¡Bibliotecaria!

Haven't posted in a long time...

2006-06-05T10:06:00.000-04:00

Categories: blog, motherhood, usability, web+design

I while ago I set a personal goal to post here once a week, but to never post when i didn't really have anything to write about.

I guess I've blown both goals, as my last post was over a month ago, and now I'm writing a content-free entry.

But, it occurred to me that I have stuff to write about--problem is, I've been busy working on the stuff, so I haven't had those free moments when it occurs to me that i should write about the stuff.

So soon enough, I'll come back and write about:

my library's attempt at a small-scale usability focus group that fell flat.

my library's revisions of our web site despite lack of usability data: how to decide what the user needs/wants when we have little data to look at besides our own erratic observations.

integrating Searchpath, the library skills tutorial, into the college's course management system.

observations on planning maternity leave in a library

And I might comment on the post I just read that reminded me that I haven't written here in a while but should have: The User Is Not Broken: A meme masquerading as a manifesto (from Free Range Librarian)

fanfic day on BoingBoing

2006-04-26T11:42:00.000-04:00

Categories: fanfic, blog

Yesterday, the blog BoingBoing (a daily read for me) had not one, but TWO posts about fan fiction. The first was nothing startling, but was eloquently put. The post links to Teresa Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor Books, who said:

In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it. (link to original)

And then later in the day, someone else chimed in to report that California was named after some 16th century fanfic:

California is named after the island of California, home of Queen Calafia, her beautiful black amazons and their man-eating griffins, as all detailed in Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo's Las Sergas de Esplandian, which was the Sword of Shanarra of its day, a highly unauthorized but popular sequel to the much more highly respected Amadis de Gaul, more The Lord of the Rings of its day. (link to original)

They both stemmed out of the same discussion going on over at the blog Making Light, prompted by a post titled "Fanfic: force of Nature." I might have a new blog feed I need to add to my Bloglines!

there are stupid questions

2006-04-21T15:03:00.000-04:00

Categories: higher-ed, info-lit

It's a sunny Friday afternoon, and I'm catching up on the pile of Chronicle of Higher Educations that have accumulated in my office the past few weeks. (I guess I've been pretty busy?)

The April 7, 2006 Chronicle Review includes a one-page think piece by Maureen Donohue-Smith called "There Is Such a Thing as a Stupid Question." The title kinda grabs you, of course, and I read it because I was curious if the title was facetious or not. It's not.

She makes the point that, indeed, in the classroom, there are stupid questions, like when a student interrupts a lecture to ask how the upcoming paper is supposed to be (when it's printed on the syllabus). But then she gets into the necessity for faculty to teach students how to ask good questions.

This reminded me of the interview for my current job, when I was asked to define information literacy, and I responded (mainly flying by the seat of my pants), it's knowing how to ask good questions. I think I made decent sense of that idea then, but it wasn't something I'd thought out too terribly much yet.

But I think Donohue-Smith and I were getting at the same thing: that students who know how to ask good questions are good learners. They know enough to know what they need to know. They enough about the discipline to know what kinds of questions should be asked.

She gives some concrete suggestions for how faculty can teach students to form good questions, such as:

Require students to ask questions in class. Research on students' attention spans suggests pausing every 15 or 20 minutes to allow students to organize their notes and summarize important points. During those pauses, ask groups of three or four students to think of several significant questions about what they're learning. Have them share the questions with the rest of the class, ask why they consider them important, and ask other students to modify the questions.

This suggestion helps teachers move beyond the simple imperative to ask for questions and wait for a response. It guides students to ask questions, rather than expecting that students already know how to ask questions.

Note: the Chronicle online requires a subscription for access to most of its content, but I *think* this article is one of the free ones.

Sonic Youth follow-up

2006-04-20T09:08:00.000-04:00

Categories: SonicYouth, music, library, government

Cool. I got an email on Tuesday from a reference librarian at the LOC's Recorded Sound Reference Center (how cool would that job be?!) thanking me for my email, and noting that the description had been corrected later that day (in other words, I was not the first to see the error.). Daydream Nation is now described as SY's "breakthrough" album, thus avoiding the whole numbering issue altogether. Yay.

Original Post
Corrected press release for the 2005 National Recording Registry list.

Sonic Youth in the National Recording Registry!

