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Karen Coyle has just published a report on Rights Expression Languages commissioned by the Library of Congress. The report provides an analysis of a representative sample of RELs, including CreativeCommons, METSRights, Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL), and MPEG-21, Part 5 (MPEG-21/5).
There was an interesting discussion at BlogWalk 1.0 on the relationship between blogs and communities of practice, which has been documented here and here. BlogWalk is a series of face-to-face meetings aimed to bring together weblog researchers and practitioners for in-depth conversations about their work, and intended to complement BlogTalk.
"MapHub is a web-based, multi-user, group managed information storage system and map. Collecting information about people, places, events, and notes, can help to document unseen narratives and histories in public or private theme-based Hubs. The project is in development.
"MapHub researches the introduction of a geographic and historical data sharing application in an urban landscape. MapHub is a peoples’ map - a map of an urban geography determined not by traditional methodology but instead by the members who participate and contribute everyday in the experience of urban life. MapHub is both a tool and a platform that gives users pen and paper to record their unique and situated perspectives and then deliver that documentation to others.
"The web-based software facilitates individual spatial and temporal narratives managed and distributed through a simple social network. Based on a Geographic Information System (GIS) backend built on open source packages, MapHub manages data as visual symbolic objects specific to Hubs organized thematically. Aside from having a personal Hub based on immediate to distant social or participant networks, alternative Hubs based on themes such as health code violations, past job experiences, safe biking routes, or corporate violations of local regulations are possible. These thematic Hubs will help to promote alternative and peripheral knowledge of the cultural, historical, and current urban geographical landscape of localized spaces."
MapHub grew out of conversations between the Carbon Defense League (CDL), a self-described media arts and engineering practice and writing collective, and the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA). IAA appears to be dormant, but their mission was/is "to study the forces and structures which effect self-determination; to create cultural artifacts which address these forces; and to develop technologies which serve social and human needs." IAA's last documented project was a van which could print messages on the pavement that would then be visible from tall buildings and low-flying airplanes; sort of like skywriting in reverse.
From the LibraryLaw Blog: Alicia Ryan has published a new law review note in the Boston University School of Law's Journal of Science and Technology. Ryan proposes that three rights be reserved for libraries and archives: the right to copy and preserve the Web; the right to copy and preserve any digital work found to be endangered; and the right to lend these digital works once they have bcome commercially unavailable for five years.
Red Hen Systems is selling a fully integrated GPS/video collection solution. The VMS-X saves all audio, video and GPS data to a single medium and will attach to any camera with a Sony Intelligent Accessory Shoe. WAAS-enabled, 10K point track log, digital compass.
This, by way of the socialsoftware blog: Stanford University, the University of Southern California and the University of Michigan have all adopted Affinity Engines' inCircle software to help alumni stay in contact with one another, and with their almae matres. Here's a testimonial from Howard Wolf, the President of the Stanford Alumni Association: "Affinity Engines helped the Stanford Alumni Association build an online community for its 170,000 members. In just 3 months, we received over 8,000 updates to alumni contact information, 1,000 new online alumni registrations, and made over 150,000 connections between alumni. Affinity Engines is helping us realize a dream we have held for years - a virtual community of Stanford alumni."
I saw this on the Teachnology blog: Saint Michael's College (Burlington, Vermont) is using blogs by current students to give prospective students an insight into what day-to-day life on campus is like. Furman University (Greenville, South Carolina) and Waterloo University (Ontario, Canada) are also using a similar technique for recruitment.
As information retrieval tools and methodologies become more and more refined, delivering more and more accurate results, I grow more and more worried. Worried that we are eliminating all chance and coincidence from our online lives. Worried that we will end up learning only what we already know. Worried that my carefully constructed virtual world will end up a stagnant pond. Back in the real world, if your circle of friends is wide enough, or merely sufficiently awake to their surroundings, you'll come away knowing something new with every interaction. Mechanisms such as collaborative filtering may go a long way to re-inserting back into the mix the serendipitous or, as Donald Rumsfeld quite eloquently put it, "what we don't know we don't know."
That's probably a needlessly pompous introduction to Audioscrobbler. Audioscrobbler uses a plug-in to track what you're listening to, creates a playlist for you, and compares your listening pleasures with other Audioscrobblers.
