Friends of the Owen D. Young and Launders Libraries

April is National Poetry Month.  A few FODYLL (or near FODYLL) notes.  On April 7th in the Morley Branch of the Canton Free Library FODYLL Board members Paul Doty and Albert Glover will be part of a reading that starts at 2:30.  Hope to see you there…thinking back to ODY, and thinking about National Poetry Month, we have a complete run (between print and electronic copy) of Poetry Magazine in ODY.  Certainly, of the literary reviews in business today Poetry would be on just about everybody’s “top five” list.  Poetry also sponsors a top five web site of poems, information on poets, commentary, and poetry, through the magic of packets, nodes, and the Internet, read aloud.  This is for both contemporary and modern poets, what better month than April to venture to Poetry online…

Robin Hutchinson

In his book Luster Don Bogen has a poem titled “Card Catalog,” a poem that is largely a narrative about interacting with this “gargantuan simplicity”:

Still, I make the most of the journey
the numbers and letters like roadsigns decorating the corners,
the special directions in red—See also, See under—that can lead you
almost anywhere,
mysterious bibliographic abbreviations, hand-printed lists of years on a
periodical card
fading back from felt-tip to ballpoint to fountain pen.[1]

One can certainly imagine that a great deal of the work librarians need to do is done within an aura of “mysterious bibliographic abbreviations;” if there is someone who has dwelt and prospered in the necessary bibliographic mystery of a library, it’s Robin Hutchinson who is retiring after 18 years of service in ODY.  While all of us who have had a chance to work with him would immediately praise his demeanor and professionalism, it’s important to pause and consider the work he has done, work in the complicated and thoroughly circuitous bibliographic mysteries of journals and databases.  Robin has been absolutely central to our journey from a print-based journal collection to the digital scholarship that now makes up the bulk of the research we do.  Further, the tools of this research share none of the “gargantuan simplicity” of a card catalog—databases are complicated entities and with unfailing good humor Robin has striven to make them work to best advantage for the students, faculty, and staff of St. Lawrence University.  Robin’s work has been checking and rechecking, planning and thinking about the best use of resources, and in all of these capacities he has served the community well. His ability to do this work with such high standards and good cheer will be missed by those of us “carrying on” from his example.

For researchers traversing the open web in search of this or that Wikipedia has become a pretty much standard stop, often number one of two result on a Google search of darn-near-anything. In an interesting piece today in Atlantic Magazine Rebecca Rosen says comparisons between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica are unfair because they take Wikipedia out of it’s historical legacy.  This legacy is one of “obsessive compilers” that Rosen traces back to Rome and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History.

At the University of Bergen (Norway) Jill Walker-Rettberg has been doing interesting work on Wikipedia for years.  Working forward from the common perception of the crowd-sourcing of Wikipedia writing Walker-Rettberg finds that most contributors to Wikipedia are young, caucasian men, and that editing is not always a cumulative process of improving, coming to consensus.  Her signature lecture on this is here, and she has worked forward from this (you’ll see other essays/lectures she’s written/given on her blog).

This also on our sister blog, Odyssey Online…

From our dynamic Collection Development Librarian, Michelle Gillie:Hoping to find an iPad or a Kindle in your stocking this year?   Don’t forget about OverDrive@SLU: our downloadable collection of e-books and audiobooks that you can enjoy on your shiny new e-reader, tablet, iPod, or other mobile device.   Use your SLU ID number to select and access titles whenever you like, for a loan period of up to three weeks.   Click here for more information about this service.

If you prefer to leave the wired world behind when you’re not at work, pay a visit to the ODY Browsing Collection located near Special Collections on ODY’s main level. Whether you’ve been naughty or nice, you’ll find plenty of bestsellers, award-winners, biographies, travel books, contemporary poetry, humor, and other popular fiction and nonfiction to relax with over the break. If you don’t see what you’re looking for, contact Michelle Gillie at ODY (mgillie@stlawu.edu or x5834).  We always welcome suggestions for new titles from the SLU community.