2006-04-13T10:05:00.000-04:00

Categories: SonicYouth, music, library, government, doh

In 2000, Congress passed the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000, "A bill to establish the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress to maintain and preserve sound recordings and collections of sound recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and for other purposes" (Public Law 106-474; H.R.4846)

Every year, the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry announces a list of 50 recordings to be added to this collection. This year, Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation was added (as were “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” from Gil Scott-Heron, We’re Only in It for the Money from Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, the incredible “Anthology of American Folk Music”, and the song “John the Revelator” from the Golden Gate Quartet. What a list.). I'm totally psyched. My favorite band honored as a national treasure by the national library.

Then I read through the Registry's 2005 list and saw a big whopping error in their description of the album. And not a nitpicking, indie music geek kind of thing either (though I would have written a very different description meself, but that's beside the point). They call Daydream Nation the 3rd album from the band, when by the most conservative counts (excluding EP's, bootlegs, and Ciccone Youth), it's their 6th. Isn't this the kind of hard facts that a library's metadata should be able to handle quite easily?

So the geek in me couldn't let it go, and I actually emailed the damn Registry people to tell them about their mistake. Eeek.

Sonic Youth Discography (see Daydream Nation as album #7)
AllMusic.Com > Sonic Youth > Discography (see DN as #6)

paperbacks, digital records, and re-de-classified documents

2006-03-03T10:06:00.000-05:00

Categories: government, openaccess, archive, paperback

Today's New York Times headlines (which I get emailed to me everyday. I get the feed too, but I've been in the habit of reading the Times like this for too long.) included THREE articles of interest to librarians.

The National Archivist has finally taken a stand on the Bush administration's/intelligence agencies' reclassification of long-ago declassified documents. Initially reported a couple weeks ago, the story broke when a number of historians found that documents they had photocopied in the past were no longer available. The reason these documents needed to be re-classified is of course not public information, but since the documents were once available, the silliness of classifying some of this stuff is easy to see:

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that [historian] Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.

Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program.

Today's report noted that Allen Weinstein (the chief archivist for the U.S.) announced a moratorium on reclassifying documents until an audit is performed.

"Archivist Urges U.S. to Reopen Classified Files" by Scott Shane. New York Times 3/3/06
"U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review" by Scott Shane. New York Times 2/21/06

And then there was the article on the ongoing process of developing a protocol to ensure that current digital records will be readable in the future:

With government records, reports and documents increasingly being created and stored in digital form, there is a software threat to electronic access to government information and archives. The problem is that public information can be locked in proprietary software whose document formats become obsolete or cannot be read by people using software from another company.

In other words, when the gov't agencies create documents that are only preserved in Microsoft's proprietary software (a Word document, for example), they may not be accessible in the future if Microsoft changes or discontinues the software, or the access may be limited to those who can afford the software. So an alliance of "30 companies, trade groups, academic institutions and professional organizations" announced that they will begin developing the "OpenDocument Format," an open-source format for gov docs (and any other docs) that will be readable across a variety of software. Apparently, the Open XML format that Microsoft is pushing isn't sufficient, but the article doesn't get into why. A story to follow...

"Push to Create Standards for Documents" by Steve Lohr. New York Times 3/3/06

AND...

The editorial I enjoyed not just because I'm a librarian but mainly because I have a large, highly dilapidated paperback collection. Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote a lovely elegy for a much-loved, much-annotated collection of classics printed on cheap pulp and bound with brittle glue, noting how indipensible the editions are, with their grad-school notes pencilled in. I have an edition of Absalom, Absalom! held together with multiple layers of tape and the pressure the two books on either side of it on the shelf. I too, can use individual pages as bookmarks, but I don't foresee getting rid of the copy where I fell in love with Faulkner, where I jotted my (brilliant, of course) comments in the margins whilst writing my undergraduate thesis.

"Yellowing Paper, Stiffening Glue and the Sudden Demise of a Library" by Verlyn Klinkenborg. New York Times 3/3/06

Boston Globe editorialist concerned about librarians

2006-02-11T16:28:00.000-05:00

Categories: librarian, patriot-act, dewey

Okay, so Richard L. Cravatts is not concerned about our welfare, he's concerned about librarians "protecting terrorists." And he does so with textbook cases of logical fallacies.

