The Nation lamented the “collective amnesia” of the exhibit, while USA Today compared the physical space to other similar venues, and also took a look inside.

The New York Times pointed out up front that “[i]f every memoirist is the star of his own story, every president is the hero of his own library,” before going on to say that oh yeah, Bill Clinton did the same thing and Obama probably will, too.

The Washington Post didn’t produce an article per se (not that I found) but did liven the coverage up with a lovely 26-color slide show.

The Houston Chronicle stopped at publishing a total puff piece but still managed to maintain a subtext of “Good Old Boy Elected President, Loves America, Repels Muslim Hordes.”

The Huffington Post even did a piece on Bush’s public outpouring of emotion at the ceremony, but then took the opportunity to say that not everyone shared that view (“Protesters Gather Outside George W. Bush Presidential Library Ceremony.”)

Ultimately I think Jon Stewart and Tim Naftali tapped closest to the vein here with the former’s “Disasterpiece Theater” coverage and the latter’s column, “Presidential Libraries are Educational Centers, Not Shrines.”

It goes without saying that the office of President is a managed position. There are crowds of people telling him the details of what’s going on in every corner of the country and globe, and recommending courses of action to him. Bush was no different, but he may have been the most micro-managed president in American history; I’ll leave that to history to judge (and so far, Uncle Dick Cheney looks like the Acting Guy in Charge, at least regarding foreign policy in the Middle east from 2001-2008.) Additionally, the Bush family has lived for generations surrounded by a great deal of private money which generally gets what it wants. Regardless of the veto power the National Archives has over the content of the Bush Library–over the loud objections of the Bush Foundation–congress has made these very public venues more vulnerable to private money. That’s a reason to be wary of who co-funds them and why.

In any case, read Tim Naftali’s column and know that the Dear Leader syndrome of recent American Presidential politics rolls merrily on.

This is a stressful time for students and staff alike; you have your problems, we have ours, things get hurried and hassled, details are lost in translation, and so on. (You know how it is.)

That said, this is not the time to forget why you’re here. The point is to graduate with a degree. I’m assuming (as do my co-workers) that you want that degree. Why else would you be here, right? (Right?)

Anyway, this is a list of things you already know, because we’ve told you before. We tell you at the beginning and the end of each semester, and we tell you at opportune moments during the semester, too. You can’t avoid these.

Granted, that doesn’t stop you from trying to avoid them, because you do try. We’ve seen you. It’s impossible not to know these things unless you expend a fair amount of energy on doing so.

So, here they are: things you already know.

Show up for class prepared.

Ask questions.

Learn the applications.

Start projects early.

We are here to help you.

The library (and the school it resides within) is a place of work.

Don’t bash the equipment.

Books are due back in 30 days.

My point is that you know all these things.  So why do we keep having this conversation?

Lloyd and Theo disengaged, and Lloyd surged across the room. He reached out and took Michiko’s hands and pulled her to her feet, then hugged her.

“Honey,” Michiko said, “what is it?”

Lloyd gestured at the console. Michiko’s eyes went wide. “Sinjirarenai!” she exclaimed. “You got it!”

Lloyd grinned even more. “We got it!”

“Got what?” asked one of the reporters. “Nothing happened, damn it!”

“Oh, yes it did,” said Lloyd.

Theo was grinning, too. “Yes, indeed!”

“What?” demanded the same reporter.

“The Higgs!”said Lloyd.

“The what?”

“The Higgs boson!” said Lloyd, his arm around Michiko’s waist. “We got the Higgs!”

Another reporter stifled a yawn. “Big fucking deal,” he said.

In honor of the fact that the world of science has more or less identified the Higgs boson–a.k.a. The God Particle–and, judging from the relative lack of news coverage it received, that the world could not care less (except for us science nerds), I figured I’d take the chance to review Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer. Published by Tor in 1999, it’s a neat book and a fun read which had nothing whatsoever to do with the television series that was ostensibly made from it.

Well . . . it had some similarities. In the show, main character Lloyd Simcoe was the dashing young physicist with Alan Richman’s accent (if not his delivery) and a son on the autism spectrum; in the book, Simcoe is the middle-aged Canadian physicist with a Japanese girlfriend a decade junior to him, who has a daughter who dies on page 10. And there is a strange event that renders all humans on the planet unconscious whereupon they experience their lives decades in the future. But that’s where the overlap kind of ends.

