Tylerism of the day

"That's me. This is the beach."

An Excerpt from the upcoming Chesty McBookerton novel, Seduction in the Stacks: Tales of a Bacardi Librarian

by Geraldine Bouvier

Chesty delicately slipped the latest bound collection of the Horn Book Guide back onto the shelf between its compatriots. As she reached up to adjust the plain beige bookends to firmly tighten the shelf's tomes, the top button on her self-knitted sweater burst from her chest, her ample cleavage surging forth like water threatening to topple a dam. The button, in its aerial bid for freedom, hurtled through the empty space amidst the shelves, into the adjacent aisle, before coming to a sudden stop.

"Ow!" came a voice. Shortly thereafter, a ruggedly handsome face poked around the corner. "Yours, I presume?" asked the gentleman to which the face came attached, holding the button gently between his thumb and forefinger. He seemed to be winking at her, but Chesty soon realized the button had fired from her breasts straight into his eye.

"Sorry," she replied nervously, taking the button from him. Their fingers met; his felt coarse, the fingers of a man whose livelihood came from his hands.

"No problem," he assured her. "After all, it gave me an excuse to talk to you." At that remark, his face turned slightly sheepish.

She gazed into his eyes, the deep and penetrating eyes of a longshoreman, or perhaps a cattle farmer of some kind. "I'd wondered what you were doing amidst the library journals," she said. "Could I--?" She paused, swallowing, nervous. "Could I help you find something?"

His eyes faltered, his line of sight dipping toward her bust. "I think I've found it," he told her, taking her waist into his strong, rough hands, and lowering his perfectly-stubbled face toward her smooth and waiting one.

Great Googly Moogly

Saving the World from Google:

Already, Google has digitized 12 million books, quietly assembling what it describes as a 21st-century version of Alexandria's ancient library. Google views the project as a classic example of how a company can do well by doing good, opening up a new market for itself while giving users instant access to just about any book that's ever been published. But Microsoft, along with Yahoo and Amazon, hardly relishes the prospect of seeing Google dominate the emerging digital book market, much less fortify its control over searches. Together with writers' groups, libraries, and research institutions, these companies have formed the Open Book Alliance, which aims to open Google's private book-scanning enterprise to competition and public scrutiny.

How much does it cost?

Literary devices with Tyler

Tyler: You lie like a rug.
Matt: Hahaha.
Tyler: Was that a pun?
Matt: What?
Tyler: What I just said. Was that a pun?
Matt: That would be a pun, yes.
Tyler: Awesome. That's awesome. I'm excited.

Decision Making

(According to Dr. Maccaferri, with minor tweaking)

While the following list is accurate when applying to developing library collections, it also applies to the various evaluation techniques that can be applied rather adequately to men.

1. Does the item of interest fall with the scope of what has already been established and decided?

2. If yes, is it of interest to users and do users find it interesting?

3. If yes, consider what the library has already shelved in terms of age and
format, including size.

4. If the item is still viable, consider the cost vs. benefit/value and overall benefit to the user.

5. Consider any special handling issues.

6. What is the source and location of the information you are considering (review.
flyer, friend, etc? [bar?])

7. Will acquiring the item pose problems (mutilation, theft, challenges, overall quality of the libraries well being)?

When making any decision, it's always necessary to take into consideration the users needs by doing a complete assessment of usage patterns and users satisfaction, as well as considering user demand for various services. Remember, "it's not like you have to fit scores of books on the shelf, it's easier to acquire one item at a time."

=)

650 #0 Beer $x Social aspects.

Copyright 2010 Bill Reed and Jay Stewart, or something. I'll find you.

Word of the day

ubiquitous [yü-ˈbi-kwə-təs]:
adj.

1. existing or being everywhere at the same time
2. constantly encountered
3. abstractly abundant
4. "The Media"
5. Brett Favre

Word of the day

conspectus [kənˈspɛktəs]:
n.

1. an overall view; survey
   
2. a summary; a résumé
3. the illegitimate offspring of conscription and prospectus
4. the journal of the South African Theological Seminary
5. the punchline to a joke about statistical analysis
6. Brett Favre
   

On Salinger and "Catcher"

There's an argument to be made for the idea that by completely removing himself from public life and not publishing a single word after the age of 45, J.D. Salinger actively enhanced the mystique and distinction of his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye; that all those years he sat rotting away in a small New Hampshire town, he was acting as an offbeat marketing scheme, promoting and maintaining his work's cultural relevance.

I'm not saying that this was his intention. In fact, I'm almost completely sure it wasn't. If Salinger ever realized this — and I suspect he did — I’m sure it bugged him to no end. But people almost always want things they can't have as a direct result of those things being unattainable. That's why Flyers fans are miserable assholes, why everyone, at some point, falls for someone who’s already accounted for, and why there was never a Beatles reunion.

Catcher certainly is a great book; you’d be hard-pressed to find a logical argument to the contrary. It was one of the first American novels to accurately capture the angst, longing and searching nature of the American teenage consciousness. It was remarkably edgy for its day, and, perhaps most importantly, it’s extraordinarily well written. But how much of the enduring fanfare for Catcher is attributable to the fact that its author ultimately snapped?

Initially, Salinger was receptive to readers — especially students and young people — who wanted to discuss the book with him. But as Catcher accumulated a cult following, Salinger decided that fame wasn't really his thing, and withdrew himself from society, moving from New York City to Cornish, New Hampshire, then ultimately cutting off most of the rest of the world.

