The opening session of LCOW08

Library Camp of the West 2008 (LCOW08) was Friday at the University of Denver. I helped organize it along with Laura Crossett of the Park County Library System in Wyoming, and Joe Kraus of DU. It wouldn’t have happened without both of them, and I agree with Laura that Joe deserves special thanks for just making everything happen from start to finish at DU.

Here are some impressions:

• As I noted in a comment on Library Stuff, this was a conference where I personally chatted with library school students, the director of a large suburban public library, people from small rural public libraries, library staff for whom this was their first conference, and long-time professionals. I suppose all those categories are represented at traditional conferences too, but I don’t know they get a chance to talk to each other directly as we did on Friday.
• I don’t know that everyone had as good a time as I did, but I think the fact that people keep updating the discussion session section of the wiki on a Saturday is a pretty good sign.
• Repeatedly throughout the day I heard people say things like “you are interested in such-and-such? Then you really need to talk to this guy…” or “when you are ready to do that, please give me a call and we can help you with that.”
• My friend, roommate, and fellow carping nerdboy, Josh Neff mentioned that in a traditional presenter/audience conference session, he often ends up twittering or IM chatting on his computer while keeping one ear on the presenter. With the library camp discussion format, it didn’t occur to him to do that once.
• Kieran Hixon, of the John C. Fremont Library in Florence, CO told great stories about setting up their Koha catalog. They hired a 14 year-old kid to help set up the catalog, so he could only work 9 hours a week because he had to go to school. (Now the kid apparently works for LibLime and works with Koha full time). They tested it on a laptop, then ran it on a Pentium II as a production server. When asked about the migration from their commercial system to Koha, Kieran said “It was Saturday afternoon, and we’d told the library we’d roll it out on Monday and I totally forgot about it until I got a phone call, ‘aren’t we going to do that migration today?’. Got there around 11, we ordered pizza, and had the data migrated by about 3.”
• In the session on IM reference, I mentioned David Lee King’s post about putting a Meebo chat widget on the “no results” screen in the library catalog. I got a Twitter reply from Jill at Pikes Peak Public Library today saying “PPLD added it on our pages by 2:30pm Friday :)” (The fact that they may have had a temporary setback doesn’t make that any less cool.)
• Photographic evidence of the event is collected on Flickr under the tag lcow08. This one of Joe, Laura, and me is wonderful. Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.
• On a more personal note, it was great fun to see out-of-towners Josh Neff, Laura Crossett, and Kaijsa Calkins again, and to meet my Tweeps jezmynne, brewinlibrarian, and jobill face-to-face for the first time. Of course, we all wished Iris was there.

From Microball, a CC-licensed image by Flickr user SerenityRose.

Mark Bauerlein–the man who recently published The Dumbest Generation (wouldn’t you love to be one of his students?)–has an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind: Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming. The good folks at the Chronicle moved the article from beyond the pay wall, no doubt knowing they’d get lots of links from us blog-addled skimmers. (I saw it via a link from Stephen Downes.) It’s always fun to read these anti-web articles in the Chron web edition, isn’t it?

I’m sympathetic to some of what Bauerlein has to say. I think it’s true that reading the average web page on a screen isn’t necessarily good preparation for reading longer, more complicated works. And I worry sometimes as I feel my impatience with reading longer works on- or offline that my attention span has been negatively affected by all my time online.

But there is also much foolishness and Gormanism in this article as well. Here is a plum library-specific example:

Last year when I required students in a literature survey course to obtain obituaries of famous writers without using the Internet, they stared in confusion. Checking a reference book, asking a librarian, and finding a microfiche didn’t occur to them. So many free deliveries through the screen had sapped that initiative.

Their initiative wasn’t sapped. They just couldn’t understand why an obituary that took them half an hour to retrieve from a microfilm of the New York Times was in any way more valid than the exact same obituary retrieved from the archive of the New York Times online.

I think it’s great to encourage students to talk to librarians, and I even think it’s great to encourage them to use printed journals and microfilm. The fact is there’s still a lot of stuff that’s not online. But newspaper obituaries?

At least at the (admittedly atypical) small, private, expensive liberal arts college where I work, the students seem to crave offline reading of important books. I’m not saying that many of them won’t cut corners when given a chance, and I’m not saying that their first thought when it’s time to do research is to check a reference book and hit the microforms.

But if we want to want to show them the richness of the complicated, multifaceted, multi-format environment that is the modern day academic library, I can’t think of a worse way to teach that than with newspaper obituaries.

Update: The person who took the “Microball” photo I used to illustrate this post wrote an interesting short blog post in response.

Tumblr is a pretty slick platform, but I stopped using it for my own linkblog, Bevedog, because it all felt so locked up. I still haven’t been able to export all my stuff from the Tumblr blog.

