What you need to know: Part 1 (Fall 2010)

See, I told you. There'll still be text posts. Welcome to the first of this year's posts about important information about the Library you'll need to know!

First, I want to refer you to last year's posts, some of which are outdated, and some of which are very outdated. However, there's still plenty of useful information in them that will serve as an introduction to our Library. Here they are:

• What you need to know: Part 1
• Includes a FAQ post link, links to individual librarian profiles (although Jane Rutherford will be retiring right at the beginning of the Fall semester, she's still worth learning more about!), and a few sample review posts of various books and films we have here. As I said, outdated, but it should give you an idea of the kinds of items we do have. In addition, there's a link to a comprehensive overview of the equipment we have available for you, which is worth checking out.
• What you need to know: Part 2
• This post includes links to a comprehensive discussion about the nuts and bolts of (a) finding journal articles; and (b) what our electronic article databases are all about. After that is a long, comprehensive listing of the previous year's Questions of the Week (which we'll do next week).
• What you need to know: Part 3
• Essentially a more focused update on exactly what changed from May to September 2009. The 2010 version will be the week after next.
  
• What you need to know: Part 4
• This was a long discussion of our new ALADIN Discovery catalog. We're not changing that this year -- not much, anyway -- so if you're new and need to know how to use our catalog, read this.

Now, let's take a look at the research-related posts of the past year or so, organized by category.

General Research
Research Paper Award, Dutch painters, baseball, and free stuff
If nothing else, this particular post explains why we're using a new format. Anyway, down at the bottom, I discuss some resources you can use freely for your research without having to pay for access. It's great as a supplement to what we have for you here, as well as a main source if you're not affiliated with Gallaudet and can't get into our databases.

Why does research take time?
What essentially passes for a "philosophical" meditation from me. It's really just me explaining to a proverbial Student that research isn't always as easy as it may seem sometimes and some of the reasons why.

Using databases for personal research
We really do encourage students, staff, and faculty to take advantage of our resources to the fullest; that includes not just schoolwork, but also important information that may affect other areas of your life. Our Library is an informational gold mine in comparison to the average schmo's experience; why use it so narrowly?

It's all about RefWorks
RefWorks is one of the most useful resources we have. It doesn't offer any information in and of itself, but it does offer a great way to manage all the information you dig up while you're researching. In this Q&A post, I go over the basics of RefWorks and explain why it's so good.

A word about searching
Basically, I sit you, Dear Reader, down, and outline the steps you need to take in order to research more efficiently and effectively. You'd be surprised how many people take a scattershot approach and just put in whatever search term sounds good, then say that there's no information available on the subject!

Specific aspects of our collection
Some words on the Little Paper Family
A recent uptick in research on the Little Paper Family (LPF) resulted in this post; what is it? Why does it exist? And how can you look at it? It's all explained in this post.

E-books: How do they work?
Any resemblance to recent works by the Insane Clown Posse are completely coincidental. However, I do explain our e-book collection and how you can use them. This is increasingly becoming a must; although our print collections are holding steady, we are expanding our electronic holdings.

Introduction to our e-books
As in: Dear Reader, meet e-book. E-book, meet Dear Reader. I sift through the catalog and dig up a few real gems in a variety of topics.

Exploring our e-journals
It can be easy to fall into the habit of thinking that our e-journals are mostly dry piles of academia in your field, but when you wander outside of the discipline you're focusing on, you can find much that's weird and wonderful!

What's hiding in our collection?
I wander the stacks and dig up a few fascinating and unusual books as an example of the sheer serendipity you can encounter while you're among the shelves.

Meet Credo, your new best friend
IN WHICH introductions are made between readers and Credo Reference. All joking aside, Credo really is a fantastic resource and should be relied upon for important historical context and a terrific method of sussing out interrelationships between people, ideas, and events. It's a database of hundreds of reference books in dozens of specialties and links them all together in a very useful way. I also offer some examples of when Credo is the perfect database to use and when it isn't.

A good way to make searching our catalog easier
In the adjustment period we underwent after switching to ALADIN Discovery, I wrote this post in order to help people use the built-in search-narrowing features. This is really one of Discovery's biggest advantages over our old catalog; it lets you limit your search to, for example, only items published in the last 10 years, or just films, or books written on specific topics by specific authors. Among other things.

That about covers it all for now. Next week, you can expect a couple of book-review vlogs (to make up for the lack) and a guide to the questions of the week that have been posted since last August. Since those are usually questions that come up at the Service Desk, keep a close eye; you might satisfy your burning curiosity about the Library!

Vlog interview with our newest librarian!

One thing I neglected to mention in my post last week was that while posts from here on out would be shorter, they'd also be more frequent. We're not sticking to a schedule, though -- some weeks will have more than others!

Here goes ...

New vlog!

And now a sample book review of The November Criminals by Sam Munson!

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Today's post will be relatively short, because we're combining the review, the main body of the post, and the question of the week into a single monstrous Frankensteinian hybrid post this week!

Before we begin: This blog will be undergoing a few changes over the next few weeks, so keep a close eye on library.gallaudet.edu for any updates that will clear things up. I can't say much more about it right now, but when you hit a weird post, that's why.

Today, it's all about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

It was selected as the Common Reading for campus this year, so I read the book a couple of months ago. It sticks out in my mind mostly because of the story, which is fairly unbelievable.

For the past sixty years or so, there's been a single cell culture underpinning virtually every major advance in medical technology, from the improvement of lab equipment to the polio vaccine. This cell culture is known as HeLa, and it is immortal. Given enough nutrients, it will double its population of cells every 24 hours, forever.

Or at least it has for the past sixty years, with no signs of stopping any time soon. It's been estimated that close to 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells have grown over the past six decades, enough for 100 Empire State Buildings. This cell line is descended from a single sample of cervical cancer cells taken from an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks at Johns Hopkins University in 1951.

Unfortunately, almost nobody knew her name. Nobody knew who she was. Nobody knew she had a family, complete with a set of five children, some with hearing losses or outright deafness. The doctor who originally sampled her cells discovered their unique properties not long after she died, and gave them away. Some people took those cells, used them to learn how to mass-manufacture cell cultures, and sold more of those cells and made millions. Industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to cosmetic surgery grew from those cells, and they made first millions, then billions, for the people who started out by using those cells. Jonas Salk grew the polio vaccine in his own copies of those cells and saved millions of lives because of Henrietta Lacks, but nobody knew her name, and her family saw none of this money.

Her family didn't even know what their mother -- though long-dead -- was doing to the world until 20 years after she'd been buried, and even then, the truth only came out because they were unknowingly being used for medical research, a common theme in African-American history during the 20th Century.

Skloot weaves together a few strands in her exploration of the story of Henrietta Lacks, propelled in some ways by Henrietta's daughter, Deborah. She digs deep into the history of Henrietta's family, both ancestors and descendants; follows the path of the cells from Henrietta's womb to its first laboratory to its distribution around the country to the world we live in today; traces, in some ways, the history of the African-American community in the early part of the 20th Century; and explores many questions of medical ethics.

For example, Henrietta's cells were taken from her without her permission. They were distributed, used, manufactured, and sold without her family's knowledge or consent. Her name -- and thereby that of her family -- was revealed, again without any agreement on their part. Her descendants were sampled and experimented upon while being told a different story. The list of sins is lengthy.

In the face of all this, the reader has to ask the question: is all of this morally-questionable behavior justifiable in the light of all the good things that have resulted from Henrietta and her cells? As we move deeper into the 21st Century, the question of privacy becomes important, not just electronic but genetic. For example, if your appendix goes bad and you have it taken out, what happens to the appendix? Does it get thrown out, or is it kept because it's useful biological material? Is your name attached to it? Does that mean the DNA in your former appendix can be analyzed, your entire genome decoded, laid bare, and stored in a database so that complete strangers can know everything about you and your body?

The list of ethics questions that arise after you read this book is also lengthy, and it's chilling. Do you have the right to your own body parts after they've been detached from you?

In general, the book addresses a huge variety of issues, from race to God and back again. This is why the book was selected as the Common Reading; that Henrietta's descendants are also deaf brings a new dimension to our discussion and makes the book especially relevant for us here at Gallaudet University.

As the Common Reading this year, all First Year Experience students will be reading it, but several other departments are leaping into the fray as well, because The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks transgresses a large number of disciplinary boundaries in its quest for the truth. Because of the involvement of so many departments, it'll be a big fall semester!

