Friday, May 25, 2012
Friday, May 18, 2012
Information literacy and coming changes
The last few weeks have gone by pretty quickly. Summer started off with a bang with my conference in Columbus, then upon my return I jumped right into some big projects. Sadly, this may become a bit of a pattern this summer, so blog updates may become more sporadic until late August or early September. Some of my colleagues will write posts as well, but we’re all pretty busy!
So I thought I’d start off with the conference I went to. It’s called LOEX, which stands for something most people have forgotten, but which covers a pretty important aspect of life for academic librarians: Information literacy.
It’s important to us, and it’s important to you, too, even though “information literacy” is one of those terms that will probably put you to sleep. It basically covers how you interact with and use information, both in your daily life and in your schoolwork -- not just knowing where to find it, but also how to decide whether it’s appropriate for your purposes, and working with it.
Anyway, information literacy is tricky. It’s an essential skill to have in both research and daily life -- you may not need to think a whole lot about the weather report unless you’re having a picnic, but this year’s presidential campaigns may require plenty of brainpower, depending on your position on the issues and whether you think we’re doomed as a country if a particular guy parks himself in the Oval Office next January.
But the ubiquity of information -- it’s all around us these days, after all -- is a big part of why it’s tricky, because you’re so used to it that you just kind of figure you’ve got a good handle on it all, which is a justifiable attitude if you need to decide which umbrella to bring to campus or which sign to put on your front lawn. In school, though, the immediate, personal stakes are higher, and the information is much more complex and difficult to sort through.
Another part of why information literacy is tricky is that it’s so hard to teach. LOEX -- a 400-librarian conference that’s been meeting annually for 40 years now -- is proof of this. It’s pretty long-lived for something that seems so simple, because the world’s been changing constantly over those 40 years, and so has our relationship to information.
So I went and learned a lot of stuff that I’m sharing with my colleagues and which we plan to apply over the coming months and years. You’ll get to see some reports on this blog about how we’re putting some of it into practice. And, of course, the conference was just a lot of fun! Everyone who goes to LOEX is pretty committed to teaching students and faculty -- and anyone else who’s willing to listen -- how to play around with our stuff. They’re also a little goofy; my last workshop of the conference played off the popularity of zombies and even included a YouTube video called “Zombie Love Song,” which the interpreter pulled off incredibly well on the fly!
Now that that’s past, what’s next? Well, a lot. I already told you about a few of the projects we’re undertaking this summer, but there’s a lot more going on, specifically relating to the Web site and our catalog. Our site is undergoing a massive redesign and the catalog will be very, very different come Fall semester.
I’m not going into a whole lot of detail about what’s happening to the catalog right now, because that’s worthy of an entire post later on, but I can definitely say it’s a very interesting experience, and we’ll be keeping an eye out for feedback from users. Once it hits -- which should be around August or so -- don’t keep your thoughts to yourself!
Last but not least, I’d like to note that Dr. Cynthia King, the Chief Information Officer who oversees not only Library Public Services, but also Gallaudet Technology Services and the Archives and Deaf Collection, announced yesterday that she plans to step down and return to faculty status next November. She’s seen an awful lot of change happen here at the Library; we wish her well!
That wraps it up for this week. I’ll try to return to a weekly schedule, but who knows?
So I thought I’d start off with the conference I went to. It’s called LOEX, which stands for something most people have forgotten, but which covers a pretty important aspect of life for academic librarians: Information literacy.
It’s important to us, and it’s important to you, too, even though “information literacy” is one of those terms that will probably put you to sleep. It basically covers how you interact with and use information, both in your daily life and in your schoolwork -- not just knowing where to find it, but also how to decide whether it’s appropriate for your purposes, and working with it.
Anyway, information literacy is tricky. It’s an essential skill to have in both research and daily life -- you may not need to think a whole lot about the weather report unless you’re having a picnic, but this year’s presidential campaigns may require plenty of brainpower, depending on your position on the issues and whether you think we’re doomed as a country if a particular guy parks himself in the Oval Office next January.
But the ubiquity of information -- it’s all around us these days, after all -- is a big part of why it’s tricky, because you’re so used to it that you just kind of figure you’ve got a good handle on it all, which is a justifiable attitude if you need to decide which umbrella to bring to campus or which sign to put on your front lawn. In school, though, the immediate, personal stakes are higher, and the information is much more complex and difficult to sort through.