I heard about Audioscrobbler from the Dan Hill's cityofsound blog. Hill points out that Audioscrobbler could be made even more useful if listeners could be weighted and recommendations evaluated based on whether I trusted this person's judgment, or whether the listener was just some moron who stumbled across something I happened to like too. He also makes the great suggestion that we need to be able to use Audioscrobbler with our iPods, where most of the listening takes place. To this I would also add one other suggested improvement. I often end up listening to WFMU's MP3 stream, rather than my own collection of songs. Almost all of the programs on WFMU now have automated playlists.....Wouldn't it be great if Audioscrobbler could track automated playlists from online radio stations? Wouldn't it be great to have Arbitron-like numbers for people who listened to, and enjoyed, music?
One more point Hill makes, that bears repeating. He talks about suddenly becoming conscious of what he was listening to, and playing his favorite songs for Audioscrobbler. Back when we all wanted our friends to understand what made us tick; now we've shifted that same anxiety to our software.
The following comes directly from the Archimede website:
Laval University Library recently launched the third component of its institutional repository. Called «Archimede» (http://archimede.bibl.ulaval.ca), this component covers e-prints, pre-prints, post-prints and other research publications from faculty members and research communities.
Following a thorough analysis of available software solutions, including E-prints and D-Space, the library decided to develop its own customized application. Inspired by the D-Space model, Archimede is arranged around research communities and fully developed in open source. The system is OAI compliant, using a Dublin Core metadata set. An open source distribution of Archimede will be available soon.
Following are some highlights of the special features and characteristics of the system:
- Archimede has been developed in a multilingual perspective, with internationalization as a focus. Using the open source standard (i18n), the text (or content) of the interface is independent and not embedded in the code. It is then relatively easy to develop an interface in a specific language without having to work on the code itself. English, French and Spanish interfaces are already offered in Archimede. That feature allows also the user to switch easily from language to language anywhere and anytime during his search and retrieval process.
- Archimede is flexible and not dependent on a specific platform. The system can be installed on Linux as well as on Windows. For a library wishing to implement the solution, the system can be easily adapted to the technical infrastructure already in place, thus increasing the efficiency of the implementation process.
- Archimede allows searching on metadata as well as on the full text, thus enhancing the power of the search engine. An application is being developed that will automatically generate and translate from the text and the abstract a proposed set of controlled vocabulary subject headings. This will be done through the « Répertoire des vedettes-matières de la Bibliothèque de l'Université Laval » and its links to LC Subject headings, Canadian Subject headings, Mesh hand AAT.
- The search engine is based on open source Lucene, using LIUS (Lucene Index Update and Search), a customized framework developed at Laval by the library staff. LIUS allows indexing of different types of documents formats : XML, HTML, PDF, RTF, MS Word, MS Excel, JavaBeans; it also permits mixed indexing, integrating for example in the same occurrence metadata in XML and full text in PDF, HTML, etc.
This site is a good guide for making online learning materials available to people with disabilities. Included are recommendations for delivering audio and video materials.
The Libraries at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities are now providing a blogging service for faculty, students and staff. Anyone with a NetID can create as many blogs as they want, and have as many authors associated with each blog as they want. The purpose of the service is "to support teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and individual expression."
From Open Access News:
Paul Wheatley, Institutional Repositories in the Context of Digital Preservation, Digital Preservation Coalition, Technology Watch Series Report 04-02, 2004. Excerpt: "The key recommendations from this report are for the continued development of specific requirements for trusted digital repositories, and also for the creation of independent certification services for digital repositories that will evaluate how repositories meet these requirements. A clearer picture can then be presented as to how well institutional repository software, as well as specific digital repositories, can deliver effective digital preservation."
The current CIO magazine has a fantastic article on the use of unfiltered blogs by corporate IT units, and plogs, or project blogs, to hash out issues that invariably arise from the implementaiton of any project. As the article points out, plogs would succeed or fail depending on their cultural context, but would provide a quick and efficient means of promoting frank discussion among team members, as well as a reality check for management. Also needed, and not stated explicitly in the article, would be an extraordinary level of trust among team members and an even more extraordinary level of respect between team members and management.
