Book Apocalypse-Not Now

Almost as soon as e-books came on the scene, there have been talks of the demise of the book as we have long known it. These doomsday predictions are far from being true. While rapid technological reform (a more accurate term than 'progress' I think) has become the norm in today's world, it is far too soon to make such a forecast about books. E-books have been on the market in a significant way since just the mid-2000s; the codex has existed in virtually unchanged form for more than 1,500 years. In just that short time, we have already discovered that the amazing convenience and storage capacity of e-readers come with a price, with draconian (i.e. anti-sharing and ownership) DRM policies and rapid generational updates ensuring that e-readers function without some of the most useful features of the traditional codex.

          

While I am quick to refute those who claim the traditional book has run its course, I am often disappointed by the overly-sentimental apologias that are usually put forward by defenders of the traditional codex. The chorus of sappy humanists defending books on the basis of emotional significance and sensory experience (see here and here) does contain a few grains of truth, but books don't need such a subjective appeal in their defense. It makes for nice drama and all, but the traditional codex will not continue to endure because of its emotional power (or use as an ironic prop), but rather due to their remarkable technological persistence. The practical value of books lies in their function and design-not aesthetics.

Shillelagh Saturday; Or, How I Really Feel About Touchdown Jesus

Deo gratias.

After  quite a few very long and painful football seasons, our day of reckoning has finally come. While I love to make a sport out of feigning my apathy for Notre Dame football during the offseason, I am as excited as any fan for tonight's game against the Trojans of USC. Win or lose, this has been a season of great drama and joy-so cheers to that.

While part of me stands in strong solidarity with those who are sickened by the excessed of collegiate athletics, I also cannot deny that a winning football team also reaps rewards for the libraries and academic programs of the schools involved. Whatever skepticism I may still have about head coach Brian Kelly, his arrival gift to university libraries and research made me slightly more receptive to his style. And as much as getting to the National Championship game would make any alum's heart sing, the thought of the libraries receiving their share of the $6.2 million BCS payout, win or lose at USC, is enough on its own to make this librarian happy.

Notre Dame's library has also been fatefully synonymous with the football program since the completion of the Word of Life mural on the facade of the current library building in 1964, popularly known as "Touchdown Jesus," which can be seen peeking out from behind the North end of the football stadium.

Now I have a big confession to make: 

           I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a sentimental lover of Touchdown Jesus.

 

"A backup isn't a backup if it's your only copy."

I recently had a hard drive fail, as it wont to happen at the busiest and most inconvenient times. After a couple days, an efficient technician, and a large hole in my wallet, everything is back up, running normally, and safe. This experience was much less traumatic than it could have been had I not had an established habit of regularly backing up my data.

I recently ran across this article regarding data storage safety. The author recounts a stressful close-call with hard drive failure:

"Last week, one of my son's friends lost a summer of work he'd done filming a documentary. It was a crucial college project for which he'd solicited and received considerable financial support via Kickstarter. He'd backed up months of footage garnered from extensive travel and interview to an external hard drive. Secure that he had a backup, he deleted the source data to gain more room on his Mac. It wasn't until the external hard drive failed that it dawned on him that a backup isn't a backup if it's your only copy."

Luckily, for the student of the article, all the data was able to be recovered with a little forensics, but one cannot count on being so lucky if your hard drive unexpectedly fails. The author has a few very simple points of advice for safe backup practices as the school year begins once again:

• Backup regularly to a drive that won't be lost or damaged with the source
• Periodically confirm that what you backup is present and recoverable
• Never carry your backup media in the same backpack or bad as your computer.

I echo all this advice. If you don't have an external backup drive, get one. Nowadays, storage devices are very spacious and are relatively inexpensive for the security they provide. Ideally, backups should be stored in a different physical location from the source drive. That way, if one gets damaged, there is a greater chance that the other copy will survive unharmed and recoverable. I'd like to strongly emphasize that backing up must be a regular  activity, like doing laundry, balancing the checkbook, or going to confession. Otherwise, you're more likely to end up with several weeks, months, etc. of lost work.

On a similar note, if you have not already done so, it is a good idea to take an inventory of just where all your data is on the web. Where do you have accounts? What are the usernames and passwords? How much data are you sharing, and when did you last use an account/service? Organizing all this information can help you mitigate personal data needlessly floating around cyberspace, and will make you more conscious of your information-sharing habits on the web.

It is important to think of managing personal digital assets and data in the same way as we care for other non-static organisms. More helpful resources for personal digital archiving from the Library of Congress can be found here.

Preservation Week: April 22-28, 2012

It is quite busy as this last semester comes to a close, but this week is also Preservation Week! As I currently work in preservation, and since conservation served as my first window into the world of librarianship, I have a soft spot for preservation in my heart.

Everyone who uses libraries plays a role in the preservation process. Just by keeping food & liquids away from books, refraining from marking in library materials, and carefully handling them, you are helping library items last longer. But when books fall victim to aging, wear and tear, and natural disasters, conservators come to save the day.

In a sense, library preservation owes a great deal to mother nature. The 1966 floor of the Arno river in Florence, Italy was the mother of all modern library disasters. Alli Burness has a great post about the event here:

Thoughts on the Working World, Education, and Librarianship

Once again it is not a completely decent hour for me to be writing. I blame evening classes (thank goodness I only have to endure 2.5 more weeks of these impertinent disruptions in my natural work and rest patterns) and my chronically restless mind. But I digress.

Although I have the good fortune of having some temporary work immediately following graduation, launching my post-student career and nurturing my future professional life have been heavily on my mind.  In light of the continually stagnant economy, the struggles of finding work and the value of education are being heavily discussed today. "Educational Return On Investment" seems to be a popular topic of discussion, flanked by contentious debates about student loan debt and encouraging purely utilitarian attitudes regarding educational choices. LIS degrees (Library and Information Science, for the non-librarian folks) tend to be brutally attacked in these discussions. A recent Forbes article listed an MLS as one of the worst educational investments one could make, mainly based on salary data. Despite the [wildly fallacious] rumors of an aging librarian workforce, librarians are now retiring late, and once they do, they are not being replaced (although this pattern cannot continue forever without the workforce entirely dying out). Many, like these sisters, ponder if a university education is really all it is chalked up to be for the price. In another realm of the debate on educational value is the ever popular undergraduate degree in business, which has come increasingly under attack for its apparent inability to produce professionals that can think critically and creatively. Alternatively, liberal arts degrees are being attacked (as they've been for a while) for their apparent inability to generate earning power and produce graduates who can make themselves truly useful. Bitterness abounds. More on the education debate later.

It isn't easy studying what matters.