Another part of why information literacy is tricky is that it’s so hard to teach. LOEX -- a 400-librarian conference that’s been meeting annually for 40 years now -- is proof of this. It’s pretty long-lived for something that seems so simple, because the world’s been changing constantly over those 40 years, and so has our relationship to information.
So I went and learned a lot of stuff that I’m sharing with my colleagues and which we plan to apply over the coming months and years. You’ll get to see some reports on this blog about how we’re putting some of it into practice. And, of course, the conference was just a lot of fun! Everyone who goes to LOEX is pretty committed to teaching students and faculty -- and anyone else who’s willing to listen -- how to play around with our stuff. They’re also a little goofy; my last workshop of the conference played off the popularity of zombies and even included a YouTube video called “Zombie Love Song,” which the interpreter pulled off incredibly well on the fly!
Now that that’s past, what’s next? Well, a lot. I already told you about a few of the projects we’re undertaking this summer, but there’s a lot more going on, specifically relating to the Web site and our catalog. Our site is undergoing a massive redesign and the catalog will be very, very different come Fall semester.
I’m not going into a whole lot of detail about what’s happening to the catalog right now, because that’s worthy of an entire post later on, but I can definitely say it’s a very interesting experience, and we’ll be keeping an eye out for feedback from users. Once it hits -- which should be around August or so -- don’t keep your thoughts to yourself!
Last but not least, I’d like to note that Dr. Cynthia King, the Chief Information Officer who oversees not only Library Public Services, but also Gallaudet Technology Services and the Archives and Deaf Collection, announced yesterday that she plans to step down and return to faculty status next November. She’s seen an awful lot of change happen here at the Library; we wish her well!
That wraps it up for this week. I’ll try to return to a weekly schedule, but who knows?
Friday, April 27, 2012
It’s getting to be that time of year!
The last week of classes for Spring 2012 is wrapping up, finals are coming, and a bunch of students are graduating. Then school’s out for the summer!
Well, for the majority of students, anyway. Things are as busy as ever here at the Library, which is a year-round condition for us. I have a couple of conferences to go to, myself -- one of which is next week, in fact, which means no blog post. I’m excited about this one, actually, even though it’s in Columbus, Ohio (Honolulu would have been nicer, or my birthplace of Clearwater, Florida), because there’ll be a lot of interesting talks about information literacy, a subject near and dear to my professional heart. And, of course, we’ve got some projects lined up.
Personally, it’s all about the weeding. I’m looking to offload a lot of our really old, outdated books that are a) falling apart, b) not being used, and c) silly. This’ll free up more room in the stacks for new books, plus give us some more flexibility in the future.
Collectively, there are three major initiatives on the agenda for the warm months, all of which have to do with managing the unruly pack of books roaming around our basement.
First, Deaf Copy 1. Fair warning: there’s quite a bit of background to this.
If you’re not familiar with that, here it is in a nutshell: Closed stacks. This room contains what we call the “first copies” of the entire Deaf Stacks you see on the first floor. The Deaf Copy 1 (hereafter abbreviated as “DC1”) stacks are our permanent, final, must-preserve copies. This room is what keeps safe the world’s best, most comprehensive collection of Deaf-related work, so obviously it’s very important.
Up until last year, DC1 -- and the Deaf Collection in general -- had a very broad purview that included everything from Deaf culture to otorhinolaryngology (ear, nose, and throat, for those unfamiliar with bastardized Greek roots). This presented a problem, both practically (medical literature has a short shelf life that becomes unmanageable when mixed in with a very large multidisciplinary collection) and culturally -- deafness as a physical state and deafness as a culture are two very different things.
So we relieved the Deaf Collection & Archives staffers of all the stuff that treated deafness as a pathological condition and absorbed it into the General Collection. Since it had all been part of the Deaf Collection up to that point, this also meant cleaning out the first copies of the books affected, which in turn left a ton of empty space on the shelves down there.