Lifted this morning from boingboing:
I've just finished reading Siva Vaidhyanathan's excellent new book The Anarchist in the Library, a discourse on the real culture war: the fight between open systems for exchanging knowledge and closed systems that see knowledge as a marketable commodity. The best part of this book is that it repudiates technology as a tool for making policy, calling for deliberation instead: in other words, copyright strictures should be created by courts and lawmakers, not DRM.Both visions of the perfect library -- utopian [all knowledge available for free, organized by volunteers] and dystopian [child-porn, spoilers and amateurish information supplanting high-quality research] -- are overstated. We are not close to constructing the perfect library, but we can imagine how it might look and act. Many of our communal efforts since the early 1990s seem to be moving our information ecosystem toward that vision. Yet long before we ge there, many are sounding alarms about the ways people might abuse their freedoms to use and move information. Even though the perfect library is not imminent, many are acting as if it is. The strong reactions of those who would squelch these freedoms might render our information systems unable to perform the positive functions of the perfect library because of the unexamined -- often merely assumed -- threats to the status quo. The closer we get to the perfect library the more the oligarchs undermine it.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released draft guidelines for securing Voice Over IP technology. The suggestions include putting voice and data traffic on logically different networks and denying access to the voice gateway from the data network. NIST is accepting comments on the draft through June 18.
Worth reading: Steven Weber, whose new book, The Success of Open Source, was just published by Harvard University Press, gives an interview to ACM's magazine Ubiquity.
The Online Journalism Review, sponsored by USC's Annenberg School for Communication, held a virtual roundtable to discuss blogs and academia. Cori Dauber (UNC-Chapel Hill), Alex Halavais (SUNY-Buffalo), Kaye Trammell (LSU) and Jill Walker (University of Bergen in Norway) participated. Good for scoping the landscape.
Also thanks to Marcus Zillman, I have discovered the Natural Language Processing/Information Retrieval Software Repository at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore. The software is intended for use by the students and researchers there, but is available to anyone.
Taken verbatim from Marcus Zillman's blog:
The Academic Web Link Database Project
http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/database/
The Academic Web Link Database Project makes available databases of academic web links to the world research community. This project was created in response to the need for research into web links: including web link mining, and the creation of link metrics. It is aimed at providing the raw data and software for researchers to analyse link structures without having to rely upon commercial search engines, and without having to run their own web crawler. You may use all of the resources on this site for non-commercial reasons provided that you notify them if you have an academic paper or book published that uses the data in any way (so that they know the site is getting good use).
A paper just released by Jean Nicolas Druey through the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. "The sum of these considerations is that information is not an object for ownership. It should not be and it cannot be. It should not, because communication, being the exchange of information between persons, is an act occurring among these persons and is therefore determined by them, and constitutes one of the highest social values. And it cannot, unless being arbitrary, because it is not possible to form information units by cutting them out from their context with other information (horizontal aspect) or their ties to previous and subsequent information (vertical aspect)."
The April issue of Ariadne has an article by Morag Mackle, Filling Institutional Repositories: Practical strategies from the DAEDALUS Project. Pretty depressing reading. All of the strategies they attempted — schmoozing prominent academics, schmoozing faculty interested in open access issues, trawling departmental websites, identifying open access journals and searching for any Glasgow faculty who had published there — required enormous amounts of time, energy and resources, and yielded precious little in the way of results. "Change is only likely to happen if staff are required, either by the funding councils or by their institution, to make their publications available either by publishing in open access journals or in journals that permit deposit in a repository."
The goal of this project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location.
Wikis Described in Plain English is one of the those great "....for Dummies" that serves as both superb introduction and future reference.
Speaking of timelines, I also stumbled on this VideoBlogging Timeline.
I've just started reading Peter Suber's blog on open access
"The open access movement: Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature on the internet. Making it available free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Removing the barriers to serious research"
but it's taken me a bit longer to stumble on his truly awesome Lists Related to The Open Access Movement and Timeline of the Open Access Movement.
In this tremendous post, John Gruber comments on an article Eric S. Raymond wrote regarding his trouble connecting to a network printer through Linux. The writing is entertaining, but the underlying implications for Open Source UI development, as well as for the feasibility of Linux as a mainstream consumer operating system, are very serious. Bottom line - there's a long way to go:
"It’s common for the Linux hacker set to poke fun at Windows’s wizard-style configuration tools, but the entire desktop Linux user interface is a pale imitation of Windows — much, much more of a rip-off of Windows than Windows ever was of the Mac. But the resemblance is merely cosmetic; functionally, desktop Linux is nowhere near as usable as Windows."
