Walking across campus today, I spotted the new easy way to tell the extroverts from the introverts.
The extroverts are chatting on their cell phones loudly sharing their intimate conversations with the world.
The introverts are listening to their iPods trying to drown out the sound of the phone conversations.
I’m not sure what to think of the people with their cell phones up to one ear and iPod earbuds hanging out of the other, especially if they’re walking along with a friend.
I made this observation while listening to contemplative music on my iPod.

Classes begin this week on campus and for the past two days the library has been participating in the freshman orientation process. Just the usual stuff. Giving tours, handing out food, teaching people how to find a book (harder than you might think in the Firestone Library).

After work yesterday I was walking to the parking garage (conveniently located a mere 15-minute walk from my office) when I came upon a new student lugging two large suitcases and a heavy backpack from the train station to her dorm. One of the suitcases was almost as large as she was. She was standing still and looking around, which didn’t surprise me because it’s a new residential college and even I’m not sure where much is.

She hailed me and asked if I could help her a moment. Thinking she was going to ask directions, I said “sure.” She did ask directions, but first she handed me one of her suitcases and asked if I’d help carry it to her dorm room. I tried not to chuckle and just took the suitcase from her, then led the way to her building.

As we were walking, she asked if I was a grad student. Since this is a not uncommon assumption, I wonder if I look young for my age or if perhaps I should just dress better. The increasing whiteness of my hair and beard means I might reconsider my wardrobe. I told her I was a librarian. I almost said it the way that woman in the Mummy movie says it. I’m a LI-BRARIAN! But that would have been hokey. Fortunately she didn’t say, “you don’t look like a librarian,” because I have no comeback for that other than, “Oh yeah? Well, neither do you!”

I give tours of Firestone for a lot of incoming students each year, but I think that one bedraggled frosh appreciated my help more than any of the students on tour. Maybe next year instead of touring Firestone I’ll set up a sign at one of the residential colleges:

Need Help with Heavy Lifting?
Ask a Librarian!

It’s too serious a day to discuss libraries.

Is there any rhetoric more divisive than war rhetoric? Probably, but it’s too depressing to think about. In my opinion, generally the pro-war and anti-war forces both use divisive rhetoric, but today a particularly irritating essay in the Wall Street Journal brought the point home. In “America the Ugly,” Norman Podhoretz discusses those on the left whom he considers to hold the”negative faith in America the ugly” and their role in the current anti-war movement, essentially equating the two.

This rhetoric both divisive and overly simplistic. It assumes that everyone who is opposed to the War in Iraq thus hates America and loves “Islamofascism.” This is the right-wing version of the simplistic left-wing view that anyone who thinks America is a great country or appreciates the rights and liberties of American citizenship is some sort of fascist (or whatever the current pejorative is for patriots). One can certainly love America and be opposed to both the current government administration and the War in Iraq, but the “love the War or Hate America” dichotomy disguises this obvious fact, and is merely a way to demonize any opposition to the war as a bunch of disgruntled radicals who want America to lose another war because they hate their own country.

Where, I ask, does that leave those who want to end the war not because they hate America, but because they were always opposed to the war? Not everyone was part of the fickle survey crowd who first wanted to go to War and then opposed it when they realized that somehow people actually get killed in wars, and not always the enemy. (My 7-year-old daughter told me one of her male friends said he wanted to grow up and join the army until she told him that sometimes soldiers get killed. That was shocking news to him, but he’s 8).

Podhoretz dislikes the “America is ugly” crowd, but one can find the “America is Ugly” crowd overly simplistic without thus defending the War in Iraq. “Well acquainted though I am with its malignant power, I still believe that it will ultimately be overcome by the forces opposed to it in the war at home. Even so, I cannot deny that this question still hangs ominously in the air and will not be answered before more damage is done to the long struggle against Islamofascism into which we were blasted six years ago and that I persist in calling World War IV.”

