Paper and Webpage for LI835

My paper on Information Transfer: A Model for Liaison Services, which includes a link to a website I constructed for it intended as a pathfinder for university students studying Native American art, can be found here .

Last Class Weekend in Portland

John accompanied me to my last class weekend in Portland. It was cold, rainy, and windy. My presentation went well and I'm glad for that. It was practicing it over and over again which made the difference, I think.

I went to the Farmer's Market, the last one I'll be able to go to until they reopen again in the spring. There were not nearly as many booths as there are in mid-summer and most of the lush produce and flowers are gone. One booth was selling mushrooms, one had a display with jars of honey, and another had a selection of homemade breads. All of the vendors were bundled up against the wind and rain in heavy coats, hats, and scarves. I did find one booth selling jams and chutneys and bought a small jar of strawberry/rhubarb jam for John. As I left the market, I noticed one booth with a basket of traditional winter vegetables-- beets and turnips--but there weren't many buyers.

As I headed back towards the classroom building, I heard roaring sounds coming for a nearby street and went to see what was going on. The street had been blocked to cars and it was now filled with motorcyclists wearing Santa hats over their helmets. Many had large stuffed animals strapped to the back of their cycles as passengers, some had sidecars filled with toys, and one was pulling a little cart piled high with gifts. They roared their engines and a few did wheelies and people watched and smiled and waved at them and they waved back with huge grins. This was the annual Portland Toys for Tots Motorcycle Parade. What a wonderful way to begin the Christmas holidays!

L-Net Training

I've been waiting for more than a year to do the training for L-Net . L-Net is a virtual reference service their webpage describes as "an online reference service provided by Oregon's libraries. You may chat live with a librarian or e-mail us your question." I finally was able to do the first part of it yesterday at the Portland Community College Sylvania Library. The second session will be next week.

Emily Papagni, the Multnomah County Library outreach librarian, provided us with the training. That's her in the photo.




This photo is of the lab in the library taken before everyone arrived.

How We Communicate

Early this morning, on the pathway leading to the OSU Library, I came across a message written in yellow chalk on the sidewalk. I had been thinking about all the exciting web2.0 tools I'd found yesterday and now, staring at me, was the simplest of messages, told in a simple way, to anyone who walked past.

The audience clearly was intended to be students and instructors and all those who walked down this path. The message wasn't meant to be permanent, only to last a day or so. It would wash off with the first rain or would be scuffed out of existence in a few days. It was short and to the point. There were no bells or whistles or flashing lights or bright colors.

Maybe, just maybe, sometimes simple is better.

It Really IS Like Christmas Every Day!

I've been opening and playing with all kinds of toys lately and adding them to my blogs. I added a widget which allows updated posts from the Global Museum , one that allows one to sign up for email subscriptions to the blog , Meebo for IM , LibraryThing , del.icio.us , Flickr, and a search worldcat function, all to this blog.

I added twitter to another of my blogs, All the Rest of My Life .

A Vision of Students Today

Thank you, April, for sharing this!

Happy Halloween!

Have a wonderful and safe Halloween!

EDI Leadership Conference

Last week I went to Kansas to attend the EDI Leadership Conference . I learned a great deal, met new friends, and met friends of old friends. I still feel as if there's a wonderful and exhilarating tornado inside of me full of emotions, memories, and ideas. I haven't sorted it all out yet. Photos can be found here , here , and here .

Northwest Central

I have updated my profile at Northwest Central.

Motivation and Diversity: Factors that Influence the Choice of LIS as a Career

This presentation is from the University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Podcast Archive which can be found here.

Lisa Hussey (British Columbia, Library, Archival and Information Studies) discusses her dissertation, which focused on building an understanding of the motivations of ethnic minorities to choose library and information science (LIS) as a career. Diversity in LIS and diversity initiatives in LIS programs have been important topics in the profession and in the literature. Increasing the presence of librarians of color may help to improve diversity within LIS. However, recruiting ethnic minorities into LIS has proven to be difficult. The central questions explored can be divided into two parts: (1) Why do ethnic minorities choose librarianship as a profession? (2) What would motivate members of minority groups to join a profession in which they cannot see themselves?

There is a presentation as well as a podcast .

LibraryThing

I joined LibraryThing in September, but didn't really begin doing anything with it until last weekend. I've added and tagged over 200 books. I can see that this will be a very useful tool. See my profile here .