Writing about the Newton, MA librarian who had the gall to require a warrent before the FBI could seize a public library computer, he quotes a conservative think-tank writer as a legal authority:

As Heather Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, recently observed, "Like it or not, once you've disclosed information to someone else, the Constitution no longer protects it. This diffuse-it-and-lose-it rule applies to library borrowing and Web surfing as well, however much librarians may claim otherwise."

and then he makes the excellent point that we librarians are a bunch of Dewey-Decimal-breathing know-nothings anyway:

More to the point, why are librarians, whose professional training concentrates on mastering the use of the Dewey Decimal System, making any decisions that affect law enforcement? By whose authority and with what knowledge are they defining and granting constitutional rights to their patrons? Where have they received training in emergency response, domestic security, and thwarting terrorist threats?

Funny, I think my library science education consisted of one 3-hour class period on DDC and at least 4 or 5 times that much on patron privacy issues, security, intellecutal freedom, and dealing with problem patrons like Cravatts (tee hee).

He concludes that this was a black-and-white, librarian-wrong/FBI-right case, and that the constitutional issues at hand are unambiguous. They are not. Perhaps the head librarian should have let the FBI search the computer if an imminent danger was at hand, but perhaps that would have opened the door to even more egregious tramplings of our constitutional rights. I don't know, but I do know that this Erika Tarlin's letter to the editor in response made me feel a hell of lot better:

In any event, should [Cravatt] himself ever need to be catalogued, I've got a spot for him on the shelf at 621.945. That would be the 620s for Engineering, 621.9 for Tools and Fabricating Equipment, and, specifically, 621.945 for Boring Tools.

More eek! stories about wikipedia

2006-02-02T15:50:00.000-05:00

Categories: government, wiki, reference

So it seems that it's not just non-elected folks who use Wikipedia to trash other people's characters. According to this news story at cnet, Wikipedia has traced a number of malicious comments about politicians to other politicians' IP addresses. In other words, they (or someone on their staff) did it in their offices and thought it was untraceable. Duh. The article points out the irony that these guys are "the same holier-than-thou political climbers tasked with writing laws telling the rest of the country how to behave." More troubling for me is that these are also the legislators that pass laws like the DMCA and other techy laws that they clearly could not understand if they didn't think their IP address was traceable.

new FirstGov search is way cool

2006-01-31T13:41:00.000-05:00

Categories: search, government, web

FirstGov, the portal to gub'ment information on the web, got its search engine a facelift. Now it looks like Google and acts like Clusty (not a bad combo). It's just a simple search box interface, but its search results are really super. (that use of a superlative, combined with "super cool" in my title have officially proven my nerdhood.)

I entered a search for "impeachment" (if only everyone in Congress was doing that search these days. Sigh.), and the results were interesting: on the left, you get clusters (ala Clusty, the metasearch engine also built by Vivismo, the folks who got the contract for this project) of topics (e.g., Representatives, House; Committee, History 109th; Impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton, etc.) which can be exploded if your topic actually matches those more closely. In the main window, you get the top results from their database of over 40 million govt web pages, and if there's one there you like (say, from the Library of Congress), you can limit your search to just that site with one click. Plus, at the top of the search results, if there's a FAQ that matches your search term, it's there. In my search, it's "Where can I find general information on the federal process of impeachment?"

Considering how difficult it can be to track down the right government document when you need it, this new search design is incredible. More functional than Google Unclesam, and much more intuitive than the overwhelming home page for FirstGov.

Plus, this is probably the sole example in the last 6 years of government information being made MORE accessible. Hopefully my search for "impeachment" didn't just get me on the no-fly list.

I first read about this at Search Engine Watch. Then I saw it mentioned by Librarian in Black. Now it's my turn.

USA Patriot Act call-in day

2006-01-19T16:02:00.000-05:00

Categories: congress, senator, patriot-act

The ALA is encouraging everyone to contact their representatives and senators about the Patriot Act extension, and to do it on the same day:

National PATRIOT Act Call-In Day - January 25, 2006.
On Wednesday, January 25th, please call both your Senators and your Representative and ask them to support the Senate language reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act. The Senate bill better protects Americans' and library patrons' civil liberties -- without sacrificing any security.

When you call, ask Members of Congress to fight for:

The inclusion of language in Section 215 requiring a statement of fact linking the person whose records are sought to a terrorism investigation.
The inclusion of language allowing a Section 215 recipient to pose a meaningful challenge to a FISA Court order.

The inclusion of language allowing a Section 505 recipient to pose a meaningful challenge to National Security Letter.