This quote is also overly simplistic. For one, it assumes a connection between the War in Iraq and “Islamofascism” that may well exist now, but did not exist prior to invasion. Iraq was not an Islamofascist state, and compared to many of its neighbors wasn’t even much of an Islamic state. The alleged connections to al-Qaeda were tenuous at best, and there no weapons of mass destruction. How could the initial invasion of Iraq have been a justified part of the struggle against “Islamofascism”?

Regardless, this rhetoric also implies that anyone opposed to the War in Iraq is some friend of “Islamofascism.” Yet surely there must be some people who do not want to give up capitalism and democracy and convert to Islam (as Osama bin Laden is supposedly urging Americans to do in his latest video), who love both America and the freedoms it offers, who oppose totalitarianism of any kind and any attempts to infringe American liberties, and yet who also oppose a war that one could argue was never a just war in the first place.

Despite the divisive rhetoric, perhaps it is possible for someone to be an American patriot opposed to terrorism and “Islamofascism,” and yet still be opposed to the War in Iraq. Perhaps it’s just possible not to fall into the trap of false dichotomies in political rhetoric.

It’s just a thought.

I read around a lot on the various librarian blogs that discuss keeping up or learning new things, especially techie things. This is one I like that discusses both the how and the why of keeping up. The reasons to change are many, and I’ve discussed before that to persuade librarians to adapt to new technologies, one has to show how it benefits them somehow. I try to do this by highlighting the way new technologies can save one time or effort.

The “why” is difficult enough, and the “how” might be even harder. A lot of librarians recommend things like “set aside 15 minutes a day to learn new things,” or they’ll recommend spending some time before opening the morning email to play around with new technology. Some librarians complain that they just don’t have the time to keep up with all this new stuff, and the “15 minutes a day” approach is to show how easy it can be.

I have no problem with recommending this sort of approach, but I don’t think it will do much, for a couple of reasons. First, that’s generally not how those of us kept-up people keep up. Just spending the time reading around on what’s going on takes up more of my time that that, not counting actually playing around with new stuff. If I find out about some new tool I think might be interesting or useful, I usually just immerse myself in it until I learn how to do it, at least at a novice level. That usually takes more than 15 minutes, but I don’t think about the time because I like doing it and I think it’s worthwhile.

Secondly, time is not necessarily the problem, despite the complaints of a lot of librarians. Sure, a lot of librarians work hard, but how many really spend 8 hours a day completely on task? That means without reading the news, or shopping online, or gossiping with their officemates, or any of a variety of other ways people can kill time. Librarians already spend at least some time doing other things, else they would end up like those factory workers in Modern Times, the ones who stop chasing the little tramp and get back to work every time he turns the conveyor belt back on. Drudgery doesn’t make good librarians.

The difference between these librarians and some of us more kept-up librarians isn’t that some of us work like we’re in a library sweatshop and others of us just goof off playing around with social software or something. It’s a difference of priorities. Some people like online shopping or gossiping. I like playing around with new stuff, so that’s one way I break up my work day to keep myself sane. I even do it at home, because I enjoy it. Along with other things, this explains why, for me at least, “work” is no longer identified with a single location.

Also, I suspect it’s sometimes a matter of definition concerning what is library work and what isn’t, which is why the rationale has to be there. I could learn how to to do something new that might benefit library users or make office communication more efficient, or I could do something that seems more “library-like,” especially as libraries were in time past.

It could be a matter of definition, but ultimately I think it’s more a matter of temperament than anything else. A lot of librarians just don’t enjoy learning new things, especially techie things. Perhaps learning is just too slow and painful, and keeping up with the bare minimum seems too much of an effort. Eventually, there won’t be librarians like this, because I don’t see how many people uncomfortable with change could enter the profession these days. But for the time being, we need to persuade people that some changes benefit them and their libraries, and then we won’t have to worry about making time to learn new things. People make time for what they enjoy and what they think important.