Apparently, the Estonian government thinks it is:
"In 2000, the parliament, perhaps inspired by their new gizmos, passed a law declaring Internet access a fundamental human right of its citizenry. A massive program is under way to expand access to the countryside, where economic development is hampered by lack of decent roads and other transportation links. The Internet, the government argues, is essential for life in the 21st century."In many ways, I almost agree with them. More and more governments are offering e-services, and I fear that those without connectivity may soon receive unequal access to those services. The time may be approaching when agencies require an email address instead of a phone number.
This article describes a test in which a video image was streamed from a wireless IP camera mounted on a police patrol boat to 30 people stationed on and around the Golden Gate Bridge. Instead of relying on physical access points, which would be complicated, expensive, and time-consuming to install, the Golden Gate users had devices with off-the-shelf 802.11b WLAN cards and an early version of wireless mesh software from PacketHop. The PacketHop software creates a peer-to-peer mesh network, where each wireless client becomes a routing node that's aware of all its neighbors and can pass data and images among them. The range depends on what kind of 802.11 radio the client has, radio power levels and antenna design. In the Golden Gate test, the WLAN radios in the NICs ran at the highest power level allowed, 200 milliwatts. According to PacketHop, the 11b client radios meshed with each other at ranges of 1,500-2,500 feet.
Robert Glushko, an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley, reflects how powerful interests can derail the work of well-established standards organizations. He also contends that the standards development in governmental organizations, such as the United Nations, is a very politicized process. High-minded goals, such as cheap global e-business standards, can easily be tarnished by money, power and access to powerful bureaucrats.
This, by way of USC's Interactive Media Division weblog:
Interactive Videodance is a research project sponsored by the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California, Irvine and uses their Active Space environment. During the performances, "expert users" (dancers and choreographers) will demonstrate the artistic potential of the system. In the installation component, "novice users" (visitors) will be able to "play" the space, improvising and exploring new ways to interact with others through computer technology. The Active Space environment combines the human body with video sensing systems, motion capture animation, software development, and interactive video and sound design to generate visual imagery and sound.
Originally posted on Marcus Zillman's blog:
"The OpenNet Initiative is a University-based policy research project documenting filtering and surveillance practices worldwide. Our aim is to excavate, expose and analyze these practices in a credible and non-partisan fashion to uncover the potential pitfalls of present policies to explore the possibility of unintended and unexpected consequences and thus to help inform better public policy and advocacy work in this area. To achieve these aims, the ONI employs a unique multi-disciplinary approach that includes: Advanced Technical Means — using a suite of sophisticated network interrogation tools and metrics; and Local Knowledge Expertise — through a global network of regionally based researchers and experts. OpenNet Initiative research will be published on this website in a series of national and regional case studies, occasional papers, and bulletins.
"As part of its work, the OpenNet Initiative also operates a 'clearinghouse' for circumvention technologies that assess and evaluate systems intended to let users bypass filtering and surveillance. We also actively develop circumvention technologies in-house as a means to explore the limitations of filtration and counter-filtration practices.
"The OpenNet Initiative is a collaborative partnership between three leading academic institutions: the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and the Advanced Network Research Group at the Programme for Security in International Society (Centre for International Studies) at the University of Cambridge. "
Okay, so the jury's still out on whether the use of Linux and tendencies toward open source in general are genetically inherited or simply a lifestyle choice. In the meantime, however, there is probably not enough being done in the way of proselytizing and conversion. Two pamphlets that may help remedy that are The Difference Between GNU/Linux Distributions, from Jem Report, and Surveying the Open Source Landscape from eBCVG.
David Kirkpatrick's recent Fortune Magazine article on Bridges.org has been hitting the blogs the last few days (e.g., Smart Mobs and ICTlogy). Bridges.org is an international non-profit organisation that promotes the effective use of Information and communications technology (ICT) in the developing world to reduce poverty and improve people's lives. Teresa Peters is Bridges' Executive Director. Three quotes jump out immediately:
"Many IT-related projects in Africa are failing. That's because, Peters says, too many ignore the basic criteria for success: 'Small, cheap, local, and relevant are the key things for IT here, with a suite of applications around the device.' Often, for instance, what's appropriate is not a PC but a handheld, or even just a cellphone."
"Peters says the most effective use of technology she's ever seen was in a pilot project that gave doctors and medical students in Kenya Palm handhelds that contained a regularly updated set of medical reference materials. Drugs change frequently, as do treatment regimens. But, she explains, 'Doctors are out all day seeing patients two to a bed and on the floor—so many it's unbelievable. They make notes on each patient but without a handheld they have to wait until the end of the day to check reference books for drug interactions and other information.' The program resulted in clear improvements in patient care."
