Showing posts with label Research Strategy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Research Strategy. Show all posts

Thursday, June 25, 2020

How to Dig Up Family History Online

J.D. Biersdorfer. "How to Dig Up Family History Online." New York Times. June 25, 2020, p. B7.

While not all government records may be free or digitized, the National Archives hosts a page of links from other genealogy sites where you can look for information.

... 
Libraries and historical/genealogical societies may also have books and periodicals that recorded the development of the area and the people who lived there, although you may have to visit in person to look at the original material has not been scanned. (Some libraries also offer free access to the commercial genealogy services.)

COMMENT 

     The article mentions online genealogy sites and the National Archives as places to start.  Libraries come in further down the list once you have done your background research online. They type of local history that genealogists seek can be hard to find. There is a period when newspapers were preserved on microfilm, and many of these have never been digitized. One-of-a-kind Special Collections materials are hidden treasure in dusty boxes.  If you get a chance to poke through them, you might find something fascinating. 

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

An Excavated Voice Never Leaves Her

Alexandra Alter, "An Excavated Voice Never Leaves Her," New York Times, March 8, 2020, p. AR18.

     Hilary Mantel has a recurring anxiety dream that takes place in a library.  She finds a book with some scrap of historical information she's been seeking, but when she tries to read it, the words disintegrate before her eyes.
     "And then when you wake up," she said,  "you've got the rhythm of a sentence in your head, but you don't know what the sentence was."

Comment 

     Here's a new twist on the extreme research story.  The nightmare involves finding the exact information  needed and then not being able to read or remember it.   It's the joy of research inverted, 

Saturday, March 7, 2020

Zara Steiner, 91, Historian Who Plumbed World War I

Neil Genzlinger, "Zara Steiner, 91, Historian Who Plumbed World War I," New York Times, March 6, 2020, p. B16.

     She went to Cornwall House in London, site of the British Foreign Office library and asked the librarian, C.H. Fine, if any archival material from staff officers existed.
     "He took me into a very dusty room and opened cabinets that had clearly not been cleaned for decades," she wrote.  "Out fell, along with bound volumes packets of papers tied up in pink ribbon, which dropped on to the floor as well as envelopes of pictures covered in dust.  "Oh dear," he said, "you had better have a look."
     "That, she added, "was how I began as a researcher."

 Comment

Hidden treasure in dusty boxes again.  Always the dust concealing the undiscovered gem.  These documents turned Dr. Steiner into an expert on what happened in England between WWI and WWII. The end of the  obituary quotes Dr. Steiner wondering how future historians will do their work in the age of Twitter and Facebook.  Without the dockets and minutes and paper trail, how will anyone ever discover what really happened.


Monday, January 13, 2020

Lessons from 4,800 Pages of History

Dana Goldstein, "Lessons from 4,800 Pages of History," New York Times, January 13, 2020, p. A2.

     About midway through my reporting process, I spent an afternoon at the New York Public Library.  There I reviewed American history textbooks from the 1950s and 1960s.  Their racism in depicting African-Americans, Chinese immigrants and Mexican-Americans  was overt, a reminder of the vastly different history educations received by today's adults-- all of whom, from Generation Z to the Greatest Generation, will be eligible to vote in November 2020.
     It was a reminder that the historical stories we tell have a profound impact on the world. 
COMMENT

    This article describes the research process for a newspaper article about differences in history textbooks used in Texas and California.  
     At the library the author consults  out-of-date textbooks, a kind of material that many librarians would weed without a second thought, particularly since they promote a kind of overt racism that would be entirely inappropriate in the contemporary classroom.  However, the books are valuable precisely because they demonstrate pedagogical history and changing attitudes.   The writer believes that knowledge of history informs voting and civic engagement,  with the implication that the racism taught in the classrooms of the past may have created a cohort of racist voters.   If we threw those outdated books away it would be hard to remember how kids learned history so many decades ago.


   

Friday, January 10, 2020

Robert Caro's Papers Find a Home

Jennifer Schuessler, “Robert Caro’s Papers Find a Home,” New York Times, January 9, 2020, p. C1. 

