TILT #57 — the fallacy of the lunar library
It’s a tired joke that people get a lot of their actual news from non-news television, but I learned about the plans for a library on the moon while watching SNL. I think they call it a Lunar Library™ because it’s alliterative. It’s basically a lofty name for some etched nickel microfiche shot into space.
Call me skeptical, but there’s a lot of fancy talk about making information available on other planets for “billions of years” — curated information like Wikipedia and Gutenberg including their heavily Western slants — when as a society we still struggle to keep our public libraries open.
“‘Cool.’ said kids in Chicago” is the punchline to this five second bit, as it should be.
A few really good presentations I’ve seen recently.
I met John Buckmaster when I was in Edmonton last year. He gave a great talk there on disability and inclusive practice in libraries. He gave this talk at the Alberta Library Conference: Disable is a Verb Using the Social Model of Disability to Improve Library Service with concrete advice libraries can use. And I could read it because the Library Toolshed is a glorious collaborative thing that library systems in Canada are doing to share training and conference materials.
Laura Quilter is a Copyright & Information Policy Librarian at UMass Amherst and writes about Wikipedia. If we’re thinking about making Wikipedia the only encyclopedia on Mars, we might want to think about its systemic biases and where they come from. Systemic Bias on Wikipedia: What it looks like, and how to deal with it and Mapping Participation Gaps in Wikipedia are both worth your time.
I have taken her advice to heart especially concerning how to make your articles “bullet proof.” Here’s a link to the page Quilter is showing on her slide showing all the female scientists who don’t have articles about them in Wikipedia.
I mentioned Beall’s List of Predatory Journals vanishing back in TILT #30. It is now back, under new management over at Weebly. This NYTimes article Many Academics Are Eager to Publish in Worthless Journals talks about the weird ecosystem that allows these journals to continue to exist.
Copyright Corner:
- How copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston’s new book from the public about how legal limbo keeps works by underrepresented writers “lost”
- New White Paper on E-book Watermarking (free by request) — many publishers are moving away from DRM and towards watermarking as a way to protect their revenue stream via this sort of “socal DRM” explains Bill Rosenblatt
Some fun odds and ends:
- St. Paul Public Library’s new “Wash and Learn” program is a great idea but not entirely new as this image from the seventies (program of St. Thomas Public Library in Ontario) shows.
- The inaugural reader-in-residence at the state library of New South Wales, Caroline Baum, talks about her assignation. Read at least down to the “We also have hair” line from the librarian.
- I did the second annual “Brag Deck” for Vermont libraries for our annual conference on Friday. It’s just images, on an auto-playing slideshow that plays in the background when the AV setup isn’t being used. Simple to assemble and quite popular.
Today in Librarian Tabs is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s available in more-accessible format your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.