But I still check in on the blogs I’m following on Tumblr every now and then, and I enjoyed this moment of JSTOR love that I found today. One of the features of Tumblr is “reblogging” where you can easily do a “me too” and blog the same quote or photo or video that you friends have blogged, choosing to add a comment of your own or not, and you get a unique view of all the reblogs if you see it through your Tumblr feed. It’s fun to see people geek out over JSTOR on a non-academic site.

The Los Angeles Times reports that David Foster Wallace was found dead on Friday night. He hanged himself.

I picked up Infinite Jest–Wallace’s best-known and most massive work of fiction, famous for its sheer length (1,079 pages) and its obsessive use of endnotes (388 of ‘em)–in late 1996, the year of its publication. I had first read about the novel in a 1996 New York Times Magazine story on Wallace by Frank Bruni, entitled “The Grunge American Novel; David Foster Wallace is being touted as the Jay McInerney of the 90’s. Can he survive the attention?” I liked the idea of reading something that was hot and talked-about and literary at the same time. I also liked the challenge of tackling a really long book, something I don’t think I had done since the David Copperfield debacle documented in the previous post.

I finished the book in January of 1997. At that point, or perhaps in the middle of reading IJ, I found Wallace’s two nonfiction pieces for Harper’s where he went on a cruise and went to the Illinois State Fair. These were republished in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, the first as the title story, the second as “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All.” I laughed until I cried when I read them Harper’s, and pretty much repeated the expderience when I re-read them in ASFTINDA.

At that point–after reading IJ, and before ASFTINDA was published–I used the University of Delaware library, where I was employed at the time, to get my hands on all of DFW’s published essays and nonfiction. I worked in interlibrary loan at the time, so I drew upon my colleagues to get everything possible.

Once ASFTINDA was published, all these essays were collected between hard covers. Shanon and I went down to Washington DC to hear DFW read from the collection and to get my copy of Infinite Jest (first edition, second state, without the misspelling of “William Vollmann” on the back cover) signed. When the time came for me to meet the author who was now a hero of mine, I tried to make some joke about how I’d tracked down all these essays separately and how ASFTINDA made all that work moot. Wallace didn’t get that I was pulling his chain and was all “no, this is better, don’t you think? All together and without all the cuts that the Harper’s editors demanded?” I was embarrassed and hemmed and hawed. Afterward, Shanon was like “smooth move, man.”

Since then, I haven’t kept as close tabs on Wallace. I have read very little of his fiction since Infinite Jest. I missed him when he came to Colorado College a few years back. I own his second collection of nonfiction pieces, Consider the Lobster, but I have only read about half of it.

A friend of mine tried reading some of Wallace’s more recent short fiction and found it really unpleasant. I told her that I don’t usually recommend Wallace to a lot of people. Being a DFW fan can feeel like having a friend whom you know is very funny and compassionate, but who gives a first impression as being something of an impenetrable pretentious pain in the ass.

One thing I have read and re-read in more recent years is DFW’s commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005. It’s getting some play right now in the wake of Wallace’s death, mostly because it explicitly talks about suicide. But I hope it gets more attention for its real subject matter: how difficult it is to be alive and conscious and aware in the world. Here is the part right after he talks about suicide:

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.

* * *

When I heard of Wallace’s suicide, I immediately thought of James Incandenza’s suicide in Infinite Jest. I guess I’ll leave you with this, a passage that I found howlingly funny when I first read it, and damn it, it’s still funny in an awful ghoulish way today. The scene: James O. Incandenza’s two sons, Hal and Orin, discuss the details of their father’s suicide (IJ 250, which I located thanks to the Infinite Jest Online Index):

‘I didn’t even think a microwave oven would go on unless the door was closed. What with microwaves oscillating all over, inside. I thought there was like a refrigerator-light or Read-Only-tab-like device.’

‘You seem to be forgetting the technical ingenuity of the person we’re talking about.’

‘And you were totally shocked and traumatized. He was asphyxuated [sic], irradiated, and/or burnt.’

‘As we later reconstructed the scene, he’d used a wide-bit drill and small hacksaw to make a head-sized hole in the oven door, then when he’d gotten his head in he’d carefully packed the extra space around his neck with wadded-up aluminum foil.’

‘Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.’

‘Everybody’s a critic. This wasn’t an aesthetic endeavor.’

‘…’

I’m at least one memetag behind, but I just saw this and thought it would be fun to mark up the list.

Looks like this one has been making the rounds for a while, but I hadn’t really noticed it until I got tagged by The Sheck (aka Sarah Cohen).

This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked “unread” by LibraryThing users. The rules: bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• Anna Karenina
• Crime and Punishment
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion
• Life of Pi : a novel
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre (assigned in high school, never finished)
• A Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Guns, Germs, and Steel
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveler’s Wife
• The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• American Gods
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Historian : a novel
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Brave New World
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
• 1984
• Angels & Demons
• The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• To the Lighthouse
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake : a novel
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Cloud Atlas (best novel of the 21st century)
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• The Catcher in the Rye
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit
• In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield (assigned in high school, read about about a quarter of it, burned the book at the end of the school year)
• The Three Musketeers

The Library Camp of the West 2008 (or LCOW08) is now fully registered, with 150 people having signed up on the wiki. It’s going to be quite a crowd at the University of Denver on October 10, and I am very excited and not a little nervous.