O Canada

A music video of Nipissing First Nation in Ontario, Canada with original music by Keith Mcleod.

2007 Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums Conference

The 2007 Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums Conference is being held in Oklahoma City on October 23-25 and even though I'll be in Emporia, Kansas the week before attending the EDI Leadership Institute Conference and Oklahoma City is less than 250 miles away, and I'm on the program committee for the 2009 Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums Conference which will be held in Portland, I won't be able to go.

It's another example of "so close and yet so far."


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First Nations DVD: Making a Difference

The Ontario First Nations Public Libraries has developed an eight minute DVD entitled "Making a Difference", to promote and increase awareness about libraries in First Nations’ communities. A short clip from that video can be found on their website, Ontario First Nation Public Libraries .

The Photo Detective

An article in today's Wall Street Journal entitled The Photo Detective , describes the work of Maureen Taylor, formerly the Library Director at the New England Historic Genealogical Society. It begins:

Maureen Taylor has dated a photograph to 1913 by studying the size and shape of a Lion touring car's headlamps. Armed with her collection of 19th-century fashion magazines, she can pinpoint the brief period when Victorian women wore their bangs in tight curls rather than swept back. Using a technique borrowed from the CIA, she identified a photo of Jesse James by examining the shape of his right ear.


and ends

Ms. Taylor gives about 20 lectures a year, has a column in Family Tree Magazine and writes books, including "Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs" (2005). Her latest quest may well be her most ambitious. Using census records, Ms. Taylor and a colleague, David Lambert, are tracking down photos of Revolutionary War veterans who lived to see the photography era in the late 1830s. So far, the researchers have found 100 images. They've also found photos of Revolutionary War families, including widows, by searching public and private collections for 1840s-era photographs of elderly people.
"We're looking for pictures people don't know they have," says Ms. Taylor, who's working on a book about the topic. "The majority of photographs from that period are still unidentified. They're lost."

A fascinating read!

Banned Books Read-Out

This report from the Banned Books Read-Out, held September 29 in Chicago, features ALA President Loriene Roy and Judith Krug from ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom speaking on the importance of choosing your own reading material, and authors Carolyn Mackler and Chris Crutcher on how librarians "save our lives daily."

Spring Semester 2008 Classes

I've registered to take ten credits next Spring. My classes are:

LI809 Introduction to Archives
LI810 Research and Inquiry in Library and Information Science
LI833 Information Transfer Among Special Populations
LI866 Introduction to Copyright
LI899 Thesis

Course descriptions can be found here .

Banned Book Week

The 26th anniversary of Banned Book Week began a couple of days ago and continues through Saturday. See the ALA site for further details. And here is an extensive list of banned or challenged books .


You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
~ Ray Bradbury

Saving Ancient Manuscripts

A brief article in the October, 2007 issue of The National Geographic Magazine caught my eye this morning.


Filed under Archaeology, the article describes how, in the 1500s, a scholar and scribe around Timbuktu by the name of Mohammed El Mawlud bought and created handwritten Arabic texts on topics ranging from theology to astronomy. When a foreign army sacked the library, destroying some of the texts and taking others, families began hiding them in caves and behind walls. More than 300,000 books survived and most are still in the hands of the families that protected them. Grants are now being used to help repair, protect, and scan these books, some of which date from the 12th century.

Read more here , a story in the Guardian Unlimited entitled In Fabled City at the End of the Earth, a Treasury of Ancient Manuscripts: In Timbuktu the Race is on to Preserve Papers that Document a West African Golden Age

And here is a link to Libraries of Timbuktu for the Preservation and Promotion of African Literary Heritage

An Old Suitcase's Journey Home

This story in today's Washington Post An Old Suitcase's Journey Home.The Bag Had Been Left Behind In a Building Under Renovation, With No Clear Owner. But It Fell Into Determined Hands tells the story of the tenacity of the members of a building demolition team, described by the author as "Guys whose job is to clobber, destroy and trash", to preserve, track down the owner, and return an old battered suitcase containing some photograph albums, a yearbook, and letters dating to the 1920's.

The owner, Washington D.C. attorney Brian Shaughnessy, stated the items inside "don't mean anything to anybody else, but they mean a lot to me."

Saving Vanishing Languages from Extinction

The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages recently reported that, while there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks.

Five hot spots where languages are most endangered were listed in a recent briefing by the Living Tongues Institute and the National Geographic Society. These hot spots are northern Australia, eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and the U.S. Southwest, South America - Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia - as well as the area including British Columbia and the states of Washington and Oregon.