A number of events are being planned, both for the Gallaudet campus community and for the outside community as well. I'll keep you posted on those as the schedules appear, but I hear there are fascinating activities on the docket, so keep an eye out. The Library will also make a LibGuide available about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the various topics it touches upon; when it's completed, I'll let you all know!

Also, please bear in mind that this book is popular; the Library has two copies right now -- which is unusual for a non-deaf-related book -- and they've quite literally been checked out nonstop since the spring. Hopefully, we'll be able to catch one of our copies as it comes back in and place it on reserve so it's available for everyone to look at. If you're not familiar with where to find the reserve materials, ask at the Service Desk -- they're on the shelves behind it! Just remember: an item on reserve can only be checked out for 2 hours at a time, maximum, although it can be renewed if nobody else is asking for it. You also must stay in the Library while using it; we can't allow it to leave the building. This is how we guarantee it's available for everyone.

Truthfully, I'm excited; it's been a while since a book that wasn't Twilight was this popular, and this fall sounds awesome. I'm teaching an FYE class, and am looking forward to exploring all of its implications with my students and with other courses.

In the meantime, come back next week for another round of posts about what students and faculty -- both new and returning -- need to know!

New site and Jane Rutherford's retirement

Thursday post! Yay, jury duty.

Well, I made it back from vacation, and the building's still standing, the collection hasn't been pillaged, and the campus is still here! That's a good thing.

First, one (relatively) minor announcement: With the exception of a page or two, the redesign of library.gallaudet.edu has been completed! I'm feeling pretty good about it at the moment, but -- and this is a big but -- please do feel free to contact me with any feedback, whether through the comments here (which will be moderated, so watch your language if the new design really ticks you off) or through e-mail at james.mccarthy@gallaudet.edu or library.help@gallaudet.edu. The whole idea here is to make things a little more compact and easier to navigate, so it's really important that I hear from anyone who uses the site.

Now, for the books. I read a lot while I was gone, but you're only getting two books out of me -- one for each week. I need to have some stocked up, after all.

First, I read The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak. Hmm. I sort of have mixed feelings about this one. A friend recommended it and I was curious about the story, which involves a young woman who's born illegitimately to a Turkish woman in Istanbul in the 1980s. It sounds fairly simple, but there's a lot wrapped up in it. When it was published, for instance, it led to a pretty serious controversy in Turkey because the author -- who is herself a Turk -- makes the Turkish genocide of Armenians in the early 20th Century a significant factor in the plot. At its heart, it's a family story, revolving around two siblings, a brother and sister, and the children they raise in the U.S. and in Turkey, respectively, who meet for the first time in their twenties in Istanbul. It's a story of reconciliation -- the American cousin is half-Armenian -- and of closure, when a big family secret is discovered and resolved in fairly short order.

I have mixed feelings about it mostly because it wasn't really my kind of book. I really enjoyed the fantastically engrossing depictions of life in Turkey, especially when contrasted with life in America, but the plot itself, especially the big secret around which it revolves, left me a little cold. That's not to say it's not a good book -- it is, very well-written and enjoyable -- but it's just not my type.

Why write about it in this blog, then? Because I think of my weekly book reviews as just those: reviews. They aren't necessarily intended to be taken as recommendations; they're just a quick peek into what's available through the Gallaudet University Library. If I'm effusive in my praise, though, that's probably a good sign that you should consider picking it up!

The second book I read was The Infinities by John Banville. The story centers on Adam Godley, a brilliant astrophysicist who's discovered a set of equations that have completely changed science and the world's understanding of time. He's dying. His family has installed him in an upper room of the homestead and called everyone back to wait for the end with him. His son, also named Adam, is visiting with his beautiful-but-hollow actress wife Helen, and Petra, sister to the younger Adam and daughter to the elder, who suffers from a severe -- but unnamed -- psychological disorder. Petra in turn brings in Roddy, a young man who claims to be interested in her, but is actually after her father, trying to write his biography. They all stay in the house along with Ursula, the elder Adam's wife, who drinks her way through her grief.

Overseeing all of this -- and this is what makes this novel so much more interesting -- are the Greek gods. The book is narrated by Hermes, the messenger, as he watches over the family and muses about their various idiosyncrasies, while being dragooned into helping his father, Zeus, get into bed with Helen, with whom he has fallen in love. There's even one fascinating episode early in the book when Zeus visits Helen and orders Hermes to hold back the dawn for an hour, which he does, of course, choking roosters and smashing the goddess of the dawn in the face.

Hermes's perspective adds a lot of humor and wry irony to the proceedings, especially when another god shows up in mortal form: Pan, the god of the woods, wildness, and alcohol. Together, the three gods create plenty of mischief over the course of the last day of Adam Godley's life.

In general, it's beautifully-written and very absorbing.

Now, on with the show. Jane Rutherford, one of our Instruction & Reference Librarians, is retiring at the end of August. I feel like I should put a little sad-face emoticon right about here: :( We're all very curious about what she plans to do and what's going through her head at this point, so I talked with her a little bit about her new adventure.

1) Every time I ask someone who's retiring what they plan to do with their time, they tend to say things like, "Well, I'm going to get up at the same time every day and make my coffee just like I always do, except instead of going off to work, I'm going off to get the newspaper, and then I'm going to sit on the back porch. That's my retirement." But you're Jane! I bet you've got a plan. Is that so? Do you mind sharing what it is?
Well, my plan isn't set yet. I've been too busy working to think about it much. BUT ... a big part of my plan is to not have a big plan for a while. I'm going to give myself 4-6 months to do just what I want, when I want. I also want to get my house in order, literally (cleaning, painting, organizing). During that time, I want to research some of the things I am interested in doing, such as volunteering, traveling, etc. I'm actually afraid I may over-commit myself so when I DO have a plan, it will have to include some downtime to really relax.

2) Will you be sticking around the Washington area, or do you plan to move somewhere exotic, like Raleigh or Macon?
Or Wisconsin? Actually, I plan to stay exactly where I am. I live in Alexandria, just south of Old Town. I have a nice condo that is very accessible, both in location and in the amenities it has for people with limited mobility (which I don't need ... yet) and quite beautiful. Plus, I just don't want to move ever again! I hate moving (well, really I hate packing).

3) Lots of retirees have told me that when they left their jobs, they had one big, outlandish thing in mind that they'd always wanted to do, but never had the time for, totally separate from their general post-retirement plans. I've heard all sorts of things -- skydiving, shark-baiting, building their own house by hand, arranging their bookcases by color, going on a European tour -- so I'm curious: Do you have something like that on your to-do list?
I don't think all of these are "big" or "outlandish," and I don't have just one, but here are a few things I am considering and will research in the next few months:

• taking tap dance and/or drum lessons (I love the thought of all the noise these two activities make!)
• holding babies. I did not have children of my own and just love cuddling babies. I am going to look around for opportunities to do that, locally and maybe even internationally!
• going to Africa. I'd like to try working with the orphanage in Zambia which my church supports and where a friend might be going for a year or so. Even though my time there would be limited, probably no more than a month, I admit this still makes me a little nervous -- so far, so exotic, so hard -- but I am truly considering it, maybe as soon as next summer.

4) Now we're going to shift to more Library-like things. You've been pretty busy this summer, getting a lot of things out of the way before you take off. Would you share some details about what you've been doing?
Well, one thing I just started recently was taking personal things home. My goodness, one accumulates a lot of stuff after 29+ years! I'm also getting things together to pass on to my library colleagues -- you know, work stuff.

I've been the library selector for education for many years now and I decided I wanted to clean out those books. I've withdrawn a very large number of books, a decent amount of which were well over 30 years old. That means that those left will be more useful, if only because they will be easier to find on the tidy shelves!

Finally (or maybe not if someone comes up with other projects), I've done a thorough inventory of the general periodical (journals, magazines, and newspapers) collection. With the expansion and popularity of electronic periodical access, the librarians have been steadily increasing our holdings of those products for quite a few years now. That means some of the paper and microfilm products have to go so we can reallocate more of our money to electronic. I've determined exactly what we have on the shelves (titles and years/volumes), collected data about those titles (how much they are used, if they are available electronically, past decisions made, which librarian should monitor them, etc.), and put all this in a spreadsheet so it will be easier to make decisions about periodicals in the future.