So we’re moving the Deaf Copy 1 stacks around a little bit this summer to fill in those gaps and make room for more stuff. It’s actually warm-up for …
The General Stacks. Yup, we’re shifting them again. It’s nowhere near as drastic as last year’s shift, though -- mostly it’s just adjusting the collection to fill in some empty spaces opened up by weeding, and to add more space on the shelves for overcrowded books. They’re distributed pretty unevenly at the moment because when last year’s shift happened, we had to estimate which areas might need more room than others.
A year later, it turns out that a number of factors, including e-books, shifts in departmental focus, and the aforementioned weeding, have solved a lot of the space issues we used to have, so instead of worrying about specific areas, we get to make sure the entire collection has room to grow.
The third thing is, of course, inventory. We’ve spent most of the Spring semester working out a process for what is probably the largest project we’ve undertaken in recent memory: finding out exactly what we have on the shelves.
It sounds funny, I know, as though we haven’t been keeping track all along. But the truth is, even the systems we’ve put into place to track the movement of our stuff -- all 220,000 pieces of it -- aren’t perfect, and the Library’s been through so many technological changes since it moved into the current building that things fall through the cracks.
The causes of these problems are surprisingly varied, ranging from obvious theft to cataloging snafus -- records get left in the system for books we weeded years ago, or sometimes it goes the other way: books that clearly belong to us, but which the system thinks don’t exist. Other times, browsing students will pull a book off the shelf, skim through it, and put it back -- somewhere else.
So we’re going to spend the next couple of years going through the entire thing, shelf by shelf.
Yes, years. It’s not as bad as it sounds; the Consortium offers us the ability to scan a whole bunch of books in one fell swoop, upload their barcode numbers, and get back a nicely-detailed report letting us know what’s out of order, what should be there that isn’t, and what shouldn’t be there that is. It’s a little weird to read, but makes the process go fairly smoothly. And because the Library will continue to be used the entire time, of course, it’ll take a long while to get through the full collection.
Actually, we will probably never get through the full collection. By the time we finish going through it, enough will have changed in the rest of the collection that we’ll need to start over again. And again. And again, and again, and …
Believe it or not, this is okay with us. We’re undertaking this huge project -- along with the General Stacks shift -- specifically so people can find stuff more easily. That is, after all, why we’re here.
And it starts this summer, along with our usual day-to-day work. We’re looking forward to getting started!
The last week of classes for Spring 2012 is wrapping up, finals are coming, and a bunch of students are graduating. Then school’s out for the summer!
Well, for the majority of students, anyway. Things are as busy as ever here at the Library, which is a year-round condition for us. I have a couple of conferences to go to, myself -- one of which is next week, in fact, which means no blog post. I’m excited about this one, actually, even though it’s in Columbus, Ohio (Honolulu would have been nicer, or my birthplace of Clearwater, Florida), because there’ll be a lot of interesting talks about information literacy, a subject near and dear to my professional heart. And, of course, we’ve got some projects lined up.
Personally, it’s all about the weeding. I’m looking to offload a lot of our really old, outdated books that are a) falling apart, b) not being used, and c) silly. This’ll free up more room in the stacks for new books, plus give us some more flexibility in the future.
Collectively, there are three major initiatives on the agenda for the warm months, all of which have to do with managing the unruly pack of books roaming around our basement.
First, Deaf Copy 1. Fair warning: there’s quite a bit of background to this.
If you’re not familiar with that, here it is in a nutshell: Closed stacks. This room contains what we call the “first copies” of the entire Deaf Stacks you see on the first floor. The Deaf Copy 1 (hereafter abbreviated as “DC1”) stacks are our permanent, final, must-preserve copies. This room is what keeps safe the world’s best, most comprehensive collection of Deaf-related work, so obviously it’s very important.
Up until last year, DC1 -- and the Deaf Collection in general -- had a very broad purview that included everything from Deaf culture to otorhinolaryngology (ear, nose, and throat, for those unfamiliar with bastardized Greek roots). This presented a problem, both practically (medical literature has a short shelf life that becomes unmanageable when mixed in with a very large multidisciplinary collection) and culturally -- deafness as a physical state and deafness as a culture are two very different things.
So we relieved the Deaf Collection & Archives staffers of all the stuff that treated deafness as a pathological condition and absorbed it into the General Collection. Since it had all been part of the Deaf Collection up to that point, this also meant cleaning out the first copies of the books affected, which in turn left a ton of empty space on the shelves down there.
