear to you, I had already written the above words when I went looking for a generic 'new improved' flash to illustrate this post, and found the image above. I think it speaks for itself.)

Segway: chariot of Karma!

I was planning a follow-up post about that poor boob doomed by his library to not only toodle around on a stupid Segway, but to wear a girly crash-helmet because he was going all of 12 miles per hour tops. Actually, Segways are more dangerous than you might think. Brit newspaper editor Piers Morgan, who had earlier mocked George W. Bush for falling off a Segway, has himself fallen off one, breaking three ribs. Mock the Segway at your peril.

When is a library not a library?

For those of you who came in late, here's a taste of the brimstone Elmo has been dishing out lately:

"Libraries have had their day. They will not survive."

In a sense, Elmo's prophecy is already coming true. If you look around my Library, probably about a third of the 'patrons' are using free internet, mostly for amusement or time-killing, another third are de-campused students using us as a study hall, and perhaps another third are what you might consider 'traditional' library patrons. It has been increasingly clear to me over the last ten years that the decline in 'serious' patrons over-the-counter is due simply to the fact that these people (the ones with opposable thumbs) can increasingly get what they want via the internet, and through self-ordering from our online catalogue. Leaving desk staff to mop up what's left.

I'm the first to admit that, past a certain point, which we have almost certainly already reached, it's the patrons who define what the institution is*. And I'm not always pessimistic about this. Just as the baths were the civic hub in cities of the Roman world, there is no reason why libraries might not bid to become something similar today. My main concern, however, is that, having begun my present working life as a research librarian, I might be finishing it as a cabana boy.

*Though I'm reminded of the good old story about the crusty university lecturer who began in the era of men-only campuses, and would begin every lecture with the salutation "Gentlemen..." Over the years, women were admitted, but he still began each lecture with "Gentlemen..." One day, it reached the point where only a single man was enrolled in his subject, the rest of the students being women. He began the lecture: "Sir..."

St. Elmo's fire

Firstly, a blushing vote of thanks for Elmo's kind words in comments to my previous post. Needless to say, I have enjoyed Elmo's blog: entertaining and thought-provoking.

But that's not all he had to say: do check it out, but make sure you're wearing asbestos gloves, and that you have a fire blanket handy for your PC. Elmo is blazing!

(I was going to urge Elmo to copyright the expression 'Whatever 2.0' - the t-shirt merchandising alone could make me, er us, millions - but of course someone has beaten Elmo to it. However, Googling the term led me to this rather good post on Web 2.0 baloney.)

Show me the money! or Musings of a 2.0 Sceptic

First, let me apologize for that image of Tom Cruise. I realize that nowadays a lot of people find him kind of creepy. But Tom is asking what I'm asking: Show me the money! By which I mean, show me what 'Library 2.0' really is.

The Learning 2.0 programme has left me with a nagging doubt that 'Library 2.0' is just another of those culture fads that we'll look back on in 10 years' time with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement, like Segways, or manmade global warming. Perhaps it'll be an answer in the 2015 edition of Trivial Pursuit.

The trouble sign is that no-one can tell me what L2.0 actually is. Every blog and website I have visited just sprays around words like community, trust, participation, content-rich, interactive, etc., in much the same way that a squid uses ink, or heavy metal bands use dry-ice fog. Sadly, I'm inclined to agree with online columnist Jonah Goldberg:

"Web 2.0 is a nothing but a buzz phrase designed to make money for people who use phrases like Web 2.0."

This is not to say that new things are not happening in Libraries. Unquestionably they are, and nobody knows this better than librarians. But what is the purpose of taking a grab-bag of mostly unrelated internet applications, and pretending that they form an organic identity that is, moreover, crucial to the survival of libraries? Blogging is important for librarians? Show me the money! Show me the library blog that really makes a difference. Tell me how many library patrons actually read it.

Librarians need to know about blogs, certainly, in the same way they need to know about lots of other things in the modern world, like pole dancing. But to insist that a librarian needs to write a blog in order to be modern is like insisting they ride around the library on those stupid Segways instead of walking.

Update: I should have known.

Must read

Again, a must-read post on the subject of Library 2.0 from the wonderful Annoyed Librarian.

Not scared enough

I'm grateful to the Library 2.0 program, who regularly stops by to read my posts and leave a friendly comment. But at the risk of seeming ungracious, I have to point out that he/she seems to have missed the point of my earlier post. When the tottery old couple re-appeared in our newly re-opened hi-tech reading room, I didn't pump my fist in the air for joy, shouting "Thank God! Our technology hasn't frightened them away!" On the contrary, I felt something between wry humour and mild depression.

