TILT-y Mail #20
Time and the art of libraries
You’d think we’d lost more than an hour. I’ve always enjoyed the bi-annual time changes as a chance to reflect on the weird social construction that is time and the decisions we’ve made as a society about it.
People who don’t know me personally may not know that my dad was an early “time traveler.” Before he worked with computers he worked for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) helping them set up satellite tracking stations all over the world. This was after satellites existed but before network time was a thing, so he’d carry a super-precise clock with him to set the time at those tracking stations. He carried letters of introduction to explain why he was flying with something that looked exactly like a bomb.
Nowadays, when the time changes, I go through his house, which my sister and I now own, and set the time on eight thermostats (zone heating for the win!) and remember him fondly. People otherwise really into this time-and-standards thing might like these books.
- Time Lord by Clark Blaise about the creation of what we now know as Standard Time. Winning phrase: “Till 1884, hardly anybody knew the time of day.”
- Whatever Happened to the Metric System? by John Bemelmans Marciano about how the world came to agree, more or less, on measurements. Adorable subtitle: “How America Kept Its Feet”
Cambridge (home of the SAO) has been on my mind lately since I am becoming obsessed with how not-open-to-the-public Harvard’s libraries are. Especially since I found that MIT has full public access to their main library and that seems to work out just fine for them. Look at these happy Yelp reviews! I stopped by MIT this weekend and had a great time doing some work there, overlooking the Charles River. Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library is open to the public. Half their funding came from Andrew Carnegie which may be the root of its openness. Here are the thirteen different categories of library users who may apply for Harvard Library privileges for a fee. Please join me in my amusement that a five dollar bill is considered part of the “necessary documentation” list for domestic partners to obtain library privileges.
In other Massachusetts library news, I will give a pass for the schmaltzy library headline for this sweet article about a retiring librarian: A storybook career ends for Ipswich librarian. Maureen Fay, the Children’s Librarian in Ipswich MA, is retiring after 22 years and says this about her time there.
I wanted to make sure that people felt welcome, that it was a haven, and that they had a friend there.
I love digital collections and online archives as much as the next person, but having a haven and a friend in the library are also important parts of libraries as institutions.
The new Librarian of Congress has been busy. In the past few weeks she has essentially fired the head of the Copyright Office and overseen the relaunch of LoC.gov, the landing page for the institution. Good moves, both.
Noted with no more comment than this.
TILT-Y MAIL is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s also available in your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.