5) You've had a long, rich career at Gallaudet, spanning almost thirty years. Looking back, what's the one thing that sticks out in your mind the most?
Change.

• How the University has changed -- Deaf President Now, communication methods, FYS/GSR, the buildings (new ones, long-gone old ones), etc.
• How the Library has changed, not the building but the things we do here and the way we do them.
• How I have changed: When I started I was the Library Systems Analyst and I worked with mainframe computers, then minicomputers, then PCs. About 15 years ago, I switched from computers to people and became a reference and instruction librarian. That change recharged my energy and made it easier to work here happily for almost 30 years.

6) What's something you might miss the most about working at the Gallaudet University Library?
There are a couple of things. First, the interaction with people, students and staff both. I tend to be an introvert, but when I start working with students, individually or in a classroom, my energy soars. Next, I will miss learning things. That is the best thing about being a librarian. New topics come up all the time, and I get to research them and learn things I would never have thought about. It's not that I won't learn new things, but it won't be as serendipitous as it is here at work.

7) And finally, you knew this question was inevitable: What brand of sensible shoes do you recommend?
I believe we all need to be stylish, so I vote for Jimmy Choo! Just kidding ... those might kill or maim me. Really though, I've yet to find shoes that are always sensible (for me that means comfortable), but as my body approaches middle- to late-middle age (this is not a typo), flats are always better and thick soles help cushion these bony feet! Not Birkenstocks!

All joking aside, we're all sad to see Jane go. She's done a lot for the Library and for Gallaudet in general, and it'll be very tough to replace her. By the same token, though, she's certainly earned her time off!

If you've worked with Jane before, please feel free to stop by the Library any time over the next month or so to wish her well!

No question of the week this week; I think this post is quite long enough -- don't you?

What have I been up to?

"I'm a Florida boy."

I have to keep repeating that to myself. "I'm a Florida boy." Sometimes we all need reminders that things could be worse, although after the sweltering weather of this past week, I'm not sure how. We broke triple digits a few times in the last few days, and just when I start to think it's not so bad, the humidity hits. Climate change or good old-fashioned heat wave? Who can say?

In an effort to clear this question -- among many others related to the weather (chief among which is "WHY?") -- from my mind, I read Generation A by Douglas Coupland.

I've heard a lot of stuff about Coupland. Most of the hoity-toity literary blogs I follow have mentioned him from time to time and it's usually in a very positive light, so I figured he must be pretty close to unreadable.

Except it turns out that Coupland is actually really readable. Generation A is the story of five individuals distributed across the world -- New Zealand, India, France, the U.S., and Canada -- who get stung by bees.

Given that the novel is set in a near-future where bees have been extinct for several years, rendering almonds, apples, and other fruits of assisted pollination (pun intended), very, very expensive, this is a global event. Coupland does a terrific job sketching in a future that looks eerily consistent with our present; the first person to get stung is an Iowan corn farmer who has a live Web stream of himself in his combine as he destroys a cornfield full of an "undesirable gene variant." The second is an Indian call-center operator for Abercrombie & Fitch, the third a New Zealander who's using her cell phone to make an "Earth sandwich" with a woman in Madrid, and so on.

So these five people are stung by bees, and this quite literally throws the entire planet into a tizzy. They become instant celebrities, their lives dissected by millions of people who are curious about what it is that attracted the bees to these people. The stung people disappear into quarantine for a few months while -- cue sinister music -- tests are run on them, and then reunite after being set free. However, they discover that there's a lot more to the story, involving a mysterious pharmaceutical called Solon, a native village on a remote Canadian island, and Belgium.

Truthfully, if the world the novel was set in were less realistic, the plot would probably exist on an astral plane with the works of people like Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, and Dan Brown. But it's weirdly believable, very funny, and completely worth your time.

Also worth my time: The things I've finished so far this summer.

First on the list: Weeding. I've mentioned this a few times over the last couple of months. It's time-consuming and less than wildly enjoyable, but it's necessary and healthy. I set my goal as a specific percentage of the books under my control, and I'm pleased to report that I met -- and exceeded -- that goal. I've focused mostly on older books in the linguistics area of the General Stacks downstairs (call numbers 420-428). Truthfully, a sizable proportion of those books were histories of the English language -- published before 1938! This was before World War II, the 1950s, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, Nixon, NASA, greed being good, the Internet, and the entirety of the George W. Bush administration, which gave our language a good workout on a daily basis. Those older books were only good for historical curiosity, but served no real academic purpose, which is our main focus.

Actually, they're perfect examples of books that have fallen through the cracks over the years. We're a busy nest of librarians, and weeding is an activity that we tend to perceive as something that goes on in the background all the time. It happens while we're doing other things, incrementally, and -- in my case, especially -- in one big whoop per year. That doesn't mean it isn't important to us, though. I've gone into detail before about why we weed, so, just as a refresher, let me sum it up: sometimes books are moldering on the shelf, dangerously outdated, never used, and are taking up space for books that have more to offer our students these days, so we get rid of them. It's easy to get into the habit of thinking that books are sacrosanct, especially where librarians are concerned (apparently we worship them; ridiculous! Ignore that altar in my bedroom closet, though); however, we have a specific mission to serve the students, faculty, and staff of Gallaudet University, and it is poorly-served by the neglect of our collection. So we prune the collection in order to encourage healthy growth.

Then the Deaf Research Help pages on our Web site. Those have needed to be updated for some time; we refreshed a few of them last year, but were barely able to make a dent. This year, we're making a big push to transfer all of that information to LibGuides. I worked on the FAQs about deaf statistics and ASL, which were pretty heavy by themselves. They're both information-heavy. The deaf statistics pages focus mainly on offering starting points for estimates of deafness within a population; the United States in general, then each state, then each country. It took me nearly a week to hunt down and tabulate the statistics for the U.S. alone; the Census Bureau and other data-collecting entities don't do things in as clear-cut a manner as they used to, so some figuring was necessary. The rest of the world took another couple of weeks -- it's not easy trying to find official statistics on the prevalence of deafness in Ethiopia, for instance, or the number of sign-language users in Brazil. Although I managed to put together a decent update, this will have to be an ongoing product as more information becomes available.

Sign language, on the other hand, was a little easier; some quick run-throughs of our catalog and major vendors, along with the advent of YouTube and Vimeo, among others, made life much simpler. All told, maybe a month's worth of work was spent on those two LibGuides, and I'm partly glad it's over and partly glad I was able to learn so much. For example, did you know that 95% of the Japanese deaf population is at age-level literacy? That's something the U.S. can't accomplish even with hearing people. Fascinating!

We've also set up a new chat system for our Meebo widget on library.gallaudet.edu. You'd be bored with the details, but it'll make our lives much easier; the main thing I'm excited about is that now, when we get a question over IM about something specific to someone's subject area, we don't have to run to their office and call them in to the Service Desk so they can answer it -- we can just transfer the IM directly to their office! The new system should also reduce the delays that sometimes occur when the person answering IMs at the Service Desk is busy helping other people and can't respond to an IM right away; someone else, in their office, will also get the same IM and answer it themselves if necessary. Overall, this should help ensure faster and more accurate responses.

I've also been working on a new program we bought earlier this year that'll let us create video tutorials (with captioning, of course) for various aspects of our online resources. I'm starting out with LibGuides, explaining how they work, what each important element is, and how to use them to your advantage. It should be appearing somewhere on the Web site within the next few weeks; I'm just about done, but what with one thing or another, it may take a little while to get up and running.

The ALA Conference was another big thing on my to-do list. It sounds funny, but a few days away from work was definitely included on my list of important things to work on this summer. You saw my post last week; most of those events were selected specifically for key aspects of my work here at the Gallaudet University Library, and I came away super-enriched with more information and ideas!