One of the myths of modern libraries which I refuse to buy into is the nonsense about people being scared of libraries, and that it's somehow our job as librarians to free them from this crippling scourge. What a load of bollocks. If anything, the problem is that people aren't scared enough of Libraries. Every day my Library is full of people who seem to think it's their lounge room, bathroom, dining room and love-hotel. To anyone who is "scared" of Libraries, I can only say Get Help. Or else, if you're scared of libraries, then it's a pretty good sign you probably shouldn't be in them. They're not for everyone.

There is another

If this blog does nothing else, in its short life, it will not have lived in vain if it brings just one new reader to the most wonderful library blog ever - The Annoyed Librarian.

(My thanks to one who I'm sure prefers to remain anonymous).

Library n.0

My head is spinning from reading some of those librarians we were asked to read for week six. Usually, when I hear talk like that, it's somebody trying to sell me a monorail, or seventy-six trombones, or something. These libraries of the future sound wonderful, but I just have one question: where are we going to find human beings worthy of them?

You are no doubt familiar with the work of New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams. One of my favourite Charles Addams multi-panel cartoons (which I can't find online), shows a gloomy, decrepit old gothic mansion in a street of otherwise modern buildings. A hoarding goes up: "Soon to be constructed on this site, modern office building, etc." In the dead of night, a sinister vampire-like figure leaves the old building, with a bundle of possessions. The old building is torn down and the gleaming, modern new building is erected. Then, in the final panel, again in the dead of night, we see the vampire quietly entering the new building, carrying his bundle.

I tell this story because it makes a very good point, which I can duplicate from my own experience. In the days before my library was extensively modernised, among our regulars was an extremely ancient and tottery couple, the husband of which would spend the whole of every day reading lawbooks (no doubt preparing to right some ancient wrong he had suffered), while his wife sat patiently in idle attendance.

Then we closed the reading room, remodelled it, and re-opened it - brand spanking new, massed arrays of glowing computer screens like the bridge of the Discovery. We seemed to have inaugurated a new era of librarianship. And who were the first people to walk through the door? The ancient tottery couple.

Have I made my point?

Week Five in review

Er, let's see, where was I? Oh yeah, Image generators. Well, as my mother used to tell me, if you can't say something nice about a piece of 2.0 gimmickry, don't say anything.

Library Thing. Again, is it just me, or this idea of people cataloguing their own book collections, and then sharing the lists, deeply sad?

Rollyo. At least I can see where this might have some use for some folks. It's just that I'm not one of them. The rolling has already been done for me, with tools like Picture Australia and Libraries Australia.

Goodbye Week Five, you are the weakest link.

The information soup-kitchen

I'm old enough to remember one of the more embarrassing catch-phrases of the early Internet era: the information super-highway. When I stand on shift at a public desk, and see someone sprawled in a chair, watching YouTube videos by the hour, a different phrase comes to mind: the information soup-kitchen. (Younger readers, and Millennials, unfamiliar with this concept can see here.)

The film-maker David Cronenberg made some prophetic movies in the 1970s and 80s, and his greatest film Videodrome (1983) contains many uncanny premonitions of the Internet age. One scene shows a character called Brian O'Blivion, who helps homeless men - or so he believes - by giving them access to television for hours on end. Television, he says "patches them back into the mixing-board of Life". When I see the idle YouTube watchers whose main purpose in life is to trigger the Library's people counters every day, I am reminded of Brian O'Blivion.

Who is Secret Thornton?

It's funny how soon your ear can become attuned and detuned to certain accents. After only a few days away in Tasmania, in the company of someone who speaks in that very precise English accent that certain native Tasmanians retain, I returned to Melbourne. When I was re-exposed to mainland radio and television (especially the ABC) I found the strine accents almost comical. I was genuinely puzzled for a moment when one ABC announcer repeatedly referred to someone called 'Secret Thornton'.

He's not in Kansas anymore

No, he's right here on 'Cries and Whispers'. My humble blog has been visited by none other than David Lee King, the Library 2.0 blogger first noticed below. He posted a comment on this post, and was nice enough not to take offense at my sceptical comments on one aspect of his blog. (Uh, Dave, you were kidding about "Kill the unbeliever", right?)

Black power

Here's a customized version of Google, called Blackle. By using a black screen instead of the blinding white of ordinary Google, it supposedly saves energy which would otherwise be carbonating our troposphere and giving polar bears heatstroke. And if you believe that, there's a bridge in Sydney I can let you have cheap.

Hold your fire!

What have I done? My innocent post on Harry Potter has released a hornet's nest. Library bloggers are conducting a vicious battle royal in my comments column. It wasn't meant to be like this. I hoped that where there was war, my blog would bring peace; where there was hate, my blog would bring love. Now cut it out, you kids! Yeah, it's fun until someone's eye gets put out with a quidditch-stick...or a sniggle-snoggle..or (insert your own Rowlingism here).

