Today, September 1, 2006, is the 30th anniversary of my first day working in a library. It was a somewhat atypical beginning; I had never worked in paid library position before that day. I had done a little bit of practicum work associated with a reference course; other than that, my library experience was as a user. My first library job was as the assistant reference librarian (yes, just one of two reference librarians for an institution with an enrollment of some 4,000) at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky. It was an atypical start in that I accepted the job without having met the gracious woman who would be my supervisor. She was on vacation the day I interviewed. It would not have made much difference had she been there. At best we would have had a hello and a handshake. The director of that library at the time conducted the entire personnel process, including the interview, solo. In addition to a brief discussion with him in which I had few opportunities to make a self-destructive error since he did most of the talking, there was a pro forma meeting with the VP for Academic Affairs. I listened as they shared university gossip with each other and soon wrapped up with a few brief comments to me about what a great place it was to work. My interview, such as it was, consumed something just over half an hour.

From that beginning I have come to today. What a let down today has been! Wind and rain from advancing tropical storm Ernesto knocked out power to the University of Richmond at 7:40 AM. By 1:00 campus authorities learned that power would not be restored until after midnight. So the library has been a haven for about ten students taking advantage of scattered emergency lights and the natural light coming through windows. They enjoyed a low-tech library experience. Most simply sat and read. A few had laptops, at least until the batteries gave out. A dwindling number of staff–by 1:00 down to two students, one other librarian, and me–closed the building at 3:00. The day provided an opportunity to catch up on some reading, to clear out old files, to fill a recycling bin, and to bring some much needed order to my office. Sort of a new beginning for a no longer new librarian!

Karen Coyle has given us a thoughtful comparative analysis of the University of Michigan's and the University of California's mass book digitization contracts with Google. In the balance, it appears that these contracts give Google more latitude than either university has to use the files.

Michigan has decided that it will not allow display of Google digital books that are covered by copyright. That is a prudent stance. Google is already engaged in lawsuits with publishers over Google's right to digitize copyrighted books even if it displays nothing more than snippets of text. Let Google pay for the court fight and then see what can or cannot be done.

Today’s mail brought a handsome book from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. MacArthur Fellows: the First 25 Years, 1981-2005 provides brief biographies of all 700+ extraordinary individuals who have been named MacArthur Fellows. That’s their official name; popularly these are the famous “genius awards.” Indexes list the fellows by class and by field of endeavor. Librarianship doesn’t appear. So I checked the biographies of the 20 fellows listed under “education.” No librarian among them.

Will 2006 be the year that a librarian is named a MacArthur Fellow? If you were on of the nominators, who in our field would you nominate?

Several days ago the Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Council of Learned Societies released a draft of its Our Cultural Commonwealth report. The report identifies the needs and the challenges the humanities and social sciences face in assuring that the developing cyberinfrastructure meets their needs. These fields have not exploited information technologies as effectively as the sciences. No one thing explains the difference. Two factors are the comparative differences in funding and, especially in the humanities, a model of scholarship that is carried out largely in solitude rather than, as is common in the sciences, in collaborative teams.

The report’s summary articulates one set of issues better, I believe, than the more discursive discussion in the body of the report. Four of these are:

• the loss, fragility, and inaccessibility of the cultural record;
• the complexity of the cultural record;
• intellectual property restrictions on the use of the cultural record;
• uncertainty about the future mechanisms, forms, and economics of scholarly publishing and scholarly communication more generally

Sounds like there is an important role for librarians and libraries!

Reports from commissions are, of course, important. But so are stories people can relate to. Release of this report coincides with publication of the August 2006 issue of Smithsonian magazine. In his “Trial by Fire”in that issue David von Drehle, author of Triangle: The Fire that Changed America, tells a story about “the loss, fragility, and inaccessibility of the cultural record.” Only this is a story of the accessibility of part of that record.

Faced with having to tell his publisher that he had neither the promised book nor any of the advance he had been paid, von Drehle felt pressured. Despite the historical significance of this 1911 fire in New York, he could not find key original records from its era. His breakthrough came, not surprisingly, thanks to librarians. He dearly wanted to find a copy of the transcript of the criminal court proceedings from the fire’s aftermath. A citation in an entry in the Dictionary of American Biography noted that records of one of the principal lawyers “are in the N.Y. County Lawyers Assoc.” He googled the NYCLA, spoke with the librarian, and learned the library had no record of attorney Max Steuer’s papers.

