The technology of orgasm: “hysteria,” the vibrator, and women’s sexual satisfaction

Rachel P. Maines; The Johns Hopkins University Press 1998

WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder

I really wanted to title this “universal orgasmic mutuality” [see below] but I figure this post is already going to draw too much of the wrong traffic to my blog. ::sigh::

This book was far more interesting than I ever imagined. It was quite the page turner. It describes the 2000-year plus history of the medicalization of normal female sexuality, the androcentric model of sex that supports this, the highly lucrative medical service of manual massage for “hysteric” female patients, the drive for efficiency in this procedure that led to the invention of the vibrator and related technologies, and how all this ties together in where we are today.

The story it tells, and the facts it is based on, are illuminating, intriguing, sometimes titillating, and frequently sad and maddening.

Let me record up front that the author does not lay this state of affairs entirely at the feet of men. In the last chapter she writes:

“The penetration myth is not a conspiracy perpetuated by men; women want to believe in the ideal of universal orgasmic mutuality in coitus” (115).

I am not so sure that men or, more specifically, the male medical establishment, ought be let off so easy, though.

Bottom line: I found this book fascinating and highly recommend it to pretty much anyone. OK, anyone past the age of puberty and with a modicum of maturity.

My one complaint is that it would have been nice to know where the images were when several pages away. That is, in addition to image number provide the page number as the images were never on the pages they were mentioned on and, frequently, were several or more pages away.

The rest will pretty much be some quotes to whet your appetite. I have also included all of the section headings so you can get a better feel for the content.

Contents:

• Preface
• 1 The Job Nobody Wanted
• 2 Female Sexuality as Hysterical Pathology
• 3 “My God, What Does She Want?”
• 4 “Inviting the Juices Downward”
• 5 Revising the Androcentric Model

1 The Job Nobody Wanted

“Descriptions of this treatment [manual stimulation] appear in the Hippocratic corpus, the works of Celsus in the first century A.D., those of Aretaeus, Soranus, and Galen in the second century, …. Given the ubiquity of these descriptions in the medical literature, it is surprising that the character and purpose of these treatments for hysteria and related disorders have received little attention from historians” (1-2)

While “hysteria” is no longer defined as a disease, it was “from at least the fourth century B.C. until American Psychiatric Association dropped the term in 1952, …. This purported disease and its sister ailments displayed a symptomatology consistent with the normal functioning of female sexuality, for which relief, not surprisingly, was obtained through orgasm, either through intercourse in the marriage bed or by means of massage on the physician’s table” (2).

The author uses the vibrator and its predecessors to examine three themes:

• androcentric definitions of sexuality and the construction of ideal female sexuality to fit them
• reduction of female sexual behavior outside the androcentric standard to disease paradigms requiring treatment
• means by which physicians legitimated and justified the clinical production of orgasm in women as treatment for these disorders (2)

“Massage to orgasm of female patients was a staple of medical practice among some (but certainly not all) Western physicians from the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s, and mechanizing this task significantly increased the number of patients a doctor could treat in a working day” (3).

“The demand for treatment had two sources: the proscription on female masturbation as unchaste and possibly unhealthful, and the failure of androcentrically defined sexuality to produce orgasm regularly in women” (3).

“There is no evidence that male physicians enjoyed providing pelvic massage treatments. On the contrary, this male elite sought every opportunity to substitute other devices for their fingers, such as the attentions of a husband, the hands of a midwife, or the business end of some tireless and impersonal mechanism. This last, the capital-labor substitution option, reduced the time it took physicians to produce results from up to an hour to about ten minutes” (4).

“Hysterical women represented a large and lucrative market for physicians. These patients neither recovered nor died of their condition but continued to require regular treatment” (4). [See below for economic impact of women's health in 1870s.]

§ The Androcentric Model of Sexuality

“The androcentric definition of sex as an activity recognizes three essential steps: preparation for penetration (“foreplay”), penetration, and male orgasm. Sexual activity that does not involve at least the last two has not been popularly or medically (and for that matter legally) regarded as “the real thing”" (5).

>50% (perhaps >70%) of women do not reach orgasm via penetration alone. “This majority of women have traditionally been defined as abnormal or “frigid,” somehow derelict in their duty to reinforce the androcentric model of satisfactory sex” (5).

“In the development of Western medical thought been thought on the subject of sexuality, it has been thought both reasonable and necessary to the social support of the male ego either that female orgasm be treated as a by-product of male orgasm, or that its existence or significance be denied entirely” (6).

§ Hysteria as a Disease Paradigm

§ The Evolution of the Technology

“In 1869 and 1872 an American physician, George Taylor, patented steam-powered massage and vibratory apparatus” (14)

The first electromechanical vibrator internationally marketed, a British model by Weiss, was designed by physician Joseph Mortimer Granville. Battery powered, it was patented in the early 1880s. (15)

“By 1900 a wide-range of vibratory apparatus available to physicians,” (15) and “Mary L.H. Arnold Snow, writing for a readership of physicians in 1904, discusses in some detail” about twenty-four different vibrators, “including musical vibro-massage, counterweighted types, tissue oscillators, vibratory forks, hand- or foot-powered massage devices, simple concussors and muscle beaters, vibrates (vibrating wire apparatus), combination cautery and pneumatic equipment with vibratory massage attachments, and vibrators powered by air pressure, water turbines, gas engines, batteries and street current through lamp-socket plugs” (16-17).

“In the first two decades of this century [20th], the vibrator began to be marketed as a home appliance through advertising in such periodicals as Needlecraft, Home Needlework Journal, Modern Women, Hearst’s, McClure’s, Woman’s Home Companion, and Modern Priscilla. The device was marketed mainly to women as a health and relaxation aid, in ambiguous phrases such as “all the pleasures of youth .. will throb within you”" (19).

