Why beavers were parachuted into the Idaho wilderness 73 years ago

 Lucy Sherriff. "Why beavers were parachuted into the Idaho wilderness 73 years ago," National Geographic,     Sept. 16, 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/why-beavers-were-parachuted-into-the-idaho-wilderness

“I’ve found it,” the voice on the other end said conspiratorially.  “You found what?” Clark asked, recognizing the voice of Michal Davidson, a collections archivist who worked in the Idaho State Archives.  “The beaver film,” she responded. It had been six years since Clark first learned of this now-infamous film which shows beavers parachuting from the sky in 1948 as part of a Fish and Game experiment to relocate them into remote wilderness.  She couldn’t wait to screen it.

…

Clark, who has worked in Fish and Game for 33 years, was determined to unearth that footage.   “It was the most fascinating story I’d ever heard.  I had to find it.”  She phoned the state archives and checked back roughly every six months to see if the film had turned up.  Finally, in 2014 she received the call.  The documentary had been mislabeled and misfiled. The old film was dry and the archivist worried it would fall apart if removed from the canister. They had to wait several more months for an expert to digitize the film before they could watch it.

COMMENT

A multi-faceted tale of superhuman librarianship-- the initial reference question led to a six year search for a missing film.  When it was finally located in the wrong place, it had decayed and was in need of digital preservation. 

 

Ruth Freitag, Librarian to the Stars, Dies at 96

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/books/ruth-freitag-dead.html"Ruth Freitag, Librarian to the Stars, Dies at 96," New York Times, May 21, 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/books/ruth-freitag-dead.html

Ruth Freitag, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress for nearly a half-century, was unknown to the general public. But she was, in more ways than one, a librarian to the stars.

...

In a way, Ms. Freitag was her own analog version of Google, providing answers to a wide array of queries from writers and researchers in astonishing depth and detail decades before computers and the internet transformed the research process.

“Ruth was known for her ability to find a needle in a haystack,” Ms. Carter said.

Her strong suit was compiling epic bibliographic guides and resources. Her notable subjects included the star of Bethlehem, the flat earth theory and women in astronomy. But her crowning achievement was her illustrated, annotated, 3,235-entry bibliography on Halley’s comet, replete with citations of books, journals, charts and pamphlets, as well as references in fiction, music, cartoons and paintings. It was indexed and bound and published by the Library of Congress in 1984, just in time for the celebrated comet’s last pass-by of Earth in 1986. Even the Halley’s Comet Society in London called Ms. Freitag for information.

“These bibliographies would take months and even years to do,” said Jennifer Harbster, head of the science reference section at the Library of Congress. “It wasn’t like you just found a title and put it in your bibliography. She would annotate it all.”

COMMENT

  Ruth Freitag's job is described as knowing more about how to find scientific information than Isaac Asimov or Carl Sagan.  She answered reference questions and complied annotated bibliographies. Sometimes she helped with things like copy editing that were probably outside of her job description. The obituary notes that authors frequently thanked her for her help in the forewords to their books (always a good place to look for library stories). 

The obituary writer implies that Freitag's skills have been rendered obsolete by Google, but Google won't annotate or evaluate anything for you.  As the Internet has become a source of disinformation, propaganda  and unsubstantiated lies, perhaps the skill of compiling epic bibliographies is due for a revival.

 

Fresh Litter

"Fresh Litter," (Talk of the Town), New Yorker, December 23, 2019, pp. 31-32.

The source material "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," is a collection of poems that T.S. Eliot wrote for his godchildren. "The poems were written in the nonsense tradition," Carolyn Vega, the curator for the Berg Collection, at the New York Public Library, explained recently.  Sara Beth Joren, publicist for the library chimed in: "And that's why when people hate on 'Cats' -- like "Oh there's no plot.' It's just like, 'Yeah, there wasn't supposed to be'. And anyway, there is a plot. There's a cat trying to get to the Heaviside Layer.  That's a plot.
     The two women were waiting for Francesca Hayward, one of the stars of the "Cats" movie.  Hayward, a principal dancer in the Royal Ballet, plays Victoria, a graceful white cat -- her first film role.  Vega was ready to give Hayward a quick Eliot lesson; she had brought out a first edition of "Old Possum" and some photographs of the poet. 

