On page A17, "Chicago State's brave new library" made news with a series of crates and robotic bins instead of old-fashioned stacks. Users request a book online, and the appropriate bin is delivered to the librarian, who can quickly grab the right book. Elapsed time: 3 minutes. (This is impressive, seeing as how the Library of Congress used a similar system, and my waiting times were usually closer to an hour.)
Library and Information Sciences Dean Lawrence McCrank (McCrank?!) extols the new technology:
"We discovered that the average student took 30 minutes to find a book. Books would be misplaced or not filed correctly," McCrank said. "That's a lot of time that cuts into how long students can spend analyzing the material, focusing on work, or continuing to find even more research on a particular subject."
But I am sympathetic to critics "who note that these storage systems eliminate the tradition of students accidentally discovering new and sometimes better material while roaming through the stacks." And while that didn't happen to me that often, I did enjoy roaming down halls and coming across bizarre titles on the way to my book.
And on the other side of the page, not only is NYU getting my friend Jen this fall, but the university's Tamiment Library has recently received the US Communist Party archives. The process of cataloging all these goodies may take up to five years. (The print edition has some pictures that aren't online, of rallies and posters.)
And one more article for today: the New York Times discovers fair trade in their midst. And I discovered that I apparently have hipster cred. Or, as they put it:
Fair trade, like more familiar labels such as organic, cruelty-free and sustainable, is another in a series of ethical claims to appear on products — a kind of hipster seal of approval. The fair trade ethic is spreading eastward from the West Coast, where it has been promoted by well-financed activist campaigns and where progressive politics are more intertwined with youth culture.This was a little bit of a surprise to me, b/c while plenty of cool kids do the fair trade thing, most of Fair Trade LA's members got involved through religious groups who focused on social justice. Upon a second reading, I'm feeling more generous, but on the first pass the article seemed pretty patronizing. But then again, it was in Fashion & Style.
1 comment:
On the Chicago State Library thing, I find it disturbing in that a big part of the joy of libraries (and bookstores) is the serendipity of stumbling on something that you weren't looking for. As an undergrad, when I'd find something in the card catalog, going to the shelves, I'd look at what was on the shelves around the book that I was after in hopes of finding something I had no idea existed. Even with it's recommendation system, Amazon is far worse for discovering new books than any visit to even the smallest mall bookstore. Even when access to the stacks is restricted so that only the librarians can retrieve volumes (as is the case at Chicago's Newberry Library), that human interaction can cause the librarians to point out other potentially interesting resources (which was something that I, in fact, encountered while I was doing some research there some years back).
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