And then, last but definitely not least, I'm redesigning our home page. Yes, again -- I can hear the groans from the peanut gallery. Although our current design is much nicer-looking than the one we had before, one of the most common questions we've been getting for the past year is, "How do I search the catalog?" It only beats "How do I find e-Journals or databases?" by a very, very slim margin. The answers to both questions are right on the home page, but people are having a hard time finding it. So I'm shuffling things around a little bit, reducing the current number of boxes by a third and reorganizing information so things are a little more unified, grouping like with like. Above it all, I'm sticking a honkin' big search box for our catalog, so you can guess what our emphasis is. The result of all this is that the layout is more compact, logically compartmentalized, and much easier to take in within one or two spins of the scroll wheel on your mouse. Here's a tiny, not-at-all-clear preview of what's to come:

All of the above is what I've been working on for the past month and a half or so, ever since we finished ordering new items and put a nice little bow on the Spring semester. The sad thing is that although I've gotten a large amount of stuff out of the way, I'm still not done. The projects you've been reading about are the ones explicitly related to the Library. Now that they're just about over with, I'm going on vacation next week, and then when I return, it's time to focus on projects that don't involve changing out anything in the Library itself: preparation for the First Year Experience course I'll be teaching in the Fall (if you're an incoming freshman and you're reading this, I may be teaching you starting this August!), gearing up for the Common Reading, which will be The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, by preparing LibGuides and planning campus-wide events, and getting started on writing questions for the 2011 Academic Bowl competition. It'll be a busy late July and August!

I'm sure you didn't miss the bit where I said I'm going on vacation next week. There won't be a blog post then. But when I come back, there'll be a Thursday post on the 22nd (unless I don't get called in to jury duty) about Jane Rutherford in anticipation of her retirement, then Friday, July 30, will see more about the Common Reading and what we're doing for it. Following that, the month of August, as it was last year, will be devoted to the incoming class!

Enjoy your weekend!

---

Question of the Week
I'm here at Gallaudet for a summer program, and I have Library borrowing privileges. But I read the sign you have up on the Service Desk, and it doesn't say anything about me or how long I'm allowed to borrow Library things for. I just checked out a book, and the librarian told me I can only have it for a week. What's up with that?
That sign only addresses regular borrowers: students, staff, faculty, alumni, and members of other Consortium universities. When you're on campus for a summer program and have obtained an ID that allows you to use the Library, your borrowing period is determined by your expiration date if it's less than four weeks away. The main program going on right now wraps up on July 17, which is a week from tomorrow, so that's when your ID -- and, by extension, your ability to borrow Library items -- expires. It makes sense: when your program is done, you're likely not sticking around; why risk incurring fines if you'll be in another state long before The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is due?

Reporting in from ALA

I'm back!

On this unnaturally cool week, we've got a doubleheader for you: The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler.

They're two books that were going to be a trilogy, except Butler died before she had time to focus on the third book. Both Parables follow one Lauren Olamina, a Californian woman who lives near Los Angeles in a society that resembles both a postapocalypse and a dystopia. The United States has collapsed, existing in name only, jobs have evaporated, and runaway inflation has put most needs out of reach for a significant percentage of the American population. Lauren and her family cling to survival in a walled enclave built out of a suburban cul-de-sac, subsisting on food grown in backyards and traded among neighbors and practicing their shooting -- just in case. The outside world is filled with the poor, the violent, and the addicted. There's a new drug, known as pyro, that's spreading throughout the country and creates in its users the desire to light things on fire. Millions of Southern Californian refugees, victims of a nonexistent economy, police forces that charge exorbitant fees for their services, and violence from the poor, are streaming their way up I-5, on their way to Oregon, Washington, Canada, or a newly-seceded Alaska.

In the midst of all this chaos, Lauren is busily planting the seeds of a new religion, called Earthseed, which says that the only thing worth venerating is change and that it's the destiny of the human race to colonize other worlds; this is her attempt to reunify the human race in pursuit of a single goal. She's interrupted at the age of eighteen when her walled neighborhood is finally overrun, her family is killed, and she's sent walking up the interstate with two of her neighbors. As they fight their way up the Pacific coast, they accumulate followers, people who join up for protection, fellowship, and, eventually, the tenets of Earthseed. At the end of the first book, they've settled on a few dozen acres of isolated woodland north of San Francisco, owned by one of her followers, and begin the process of building a community, named Acorn. The Earthseed religion strongly emphasizes learning over education with special attention paid to reading, math, and the sciences. It's a communal way of living; people look after each others' kids and share their food.

In the second book, Lauren's daughter takes over the narrative and pieces together the story of the rest of her mother's life after settling down in Acorn. A new president is elected, a Christian fundamentalist who -- wink, wink, nudge, nudge -- loudly decries the actions of vigilante bands of Christians who have been attacking poorer communities and killing or enslaving anyone who doesn't subscribe to their creed. The country appears to be devolving into a theocracy, and Acorn is one of the last holdouts. Unfortunately, they are finally invaded and Acorn's residents -- including Lauren -- are enslaved, their children taken away and adopted into good Christian homes, away from their "heretic" parents. Lauren's daughter is one of those kids, as she tells us years later while sharing her mother's story. A fortunate landslide leads to an uprising, the extermination of the slavers, and the scattering of the people of Acorn. Lauren, during her flight, begins to think that she needs to grow her system another way; instead of centralizing it into a single community that can be attacked, she should teach people, who can then go out and teach others. The story then skips forward a few years, when we find out that not all of Lauren's family was killed in the initial invasion of her enclave-neighborhood; her younger brother has survived and is now a minister in the church supported by the new president. He manages to hunt down Lauren's daughter in her good Christian home -- where she has been abused and neglected for being black and unlike her adoptive parents' real daughter -- and take her home with him.

We jump forward a few years again, and we see that Earthseed has spread far and wide; there are communities everywhere, and the religion, centralized under Lauren's authority, has become wealthy enough to build schools everywhere and invest in industries that promote spaceflight; the goal here is still to find other worlds to live on. Lauren's daughter finally meets her, 20 years after her birth and subsequent seizure by the fanatics, and discovers that although her mother loves her, she loves Earthseed more: her first child. The book ends there; the series will never be finished.

I find myself disappointed by that. It's pretty different from Butler's other books, which are much more overtly science-fictional -- people with super-powers and all that -- but it's still typical of her writing, which I love. She had a singular talent for uniting a whole slew of issues -- from gender to race to politics to religion -- into a single story. Her protagonists tend to be African-American women, which is a welcome change from most of the science fiction of her era, which was -- and still is -- overwhelmingly white-male-dominated. I have no desire to read only books that are narrated by characters just like me, and Butler's work is a perfect example of the difference I seek.

Then there's the epic nature of the Parables' plot (epic in scale, not as in "epic win"); this one woman in a collapsing society creates a whole new belief system that, after years of struggle, hard work, and horrifying violence, sweeps the world and begins to change it. It's good stuff! I strongly recommend both books, as well as the rest of her work that we hold: Bloodchild and Other Stories, Dawn, Wild Seed, Kindred, and Fledgling. Out of these five, plus the Parable books, I guarantee there's something for everyone. Vampires, aliens, immortals, time-travelers, or budding High Priestesses, it's all good.

Now, I skipped a whole week. What's going on with that?

Well, I attended ALA, or the American Library Association's annual conference. We call it "ALA" because it's so big, it doesn't need much more of a name. 20,000 librarians descended on Washington, DC between last Thursday and this Tuesday to attend workshops, seminars, discussion groups, and the exhibit hall. I -- as well as most of my colleagues here in the Library -- was among that 20,000.

First, the exhibit hall. It's like most conference exhibit halls; big fancy booths rented by the major movers in the industry and small cookie-cutter booths rented by the smaller, independent companies. Nearly all the database vendors we know of were there -- ProQuest, Ebsco, SAGE, and so on. Also like most exhibit halls, it was full of giveaways; little branded trinkets that open beer bottles, illuminate a small section of wall, or offer an outlet for stress. And books. Lots of free books. Besides the vendors, the rest of the exhibit hall was occupied by publishers like Scholastic, Random House, Hyperion-Disney, Dark Horse (they do comics like Hellboy and Scott Pilgrim vs. the Rest of the World), and Wizards of the Coast (Dungeons & Dragons). I came away from this weekend with more than 40 new books, most of which will end up in the Library. Many of those books are uncorrected printer's proofs or advance reading copies, which means that most of them have not been released on the market yet and won't be for a few months; the rest is just the publisher's attempt to unload surplus inventory that can't be sold. So that was nice. I loved the exhibit hall.

Now that that's out of the way, on to the more important stuff. ALA is very, very large; the conference occupied all of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center here in town, and took over several nearby hotels as well. Dozens of workshops, seminars, lectures, discussion groups and panels are available for registered participants. To make things a little easier on me, here's a list of the stuff I went to, along with summaries of each and what I learned.