"When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday," said K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

As many as half of the current languages have never been written down, he estimated. That means that, if the last speaker of many of these vanished tomorrow, the language would be lost because there is no dictionary, no literature, no text of any kind.

Anderson said languages become endangered when a community decides that its language is an impediment. The children may be first to do this, realizing that other more widely spoken languages are more useful.

The key to getting a language revitalized, he said, is getting a new generation of speakers. He said the institute works with local communities and tries to help by developing teaching materials and by recording the endangered language.

Harrison said the 83 most widely spoken languages account for about 80 percent of the world's population while the 3,500 smallest languages account for just 0.2 percent of the world's people.

But there is hope coming from new technology to at save some oral knowledge.

Fragile field recordings of American Indian speech and song gathered in the early 1900s may be saved for future generations through breakthrough technology supported by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

"This agreement underscores the federal commitment to making critical and irreplaceable collections held by the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology - and thousands of museums, libraries, and archives around the country - available to the widest possible audience while preserving and protecting the original objects and respecting the sensitive nature of the recordings," said Rep. Barbara Lee.

"The 2,700 wax cylinder recordings held by the Hearst museum are jewels in a treasure trove of early recordings that we hope will be rescued. Saving the delicate recordings, which literally may keep alive some of these Native American languages, fits squarely within the goals of IMLS's conservation initiative -- Connecting to Collections: A Call to Action", IMLS Director Anne-Imelda Radice said. Nationwide, there are approximately 20,000 Native American fieldwork recordings on fragile wax cylinders, the earliest method of recording and reproducing sound.

Other rare recordings that could benefit from the technology include:

** Field recordings of linguistic, cultural, and anthropological materials, such as early 20th century Mexican-American folk recordings from Southern California and Hawaiian folk music recordings.

** Field recordings of American and European folk music, including those recorded and collected by John Lomax.

** Speeches of historical figures such as Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and P.T. Barnum.

The new 3D system builds on a 2D system also developed by the Berkeley Lab called IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), which gathers digital sound from grooved discs (flat recordings such as traditional 78rpm shellac disc records) by illuminating the record surface with a narrow beam of light. The flat bottoms of the groove -- and the spaces between tracks -- appear white, while the sloped sides of the groove, scratches, and dirt appear black. The computer turns this information
into a digital sound file and corrects areas where scratches, breaks or wear have made the groove wider or narrower than normal. IRENE then "plays" the file with a virtual needle without damaging or destroying the original media. The technology was adapted from methods used to build radiation detectors for high-energy physics experiments.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute's mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development.

Fun at the National Archives!

I recently came across this online exhibit. Entitled When Nixon Met Elvis , it shows through letters, photographs, and memos, how and why the two met in the Oval Office on December 21, 1970. This photo is from that exhibit.

PCs and Libraries

The headline for this article, Despite Demand, Libraries Won't Add PCs, is a bit misleading as the problem seems not to be that they won't add more PCs, but that they can't because they don't have room, the wiring is inadequate, or they just don't have enough money.

A new study from the American Library Association, scheduled for release Wednesday, finds the average number of public Internet terminals largely unchanged since 2002, yet only 1 in 5 libraries say they have enough computers to meet demand at all times.

I see this in both academic and in public libraries. The computers are always in use and, where it's allowed, people signed up waiting to use them. Often there are time limits for use.

Meanwhile, three-quarters of the libraries say they are the only source of free Internet access in their communities, increasing pressure on them to meet demand.

And the problem isn't only access but speed. Many web pages are interactive and not just text based. They have images, sound, and videos which requires a higher speed to access. The good news is that more libraries are going to wireless networking and that will help those who own laptops or have libraries where they can check one out for use. But again, we come back to the money issue.

Walking a Mile

This report Walking a Mile: A First Step Toward Mutual Understanding ,"a qualitative study exploring how Indians and non-Indians think about each other", describes Indians and their perceptions of their place in contemporary American society and how non-Indians view American Indians. It was based on the findings from 12 focus groups, seven with Indians and five with non-Indians, held in 2006-2007

The study was funded by a grant from The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation.

Note: While some Indians interviewed for the project prefer to use the term "Native American," the Bureau of Indian Affairs reports that the tribes it represents generally prefer the term "American Indian." Consequently, the latter is used exclusively in the report.