Let’s start with the book.

Lloyd Simcoe is the head physicist on an international project to  identify the Higgs boson. The experiment is planned for April 21, 2009. They throw the switch, and every human on the planet falls unconscious for two minutes and seventeen seconds as they experience their lives twenty-one days in the future. They wake to find the world in chaos. Automobile collisions are everywhere (Michiko’s daughter was hit by a car and killed instantly), swimmers have drowned, aircraft have crashed on take-off or landing; people have burned to death after collapsing on their stoves or broken bones while falling down stairs. And no surveillance camera anywhere caught any of it; two minutes and seventeen seconds of snow is all they can show.

Simcoe’s ALICE project has created a temporal event, we learn. Everyone has an experience of themselves at a future point in time. This bring up a slew of paradoxical arguments, suppositions, and flat denials that there is such a thing a time travel in any form (Sawyer bring up Larry Niven’s Law of Time Travel, and mocks a James Randi-like character).

The bulk of the book is an exercise in scientific methodology, as the characters work to figure out what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. In the meantime, everyone wants to work through what they saw (or didn’t see . . . those who were dead in the future merely stayed unconscious; Simcoe’s co-worker Theo Procopides is one of these). A wiki is set up so that individuals can tell their respective stories. Every new story becomes another piece of the mosaic.

Ultimately, the cause is determined: at the very second the Large Hadron Collider was revved up to full power, the Earth was being hit by a wave of neutrinos emitted from a remnant of supernova 1987A. This remnant is not a proper neutron star, but a quark star, an incredibly weird object composed of superdense strange matter. These pulses happen in response to frequent (in human terms) starquakes. As the date of the future visions approaches, a satellite is launched to orbit Pluto so it can give a few days’ warning to Earth (neutrinos have mass so they travel slower than light; a radio message would arrive earlier.) The intent is to create another flashforward.

The final part of the book takes place twenty-one years later and  follows Simcoe’s co-worker Theo Procopides; one of the few remaining scientists at CERN, which was abandoned years earlier. The satellite has flashed a warning, and the LHC needs some repair to activate. Descending into the machinery he finds the embittered husband of a woman who died in the flashforward attempting to sabotage the gear. A chase and fight ensues, and Theo both manages to put down the attacker and prevent his own death.

It turns out that the flashforward transported everyone to the day of the second neutrino burst. People prepare for the flashforward by lying in bed or on the floor; the switch is thrown, and for nearly everyone nothing happens except for an hour of mere unconsciousness. Lloyd, however, experiences a bit of life far into the future, well after the Moon has been turned into a partial Dyson Sphere. After the event, he is offered the chance (along with Nobel laureates from around the world) to partake of a treatment that will allow a form of immortality by means of biomechanical bodies. Lloyd realizes that the flashforward was a connection between two points of quantum connection occurring within the lifetimes of the people involved. Since death severs the connection, only those who were offered the immortality treatment had visions.

This is what makes an awesome science fiction story: smart characters doing smart things, trying to solve a problem that threatens to change everything. It does not, however, make for necessarily compelling television. So, they turned it into a cop show. Simcoe became a side character, the FBI became the stars of the show, and the flashforwards became an attempt by shadowy forces to manipulate the world.

I watched the show. Every episode. It was fun and I’m glad Sawyer got the recognition (and, I’d hope, the money) that he deserved. But it wasn’t the same.

There were a few bits in the book that I just couldn’t get over. The reason that the cameras did not record anything, for example, was reportedly due to unobserved (and unobservable) wave functions. In short: every observed event is the result of a collapsed wave function. The cat in the box might be alive or dead–mathematically, it is both alive and dead–until you look in the box. Then the wave function collapses to a single state: alive or dead.

Sawyer’s premise is that if every human on the planet falls unconscious, then nothing really happens in the sense of  concrete events; what follows for that period of time is mere potentiality of events. Which might make sense mathematically (my Math Fu is not up to that particular task) but doesn’t quite work in the world we all experience. Clearly the universe existed in a concrete, measurable fashion before humans showed up to observe it, before there was such a thing as conscious thought.  I think one can make a good case for the fact of big-brained mammals (dolphins and the great apes, at least) being competent observers. I think one can make a case for the first bacteria being the first observers.