"Bridges is now conducting a study comparing open-source software like Linux with proprietary software for community-access computer labs and Internet cafes. It is assessing the total cost of ownership—doing what Peters calls a 'reality check.' While the report is not complete and she says they aim not to take sides in a commercial competition, 'today's realities indicate that proprietary software is more suitable for most of these labs. Technical support is the absolute deal killer. The tech support is just not there for open source.' While she says most African governments are feeling pressure to move to the 'free' open source, most projects will fail because, for now, there is simply no technical support in Africa for desktop Linux. (People aren't having as much trouble with Linux for server installations, she says.) Microsoft, on the other hand, which is the de facto supplier of proprietary alternatives, has a well-developed support infrastructure in many places."
Miriam Drake, the former Dean of Libraries and currently Professor Emerita at Georgia Tech, has just published a succinct overview on institutional repositories. Covered are policies, legal considerations, standards, sustainability and funding, as well as examples.
First Monday has just published selected papers (with video) from the Fifth Annual Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World, sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services and the University of Illinois at Chicago (3–5 March 2004). The first paper that jumped out at me was Don Waters' Building on Success, Forging New Ground: The Question of Sustainability.
This paper focuses on three factors that contribute to the sustainability of digital scholarly resources. First, the development of such resources depends on a clear definition of the audience and the needs of users. Second, the resource must be designed to take advantage of economies of scale. Third, to create an enduring resource, careful attention is needed to the design of the organization that will manage the resource over time.
As usual, I went straight to the section on structural impediments...er....Waters calls it "Organizational Design." Here's the quote I'll be borrowing:
"..... the huge economies of scale that are possible with digital databases are difficult to manage over current institutional boundaries. Much as they might like in principle to do so, few academic institutions, large or small, are actually endowed with the mission, leadership, accountability, support structures, and other organizational apparatus to serve up collections to scholars worldwide."
I got this from Rajesh Jain's blog, who got it from David Weinberger. Michael Berry has been doing this sort of thing here at Tennessee for years.
Clara Yu, John Cuadrado, Maciej Ceglowski and J. Scott Payne. Patterns in Unstructured Data: Discovery, Aggregation, and Visualization. A Presentation to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 2002.
Jain's comments:
"In talking about search engines and how to improve them, it helps to remember what distinguishes a useful search from a fruitless one. To be truly useful, there are generally three things we want from a search engine:"Improving our trinity of precision, ranking and recall, however, requires more than brute force. In the following pages, we will describe one promising approach, called latent semantic indexing, that lets us make improvements in all three categories. LSI was first developed at Bellcore in the late 1980's, and is the object of active research, but is surprisingly little-known outside the information retrieval community.
- We want it to give us all of the relevant information available on our topic.
- We want it to give us only information that is relevant to our search.
- We want the information ordered in some meaningful way, so that we see the most relevant results first.
"Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant... Although the LSI algorithm doesn't understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent.
"When you search an LSI-indexed database, the search engine looks at similarity values it has calculated for every content word, and returns the documents that it thinks best fit the query. Because two documents may be semantically very close even if they do not share a particular keyword, LSI does not require an exact match to return useful results. Where a plain keyword search will fail if there is no exact match, LSI will often return relevant documents that don't contain the keyword at all."
Matt Webb has just published either an awesome introduction or a thorough overview (depending on how much you already know) on the subject of social software:
"Social software's purpose is dealing with with groups, or interactions between people. This is as opposed to conventional software like Microsoft Word, which although it may have collaborative features ('track changes') isn't primarily social. (Those features could learn a lot from social software however.) The primary constraint of social software is in the design process: Human factors and group dynamics introduce design difficulties that aren't obvious without considering psychology and human nature."
He includes a goodly number of links to other substantive pieces, as well as a link to the recently rolled-out Many-to-Many Social Software Reader.
Posted by Chris Hodge at 12:28 PM
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Categories: Interaction & Collaboration
The name says it all. This page describes the new initiative:
The Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University has adopted an innovative technological program for free online publication of books, articles, and databases designed to make resources in the classics more visible and accessible.I must say, this is tremendously exciting news for the Humanities, Classics, e-learning, and anyone interested in innovative initiatives to share data.
"In January 2003, BBC R&D produced a prototype video coding algorithm, based on wavelet technology, which is different from that used in the main proprietary or standard video compression systems. Our algorithm seems to give a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG-2 for high definition video (e.g. 1920x1080 pixels), its original target application. It has been further developed to optimise it for internet streaming resolutions and seems broadly competitive with state of the art video codecs."