     The books are already monumental.  And now Mr. Caro is getting monumental treatment himself.
     The New-York Historical Society has acquired Mr. Caro’s papers  — some 200 linear feet of material that will be open to researchers in its library.  And just a as important to the 84-year-old Mr. Caro, it will create a permanent installation int its museum galleries dedicated to showing how he got the job done.
...
     The archive will be among the largest of an individual in the historical society's collection.  It includes research notes, drafts, annotated news clippings, correspondence, and other documents, from once-classified memos excavated at the L.B.J. Presidential Library to at least one artifact literally coaxed out of a secret trunk. 

COMMENT

     The article describes an archival collection acquired by a special library.  The collection originates from a research strategy that includes library research as well as other kinds of documentation.


     The article also describes Caro’s research process as “a kind of museum of a vanishing analog world.”  As a consequence of his careful gathering, his research materials can now be used by other historians.  This kind of idiosyncratic individual collecting stands in contrast to automated approval plans the mean every library buys the same things. There’s a photo of a typewriter, and the article says he has more than one just in case he needs spare parts. 

Friday, January 3, 2020

Educated




Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir, 2018.

Sometimes, when she was delivering herbs, if we’d finished our chores, Mother would  drop us at the Carnegie library in the center of town.  The basement had a room full of children’s books, which we read.  Richard even took books from upstairs, books for adults, with heavy titles about history and science.    Learning in our family was entirely self-directed: you could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done.  Some of us were more disciplined than others. I was one of the least disciplined, so by the time I was ten, the only subject I had studied systematically was Morse code because Dad insisted that I learn it.  [p.46-47]
...
     I stared at them as if they were behind glass. I’d never heard anyone e use the word “feminism” as anything but a reprimand. At BYU, “You sound like a feminist” signaled the end of the argument.  It also signaled that I had lost.
     I left the cafĂ© and went to the library.  After five minutes online and a few trips to the stacks, I was sitting in my usual place with a large pile of books written by what I now understood to be second-wave writers — Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir.  I read only a few pages of each book before slamming it shut.  I’d never seen the word “vagina” printed out, never said it aloud.
     I returned to the Internet and then to the shelves, where I exchanged the books of the second wave for those that preceded the first— Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill.  I read though the afternoon and into the evening, developing for the first time a vocabulary for the uneasiness I’d felt since childhood. [pp. 258-259].

COMMENT

   The first story from Westover’s childhood describes using the children’s collection as a kind of babysitter.  The kids were inconsistently homeschooled, and the shelf of library books didn’t compensate for a lack of educational direction.


    In the second library story Westover is enrolled in college and realizing how many things she doesn’t know about.  This time the library reveals its secrets. The books offer a vocabulary to talk about feminism that was not available in small town Idaho nor at a Mormon religious university. 

American Gods



Neil Gaiman, American Gods. Tenth Anniversary Edition. Author's preferred text. 2011.

     "Hinzelmann, have you heard of eagle stones?"
     "Up north of Rhinelander? Nope, that's Eagle River. Can't say I have."
     "How about Thunderbirds?"
     "Well, there was the Thunderbird Framing Gallery up on Fifth Street, but that closed down.  I'm not helping, am I?"
     "Tell you what, why don't you go look at the library.  Good people, although they may be kind of distracted by the library sale on this week. I showed you where the library was, didn't I?"
     Shadow nodded and said so long.  He wished he'd thought of the library himself.  [p.372]

COMMENT

      The entire library episode actually extends from p. 372-377 -- too long for me to type out.  What does Shadow do at the library?  He requests a library card,  has a discussion with a librarian about a man who stole rare library books, researches Native American traditions, talks to a neighbor and purchases weeded library books at the library book sale.  
     Two of these book sale books are probably perfectly appropriate to weed, but one of them should certainly have been kept in the collection unless it was a duplicate-- Minutes of the Lakeside City Council, 1872-1884.  If this was indeed the only copy of local history it was completely irresponsible for librarians to send it to the book sale.  However, the contents of this imaginary book turn out to be a plot point since is contains evidence about children killed by a resident demon.  In real life Gaiman is an outspoken supporter of libraries. As a writer, he had to to betray the librarians and send this particular  book to the book sale in order to give his character  more time to read it.  