And Sawyer has a thing for immortality. It shows up in a number of his books. Sometimes the subject is parenthetical, as in Starplex and Calculating God, but once in a while it becomes the focus of the story, as in The Terminal Experiment. I admit that I’m years behind in following his books, but I’m eager to see if he ever works through that particular issue, and if so, how.

Anyway . . . we got the Higgs!

FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013
3:00 P.M.-5:00 P.M.

Columbia University Libraries
Butler Library, Room 523
535 West 114th St. New York, NY 10027

FREE

Wine & Cheese will be served.

Why
This is an opportunity for librarians, archivists, and information professionals from the Metropolitan area to meet informally. It is also a chance for library school students to learn about the various professional organizations in the metropolitan area and to meet future colleagues and employers.

You are welcome to bring announcements of professional opportunities to the reception. Reception co-sponsors welcome. If your professional organization would like to co-sponsor the reception, please contact us to make arrangements.

Due to a limited space the RSVP is required and we will not be able to accept walk-in registration for this event.

Please RSVP to Jonathan Frater, NYTSL Secretary, at jfrater@metropolitan.edu by April 9, 2013.

At some point however, I checked the boxes above and below it as well. The former exported the junk tags; harmless for most purposes, useful for a few. I didn’t think they were really necessary for either project, but figured better too much information than too little and I checked it.

At some point, I checked a box that was marked “Export Symphony catalog key to MARC tag 001″. Now, if you use Workflows and have checked that box yourself while exporting records, you can probably see where this is going. For everyone else, here’s the situation.

We uploaded the exported files to OCLC. They processed the data as we’d arranged in our paperwork and posted the files to their web page. You click the link, download the file, and read it back to your ILS.

Except our files didn’t reload.

I decided that I needed to take a look at the records themselves and wanted to do so within OCLC Connexion Client. I’d been trained to use Client as a primary cataloging tool by my former boss at NYAM and had trained the cataloging staff here how to use it as well. It felt familiar. In there, I felt that I could troubleshoot matters more effectively than I might otherwise.  But I didn’t want to import a ginormous file into it.

So I explained the situation to the staff at OCLC’s batchload desk and they were happy to break the files up into smaller chunks, each one with a maximum size of 9,000 files (Connexion Client has a maximum of 9,999 records per file and I wanted a buffer.)

I downloaded the new files. I saw everything that we’d sent, and everything that OCLC had done. The OCLC control numbers were indeed in their 035 fields. Our local control number tags were in their own 035 fields.  What I didn’t see anywhere were the Sirsi control tags in 035 fields.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know how important that was at the time. I have since learned that in a properly created export file, Workflows adds its own control number to a new 035 field in each record specifically so that you can match on that number when you re-import the records.

What I did know was that the records refused to load. I tried using the 020 to match on the ISBN number . . . that worked, but it also created a load of duplicated records that did no one any good at all and which were later deleted.

I tried matching on the vendor 001. No go.

I tried matching on the OCLC 035. No joy.

I tried matching on the (non-existent) Sirsi 035 a few times. Nada.

I tried matching on the 245 but that created a similar problem to the attempt to match on the 020: titles matched but duplicated records rather than replacing and updating them. So that didn’t work.

In between all these attempts to use the data I’d exported, OCLC was insisting that I was doing something wrong and Sirsi was telling me that OCLC had wrecked our data.

Finally, I arranged a phone conference with Sirsi’s senior analyst and had him log in remotely to my PC to see what he could see. The punchline was this: you remember that check box that exported the catalog key to the 001? That should not have been checked. Catalog keys cannot be used as matching points on a Bibload report in Workflows.

In other words, I had 129,000 records of garbage.

Yeah.

Sometimes the best thing to hear is that you’ve screwed up. It frees you to trash what you’ve done and start again from the beginning. So I did.

This time, I made sure that the catalog keys were not exported to the 001. I made sure the export files were no more than 9,000 records long. I made sure that each file was checked in Connexion Client before I uploaded it to OCLC’s server. I made sure the file names had the correct syntax.

