Category: Personal

Author Terry Deary On Libraries

I imagine that by now everyone in Library Land – and in Book-Lover Land more generally – has seen this news story:

Horrible Histories Author Terry Deary On Libraries: ‘No Longer Relevant’ (posted on the Huffington Post on February 14, 2013)

Such attitudes toward libraries make me sad and angry. Of course, I’m highly biased on this subject, but it’s more than that. It’s the way his whole argument perpetuates misinformation, encourages overwhelmingly selfish principles, and his understanding of how communities and social systems actually work is frighteningly simplistic.

Not only does he completely ignore the massive pile of evidence that libraries are an incredibly effective venue for reader discovery and a leading driver of book sales, I’m personally disgusted by his unmitigated self-interest.

And he’s absolutely, 100% wrong about the “concept behind libraries”.

Never forget – the intent of public libraries is to provide all citizens with access to information in service of maintaining an informed democracy. The purpose of libraries is to enable self-improvement and drive social progress. This is true throughout modern Western culture.

He considers his paycheck more important than civic duty and the communal good, and I think that’s pathetic.

Actually, now that I think of it – people holding their paychecks as more important than civic duty and the communal good is the source of most of our current social ills…

The Virtues of Anthropomorphization

Chimpanzee from Disneynature
Chimpanzee from Disneynature

Recently, I was perusing Cracked, just randomly clicking through the linked articles at the bottom of the page, wasting time as is my wont, and I came across this:

5 Mind-Blowing Ways Animals Display Human Emotions

This reminded me of a movie review that one of my coworkers wrote last year for the Disneynature documentary Chimpanzee.

Both of these articles illustrate a near-universal attitude toward the subject of animal and human behavior and emotions: Namely, the assumption that human and animal behaviors are essentially different.

Both of these articles make me want to ask:

Just where do you think human behavior and emotions come from?
Continue reading “The Virtues of Anthropomorphization” →

Data Handling in Electronic Systems – Inspiration for a Paradigm Reassessment

At my library, we’re currently working on a project in conjunction with several other regional knowledge institutions to put online our full collection of historical documents regarding the Civil War in Missouri and Kansas. One piece of functionality we’re creating is a way to visually represent the relationships between people, places, and things within this pool of data. These visualizations are based on a relationship database that we constructed, using a basic semantic structure: “Object A [relationship] Object B” and we can verify this relationship with “Document X”. Thus, for example:

Iskabibble Jones is married to Bridgette Jones and we know this because of information contained in Bridgette’s letter dated …

Only, instead of statements, we represent this all graphically with links to images and documents. It’s a pretty nifty function!

The way we’re building the database for this relationship visualization tool is representative of how online data gets handled in general. It illustrates the fundamental paradigm that has governed computer development from the beginning – and, indeed, the development of mechanized data handling even before the advent of computers.
Continue reading “Data Handling in Electronic Systems – Inspiration for a Paradigm Reassessment” →

Censorship Is Stupid

As is typical with the changing of the year, librarians and watchdog groups take some time to look back and reflect on the past year in censorship. Here are two such articles that I ran across recently:

Censorship drives me insane. It’s stupid. It doesn’t work. It’s never worked.
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The Joy of Saying Yes

Last week, I switched into a new job here at the Kansas City Public Library – Digital User Specialist. As we expand our library services through new technological portals, it’s my responsibility to ensure that these new services and interfaces answer to the needs of our patrons, and that they’re actually usable. I’ll be doing usability testing, creating personas, collecting user feedback, lots of wire-framing. But mostly, I’ll be the one constantly asking the questions:

  • “Does this actually work for our patrons?”
  • “Will this allow us to provide more and better services?”
  • “Is this something our patrons need?”

Moreover, I’ll be the one encouraging all my library co-workers to ask these questions, as well.
Continue reading “The Joy of Saying Yes” →

Speaking of Skeuomorphism

With all of the changes taking place over at Apple, people are wondering how it will affect the design of their future products – both the external look and the software interface. As a result, skeuomorphism is very much on the minds of systems and UX designers.

Skeuomorphism gets a pretty bad rap among many tech-savy computer folks. It’s kitschy, it’s gimmicky, it’s corny. Some feel that it dumbs down the essential nature of digital technology. By over-emphasizing analog equivalents (equivalencies that are, arguably, false in their foundation) skeuomorphism runs the risk of obscuring many of the things digital technology can do that analog can’t – the aspects of the digital tool for which there is no analog equivalent.

Mashable has a delightfully snarky gallery of some of Apple’s more infamous uses of it:

Say Farewell: Apple’s Skeumorphism Hall of Shame

Many of these criticisms are largely correct. So why am I still a fan of skeuomorphism?
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The Continuing Saga of Copyright Reform

On Friday, I saw this article on Techdirt:

House Republicans: Copyright Law Destroys Markets; It’s Time For Real Reform

And it gave me such hope that our elected leaders might finally openly acknowledge and own up to everything they’ve done wrong with copyright over the past couple of decades! This passage, in particular, echoes everything I’ve been arguing about copyright for years:
Continue reading “The Continuing Saga of Copyright Reform” →

The True Scope of History, Part II

Homo sapiens is unique on this planet in that we’re the only genus with only one species. It’s not normal to be the only species within a genus! All other animals exist in a world in which there are others very like themselves, but not them.

Humans, by contrast, take it for granted that there are no other species in the world like us.

It didn’t used to be that way, though. We used to share this planet with other people who weren’t us.
Continue reading “The True Scope of History, Part II” →

The Purpose of Human Imagination

The Internet Librarian International 2012 conference wrapped up yesterday. Perhaps the most widely circulated tweet from the conference came from Airport Librarian (@airprtlibrarian):

We have libraries because people need a place to dream. The collection is not the main goal. #ili2012

— Airport librarian(@airprtlibrarian) October 30, 2012

“People need a place to dream.” Yes!

[Edit: At the request of Airport Librarian, I’d like to credit David Lankes as the original source of the quote, from his keynote speech.]

The human ability to dream and to imagine is one that has fascinated me from a very early age. The scientist in me wonders: Why do we dream? What necessary function is served by our imagination?

Why do people need a place to dream?

I had an experience during my freshman year of college that informed my understanding of the purpose of imagination more than any other…
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Misquoted Darwin

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”—Charles Darwin

A friend of mine recently posted this quotation on Facebook. I commented that this is one thing that too many people get wrong about Darwin’s theory—too many people assume that survival of the fittest means survival of the strongest. But that’s not necessarily the case.

I was all set to write a blog about all the other commonly held misunderstandings that people have about the Theory of Evolution. First, though, I wanted to verify the quotation my friend had posted.

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