So we’re moving the Deaf Copy 1 stacks around a little bit this summer to fill in those gaps and make room for more stuff. It’s actually warm-up for …
The General Stacks. Yup, we’re shifting them again. It’s nowhere near as drastic as last year’s shift, though -- mostly it’s just adjusting the collection to fill in some empty spaces opened up by weeding, and to add more space on the shelves for overcrowded books. They’re distributed pretty unevenly at the moment because when last year’s shift happened, we had to estimate which areas might need more room than others.
A year later, it turns out that a number of factors, including e-books, shifts in departmental focus, and the aforementioned weeding, have solved a lot of the space issues we used to have, so instead of worrying about specific areas, we get to make sure the entire collection has room to grow.
The third thing is, of course, inventory. We’ve spent most of the Spring semester working out a process for what is probably the largest project we’ve undertaken in recent memory: finding out exactly what we have on the shelves.
It sounds funny, I know, as though we haven’t been keeping track all along. But the truth is, even the systems we’ve put into place to track the movement of our stuff -- all 220,000 pieces of it -- aren’t perfect, and the Library’s been through so many technological changes since it moved into the current building that things fall through the cracks.
The causes of these problems are surprisingly varied, ranging from obvious theft to cataloging snafus -- records get left in the system for books we weeded years ago, or sometimes it goes the other way: books that clearly belong to us, but which the system thinks don’t exist. Other times, browsing students will pull a book off the shelf, skim through it, and put it back -- somewhere else.
So we’re going to spend the next couple of years going through the entire thing, shelf by shelf.
Yes, years. It’s not as bad as it sounds; the Consortium offers us the ability to scan a whole bunch of books in one fell swoop, upload their barcode numbers, and get back a nicely-detailed report letting us know what’s out of order, what should be there that isn’t, and what shouldn’t be there that is. It’s a little weird to read, but makes the process go fairly smoothly. And because the Library will continue to be used the entire time, of course, it’ll take a long while to get through the full collection.
Actually, we will probably never get through the full collection. By the time we finish going through it, enough will have changed in the rest of the collection that we’ll need to start over again. And again. And again, and again, and …
Believe it or not, this is okay with us. We’re undertaking this huge project -- along with the General Stacks shift -- specifically so people can find stuff more easily. That is, after all, why we’re here.
And it starts this summer, along with our usual day-to-day work. We’re looking forward to getting started!
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Graduation season
It’s getting to be that time of year again. Students panicking over graduation, our preparation for the oncoming summer, and the LURP Award.
Just because I’m in that kind of mood, let’s take each thing in reverse order.
First, “LURP” is short for “Library Undergraduate Research Paper.” We do this every year; undergraduates submit their best papers from the last couple of semesters and a group of Library people reviews them and determines a winner in a blind judging. Winning relies on a number of factors, including the use of Library resources in the paper. The prize? A $200 gift card to Amazon.com!
There’s a link to the submission details and form on our home page, but here it is as a Word document anyway.
Second, our summer is going to go pretty much as usual; there’ll be a few projects we’re undertaking. This year, however, they won’t be disruptive to people who want to use the Library.
One thing I’d like to add for students, though: Even if you aren’t registered for the summer semester, you can still use the Library if you’re in town! Just come in after the end of the spring semester (after May 6, in other words) and let us know:
We also get a few people who contact us after a month, upset because they suddenly have fines; maybe they thought they could borrow an item for the entire summer, or someone else placed a hold on their item, so it can’t be renewed, or they just maxed out their number of permitted renewals. After asking some questions, we generally find out they’re not in town, one of the local states, the country, or -- in rare cases -- on this planet*.
Our advice in each case, often given pre-emptively and sometimes far too late, is the same, and here it is: Although we understand the desire for some free vacation reading, books have a nasty habit of being left behind on planes, forgotten under hotel beds, dropped on mountain tops, or buried in beach sand. Depending on how conscientious you are about keeping track of your things while backpacking through Peru, it may be a better idea to spend the money on a new book for yourself. Better safe than sorry!
