| a holiday? who knew? |
[Feb. 20th, 2007|12:52 am] |
Last night, we went up to the library so I could try some more reference interviews. I had a degree of success, getting some good observations out of the process and finding both a helpful and an unhelpful reference librarian. (In fairness, the latter was just some student worker manning the desk, not an actual librarian.)
I had some thoughts about the levels of knowledge available in the library versus that available on the internet. Part of our reading consists of research anecdotes which usually go as follows: I used a title search, and found two items. I used the classification system, and found ten items. I did a subject search, and found fifty items. I used a subject search to find a bibliography (in the Z section), and found five hundred items. It seems that I'm stuck at the first stage when I'm using the internet for research. It's far, far quicker and easier than driving out to the library, but it has its limits; the first step's very short, but that second step is quite a doozy.
The library contains a far greater depth of knowledge than, for instance, Wikipedia does. It's orders of magnitude larger; of course it does. This knowledge is squirreled away, and requires that second step, that higher level of effort to retrieve it--and since it's not available via a simple Google search, it requires knowledge of the often Byzantine intricacies of the cataloging and classification standards. (Which really do have a rhyme and a reason to them, honest they do.) From that perspective, my work with Wikipedia and with Project Gutenberg simply seeks to make this deep content as easily available as anything else Google touches; it's the same goal as Google Print has.
For instance, Did You Know that Laura Rosenfeld, who had rejected Maurycy Gottlieb's marriage proposal, died at eighty-seven while being deported to Auschwitz? Thus, a thread connects the greatest Jewish painter of the nineteenth century to the defining event of the Jewish people in the twentieth century. See, that's deep information, and something I got just flipping through Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art, which was the one book on the painter the library had. (Now that I know what to Google for, the information actually does appear on the internet, and that book is in Google Print, though locked down for copyright purposes. But the point stands.)
And speaking of Maurycy Gottlieb, that painting shows up in all sorts of places. I think it may be because it appears on Judaism, Jew, Yom Kippur and Jewish identity. This should really motivate me to scan some more things out of that Jewish Art book at some point.
Today is President's Day. I don't know if I've ever gotten President's Day off. Last year I was in a job that didn't have holidays, the year before that I was working at the call center, and before that I was in school. So I don't feel so bad that I got up and IM'd Jay, asking where everyone was. He inquired as to how long ago I'd fallen off the boat. Fair enough.
In light of my surprise day off, Carin and I went out to the movies, then to Borders. We saw Breach, which for a serious political thriller, was remarkably... funny. The small ways in which Hanssen would intimidate O'Neill, by walking him into hallway detritus or things like that, make Carin giggle. Still, I found his character inscrutable, confusing, mysterious. Even though the movie revolves around Hanssen, I couldn't get a good idea of exactly what made him tick. The Catholicism, the sexual deviance, the espionage--it just didn't all fit together. Which, I suppose, may have been the point.
I considered applying to be an FBI agent when I was initially looking for work, right out of school. They hire IT people, you know. The application explained that I had to be willing to, if necessary, chase people around and point guns at them, though that wouldn't be the main point of my job. I can't imagine having gotten that job; being a cop was never something I envisioned myself doing.
It's still really fucking cold out. Sometimes I think I've gotten used to the winter--usually when it's in the high twenties--and sometimes I'm wondering why I got the crazy idea to leave the apartment into my head.
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