COMMENT

      An actor in need of information about her role consults a librarian.  Sure, there is plenty about T.S. Eliot on the Internet, but it could be quite a slog to discover how we got from Eliot the poet to the musical "Cats."  The librarian helps zero in on the nonsensical origins of what is, after all, a distinctly nonsensical musical.   Hayward reacts appropriately to the first edition, experiencing that spooky sense of history that is connected to physical artifacts.

Everything All at Once

Bill Nye, Everything All at Once, Rodale, 2017.

When I was a kid and I wanted to look up an odd or obscure fact or a piece of information, like Millard Fillmore’s politics party affiliation, I hit the books — the actual paper books— in a library.  Or in high school if I wanted to know the atomic number of rubidium, I looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, or if I was feeling hard-core, the Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (the ol' CRC).  Nowadays I just pull out buy laptop or buy fancy new phone and go to Google. Then 586,000 results and 0.46 seconds later, I learn that Fillmore was the last president affiliated with neither Democrats nor Republicans, lucky guy.  And 146,000 results tell me that rubidium, symbol Rb, has an atomic number of 37, which means that it contains 37 protons.  …In the old days, you had to look things up in just a few reliable sources to save time.  In today’s data-soaked world, though, you easily can do quite a bit of extra sleuthing.  Information comes at us so quickly now that the challenge is not speed and efficiency but figuring out which of those 146,000 results contain the highest-quality answers. [pp.188-189]

COMMENT

Bill Nye the Science Guy documents changes in ready reference in order to promote nerd culture that seeks evidence-based answers.  Librarians no longer need to direct patrons to encyclopedias or CRC handbooks.   That turned out to are a problem because rubrics for counting reference statistics differentiated between  “easy/directional questions,” “ready reference” and “research help.”  The decline of ready reference misled some librarians into thinking that there was no longer any need for reference services.  They failed to notice that not all “easy/directional” questions were actually simple to answer, and that sorting through six-figure results makes it especially hard to find basic background information.  Nye understands that people  need guidance to sort through the overwhelm.  His chapter on “Critical Thinking, Critical Filtering” would make a useful reading for students who are learning the research process.  I once heard Nye speak at a library conference, and he's on our side. 

Draft No. 4

John McPhee, "Checkpoints," in Draft No.4: John McPhee on the Writing Process, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 201,  pp. 129-155.

     Any error is everlasting. As Sara told the journalism students, once an error gets into print it "will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed... silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata." With drawn sword, the fact-checker stands at the near end of this bridge. It is in part, why the job exists and why, in Sara's words, a publication will believe in "turning a pack of professional skeptics loose on its own galley proofs." [136]
...
     Today's fact-checkers always start with the Internet, they tell me, and them ramify through the New York Public Library and beyond-- a pilgrimage from the errant to the trustworthy. [146]
...
    [On searching for the source of a Henry Moore quote] The Internet was no help, but Josh, searching through the catalogues of the New York Public Library, learned that collections of Moore's commentaries on sculptural art were in a midtown branch, across Fifth Avenue from the library main building.  After an hour or two there, he found an essay by Moore from a 1937 issue of the BBC's The Listener.  In the next-to-last paragraph were the words that Lynn Fracker had rattled off to me. [p.152-153]
...
     [On verifying a date of birth] When Mather died, on February 13, 1728, Seccocmbe was either twenty-one or twenty-two.  Which?  The Internet failed me. Libraries failed me. The complete works of Joseph Seccombe and Fluviatulis Piscator failed me. I called Kingston New Hampshire, where he had served as minister for more than twenty years. The person I reached there generously said she would look through town and church records and call me back, which she did, two or three days later. She was sorry. She had looked long and hard, but in Kingston evidently the exact date of Seccombe's birth was nowhere to be found. I was about to give up and insert "in his early twenties" when a crimson lightbulb lit up in my head. If Joseph Seccombe was a minister in 1737 (the year he arrived in Kingston) he had been educated somewhere, and in those days in advanced education in the Province of Massachusetts Bay there was one game in town. I called Harvard.
     By the main switchboard I was put through to someone who listened to my question and said right back, within a few seconds, "June 14, 1706."[p. 155]