Let's forget our differences and combine against the real enemy...Library 2.0!

Update: some wise words of warning from Marian Paroo in the comments to this post. At first I thought I would be safe if I just stayed away from making snide cracks about Library blogs with pictures of cats. I wish! I just had to go and stomp on the toes of the Harry Potterers, and now the Web 2.0 zealots. Excuse me, but I think I hear an angry mob outside my window. Pitchforks? Check. Flaming torches? Check.

But seriously, I am somehow not surprised to hear Marian's report from the Library 2.0 flame wars. I can see how easily the barely concealed fervour in even rational-seeming types like David Lee King could turn into "Kill the unbeliever!!"

Because it's there!

This week's learning assignment is RSS feeds. I seem to have got the hang of it, but again, I can't see it having much use for me. I read about 4-5 blogs on a daily basis, and most of these update fairly infrequently, so RSS feeds aren't much help to me. I worry about the librarian who tells us she follows 80 blogs a day. What would you say to someone who told you she washes her hands 80 times a day? My response: Get. Help.

I don't care who they are: nobody needs to read 80 blogs a day. Even I can easily spend 40 minutes reading my favourite blogs, and though I enjoy it, I always come away with the slightly seedy sense of having wasted time. Just as if I'd been playing a computer game, or...reading Harry Potter.

I came across David Lee King's blog, which is steeped in the 2.0 mantras, but still manages to be interesting. David seems to belong to the 'because it's there' school of thought on Libraries and Web 2.0. Why do librarians need to know about Web 2.0? Because it's there! Pragmatic, functional justifications for particular applications seem to be in short supply. Increasingly, this is my Canute-like critique of the whole Library 2.0 project. The idea seems to be to grab each new thing - wikis, RSS feeds, blogs - and then try to find a reason why libraries need it. It ends up sounding a little desperate.

The rise of the Millennials

We've been hearing a lot about millennials at the Library lately. In a recent library forum, I found myself, and most of my colleagues, neatly boxed up as soon-to-retire 'boomers' by a self-proclaimed millennial.

Since the world is their oyster, the big question seems to be how to attract the Millennials into librarianship? Gee, I dunno, maybe..we could..pay them to work here. That's what got me in. So what remains for me, as a boomer librarian (on the cusp)? Maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll get the deluxe euthanasia package, with a complimentary soylent green mint on my pillow. (Apologies to any Millennials who might be reading: 'soylent green' is a reference to a pop culture artefact from the late Twentieth Century. For more information, consult a talking ring in your crumbling and vine-overgrown public library, take a left at the Forbidden Zone. Oops, sorry, another of those references.)

Harry Potter sells out

Here's my transparent ploy for topicality: a post about Harry Potter. I was travelling on Saturday morning and seemed to see people everywhere clutching the new volume. As I passed my local bookstore - all done out with Potter-themed curtains and faux-gothic front - I overheard a harassed mother with two kids in tow wailing "They've sold out!" At the risk of making myself even more unpopular, I have to confess to being one of those people who is depressed by the sight of an adult reading a Harry Potter book. Should I go further and say how surprised I am to see many librarians reading Harry Potter?

When I was a child, I read as a child, but I wanted to grow up and read grown up books. I thought my older brother's copy of To Kill a Mockingbird was a fascinating object, and, in typical fraternal spite, he hid it from me in a pile of old washing that sat on the defunct copper* in our washhouse. (This pile of washing, though perfectly clean, was never disturbed by my mother, and seemed to have no real function in our household.) It was a good place to hide a book, but not good enough. I found Mockingbird, and read it over a period of days, in short standing snatches, when my brother was out of the way. This was probably the most intense reading experience of my life.

So to see people reading Harry Potter when they could be reading D. H. Lawrence or Henry James or Vladimir Nabokov or Anthony Burgess seems to me almost a treason against one of the few compensations we have for leaving childhood behind.

The Potter phenomenon reminds me of one of my favourite childhood books, John Masefield's The Midnight Folk, similarly a tale of a young boy's adventure in a world of magic, written long before J. K. Rowling was even a single mother. I recently found and bought a copy, hoping to revisit this world, but funnily enough it has sat on my shelf for nearly a year now, and its prospects of being read seem slim.

(Incidentally, here's an interesting article on the economics of the world of Harry Potter. )

*note for younger readers: a 'copper' was a large copper basin heated by a wood fire, in which the hot water for the laundry was prepared, back in the ye olde dayes.