Also, I wrote of Atlantic Magazine being a great source for information on books, book recommendations, and Benjamin Schwarz has put forth their best books of 2012 list.  It’s a good list, and we have most of them.   Recommending a book is a great Holiday activity, well, it’s a great activity in the summer to, one part reflection, one part bravado (I know books and I’m going to make sure you know too), and one part verbal correspondence. When you are recommending a book you are giving a little bit of yourself, you are making a statement the way you might in a letter and just like a letter you have to wait for a response.  In talking with the digitally-oriented youth who prowl and patrol this northerly campus one of the aspects of letter writing they find alien is waiting on a response–that you don’t get with the send command a reply.  Same with recommending a book, you have to wait until the person to whom you’ve recommended  the book reads it.  So I suppose, taking my own logical postal, that the trip to the book store is itself letter writing…of a kind…a correspondence with an imagination out, above and below immediate experience.  Here’s hoping there are plenty of books in your holiday…

…as a follow up to the earlier post on Rockwell Kent, North Country Public Radio has fun a feature on the Kent exhibition here in ODY.  If you haven’t had a chance to see the show, we’ll be open again after Thanksgiving so please do come in and check out the great work that has been done to bring to light our new Rockwell Kent Collections…

…Over at Odyssey Online (the SLU Libraries blog) more on the Anthony Daniels essay…

Anthony Daniels has published an essay in the New Criterion titled Loss & Gain: On the Fate of the Book.  It is a long wide-ranging essay that discusses books, libraries, digital technologies, and the consequences of the emergence of these digital technologies.  In the course of the essay Daniels self-identifies as a bibliophile, the kind of person who “…when I got into someone’s house, I find myself drawn to the bookshelves.” He further self identifies by drawing distinctions between different manifestations of bibliomania:

I am not a bibliophile in the true sense, that is to say someone who finds excitement in a misprint on page 278 which proves that the book, which he might or might not ever read, is a true first edition. Nor am I a bibliomaniac in the true sense, the kind of person who will eventually be found lying dead under a pile of books that he has incontinently or indiscriminately collected because of some psychological compulsion to accumulate. No, I am something in between the two (as a physician put it when I was a student, as he tried to explain to a patient that he had myeloma, which was neither cancer nor leukaemia, “but something in between the two.”) I prefer a good edition, physically as well as literarily speaking, to a bad one; I buy more books than I read, though always with the intention of reading them; I am not an aficionado of rarity for rarity’s sake, though I have some rare things, upon which the eye of the avaricious bookseller called in by my relict will immediately alight as he offers her yardage, $5 a yard of books.

I wonder whether this kind of happy madness will survive the palm-pilot to blackberry to iphone transition that so preoccupies people.  I know quite a number of people who take great pride and garner really enjoyment from the digital devices they own, but it is an enjoyment as transitory as it is real.  These folks happily throw off one networked information technology for another, and give the obsolete (or the poorly marketed) object nary a thought once it is gone.  Personal libraries are of course autobiographies, when Daniels leaves the dinner guest to look at books he’s really making an appraisal of his hosts, he is coming to an understanding of the people he is with. Like Daniels, I have books at home I have not consulted in years, but would not think of getting rid of them–they are the time and place of their reading.  This particular acquisitiveness is a kind of memory, a kind of modest human-made modeling of remembering.  However much reading can and will be kindled by e-books, the ebbing of actual books maybe an abdication of purposefully remembering, of purposefully keeping.

Ongoing to December 15th are two exhibits on Rockwell Kent, including an exhibit in the Frank & Anne Piskor Reading Room here in ODY.  Many people are introduced to Rockwell Kent through his illustrations in the celebrated 1930 Random House edition of Moby Dick. After that, Rockwell Kent’s work and style is simply there, a part of a life sometimes sought, sometimes serendipitous, always noticed and never forgotten.  It’s the simplicity and ingenuity that is so gripping in Kent’s work, a striving that Fridolf Johnson described in Rockwell Kent an Anthology of His Work as “…an almost uncontrollable urge to accomplish things, to succeed in everything, to see out and overcome obstacles.”  Of his own work Rockwell Kent wrote in a small pamphlet titled How I Make A Woodcut (on display in ODY’s foyer):

Good craftsmanship is but a means toward that clear, unbefuddled eloquence which is not art but part of it. Yet in wood block prints the inescapably definite nature of every step of the technique, from the cutting of the blocks to the printing of them, makes the values of their craftsmanship inseparable from their art. They are a proper medium for the expression of clear uncompromising thought. Love them for that.

Come in a see the unbefuddled eloquence of Rockwell Kent these cold days now upon us.

This from Atlantic Online, the University of California System is working to make free digital textbooks available nationally. The project strikes both at the problem of e-books and the problem of textbook costs. Textbooks are an expensive part of the expensive proposition that is known as university study.  This could be an open source initiative that speaks to issues of expense, and textbooks would seem to be perfect candidates for e-book publication: they are frequently updated, they are frequently part of courses where other elements of the course are online (things like syllabi), and they are not books that people necessarily want to keep.  There is also something about this that strikes forward as public initiative within higher education.  Within the critiques of the commodification of college wrought by networked information technology, here’s one working the other way–open source to promote face-to-face.  Worth noting and reading…