On top of this, OCLC very graciously re-processed our data for free, owing to the fact that the project was still current and that the result had been a case of garbage-in-garbage-out.

This time when the files came back, they uploaded perfectly and updated our original records without problems. That done, I re-exported another set of records for Serials Solutions and their metadata people will work on that shortly.

So. The takeaway:

1. I don’t care what The Cult of Done Manifesto says, pretending you know what you’re doing is not almost as good as knowing. There is no substitute for hands-on experience. Do as much research as you want, but getting your arm stuck in the machinery and pulling a bloody stump out is an effective lesson all its own.

2. Cataloging and Systems Librarianship are like hiking and swimming: both are useful skills, but hardly interchangeable.  Catalogers don’t do systems work and the systems folks can’t catalog. Luckily there enough of us accidental systems librarians out there that we can get the requisite work completed, if not always as quickly as we’d planned for.

3. Experts are experts in their systems, not each others. Which means that . . .

4. Experts will blame each others systems for what goes wrong.

5. Ask for a favor. You might be surprised, as I was when OCLC told me they would re-run the project at no additional cost. And finally . . .

6. Fixing it makes everything that came before before seem better.

These are things to remember for future projects.

For those of you who are not Tech Service Librarians:  Batchload Reclamation is the name that the system folks at OCLC give to a project whereby a member library exports their MARC records to their servers. Then OCLC matches the information in those records to the holdings in their databases, strips out the weird shit, dupes, and incomplete material, then sends it back to the library in question. The new records get uploaded into that library’s ILS and the result is a cleaner catalog that can be more effectively searched in WorldCat.

Our catalog, not to put too fine a point on it, was a mess. Fragmentary records, old records, thousands of records that had never been synced with OCLC’s holdings. Our big weeding project from last year helped identity a number of the inconsistencies between our shelves and the online catalog, but OCLC had no records that matched the fixes we implemented. So in the same way that looking at distant stars through a telescope means looking at the light they radiated millions of years ago, any libraries looking into our holdings via WorldCat or FirstSearch would have seen a catalog that was years out of date.

Additionally, we are in the process of implementing Summon, Serials Solutions’ discovery platform, which showed real promise for expanding the currency of our holdings and being able to demonstrate the value of such things to our students and faculty. Demonstrating these things to our administration will take more work (they think we can do the same thing with Moodle. They are wrong. But, baby steps.)

Anyway, Summon also requires current and accurate holdings and catalog records, so we needed to clean up the catalog. Besides that, we wanted to take advantage of the fact that OCLC will do a one-time batch load reclamation project for any library that is a member and has not done such a project since 2005. It’s a win-win project. Or so it sounded when I described the process to my co-workers.

Getting there in practice was another story entirely.

The problem:  Summon uses local control numbers as primary access points for scanning MARC records. Specifically, they use the 001 field as a repository for their own tracking data. The problem for us was that our ILS used those same 001 fields as the primary tracking field for our own use.

The Proposed Solution: Move the contents of our 001 fields over to something more easily accessible–namely, the 035 field–and allow Serials Solutions to populate the 001 fields of our uploaded records with their own data. We retain the ability to track our records on the way and and Serials Solutions can track everything with their data once the scan is complete.  Win-win, right? Of course, right.

The first hint of something having gone wrong was that my first export to the Summon server went . . . strangely. First, there was the size of the file: 67MB.I use Filezilla as an FTP client on my PC, but the network in my library isn’t as robust as I’d like. Data transfers stutter along, and something frequently gets caught hanging for long enough that the receiving server decides that the connection has been lost and restarts the the transfer from the beginning. With a giant file, this is problematic. Not a huge problem in terms of lost sanity, but stressful nonetheless.

Ultimately, however, the transfer got done. Summon’s implementation team’s news: we see your records. But . . . there’s no item location or object type information in them. What happened?

What happened is that I had never set up a proper export in Symphony Workflows before and didn’t know exactly what I was doing. Resolving to do better, I called SirsiSynix’s tech support crowd and got one of their reps to walk me through the procedures. I took notes and everything.

So when I had to export the files for OCLC’s project, I thought I knew what I was doing. And I did. Sort of.

