Is it REALLY about reading?

Max forwarded me this article entitled "Two-Make that Three cheers for the Chain Bookstores!"and here is a particularly interesting part:

Although there is some reality in the image of the chains as predators (ours is a capitalist economy, after all), it is not the whole truth or even, perhaps, the most important part. The emotional drive behind the anti-chain crusade is an understandable mistrust of big corporations allied with the knee-jerk snobbery that is never far from the surface in American cultural life. "I am a reader," the interior litany goes, "therefore I belong to a privileged minority; I patronize exclusive bookstores known only to me and my intellectual peers." With the chains, which target a wider public and make the process of book buying unthreatening to the relatively less educated, the exclusivity factor disappears.[...]

Wonderful though many of the independents were (and are)...the fact is that most of the good ones were clustered in the big cities, leaving a sad gap in America's smaller cities and suburbs—the places, in fact, where most of the American population actually lives. Books-A-Million's 202 stores, for instance, are almost all located in the Southeast. Borders has from the beginning targeted another underserved market, the suburbs, and as a result the quality of life in American suburbia has radically changed over the past decade. This is a point that the urban intelligentsia, which loves to characterize the suburbs as a cultural wasteland, seems to have missed, or at least to have taken no interest in.

I love a cozy bookstore as much as anyone, but if I really care about improving the reading habits of the general public, and the dissemination of knowledge as i so fervently claim to, doesn't this make sense?

Who Loves Lists?

Well, I guess I do. Who knew? Not only have I turned into a list maniac about Jordan and our Europe plans (you should see the spreadsheets), my school life has turned into listmania too! I have been working on the last big group project for my Information Retrieval class and I'll just tell you a little bit about what we have to do.

My group has to read 15 articles and create a searchable database to house them and records to represent them and vocabularies to search them by. The searchable part is what is difficult. We each read a few articles and then we had to create what are called pre-coordinated vocabularies and post-coordinated vocabularies for the concepts in the articles. The Vocabularies are the terms that you would search for in a library catalog or database. So we have to determine what the concepts of the article are and guess what terms would most likely be searched to put on our record. Each term or term phrase is associated with an article (or sometimes several articles).

The Pre-coordinated terms are the hardest I think because we have to combine several terms that represent the articles. Example: If the article were talking about how to train poodles we would create a subject heading string that looked like this "Dogs-training-poodles". But perhaps several more until we had adequately covered the article We have to anticipate the users search methods and make sure that the terms are enough the same (aggregation) and enough different (discrimination). (There may be many articles about Dogs, but as we start to descriminate the terms, training, poodles, it becomes more specific - make sense?)

Anyway, working as a group has also been challenging. One persons terms say "User Interfaces" and the other says "Patron Interfaces". They may mean exactly the same thing but trying to combine 5 people's different terms that use the same words for the same thing has been a tasky tootle. I volunteered for this part, and it has taken more time than I thought. It's not "hard", but it is time consuming.

All that being said, I have enjoyed them mental excersize of breaking information into its largest concepts on down to its smallest. There is something about disecting information that way that is soothing to me, like those little sand boxes that you rake through with a tiny fork. Call me crazy.

Nice German Man Says...

Nice German Patron: These kids with earrings and painted hair – Hitler wouldn’t have stood for it. I’m a survivor of Nazi Germany and Hitler was a better man than most of our politicians. He never lied about what he was doing. He was a poor uneducated fellow who never could have gotten into power by himself. It was the wealthy bankers who put him in power and they are responsible for what he did.

You know the bankers would take over this country, but they are afraid of the people who have guns. They are trying to destroy America, the constitution. Did you know that president Bush can tap your phone line if you say certain things? If you say “president bush” or “nazi” or “communism” a machine will record your conversation.

huh?

Not a Lie

Me: What can I help you with today?

Patron: You know, I used to be able to move things with my mind when I was a child, but I have kind of forgotten. Can you help me find some books that will help teach me again?

Me without even blinking: Oh sure, here is the call number for our books about telekenisis

I've really entered another dimension. What's the best is that it doesn't even phase me. I love this job.