I am also thrilled to be able to show you the LCOW08 logo artwork donated by Denver comic book artist and writer, John Porcellino. As I may have mentioned before, John is a hero of mine for his work on the long-running King Cat Comics and books like his new one, Thoreau at Walden. It tickles me to no end to have John’s camping cow as the logo for LCOW08.

After a summer where I hardly spoke to any students, in the last two days I have done four tours, three instruction sessions, and sat in on a class. (I also had to tell some non-student dude to quit chatting up our female students.) By the time the week is up, I’ll have done three more tour/classroom sessions, attended a workshop on setting type at the Press at Colorado College, and had a class discussion of James O’Donnell’s Avatars of the Word over breakfast.

The beginning of the school year is always an exciting time. I’m especially excited this year because I have a few more opportunities than usual to work with students and understand their work a bit better.

At my library, we make a special effort to get all the First Year Experience (FYE) classes into the library. Given our intensive block plan academic calendar, this means as a group, we are doing dozens of instruction sessions in the first two weeks of the school year, with a few more classes scattered over the next six or seven weeks.

In addition to those classes–usually one- or two-off sessions for sixty or ninety minutes–I’m going to be working with another FYE on something more like a daily basis. One of our history professors has recast her usual “Civilization in the West” course to focus on “Cultures of the Book.” In addition to reading great works by Plato, Augustine, Voltaire, Goethe, and others, they’ll be reading some secondary literature on the history and future of the book (such as the O’Donnell I already mentioned) and–even better–hand-setting type at the Press under the instruction of the College printer. My friend, Jessy, the Special Collections librarian, will also be heavily involved, as students work with materials in her library, and choose a text to print from among the manuscripts in Special Collections. You can see the class syllabus online.

I’m not sure where this is all going to go, but in my experience it is always enlightening when I get a chance to see how students actually work as readers, thinkers, speakers, researchers and writers. I’ll be very interested to hear how they think the historical changes that came with the shift from orality to written language, from scroll to codex, and from manuscript to print can help us think about what is happening now as digital communication is changing how we write and work and think.

From cavlec I learned today that October 14 will be Open Access Day, as proclaimed by SPARC, PLoS, and Students for Free Culture. Exactly what that will mean is a bit up in the air, but there will be some online video appearances, and institutions across the country will be observing the day after their own fashion. There is, of course, a press release with more details.

They have blog badges like the one you see here, promises of downloadable posters to come, and even a t-shirt drawing that I shouldn’t tell you about because I’d really like a t-shirt.

There is a blog post contest that you shouldn’t even enter because Dorothea is planning to win.

Once the smoke clears from the start of school, I plan to put something together on my campus, though I haven’t any idea what that will be.

One thing I plan to do before October 14 is to finally write up the Open Access session that a colleague and I did for CC faculty way back in April. Until that time, here’s the page of information and links we used for that talk.

By now you have probably seen Michael Porter and David Lee King’s video, “Hi-Fi Sci-Fi Library.” If not, here it is:

And here are a few blog posts about it from the men themselves: “hi-fi sci-fi library” video is here!+story and hi-fi sci-fi library: The Lyrics and Credits (Michael) and New Song & Video: Hi-fi Sci-fi Library (David).

These guys took something that they are serious about–the need for libraries to change and adapt–and made an endearingly silly video around it. When it comes to the specifics of what libraries should do to change and adapt, I’m not always on the same page as David and Michael, but I love the way they aren’t afraid to go out on a limb, and the way they invited us all to go out there with them in the making of the video.

It is fun to see all those familiar faces in the video, but it does bring up something I have been wondering lately. When we try and include images of librarians to make a project seem more human and inclusive, is it counter-productive if many of those images are of the usual suspects? Or do only the usual supects even notice that the images are of the usual suspects? We have been talking about this over on FriendFeed w/r/t Laura’s suggestion that we prominently feature the LSW dogs photo on thelsw.org and I’m still not sure what I think.

One thing is for sure, though: I crack up every single time I see Cindi’s Miss 2 wipe out at the end of the hi-fi sci-fi video.

This is the third blogversary for See Also…. Looking back over the past few months, I realize that I have failed to write about far too many projects and ideas that are important to me; I hope to rectify that soon.

I’m still excited by the possibility of this blog and blogs in general. I’m amazed at how blogging and participating in online networks has resulted in a wonderful network of friends and colleagues.

Instead of writing much more, I’ll share this Wordle cloud created from all the words in my posts from the past three years. I love that “Michael” is one of the most used words on my blog. Between Stephens, Sauers, Casey, Porter, and G-rm-n (am I missing anyone?), I suppose it is no surprise.