In the late 1920s vibrators “disappeared both from doctor’s offices and from the respectable household press.” Was this due to “greater understanding of women’s sexuality by physicians” or the appearance of vibrators in erotic films? They reemerged in the 60s as an “openly marketed” sex aid. “Its efficiency in producing orgasm in women became an explicit selling point in the consumer market” (20).

2 Female Sexuality as Hysterical Pathology

§ Hysteria in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

“Hysteria was a set of symptoms that varied greatly between individuals (and their physicians), including but not limited to fainting (syncope), edema or hyperemia (congestion caused by fluid retention, either localized or general), nervousness, insomnia, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, muscle spasms, shortness of breath, loss of appetite for food or for sex with the approved male partner, and sometimes a tendency to cause trouble for others, particularly members of the patient’s immediate family. The disorder was thought to be lack of sufficient sexual intercourse, deficiency of sexual gratification, or both (23).

“Hysteria appears in the medical corpus as early as 2000 B.C. in Egypt, but it was not until the time of Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C. that the Western clinical definition of the disorder began to take shape” (23).

§ Hysteria in Renaissance Medicine

§ The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

“Russell Thacher Trall, …, who was associated mainly with the hydropathic school, wrote in 1873 that women, including but not of course limited to hysterics, were an economic godsend to the profession of medicine, claiming that “more than three fourths of all the practice of the profession are devoted to the treatment of diseases peculiar to women” and that of the annual estimated aggregate income of United States physicians of more than $200 million, “three-fourths of this sum—one hundred and fifty millions—our physicians must thank frail woman for.” This amount “equaled just under half of the entire federal budget” (38).

§ The Freudian Revolution and Its Aftermath

3 “My God, What Does She Want?”

§ Physicians and the Female Orgasm

§ Masturbation

§ “Frigidity” and Anorgasmia

§ Female Orgasm in the Post-Freudian World

§ What Ought to Be, and What We’d Like to Be

4 “Inviting the Juices Downward”

§ Consumer Purchase of Vibrators After 1900

§ Hydropathy and Hydrotherapy

§ Electrotherapeutics

§ Mechanical Massagers and Vibrators

§ Instrumental Prestige in the Vibratory Operating Room

§ Consumer Purchase of Vibrators After 1900

5 Revising the Androcentric Model

§ Orgasmic Treatment in the Practice of Western Medicine

“The history of physical therapies for hysteroneurasthenic disorders … tell us several things about Western physicians.”:

• normal conditions can be medicalized, especially in women
• doctors both create and become invested in dominant social and medical paradigms
• disease paradigms go in and out of fashion (111)

In Western medical practice, “[t]here is a systematic effort to subsume the knowledge that the clitoris, not the vagina, is the seat of greatest sexual feeling in most women into the androcentric model and to avoid one-to-one heterosexual confrontation over orgasmic mutuality by shifting the dispute onto medical ground” (112).

§ The Androcentric Model in Heterosexual Relationships

“Many questions can and should be raised about the persistence of Western belief that women ought to reach orgasm during heterosexual coitus” (115).

“The penetration myth is not a conspiracy perpetuated by men; women want to believe in the ideal of universal orgasmic mutuality in coitus” (115).

“In our own culture there have been, and remain, powerful means of negatively reinforcing women’s demand for orgasmic mutuality” (117). [See also the rest of the paragraph!]

“Despite the systematic perpetuation of ignorance and misunderstanding—by women as well as men—most heterosexual men have looked to the female orgasm to reinforce their self-respect as sexual beings” (118).

§ The Vibrator as Technology and Totem

My conclusion:

Bottom line, this is an excellent book. It does a first-rate job detailing a bizarre, multi-millenial history of the medicalization of the normal functioning of women’s sexuality. Sadly, we have not really left it behind despite physicians no longer manually massaging women to orgasm, while denying that was what it was, and despite the APA dropping “hysteria” as a psychiatric condition.

There still exists far too much ignorance and misunderstanding about normal sexual functioning and far too many men measure their sexual (and general) self-worth on bringing their partner to orgasm via the androcentric model.

Read this book. It will give you a lot to think about.

Yesterday I finished reading Walt Crawford’s “Zeitgeist: hypePad” article in the newest Cites & Insights.

Walt did a fine job of summarizing a lot of blowhards and a few sane persons. But. The further along I got the stronger my apprehension got. Was Walt going to notice something I was noticing or was he buying into a certain rhetoric and, if so, why?

Here’s the thing. Many people, people on both ends of the iPad hype spectrum, are claiming that it is purely a content consumption device and not a content creation device. And that, my friends, is pure horseshit.

While there are some serious issues with how proprietary the device is, the limits of the iTunes/app store model for acquiring software you need/want, and the rampant DRM, and these certainly deserve some critical ink spent on them, this in no way makes the device a “consumption only” platform.

I am not sure what constitutes content creation for the technophiles and Wired editors and the likes but I believe that Walt knows better. Almost no one is producing fancy, professional-quality, full-color glossy Web magazines. We are writing blog posts, interacting in Facebook, conversing in friendfeed, posting pictures to Flickr and other image sites, writing documents and reports that end up on the Web, and so on.

The iPad will not only allow but enable one to do the vast majority of these things! Sure, you won’t be able to run Dreamweaver or QuarkExpress or … but these are NOT the only things that generate “content” [By the way, let me go on record here as to how much I dislike this usage of "content."].

According to the iPad features page it includes Safari, Mail, Notes, Keynote, Pages and Numbers, along with, of course, access to the App Store. While most of us probably do more consuming with our web browsers we also do creative work. This critique may be minor and it may not be very creative but I am not consuming it and I am creating it in a browser. I could have written this on my Touch.

The other programs are even more heavily toward the creation side of this supposed dichotomy. There are also apps for painting and drawing and many other forms of creative activity. Famous artists have even used their iPhones to create and share art.

