Shelf Life

The other day, someone mentioned the movie Desk Set to me. I hadn’t seen it but the plot intrigued me: a showdown between corporate librarians at a large TV network (could it be modeled after NBC?) and the new computer planned by an MIT whiz kid (played by Spencer Tracy) to replace them. The head librarian, played by Katharine Hepburn of anorexic slimness, is a one-woman dynamo, instantly able to recall a plethora of facts and figures, belt down her champagne with the best of them, and solve any brain teaser thrown her way. In a word, she’s a wonder.

In the film, the computer malfunctions, the librarians win, and Spencer Tracy gets the girl (or Hepburn gets her guy)–entertainment all around. If you’ve never seen the movie, well, you should.
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So goes the line in William Carlos William’s poem January Morning. He goes on

For what good is it to me
if you can’t understand it?
But you got to try hard—

According to the analysis at poetry.org, Williams is admitting in these lines that poetry (and dare I say, communication) is plain old hard. That the poet depends on the effort of the reader; that somehow, you as a reader must “complete” what the poet has begun. And it strikes me that the same could be said of blogging and the attendant 2.0 phenom. There are so many cool and unusual applications; analysis and comments that I’m left dazzled, overwhelmed with the concomitant fear that I’m missing the point. Is this just so much navel gazing or am I not trying hard enough?

Prescript. I work at this funky place in Newton, MA where they do academic research. It’s not a university, but it’s not your garden variety non-profit either. A lot of what they do is make connections –ones that other scholars haven’t previously. Some of them are off the wall. Some are actually pretty prescient. In any case, there’s a whole lot of research’n going on. Nine times out of ten, people who should know better are just trawling when it comes to information access. So I wrote the following post to address what I saw as a basic problem in approach. It’s largely fallen on deaf ears–what is it about academic types? Why do so many of them think they know how to use all these tools? Am I just too honest in admitting there are so many strategies they can make your head spin like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist? Anyway, this has become one of my cause célèbre and I’ve reproduced here for my pleasure and perhaps the poor soul who stumbles in here.

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The story you didn’t want to read, in a place you can’t find it…

One, Two, Three..

First let me say that being a librarian did change my life. No, no, I didn’t suddenly go zinging around cataloging or stamping everything in sight. But it did take me to places I might not have otherwise gone and consider things I might not have otherwise considered. Anyway, what I want to write about isn’t me and I’m not even sure the people for whom I’m writing would use the phrase “magical place,” but I am sure they will tell you that the Open Windows library in San Miguel Dueñas, Guatemala is a fun place to be.

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