In Part 2 of this story–which I’ll post on Monday–I’ll let you know what happened.

Well, we know how well that went.

Fast forward a few decades, replace Vietnam with Iraq and Ho Chi Minh with Saddam Hussein, and you get an idea of where this leads: Operation Iraqi Freedom. The particulars are different, the grand plan is not.

Welcome to the wacky world of Iraqi independence from something. But not from American influence and aid, as Peter van Buren describes in his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. Place: Iraq. Population: the U.S. army, a bunch of Marines, the U.S. Navy, which flies combat air patrols from off the coast, a few diplomats, a huge number of private contractors, no small number of mercenaries, and Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren.

The State Department was tasked in 2003 to gaining the trust and co-operation of the Iraqis in managing the American presence in their country. In some cases this meant buying loyalty from local troops. Sometimes it meant paying informants for intelligence on local troublemakers. More than once it meant teaching the Iraqis to create local businesses, complete with written plans, venture capital, income and expenses, and financial reporting. (You’ll notice it generally had to do with spending money.)

The reality was usually  different.

Peter van Buren was intimately familiar with these situations. A career diplomat, he volunteered to serve as a Foreign Service Officer (FSO) in Iraq from 2009 to 2010. Most importantly, as soon as this book was published, the State Department lost no time in revoking his security clearance and then filed paperwork in order to dismiss him. A case might be made for his situation based on his publishing without a government mandate, but not a good one. The government received a draft for their examination as the rules dictate. There is nothing in this book that suggests vital intelligence was leaked. There’s nothing in here that suggests anything but the pervasive incompetence that comes from following the theory even when it’s been disproved by reality.

But the book is embarrassing, or it should be. It begins with the story of My Arabic Library, a collection of American titles translated into Arabic for the U.S. government, with the stated purpose of teaching literacy to the natives. The possibility that Iraqis might not care to read Huckleberry Finn or Moby Dick never occurred to the planners who developed the project (at a cost of $88,000.) The books arrived and end up in a rubbish heap in back of an Iraqi elementary school.

There’s the story of how they went into the desert to evaluate a  sewage plant (among many throughout Iraq) for repair: under Saddam, all water and sewage services were free. The new paradigm meant (among other things) adding machinery to measure flow rates in order to sell services to locals. Repairing the plant involved huge government outlays to be divvied up between contractors in multiple countries, none of which were Iraqi. The plant is never repaired. The cost: $4.6 billion dollars.

There’s the story of sex on Forward Operating Bases: the official rules say don’t do it. Unofficially, there’s plenty of action going on. Some couples head to latrines for a bit of privacy, others beg their room mates to take an extra long coffee break. Propositions fly across offices in e-mails, and some get forwarded all over the Internet. Like seeks like, and the lonely seek each other. What happens in Iraq stays in Iraq.

There are extensive chapters on entering and exiting the country through military way stations: warehouses full of men and women beset by paperwork, gear checks, body armor snafus, and a lot of waiting for something to happen.

There’s the story about seeking coherent trash collection led to van Buren’s meeting Yasmine, an honest municipal service director who concedes that the corruption and lack of skilled technocrats would stymie any attempt to fix existing problems. Everyone agrees that trash pickup is a real need: the army fears that piles of garbage will make hiding spots for home made bombs, the civilians fear the vermin the piles attract, locals hired to actually do the work seem better at making the money disappear than the garbage.

The result is the same, time and time again: the Americans define a problem, the government fronts a huge amount of cash to fix it, the money disappears, the problem never gets fixed. Never has so much been spent to enrich so few with so little result.

And yet . . . we meant well. If those three words don’t make you want to cry, the rest of the book will.

Van Buren is now a regular contributor to Tomdispatch.com. You could do worse than to follow his posts there.

I think he’s an idiot.

The Huffington Post picked on this tidbit from Deary’s interview with the Guardian:

“I’m not attacking libraries, I’m attacking the concept behind libraries, which is no longer relevant,” Deary told the Guardian, pointing out that the original Public Libraries Act, which gave rise to the first free public libraries in the UK, was passed in 1850. “Because it’s been 150 years, we’ve got this idea that we’ve got an entitlement to read books for free, at the expense of authors, publishers and council tax payers. This is not the Victorian age, when we wanted to allow the impoverished access to literature. We pay for compulsory schooling to do that,” said Deary…

Bullshit. Of course he’s attacking libraries. All those people reading his books for free. (Bastards!)