Walt does say that “the iPad will succeed or fail largely on its own merits. While those merits may not meet my needs—and while I do believe you’re better off thinking of the iPad as an appliance, not another kind of computer, and that the closed model is dangerous—there’s no doubt its merits are real” (p. 30). Yes, I think the appliance label is useful. I certainly do not think of my Touch as a computer except in a generic sense.  I certainly do not confuse it with my MacBook and what it can do.

I am intrigued by the iPad but I highly doubt I will be buying one any time soon. I do my best not to buy 1st generation hardware/software from anyone. And I have serious concerns with the many other issues around the iLine of products—closed systems, DRM, etc. I also do not know where the iPad would fit into my way of being.

Walt finds the closed model dangerous and so do I; especially if it proliferates and closed systems become our only choices. But I also find lots of room for the closed appliance model of computing. There are an awful lot of people who could benefit from a device like this who are simply overwhelmed with a standard computer and all that that entails. Of course, most of the people Walt cited—the pundits anyway—probably cannot begin to relate to that thought.

So while the kinds of content that can be created on an iPad are reduced from what one could do with a full general-purpose computing device and appropriate software and input/output devices, it is not non-existent. To call an iPad—in general, irrespective of any particular use cases—a content consumption only (or primarily) device does more to show us what the commentor thinks they value over the truth of the matter.

For instance, Walt cites Lauren Pressley’s thinking (p. 16) “that things on the web are shifting from mass creation to primarily consumption (that is, “regular folks” are mostly tweeting, not contributing long-form content) with organizations creating more of the content ….” But since about Day 2 of the Internet that has probably been the case with organizations creating most of the (long-form) content.

Also, since when is Twittering not content creation? There seems to be a real discrepancy between what people consider not only “content” but “creation.” Until those nuances are pulled apart it is nonsensical to make such statements and to apply such labels to our devices.

In the end, I do think that devices like the iPad are restrictive in the way of content creation. But then so is my $2000 laptop. My laptop cannot help me paint a picture in oils on a real canvas, nor can it help me build a fancy gingerbread house. Now just hold on! If you want to tell me that I can find all kinds of good info on the web on how to paint, where to buy supplies, etc. that is only consumption towards a creative goal (under the current model). If you tell me I can find designs for gingerbread houses on the web then same thing. And I could do all of those with an iPad.

One thing to notice here is the complex issue of just when and how does consumption lead to/change into creation. There are no acts of immaculate conception in art/creation. It all comes from some influence; an influence that was consumed at some point, whether one knows it or not.

There are also larger issues of just who is doing content creation to share on their computers anyway. And of what we are calling content creation. Sure, precede it with long-form content, if you like. But you cannot separate long-form content until other kinds until you have delineated what content is, period.

In summary, while there are many issues surrounding the closed appliance model of the iPad to call it a primarily content consumption device, all the while ignoring what is or is not consumption vs. creation, ignoring other use cases than ones own, ignoring who is creating vs. primarily consuming, is simply to show ones biases.

In the end, once/if all these ideas are teased apart we might still label the iPad and similar devices as primarily consumption devices. I am perfectly fine with that, because then we will know what we are actually claiming.

Do I expect any of this to happen? At least on a broad-scale? Nope. No hope whatsoever. Academics will pull some of it apart, if they aren’t already, but little will filter down into the mainstream any time soon.

Unfortunately, this is an area that is rife with hype and I do not see it changing any time soon. But I intend to stay alert for this kind of framing—if one can call something framing which lacks much structure—and rhetoric so I can better assess the tools my society makes available.

Disclaimer: I am not an Apple fanboy although I am an Apple user. I have a 30GB photo iPod, a Touch, and a MacBook. I also have a 12″ PowerBook collecting dust until I possibly get around to totally reinstalling the OS and software.

But ask me about my 1st computer purchase years ago only to have Apple kill the Apple II line once they decided everyone had to have a Mac. My next and 3rd and 4th and 5th and … computers were all DOS/Wintel-based, for years after.

I think that, for now, Apple computers offer a good bargain; quality hardware and software for a reasonable price. Is there a premium? Sure there is. But I do not mind paying for quality in my important purchases. But, although far less than when I had Windows machines, I still yet at my computing devices on occasion, just as I frequently curse Steve Jobs and his (peoples’) design decisions that baffle me.

Ready for writing/research.

Originally uploaded by broken thoughts

Decided to clean up my writing/working areas before I buckle down and attempt to write my bibliographic essay.

Sure. It was a diversion to keep from real work. But this is a diversion that should pay huge dividends. I can actually see most of the desktop and I have room to spread things around again.

Yesterday, I also bought a laptop desk to use in my recliner. Hopefully that’ll help some so I’m not restricted to this uncomfortable chair in front of the computers.

Flickr set here.

Sunday, Oct 21

Who Is Tagging Information? – Edward C. Lomax (Georgia State U), Hsin-liang “Oliver” Chen (U of MO-Columbia), and June Abbas (SUNY-Buffalo).

Lomax spoke about Social Tagging in K-12 Education; Chen spoke about Social Tagging and Newspapers; Abbas spoke about Tagging and Libraries and Museums.

The panel was down two members so that had some impact on the program.

I’m not going to get into details as I took few notes but despite June’s best efforts this panel was only the first of several that really left me depressed about this portion of my field. I later had a conversation with June (and have had a few on other occasions) and I know she gets it. But what the heck is most everyone else’s problem(s)?

There are fundamental issues with tagging (as with anything else) in libraries and, in particular, as a means of access and retrieval. But these can be dealt with. Anyone who reads me regularly well knows that I am quick to play devil’s advocate and ask the tough questions while all the cool kids are espousing how great something is. But good God! Can we please move forward with some real research in this area? I most certainly do not mean to disparage June’s or Margaret Kipp’s (and a very few others) here. They are doing good work, but can we please support them?