They've put together a web site with talking points and a list of reps' and senators' phone numbers. Or call the Capitol Switchboard number at 202-224-3121. Or visit the House or the Senate on the web.

Are you a librarian? quiz

2006-01-12T12:34:00.000-05:00

Categories: librarian, quiz

I just took the "Are You A Librarian?" quiz and scored a 65%. My excuse is that, hey, I'm young & new to the profession. A lot of the questions were about library history, and I was guessing on all but the most obvious ones. I wish they told me the correct answers (or even which questions I got right!) so i can become a *real* librarian.

My results:
Assistant Librarian: You scored 65% on knowledge of librarianship.

You seem to be a librarian, but you are not as knowledgeable as your more devoted colleagues in some of the library lore, trivia, technical details and social knowledge that can give depth and perspective to ones professional identity; but your practical knowledge of your job may be quite excellent.

Teaching RSS Feeds Workshop

2006-01-10T10:06:00.000-05:00

Categories: instruction, library, rss

In about 45 minutes, I'm going to be teaching a class on RSS feeds to faculty and staff at my college library. Last night, I imagined that there would be one or two people showing up for the class. It is still winter break, so the number of people on campus is limited. Plus, I have no idea how many people know what RSS is, or why they might want to know.

But when I came into work this morning, I saw the list of people who have signed up, and there are nine people. Hopefully there will be a few drop-ins too. This is really awesome.

It's funny that I'm teaching a class on a technology that I only really started to understand about 6 months ago. But it's promising - both for our library, which is trying to bridge the gap between us and the faculty, and for me, since I might become a better-known face on campus. Of course that might make it more difficult for me to surrupticiously run into the campus center for lunch and hide out with my ipod on. But then again, my ipod is yet again broken so I guess it's time to get more social on campus anyway.

FBI keeping files on activist groups again

2005-12-20T09:14:00.000-05:00

Categories: government, privacy, activism, newspaper

The New York Times reported today that, as they did under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI is watching activist groups (all of which, from the report, appear to be leftist, of course). Their counterterrorist agents are keeping tabs on Greenpeace and the Catholic Workers, among many others. The ACLU just released some documents, requested under the Freedom of Information Act. In the article "F.B.I. Watched Activist Groups, New Files Show" (12/20/05), Eric Lichtblau reports:

Counterterrorism agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have conducted numerous surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations that involved, at least indirectly, groups active in causes as diverse as the environment, animal cruelty and poverty relief, newly disclosed agency records show.

F.B.I. officials said Monday that their investigators had no interest in monitoring political or social activities and that any investigations that touched on advocacy groups were driven by evidence of criminal or violent activity at public protests and in other settings....

But the documents, coming after the Bush administration's confirmation that President Bush had authorized some spying without warrants in fighting terrorism, prompted charges from civil rights advocates that the government had improperly blurred the line between terrorism and acts of civil disobedience and lawful protest.

It's seeming less likely that that U-Mass student was making up his story about DHS agents questioning him about an ILL request for a communist book. But with each new report of another example of the Bush administration overstepping its bounds and violating the constitutional rights of its citizens, I keep expecting huge outcries, talk of impeachment, and so on. And I don't hear it. Yet. I've written my rep in congress. Have you?

(link to the New York Times article. Should be there for a couple weeks, but free registration required, or go here.)

a hoax? or is that just what THE MAN wants you to think?

2005-12-19T21:09:00.000-05:00

Categories: patriot-act, commies, library, hoax

So there's been debate about whether the student at U-Mass Dartmouth actually did get a visit from Homeland Security.

Maybe he was trying to bring attention to what it means to live in country where the government snoops into your reading materials. But if this is a stunt, it seems to actually undermine the intent--it gives skeptics reason to say that opposition to the Patriot Act is hysteria. Yeesh. The plot thickens.

(link to my previous post about this incident)
(link to Boing Boing's coverage/debate)
(link to librarian.net)

Update (12/24/05): 'Twas a hoax. The Boston Globe reports.

del.icio.us offline!

2005-12-19T12:29:00.000-05:00

Categories: socialsoftware, web2.0, offline

One of the problems with relying on web sites for data storage is when they go offline. I'd been trying to access my del.icio.us account yesterday and today, and finally learned why i couldn't:

Our datacenter has had full power outage, and we are now recovering from the aftermath. About half of the machines are still down and we are working on bringing them back as soon as possible. To keep things moving, I've turned off RSS and some other features so that posting will still work and so that you will still have access to your bookmarks. (link to the del.icio.us blog)

Eek. A funny thing to come across just after reading about the web 2.0 applications of the year, where putting one's data online is touted as the way of the future. Maybe I'm not so ready for that.

