Libtools

Do librarians read? November 19, 2020

It’s perhaps an understandable misconception that librarians are always reading books, and/or that their jobs somehow requires them to read books. But actually reading books — let’s say for pleasure — is incidental.  Or even coincidental.

For a moment, though, let’s set aside the reading time required to read books and book-like things that contain many pages — let’s say, things over 200 pages – aka monographs.  Reading monographs takes time.  You’re on your honour.  No tl;dr. No cheating. Well, of course there are ways you can reduce the time and we all do it — for example, pick up a book of essays. Repurposed/repackaged blog posts.  Big fonts.  Lots of white space. Wide margins.  Number of pages.  Thick paper. If we start getting bored or bogged down in excess, there’s always skimming, which technically is allowed.  But to be considered “reading a book”, let’s assume next-to-no skimming and no skipping of chapters.  Fine then. I wear my reading heart on my sleeve. 

Well, what about short things like articles? Professional articles?

In the recent past, articles published in the professional literature were read, circulated among colleagues, intellectually absorbed, discussed.  We professional librarians added penciled-in annotations, usually initialled (to identify author of the annotation), underlined parts of the text, questioned the statistics and data in tables and charts, looked at statements colleagues had pointed out, followed up footnotes.

The particular decline of these practices corresponded with the reduction in the journal print collection and increase in electronic access.  Colleagues stopped paying attention to the professional literature. Articles only seemed to matter in terms of attaining high-value “deliverables” and “output”.  

You might think that the reading, annotations, and discussions among colleagues followed over to the electronic versions in a big way, but it seems instead to have gravely marginalized practitioners from researchers. 

Recall the shock and awe when Steve Jobs proclaimed that “nobody reads anymore”? https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/the-passion-of-steve-jobs/

So yes, Nicholas Carr, in many ways, Google has made us stoopid.

Meta to the Fore October 23, 2014

I am missing some good old-fashioned skeuomorphism. Too much white and overuse of the right side of my brain. I want something which will appeal to my left hemisphere. That’s right, hemisphere — a spatial metaphor. Like those round things: GLOBES. And what ever happened to using color to assign mail filters? Folders? Labels?

Can we please please please texturize that two-dimensional space that we use as the flat reading plane? Like using some color, pattern, shape. Jony, bring some texture back.

Revisiting some of my previous thoughts on the subject:

‘Cut, copy, paste’ are essential editing functions which need no introduction or explanation.  They constitute a highly functional suite of concepts we take for granted.  They are also are based on a paper/scissors/glue metaphor which has enormous utility. These functions could of course be replaced by other, far wordier alternatives, but it’s hard at the moment to see how replacements would be as effective, or compact, or universally understood.

Shall we do away with these familiar editing metaphors because they are rooted in a physical or even print/paper world?  Hardly.  Metaphors grounded in the paper-based world are very handy indeed, and will continue to be, until they are no longer valuable conceptually.

Probably few of us have used any ‘paste’ since we left kindergarten.  So when we’re editing a document, we know that using paste isn’t really involved.  But the metaphor works.  It sticks.

It sticks like PASTE.