Caveat Lector

I walk an odd sort of tightrope, really.

On the one hand I am an unabashed electronic-text enthusiast. I love this stuff. I think it’s going to take over large swathes of the world, and I don’t regret that prospect even a smidge. Regret it? I’m going to help bring it about.

I have utterly run out of patience with the book-smellers. I really have. They can stay back in the nineteenth century (yes, I said nineteenth and I meant it); the rest of us have work to do.

On the other hand, I constantly rail about the average technologist’s utter cluelessness about the wondrous bit of information technology that is the print book. Look, folks, print has a lot of lessons to teach. We have a hell of a nerve making noise about how we’ll supplant print; we’ve barely begun to learn those lessons.

No wonder I’m so uncomfortable in so many discussions of text, print or e-.

“What’d you get on the collection-development assignment?” I was asked as I came in to reference class this morning.

Oh, crud, forgot to check my departmental mailbox. Okay, mailbox checked. “An AB.” Probably better than I deserved. I am not a born collection developer; I figured that out already. The in-class discussion of the assignment told me exactly where I’d missed the boat. I accepted the new information gladly, and had no intention of sweating the grade.

Not so my reference-class colleagues. A roll of the eyes greeted my answer, along with “What was up with that? I did the work… I did what the sheet said…” and on and on. Whinge whinge whinge.

Gah.

Come on, people. Once the degree is in hand, nobody is going to give the ghost of a damn what your grades were, much less what you got on your collection-development assignment in intro. Is it too much to ask that you do these assignments in the spirit in which they are intended, learn from them, and move on? Without inflicting a lot of whinging on the rest of the world?

(The guilty parties don’t just whinge about their grades, either. They whinge about bloody everything, every time I see them. I’m seriously starting to wonder why they’re here if they hate it so much.)

I’ve misunderstood more than one assignment this semester: at least one in all three of my classes. Part of being a newbie, really. I haven’t gotten less than an AB on any of them; clearly nobody’s out to get me, and I frankly doubt they’re out to get anybody. And truth be told, I learned more from the stuff I initially screwed up than the stuff I did right.

And, honestly, the grades just. don’t. matter.

This is rapidly becoming one of my yardsticks for who belongs in grad school and who doesn’t. Who’s genuinely enjoying herself, and who’s going through the motions? Who reads the literature because she can’t keep her hands off it, and who has to be shoved reluctantly into the current-periodicals room?

I’ve been on both sides of those questions. Let me tell you, being on the positive side makes a hell of a difference.

I saw a peregrine falcon as I walked down Frances Street to work today.

She was evidently contemplating nabbing one of the plump juicy sparrows chattering to each other on the ground as I passed. The sparrow hivemind being what it is, they didn’t mind her at all, but scattered in all directions once I came by.

The peregrine sailed to the floor of a balcony, the sun filtering through the light stripes between the dark bars on her wings. Then she hopped up to the railing and fixed me with one heavy dark-circled eye. I think she decided she wouldn’t know what to do with all the meat if she killed me. She took off ’round the building, perhaps for more sparrows.

I shivered as I watched her go.

We discussed library skills—er, that is, bibliographic instruction—er, that is, information literacy—in reference class yesterday.

Boy, if Katz is their paragon (and admittedly he may not be), I don’t think much of the anti-BI crowd. I didn’t even have to say anything; everybody else said it for me. Paranoia, a notion of “profession” that is closer to “mystery cult,” a patronizing attitude toward patrons, and total handwaving past the notion that information skills may be good medicine even if folks don’t eagerly step up to take it.

There’s also a homo stramineus lurking in Katz: the idea that BI advocates somehow refuse to answer questions at the reference desk because of their fanatical devotion to teaching people how to answer their own questions. This is sheerest hogwash.

I get the impression that part of what’s going on here is reduction of the patron population to the broad stereotype of what shows up at the reference desk: clueless, unfamiliar with libraries, and apathetic if not actively antagonistic. The reference literature describes in excruciating detail how to deal with these people, and it’s hardly a surprise that BI is pretty low on the list.

Just one problem. These aren’t the only people in libraries. They aren’t even the only people who show up at reference desks, though I shan’t argue that they’re the lion’s share.

I wrote a squib about the Katz readings that riffed off the Four Sons bit in the Haggadah. I won’t post it here, because it’s too much Katz to be of general interest, but I do think it’s a fair model to consider BI services from. We’re doing great with the Second Library Patron (the hostile one), but I don’t think we’ve done diddly for the First Library Patron (the wise one), and we’ve a ways to go with the Third and Fourth, too.