Plus, now that del.icio.us has been bought up by Yahoo (which has another social bookmarking tool already, My Web2.0), how do i know how long del.icio.us will last? I'd think that its popularity ensure some stability, but who knows.

I'm grumbly today because I think I'm getting sick. Eck.

Update (later in the day): Del.icio.us is back up and running, but now Bloglines is down. Oh, the humanity.

why "radical militant librarians" are up in arms

2005-12-18T19:09:00.000-05:00

Categories: patriot-act, library, commies

This is why it's a good thing the Senate didn't renew the Patriot Act:

A Massachussetts paper is reporting that a college student was visited by Department of Homeland Security agents in October after requesting a copy of Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung -- better known as "The Little Red Book" -- from a university library...

(from Boing Boing).
WTF?! Homeland Security is worried about college students reading about communism?! At least they're only using their powers to catch the real terrorists.

An appropriate reaction to a college student using ILL to get a primary text for his research would be a team of librarians showing up at his door to give him a garland. Now that would be cool.

(link to news story here)

Uncyclopedia

2005-12-07T09:18:00.000-05:00

Categories: wiki, reference, funny

Amid all the recent wringing of hands over Wikipedia's reliability, a new contender in the collaboratively-produced encyclopedia field has emerged: Uncyclopedia.

Self-described as "the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," the Uncyclopedia attempts to undo Wikipedia's dominance in the cataloging of un-facts, and it does so with a premium* sense of absurdity. Most entries include apt Oscar Wilde quotes which aren't Oscar Wilde quotes.

My favorite entry so far is Your Mom. There is also an entry on Librarians, though this entry is basically a rehashing of librarian stereotypes (sigh. guess i have to start editing the entry, huh?).

I first read about it at Library Stuff, one of my new favorite blogs, btw.

*I'm taken with the word "premium" lately. Mostly as a result of reading Everything is Illuminated.

What Google Should Roll Out Next: A Privacy Upgrade - New York Times

2005-11-28T09:33:00.000-05:00

Categories: privacy, search, news

Yikes, was I the only one who didn't know that Google stores users' searches with personally identifying information? The New York Times just published an editorial urging Google to adopt stricter privacy controls, an article that brought this to my attention (why I didn't learn this from library sources is beyond me! Perhaps library listservs are too busy bashing Google for stealing our databases' thunder to pay attention to some real substantial reasons to be upset about what they're doing...):

Google has been aggressive about collecting information about its users' activities online. It stores their search data, possibly forever, and puts "cookies" on their computers that make it possible to track those searches in a personally identifiable way - cookies that do not expire until 2038...

The government can gain access to Google's data storehouse simply by presenting a valid warrant or subpoena. Under the Patriot Act, Google may not be able to tell users when it hands over their searches or e-mail messages. If the federal government announced plans to directly collect the sort of data Google does, there would be an uproar - in fact there was in 2003, when the Pentagon announced its Total Information Awareness program, which was quickly shut down.

Further evidence that The Onion is sometimes closer to the truth than non-satire newspapers.

Adblock from Firefox

2005-11-16T14:43:00.000-05:00

Categories: firefox, tools,

Wow, this is almost surreal. I've installed the AdBlock extension in Firefox on my machine at work, and I'm now looking at ad-heavy sites like Yahoo Mail, New York Times, and The Onion, and they're full of white space. This extension, with a little training, blocks out ads from pages based on their file names (so if you add doubleclick.com to your list of blocking criteria, no ads from there show up on your screen). It's awesome. It's almost eerie, though. I've become so accustomed to my Yahoo Mail blinking and flashing at me, it's strange for it to be so still, so calm.

I think I could get used to this.

The DaVinci Institute's The Future of Libraries

2005-11-11T11:19:00.000-05:00

Categories: library, culture, my-thesis

A new contribution to the growing body of literature about the future of libraries, this report takes the novel approach of avoiding doom-saying. While I'm a little skeptical about the prediction that our culture will transition to a completely verbal one by 2050 (i.e., non-literate within my lifetime?)...