My conference roommate was also quite disturbed by the state of research in this area and it was having a serious impact on his view of his first ASIS&T. When he questioned me as to why this was it sounded like he was putting much of the blame on the researchers. But this is not the case at all. Tag researchers in no way control the systems (OPAC, tag systems,etc.) that (may) implement these tools. Let’s hope PennTags is doing something useful with their data; even better would be if they’ll share that data with outside researchers.

Another big issue in this equation is that large-scale, easily implementable tag systems are fairly new. Certainly far newer than the 10 years of research in tagging.

Here are only some of the disparate reasons why my roommate and I are so depressed about this:

Much is based on audience reaction(s): complete misunderstanding of tagging and/or how it even works [researchers have to give demonstrations of how tagging works in a session before presenting their research or the audience will be completely lost]; what about Internet predators?; do tags need to be vetted?; what about bad words?; are we just going to throw out privacy?; we can’t have the public adding things to our records, ….

In some cases it is the presenters themselves who are not really prepared to investigate such a multiply complex topic that they have happened to find interesting. One of the presenters in this session offered Amazon.com as the gold standard of tagging sites. Excuse me? There were several other non-starters offered up by two of the panelists but perhaps in the sake of mental health I have repressed them.

Yes, there are serious issues to be addressed in this area. I do not mean to make light of them. But if we cannot move further quickly now that we have systems that will allow us to do some real and useful research then we are failing ourselves and, more importantly, users.

Can someone please provide funding and access to a quality system to folks like June Abbas and Margaret Kipp?

Theoretical/Methodological Exploration (Papers)

Megan A. Winget (UTA) – “A Methodology and Model for Studying Boundary Objects, Annotations and Collaborative Practices: Musicians and Musical Scores.”

Jason M. Turner (Air Force Inst. of Tech.) – “Towards a Social Affordances Perspective of Media Capabilities and Interface Design.”

Miles Efron (UTA) – “What Crossword Puzzles Teach Us About Information.”

Upfront admission, I went to this session primarily based on the crossword paper. Boy, was I ever surprised!

I may not be a musician but Winget’s presentation was fascinating! I look forward to reading the whole thing. She looked at score annotations across amateur, semi-pro, and professional musicians in chamber group and orchestra settings. Annotations are almost always fascinating and this area was especially so.

As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the few must reads from the sessions I attended. Get your hands on the proceedings and read this one.

Efron on crossword puzzles was, for me, a big disappointment. As far as I’m concerned his title is a complete misnomer and a big unanswered and unaddressed question.

He took a mathematical approach to determining the difficulty level of the weekday New York Times crossword puzzles. As you may know, the difficulty level of the NYT puzzle (generally) increases from Monday to Saturday. The puzzle editor is the one to determine which puzzles are printed on which days. This work is an attempt to formalize that determination.

On one hand, it is kind of interesting and it works reasonably well. He also made sure to restrict his claims to being able to determine the difficulty level of a puzzle as to which day of the week it should be offered on and not as to the difficulty level of a specific puzzle for any individual puzzle solver. Kudos for that! Nonetheless, it really doesn’t seem to teach us anything about information and, more importantly, this sort of mathematical approach to word play is an anathema to me and many other word lovers. Color me mostly disappointed in this one.

Dinner at The King and I (Thai) with Karen, Wei and Gina (fellow UIUC students).

Welcome Reception/SIG Rush.

Monday, 22 Oct

Assuring Quality in the Information Professions – Nancy Roderer (moderator), Ann Prentiss (for José-Marie Griffiths), Charles Henry (CLIR), and Libby Trudell (Dialog)

Prentiss presented some early results from a 2006 IMLS study for Griffiths who could not be there at the last moment. Due to this we couldn’t get much beyond the slide content and it is early results. There may be something interesting to come out of this study, and I hope there will be, but not so much yet.

Henry as the President of CLIR had some interesting things to say.

Context: higher education, specifically the profound changes in HE, and the continual redefinement of libraries in HE

1 Rise of cyberinfrastructure – 3 major reports recently on the sciences, social sciences, and humanities are all in agreement

• technical layer
• software
• new kinds of expertise [these 3 are the definition of cyberinfrastructure]

leads to new research methods and new intellectual strategies [CLIR is more interested in these, along with the incredible collaboration that arises (from Q&A)]

2 Rise of new disciplines

3 Rise of undergraduate research

4 New models of scholarly publishing – books and articles less and less as growth of knowledge, more and more as accreditation

Trudell (Senior VP at Dialog and on SLA Board of Directors)

Context: Information industry and the role of info pros in business

Roles:

• Service supply side: large number of roles
• Product development end: design, QA, editorial, product documentation
• Senior management roles

Professional competencies across this broader perspective:

• core competencies
• people skills
• business savvy
• strategic perspective
• attitudes – assertiveness, proactiveness, flexibility, driver for change

Spectrum – varies by role

technical vs. content

knowledge of particular target area, e.g., pharma, …

Person should have an interest in a wide variety of ways info can contribute to success of the organization.

How can industry contribute?

• expand core curriculum
• partner in creative ways
• professional organizations, continuing certification, advocate for values of profession

What is role of service provider?

• on-going education and training: product/content, “Quantum program”/leadership development
• provide support for prof. orgs./library schools to do their jobs

Key is vendor participation in prof. orgs., not just as vendor display & funding, but as colleagues, and investment in education.

Q&A

Archivists and info managers are much more embedded in orgs. than libraries.

What about the downsides?

• HE doesn’t study itself closely. Info pros see these changes more clearly. Thus, we have an opportunity to lead. Onus is on us to do so.

Plenary: Anthea Stratigos, Outsell, Inc.