Friday, December 13, 2019

How To Do Nothing

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, 2019

     I feel the same way about libraries, another place where you go with the intention of finding information. In the process of writing this book, I realized that the experience of research is exactly the opposite to the way I usually often encounter information online.  When you research a subject, you make a series of important decisions, not least what it is you want to research, and you make a commitment to spend time finding information that doesn't immediately present itself.  You seek out different sources that you understand may be biased for various reasons.  The very structure of the library, which I used in Chapter 2 as an example of a non-commercial and non"productive" space so often under threat of closure, allows for growing and close attention. Nothing could be more different from the news feed, where these aspects of information-- provenance, trustworthiness, or what the hell it's even about-- are neither internally coherent nor subject to my judgment.  Instead this information throws itself at me in no particular order, auto-playing videos and grabbing me with headlines. And behind the scenes, it's me who's being researched.  [p.175]

COMMENT

    This is a beautiful description of library research as a practice of close attention--  the opposite of the endlessly distracting information deluge online.  By "non-productive" Odell doesn't mean that library time is worthless, but that library time is not economically optimized for money-making.  The book argues that such economically unproductive time is not  just a good thing but essential for a good life.

   

Monday, November 25, 2019

The Library Book

The Library Book


Susan Orlean, The Library Book, 2018.

The story of the Los Angeles Public Library and the 1986 fire required years of research and scores of interviews with current and past library staff, deep dives into the Fire Department’s archives and the City of Los Angeles’s court records, and a lot of digging through the musty boxes of material stashed in the Library’s Rare Books Room. There I found a trove of information, including newspaper clippings about the library from the twenties; book lists from the thirties; paraphernalia from every decade; and countless, fascinating odds and ends left behind by the hundreds of librarians who passed through Central Library at some point in their careers. This material was essential to the writing of this book.  I also found a great deal of valuable material in the many books and published papers about California and library history.  [p. 315].

COMMENT

The notes on the author's research process mention those d/musty boxes again.  This time they contain ephemera of a kind that might strike some people as especially useless.   Who would consider old library book lists worth keeping? And yet here they are informing a bestseller. Interviews, government information and published books and articles are also cited as part of the research strategy.   The resulting book is the story of a community told through the lens of its public library, quite literally putting the library at the center of community and community resilience. 


Tuesday, July 16, 2019

University Contributions to the Circular Economy

Nunes, Ben, et al. "University Contributions to the Circular Economy: Professing the Hidden Curriculum." Sustainability10.8 (2018): 2719-


Scopus was used to identify 150 pieces of relevant literature. These were then reduced to 70 studies by only including (i) papers appearing in journals with an impact factor cited by the Web of Science, (ii) books receiving a high level of citation on Google Scholar, and (iii) publications relevant to the topic of study.[p.2718]

 COMMENT

   Scholarly articles nearly always have a literature review, but the library research process is almost always invisible. It's just assumed that scholars know how to use the library.  In this paper, the researchers used an expensive research database called Scopus which was almost certainly provided by an unmentioned academic library. The process of winnowing such papers is described.   The authors specifically threw out papers that are not published in peer reviewed journals or scholarly books.  This research strategy is good as far as it goes, but it has the potential to create a blind spot. University facilities are often managed by people who are not faculty and who therefore have no mandate to write publish. As a result, it is harder to find papers about faculties management than articles about university curriculum and teaching. If I were advising these researchers  I might have suggested extending the Scopus search with citation searches on the key articles as well as reviewing the article bibliographies for relevant publications. I also might have suggested seeking out reports published by universities that were not published in journals at all.

Monday, July 8, 2019

Woman of the River


Richard E. Westwood, Woman of the River: Georgie White Clark, White-Water Pioneer, Utah State University Press, 1997.

I have had the generous help and cooperation of many people in getting this book together.  Karen Underhill and the staff at Cline Library, Arizona University, got me started and helped along the way by guiding me through the Georgie Clark collection and putting me in touch with Rosalyn J. (Roz) Jirge. This book would have been incomplete without the input and help from Roz.  She not only told me of her own experiences, but collected others' diaries, did interviews, transcribed taps of my interviews and supplied me with names and address of passengers and boatmen that were invaluable in my research. 

COMMENT

It's not uncommon to find a librarian listed in the acknowledgments of a book. This one has a nice description of a research strategy as well,  that includes tracking down people for interviews.  Sometimes the answer to a research question is not in the library collection but in knowing the right person to ask. This librarian happened to know that Roz Jirge was the right person. This kind of reference help is only possible when librarians have local knowledge.  Librarian training is focused on generic strategies to find published or archived information, but researchers are often focused on information gaps-- the biography that has not yet been written, the history that has not yet been told.  A recurring library story is about finding hidden treasure in dusty stacks or archival boxes -- the material that nobody has noticed and nobody has thought to use.