Everyone who writes puts something of themselves into their work. There is some element of autobiography in every single work of literature ever published, and Catcher is no different. Salinger acknowledged that Catcher contained these elements in a 1953 interview, saying, “My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book ... [I]t was a great relief telling people about it."

Telling people about it might have been cathartic for Salinger, but that effect obviously didn’t last too long. You don’t have to be a literary scholar to draw the parallels between Holden Caufield’s dismissal of most adults as phonies and Salinger’s straight up rejection of the adult world. Even in the years after he wrote and published Catcher, it’s abundantly clear from what we know of Salinger’s life that he wasn’t ever too far from his wayward protagonist — compulsively experimenting with different religions, having a series of failed relationships, and, according to some sources, writing as many as 15 unpublished novels — the intellectual equivalent of taking your ball and going home.

Salinger received numerous offers over the years from Hollywood moguls who wanted to get their hands on the film rights to Catcher, and he always relented. Salinger’s former lover, Joyce Maynard, once said, "the only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J. D. Salinger.”

For all we seem to think we don’t know about Salinger as a result of his reclusiveness, his signature work and what we do know his life might tell us all we need to know. This is someone whose premiere character was an autobiographical self-reflection; angry, depressed, searching. His reclusiveness in the wake of the novel’s immense success sends a pretty clear message: J.D. Salinger did not write The Catcher in the Rye for you. He didn’t write it to connect with people or help people in situations similar to his understand themselves or their predicaments any better. He wrote it for himself.

And when the phony-ass world co-opted it and collectively nominated it as the novel of a generation, he reacted to it in the same way Holden Caufield probably would have: he said “fuck it,” and ran away. He kept it real. And he spent 46 years keeping it real. While it’s great for teens to have a book like this that they can identify with, perhaps Catcher’s long-term cultural value is best ascertained from examining it within the context of its author and his life.

Salinger got married, he had a few kids, and he supposedly wrote up a storm. But all signs point toward him being someone who never really grew out of the juvenile worldview that allowed him to write this book in the first place. While Salinger and his work will probably always be culturally relevant, perhaps the best lesson to take away from the end of this 50-year saga is that whether you like the world or not, you have two options: you can grow and adapt and work to change it, or your can take your ball and go home.

With the mind Salinger had, it’s a shame he chose the latter.

Wow. That was fast.

"At Apple, our philosophy is 'create products that are simple to use. And nothing's more simple than a single giant button."

Isn't it cute?!

Apple rolled out the iPad this afternoon, and people are freaking out. Mashable has a really good breakdown of the device, complete with specs, options, etc., if you care about that. But you've got to wonder if this thing really has the ability to be the market force that so many seem to think it will.
"The new Amazon Kindle DX has a few weeks to live—and the magazine and newspaper industries may not have much longer." - Sascha Segan, PCMag.com

People who say things like this have never seen a Kindle. The E ink and electronic paper format is immeasurably easier on the eyes than any of the backlit stuff we've been dealing with in the history of this kind of technology. And you've got to figure that eventually, someone is going to devise that kind of technology in color, which will kill backlighting across the board. When you hear someone trash the Kindle, ask them if they've ever actually seen or held one. Some of the backlash against this technology by traditional book people is understandable -- there really is something satisfyingly tactile books -- but don't buy into any of the garbage you hear about it being tough on the eyes. The visual technology that kindle brings to the table is not going to be outdone by anything Apple will roll out until it develops its own proprietary version of what the Kindle has to offer.

I suppose it could ultimately kill off the netbook, but there really is something to your eyes and fingers approaching the whole thing at different angles. Yeah, they've got the keyboard dock for that, but if it's all the same, why not just have a much cheaper netbook and a smartphone?

"The iPad itself seems less svelte than many fans expected-a blogger at Gizmodo estimates that 20 per cent of the surface is bezel. The device's home screen features weirdly spaced-out icons. The overwhelming early response among those live-blogging the event, and reacting to the live blogs online, is that this thing looks like a really big iPhone," - Newsweek

There's a host of notably important things that it does not do. Per the New York Times liveblog of the event:

• No ability to play Adobe Flash animations, widely used on the Web.
• No camera, still or video
• No non-Internet phone function
• Unclear whether you can bundle your AT&T iPhone plan with an iPad data plan
• No removable battery for a device that can suck a lot of power
• No removable storage

Once someone figures out how to produce the Kindle's visual technology in color and integrate it into a device that doesn't look like a children's toy from the 80's, we can talk. Until then, this isn't particularly impressive.

"I'm sorry, but this idea is weak sauce. I can see shrinking a laptop down to make a netbook....but increasing the size of an iPhone/iPod touch to that of a netbook seems like a sign of a company really desperately trying to scrape the bottom or the nearly-dry barrel of the whole iPod/iPhone concept." - PC World

Amen.

[Insert your own feminine hygiene product joke here].

Week two

Why, when we search using keyword-based engines, do we often not look at results past the first page or two?

As the internet grows, how does the way we search it evolve?

How long before the volume of extant information outgrows the current popular search algorithms?

Boolean searches are more accurate, but difficult to construct, and many different databases have specific or proprietary string languages.

Do databases like LexisNexis structure or restructure themselves to prevent or encourage specific kinds of searching or data mining?

Book recommendation of the day: Everything Is Miscellaneous

Tylerism of the day: "I like Turner's."

On the idea of the content curator.

Week Two: In the room

Class attendance is encouraged. We're going to be using APA style for this class, unless we decide that there's another style we might like better. A grading rubric exists, in theory.