H.W. Wilson Breakfast
H.W. Wilson is a database vendor; we subscribe to their Biography Reference Bank. I thought it might be a good idea to attend this breakfast and see what they've been up to, which turned out to be a lot. Bearing in mind that the disciplines I work with consists of the fine arts, literature, and language, I got excited by their new A Social History of the 20th Century, which is a database of art defined within the context of the 20th Century; what social changes do they express? What questions did they bring up for the people of their time? It's a good resource for fine arts, history, and sociology. They're also offering the Art Museum Image Gallery, which is a collection of several thousand scanned images available on the Web from museums all over the world, collected in a single place.

Beyond Library Guides
This was a workshop about LibGuides, which we started using last year and which has been growing steadily in use. This particular talk focused on using LibGuides as a project for students in a first-year course on the history of New York; new features that have been added by the company that owns LibGuides are now enabling more collaboration from people who don't have their own accounts, and turning the guides into a wiki-like project. I'm teaching an FYS class in the fall, and am thinking more about how this could apply; this might also be good for the Library. Allowing people to contribute content would be good for LibGuides like the one that covers free things to do in Washington, DC, or the LibGuide for GSR 150: City as Text. I'll be talking with some faculty as we get closer to the fall for some ideas about what we could do with this.

Ebsco lunch
Yes, database vendors offer a lot of free meals in exchange for permission to spend an hour or more talking to us about how great their company is. Usually, this is justifiable: For example, Ebsco talked about its new Discovery tool, which would allow libraries to include results from their Ebsco databases in with their catalog records; this means that if you're looking for books on a specific topic, you'd also be able to see journal articles that are relevant to your topic. This would save a lot of time and make research a lot easier. Something like this might be in the Library's future, in fact; more on that later!

The Open Access Debate
A panel of advocates for open access, along with a librarian from the National Library of Medicine and a representative from Elsevier, another database vendor, discussed what's been going on lately with the movement toward open access. I've talked about it on this blog before; most of the things I mention in that previous post were kicked around in this meeting, and it was very informative. In general, publishers and database vendors are struggling to figure out how to make open access a viable business model; how do you make information available for free and still earn a profit without going down the credibility-destroying path of advertising? It was a heated debate, actually, mostly centering around the Elsevier representative, and it ended with a huge surprise from a Springer (yet another database vendor) representative, who announced Springer's own open-access initiative. More details about that will be forthcoming within the next few months.

Science Fiction and Fantasy: Informing the Present by Imagining the Future
Actually, this one was just for fun. After a long Saturday, you just want something light to finish off the day. The highlight involved Cory Doctorow, an author I've spoken about on this blog a few times before, and a name my coworkers have grown tired of hearing. What can I say? I love the guy and his work. He's always been a huge advocate for libraries, although he's more known for ranting against copyright, his work for BoingBoing, and as a fan-favorite character on xkcd.com (read all the way to the end; the whole strip is worth it!). Also, they gave out more free books at this talk. I'd say I came out ahead.

Strategic Future of Print Collections in Research Libraries
This one was very interesting. The basic question centered around things like Google Books. Do print books have a future in a society where everything's migrating online? Most of the panelists said yes; one speaker from the University of Michigan has been working with Google to scan the university's collection of rare books, and she said something very interesting: "Don't forget microfilm." See, when microfilm was becoming popular at libraries everywhere, the thinking was that microfilm was not a perishable storage medium. Because of this, thousands of books and journals were converted to microfilm and destroyed, whether in the conversion process (pages had to be taken apart to be scanned individually) or afterward (because they were no longer necessary). Unfortunately, a few years later, it turned out that microfilm actually decays; the vast majority of the stuff that was produced between the 1930s and 1980s were produced from cellulose acetate, an organic material that decomposes quite readily in fairly common conditions. Worse still, because they're made from acetate, they give off a vinegary stink and generally make life difficult for everyone. This problem was compounded by microfilm's rapid obsolescence as digital analogues arose during the 1970s, rendering all that expense useless and the destruction of the original texts pointless. There's a lesson to be learned from this. Another speaker echoed the U Michigan librarian; he said the future was more likely to see both print and digital texts supplementing each other, rather than being all one or the other.

Question, Find, Evaluate, Apply
A sort of seminar about ways to assess information literacy. It all sounds like impenetrable Librarianese, I'm sure, but basically, one of our missions here at the Gallaudet University Library involves teaching students and faculty how to navigate information systems to find what they need to do their work. It involves knowing how to use Google and what its limits are, how to perform searches in databases in order to find articles that are relevant to your topic, and when to ask for help. In order to find out whether or not we're successful at this, we have to ask students to fill out papers testing what they just learned, so if you've ever had to do that after a Library presentation, you now know why. It's not to test you; it's to test us. And this seminar offered a bunch of really useful ideas about how we can do this better.

Recruiting Undergraduates to the Library Profession: A Mellon Success Story
Yes, I admit it. I'm actively trying to get students to consider librarianship as a possible future career. This panel consisted of current or former library-school students who had been recruited by the Mellon Foundation into a program that let them go on library-related internships as undergraduates and earn scholarships for grad school. It was actually a pretty enjoyable talk; the proto-librarians were all very interesting -- and funny -- people. One of them said that the thought of being a librarian never entered her mind until one day when she was coming out of the bathroom and spied a poster on the wall opposite her that said, "Ever thought about being a librarian?" And she was hooked. In general, being a librarian requires a few specific traits that aren't easy to find all together, so if I say, "Hey! You should think about becoming a librarian," you should start looking for library schools like now.

Privacy, Libraries, and the Law
This was a fairly sober discussion. Whether we like it or not, the surveillance of our daily activities -- whether by the government or the corporations whose products we consume -- is increasing quickly. As Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, famously said, privacy is no longer the social norm. So what does this mean for libraries? We're still figuring that one out, even as we recover from the storm that the USAPATRIOT Act kicked up around us after 9/11.

For the Love of Reference
This one was kind of fun. Another panel -- there are lots of those at ALA -- discussed reference as an important part of being a librarian. "Reference" is Librarianese for "answering people's questions." Whether it means sitting at the Service Desk for a few hours a week or answering IMs coming in late at night, reference tends to get overlooked in favor of other aspects of working in a library -- electronic resources, cataloging, or larger issues like, as listed above, privacy and assessment. Nancy Pearl, who is probably the first and only librarian ever to have her own action figure, was on the panel, and it was a treat to listen to her discuss how aspects of reference are both changing and staying the same as new technologies and methodologies emerge.

Closing Session: Amy Sedaris
I learned nothing from this, other than the fact that Amy Sedaris is a drunk and possibly slightly insane. Also hilarious. This was the wrap-up session for the ALA Conference itself, a sort of official period at the end of a long sentence about workshops, free books, and new vendors to think about. And yes, it was book-related -- Sedaris wrote I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence.

And that was my weekend. I'm tired. Luckily, this is a three-day weekend!

Next week is the deadline I've set for myself for most of my summer projects. I'll let you know more about those next Friday. Enjoy your 4th!

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Question of the Week
How come the books on the display tables at either entrance to the Library haven't changed in a while?
Because it's summertime, mostly. There are fewer people here to look at them and maybe think about checking them out. That doesn't mean they aren't getting looked at, though -- I catch two or three people reading the dust-jacket blurbs every day. They're also being checked out, somehow; they seem to disappear when I'm not looking! You'll see some fresh stuff on there in mid-to-late July, though, for Jump Start, CPSO summer programs, and brand-new and returning students. I guarantee they'll be interesting.

What's hiding in our collection?

This past week, I committed a grave sin. I've done it before, but often for reasons having to do figuring out how to best expand the collection. This time, though, I just wanted to read it and we didn't have the book, so I ...

Well, I ... I ordered it from another university.

Okay, I'm kidding. Truth is, the availability of so many books from so many good universities is one of the Gallaudet University Library's many benefits, and I feel no real shame in taking full advantage of it. In this case, it was Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, a collection of Richard Feynman's personal letters, edited by his daughter.