Third and finally, graduation. If you’re graduating in May and have outstanding fines or fees on your record, please don’t forget to get that taken care of before you leave. Commencement is still more than a month away, but as the victim of two graduations myself, I know those final weeks can be hectic!
That’s three. Vlog next week. Ditto MLB’s Opening Day. Spring is here!
-----
*Just kidding. As far as we know, no one at Gallaudet University has been definitively proven to be an extraterrestrial.
Just because I’m in that kind of mood, let’s take each thing in reverse order.
First, “LURP” is short for “Library Undergraduate Research Paper.” We do this every year; undergraduates submit their best papers from the last couple of semesters and a group of Library people reviews them and determines a winner in a blind judging. Winning relies on a number of factors, including the use of Library resources in the paper. The prize? A $200 gift card to Amazon.com!
There’s a link to the submission details and form on our home page, but here it is as a Word document anyway.
Second, our summer is going to go pretty much as usual; there’ll be a few projects we’re undertaking. This year, however, they won’t be disruptive to people who want to use the Library.
One thing I’d like to add for students, though: Even if you aren’t registered for the summer semester, you can still use the Library if you’re in town! Just come in after the end of the spring semester (after May 6, in other words) and let us know:
- You’re here and want to use the Library
- You’re registered for the fall
- You’re going to be around long enough to return your materials on time
We also get a few people who contact us after a month, upset because they suddenly have fines; maybe they thought they could borrow an item for the entire summer, or someone else placed a hold on their item, so it can’t be renewed, or they just maxed out their number of permitted renewals. After asking some questions, we generally find out they’re not in town, one of the local states, the country, or -- in rare cases -- on this planet*.
Our advice in each case, often given pre-emptively and sometimes far too late, is the same, and here it is: Although we understand the desire for some free vacation reading, books have a nasty habit of being left behind on planes, forgotten under hotel beds, dropped on mountain tops, or buried in beach sand. Depending on how conscientious you are about keeping track of your things while backpacking through Peru, it may be a better idea to spend the money on a new book for yourself. Better safe than sorry!
Third and finally, graduation. If you’re graduating in May and have outstanding fines or fees on your record, please don’t forget to get that taken care of before you leave. Commencement is still more than a month away, but as the victim of two graduations myself, I know those final weeks can be hectic!
That’s three. Vlog next week. Ditto MLB’s Opening Day. Spring is here!
-----
*Just kidding. As far as we know, no one at Gallaudet University has been definitively proven to be an extraterrestrial.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Review: Mr. Darwin's Shooter
So I’m sickish this week and because coughing would make a vlog more or less unpleasant, I’m going to review a book using words.
I just finished Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter and in spite of the title turning out to be enormously misleading, really enjoyed it.
It sounds like the book’s about a person who shot Charles Darwin. It’s actually about a person who shot for Charles Darwin; specifically, animals that Darwin subsequently used to formulate his theory of natural selection.
Syms Covington was a scion of a lower-class family that ran a tannery in Bedfordshire, England, in the early 19th Century. Religious by nature, he gets recruited by a traveling Congregational evangelist named Phipps, who makes his living as a sailor.
Leaving his family -- including a very loving stepmother -- at the age of twelve (his father allows this because competition from South America has depressed the local market for animal skins sufficiently that he can no longer afford to feed a growing boy), he joins Phipps on several voyages around the world.
The pair stick together for several years, but Phipps and Covington drift apart as Covington discovers the joys of being a globetrotting young man. Still, their relationship remains close, and they continue to work together, even after tragedy strikes both men.
By chance, this tragedy occurs just as their latest voyage is ready to leave harbor, aboard the good ship Beagle, which is setting off on a surveying mission under the direction of a gentleman naturalist named Charles Darwin.
Covington, being naturally curious and rather ambitious, immediately begins to jockey for the opportunity to serve Darwin in any capacity possible, and is ultimately successful. He starts out as a scribe for Darwin’s notes, translating the gent’s chicken-scratch into a very nice copperplate, and eventually begins to collect strange specimens from the New World and the Pacific Islands for himself. Over the course of the five-year voyage, he begins to lose his hearing and returns to England completely deaf.