Thanks to this researcher, the historical memory of Roz Jirge has been written in a book that is now available in the library collection, and anyone can read the story of a river running pioneer.  Not so long ago, I took a river trip through Westwater Canyon at high water (30,000 cfs).  The river guides lashed the rafts together in "double rigging" that they said was invented by Georgie White Clark to run the big rapids in the Grand Canyon.  I'm glad those guides knew their river history!



Thursday, June 6, 2019

Student of the Game Aced Final

Julia Jacobs, "Student of the Game Aced Final: Emma Boettche, a Librarian from Chicago, wrote a mater's paper on 'Jeopardy!' Clues, New York Times, June 4, 2019, p. C6.

     Before Emma Boettcher arrived at the "Jeopardy!" studio in California on a Tuesday in Mach she hadn't heard of James Hozhauer.
     Boettcher, a 27-year old librarian at the University of Chicago, did not know that the contestant she would soon face had already won 32 games, amasses $2.46 million and established himself as one of the game sho's greatest players of all time.  Games are prerecorded, usually five in one day; Holzhauer's first win would not air until April 4.
...
     As a book and theater lover growing up outside Philadelphia, Boettcher first tried out for "Jeopardy!" in high school.  As she continued to chase her goal, her father, Kevin Boettcher, bought her books on topics that she needed to bone up on, such as sports.
After finishing college at Princeton, she went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where she studied information science.  While there, Boettcher decided to write her master's paper on her longtime obsession with a certain game show.
     In her 70-page final paper, Boettcher explored whether certain characteristics of a "Jeopardy!" clue could predict its difficulty level.  She said she wanted to determine if a computer could predict whether a clue was easy or difficulty based on the words it was using or the length of the clue.  In essence, she was asking if there was a material difference between a $200 clue and a $1,000 clue. 
COMMENT

   OK, maybe librarians deserve a little of that vocational awe.  A Master's theses on Jeopardy! clues sounds like a candidate for an Ig Noble Prize, but it seems to have been a useful piece of scholarship. Hozhaur is a professional sports bettor who was using a sophisticated statistical strategy to successfully beat the TV trivia game. He was zeroing in on Ken Jenning's record when the librarian beat him.

     This is the first story I've encountered that contains any description of professional education for librarianship. Although the reporter seems dubious that anyone would bother to study the difficulty of questions, in fact, I have co-authored such a paper myself. [1]  Unfortunately, librarians have spent a fair amount of ink trying to prove that most reference questions aren't all that hard.  The goal is to replace trained reference librarians with cheaper part-time student help. In most such studies, shabby research methodology is based on circular logic that pre-defines certain types of questions as "easy/directional" without ever evaluating whether such questions are actually easy to answer. 

  In any case, if I wanted information help, I'd far rather ask someone like Emma Boettcher with a passion for information than an under-paid part-timer.
 
[1] LeMire, Sarah, 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): 230-238.

Monday, May 20, 2019

The Presentation on Egypt

Camille Bordas, "The Presentation on Egypt," New Yorker, May 20, 2019, 69-75.

     Punishment, at Peters Elementary, meant going to the school library during lunch break and reflecting on your behavior. Danielle had her habits at the library, a favorite spot.  At this point, she knew where everything was, so she went straight to the wildlife section and picked out a book about sharks. She wanted to know if they build houses, like she'd told her mother they did. She was pretty sure they didn't, but maybe they did something else that was impressive. 

COMMENT

      In this fictional short story Danielle is nine years old.  She is being punished because she brought a cigarette lighter to school.  The library establishes Danielle as the kind of friendless kid who prefers the library to the playground.  The story centers on withholding information and keeping secrets.  Earlier in the story, Danielle's surgeon father has persuaded the wife of a dying man to pull the plug by suggesting that even if the man is "asleep" he might be suffering. "Aren't most of your dreams horrifying?" the father asks, talking about himself, of course.


Monday, May 13, 2019

Prescribed Reading

Abigail Zuger, "Prescribed Reading: A Doctor's Guide to Books," New York Times Book Review, May 12, 2019, p. 11. 