COMMENT

     What wonderful reference stories these are! Note that in the extreme sport of New Yorker fact checking, the library is only the second line of defense.  McPhee gives the same advice I would give to student researchers -- try the quickest, easiest thing first. However, if that fails, the true fact-checker will be willing to go to great lengths to verify the truth of information.  

     Libraries figure in two of McPhee's fact-checking anecdotes. In the first the New York Public Library comes through with flying colors. Careful cataloging and a well-curated special collection focused on the artist Henry Moore eventually lead the dogged fact-checker to the source of the desired quote.  

     The second anecdote turns up one of those annoying failures of previous fact checkers  How on Earth did whoever edited the complete works of Joseph Seccombe (a.k.a. Fluviatulis Piscator) fail to learn his date of birth?  Though to be fair, it takes even the superhuman brainpower of McPhee more than a day to think of a strategy to find the answer.  

     In the scholarly literature of librarianship there are articles [1] that advocate replacing low-paid reference librarians with part-time staff hired from among the working poor. The primary argument for this money-saving strategy is that a category of question that used to be called "ready reference" (essentially fact-checking) has largely vanished due to the ease of Internet searching.  In theory, most of the questions that still come in are too "easy" to require expert assistance.  The problem is, there is actually no way to pre-determine whether a particular question is "easy" or "difficult."  The question about Seccombe's birth date sounds pretty easy, but in practice it was a stumper.  It turns out that regardless of various query-difficulty scales, the best proxy to measure difficulty is is, how much time it took to answer a question. [2]  Many libraries keep reference statistics, but treat "extended" questions as anything over about 15 minutes. A question that takes days or weeks to answer is not that unusual, but this type of question is barely even on the reference service radar. 

     The best librarians will take the time to follow the really difficult questions all the way through. It's good a way to keep in practice and develop a sixth-sense about how to approach questions.  The worst librarians "instruct" patrons how to do the research and then abandon them because they imagine that there is really no skill involved in tackling reference questions, or that they somehow think that skill can be acquired in a 15-minute consultation. On more than one occasion, I've observed  desk staff (librarians and non-librarians) give out information that is just plain wrong. There has to be some spark of passion for the importance of fact-checking.  If you don't have it, you should probably not present yourself as a reference librarian. 

     These days, weaponization of information has made Internet fact-checking into a minefield.  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has identified disinformation as a danger that is moving the hands of the Doomsday Clock closer to Armageddon. [3] Unwary researchers are are likely to encounter unfiltered lies in disinformation generated by corporate-financed think-tanks, Russian trolls and hyper-partisan news stations. It seems urgent for librarians to re-focus information literacy instruction so that it's less about constructing scholarly bibliographies and more about fact-checking. 

[1] Susan M. Ryan, "Reference transactions analysis: The cost-effectiveness of staffing a traditional academic reference desk." The Journal of Academic Librarianship;34, no. 5 (2008): 389-399. This frequently-cited article invalidates itself when the author admits that she couldn't find a method for coding the queries so she made one up. I, too, can get any result I want by jiggering the coding system. 
[2] Sarah LeMire, Lorelei Rutledge, and Amy Brunvand. "Taking a Fresh Look: Reviewing and Classifying Reference Statistics for Data-Driven Decision Making." Reference & User Services Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2016): 230.
[3]Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 2018 Doomsday Clock Statement. 

Illiberal Values

Kirn, Walter. Easy Chair: Illiberal Values. Harper’s vol. 337, no 2019 (Aug. 2018). p5-7.