"At the moment the codec, called Dirac, is in the early stages of development. It has been developed as a research tool, not a product, as a basis for further developments. An experimental version of the code, written in C++, was released under an Open Source licence agreement on 11th March at http://sourceforge.net/."
"Sun Microsystems Inc. may be selling servers running Linux, but that doesn't mean it is cutting back on the evolution of Solaris. Among its plans, the company is considering offering a free, open source version of its flagship operating system, said Jonathan Schwartz, the company's recently appointed president and chief operating officer."
"'Maybe we'll GPL it,' Schwartz said of Solaris, referring to the GNU General Public License under which the Linux operating system is distributed. 'We're still looking at that.'" [InfoWorld, 30 Apr 04]
Also in the May issue of Syllabus Magazine is Paul Conway's case study of Duke University's Digital Library initiative. The quote from Deep Infrastructure Supports Digital Library Services that caught my eye: "The digital library program at Duke is not an isolated 'free agent' on campus but is closely allied with central IT operations and with technology activities based in professional schools and academic departments. The relationship between the library IT operation and the central Office of Information Technology (OIT) can best be characterized as highly collaborative and collegial in that special southern way. [??!!] The resources that OIT marshals dwarf those of the library. The library’s digital initiatives have, as a result, emphasized a principled division of labor that builds on the library’s traditional intellectual strengths: structured organization of information resources, a deep commitment to preservation, and mediation in the search and retrieval process."
Learning Object Repositories, Digital Repositories, and the Reusable Life of Course Content by Philip Long has just been published in the May issue of Syllabus magazine. "What do learners need? They should be able to draw on digital assets from any resource, or repository, that strikes them as useful—even if the rationale is serendipity—at the exact moment when the learning activity calls for it. Today they can’t do that."
In an interview on National Public Radio this morning, the novelist and poet Sandra Cisneros recalled how, as a young girl, she would search out the most darkened and dog-eared cards in the card catalog at her local branch of the Chicago Public Library, and read as many of these books as possible, since they were obviously popular (and therefore, good). This tactile memory triggered in me one of those madeleine moments to which the senescent so often fall prey. I found myself back thirty years ago in the card catalog room of the New York Public Library, where moving from the tray containing Aar-Abe to the tray containing Luv-Mab gave you a palpable sense of the vast physical holdings crammed below and around you. I remembered how often I would come across, among the machine-made cards, a lined index card from the previous century, with a handwritten script today only available for special occasions and at great expense. (That card catalog was chopped up into end tables less than ten years later and given to those who had made a substantial contribution to the NYPL. I remember the first time I saw one of the tables in someone’s home; I think my expression was probably the same as someone seeing their first shrunken head.)
I also recalled tracking down a copy of Velleius Paterculus in the stacks of Butler Library at Columbia University. Their one copy had been printed in Amsterdam in the late 17th century, and still bore the King’s College stamp. In the back was the sign-out card, which traced decades of use by scholars, some of whom were unknown, a few not only known, but already absorbed into what we would have referred to back then as the warp and woof of history. (Perhaps this entry is also the story of the search for unpopular books.)
Of course, even thirty years ago, technological change was barreling down on us at an alarming pace. At Saint Louis University in 1973, we could browse the Vatican Library on microfilm, although I don’t recall too many finding aids; perhaps access has improved since then, perhaps not. Those handwritten index cards had been curiosities for some time. While I might have added my name to the list on the sign-out card for Velleius Paterculus, more likely even then my ID was optically scanned and no physical artifact remains; just my memory. And all the end tables in the world would not persuade me to reverse time. I sympathize with Nicholson Baker’s seemingly inconsolable anger, but it’s not mine. My life is undeniably better now than it was thirty years ago when I first fell in love with the doing of scholarly research.
But Cisneros did make me think about what is lost. Thirty years ago, searching engaged our senses and created memories. Searching was a physical activity, taking place in a specific time and place. We tripped over, time and time again, serendipitously, human remains. I still recall some of what I learned back then, but I also remember the learning — long, lazy summer days in the Main Reading Room at the NYPL, the soft whirr of the fans, music floating up and through the windows from Bryant Park, waiting for books to be sent up. Even if Google gives me the information I need, and when I need it, what will I remember? Will I be happy?