     Experts have been tackling the worldwide resurgence of measles for decades no, and it was only a matter of time before the scattershot outbreaks of years past turned into the year's newsworthy explosions.
     Readers curious about this infection rising phoenix like for its own ashes will find both less and more in the library than they may want.  Aside from a few textbooks an pamphlets, I couldn't find a whole book devoted to measles-- not since the 10th century A. D., the is, when the Persian physician Al-Razi write "The Smallpox and Measles" to differentiate the two.
COMMENT

     The passage comes from a bibliographic essay about vaccinations. The author assumes that you would probably not need to buy your own collection of such books, so naturally you'd look for them in a library collection.

     The problem is, it's not a straightforward reference question.  Looking up the word "measles" turns up medical information that is radically out-of-date and unhelpful.  You could look online, but then you'd find medical sites, not a history of the disease or the development of vaccinations against it.  Worse, the Internet is a prime source of misleading anti-vax propaganda that is responsible for recent measles outbreaks in the first place.  If anti-vexers had started with better information research strategies, they might have made better medical decisions.

     These research pitfalls are familiar to reference librarians.  Biased websites, fake news, ads masquerading as "news," websites that are too specific with no context -- some medical libraries have set up websites to try to point people towards relatively more reliable medical information online.  But in this instance seems like the library is not much better with its one historic reference.  The author does what any good reference librarian would do and tries different vocabulary, re-focusing on the question of vaccination rather than the etiology of the disease. A spate of recent popular science books turn up, which tell a compelling tale of medical history although at least one has "some real bloopers" as far as medical science.  The author comments, "that's why some wise educator long ago created textbooks."

   




Sunday, May 12, 2019

Math, Taught Like Football

John Urschel, "Math, Taught Like Football," New York Times, May 12 2019 p. SR10.

     In elementary school, my mind wandered so much during class that I sometimes didn't respond when I was called on, and I resisted using the rote techniques we were taught to use to solve problems.  One of my teachers told my mother that I was "slow" and should repeat a grade.
     But my problem wasn't with math itself.  In fact, I spent countless hours as a child doing logic and math puzzles on my own, and as a teenager, when a topic seemed particularly interesting, I would go to the library and read more about it. 

 COMMENT

    A recurring theme in library stories describes self-directed research that enables someone to find their passion or discover an identity. This library exploration is notable for being independent of formal teaching, and in a few instances, specifically described as a reaction to active discouragement. [1]  Most teachers do try to encourage self-directed learning, by assigning research papers and such, but the structure of classroom teaching based on a core curriculum means students are always studying for a test.  

   These stories suggest that the library is essential to education not because it supports classroom learning but specifically because the knowledge to be found in library materials it is not limited by classroom learning.  One kind of coming-of-age happens when a child gets their first library card and can read whatever they want to; another coming-of-age happens when students realize that they are not limited by the authority-figure of a teacher.   In that sense, academic libraries have a neglected role in facilitating the transition from student to expert.  Colleges and universities award degrees based on a set of classes, but going to class is not actually the goal of higher education.  The goal is for students to move beyond the need for professors.  The pretense is that the transition happens by writing a dissertation or thesis.  In reality, the transition often happens at the library, even though nobody awards grades or credit for the achievement.  

  This writer went on to get a PhD in mathematics despite poor teaching.  It's not clear whether or not better math coaching would have resulted in better self-directed research, but it is clear that having access to a library compensated for the limitations of the classroom.  

[1] See Well Read, Well KnownHow to Tap Your Inner Reader; Between the World and Me

Friday, April 5, 2019

A Haven Like No Other

Sean P. Means, "A Haven Like No Other, Salt Lake Tribune, April 5, 2019, p. D1.

     Estevez--whose onscreen history with libraries goes back to The Breakfast Club in the 1980s-- was so taken with Ward's essay that he bought the film rights to it and worth a script inspired by it.  After several starts and stops, Estevez's move, The Public is opening Friday in theaters nationwide,
     Estevez saw what Ward was describing years before the essay was published. Estevez did most of the research for his 2006 drama Bobby about the days before Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, in the Los Angeles Public Library. 

COMMENT

     Technically, this whole article is about libraries and falls outside the scope for this blog which is dedicated to libraries that appear in stories that are not otherwise about libraries or librarianship.  The article is about programs for homeless patrons at the Salt Lake City Public Library. [1]  However, the embedded anecdote about library use is simply too good to leave out.   Where else besides a library is it possible for a famous Hollywood actor and homeless people to coexist in a state of social equality?