Covington’s personal collection turns out to be a boon when the specimens collected by Darwin himself are damaged in transit to England; Covington’s set of finches is co-opted for study, which he not-so-graciously agrees to, and eventually, On the Origin of Species is published.
One problem: Covington is not mentioned anywhere in the book for his help in bringing in wild animals for study or even for the “donation” of his personal collection.
This is important because the book takes the form of a series of flashbacks coming to Covington as an old man in 1859. He’s grown old and wealthy, holding vast lands in Australia’s interior, with children and a wife. He serendipitously meets a young doctor in a small village near Sydney who saves his life and eventually …
Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.
In any case, it’s a fascinating look at not only a woefully-underexamined side of Darwin’s story, but also life in a great era of discovery. Although the official Age of Discovery had passed by the end of the 18th Century, the New World and Pacific Islands had only just begun to yield their biological wonders. Much of the Amazon had still not been mapped, and Australia alone still held many surprises.
You also get a very good idea of what it was like in those days of sailing, when you spent months at sea on a rickety wooden tub that was vulnerable to just about everything out there. There was no GPS, no radar or sonar, no radio, no entertainment or Internet or anything. Just long, hard work, questionable maps, and the stars.
I especially appreciated the way the story unfolded, switching between the life of the younger Covington and that of the same man long after his voyaging had ended. The evolution of his personality -- from brash young man to curmudgeonly geezer who can still outclimb most younger man -- is a lot of fun to watch.
Nevertheless, his bitterness and disappointment -- poor old guy -- at being underappreciated by Darwin and not being given credit for all the work he did despite an intense professional relationship that lasts for decades is hard to take, but adds a great deal of depth to his character. On the Origin of Species doesn’t arrive at his house until about halfway through the book, so the chapters about old Covington before that point include little details that betray his anxiety and anticipation; the chapters after that point really come down hard on his sense of betrayal and loss.
The language is also wonderful; it gets a little flowery at times, and the author slips into a kind of annoying habit of using sentence fragments to convey elements of the scene, but for the most part, it does a great job of getting the setting across. My favorite passage explains why the young doctor doesn’t think it odd that Covington collects small animals left and right in the wilds around Sydney:
In general, fantastic book. It’s a nice piece of historical fiction that reveals much about a relatively-simple theory that nevertheless completely transformed how we understand life itself. Strongly recommended.
I just finished Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter and in spite of the title turning out to be enormously misleading, really enjoyed it.
It sounds like the book’s about a person who shot Charles Darwin. It’s actually about a person who shot for Charles Darwin; specifically, animals that Darwin subsequently used to formulate his theory of natural selection.
Syms Covington was a scion of a lower-class family that ran a tannery in Bedfordshire, England, in the early 19th Century. Religious by nature, he gets recruited by a traveling Congregational evangelist named Phipps, who makes his living as a sailor.
Leaving his family -- including a very loving stepmother -- at the age of twelve (his father allows this because competition from South America has depressed the local market for animal skins sufficiently that he can no longer afford to feed a growing boy), he joins Phipps on several voyages around the world.
The pair stick together for several years, but Phipps and Covington drift apart as Covington discovers the joys of being a globetrotting young man. Still, their relationship remains close, and they continue to work together, even after tragedy strikes both men.
By chance, this tragedy occurs just as their latest voyage is ready to leave harbor, aboard the good ship Beagle, which is setting off on a surveying mission under the direction of a gentleman naturalist named Charles Darwin.
Covington, being naturally curious and rather ambitious, immediately begins to jockey for the opportunity to serve Darwin in any capacity possible, and is ultimately successful. He starts out as a scribe for Darwin’s notes, translating the gent’s chicken-scratch into a very nice copperplate, and eventually begins to collect strange specimens from the New World and the Pacific Islands for himself. Over the course of the five-year voyage, he begins to lose his hearing and returns to England completely deaf.
Covington’s personal collection turns out to be a boon when the specimens collected by Darwin himself are damaged in transit to England; Covington’s set of finches is co-opted for study, which he not-so-graciously agrees to, and eventually, On the Origin of Species is published.
One problem: Covington is not mentioned anywhere in the book for his help in bringing in wild animals for study or even for the “donation” of his personal collection.