I took a few notes that I am not going to reproduce. This was highly disappointing on so many levels. ASIS&T is full of corporate and business types along with academics and practicing professionals, but I resent being sold a message of the market economy, which is all this boiled down to!

She really rubbed some of us the wrong way when she started off the section on the Library Environment with a slide with a picture of a card catalog and the caption, “It Used to be Simple.” While there is some truth to what she was trying to get at there are much better ways to get at that truth visually. There simply is nothing simple about the card catalog as a technology and/or information environment! While I am well aware that many of my colleagues think there was, it only goes to show their lack of education and understanding of history and systems.

I was so proud of Karen for going up during the Q&A and correcting Ms. Stratigos on this point. Oh, one should know that Karen is highly mathematical and her research focuses on the application of logic in our field. Way to represent, Karen!

One of her main claims is that libraries are not keeping up and/or moving fast enough. Of course, this claim was across libraries broadly. Enough said.

Under What Does this All Mean? we get the claim that all of this is “creating a permanent shift in consumer habits.” Sorry, Ms. Stratigos, but there is nothing permanent about this shift (these shifts, would be truer, also)! Shifts have happened before and will happen again. Shift may be permanent, but this shift is certainly not.

Under A New Order Emerges we get the shift from product-centric to market-centric. We also get Information as Entertainment and Entertainment as Information (ala Richard Saul Wurman). As something to celebrate. Perhaps I ought to learn to play the fiddle at this point?

Essential Actions gets summarized in the statement, “Be a digital marketer delivering a digital experience.” Um, no thank you.

So, yes, a marketing talk delivered by a marketer.

Lunch at the mall with Christina Pikas.

Poster Session II

Most interesting to me:

How Incorrect Information Delivers Correct Search Results: A Pragmatic Analysis of Queries. Jin Ha Lee and Allen Renear (UIUC)

What Exactly Is an Item in the Digital World? Ingbert R. Floyd and Allen Renear (UIUC). How often do you find research with two different views presented?

Tag Decay: A View into Aging Folksonomies. Terrell Russell (UNC-CH)

Tagging the Tags … Process, Observations and Analysis of Conversations in Metatagging at an ASIS&T Interactive Poster Session. Jennifer E. Graham and June M. Abbas. (SUNY-Buffalo). This was an initial follow-up to their amazing poster at last years ASIS&T. [Photo from about the mid-point.] Great stuff!

Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) Standards – Marcia Zeng (Kent State U), Margie Hlava (Access Innovations), Jian Qin (Syracuse U), Gail Hodge (Information International Associates), and Denise Bedford (World Bank Group)

Zeng covered some of the work that the ASIS&T Standards Committee did this past year [I am a member of this committee].

Hlava covered KOS standards, focusing primarily on the US and British controlled vocabulary standards.

Qin covered Encoding KOS: Languages for Machine Understanding and Processing.

Hodge covered KOS in the Government Environment: From Traditional Thesauri to Standards Integration.

“Agencies are interested in how better management of semantics can improve organization and access.” This quote makes me smile (as long as I ignore a literal parsing of “management of semantics”).

Bedford discussed Popularization and Use of Standards at World Bank. This was real-world usage on a vast scale across many languages. Fascinating stuff. My jaw about hit the floor when she said they use MultiTES! Primarily due to its reporting capabilities. Now MultiTES is just one small part of a very complex system, but still ….

I was also quite impressed when she said that recently one group within WB wanted to add an area to the system. Something like 91,000 terms reduced to under 15,000 and properly related in something like 2 weeks! Clearly she has better systems and more people than when I was doing real-world thesaural work, but I still find that amazing.

Standards Committee meeting

Dinner at The King and I with Edward Corrado, Heather Pfeiffer, Emma Tonkin, Margaret Kipp and Qiping Zhang.

Tuesday and Wednesday to follow

I want to add a few comments and, perhaps, caveats to Meredith’s use of the bookstore as an analogy in her post, “It’s not just the OPACs that suck.” I want to emphasize that I generally agree with Meredith here. I do not think she crossed any lines that shouldn’t be crossed. But we see this analogy, and others, frequently in our field, and I’d like to add some cautions against them and perhaps start a conversation.

A few days ago I was in Borders trying to spend money when I remembered a book I need for 590RO this Spring. I headed to the computer section and browsed around. No luck. I found one of those kiosks and looked it up. Yep, it was in Computers, in fact, Computers–History and blah, blah and it was in stock. So I head back to Computers and look all over for –History and blah, blah; finally finding the section. [The arrangement of the subdivisions of Computers makes absolutely no apparent sense, to me, nor most of the rest of the store(s).] The book is not there.

So what book was I looking for? Ambient Findability. These sorts of little ironies amuse me to absolutely no end.

As a counter possibility to Meredith’s use of bookstores as example, [fn1] …

I find browsing in a library, at least as good, and probably better than browsing in a bookstore. I can suss out a fair amount of Dewey or LC, but not, it seems, Bookstore. I rarely am able to find anything I am looking for in a bookstore (talking big chain stores here). Their categories are practically meaningless to me; ever had the misfortune of looking for philosophy in a modern, mega-bookstore? Better be prepared to wade through New Age and “Eastern” philosophy crap. [For any Islamists, or otherwise out there, I do not mean to in any way to disparage non-Western philosophy, only the big bookstore's categorizations of these topics. Kind of like placing rap music in R&B.]

I almost always just browse in a bookstore. If I must find something specific then I’ll try looking in the places I think it belongs, then I’ll find one of those kiosks to look it up and verify if it is in stock (because just like if it is checked out at the library, if not in stock it can’t be found via browsing) and in which section. After that, if I’m still having troubles (and still want the book) I’ll ask a salesperson. I forewent the salesperson in looking for Ambient Findability because the price looked to be quite a bit higher than Amazon (and I was right).