     So I'm going to count it in because it relates an organic library use. Like the story of Micky Hart at the library, [2] this library anecdote involves a person who is famous enough that he might be recognized.  Yet there he was, apparently anonymous, at the public library researching history for his next movie.  Honestly I would have imagined that the rich and famous would hire someone to do research for them so it makes me happy to know that Emilio Estevez went to the library to do his own research.

     The article also recounts how Estevez read Chip Ward's essay in the Los Angeles Times and then looked it up again on TomDispatch.com where it originally appeared.  The daily newspaper provided inspiration for the movie by providing a curated collection of articles.  Estevez went back to read the article online, but he might never have found it in the first place without the newspaper editorial page.

[1] See Stony Mesa Sagas
[2] See Drumming at the Edge of Magic

Sunday, March 3, 2019

All Over the Map




Betsy Mason and Greg Miller, All Over the Map: A Catrographic Odyssey," National Geographic, 2018.

Some of these maps come from museums, prestigious universities, and famous collections, but we've gone out of our way to also include maps from less vaunted sources. They've been buried in obscure government reports, long-forgotten scientific papers, private collections and dusty corders of libraries. Some are products of popular culture, such as one from the blockbuster television series Game of Thrones. Others are part of everyday life-- the kind you might expect to find in the seat-back pocket of an airplane or that you would tuck into your pocket before hitting the ski slopes. 

COMMENT

 The book All Over the Map is not an atlas, but rather a picture book of curious and interesting maps.   It could conceivably be subtitled "why digital maps suck." The wide variety of geographic representation is a reminder of how GIS makes all maps look essentially the same. In the chapter on ski area maps, cartographer Jim Niehues frets that hand-draw ski area maps could become a lost art if he retires.  His technique involves creative distortion of the terrain, orienting the layout around peaks that serve as landmarks for skiers. 

   Yet again library dust is mentioned.  It doesn't indicate worthless unused objects suitable only for the dust bin.  Rather the dust has gathered on hidden treasures waiting to be uncovered, maybe even in some of those obscure government reports lurking in the Stygian library basement (See: Autobiography of Red).

     When the database Hathi Trust digitized government reports they did not bother to digitize map supplements or oversized foldouts.  The maps they did digitize were single-pagers, not in full color.  Cartographic information was sacrificed to expedite the digitization process, probably because whoever made the decision didn't think maps were are all that important since maps are seldom a heavily used part of any library collection.  Despite such sloppiness, some librarians base sloppy decisions about what to weed on digital libraries like Hathi Trust.  If the title is online, they conclude that it has been accurately reproduced and it's just fine to throw out the library's physical copy, regardless of map supplements.  This makes me particularly mad because I live in Utah where public lands politics have been driven for years by a poorly executed Utah Intensive Wilderness Inventory (BLM, 1980).  Without good maps, the text of that particular land use document and the many, many subsequent plans are meaningless.  Even if the maps were digitized, it's difficult to see them online.  For optimum viewing, they need to be spread out on a big table.

 

   

Thursday, February 14, 2019

It's a Dog's World in the Lab

James Gorman. “It’s a Dog’s World in the Lab: When it Comes to Research, Scientists Favor Canines Over Cats by a Large Margin.” New York Times, December 30, 2018 p.F14 [Originally Published Feb. 26]

And now the numbers: A search of Pub Med, a database that include most biomedical journals, yielded 139,858 results for cats and 2,850,000 for dogs.  These are sample searches, of course, and don't say much about the kind of research that was undertaken. As for journalism, my searches on the news database Nexis for dogs and cats kept returning more than 3,000 hits, which my screen warned my would take a long time to retrieve.  So I settled for searches of “dog genome” and “cat genome.” The result, 20 for dogs, 6 for cats.  The dog genome was sequenced before the cat genome.      I would caution against concluding anything based on this haphazard browsing other than the results do back up the researchers’ sense that there’s more research on dogs. 
COMMENT

      Journal databases provide a quick and dirty estimate of the relative number of scientific studies.  The researcher used Pub Med for scholarly journals and Nexis for news, two databases that most librarians would be familiar with. One assumes that the author was a savvy enough searcher to realize that the letters "CAT" and "DOG" don't always mean felines and canines.

   The author does not actually say whether these databases were from a library or not.  Pub Med is a service of the National Library of Medicine, though, so it's technically a library regardless. Nexis is an expensive subscription so a library is the most likely point of access.

