Tom Roper's Weblog

Countless reasons why lists are bad

Library people, what do you want from a library organisation / body twitter account? Generally speaking? Would really like your views.

— Ned Potter (@ned_potter) February 4, 2015

It started as on Twitter. @nedpotter asked a question. What, did we think, a library organisation Twitter account should be like? I weighed in, to say,as did many others, that I thought it need to combine professionalism leavened with humanity. The next day, as an afterthought, I also said that I disliked the infantile lists, or listicles as they are sometimes known, which are tweeted from our professional association.

@ned_potter @sophiebiblio An afterthought: whoever can cure our professional body of puerile addiction to numbered lists would be my hero

— Tom Roper (@tomroper) February 5, 2015

Examples, should you need them, include, ‘Five books that took decades to get published, What we learned in 12 months, 4 Ways Copyright Law Actually [why that redundant actually?-TR] Controls Your Whole Digital Life, Top 10 Science Fiction Books & Movies, The top library and information stories from Jan 2015. 
Of course the @CILIPInfo twitter account is not the only offender. The internet is littered with the damned things and my Twitter feed and my e-mail inbox are crammed with messages from people convinced I am so stupid I can only grasp information in a numbered list. 
The conventional wisdom is that lists are attractive and work. Ned himself notes that his posts constructed as lists being significantly more visitors to his site. I believe that lists are written by lazy writers for lazy readers. I blame many things, not least among them PowerPoint, which has made bulleted list impossible to avoid, and lent them spurious authority.
I first noticed this some twenty-five years ago, when working for an organisation whose aim was to promote British culture. I wrote something for a newsletter we published. My manager, who had to give it her imprimatur, before the presses could roll, said it was fine, but it needed a bulleted list. I held my tongue, being on a temporary contract, but I knew perfectly well there was nothing in my writing that required to be presented to the reader as a bulleted list. Her wish for a bulleted list came, I believe, from a belief that lists were, in themselves, good, and that every piece of literature  that came out from her department had to have one, in order to show the world our modernity. 
Lists treat both reader and writer as infants, incapable of sustained thought. Marx, Darwin, Freud, Proust, Wittgenstein, any writer worth reading needs something more than a list. A professional association that represents those who organise, preserve and disseminate knowledge needs to reflect that in the ways it communicates with both its members and the world. 
Now I’m off to read 44 Medieval Beasts That Cannot Even Handle It Right Now, as recommended by Ned.  

Literally robust

I enjoyed reading John Sutherland's article in G2 today as I ate my lunchtime sandwich, How language is literally losing its meaning, occasioned by the admission to the Oxford English Dictionary of the abuse of the word literally to add vague emphasis to a statement. 

He also inveighs against the misuse of robust.  A few minutes later, back at my desk, I recieved notice of a new article. The first sentence of the abstract reads thus, This study utilizes an informatics tool to analyze a robust literature search service in an academic medical center library.

What on earth is a robust literature search service? Why would anyone offer one that wasn't?

The article in question is this:
Hinton EG, Oelschlegel S, Vaughn CJ, Lindsay JM, Hurst SM, Earl M.
Building and evaluating an informatics tool to facilitate analysis of a biomedical
literature search service in an academic medical center library.
Med Ref Serv Q. 2013;32(3):235-43

 

The Elysian Fields

As I drove from one training session to another through the coastal suburbs of West Sussex, I was startled to come upon some new houses being built, called the Elysian Fields. I wish I had taken a photograph, for no one will believe me. The houses themselves were in that nondescript modern idiom so widespread, walls in primary colours like a child's pairing of a house, flimsy, impermanent materials, sited thoughtlessly on a busy roundabout.

Apart from the vaingloriousness of the name, do the developers suppose that people will not remember that to inhabit the Elysian Fields, you had to be dead? Or, if they were to grasp the Parisian reference, might they not make unfavourable comparisons between a dirty road on the south coast of Sussex and the avenue down which the French armed forces parade on le quatorze juillet?

Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance

In this morning's Financial Times, they interview the new lord mayor of London, David Wooton. The interview is a clear piece of propaganda for the Corporation of London, but, for all that they probably paid a PR a great deal of money to come up with convincing and plausible statements, I think they should ask for their money back

He says he is “fine” with people’s right to protest and points out that the City has a richer history of political radicalism than commonly thought. “As I am often fond of saying, if you go over to the Bishopsgate Library, which is in the' City, you will find the biggest collection of leftwing literature in Europe. Every revolutionary in the western world in the last 100 years Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, Guevara ... they have all been [there].” ' http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d3c49166-11f3-11e1-9d4d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1eBr4H1iO

Where to start? Marx died in 1883 , so was definitely not in the City in the past hundred years. In any case, he was more of a Camden man. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, who he fails to mention, visited London, but were mostly to be found in what is now Islington or Hackney. As for Che Guevara's visits to London, they have not been recorded by any biographer to date.

 

 

Craig Raine and the Dewey Decimal classification

I am reading Craig Raine's Heartbreak at the moment, and enjoying it very much. It is very much a poet's novel, but none the worse for that.

However, I paused, shocked, when I reached page 30 of the hardback edition, in the second story of the novel, that of Gallagher, a poet and Frazer, a law professor. Raine writes, of their meeting in the Law Library at Charlottesville, 'One day, she dropped her armful of books when Frazer's face appeared from between LJ6: 88.00-280.00 and LJ7:280.01-400.00 LJ was Dewey for law journals.'  She drops her books because Frazer's face is badly burnt after a road accident.