If you don't know who Richard Feynman (pronounced FINE-man) is, shame on you. He was one of the most significant and well-respected physicists of his time, which actually comprised the majority of the 20th Century -- he was born in 1918 and died in 1988. He started out fairly young, earning his doctorate at Princeton and working at Los Alamos in his 20s, helping the military figure out how to build an atomic bomb during World War II, then moved on to figuring out the fundamentals of several very important aspects of quantum physics. He went on to become one of Caltech's most popular teachers, won a Nobel Prize for some of his work in 1965, and was one of the investigators of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

It all sounds relatively pedestrian until you dig into the details of his life, which Perfectly Reasonable Deviations lets you do. For instance, he was also a widely-known bongo player. Mad about bongos, actually. He played them all over the world and once joked that people knew him better for his drumming than his physics. He had two great loves of his life; his first wife died in the 1940s of tuberculosis while he was working at Los Alamos, and he met (and married) his second wife on the spur of the moment in the 1960s and she was with him when he died in 1988, just shy of 70 years old. In the twenty years that separated both wives, though, it is said that he was very popular with the young ladies.

This might sound odd to you, but he was also one of the first scientist-celebrities. Albert Einstein made headlines, but this guy made movies. His Lectures on Physics sold millions of copies on tape and in print, and he had his own television miniseries, where he just stood there and talked about physics. People ate it up; he was a brilliant and engaging teacher who was able to explain some of the most exotic concepts known to modern science (at that time, anyway) to complete laymen. He was the first Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, and Neil deGrasse Tyson in terms of his recognizability, though much closer to Stephen Hawking in his contributions to quantum physics.

He also had a bit of a Mr. Wizard sensibility; he demonstrated to a Congressional hearing that the Challenger disaster was due in large part to frozen O-rings failing to protect the Shuttle from the superheated gases propelling it upward. How? By dropping a piece of O-ring material in a Styrofoam cup of ice water, then showing how the cold temperature made the O-ring return to its proper shape much more slowly than it should have, a vital characteristic when you don't want multibillion-dollar spacecraft exploding and people dying.

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations emphasizes his popular appeal quite a bit; it includes dozens of fan letters from a wide range of people, from car mechanics to British housewives, all thanking him for making it all perfectly clear to them and asking him questions one wouldn't expect to hear outside of a graduate-level physics course.

Of course, the larger message of Perfectly Reasonable Deviations is subtle: Although Feynman became busier and busier and more and more famous over the fifty-year period covered in the book, he answered almost every single letter personally, albeit occasionally with apologies for taking so much time to respond. His responses nevertheless show that he took the time to read them, think about them, and do his best to answer any questions that came up. And they certainly came up; he responded to questions about anything from the quirks of particle behavior to a father's worries about his science-loving son. The overall impression is one of a very smart, very funny guy who treated complete strangers with the utmost grace.

It's highly recommended if you're curious about the life and mind of one of modern science's seminal figures. No lab-coat-bedecked geek here!

And now, as another brilliant 20th-Century mind once said, on with the opera.

Did you know that Gallaudet University has had a library since 1864? We'll be celebrating our 150th birthday in 2014. One of the biggest advantages of our longevity is that we've had time to collect some truly interesting items, including the occasional 19th-Century specimen.

Those older books can be pretty fragile, though; we do have plenty of cool stuff dating from 1950 up to now. Let's take a look, starting with the magical stuff (literally) and moving to the just plain interesting:

A History of Magic and Experimental Science
This one kind of breaks the rule -- the first volume was published in 1923, but the last was published in 1958. The title constitutes an interesting juxtaposition, doesn't it? In general, this series of historical investigations covers the transition from superstition and magical thinking to the scientific method, starting with the Roman Empire (Volume 1, The first thirteen centuries of our era) and ending with the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment (Volume 8, The seventeenth century). It's a fascinating look at the history of our civilization and the foundations of the rationalism so venerated in some circles today.

The Magician, the Witch, and the Law
Another historical tome, this one focuses more specifically on medieval witchcraft and the effect it had on society and the legal code -- such as it was in a feudal age. It examines how magic in general influenced public thinking, analyzing public discourse and how leaders took advantage of the superstitious to achieve their own ends -- and how the witches and magicians of the time took advantage of this same credulity to achieve their own. It also goes into some detail about how medieval witchery clashed with the Inquisition and the tragic results.

Magic: A Reference Guide
Because I am hilarious like that, we'll wrap up the conjuration with a book on prestidigitation: stage magic. This book is a terrific look into how something that may appear on stage to be utterly unexplainable is actually totally rational; it's all a matter of manipulating objects, the audience, and the situation. It's a fascinating read!

How to Enjoy Ballet
I have no real interest in ballet or learning how to enjoy it, but isn't the title great? In all seriousness, ballet is one of the most difficult forms of dancing; it's highly reliant on a combination of technically-adept execution and aesthetic appeal. Not only are there specific moves, foot placements, and arm positions, but a dancer needs to be able to follow the music and transition from one position to another as smoothly and elegantly as possible. Like figure-skating, it's a much-misunderstood but extremely complex form of expression, and some people need help understanding it. This book is a great place to start!

Contemporary Hermeneutics
It's not the most welcoming of titles, I agree; "hermeneutics" is generally defined as the science of exegesis, particularly of spiritual writings. In this book, though, it's placed in an architectural context on a continuum from Pre-Classicism all the way up to Ecoism. It discusses how buildings are interpreted, often in terms of the prevailing beliefs of the time. For example, Thomas Jefferson's mansion in Virginia, Monticello, was designed in the Palladian tradition, which was heavily reliant on geometry, symmetry, and the designs of ancient Greek temples. That one of our founding fathers chose to build a house that resembled, in some ways, a three-thousand-year-old temple suggests that he saw some essential similarities between ancient Greek society and the civilization he was trying to build. It's a very fascinating book, especially when you get up into the incredible mishmash of architectural philosophies represented by early-20th-Century New York.

Soviet Economic Progress: Because of, or in Spite of, the Government
Part of the reason I find this book interesting is the perception I have of US-USSR relations around 1957, when this book was published. It just feels as though both countries were completely closed off to one another, their motives inscrutable to us, ours untrustworthy to them. Intellectually, though -- and partly because of this book -- I understand that that simply wasn't true. In fact, in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, reviewed above, there are several letters between Dr. Feynman and the Soviets as he repeatedly declines their invitations to participate in a symposium in Leningrad. There was plenty of information exchange between both countries, regardless of how hostile both governments were toward one another.

After Hamelin
This one's a lot newer; published in 2000, it's a novel about an old woman who tells a story about the Pied Piper of Hamelin. If you're not familiar with the story, the town of Hamelin had a serious rat problem, and they hired the Pied Piper to use his magical pipe to lure all the rats away. However, when he was done, the town refused to pay him, so in revenge, he pulled out his pipe and took all the children away, and they were never seen again. That's the basic story as most people know it; in After Hamelin, the old woman reveals a new fact: one child stayed behind. The Pied Piper couldn't lure her away because she was deaf! Terrific book.

Face Reading
This is a cool book! It relies on the art of physiognomy: determining aspects of personality based on one's facial shape and features. It's an ancient Chinese art (one of many, it sometimes seems) known as siang mien. Your ears can predict your future (how does that work for deaf people, I wonder ... ), and various facial features can impute information about one's sexuality, success in relationships, and the outcome of each year of a person's life. There's some bona-fide medical stuff in there too: some diseases are indicated, first and foremost, by changes in facial characteristics, like the loss of eyebrow hair, changes in the shape of the nose, lip coloration, and the structure of the eye.

I think we'll stop here -- it's an interesting mishmash of stuff I've dug up. There are many more books like these throughout the collection; an hour's worth of browsing can yield some serious serendipity if you're after the weird and offbeat.

As a reminder: Next week, no post. I'll be at the big, giant ALA conference. The following week, you'll get an on-the-ground report from your friendly neighborhood librarian!

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Question of the Week
The Library printer I was using jammed! What do I do?
The first thing you should do is tell the person who's working at the Service Desk so he or she can fix it. If you're really pressed for time, you can also switch to the other printer. That's why we have two; sometimes things don't work quite right with one, so we have the other one as a backup.

New fiction

And our summer marches on!

I've been curious about Joe Hill's books for a few months now, so I checked out The Heart-Shaped Box and Horns and clipped through them in a single weekend; they're that quick and easy to read. They aren't small books, though -- they're full-fledged novels with really terrific characters and absorbing plots.