This is important because the book takes the form of a series of flashbacks coming to Covington as an old man in 1859. He’s grown old and wealthy, holding vast lands in Australia’s interior, with children and a wife. He serendipitously meets a young doctor in a small village near Sydney who saves his life and eventually …
Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.
In any case, it’s a fascinating look at not only a woefully-underexamined side of Darwin’s story, but also life in a great era of discovery. Although the official Age of Discovery had passed by the end of the 18th Century, the New World and Pacific Islands had only just begun to yield their biological wonders. Much of the Amazon had still not been mapped, and Australia alone still held many surprises.
You also get a very good idea of what it was like in those days of sailing, when you spent months at sea on a rickety wooden tub that was vulnerable to just about everything out there. There was no GPS, no radar or sonar, no radio, no entertainment or Internet or anything. Just long, hard work, questionable maps, and the stars.
I especially appreciated the way the story unfolded, switching between the life of the younger Covington and that of the same man long after his voyaging had ended. The evolution of his personality -- from brash young man to curmudgeonly geezer who can still outclimb most younger man -- is a lot of fun to watch.
Nevertheless, his bitterness and disappointment -- poor old guy -- at being underappreciated by Darwin and not being given credit for all the work he did despite an intense professional relationship that lasts for decades is hard to take, but adds a great deal of depth to his character. On the Origin of Species doesn’t arrive at his house until about halfway through the book, so the chapters about old Covington before that point include little details that betray his anxiety and anticipation; the chapters after that point really come down hard on his sense of betrayal and loss.
The language is also wonderful; it gets a little flowery at times, and the author slips into a kind of annoying habit of using sentence fragments to convey elements of the scene, but for the most part, it does a great job of getting the setting across. My favorite passage explains why the young doctor doesn’t think it odd that Covington collects small animals left and right in the wilds around Sydney:
There was a special pride among the takers of the place, because the plants and animals were so strange. Everything so queer and opposite. There must have been a separate act of Creation, it was maintained, and as Darwin had said on visiting there, to bring them into being. Swans were black. A mammal, the platypus, laid eggs, although nobody had ever seen one do it …The fact that Covington goes deaf as an adult adds an interesting twist to how his particular personality copes with the world around him. He never learns to sign, of course, but lip-reads so well that the young doctor has no idea he’s understood every time he says something insulting Covington without making an effort to speak clearly.
In general, fantastic book. It’s a nice piece of historical fiction that reveals much about a relatively-simple theory that nevertheless completely transformed how we understand life itself. Strongly recommended.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Spring break update and ILL
Spring break is here!
Well, not for much longer. But it’s still been a very quiet week as far as helping students is concerned. I’ve taken the opportunity to finish a few projects and clean out my office. If you’re reading this and have visited my office, you know how cluttered it’s been for the past three years. It was about 75% donated books and films I was considering adding to the collection and about 25% my own natural messiness.
No more! By the end of Spring Break, it’ll all be either in the collection or for sale on the Book Sale shelf we use to re-home any donations we don’t need. My office feels so much larger now.
We’ve also been adjusting the DVD shelves; for the past few weeks we’ve replaced nearly all of the security cases with a new batch we ordered last summer specifically for this reason. Before this project, we had three or four different kinds, requiring about the same number of magnetic unlockers, and that was a bit of a silly headache. Now we’re down to two kinds -- one for DVDs and one for VHS tapes.
Of course, the new DVD cases are a little funny in comparison to others we’ve had in the past; they’re thicker at the top than they are at the bottom. This leads to some shelving weirdness where half a shelf is tilted one way and half is tilted the other. Although it all takes up about the same amount of space, it needed to be arranged differently, so we’ve spread them out. We're also working on a better way to store DVDs in those cases that might alleviate some of these issues.
Complicating matters is the weather. It’s so incredible! Perfect temperatures, blue skies, blooming flowers, lovely breezes. Spring has arrived a little ahead of schedule, and it’s making it tough to work in the Library all day long.
It’s also been a busy semester. On top of everything else, I’ve added inter-library loan (ILL) work on a temporary basis, and it’s been an eye-opener!