Trend #6 - Over time we will be transitioning to a verbal society

...Dr William Crossman, Founder/Director of the CompSpeak 2050 Institute for the Study of Talking Computers and Oral Cultures, predicts that as we say goodbye to keyboards we will begin the transition to a verbal society. He also predicts that by 2050 literacy will be dead.

While the accuracy of his dates and the wholesale transition from literacy to a verbal society may be debatable, there will undoubtedly be a strong trend towards verbal information. Computers will become more human-like with personalities, traits, and other characteristics that will give us the sense of being in a room with other humans.

...many of the trends discussed here fall in line with the idea I advanced in my thesis--that libraries should re-establish their place in the community as cultural centers. Here they're advocating for physical spaces in the library for cultural activities, while I argued for an online space for such activities (namely, but not limited to, fanfic).

The notion of becoming a cultural center is an expansive role for the future library. It will not only serve as an information resource, but much more, with the exact mission and goals evolving and changing over time.

A culture-based library is one that taps into the spirit of the community, assessing priorities and providing resources to support the things deemed most important.

The DaVinci Institute's The Future of Libraries

posting to professional listservs

2005-11-10T10:59:00.000-05:00

Categories: professional-development, community

Whew. I've finally posted something to a professional listserv. I had avoided it thus far, fearing saying something stupid to a national audience of my peers, but I finally got with the program and said something (and i don't think it's too stupid.)

And the cool part was getting two responses directly to me complimenting me on the post, one from the person who I was responding to. Hooray for me!

Information Literacy Instruction Listserv (requires login to view Archives)

Book I'm reading now: Can't Stop, Won't Stop

2005-11-09T15:30:00.000-05:00

Categories: books, hiphop, music

I'm going to try to do this regularly from here on out. How long till this declaration mocks me and my lack of follow-through?

I'm reading Jeff Chang's Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York : St. Martin's Press, 2005) right now. I'm nearly done with it--despite it's fatness, it's a quick read.

The subject matter is really interesting, especially at the beginning of the book. The first chapter sets the scene with a harrowing description of Bronx in the early 1970's, victim of "urban renewal" projects and escape-Manhattan highways. (It actually helped me understand what i had seen when my family went to Yankees games in the mid-80's!) He makes the connection between Jamaican sound systems, early Bronx DJ's like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, and the beginnings of hip hop.

The early sections are fascinating--things I learned (off the top of my head):
* pioneering DJ's like Herc, Flash, and others weren't the first to cut records because they didn't see what they did (live turntabling) as something that should be recorded, so the Sugar Hill Gang's Rapper's Delight was a total studio production, from the song (written by the record producer) to the group (assembled from a trio of kids who's done some rapping but weren't a performing group).
* there was an interesting (but often tense) relationship between the early hip-hop scene and the early punk/downtown scene. Graffiti artists got downtown gallery shows, the Clash had Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five open for them in 1981 (can you imagine that? They weren't well received.).
* Break dancing was so named because they danced to the song breaks. I think I always thought it was because you risked breaking something to spin around on your head, but the showy stuff developed out of the street dancing rituals that allowed gang rivals to blow off steam without outright fighting. Whoa.

Chang does a great job of contextualizing hip hop--in presenting what was going on in the Bronx, in South Central, when their hip hop scenes broke out. I didn't know a huge, city-wide gang truce was being brokered at the very same time the L.A. Rodney King riots were breaking out. Obviously, being, what, 15 when it happened, and living in a very white, suburban area, I wasn't privy to the inside scoop on the news out of Compton and Watts, but this completely changed my perception of LA in the early 90's and Bronx in the mid/late 1970's.

This past spring, I read Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, which was a fictional first-person account of a white kid growing up in a black Brooklyn neighborhood. Reading these two books together (or within the year, I guess) makes for a whole new perspective on a time period and a place I missed out on--kind of. It's weird to think of this whole other world that existed just two hours away from Shimerville, PA, and during my lifetime, that seems so foreign, and yet not so.

Anyway, I'm rambling (but this is my blog, and i can ramble if i wanna!).

The major weakness Can't Stop, Won't Stop has is poor editing. Chang gets carried away with using lingo and casual references, but he often doesn't explain the lingo, or if he does, does so poorly or way too late in the book (for example, he refers the Five Percenters over and over, throughout the first half of the book, but never explains who they were until about halfway through. It didn't take that long to describe them, but it was silly to assume that most of his readers would know who they were). A glossary would have been super-helpful.

