Slow

It is so slow I almost wish Mrs. Ochman would call again. Almost.

New bridge arrives

An adventure in multidimensional space

Amidst requests for newspapers and for directions to the bathroom, a good, solid question appears every so often, and today I got a good one: books on topology manifold. HW owns one that fits the patron's needs perfectly:

An adventure in multidimensional space : the art and geometry of polygons, polyhedra, and polytopes / Koji Miyazaki ; translated by the author ; edited and revised by Henry Crapo.

Bridge on the move

Librado Romero/The New York Times - The new Willis Avenue Bridge will dock in New Jersey before going to the Harlem River.

Reference question on WW II

A patron came into Peninsula Library looking for information on two topics:

1. Jewish soldiers in the Finnish Army who participated in the siege of Leningrad

2. Ukranian soldiers who served in the German Army.

He knew about both, yet wanted printed information so that he could prove the points to someone. He said he served in the US Army and was at D-Day; when US soldiers captured Nazi soldiers at Normandy, it turned out that they were not speaking German, and that they were Ukranian. He also knew about Jewish Finnish soldiers, and related to me a story of Finnish Army Marshal Mannerheim: requested by a German officer to not have Jews serving alongside Germans, he told the German that said soldiers were Finnish, and that he would not be told who could serve in his Army.

I did find material on the web, including a link to an article in the Jewish Quarterly, and information at Yad Vashem.

Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim was a soldier and a politician, became president of Finland.

14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Ukrainian)

A list of books

This quiet, gray afternoon, a patron came in with quite a list of books; most were out, but she did find a handful to take with her; the others I put on hold. Quite an interesting selection:

Zeitoun, Dave Eggers (2009).

A ticket to the circus: a memoir. Norris Church Mailer (2010).

The house at Riverton, Kate Morton (2009).

Hannah's list, Debbie Macomber (2010).

Bombay time, Thrity Umrigar (2001).

Day after night, Anita Diamant (2009).

Welcome to Utopia: notes from a small town, Karen Valby (2010).

The cleanest race: how North Koreans see themselves and why it matters, B.R. Myers.

Somewhere inside: one sister's captivity in North Korea and the other's fight to bring her home, Laura Ling and Lisa Ling (2010).

In search of Nella Larsen

Hutchinson, George. (2006). In search of Nella Larsen: a biography of the color line. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Saw an advert for this book, and was fascinated enough to pick it off the shelf. Whilst I am already reading other books, I could not resist the urge to look at this one. Thus far, the Introduction, my judgment has been confirmed.

One item of particular interest: Larsen was a librarian.

Mack & Mabel

A patron called for this book, specifically one song in it: I won't send roses. Found it, set it aside for her, told her it'd be held at the Reference Desk.

Literally minutes later a young man came over and asked for the book. He is her brother; she is in Massachusetts, working in the theater, and needs this song.  He will go home, scan it, and attach the file to an email.

Yay for high technology.

O, how true

Unshelved gets it spot-on again, and again.

How often one wishes to say so.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö

A Peninsula Library patron told me he was looking for books on CD by these Swedish authors, back some weeks ago. He was in today, and thanked me profusely for enlightening him on accessing the OPAC online. Nice to get such feedback.

Plundering paradise

Seemed good; could not get into it.

War at the Wall Street journal

As light as a Journal article. Put it down.

Imperfectionists

A patron suggested this book. Looks interesting.

Under the Lemon Moon

Under the lemon moon / by Edith Hope Fine ; illustrated by René King Moreno.

A patron requested it.

Where?

An Orthodox Jewish woman came in looking to reserve a book; her address was on Church Street. Just a curiosity.

Chapter and verse on e-Bookstores

As books go digital, much of the focus has been on which gadgets offer the best approximation of old-fashioned paper and ink on a screen. But there's another choice that's just as important for readers to weigh before they make the leap to e-books: which e-bookstore to frequent. Reading devices like the iPad, Kindle and Nook will come and go, but you'll likely want your e-book collection to stick around. Yet unlike music, commercial e-books from the leading online stores come with restrictions that complicate your ability to move your collection from one device to the next. It's as if old-fashioned books were designed to fit on one particular style of bookshelves. What happens when you remodel?