Paula was our town librarian. She used Ms. in front of her name and held opinions— on Nixon, the Vietnam War, and civil rights— that I’d heard on the news, from protest leaders and such, but hadn’t experienced up close.  Since the library was on the first floor of the town hall, an old wooden building with a bell on top and an air of venerable officialdom, I wondered whether she was endangering herself by sharing her views while on the job. To demonstrate my own courageous spirit and win her respect, I picked out books that struck me as controversial or sophisticated from the adult shelves, then plunked myself down to read them in an armchair that was visible from her desk. Though I was just eleven, I read Slaughterhouse Five and Future Shock this way. Sometimes we ended up talking about the books. Through gentle questioning, she would elicit from me opinions I wouldn’t have dared to share with others, such as my hope that humans would die out as punishment for harming whales and dolphins. [p. 5]

COMMENT: 

     I have a bit of a crush on Paula. She’s what I would like to be as a librarian. I especially love her willingness to discuss books with her callow young admirer.  

     I can remember doing this kind of reading when I was about eleven, but I didn't always rely on the library.  Slaughterhouse Five and Future Shock were on the bookshelves of my parents or my friends’ parents, as were the utterly fascinating Joy of Sex and Our Bodies Our Selves.  I don’t recall ever trying to discuss them with an adult. Even though I had a perfectly good library card, in Jr. High I loved Kurt Vonnegut so much that I spent my own money on paperback copies of his books so I could read and re-read them. I recently re-read Slaughterhouse Five because it was on my daughter’s high school reading list, and was pleased to find that it is still as good as ever. “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”  It gives you chills, doesn't it?

Drumming at the Edge of Magic

 Mickey Hart, Jay Stevens, & Fredric Lieberman. Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey Into the Spirit of Percussion,  HarperSanFrancisco, 1990.

     For a long time I thought I would walk into a bookstore and come out with a book explaining all of this.  I finally sought guidance from several of my more learned friends who suggested I try a good research library.  Have you ever been to a major research library, like Harvard’s Widener or Berkeley’s Doe? They’re imposing stone structures, every inch of which hammers home the message that this is a very serious building.  The first time I went into the library at Berkeley I felt as if I had entered a strange kind of church that was both very busy and very quiet – a kind of hushed, scurrying place.  Everywhere you looked, serious people were praying over piles of books.

      I couldn’t wait to get my pile.  I felt the same excitement that I remembered feeling when my grandfather took me to see the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History – this was where the answers were kept.

     My guide was a brisk, no-nonsense type with a Ph.D. Astonished that I’d never been inside a big library before, she was enough of a teacher to be moved by my sudden and naïve eagerness for knowledge. Leading me over to a computer terminal, she punched in the topic – percussion—and scrolled quickly through the entries, jotting down numbers.  I was captivated by the process, particularly by the fact that inside this immense medieval stone building pulsed a heart of high technology.  In a minute we were trotting toward the stacks, zipping past aisles, checking numbers as we went.

     We made a right turn down between two of the stacks and halted in front of a squared-off section of maybe two dozen books.  The mother lode? I gazed at the titles.  Blades was there, of course, along with Curt Sachs’s History of Musical Instruments and John Chernoff’s African Rhythm and African Sensibility, but there were also a few volumes I had never seen before.  Eagerly I skimmed some of the tables of contents, my excitement fading as I went—there didn’t seem to be much here.

     Why were so many of the drum books so thin? And why, now that you mention it, were there so few? Why were there shelves full of books about the violin and walls full of books about the piano but only a dozen or so about drums, most of them monographs on obscurities like the gong in fourteenth-century Manchuria or gigantic tomes on narrow subjects like the mbira (the thumb piano in Zaire).

     I wheeled to question my guide, who nervously backed away murmuring something about there always being gaps in the scholarly record; if there weren’t gaps there’d be nothing for aspiring Ph.D.s to do.   [p. 29]

COMMENT

     This is my favorite library research story of all times.

     The drummer for the Grateful Dead walks into a library in Berkeley and... the librarian fails to recognize him. Then she gives him wrong advice.  Only in a moment of zen it turns out to be exactly the right advice.