The book is also messy--it's rambling at times, going back and forth in time and theme, and at times reads like a collection of separately written articles clumsily mashed together to create a book. It's a good 546 page book, but it could have been an incredible 350 page book. It loses steam about halfway through--the pace slows down, it gets repetitive, and it loses focus. I'm not sure if I'm going to finish it or not--I just read a chapter about the founding of The Source, which I really don't care about--and I might just return it to the library unfinished (though i think I'm at least 450 pages into it).

Buffy Halloween musical shut down :(

2005-10-20T16:03:00.000-04:00

Categories: buffy, my-thesis, copyright, fanfic

Just read that Fox has sent cease and desist letters to the drama troupe that was to put the BTVS "Once More With Feeling" episode on stage. Even Joss had given the fan-based group his blessing.

Saw it first at BoingBoing, which pointed to LawGeek, who rather eloquently argued that "An artist on their own can make a work of art, but only fans can make it mean something in our society. Fans take art and translate it into culture. They invest in it, obsess over it, share it, and spread it to others. They turn it from an isolated item into a means of communication."

This extends the argument Henry Jenkins makes in Theorizing Fandom that fandom is in itself an act of creation (creating new meanings, new subtexts, new alternate realities). That current copyright law doesn't recognize this is troubling, especially when the law rears its ugly head as it's done in San Francisco.

In my masters thesis, I explored a number of the issues fandom has been facing since it moved online; copyright law is the one that hangs most frighteningly over the heads of fanfic writers, because it can turn a fun, fannish labor of love into a legal problem. It's sad to see that threat coming to pass, especially in a fandom that has the support of the actual creator of the work in question! When you consider that copyright law was designed to encourage artistic expression and to protect creators' rights, this situation becomes even more absurd--it's not the creator who is protesting this alleged violation, it's the network that aired the show.

So i end my rant--my first blog posting since I got back from Spain in May. I'll try to get back in the habit of writing more often.

leaving Pamplona

2005-04-26T10:07:00.000-04:00

Categories: spain, library

Wow, I can't believe it, but we're leaving Pamplona tomorrow. Tom and I are heading to Madrid tomorrow, Granada Thursday, Salobreño (Saturday...the beach!), and then back to Madrid to fly to Philly one week from today!

It's funny trying predict what I'll miss about Spain and about Pamplona. Probably things that annoyed me while we were here. We'll see...

I gave my presentation to the library staff yesterday...a little nerve-wracking, but I think I did okay. At least everyone here was kind enough to say i did okay. I was later told that I only made up two words, which is really not too bad.

Okay, back to work...lots of loose ends to finish up here before I depart!

Casa rural, photos, and scripting errors, oh my!

2005-04-18T16:32:00.000-04:00

Categories: spain, travel, basque

Hola,

Last week I wrote a nice long post, and when I went to post it, something glitched and it got deleted. I have no idea what all I had written, but here's a synopsis of what's been going on lately:

Our friend Rich visited for a week, and we went out A LOT (a good thing, except for me being the only one who had to get up the next morning!).

We visited Barcelona two weekends ago (with Rich), which was beautiful but quite crowded with tourists (like us, but in our way).

I finally posted my photos at Yahoo Photos. There is a TON there, but I tried to organize them into folders.

My internship is going well, and I feel semi-competent with Spanish!

Perhaps most exciting, I have a job interview scheduled for when I get back to the States!

This weekend, Tom's parents flew in to Bilbao and we rented a casa rural near Extelar. The town is a beautiful, quaint Basque village about 45 minutes north of Pamplona. The house was about 6km up up up some rather rough roads, and we were renting a 3 bedroom section of the house. It's an old, gorgeous house on a pony farm! It rained most of the time, but we had a fire going and we made pizzas, so all was very well. We took a little trip into France (which is about 7-8km from Extelar, along a very windy road), and visited Sare (a beautiful, quaint French Basque village) and St. Jean du Luc (which we've seen before...it's along the beach). We're back in Pamplona now, and Tom's folks are here till Thursday. Who knows what we'll be up to...

I can't beleive that next week we'll be moving out of our apartment and heading off to Andalucía! We'll be there for about 4-5 days, then we fly out of Madrid in about 2 weeks. Now that the language barrier is less a problem, I'm ready to stay longer...Spain's a lot more fun when you're not in a constant state of frustration!