I’m currently writing an article about the Annoyed Librarian and her role in debates within librarianship. In fact, I just finished it yesterday and after finishing, I started reading some library blogs. Imagine my astonishment as I went through the feeds in my Google Reader list and discovered that everyone seemed to be writing about the Annoyed Librarian at the same time. Just of the blogs I subscribe to, the AL and her recent post on the Cult of Twopointopia was a topic of discussion at David Lee King, Free Range Librarian, Librarian.net, Library Stuff, Information Wants to Be Free, and Tennant: Digital Libraries.

Of the various criticisms, I think Meredith Farkas’ and Steven Cohen’s come closest to my own opinion, but since I have been thinking about the topic a lot recently, I wanted to put forward what I recently concluded in general about the Annoyed Librarian and what she offers to debates in librarianship. Of course, I might be wrong.

The Annoyed Librarian, at least writing as the Annoyed Librarian, definitely represents the extreme position of whatever debate she enters. In the political battles, she is completely against the SRRT and offers no compromise, much like some of her critics. Her criticisms of the ALA, Internet pornography in libraries, the alleged librarian shortage, the banned books movement, and the Library 2.0 phenomenon have been relentless. Many have taken her arguments at face value and wondered why anyone who was so aggressively opposed to so much in librarianship would remain a librarian. On the other hand, many of her regular readers provide a cheering section and seem to agree with just about everything she writes. As a regular reader, I am somewhere in the middle, mostly because I recognize, or at least I think I recognize, what she is trying to do. Since she has no professional reputation to make and writes pseudonymously, she does not need to be consistent. She does not need to be polite. Yes, the positions the AL takes on various issues are often extreme, I think designedly so. She offers the most extreme argument she can muster against whatever annoys her at the moment, and this very extremity helps to clarify a problem. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein says somewhere that his philosophical work attempts to sweep away the debris that accumulates around philosophical arguments so that we may see them clearly. This, it seems to me, is also what the extremity of the AL’s positions does to debates within librarianship. By posing her arguments in the starkest terms, she often shows what is really at stake in a debate, then lets others wrestle with those arguments to come to a more sensible middling position. Even for her staunchest opponents, she often presents strong arguments they would do well to consider.

While clearing away the debris, she is often satirical as well. In a profession sometimes given to uncritical and humorless jingoism, the AL provides an antidote with her satire. But satire has a purpose; it does not exist merely to make people laugh. Satire aims to correct abuses, and it is often extreme. Consider, for example, Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal.” Some satire is gentle, and some harsh. We usually categorize gentle satire as Horatian. While the AL does sometimes adhere to the Horatian dictum to teach and delight, her satire is far from gentle. No, it is more Juvenalian, exposing abuses with biting wit and moral indignation. Juvenalian satire is so alien to the profession of librarianship that many readers do not understand what is going on. How could someone be so bitter? Why doesn’t she stop criticizing people and go do something else? Why does she remain a librarian? These are responses to her work that I have seen, but these responses miss the point. Some seem to think this Juvenalian satire from the Annoyed Librarian is a sign that she thinks librarianship is worthless, and that she should thus cease to be a librarian. But that shows a misunderstanding of the moral purpose of satire. We do not satirize that which is beneath contempt or that which is unimportant. We satirize abuses to things that we value. The moral purpose of satire is to criticize vice to protect the virtues of things we love. Considered in this way, it is just possible that far from finding librarianship or librarians or even the ALA worthless, the Annoyed Librarian instead considers them very important, important enough to be saved from the follies that sometimes beset them.

It’s that time of the year when I begin to think about teaching again. I’m on vacation this week, and one of the things I have to do is revise my writing seminar syllabus for the upcoming semester to reflect the change from “Liberal / Conservative” to “Liberalism and Its Critics.” (Less conservatism and more communitarianism, republicanism, feminism, etc.)

It might interest some librarians to know just how much I rely on the library to supply my course texts. The answer is, almost completely, since I don’t require the students to purchase any outside texts. I know a lot of teachers still put together course packets, but I think these are unnecessary if your academic library supplies the right services.