     When people search online databases they often miss the fact that they are a library service.  Scholars at universities sometimes claim that they never use the library because they can find all the articles they need online.  These researchers don't realize that the library has paid for their access or that convenient links to articles from Google Scholar are thanks to library software that integrates database subscriptions into the search.

A more formal version of this kind of citation analysis is frequently used in bibliometric studies to trace the development of scholarship-- say the use of the word "Sustainability" after the publication of the Brundtland Report, [1] or the rise of the word "Anthopocene" as a metaphor for human influence on the Earth. [2]
   
   [1] Schubert, András, and István Láng. "The literature aftermath of the Brundtland report ‘Our Common Future’. A scientometric study based on citations in science and social science journals." Environment, Development and Sustainability 7, no. 1 (2005): 1-8.


[2] Belli, Simone. "Mapping a Controversy of our Time: The Anthropocene." inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225-248.


Brondizio, Eduardo S., Karen O’brien, Xuemei Bai, Frank Biermann, Will Steffen, Frans Berkhout, Christophe Cudennec et al. "Re-conceptualizing the Anthropocene: A call for collaboration." Global Environmental Change 39 (2016): 318-327.

Sunday, February 10, 2019

The Overstory



Richard Powers, The Overstory, WW Norton & Company, 2018.

NEELAY MEHTA

     He works for months on a role-playing space opera slated to be his greatest giveaway yet. The graphics are sixteen-bit high-res sprites, come to life in sixty-four glorious colors.  He heads out on a hunt for surreal bestiaries to populate his planets.  Late one spring evening he winds up in the Stanford main library, poring over the covers of golden age pulp sci-fi magazines and flipping through the pages of Dr. Seuss. The pictures resemble the mad vegetation in those cheap Vishnu and Krishna comics from his childhood. [108]

DOUGLAS PAVLICEK

     He's missed the complimentary continental breakfast by four hours.  But the clerk sells him an orange, a chocolate bar, and a cup of coffee, three priceless tree treasures that get him to the public library.  There he finds a librarian to help him research. The man pulls several volumes of policy and code off the shelf, and together they search. The answer isn't good.  Thing Two, that loud bastard, was right. Planting seedlings has done nothing but green-light more colossal clear-cuts. It's dinnertime when Douggie accepts this fact beyond all doubt.  He has eaten nothing all day since his three tree gifts. But the idea of eating again-- ever-- nauseates him. [187]
    He doesn't leave Portland right away.  He heads back to the public library, to read up on guerrilla forestry.  His old librarian friend there continues to be more than helpful.  The man seems to have a little thing for Douggie, despite his aroma. Or maybe because. Some people get off on the loam.  A news story of an action near the Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness gets his attention-- an outfit training people how to blockade logging roads.  [206]

PATRICIA WESTERFORD

     Journal articles have always been hard enough.  Her years as an outcast come back to her each time she writes one, even when she's only one of a dozen coauthors. She feels even more anxiety when others are on board.  She'd sooner retire again than inflict on those beloved colleagues anything like what she once suffered. Yet even journal articles are a walk in the woods compared to writing for the public.  Scientific papers sit in archives, matters of indifference to almost everyone.  But this millstone book; She's sure to be mocked and misunderstood in the press.  And she'll never earn out what her publisher has already paid. [219]

ADAM APPICH

     He squeezed through a channel in the milling crowd, alongside the People's Library.  He can't help grazing the shelves and bins. There's Milgram's Obedience to Authority, marked up with a  million tiny marginal words. There's a collection of Tagore. Lots of Thoreau, and even more copies of You vs. Wall Street.  Free circulation, on the honor system.  Smells like democracy to him.
      Six thousand books, and out of all of them all, one small volume floats up to the surface of its heap like a fossil coughed out of a peat bog. The Golden Guide to Insects.  Bright yellow-- the only real edition that classic ever had.  In shock, Adam picks it up and opens to the title page, ready to see his own name gouged there in smudgy no.2 all-caps balloons.  But the name is someone else's, inked in Palmer Method cursive: Raymond B. [427]

DOROTHY CAZALY

     The knock gets faster and louder.  She crosses through the living room, reviewing in her head the defense of their property rights that Ray has helped her prepare.  She has spent days at the public library and the municipal building learning how to read local ordinances, legal precedent, and municipal code.  She has brought back copies to her husband for explanation, one stunted syllable at a time.  She has pored through books, compiling stats on just how criminal mowing, watering, and fertilizing are, just how much good a reforested area and a half can do. All the arguments of sanity and sense are on her side. [468]