So if anybody who writes about reference wants to take this idea and run with it, be my guest. Just send me the cite when the article’s published; I want to read it.

So good ol’ PJ has finally said he’d be interested in doing a movie of The Hobbit. If, that is, the Tolkien Estate will let go of the rights. (See correction, bottom of post.)

Don’t hold your breath, people. Just don’t.

I haven’t tangled directly with those folks, but I know quite a few people who have. Their default answer to anything is “no.” If they take against someone—and you bet they don’t like PJ—you couldn’t pry a concession out of them with the world’s biggest crowbar.

How did the movie trilogy get made? Because JRRT himself sold the rights during his lifetime. New Line didn’t get them from the Tolkien Estate, which was powerless to stop the sale of rights they didn’t own any longer. If they could have stopped it, my bet is they would have.

This Hobbit movie? It’s not going to happen. There’s just no way. Save your enthusiasm for some other project.

Correction: My bad. The Rankin-Bass movie is pretty clear proof that the Hobbit movie rights were sold also. I’m not sure who owns them currently; I thought the Estate had bought them back, but apparently that is not the case. I dunno what the “rights problem” being touted in the press is, then.

(There’s another rights flurry currently over a props museum for the movie trilogy, but that’s different, and as best I can tell clearly does involve the Estate.)

Thanks to Carl F. Hostetter for setting me straight.

I’m still not holding my breath, not for the Hobbit movie and absolutely not for the props museum; I just don’t believe they’ll happen. But life is strange; who knows?

Well, dang, if I’d known you could learn so much useful stuff in library school I’d have gone long ago.

A diligent SLISmate has found local experts to teach Lexis/Nexis, Westlaw, Dialog, and Factiva next semester, as extracurricular interest sessions. Barring schedule conflicts, I’m ever so there. Nifty.

A SLISmate asked me a while ago whether TAG did web design. I shook my head. “No good at it,” I said. “Give me a design and I’ll code it up, but that’s different.”

I am in awe of good web designers. Wow. Markup is easy. What they do is hard.

Every once in a while I run across a design that makes me wish my site looked like that. Happened just today, as a matter of fact.

That’s just beautiful. Wow. Love it to death. And it ain’t table cruft under the hood, either; View Source and see for yourself.

I can’t imagine spending my whole life studying names. That stuff will tie your brain in knots.

You start with the perfectly normal Spanish name Pablo. If you’re greatly daring, you make it into a feminine: Pabla. (Attested in current PR census data, though very rare.) Then you import Paula, I daresay from Portuguese. (Also rare.)

Then you squish them together to make Paubla, which to my eyes is an ugly abomination, but one doesn’t expect parents to be reasonable when naming their offspring. This name inexplicably becomes popular.

But no, wait, it gets worse. From Paubla one derives Paublina. And then—get this—the name migrates back to the masculine side of the ledger, ending up as Paublino and even Paublo. Gah! At least Paublo doesn’t come anywhere near supplanting Pablo.

I do hope there’s a better explanation for all this than the one I just advanced. I mean, I can live with Margarita to Margara to Margaro (that’s actually morphologically clever), but this is just plain cruelty to innocent phonemes, that’s all there is to it.

I wish I’d cottoned onto this research-project thing a long time ago. My, it makes writing the paper easy. Here I am with barely a start on the background and not quite done describing my methodology, and I’ve gone and written a third of the required paper length already. No footnotes yet, even. (But there will be. Oh, will there ever be.)

And it’s only 10:30 in the morning. I can do this. I can. I can! It’s been five years since I wrote an academic paper, but I can still do it. Nobody’s more surprised at that than I am, believe me.

Addendum: Of course, having a methodology means that one must actually adhere to it. I don’t know what got into me when I was picking out databases, but I committed a few bloopers. Fixing them now.

I’m going to finish my list, run the rest of the WAVE tests I need to, and call it a day, I think.

It’s silly-season again.

National broadcast news just called. They want to say some Elvish live on teevee tonight, whee.

At least the harried-sounding assistant didn’t automatically assume David has nothing better to do than feed them taglines. And extra points for not bullying me, not to mention actually asking my name. Even more extra points for not betraying surprise that a Ph.D student in historical linguistics with an uber-geek sideline has, like, an actual honest-to-goodness wife.

(Do they teach a whole course on rudeness in journalism school, or is it just a regular part of j-school course syllabi? I’m just curious. I have really bad memories from silly-season two years back. A couple-three news organs which will remain unnamed can just plain bite me.)

So I gave them his email address, with no assurances whatever that he’ll actually check it in time.

Why, why, why did these movies have to get released during academic silly-season? Grrr.

Okay, back to paper.