So, while we have a lot to learn from bookstores and their arrangements of items and space, they are in a completely different business than us. The bookstore is one example that is often used in analogies to libraries, and it does have its place as such. But, often completely glossed over is the vast differences between libraries and bookstores, especially in the context of the 21st century consumer.

Bookstores are in the business of selling products, and some services, but those services are all primarily geared towards selling more products. Libraries sell nothing. I know, I know. Many of you, especially the more market-based among you, will argue that libraries are selling something(s). To the extent that image and tax-supported services are selling, then fine. But there are vast, and often quite subtle, differences between what and how libraries and bookstores fulfill their respective roles in society. Honestly, there is very little overlap.

And for anyone who wants to argue that we should go with “Bookstore Classification” for arranging our materials, please, please, please go have a look at the BISAC Subject Headings. [I am not implying that Meredith said this. She didn't.]

Sure. They are fairly intuitive. And they also have absolutely no depth. Here, for instance, is the Philosophy “schedule.” Now, I would love to see this much differentiation in philosophy at a bookstore. But is it going to be good enough for a library with anything over, say, 500 books on philosophy? Not at all, especially if most are from only one or two sub-categories.

I am not saying we shouldn’t use the ONIX metadata with either the BIC or BISAC subject headings, but we certainly cannot (currently) rely on it to do much for us. See the final report from the CC:DA Task Force on ONIX International.

As for interior space in bookstores: “Those bookstores have done serious research on user behavior, browsing behavior, etc. and have designed their spaces accordingly” (Meredith). Maybe they have paid a fortune for these things, but one point from above and a caveat from below.

The layout of bookstores may comport to some idea of consumer behavior and browsing in that situation. But I would maintain that those behaviors are different in bookstores and libraries. And yes, empirical data could prove me right or wrong. They may only be slightly different or the behaviors themselves may not be different, but the underlying motivations and decision-making are. I would also argue that it is a difference that in the end makes a difference. Or at least, should.

If the behavior and decision-making by the user in a public library and the behavior and decision-making of (the same) consumer in a bookstore are exactly the same, please let me know folks so I can leave our discipline now. If our society is to the point where these two vastly different processes are exactly the same transactions in the mind of most of the public, then there is little good I can do for anyone in this profession. Or, it becomes even more elite than it ever has been. And while I can easily drift into a form of elitism, my more democratic tendencies rail against it.

My shopping experiences seem to often be vastly different than those of many folks who turn to other product/service suppliers as shining examples of how to do things better in our libraries. While there often are analogies to be made, I think they need to be far better qualified and some actual analysis provided before they are used to support what we in libraries should do, except as a point of departure and something to consider. But as soon as we seriously start considering them as examples for emulation then we need some serious, and subtle, questions answered. This then is my caveat, how well do I provide any sort of counterexample to these ways of thinking? Am I that much of an outlier in my society? How many other people experience these things in the same way as I do? Or in some way different than the expensive studies show and different from me? How big are the differences? What about the differences between users and non-users? Ad infinitum.

I do like bookstores. Mostly because I like books. But, for me, shopping in a brick-and-mortar big box bookstore is not a pleasant shopping experience. Those tables of new paperbacks, etc. are generally just in my way. There is, to me, very little order except of the most general sort. Maybe I’m lucky that I am rarely looking for something that would be on one of those tables; I’d never find it. Now I do, in fact, browse these tables sometimes. But at best it is a sort of scanning process that picks out an interesting looking cover or perhaps title, if I am even processing words.

On another note, and again I do not mean to argue with Meredith but only add some nuance to the discussion, not all bookstore employees are kind, have smiles on their face, are easy to locate, etc. There are a lot of people in customer-service oriented jobs who have no business being in them. But, again, Meredith’s point about libraries being personally welcoming is well taken. I have worked with some of those folks, and they can have a massive impact on our users. Many are actually great people, but do not radiate warmth and, in fact, radiate the opposite. Some just are not nice people. They do need to be dealt with in some manner. But these people are pretty much everywhere in society, and my consumer activities are filled with them.

So, while I do think Meredith’s use of the bookstore analogy is warranted in her use, I also caution that it is limited in its application and generalizability. I also want to caution that this analogy, which is so easy to fall into, is a very seductive one, but one that is dangerous and far more subtle that most seem to appreciate.

And when Ambient Findability is ambiently unfindable, well, I find that darkly humorous to no end.

[fn1] Meredith made a proper use of her analogy, one which I support. I have no argument or disagreement with her use. I merely want to point out the model being used as a comparison is not flawless either. At least, not for everyone. Of which I have no doubt that Meredith would fully agree. Also. To hold myself up as some sort of counterexample is silly in my opinion. I consider myself to be an outlier, in so many ways, but generally not a counterexample. To hold me up as an example of a norm of human behavior is quite possibly a waste of time and effort. But then none of us want to be a complete outsider all of the time, either.

Let me begin by saying that I had a wonderful “Christmas.”

I put Christmas in quotes because, as it has been for a long time, Christmas is really a couple to a bunch of Christmases at different places over what may be a several week period (only 6 days this year).

It was great to see almost all of my (immediate) family; everyone, that is, except my Mom and my little (younger than Sara) brother, David, who is in the Air Force and currently stationed at Fort Gordon, GA (Disgusta, GA. Horrible shivers!).

I got to hang out with both my kids most of the afternoon/evening Christmas Eve and pretty much all day Christmas at the ex’s. And Jeremy met me at the diner for breakfast Wednesday as he headed to his girlfriend’s in Ohio.

Yesterday, I went to St. Louis to hang out with Dad’s side of the family (minus David). My sister and her family had driven in from DC. I went down and back yesterday, but was there from around 11 AM – 8:30 PM. That was nice.

I got several nice presents, including Cowboy Junkies The Trinity Session, Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Davis and Phillips’ Learning PHP and MySQL, The Muppet Show Season 1 DVD, Epictetus’ The Art of Living, Cicero’s On the Good Life and $80 for books.