I'm terribly sorry but the shelf marks Raine gives are nothing to do with Melvil Dewey and his Decimal Classification. They look to me like one of those home-made schemes, supplementary to a bibliographic classification, use for finding material on shelves that many libraries develop. Can anyone shed any light?

Here, for example, is a screenshot from the University of Virginia's online catalogue, Virgo, which shows no call number anything like the version Raine gives:

Ian McMillan banned from speaking in a Sheffield library

It's not just Mubarak's police state that tries to silence writers.  Ian McMillan,  presenter of the Verb on Radio 3, has been banned from running a creative writing workshop at Upperthorpe library in Sheffield, the SINTO blog reports. There's no justification given on Sheffield council's website. 

It is curious that this should happen in Sheffield , the city which hosted, with full support from the council, the founding conference of the Library Campaign in the 1980s.

This is extraordinarily stupid. Councillors and senior officers are reported to fear that he may make 'political comments'. I should hope he would.  If Sheffield councillors were to bother to go into a library, instead of spending their time trying to close them, they would find Dewey class 320 devoted to a great deal of political debate, to say nothing of the 330s, fiction and poetry sections, and so on. An important  reasons why the movement to save libraries has gathered such momentum is that libraries have such an important place in our lives, including our political lives,  arsenals of the democratic culture," as Sidney Ditzion described them.  

Fortunately, Sheffield library users and workers are taking this in their stride and are organising a mass shush-in at 11 am on Saturday 5th February, part of the national day of action to save libraries. One very much hopes that the council will rescind the ban on Ian.

I give the last word to Ian himself, 'Libraries are a vital and irreplaceable part of a cultured and civilised society, and one of the few public places left where you don't have to pay to get in...'

In agriculture, learn from Dazhai

When I was a young thing in revolutionary China there were two slogans, in agriculture, learn from Dazhai and in industry, learn from Daqing. The capitalist version of this, with which librarians have been bombarded throughout the thirty-two years I've practiced the art, is that we should learn from the great wisdom and successes of the private sector.

That this is manifest rubbish is obvious to anyone who's been awake for the past few years, but we seem to be seeing a renewed propaganda effort by those who think that finance capital can do no wrong. Nowhere more so than in the area of customer service.

When I was made redundant recently my colleagues, touchingly and with less than twenty-four hours notice, clubbed together and bought me a leaving present, a Waterstones gift card. Now Waterstones are one of those bookshops that we in libraries are so often exhorted to emulate. I was delighted by my ex-fellow workers' thoughfulness. I ordered two books I have coveted for some time, Julian Bell's Mirror of the World and Gabriel Josipovici's Everything Passes. The Bell came quickly, and is a great book; the Josipovici, though easily obtainable and in print, seemed to cause them problems. I checked my account online from time to time, and it was still shown as on order. Today I had an e-mail from them. It said: 'We are writing to you to inform you that your order contained an item(s) that we are unable to deliver. This is because our supplier has been unable to fulfil the order and/or the item(s) are unavailable to us.' This is poorly phrased, but let that pass. What could I do to find something else to use the present my colleagues had kindly given me. The message further said that, 'Please note that if you paid for your order using a gift card, Waterstone's Loyalty Card or e-wallet credit, the amounts used will be refunded to your e-wallet (giftcard/e-wallet credit) or Waterstone's Card. However, when I checked my account on Waterstones, the amount had not been credited to my account. I looked around the website for advice on what to do, but there was none, At this point I must have lost my presence of mind, for I then decided to ring them. After a bewildering series of options, repeated invitations to look at the web site I'd just been to to find the answer to my question, and a fifteen minute wait, I spoke to a human. He was perfectly pleasant, but said that they could not credit my account for 72 hours (what? the colleagues who bought me the gift card had to hand their money over then and there) and that they could not give me a refund. Having decided on the Josipovici, there seemed to me no reason why, if they could not provide it, they could not give me the money to go and buy it elsewhere. He promised he would ask his supervisor who was 'on the phone' and ring or e-mail me back within a half-hour. I have heard nothing.

Plants can't read

'The propagation of this plant without a licence is forbidden'; so reads the label on a rose I bought today for a relative's 90th birthday tomorrow. I don't believe she reads this blog so I think I am safe in disclosing this.

Could there be a better example of the crazy lengths to which capitalism will go than to try to regulate a plant's propagation? Apart from the fact that the plant can't read, so won't know that it is in breach of the grower's intellectual property rights as it does what comes naturally, flowering and fruiting to reproduce itself, would they make criminals of every gardener who knows how to cut and graft, and goes forth on expeditions to other gardens with secateurs, rooting powder and plastic bags?

The Kübler-Ross model: the five stages of grief

Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you my interpretation of the five stages of grief, from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying.

Denial

Anger

Bargaining

Depression

Acceptance

Les apéros géants

I buy Le Monde on Fridays, ostensibly for the book reviews, but something else often catches my eye. Today it was a story entitled Facebook saoule la préfectorale, about the trend for French young people to organise street parties on Facebook at which they get drunk in a manner Le Monde haughtily describes as plutôt anglo-saxonne.

Thousands have attended such parties in Nantes, Rennes, Caen, Brest and last night in the main square of Clermont-Ferrand. In some of these cities, the police have tried to ban the public consumption of alcohol, in others they have been more tolerant. The next city for one of these parties is Paris herself, on 23 May.

When British licensing laws were changed in 2003 politicians expressed the pious hope that the British would import the more leisurely and civilised attitude to alcohol of southern Europe. Alas,  British binge drinking seems to be our chief export.