The Heart-Shaped Box was essentially Hill's debut novel, and it made major waves when it came out last year. This is because it's supremely creepy and doesn't spare any ultraviolence. An aging rock star named Judas Coyne -- a combination of Elvis, Mick Jagger, Ozzy Osbourne, and anyone from ZZ Top -- is a gothy sort who lives with a young lady half his age in a farmhouse somewhere in New York. He collects creepy things, like a human skull belonging to someone who was trepanned (a process where a hole is drilled in the skull of a live person to cure ills -- not as widely practiced these days), coffins, and a dead man's suit.

The dead man's suit, in particular, is the basic premise of the novel. The rock star's assistant gets an e-mail telling him about the suit, which is up for auction online, and of course, Coyne can't resist, especially when he finds out that there's a ghost attached.

Unfortunately, it turns out to be true. And it's done in a disturbing way that still makes me nervous. The night after he gets the suit (wrapped in a heart-shaped box, hence the title), he wakes up in the middle of the night, thinking he heard something. He walks down the hall, past an old man sitting in a rocking chair, goes downstairs and looks around a little bit, but nothing's out of order. He goes back up the stairs, walks past the old man sitting in the rocking chair, and goes into his room. Then something strikes him as odd, and he looks back into the hall, which has become very cold, but there's nothing -- and nobody -- there. And so it begins ...

Horns is a little more straightforward. It's less creepy and more of a surrealist revenge fantasy. This guy goes on a major bender, completely blacks out a full night, and wakes up the next morning in his own bed, much the worse for wear. He goes into the bathroom, glances at himself in the mirror, and discovers that he's grown a pair of small horns for no apparent reason. He discovers a few new talents he's picked up with the horns: first, nobody notices that he has horns -- and they always forget he was ever there after the conversation ends. Second, when he talks to people, the horns make them confess all of their most secret sins, and he can make them do things. Third, when he touches someone, he picks up their entire past, including some of the darkest things they've ever done. And snakes really, really like him.

Of course, I still haven't mentioned the most important part, other than the horns: His girlfriend was violently murdered a year previously, and he's the main suspect. All the evidence that might have cleared his name was destroyed in a mysterious fire, and his girlfriend was beloved by their hometown, so he's nearly universally hated. I was expecting this to be almost a mystery, the main character spending most of the novel trying to find the killer's name and then facing off with him in an apocalyptic showdown. However, he discovers the real murderer's name within the first couple of chapters, and the rest of the novel is concerned chiefly with hunting down and cornering the killer and exacting vengeance. All throughout the book, the horns keep growing and his skin begins to change ...

Well, read the book. It's a fantastic read, possibly (slightly) better than The Heart-Shaped Box.

Anyway,I've spent most of this week locked up in my office working on stuff, which I will explain more about later in the summer, I promise. I've also been planning for the American Library Association's big, giant annual conference, which is here in DC in a couple of weeks. I'm excited; I've been a bona-fide librarian for two years now and I'm finally going to the conference. I'll skip that week's post (Friday, June 25) and report to you all the following week! In the meantime, here's a list of fun new fiction that's come in over the last couple months to hold you over until I can focus on something more substantive!

The Infinities
A most decidedly unusual book, this novel tells the story of a dying mathematician (hence, the title -- partly) and his family, who are holding vigil over him on a hot summer afternoon. However, his family is not alone in participating in the end of his life; all around them are little gods, in the classical Greek sense (the other part of the title's meaning), who move around and through the family seen and unseen and wickedly stir up a seething cauldron of trouble.

Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal
The title takes things a bit literally; the author/narrator spends some time with the Hamburger King, one of the most influential businessmen on the planet, while he machinates his way through his empire, subordinates, friends, and relatives. Funny, eccentric, and highly satirical, this novel, translated from French, sort of makes you think about all the ways in which we all endure servitude and even, in some cases, enjoy it.

Beatrice and Virgil
Yann Martel, author of the bestselling Life of Pi, brings us another animal-themed novel; Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a howler monkey, are the centers of a play-within-a-novel written by a taxidermist. The main character is an author who seems rather similar to Martel, sucked into the taxidermist's bizarre inner life as he assists in writing the play.

Let the Great World Spin
The 1974 feat of Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker who walked between the towers of the World Trade Center, 110 stories up, becomes the focal point of several different Manhattan stories that intersect at the end of the novel. It's one of those books, but the author pulls it off with such grace you're guaranteed to be thinking about it for weeks afterward.

The November Criminals
This novel pulls off the triple distinction of being a funny stoner novel set in DC. A small-time drug dealer in high school decides to investigate his classmate's murder, but he has a weakness for his own product, which throws a few wrenches in his clever, clever plan. The book can be a little hard to follow, but that's just because the main character is stoned all the time, so is easily distracted by interesting tangents.

Dog Boy
One of those fascinating feral-child stories, a young Russian boy is abandoned by his mother, and he falls in with a pack of stray dogs, which enables him to survive for another two years. The author follows his progress from the hairless outsider of the pack to a trusted alpha dog until his capture by a scientist who hopes to make his name based on the young boy's life. Strange, but it's a wonderful read and avoids the drippy sentimentality one sometimes gets from boy-and-his-dog stories.

The Last Surgeon
A hospital thriller, this novel takes everyone in the operating room during a nastily-botched surgery and kills them off one by one. The survivors -- a nurse, a physician, and the last remaining surgeon -- have to team up and hunt down a hired killer who has a singular talent for making a murder resemble a suicide. Taut and suspenseful, this makes for great light reading.

The Sheen on the Silk
A fascinating historical novel that takes place in the late-13th-Century Byzantine Empire, this book follows Anna, who must investigate the circumstances under which her twin brother was exiled. He's innocent, but is the center of a mysterious conspiracy; Anna dresses up as a eunuch and spends much of the book maneuvering herself closer and closer to the central figures of the story.

Wench
Another historical novel, this one is set in antebellum America, at a resort in Ohio known for its clientele of rich white slave-owners with their slave-mistresses. The novel follows three women who are regulars at the resort and the upheaval in their lives following the arrival of a fourth, who does not hold back from wondering about freedom. That the resort is in Ohio, a free state, complicates matters, as does the fact that one of the slaves is in love with her master and thinks the feeling is mutual. It's a complicated, psychological book.

The Book of Spies
Ivan the Terrible is a legendary figure in Russian -- and indeed global -- history. What few people know is that he was an avid collector of books, one of many characteristics I share with him. Unfortunately, his collection was lost, and since he owned many rare, one-of-a-kind books, those stories were lost as well. Now they've begun to emerge, and are at the center of a sort of worldwide book club composed of a cabal of incredibly wealthy men. Then the CIA finds a link to a bank account associated with terrorism and gets involved ...

That takes care of this week. We got a fantastically good crop of books this year, and I'm very pleased with the results. Next week, we'll take a look at the rest of the collection and some of the more unusual books we have here.

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Question of the Week
I saw a bunch of librarians cleaning out the VHS shelves. What's going on? Are you getting rid of all the movies?
We're clearing out the VHS shelves, but we're not getting rid of all the movies, just many of the videotapes. Part of it is because those things are old, rarely checked out, and obsolete. Most of them have degraded significantly since they arrived -- normal for VHS tapes -- and because the format is so outdated, most people end up watching them here in the Library, where there are still VCRs. Another part is just that our collection of Deaf DVDs is expanding, and they need room! That's the life of a library -- over time, some things elbow their way in and other things get pushed out. We're not getting rid of stuff, we're making room for new things. It's been an exciting summer so far!

An introduction to our e-books

Summer has arrived, hot and steamy! I remember a month ago, when the temperature just would not rise, wishing things'd heat up a little. Well, I got my wish, and in spades. It's barely June, and already I'm thinking about snow and how it maybe isn't so bad after all.

Haha! I'm kidding! Forget snow.

Let's jump right in. I finished up Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities this past week because I bought a book based on his work -- Tom Wolfe's America: Heroes, Pranksters, and Fools -- and it piqued my curiosity. Bonfire seemed pretty well-thumbed through, and it's one of those titles you're always hearing about, thinking it's something by Maugham or, yes, even Woolf, maybe mid-century or even further back.