COMMENT

      The nine main characters in this novel use libraries in various ways that turn out to be pivotal to their life stories. The Dr. Suess book used by Neelay, the computer game designer, is pretty clearly The Lorax; Two of the characters use the library for civic engagement to investigate laws and policies, leading to acts of civil disobedience in defense of trees; The small-town librarian is portrayed as helpful, and maybe even a bit  conspiratorial in support of environmental activism; At the Occupy Wall Street library, an explicit metaphor for Democracy, one character reconnects with his childhood innocence, which leads him to an act of noble self-sacrifice.

     In her evaluation of the academic library Patricia, a field biologist, describes the contrast between unreadable scientific information and the stories that people tell to actually make sense of the world understand (another character, a psychologist named Adam Appich,  makes the same point from a different perspective), and a third storyteller is not a library user but a mystic who hears the voice of the trees directly without the filter of  science or human interpretation.

     These libraries are not just incidental plot devices.   In the narrative they offer enlightenment. The the library is almost like an oracle, offering up a book or new article that shows the next step.  This book is not anti-science, but one of the themes is about information--  laws and policies can be wrongheaded and scientific prejudices can prevent people from connecting with the mysteries of the world around them.  Nonetheless, the truth is there for people who take time to do their library research.
      

Friday, February 8, 2019

An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance

Walter Terry, “An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance.” Smithsonian, Oct. 1980, p. 61-69.

     The procedure for mounting each of the historic dances in “early Years” varied.  Rehearsals went on in company studios or in the University of Utah’s old Kingsbury Hall. But coaching sessions and practice also took place wherever and whenever there was time; individuals sought out advice from from New York to Hollywood. They sat in screening rooms at the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library, the greatest dance archives in the world, or they huddled by screens at home to see movies, whole and fragmentary, of the dances they were preparing. They sprawled on studio floors while listening to reminiscences and they rehearsed and sweated on those floors as they strove to capture the past 
     On occasion, someone from he Dance Notation Bureau in New York City would come to them with the score of a dance recorded in Labanotation, a highly accurate and detailed system. (It is named after Rudolf von Laban, pioneer, along with Mary Wigman of Germany’s modern dance, and it can record the position of thumb and the flicker of an eyelid as well as vast patterns by a huge company.  After notation set the dances, “live” experts would come to place final touches because, says Chmelar, commenting on one weakness of the notation system, “the breath of life is missing.”


COMMNET

     Here's a truly amazing story of extreme library research. The Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT) re-constructed a program of early modern dance performances from the 1920s-50s from evidence left behind.  The problem is, of course, that dance happens in the moment.  The traces it leaves are in the memory of the people who did it or saw it.  Other than that, the movement has been translated into words or images.

     But what about movies?  What about the that Labanotation?  The problem is, says  Robin Chmelar who performed Isadora Duncan choreography in the show, "the breath of life is missing."

     Walter Terry, the dance critic who wrote the article, hated this project. “In theory, the multiple-source procedure used by the RDT to stage its fist program of historic dances was admirable.  But there were pitfalls," he wrote.  Terry believed that the movements of modern dance are inextricably connected to the original style of the original dances, and that the dances could only be properly transmitted by a teacher/guru who had learned the original.  Linda C. Smith, who was Executive/Artistic co-director of RDT felt differently.  If the dance had validity, she responded, then it had validity on her dancing body.    

       In library terms these two are arguing over preservation issues.  In Terry's view, the recorded traces in the archive are memory aids, but not living documents.  Smith, by contrast, views the archives as preserving a form of memory that can be re-activated in a meaningful way. 

     I actually saw this program back in the 1980s, and it made a big impression on me.  It was not merely danced, but was accompanied by a lecture on dance history.  The audience left knowing who the original artists were and why they were important.  Seeing these dancers with the "breath of life" was an entirely different experience from watching films or looking at still photos in books.  I think Terry was wrong to think that the reproductions were "tampering with history".  We recreate fictionalized history in all kind of ways with novels, movies, and plays and other art.  Why not  use what's in the  library archives to re-create an experience of seeing early modern dance?  As Linda C. Smith pointed out, she never claimed to impersonate Isadora Duncan.  Rather, she was dancing her own interpretation of dances that Duncan made, taking the inspiration of the dances into the future.