Come and go? It is a valid point, at any rate.


The e-bookstores share in the blame. Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Barnes & Noble Inc. and Sony Corp. all want you to buy their own gadgets and to continue buying e-books from their stores. For example, purchases from Apple's new iBooks store can be read only on Apple's own iPad (and soon the iPhone). Even though Apple said it would support an industry standard format called ePub for iBooks, in practice your iBooks purchases remain locked on Apple's virtual bookshelf.


These vendors are in the business of selling hardware.


For now, the e-bookstore choice comes down to which compromises readers are willing to accept. Anybody who just wants a simple way to carry digital books around might be happy with an app-based approach. But readers intent on building an e-library may want to either invest in an ePub-based collection, or hold off until the industry figures out a better solution.


Many of the biggest e-book providers fall short of putting readers fully in charge of their own digital-book collections, but they have begun to unveil their own solutions for moving your e-books around.

Amazon targets real readers

By Geoffrey A. Fowler


Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said the company's strategy for competing with Apple Inc.'s iPad was to keep its own Kindle e-reader focused on reading. He also said a reflective color screen for the Kindle e-reader was a ways off.

A ways off?

Speaking at the company's annual shareholders meeting Tuesday in Seattle, Mr. Bezos said Amazon's approach to digital reading was focused on two fronts: devices and being an e-book retailer. For the device business, he said Amazon would focus on building a Kindle that appealed to serious readers, as opposed to devices like the iPad that try to serve several different purposes.


"There are always ways to do the job better if you are willing to focus in on one arena," Mr. Bezos said. He also conceded that "90% of households are not serious reading households."

10% of households are serious readers.

The comments were the CEO's first about the Kindle strategy in about six months, during which the landscape for e-book readers and e-bookstores has changed with the introduction of the iPad and a shift in the system for pricing e-books.

Follow the hyperlink

A fascinating article in the current issue of the New York Review of Books on three books about the Dreyfus Affair, by Robert Gildea. In the Contributors page, he is identified as Professor of Modern History at Oxford University. Indeed.

Four of his books are in the OPAC:

Barricades and borders : Europe 1800-1914. Oxford [Oxfordshire] ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1987.
Children of the Revolution : the French, 1799-1914. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2008.
France since 1945. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2002.
Marianne in chains : everyday life in the French heartland under the German occupation. New York: Henry Holt, 2003.

HW owns the 2nd and 4th; I'm going to take a look.

Kissinger dissertation

Came back from lunch to a question of finding Henry Kissinger's doctoral dissertation. Googling the term Kissinger Elena Kagan (I recalled some news item to that effect – which turned out to be a Daily Beast quiz Is Elena Kagan a Socialist and was about their senior theses) eventually led me to Henry Kissinger - Conservapedia. Therein I saw reference to his dissertation: "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22," a study praising how the conservative diplomats of the era built a stable and peaceful international system after the Napoleonic wars. 

The dissertation was published in 1957 by Houghton Mifflin [940.57 K].As the father, who had asked the question, said his son attends Yale, I went to Yale.edu, found a link to the library, entered the title, and got a record back:

A world restored; Metternich, Castlereagh and the problems of peace, 1812-22.

Author:	Kissinger, Henry, 1923-
Title:	A world restored; Metternich, Castlereagh and the problems of peace, 1812-22.
Published:	Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1957.
Description:	354 p. illus. 23 cm.
Location:	SML, Stacks, Yale Classification
Call Number:	Bi43 957K
Status:	Not Checked Out
Subjects (Library of Congress):	Metternich, Clemens Wenzel Lothar, Fürst von, 1773-1859.
	Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount, 1769-1822.
	Europe --Politics and government --1815-1848.
Database:	Yale University Library

The first link in searching on Google scholar was Kissinger: A Biography, by Walter Isaacson.

Wrote the kid an email, and closed the case (sorta).

Bookless library

Stanford University prepares for 'bookless library'


One chapter is closing — and another is opening — as Stanford University moves toward the creation of its first "bookless library." Box by box, decades of past scholarship are being packed up and emptied from two old libraries, Physics and Engineering, to make way for the future: a smaller but more efficient and largely electronic library that can accommodate the vast, expanding and interrelated literature of Physics, Computer Science and Engineering.