My course has no book-length sources, because I like to pack as many different viewpoints into 12 weeks as I can (we have only 12 weeks of class for a semester), and a single book of political philosophy could take up half a semester, especially with freshman. We usually get through about 10-12 essays over the course of the semester, many of which can be found on JSTOR, which has a strong political philosophy collection. Anything not available on JSTOR or another of our many databases can be scanned and made available through our electronic reserves. Thus, all the primary readings are available electronically to the students at all times via Blackboard.

For the writing resources, I rely mostly upon websites: Silva Rhetoricae, Nuts & Bolts of College Writing, and Research and Documentation Online. The Purdue OWL is good as well, but I don’t use it. Most of the material I want I create or recreate in my own handouts, also available electronically. I have a whole set of handouts on classical rhetoric and writing techniques, some of which I’ve made myself, and some of which I’ve borrowed (with attribution) from others. A lot of the writing instruction is embedded in discussions of course assignments and student essays, anyway.

When I started teaching 15 years ago, none of this was available. The WWW was still pretty new, and if there was much content on it about academic writing, I didn’t know about it, because I’ve never been an early adopter. (I’m embarrassed to say when I first used email, but let’s just say I avoided it as long as possible.) Reserves consisted of paper in folders at one specific physical location that could be accessed by only one student at a time, unless one wanted to duplicate the material in multiple folders. Thus, course packets were the best choice for those who didn’t like commercially available textbooks (and I’ve never been particularly impressed with the general run of writing textbooks).

And now, with some work by the library supplemented by a few good websites, everything my students need is online and easily accessible. The students don’t have to pay anything or go anywhere to get the material. They also can’t complain that the textbooks are sold out or that they’ve lost their course packets. I have the ability through Blackboard to control the presentaton and organization of the materials and make sure they really are available. I can repackage the same materials for different course emphases with ease. This is just one minor example of the way emerging technology and a library’s commitment to academic services can significantly improve the life of both teachers and students.

Via the Kept-Up Academic Librarian, I discovered that one blogger has named Princeton as #2 in his list of The 20 Most Beautiful Colleges in the USA. It is a lovely campus. If you’re not familiar with it, you can take the virtual tour. You can also just watch the opening credits of the tv show House, since the big building you see from the air that poses as the hospital is actually the Frist Campus Center at Princeton. I discovered that when my lovely wife Jen ordered some House episodes on Netflix.

The list reminds me that I sometimes forget how beautiful the campus really is. When I’m on campus, I spend a lot of my day in my office and other windowless underground rooms in Firestone Library. I like my office, except it doesn’t have a window and it’s three floors underground (and five floors from the philosophy and religion collections). My last office did have a window, but it only overlooked the area outside a staff elevator and wasn’t nearly as pleasant a space, so it’s hard to complain too much. On the positive side, my office is very quiet and private, and it’s easy to get work done there as long as I remember to take vitamin D pills to make up for the lack of sunlight. Fortunately, the library supplies me with a fresh bottle of vitamin supplements on the first of every month so that’s not a problem.

It’s easy for me to get caught up in the daily problems of the library and forget the attractive world just outside the door. I need to force myself to leave the building occasionally and take some long walks around campus.

It also reminds me, though, of one reason I like being an academic librarian. I’ve been in some very attractive public libraries, but rarely are the surroundings as pleasant as a lot of college campuses. Princeton is especially attractive, but many colleges and universities have attractive campuses (my own humble alma mater the U. of Alabama was ranked #17). One of the perks of working in academia, at least at many colleges and universities, is the pleasant surroundings. Sure, at Princeton inside the building might not be that great (I love walking the stacks of Firestone, but it’s a workaday library on the inside, not a showplace), but all I have to do is step outside and take a look around to gain a completely different perspective. For example, if I walk about 20 yards across the courtyard, I can go in the chapel, which is magnificent and about the size of many a cathedral. I think the lack of collegiate surroundings would be what I’d miss most if I ever left academia.

I’m counting my blessings instead of sheep.

I’ve been on vacation the past few days and finally got around to reading Everything is Miscellaneous, by David Weinberger. I should have just watched the Google Tech Talk, but it was easier to sit by the lake with a book than a computer. If I dozed off and my book fell to the ground, it wouldn’t matter as much.