     As things transpire, if you are Mickey Hart you have connections. Not long after this library incident, Hart's friends invited him to dinner with Joseph Campbell who literally wrote the book on The Power of Myth (1988). After chatting for a while about drums, Campbell (who like the librarian had also never heard of the Grateful Dead band, but knew the folktale)  offered the same advice  the librarian had given. He told Hart to write a book. 

   Micky Hart did what any respectable cult-band percussionist would do and hired a writer to help him write and a music professor to help with library research.  The book they wrote together is a marvel.

    It occurs to me that the reason that Hart failed to find books about shamanic drumming in the first place is because he was looking for indigenous knowledge.  The root problem is, most shamans don't write books.


 

Stony Mesa Sagas

Chip Ward. Stony Mesa Sagas. Torrey House Press. 2017.

But in his last story, the one he didn'’t complete, he learned he leaned that sometimes It's hard to distinguish the the good guys from the bad and the bad guys do get away and the truth is suppressed. He’d investigated the shooting deaths by police of homeless men. Not just homeless. There were many people who are temporarily homeless while trying desperately to land on their feet, but the people who had been killed were chronically homeless. They are the ones we point to, the ones who live on the streets, sleep in parks and alleys, spend their days reading in public libraries, and sometimes rant on sidewalks, piss in the courthouse shrubs, and scream in the subway when visited by their inner demons  They’re the ones who cry with joy in fast food lines when angels appear above the condiment bar. 

     America, Buchman realized, had kicked the mentally ill out into the streets and then punished them for expressing the symptoms of untreated illness. Often, way too often , the ranters and screamers who didn’t or couldn’t respond to the police when confronted were coldly executed.  In case after case, an order was given once and given again. If the raging didn’t stop, a cop would calmly and deliberately take aim and then fire. These incidents had a cold and calculated aspect and they were becoming almost routine, like removing pests from a garden, bullets instead of bug spray. [p. 36-37]

COMMENT

      This is fiction, so it's made up, but the premise is drawn from real life. Ward's essay about homeless people at the public library [1] is probably the only essay ever written for an audience of librarians that has been turned into a Hollywood movie [2]. In the novel Buchman, Ward's fictional alter-ego (get it?), is a journalist who has quit his job and moved to a small town in Utah after a cover-up involving the murder of homeless people. There he continues to serve as a sort of  reference librarian/detective, helping people find and use useful information.  

    I don't think that Ward knew of any actual cover-up as horrifying as this fictional one, though I'm sure he was aware of abuses. After Ward's essay came out, many libraries actually made an effort to be more helpful to homeless patrons. [3] The Salt Lake Public Library, for example, staffs a Volunteers of America desk to help connect people with food, shelter and other services. 

     Public libraries are a key institution for democracy, one of the few places where people of all ages, ethnicity and social class all share the same space. It's hard to imagine a privatized space that would find ways to mitigate the disruption of homelessness or welcome homeless people in any way.

[1] Chip Ward, "How the Public Library Became Heartbreak Hotel," TomDispatch.com, 2007 .
[2]  The Public (2018)
[3] Dowd, Ryan. The Librarian's Guide to Homelessness: An Empathy-driven Approach to Solving Problems, Preventing Conflict, and Serving Everyone. ALA Editions, 2018.
[4] [Book Review] Stony Mesa Sagas. Reviewed by Amy Brunvand in Catalyst magazine, November 2018.

The Portable Veblen

Elizabeth McKenzie, “The Portable Veblen, Penguin Press, 2016.

“Veb, did I ever tell you how I became interested in neurology?”

“Can’t say that you did,” she said stiffly. 