"The role of this new library is less to do with shelving and checking out books — and much more about research and discovery," said Andrew Herkovic, director of communications and development at Stanford Libraries.

Well put, indeed.

Libraries are the very heart of the research university, the center for scholarship. But the accumulation of information online is shifting their sense of identity. For 40 years, the metal shelves of the modest Physics and Engineering libraries were magnets to thousands of students and faculty, including Nobel Prize winners Douglas Osheroff, Robert Laughlin and Steven Chu, who now directs the U.S. Department of Energy. On the wall of the Physics Library are 16 original prints by photographer Ansel Adams, dedicated to pioneering physicist Russell Varian. A cardboard cutout of a cheerful Albert Einstein greets visitors. A playful collection of clocks — illustrating the randomness of time — decorate a wall.

The future library — on the second floor of "The Octagon," the centerpiece of the university's new science and engineering quad that opens later this year — will offer a stark contrast. It is only half the size of the current Engineering Library, but saves its space for people, not things. It features soft seating, "brainstorm islands," a digital bulletin board and group event space. There are few shelves and it will feature a self-checkout system.

It is developing a completely electronic reference desk, and there will be four Kindle 2 e-readers on site. Its online journal search tool, called xSearch, can scan 28 online databases, a grant directory and more than 12,000 scientific journals.

Several factors are driving the shift. Stanford is running out of room, restricted by an agreement with Santa Clara County that limits how much it can grow. Increasingly, the university seeks to preserve precious square footage. Adding to its pressures is the steady flow of books. Stanford buys 100,000 volumes a year — or 273 every day.

"Most of the libraries on campus are approaching saturation," Herkovic said. "For every book that comes in, we've got to find another book to send off." This fierce competition for space on campus means that many, perhaps most, books will be shipped 38 miles away to a Livermore storage facility.

Stanford's plight is not unique. Four miles off its Durham, N.C., campus, Duke University has a high-density storage facility, with shelves 30 feet high, to hold 15 million books. Harvard's repository is 35 miles away in the rural town of Southborough, Mass.

"You just get to the point where you're busting at the seams," said Lori Goetsch, president of the Association of College and Research Libraries and dean of libraries at Kansas State in Manhattan, Kan. — which stores its books more than 80 miles away, in Lawrence.

The sciences are the perfect place to test bookless libraries, librarians say. In math, online books tend to render formulas badly. And those in the humanities, arts and social sciences still embrace the serendipitous discoveries made while browsing. Johanna Drucker, UCLA professor of information studies, asks: "What version of a work should be digitized as representative? Leo Tolstoy's original Russian text? Or the Maude translation? Should we digitize the sanitized version of Mark Twain's classics, or the originals?"

That serendipity can also work in the sciences, no?

But technical information is readily and conveniently accessed online. "Physics was one of the first disciplines to really develop a strong electronic presence," Goetsch said. Science and engineering students agree, saying there is little nostalgia for paper.

"As far as research articles go, physics publication is already essentially entirely online," said physics graduate student Daniel Weissman. "And old journal editions from before the Internet era have largely been digitized, so you can get those articles online too. So that just leaves reference books — and yeah, you're starting to see more and more of those in online versions, too."


But the transition is tougher for Physics librarian Stella Ota, who is responsible for the fate of thousands of old books as she prepares for the June 9 closure. "It is challenging — I'll look at a book and say, 'This is important work, but not currently used,' " she said. So the 1937 edition of Webel's Technical Dictionary, German-English, is moving to Livermore. So is the huge and heavy Carnegie Atlas of Galaxies, with glossy photos. "Or perhaps it is worn, or damaged, or food was spilled," so it will be given away, she said. That is the fate of the 1970-79 Bibliography of Astronomy, as well as the decrepit Selected Physical Constants. A lucky few will be selected for the few shelves at the new library.


"When I look back, then there is a certain sadness for me. Any change is hard. And there are moments of joy, when I see bookplates of former faculty who owned and donated the book, and sometimes made notes on the side," Ota said. "But looking forward, I see an opportunity to create something new."