I am already reading Epictetus, and I have no doubt I could finish it by this evening, but no need to rush it.

I like not getting a ridiculous amount of stuff; makes life a bit more manageable. I am, almost paradoxically, excited about having cash to exchange for more “books,” though. Plenty left on the wish list.

But back to the title:

As Christmas Eve arrived, I did not greet the day knowing that I was heading to Mary’s, as I did not know both kids were already there. It was also a Sunday morn so doubly slow. Once I learned they were there (around 10 AM, I think) I was still needing breakfast. So, I cleaned up, got dressed and headed to Merry Ann’s diner on the way.

I sat in what I hoped was a quiet spot, next to a couple around my age. This couple. This couple. I wanted to knock their heads together! I felt bad about it; I did [I still have plenty of Baptist guilt to go around]. But I really did want to knock their heads together and yell at them to “Grow the fuck up!”

I finally had to pull out the laptop and throw in my earbuds to try and drown out the incessant whine, which did not work so well. For the whole time I was there—trying to enjoy my Christmas Eve breakfast—one or the other was on the phone, loudly, complaining about portions of their family, how fucked up it was that they had to miss most of the football game today to be somewhere with family, how they went late to something else because of some awesome new interactive game system, shouldn’t the brother’s families just get together and play games and ignore the rest of their familial commitments [clearly not their words], yadda, yadda, yadda.

Jesus. I wanted to scream! I mean WTF! If your family really does suck that much, then Christ almighty (whose birthday we are theoretically celebrating), get a new family! If you are my age in this world, and you have yet to figure out that you create your own family, you are, well, in serious freaking trouble.

I’m no longer Christian, and even when I was Christmas was also highly secular, nonetheless, Christmas for me is about love, family, being with the ones you love and the family you have created, sharing that time together, and traditions, including starting your own [the last is very important]. There are few good reasons to be with people you don’t really consider family (or at least friends, in a traditional sense of “friend”) at this time of year. Call me old-fashioned. Anyway, this couple really started my “Christmas” out badly. “Grow the fuck up, people!”

At least I got these shots out of this trip to the diner.

My other, even bigger, Christmas gripe is about television. And I think maybe I’ll just leave it at that.

I did have a great holiday season—generally low-key, not a lot of traveling, got to spend time with most everyone, and a got a few great gifts. There were just two biggies that I’d like to avoid in future manifestations of “Christmas.”

I hope everyone’s was at least as good as mine! And, although, I might say it again later in the day … Happy New Year 2007!

Unproductive consumption of goods is honourable.

I recently finished this little, but powerful, book [OWC]. Actually, I believe it is an excerpt from a much larger work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, edited and introduced by Robert Lekachman (Penguin Classics, 1994) [OWC].

I bought this book in the Penguin Books . Great Ideas series. This is a series of excerpts, extracts, abridgements, etc. And while I generally loathe such things, this may be a good idea in this case; some of them for some people anyway. Would I have really ever read 400 pages of The Theory of the Leisure Class? Probably not.

Some of the works in this series include Sun-tzu’s The Art of War, Plato’s Symposium, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Marx & Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, among others.

While I would only read several of these titles in their entirety, some might be more useful to me in a shorter version. I imagine the same applies to others, just differently. For instance, although I see no need to read a short version of the Symposium, I would recommend the full-length version to very few people.

All in all, this edition seemed like a good one. The book is small–18×11 cm.–and costs only $8.95 retail. Type is a reasonable size, although not large, and there is a decent use of margins. The publisher provided information about which edition this “extract” came from, and the birth and death years of Veblen. What they did not tell me, and I consider this to be the major flaw of this manifestation, was when the first edition of this book (or its whole, actually) was published. That information seems just a bit useful to place the work in context!

There were a few points where I was trying to decide if something being described was during the interwar years or earlier. It turns out the book was originally published in 1899; almost 20 years before the interwar years. There have been many editions and manifestations of this book. It is possible that it had been edited over all those years and that the things I was questioning had been added later. I’ll just have to do a bit more research into the actual editions of this book if I want to know.

The contents include: The Leisure Class; Conspicuous Leisure: Status and Servants; Conspicuous Consumption: Women, Luxury Goods and Connoisseurship; Canons of Taste: Greenery and Pets; Admission to the Leisure Class; Survivals of Primitive Male Prowess: Fighting and Sports; and Conspicuous Uselessness of Education.

Now I’d like to highlight some passages I found particularly “important” to me:

The ground on which a discrimination between facts is habitually made changes as the interest from which the facts are habitually viewed changes. Those features of the facts at hand are salient and substantial upon which the dominant interest of the time throws its light. Any given ground of distinction will seem insubstantial to any one who habitually apprehends the facts in question from a different point of view and values them for a different purpose (8).

This should be common sense, especially in library work, but is it? How many people in our society, or even our profession, really honestly believe— and more importantly, live by— this idea?

The early development of tools and weapons is of course the same fact seen from two different points of view (19-20).

See also: “Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.” Ani DiFranco. my iq. Puddle Dive.

[The] term ‘leisure,’ as used here, does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is non-productive consumption of time. Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness (21).

A knowledge of good form is prima facie evidence that a portion of the well-bred person’s life which is not spent under the observation of the spectator has been worthily spent in acquiring accomplishments that are of no lucrative effect (26).

Unproductive consumption of goods is honourable, primarily as a mark of prowess and a perquisite of of human dignity; secondarily it becomes honourable in itself, especially the consumption of the more desirable things (43).

But a base service performed for a person of very high degree may become a very honorific office; … (53).

No class of society, not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous consumption (58).

The enthusiasm for war, and the predatory temper of which it is the index, prevail in the largest measure among the upper classes, especially among the hereditary leisure class (77).