I wonder if it’s worth noting that public libraries in the U.S. had very little to do with the Victorian example, and everything to do with a Scottish gentleman named Carnegie who thought that public libraries were essential to self-improvement, and led to success in life. (Nah!) For that matter, I seem to remember the Victorian age had a lot more to do with subjugating two thirds of the planet in the name of the crown than educating the masses, but hey, what do I know?

HuffPo followed up by noting that Deary is actually paid by the British government when his book is borrowed. When this was pointed out to him, Deary became incensed:

As one of the most popular library authors – his books were borrowed more than 500,000 times during 2011/12 – Deary will have received the maximum amount possible for a writer from the Public Lending Right scheme, which gives authors 6.2p every time one of their books is borrowed, up to a cap of £6,600. “If I sold the book I’d get 30p per book. I get six grand, and I should be getting £180,000. But never mind my selfish author perception – what about the bookshops? The libraries are doing nothing for the book industry. They give nothing back, whereas bookshops are selling the book, and the author and the publisher get paid, which is as it should be.

Earth to Deavy: you did sell those books. To libraries. How the hell do you think those libraries acquired them in the first place? it’s not like publishers hand us books for free. (Donations, I agree, are another matter.)

On top of that, after those books were sold they continued to earn royalties through this amazing program. The British government is paying him every time someone read that book. This creep is sitting on the ultimate sweet spot for any author and he’s still complaining? Putz.

He goes on to declare that libraries are forcing book stores to close, and if there were such things as “car libraries” the automotive industry would collapse as well. Which is stupid because the average rental fleet owns 1.86 million vehicles. For all the problems with the auto industry, people renting cars is not one of them. If he want to decry the loss of book stores, he should try denouncing video games. Those are direct competitors to reading.

Libraries are a primary force for book sales. That is a fact.

You’ll notice he didn’t bother to wonder how many of the folks who discovered his work at the library went out and bought the books for their kids. Nor did he care that those volumes loaned out by libraries already counted as part of his total sales.

An author–even a best-selling children’s author–need not be a saint (Roald Dahl certainly wasn’t.) But it takes a particular mindset to see the act of reading as a zero sum game.

I mean, how big an asshole do you have to be for Neil Gaiman to call you “selfish & stupid . . . mostly selfish”?

Stupid git.

You read the header right: Amazon has access to roughly twice as many new texts from the nineteenth century as it does from the twentieth. This is thanks to copyright laws that frankly haven’t kept pace with the promise of the printing press, much less electronic publishing.

The real grunt work in preparing the data came from University of Illinois law professor Paul Heald, who described his effort this way:

We broke these out by decade. … You would expect that if you can crawl through Amazon looking at only new books and only books sold by Amazon — so these are not used books, these are not sold by Amazon associates, this is what’s in Amazon’s warehouses — of course, the biggest number of books is from the decade 2000-2010. That’s what you’d expect; they’re more recent, more popular. Drops off really quickly for books in the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, ’60, 1950, 1940, 1930 — here’s the point in time where books start falling in the public domain. Suddenly it goes up and up and up. There’s as many books [that] Amazon is selling brand new right now from the 1900s to 1910 as from the 2000s to 2010. You go all the way back to 1850 — there’s twice as many books from the 1850s being sold on Amazon right now as the 1950s. So this sort of confirms the notion that there’s some sort of positive public-domain effect …

Read the whole article here.

Had I been a truly devoted blogger, you say, I’d have done my Book A Week post last night while I had time for  it. Which is one reason I don’t call myself a blogger. I’m a librarian who writes and has a blog. There is a difference. I think.

What I’m trying to say is: SNOWPOCALYPSE!

If you need me, I’ll be stripping the shelves of Trader Joe’s of everything I can carry and beating down people who get in my way. The old, the sick, the infirm, the toddlers, I don’t care. When CNN tells me to panic, I listen. I figure it’d be rude not to.

Back on Tuesday.