Freeze-dried books

Who knew?

One technique for salvaging water damaged books is to freeze the books solid and then remove the water through a highly controlled vacuum freeze-drying method. During the process, the water in the damaged material sublimates--passes from a frozen solid state to vapor (gaseous state), without reentering the liquid state. This way you avoid issues such as inks running or book boards and pages warping and wrinkling. There is a whole industry of manufacturers (such as Freezedry Specialties, Inc., who also happen to recommend their services to taxidermists) dedicated to providing libraries, museums, and other collectors with this futuristic disaster relief technique. Interesting things can be learned from textbooks sometimes.

Photo Via.

MARC

Last semester I wrote about how out of my depth I felt during the beginning weeks of classes when my professors seemed to lapse into foreign languages full of complicated acronyms and unfamiliar terminology. After I eventually found my footing in the world of library lingo, I became more confident about my understanding of the principles and practices of information science. Since then I've been keeping up pretty well, despite the technical nature of two of my courses this semester, and I'm almost surprised how comfortable I feel with work models and the basics of XML schema. Ironically it's when we hit MARC, a 40 year old cataloging format, that I start feeling the water over my head again.

I know librarians love organizing and classifying things, making information neat and tidy, and lending an air of authority to it all, but the librarians who invented MARC must have been the most detail oriented, obsessive compulsive catalogers in the world. The technicalities of MARC data elements are astounding, and while the system has worked more or less since libraries began implementing it decades ago (though most of them, I dare say, don't understand all of its components), it seems like they made the whole thing far more complicated than it needs to be.

So after many years of revisions and changes, you can imagine that the problem has naturally gotten quite a lot worse. Today it is generally agreed that MARC is no longer serving the library as well as it used to. It remains to be seen if the research being done in the realm of Linked Data and the Semantic Web will yield more straightforward results, but the current problem is how to transfer all the MARC encoded data into a new format. It isn't very often that I spend hours reading a short article and realize at the end of it that I have absolutely no idea what they are talking about, but that's how I felt today.

Weeds

Awful Library Books is a popular library blog which displays the results of postponing the dreaded library tasks of weeding and collection management. The site is run by two librarians who turn archaic books discovered on library shelves into humorous blog posts. Weeding may be a difficult process, but it is still an essential one for nearly all libraries. Deselection ensures that library users can find what they are looking for more easily: it improves browsing by eliminating unnecessary or outdated materials and frees up shelf space for new books. But despite this important role in the library circle of life, weeding is generally considered one of the least desirable tasks on a librarian's to-do list. Even the many euphemisms we use for weeding (terms such as thinning, deselection, deaccession, retirement, reverse selection, and book stock control) suggest it is an unpleasant duty (Johnson, p. 139). Some of the biggest conflicts relating to weeding can arise due to the emotional investment users, donors, and librarians themselves may have in materials undergoing reassessment; because of this, Johnson describes collection management as “more politically charged than collection development” (p. 138). This sensitivity makes it even more important for libraries to have a “disposition policy” to stand behind when weeding decisions are questioned or challenged (Johnson, p. 143).

Johnson's text may be a little outdated, but the fact remains that “shelf scanning” is still one of the most common weeding techniques. Quite basic and very time consuming, this title-by-title approach seems tremendously inefficient. It seems like libraries could benefit from a push to utilize more effective and technology driven methods. Though traditionally intuition has played a large role in library collection management, modern library science scholars are increasingly supporting the notion of “data-supported collection decisions” (Connaway et al, p. 372). However, a new system would still need to address the three fundamental weeding criteria (“Has it been used? Is it worn? Is it outdated?” Johnson, p. 141), which is an ambitious goal for an automated process. Circulation statistics are invaluable data, but do not represent items of the collection that have been used inside the library without being checked out. And the third question is tricky for a computer to answer because even a so-called “outdated book” can be useful to some types of research and as an artifact of its time. Despite these challenges I still believe that for efficiency's sake and in light of our ever expanding collections, librarians need to devise new ways to implement computer-assisted weeding. New techniques will also be important to help libraries deal with the increasing number of e-resources libraries maintain: just because an item is digital doesn't mean it isn't possibly taking up unnecessary space or in danger of being outdated.

One of the things that struck me while I was reading Johnson's chapter on collection management is that librarians involved in the weeding process need to be sure that they do not just think about the effects their work will have on current users, but increasingly they need to be mindful of future users too. Different libraries may have different weeding needs (and weeding may be a higher priority in some libraries, such as small, popular fiction-driven public libraries with limited space) but all libraries should take care not to let weeding be neglected, unpleasant though it may be.


Connaway, L. S., O‘Neill, E. T., & Prabha, C. (2006). Last copies: What‘s at risk? College & Research Libraries, 67(4), 370-379.

Johnson, P. (2004). Fundamentals of Collections Development and Management. Chicago: American Library Association.

Sleep-storming

If only this worked.

 Nope.

Daylight savings

This year daylight savings was planned (purposefully, I'm sure) to steal away one of my last hours of spring break. So cruel. When this time of year rolls around again, I always find myself wondering if daylight savings is really actually helping us any more. I know originally one of the primary reasons for its implementation was to provide farmers with more daylight, but farming is no longer one of the major industries in the US. Germany was the first country to use the daylight savings model, but is their 1916 attempt to conserve energy still effective today?

Here's a funny and very informative video about the history of daylight savings and what daylight savings looks like today. I think it's really interesting to consider the possibility that if daylight savings gives people more time, but they don't use that time to go outside and take advantage of the extended natural light, we might actually be using more electricity because of daylight savings. And then there are states like Hawaii and Arizona who don't subscribe to daylight savings simply because they don't need any extra sunlight. But for the rest of us, if daylight savings causes the world to use more rather than less energy, plus results in huge costs of lost productivity the week after we "spring forward," time-zone inconsistency headaches, and even higher heart attack and suicide rates, then why do we continue to deprive ourselves of sleep every year?

Slantways

No, this photo hasn't caught a wall of bookshelves in mid-collapse, and you don't have to worry about the boat going down either. It's just a fun bit of architecture and a creative (if maybe slightly impractical) way to display your wall-full of books.

Via TYWKIWDBI.

Literary Origami

As a kid I was quite the origami enthusiast, and while today I probably don't remember how to make much except the quintessential paper crane, I am still drawn to origami creations. The work of a Chicago artist (named Betsy) recently caught my eye; the artist finds used books and provides them with "a second life as a small work of art."

Through complementary folds, each book is transformed into a unique, sculptural form.

While perhaps not strictly "origami," these folded books capture the same graceful energy that emanates from traditional origami creations.

This piece (one of my favorites) reminds me of rolling ocean waves. I imagine the books are even more fascinating to examine in real life.

You can follow Betsy's work on the exploded library tumblr.