Update: Huginn, who seems never to sleep, and who has more eyes than Argus, defends the Potter-readers, bringing no less a witness than C. S. Lewis. In my own defence, I can only plead the virtue of inconsistency. I did mention buying The Midnight Folk, with the intention of revisiting it as an adult. Some of my real cultural treasures are things that fall into that area of works created by adults for adults, over the heads of children - such as Looney Tunes cartoons, and the Donald Duck comics of Carl Barks. My concerns about the Harry Potter books go to a question I am unable to answer (not having read them), and have seldom if ever heard raised: are they any good as literature? To put it another way: how do the Potter books compare as literature to the Narnia books? Put yet another way, if the first Potter book had been released as a book for adult readers, would it have succeeded?

Second thoughts

I just thought of a better name for this blog: My 2.0 cents' worth. Geddit?

Fractured Flickr

I have a confession to make to my readers - both of you. This week's Learning 2.0 is about Flickr, something I had already made a brief reconnaissance of. Dutifully, I turned to Flickr again, found out what a mashup is, etc. Am I missing something? Am I the only person on the planet who finds Flickr stupendously boring? Why would I want to look at photographs by amateurs? Who breaks into other people's houses in order to look at their photo albums?

OK, I resolve to try a little harder. Let me use my searching skills to find someone who can tell me why librarians should care about Flickr. I come up with something like this. Read it very carefully. Despite its hyperventilating title "Why Flickr is so great for libraries", there is nothing there.

I don't lie awake at night, tossing and turning, thinking "Oh, if only someone would invent something that allows me to post and share images to the Internet - it would revolutionize my work at the Library!!"

And the 'Librarian trading cards' are deeply sad. Sad, sad, sad.

'Forever minus one day'

Librarians with an interest in copyright - and hey, isn't that all of us? - might be interested in this. A super-brainy maths-type guy at Cambridge has made a study which attempts to quantify the competing interests in copyright, in order to calculate the optimum period of copyright. Care to guess? His answer is fourteen years. Sounds good to me, but I suspect Mickey Mouse's lawyers might have a different idea. Speaking of Mickey and his lawyers, that reminds me of the joke about Mickey's divorce, but it's a bit too 'blue' to repeat, even on a library blog.

No place like House

Now, I hear you asking 'Who is this amazing new mystery man who's setting the world of Library blogging on fire? Why does he hide behind the ludicrous pseudonym "Gerard"? What's his drink? What's his favourite TV show?'

Wonder no longer. My one must-see on free-to-air is the medical drama House MD. I could go on and on about why this is such a good show, but I'll try to narrow it down. (Don't worry: I'm blogging this on my own time.)

1. Hugh Laurie. In one of the best bits of counter-intuitive casting in TV history, an English comic actor is cast as an American doctor in a drama, and it works beautifully. Laurie is just such a watchable actor: the show has learned to do these moody closeups of his face with chiaroscuro lighting, and Laurie is one of those actors who can suggest an interior life, and the process of thought. Especially against some of his co-stars who are cute, perky and chipper, and about as deep as a snowflake.

2. Sarcasm. House's character as a sarcastic ogre with no time for pleasantries, evasions or even ordinary courtesy allows the show to subvert all kinds of anti-rational pieties. It's surprising how often the show comes out with what are effectively conservative opinions: a recent episode was emphatic in dismissing the existence of Gulf War Syndrome.

3. Sleaze. Another of the pleasant subversions of this show is that, even though we know House has a heart as big as all outdoors under that rumpled t-shirt, he isn't made into a saint. It has been established that he regularly pays for sex and is not averse to pornography, and the show gets considerable comic mileage out of this.

Just as CSI has been franchised from Vegas to New York and Miami, maybe the House idea could be franchised to a library setting. Let's see: a brilliant, abrasive and iconoclastic research librarian, equally dismissive of his clients and his well-meaning but bumbling colleagues. He could be based in..oh, I don't know..say, a Picture collection. But where to find the model for such a character...where?...

Fashion Plates

They're hip! They're young! They're edgy! They're Librarians!

Title of this blog

Filmbuffs amongst you will recognise this as the title of a 1972 movie by Ingmar Bergman. Its actual title is Viskningar och rop but somehow that didn't seem such a good idea for a blog name. But who knows, I might have made lots of new friends in the Swedish library community. Hmm. Your Library Learning 2.0 assignment for today is to google the term "swedish librarians". Go on, I dare you.

First Post

Yes, that's right, the Victorian taxpayer is now supporting my blog habit. I was going to say something snarky about librarians' blogs with pictures of cats, but then I looked at some of the others in this project and decided it was better to keep my smart comments to myself. But really, if you've looked at a few librarian blogs, as I have, you have to ask, 'What is it with the cats, already?'