the pod bay door

:: In today’s Edmonton Journal comes a column by Scott McKeen, titled: Civilization’s safe after all. Libraries are cool again. Um, er, well…duh. Those of us in the profession have a news flash for Mr McKeen – our hallowed halls of employment were never uncool. Dude. McKeen observes that when All Things Pop Culture exploded (in the 90s, I presume), such as computers (read: Internet), home theatre, big box bookstores, instant gratification, and so on, the prediction was people would stop frequenting libraries, and by extension, their services. I’ve been a librarian for 25 years, and don’t recall any particular point in time when my colleagues and I thought the sky was falling on our vocation and the buildings in which we work(ed). Read McKeen’s column, and one might conclude that it’s a modern miracle libraries didn’t collapse from within when the Internet and Napster and stadium seat theatres and Digimon and all these fast food thrills took hold of Planet Earth. Well, public libraries at least. In academic and college libraries, we’ve spent the last 10 years doing our best to help students understand why the Internet isn’t the Answer to Everything, and why their research and studies will take them to the library and its resources. *Cough*. (BTW, am I the only person who thinks the Edmonton Journal’s web site really, really sucks? Like, badly? Unfortunately, the EJ website is the mirror image of all newspapers in Canada owned by the National Post.)

In fairness to McKeen, he does sing the praises of (public) libraries, and notes that Alberta municipalities are lobbying our provincial government for higher library grants. Um, I won’t lose sleep waiting for that to happen very soon – increased library funding in Alberta could lead to a better educated populace. God forbid that might happen here.

:: Speaking of public libraries, this is such a cool idea, I wish someone in Canada would do it, too: The Third Annual New York Times Librarian Awards for public librarians across the United States. This year the awards have gone national in the USA.
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:: The talk in libraries these days (well, one of the “talks”, anyway), is wireless – when are we going there, how can we make best use of it, how will it change what we do, and in the cases of many libraries already wireless, what has its impact been on what we do. The Wireless Librarian brings together resources for librarians and the experience of working in libraries with wireless technology.

Wireless technology has been with us since the 1890s, thanks to Marconi. In the October 1945 issue of Wireless World, Arthur C Clarke wrote a four-page article called “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?” He proposed that satellites in geosynchronous orbit, spaced 120° apart at 36,000 feet, could achieve instant global communication coverage. Scoffed at initially, his proposed “relays”, which would be part of orbiting space stations, evolved into today’s communication satellites, or comsats.
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:: Test Below, I mentioned the snow to which we woke up last Sunday. Well, that snow melted, we had a few warm days, and then yesterday it started snowing again. Oh yes, it’s May 5th. Anyway, it’s been snowing now for 24 hours. It’s getting ridiculous. Check out my backyard and the front of my house at 8:30 pm MDT tonight. The grass is green, by the way, and until two days ago, I had plans to mow my lawn for the first time.

In the meantime, to remind me of warmer climes, I uploaded a few photos using a free photo gallery program called Web Album Generator. Thanks to Dania for telling me about this one.

:: Changing gears, this 1 May 2003 editorial in the Wall Street Journal got it right regarding the WHO‘s embarrassing and baffling travel advisory to Toronto re: SARS, noting that no new cases have been reported in Toronto since April 9th, and that all 144 cases have been traced to one person who had visited Hong Kong. The WHO did lift its travel advisory, and John Fund writes that the American Library Association will make the right decision regarding holding the joint ALA/CLA conference in Toronto, where up to 25,000 people are expected to attend. Thankfully, the day after the editorial appeared, ALA did just that.

:: Did you know that the planets, satellites and spacecraft in our solar system have been assigned IP addresses by the Interplanetary Internet (IPN)? If you are interested, participate in the ongoing discussion. (Thanks, Karlin.)

¦¦ The sickening, unfortunate news from Iraq continues unabated. In addition to 170,000 artifacts in the National Museum having been looted or destroyed, the Iraq National Library was in flames as well on April 13. The building was so thoroughly torched that heat still radiated 50 paces from the front door. From the April 13 NYTimes:

By tonight, virtually nothing was left of the library and its tens of thousands of old manuscripts and books, and of archives like Iraqi newspapers tracing the country’s turbulent history from the era of Ottoman rule through to Mr. Hussein. Reading rooms and the stacks where the collections were stored were reduced to smoking vistas of blackened rubble

The US Administration has finally acknowledged the seriousness of the destruction and looting, and has pledged to recover and repair antiquities. One wonders if this will happen.

The destruction of libraries continued with the Islamic Library of Qur’ans set ablaze. Here is an account from the Arab News. I hope all librarians around the world will gather together to help Iraq rebuild its history.

¦¦ The war in Iraq has brought death to many innocents and soldiers, a shortage of supplies, food and water, and the serious need for humanitarian aid of all kinds. Unfortunately, anarchy continues to spread in the larger cities, including Basra.

There have been many photo galleries available with astonishing images of the events as they have unfolded in Iraq in the past three weeks.

Today in the Globe and Mail, I spotted this picture (© 2003, LA Times, taken by Don Bartletti of the Los Angeles Times, and winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Journalism: Feature Photography). I was saddened by what I saw: a looter damaging part of a library at the Basra Polytechnic College in order to steal bookshelves. The photo also reveals a gaping hole in the roof, damaged perhaps by mortar or debris after an explosion or bombing.

For a librarian, this is perhaps the most disturbing image of all: a thoughtless assault on what belongs to everyone: information, knowledge, data, all that is contained on the shelves and via the computers of a library. Who knows what was going through this man’s mind as he relentlessly threw the books to the floor of an already badly damaged and abandoned library. I wonder about the students, staff and faculty, there to teach, study and learn, their lives and work interrupted by war. For those fortunate enough to return to this college, it will be a long and arduous time of rebuilding and recovery.

In the past, librarians in first world countries have rallied to help librarians and libraries in less fortunate countries to salvage their collections when serious damage has happened to them, be it the result of fire, flooding, or in this case, war and anarchy. I hope that our larger library community is able to learn, in a short time, more about the extent of damage and loss faced by the library at Basra Polytechnic College, and other libraries in Iraq that may be suffering the same fate. Hopefully we can then respond with help to restore books to their shelves and dignity to their lives.

A library specializing in the history of artificial intelligence, whose collection was built over a 20 year period by one librarian in particular, together with 150 work stations and equipment worth over £500,000 was destroyed by fire in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Dec 14th. Ouch! As a fellow librarian, I empathize with how hard it must be to come to terms with such a loss.

In Florida, a manufacturer is producing a set of trading cards which feature portraits of victims of the Sept 11 attacks. He apparently has the approval of the families of each victim shown on the individual cards, which will sell for $2.50US each. Families will receive 8% royalties. The manufacturer denies he is cashing in on tragedy, but rather, is “providing a service to these families.” Do you agree? I don’t – I think it’s really difficult to justify this. I might be more amenable if all the profits went to charity after costs, but that isn’t possible when a for-profit enterprise is behind such a product.

Today in NYC, another seven new plans for the rebuilding of the WTC site were unveiled. My first reactions are not that positive, but I believe I need to study the designs further. The design from Richard Meier and Partners appears as an enormous hash mark from a distance, for example. You can see them here, and vote for your choice. Clicking on each entry opens another window with different views of the proposed sites, and each graphic within the new window moves while you are looking at it, a nice touch. (Warning: pop-up windows)