Truth is, ILL is a pretty fascinating portion of what we do here. Since so much of the Deaf Collection consists of publications that are pretty tough to find -- theses, for instance, or non-profit organization reports on services to populations with hearing loss -- a good deal of ILL has to do with fulfilling requests from outside libraries for our stuff, providing nobody at our Library needs it right then. We also do a fairly brisk business for Gallaudet students and faculty who need stuff that manages to slip through the cracks in the Consortium -- those cracks are small, given our huge collective holdings of around eight million items, but do exist!
There’s a pretty good system in place that allows libraries nationwide, sometimes even worldwide, to share their stuff. It includes everything from simply being able to see that another library has what you want, to managing the shipping of those items, down to providing labels that you can print out and use for mailing.
The sheer scale of this system is mind-boggling. We’ve been using Rolodexes -- kind of like this one from Staples if you’re young and clueless about these things -- for years to keep records of institutions that have requested things from us in the past, using cards with all the information we need for shipping and bar codes for each one. This way, it’s easier to lend to them again if they ask: scan, drop in envelope, stick on label, and go. Those things are huge by now, which means there are hundreds of libraries in there.
That just covers institutions that have borrowed from us in the past. On top of that, we still get one or two new ones every other week that don’t have a card in either Rolodex and have to add one for them.
This lends itself to a new sort of perspective on how this whole library thing works. Funny, isn’t it, to think of the staggering investment involved in providing people the information they need?
Well, not for much longer. But it’s still been a very quiet week as far as helping students is concerned. I’ve taken the opportunity to finish a few projects and clean out my office. If you’re reading this and have visited my office, you know how cluttered it’s been for the past three years. It was about 75% donated books and films I was considering adding to the collection and about 25% my own natural messiness.
No more! By the end of Spring Break, it’ll all be either in the collection or for sale on the Book Sale shelf we use to re-home any donations we don’t need. My office feels so much larger now.
We’ve also been adjusting the DVD shelves; for the past few weeks we’ve replaced nearly all of the security cases with a new batch we ordered last summer specifically for this reason. Before this project, we had three or four different kinds, requiring about the same number of magnetic unlockers, and that was a bit of a silly headache. Now we’re down to two kinds -- one for DVDs and one for VHS tapes.
Of course, the new DVD cases are a little funny in comparison to others we’ve had in the past; they’re thicker at the top than they are at the bottom. This leads to some shelving weirdness where half a shelf is tilted one way and half is tilted the other. Although it all takes up about the same amount of space, it needed to be arranged differently, so we’ve spread them out. We're also working on a better way to store DVDs in those cases that might alleviate some of these issues.
Complicating matters is the weather. It’s so incredible! Perfect temperatures, blue skies, blooming flowers, lovely breezes. Spring has arrived a little ahead of schedule, and it’s making it tough to work in the Library all day long.
It’s also been a busy semester. On top of everything else, I’ve added inter-library loan (ILL) work on a temporary basis, and it’s been an eye-opener!
Truth is, ILL is a pretty fascinating portion of what we do here. Since so much of the Deaf Collection consists of publications that are pretty tough to find -- theses, for instance, or non-profit organization reports on services to populations with hearing loss -- a good deal of ILL has to do with fulfilling requests from outside libraries for our stuff, providing nobody at our Library needs it right then. We also do a fairly brisk business for Gallaudet students and faculty who need stuff that manages to slip through the cracks in the Consortium -- those cracks are small, given our huge collective holdings of around eight million items, but do exist!
There’s a pretty good system in place that allows libraries nationwide, sometimes even worldwide, to share their stuff. It includes everything from simply being able to see that another library has what you want, to managing the shipping of those items, down to providing labels that you can print out and use for mailing.
The sheer scale of this system is mind-boggling. We’ve been using Rolodexes -- kind of like this one from Staples if you’re young and clueless about these things -- for years to keep records of institutions that have requested things from us in the past, using cards with all the information we need for shipping and bar codes for each one. This way, it’s easier to lend to them again if they ask: scan, drop in envelope, stick on label, and go. Those things are huge by now, which means there are hundreds of libraries in there.
That just covers institutions that have borrowed from us in the past. On top of that, we still get one or two new ones every other week that don’t have a card in either Rolodex and have to add one for them.
This lends itself to a new sort of perspective on how this whole library thing works. Funny, isn’t it, to think of the staggering investment involved in providing people the information they need?
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
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