I liked the book, but I’m not sure I was the right audience, since much of it had a “well, of course” feel about it. All the speculation about the way current trends in sharing knowledge change our understanding didn’t surprise me at all. We seem to be in agreement on the benefits of both blogs and the Wikipedia, and he specifically criticizes Cass Sunstein’s worries about the rise of the “Daily Me.” Like most popular non-fiction I read, the book could have been reduced to an excellent 50-page essay, which could have developed the main point sufficiently without all the repetition. I can’t remember how many times Weinberger quotes Umberto Eco on ways to slice beef, but certainly more than once.

He didn’t seem to me to give libraries a fair shake. It seemed odd that he focuses so much on the Dewey Decimal System, and that in his frequent mentions of library catalogs, they are always card catalogs and he always refers to catalog cards, never to database records. He discusses “three orders of order” – the first order of things put in their places, the second order of “card catalogs” telling us where the things are (both orders of physical things), and a third order of bits and bytes no longer restricted by the physical. Libraries always seem to be examples of the first two orders, because a book has to go on a specific physical shelf, and a “card catalog” has physical cards that limit what can be said about the book. The Dewey Decimal System is an example of the old order, because it classifies each book and puts it in a particular place on a particular shelf. Weinberger makes much of the limitations of Dewey, both because it doesn’t order the world like many people now order it (e.g., too much focus on Christianity, not enough on Islam) and because it has only one place to put a particular book, whereas a third order system can locate the book in many places, even if only virtually.

When he mentions the Library of Congress, he mentions only their relationship to the DDC, not their more sophisticated LC Classification System or their LC Subject Headings. Even when he mentions subject headings in general, which he does once when listing what’s on a catalog card, he doesn’t notice that subject headings themselves are already a way to break out of the second order of order and into the third, even more so once the “cards” are in fact online records. Subject headings are still examples of central groups trying to organize knowledge, rather than letting the folk develop their own organization, but they’re not necessarily an example of the knowledge tree that Weinberger criticizes so often. In the knowledge tree of the library catalog, a particular leaf can hang on many branches thanks to subject headings. He might have mentioned that for a century the Library of Congress has been taking steps to create multiple ways to find a single item in a library, even though the item could be in only one physical place.

He goes on at length about the way social software such as tagging allows us to create new understandings and see the world in new ways. It’s an exciting discussion, but his examples seem to be mostly drawn from business and science. There’s a good discussion of the way customers can take back control from advertisers and producers by creating online forums for evaluating products, and celebrates the transparency that comes from sharing the little bits of knowledge that many people might have. He also notes that publishing science is easer thanks to efforts like PLoS ONE. We no longer have to wonder why “through a startling and persistent coincidence, all the knowledge developed in the natural sciences since 1869 has fit exactly into the number of pages alloted for it in Nature each week,” because now publication isn’t limited by the expense of paper, printing, or distribution.

I wonder, though, about the importance of this new model for other areas of academic research. Weinberger rightly celebrates the ease with which ordinary people can now produce and control knowledge, but most academics doing research have a different relationship to their field than a consumer does to a company. Academics are already knowledge producers, and often tend to have a good idea of who are the other similar knowledge producers in their field. Breaking down some print-bound publishing models will help people publish more easily, but the sense of wonder at being able to control your information must surely be less.

Lately I’ve been editing and writing an introduction to a book based on a blog, running a blog for a writing seminar I teach, and talking about blogs in public as if I know something about them, so I figured it was time I started my own blog. I’ve been waiting until I had the Princeton librarian’s lite version of associate professor with tenure (which we call “Librarian with continuing appointment”) before beginning the blog, so that I could tell the brutal truth about my work and have my academic freedom protected. Effective July 1, I’m a Librarian with continuing appointment, so I can now speak freely.

The brutal truth is that I’ve got a fine job in a great library. I probably could have said that before getting continuing appointment without fear of repercussion, but I’m naturally very risk averse.

For anyone who wonders what “in principio” means, it means I’m pretentious.