Given a tough information challenge, many librarians take ownership for it like a dog with a bone. The NYCLA librarian posted the question to a local law librarians listerv, got a lead from another librarian who had worked at NYCLA, and they found the documents van Drehle needed. Actually, they found two bound volumes of the Triangle trial transcript. The other two, presumably once in NYCLA’s collection, remain missing. But those still at NYCLA, as well as part of a third held at Cornell University, allowed von Drehle to write his book.

Journalists such as von Drehle and scholars in the humanities and social science compile significant collections of research materials, notes, and data sets. These form the foundation on which they erect their published edifices. Many colleges and universities are building institutional repositories to showcase their students’ and faculty’s scholarship. Some repositories accommodate these foundational infohoards so other scholars can use them. The infohoard supporting Triangle: The Fire that Changed America has been digitized by Cornell’s Kheel Center. The Kheel Center offers a Web exhibit about the fire and the complete text of the remaining volumes of the court proceedings.

Librarians are already playing a vital role!

Library bloggers have understandably expressed disappointment and incredulity over the overwhelming vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on July 25 in favor of H.R. 5319, DOPA, the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006. A more descriptive name for the bill would be the Deleting Online Tools and Users Act. It is yet another attempt to use a nuclear bomb to solve a limited (albeit genuine and serious) problem–in other words, a solution that creates far many more problems than it solves. If the Senate compounds the House’s error by passing DOPA, it will “amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require recipients of universal service support for schools and libraries to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms.”

Among early respondents were LibrarianInBlack Sarah Houhgton, Jessamyn West, Walt Crawford, Rochelle Hartman, and the American Library Association’s Washington Office.

Posturing politicians may win this battle against intellectual freedom, but as long as there are libraries, they can never win the war. Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, has said “The Net is not about technology, it’s about people.” Congress doesn’t seem to appreciate that. Libraries are far more about people than they are about technology. They are also places that, as ALA president Leslie Burger so eloquently explains, transform communities.

I recently read Ian McEwan’s Saturday, his novel set in London during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. It can be read in many ways. And undoubtedly it has been discussed by many a book group in many a library. Henry Perowne, its main character, relies a bit too much on technology (in this case his BMW) and gets into a difficult situation in which there is plenty of blame to go around. He also gets into that situation by accepting at face value a bit of information about a road closing and by assuming that everyone else knows and interprets that information the way he does. Violence is averted thanks to his daughter’s recitation in a very tense situation of Matthew Arnold’s melancholy “Dover Beach,” implying that art and philosophy are every bit as important as technology. The climactic scene (I hate plot spoilers and won’t be one myself) finds Perowne taking responsibility for his part in creating the situation and making it better (but not perfect–some damage has been done). I read the novel as a cautionary tale about relying too much on the latest technology, about assuming a single interpretation of information is the sole interpretation, and about the value of taking a measured and well thought-out approach to conflict. I wonder how many readers who have borrowed Saturday from a library or who have met with their book group in a library to discuss the novel have come to similar conclusions–conclusions that I doubt Donald Rumsfeld would endorse.

Even if DOPA severely limits online access to and interaction with others in libraries that cannot afford to give up e-rate funds, those libraries will still be gathering places, places where people come together and exchange ideas. The library is the Ellis Island of ideas, welcoming them from all quarters and allowing people to mix and share ideas and generate new ones. So does the Internet. DOPA would deprive some library users of the opportunity to engage in that free exchange of ideas online at their libraries, but it cannot deprive them of the opportunity to exchange ideas and be exposed to ideas at their libraries. Some of those ideas might even be considered subversive by others!

This past week a worker digging an excavation in a bog in Ireland unearthed an ancient fragment of the Book of Psalms. Officials at the National Museum of Ireland, simultaneously ecstatic and gobsmacked, estimate that it is more than 1000 years old. The Irish Times reported that “The farmer on whose land it was found notified museum staff immediately.” Kudos to that farmer, first for recognizing the importance of this cultural artifact and, second, for placing it in the custody of an appropriate cultural institution rather than putting it up for sale on eBay!