“Kind of painful,” Paul continued. “I was spending all my time in the library to get away from the freaks at home, and the librarian took me under her wing. Mrs. Brown. She was a stern old bag who pitied me, I think. I was all over the place. So one day she handed me the Life picture book called The Mind — up to that point I’d mostly been reading science fiction — but The Mind was even weirder.  I remember seeing this one page, ‘Isolate human.’ A Princeton student in a lightless chamber with no sound, his hands in gloves.  I think the guy went totally crazy after thirty or forty hours. [p.219]

COMMENT

This is an amusing fictional variation on the transformational book narrative, but I’m pretty sure I remember reading this actual book as a child, or at least one very much like it.[1] The joke is, the transformational book is both life-changing and self-delusional. Grownup Paul becomes a mad scientist. 
         Libraries, librarians and books occur frequently in this effervescent novel offering the characters ways to view the world and themselves (some more helpful than others). Mrs. Brown the Librarian turns up in another part of the story when young Paul is setting up a science fair experiment hoping to document the sound of screaming snails. She helps him find reference material in entirely made-up books called Invertebrates Around Us and Gastrapoda Today. When his experimental snails fail to scream young Paul, to his lasting shame, falsifies his data. Veblen, the protagonist, is named after the Norwegian-American philosopher Thorstein Veblen and she frequently channels her namesake. Her kind but self-effacing stepfather Linus, “had been an academic librarian at UC Berkeley, and a rare-book dealer.” He mentors his stepdaughter by offering her carefully selected books. As young Veblen is being sent on court-mandated visits to her insane biological father he supplies her with White Fang, Call of the Wild, and “a few other novels about ill-treated beasts.” 

[1] Wilson, John Rowan, The Mind,  Life Science Library, 1965.   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1135687.The_Mind

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

J.K. Rawlings. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Bloomsbury, 1997.

They had indeed been searching books for Flamel’s name ever since Hagrid had let it slip, because how else were they going to find out what Snape was trying to steal?  The trouble was, it was very hard to know where to begin, not knowing what Flamel might have done to get himself into a book.  He wasn’t in Great Wizards of the Twentieth Century, or Notable Magical Names of Our Time; he was missing, too, from Important Modern Magical Discoveries, and A Study of Recent Developments in Wizardry. And then, of course, there was the sheer size of the library; tens of thousands of books; thousands of shelves; hundreds of narrow rows.

Hermione took out a list of subjects and titles she had decided to search while Ron strode off down a row of books and started pulling them off at random. Harry wandered over to the Restricted Section.  He had been wondering for a while if Flamel wasn’t somewhere in there.  Unfortunately, you needed a specially signed note from one of the teachers to look in any of the restricted books and he knew he’d never get one.  These were the books containing powerful Dark Magic never taught at Hogwarts and only read by older students studying advanced Defense Against the Dark Arts. 

‘What are you looking for, boy?’

‘Nothing,’ said Harry.

Madam Pince, the librarian brandished a feather duster at him.

‘You’d better get out, then.  Go on— out!’

Harry left the library.  He, Ron and Hermione had already agreed they’d better not ask Madam Pince where they could find Flamel. They were sure she’d be able to tell them, but they couldn’t risk Snape hearing what they were up to.  [p 145-146]

COMMENT 

     Madam Pince, the librarian, is neither friendly nor helpful.  She is the kind of librarian who is protective of books.  Her possessiveness reminds me a bit of an archivist I once encountered who kept his arms literally wrapped around a box of documents I wanted to use while lecturing me on how to treat the contents with respect. Despite her scariness (she is a "thin, irritable woman who looks like an underfed vulture,"), Madam Pince is a good librarian, though. She has assembled a truly excellent collection of magical information, a comprehensive treasure-trove that always seem to have whatever obscure information Harry and his friends need to find.

     As far as I recall, Madam Pince never teaches any kind of magical information literacy session. Hogwarts students are more or less on their own, though one in a while a professor allows them to look into the Restricted Section. The research styles of the three students  \match their characters.  Hermione is methodical with confidence in the cataloging system; Ron is haphazard; Harry is sure that the information has been hidden on purpose. The three fictional students are doing something that is often turns up in non-fiction narratives. They are seeking knowledge that they believe adults around them would not approve. It's a classic transition out of the children's section into the adult stacks.
     

Earth and the Librarian

"Earth and the Librarian," in Jean Valentine, Break the Glass. Copper Canyon Press, 2010, p.25.

COMMENT

I love this poem so much.  Delicious little books of baked earth pretty much describes what I hope to give people who come to the library.