Bonfire's actually set in Manhattan of the late 1980s or thereabouts. It follows a few interrelated threads, mostly characters whose lives brush up against a single crime. The perpetrator is a Wall Street bond trader in collusion with his bored-heiress mistress; he picks her up from the airport after one of her many Italian trips, gets lost in the Bronx, and is accosted by a pair of local youths, who happen to be black. They panic, peel out of there, and in the process accidentally hit one of the young men and put him in a coma. The entire book is about the thought processes of three specific people involved in the accident's aftermath: the bond trader wrestling with his guilt; the Bronx assistant district attorney in pursuit of fame; the tabloid reporter chasing after his next drink. Other major players come through all of their lives: the black community leader who stirs up a seething cauldron of race and oppression while covering sins of his own; the heiress from an impoverished background and her drive to fight for freedom; the racist mayor and his staff's hapless observations of all that's going on far below them.

It's a fairly epic story, although you get a little tired of how repetitive some of the characters are, especially where scenes of wealth and privilege are involved. Wolfe lays it on a little thick: two detectives come to visit the bond trader in his opulent Manhattan apartment and gape around at the place. The bond trader thinks they're impressed and a little intimidated at this display of his wealth. Their interrogation done, the two detectives go back to the Bronx and mock the excess over dripping sandwiches. It's constantly driven home to the reader: Manhattan and the Bronx are two different worlds; wealthy WASPs and the Irish/Italian/Puerto Rican/African Americans two different classes. Still, there are some funny moments; the assistant district attorney who's prosecuting the case has a crush on a young woman juror from another case, so takes her out to dinner and extols his own bravery in the face of overwhelming poverty and crime. At the end, they're about to part, and he wonders what's going through her head. Wolfe tells you: She's thinking that those Manhattan men are more trouble than they're worth; you have to listen to two or three hours of His Career before he pays for dinner.

The whole point of the book seems to be completely puncturing the egos of nearly every significant male character. The bond trader gets arrested and is no longer Master of the Universe; the assistant district attorney finds out that the muscles he's so proud of are actually mocked by the women he pursues; the tabloid reporter discovers that his success is more due to luck than any skill on his part -- of which he has none. Nearly all of the characters are despicable and pitiable in some way.

Enjoyable (possibly because of the sheer schadenfreude saturating the book), but it's hard to say that I'd read it again or recommend it to anyone else who doesn't have the patience to slog through dozens of pages of exposition, stream-of-consciousness, and the insides of people's heads.

Now that that's over with -- I hate writing reviews of books that only get as far as "enjoyable" in my mind -- let's turn to e-books. What have we got?

Something like 70,000 of them. To start with. They cover topics from ethnic relations and civilization (whatever that means -- I'll include an example of this topic below) to economics and church history. It's a dizzyingly diverse array of topics, and is a pretty strong argument for having e-books in general. Let's take a look at a quick cross-section:

Talons and teeth: County clerks and runners in the Qing Dynasty
China's one of the oldest continuous civilizations on Earth, and has been a major power in Asia for most of that time. However, this book argues that although the Chinese imperium and its high-level functionaries had great influence, they were far outweighed by people who carried things between county governments. It's like saying that bicycle couriers are more powerful than the President, for instance; this is because those clerks and runners knew full well what they were processing and carrying, and were subject to some truly outstanding corruption. However, little is known about these people; any information we have about them survives through records kept by the highest of the high officials, which suggests something important on its own.

The Singapore Puzzle
It's long been a truism among certain kinds of people that a high degree of personal liberty is essential to keeping the people happy and the state functioning properly. Singapore, however, defies this; one of the most authoritarian governments in the world, it is home to one of the most modern, most prosperous, most successful city-states on the planet. Why is this? Why are people okay with being told not to chew gum, or spit, or smoke in public? Why do corporations agree to work in such restrictive environments, in spite of the laissez-faire capitalism practiced (in comparison anyway) by most of the rest of the developed world?

Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism
I found this one kind of spooky; it's a treatise on the history that exists between Afghanistan and the United States and its outgrowth into international terrorism -- written, rather presciently, in 2000. Even before September 11 occurred, there were warning signs and clashes between the U.S. government and Afghanistan-based terror groups, including Osama bin Laden, involving the first World Trade Center bombings and an incident in Nairobi that placed its imprimatur on relations between both countries. The chapter relating to a direct assault on America covers the history of cooperation between the US and groups in Afghanistan to throw off the Soviet Union concludes with this scary paragraph:

"Perhaps future governments, whether the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, or less powerful and influential nations, will take to heart this important lesson of late twentieth-century history: When you decide to go to war against your main enemy, take a good, long look at the people behind you whom you chose as your friends, allies or mercenary fighters. Look well to see whether these allies already have unsheathed their knives -- and are pointing them at your own back."

The Swedish Table
This is a pretty far-out cookbook; sort of traditional Swedish foods and customs. The recipes are making me hungry (I'm writing this just before lunch, so forgive me for this) -- for instance, Vegetable soup with prosciutto-filled "gnocchi," actually traditional salty potato dumplings called kroppkakor. Or gravlax-and-nasturtium sandwiches with mustard-dill sauce.

Lunch must wait. More to go ...

Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science
I was kind of hoping I'd come across this one. It's controversial! Those are the best books to have in a library, even if it's purely electronic in nature. The author argues that science is, by nature, heresy because it requires objective thinking. This is okay on its own -- we humans are instinctive, feeling creatures that believe in UFOs, ghosts, and angels -- but he takes it a little bit further by noting that of all the ancient civilizations, only Greece developed geometry and number theory. This leads to a set of arguments that assert that the Western world was solely responsible for the discovery of scientific thinking, and that science itself is not an intrinsic aspect of the evolution of civilizations. It's controversial mostly because it disregards quite a few other civilizations before and after the Greeks who independently developed mathematical systems and a logical infrastructure of their own.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Ever wondered about the guy in the deerhunter hat, a pipe in his mouth, and Watson in tow? Wonder no more. I've met people who struggle to get started on reading the Holmes stories because they're never sure which one to start with. I usually say, "They're all good," but that doesn't help them out much, so I steer them toward "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and hope for the best. In this case, there's a little less to worry about; there's a pretty good selection of nine short stories that are usually thought to express the quintessential Holmes, including classics like "The Red-Headed League," "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," and "A Scandal in Bohemia."

Cosmopolitanism in the Americas -- This is the one from "Civilization"!
North and South America, as a whole, represent a study in contrasts. The United States and Canada occupy the majority of North America, and they're places where it's difficult to find a culture that's remained in isolation for very long periods of time. We've pretty well hegemonized gigantic tracts of land, and have become relatively cosmopolitan as a result. Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, on the other hand, represent even larger swaths of people who have relatively little contact with the outside world; although some of the world's largest cities are located in the region (Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires, for example), there are still plenty of pockets where the intrusion of the outside world is minimal and cultures, traditions, and norms haven't changed much. However, that's in the process of being turned on its head; what does it mean when the American style of urbanization begins to overtake the jungle? How does it affect the people?

Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power
With a title like that, you know it's got to be good, right? I know, right. The author traces the history of the notion of "intellectual property" back to the case of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin. Mr. Whitney had a lousy life; after he took his new invention public, the designs were promptly stolen by local farmers, who then built their own cotton gins. Whitney then began to sue anyone and everyone who built cotton gins similar to, but not exactly like, his design, but it was a long, painful, and expensive struggle -- partly because it was so difficult to prove which came first and partly because precursor designs had already been in use outside the United States, so it wasn't easy for him to claim the cotton gin as his own invention. However, and this is a side to the issue that the author pays attention to, this sort of piracy has gone on for a long time and is one of the biggest contributors to innovation and technological advancement. It's the whole idea of "intellectual property" that's a relatively new thing, and the author explores the ways it's used to both promote innovation and suppress it in the pursuit of profit; most tragically, in the case of HIV drugs in Africa.

Again, as with our journals, this represents only a very tiny drop in the bucket. From the intricacies of ancient Chinese government to industrial thievery in the United States, there's something in nearly every topic; it's hard to think none of these books actually take up any room on the shelf!

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Question of the Week
I checked out a book from another university, but I didn't realize they had a different due date. My book was due on May 31, a week after I got it, and now it's late. What gives with the one-week loan period?
It depends. If you're a student, you might be finishing up an Incomplete that's due on that date, and then you're no longer a currently-registered student if you haven't signed up for the summer. If you're a faculty or staff member, it may depend on when your contract expires or a host of other things.

Generally speaking we can solve the problem for you. But when we can't, it's time to go to the lending university and find out what their system thinks you're doing, and work it out as is appropriate. Just get in touch with us, and we'll get you all the contact information you need!