Now ain’t this just the damn truth? And what are we to finally do about it?

It is only the high-bred gentleman and the rowdy that normally resort to blows as the universal solvent of differences of opinion (79).

Sports shade off from the basis of hostile combat, through skill, to cunning and chicanery, without it being possible to draw a line at any point. The ground of an addiction to sports is an archaic spiritual constitution – the possession of the predatory emulative propensity in a relatively high potency. A strong proclivity to adventuresome exploit and to the infliction of damage is especially pronounced in those employments which are in colloquial usage specifically called sportsmanship (85-6).

The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development of the man’s moral nature (86).

The slang of athletics, by the way, is in great part made up of extremely sanguinary locutions borrowed from the terminology of warfare. Except where it is adopted as a necessary means of secret communication, the use of a special slang in any employment is probably to be accepted as evidence that the occupation in question is substantially make-believe (87).

Hmmm. What does this second sentence say about librarianship?

The chapter entitled “Conspicuous Uselessness of Education” is particularly damning of the humanities. While I tend to agree with Veblen’s analysis, I do think that there are some countervailing issues that bring their value (of which Veblen admits) more to the fore. There have also been further changes in higher education (or education, period), along with the demographics of students, professors, and so on, which impact his analysis. All in all, though, a very interesting chapter; especially since it was written so early in the history of public higher education.

The presumption that there can ordinarily be no sound scholarship where a knowledge of the classics and humanities is wanting leads to a conspicuous waste of time on the part of the general body of students in acquiring such knowledge. The conventional insistence on a modicum of conspicuous waste as an incident of all reputable scholarship has affected our canons of taste and serviceability in matters of scholarship in much the same way as the same principle has influenced our judgment of the serviceability of manufactured goods (99).

A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensable to a blameless scholastic life (102).

I may just have to read Veblen’s whole work one of these days. I’m also interested in seeing some critiques from over the past 100+ years of its issuance. It is very insightful, although I imagine some of the ideas could be couched differently, also more scholarship in areas which Veblen uses for support has been done. If things have changed in these areas, it might affect his arguments.

Anyway, highly recommended short read. As for the series, you might consider it for your library if you have patrons that need an “easier” or, at least, shorter introduction to assorted “classics” of Western lit.

And as “good Americans,” as I have no doubt most of my readers are, remember, “Conspicuous consumption of goods is honourable.” Even our president urged us to consume in the wake of 9/11; so it must be honorable.

Hey, Iris, Veblen is a Carleton geek, er, I mean grad.

As some of you (may) know, I am not a big fan of reading challenges. Nor do I do resolutions. You may also know that currently I do not read many books (as you will see soon enough [future link]); although I do have a pretty good theory about why my reading is what it is currently.

When I first saw this 2007 TBR Challenge at Wanderings of a Librarian I thought “No way!” Then I noticed that it was only committing to 12 books in a year. As you will soon see, that is about how many books I read this year for “fun.”

I thought it doable enough that I went through many of my books and identified about 30 possibilities and a few definites. Narrowing it down from there has been much more difficult. The rules also theoretically proscribe anything newer than 6 months in your possession. What if I get (or buy) something good for Christmas? [As I did the 1st and will do the 2nd.]

I was trying to work on narrowing down my list earlier and decided to go back to the official challenge site to see how people were handling “options,” whether alternatives or extras. I was mostly interested in alternatives, but it was the “extras” that got me. MizB, the originator of this challenge, and others, are referring to these as “Extra Credit.” Extra Credit. WTF? There’s no “extra credit” for expanding your mind and/or experience. You read because you want to, and maybe you help motivate yourself by committing to these challenges, or listing your goal publicly somewhere [as I seem about to do...], maybe even somewhere others can comment on them, but there is no freaking “extra credit” for reading.

Maybe it makes sense to some of you; I’m sorry for my comments if it does, but it seems completely inane to me.

So, with all that babbling as preface … I am going out on a limb (for me) and making a vaguish commitment to try and read 12 books (at least) in 2007, many of which will come from my huge backlog of “to be read” books.

I am setting this goal as part of my continual attempt at self-growth; exposure to information, facts; and striving for knowledge and wisdom. I read for me; so that I can be a better person and a better citizen of the world. “Extra credit” has no place in the picture. I am also not linking anywhere, joining any lists, or doing other things. This is an opportunity for me to do a little more focused reflection on what I need/want to read in 2007.

(Probable) Definites

Lakoff – Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind 600 pp.
Foucault – The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language
Eli Hirsch – Dividing Reality
Herodotus – The Histories
Henricus Cornelius Agrippa – Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex
Nicholas Ostler – Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
George Eliot – Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Alain Renaut – The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of Subjectivity

Possibilities

Lakoff and Johnson – Philosophy in the Flesh 600 pp.
Hofstadter – Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought 500 pp.
Hofstadter – Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid 760 pp.
Elio Frattaroli – Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain: Becoming Conscious in an Unconscious World 430 pp.
Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 700 pp.
Michael Williams – Groundless Belief: An Essay on the Possibility of Epistemology, 2nd ed.
John Cottingham – Philosophy and the Good Life
Richard Rorty – Philosophy and Social Hope
David Riesman – The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character
Todorov – Hope and Memory: Lessons from the 20th Century
Ellul – The Technological Bluff
Buschman – Dismantling the Public Sphere: situating and sustaining librarianship in the age of the new public philosophy
Erik Davis – TechGnosis: myth, magic + mysticism in the age of information
The Information Society Reader (Routledge Student Readers) ed. Frank Webster
Brown & Duguid – The Social Life of Information
Camille Paglia – Blow, Break, Burn
Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. by Lorraine Daston
Thoma Gieryn – Cultural Boundaries of Science: credibility on the line
K. C. Cole – The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty
Dumas – The Three Musketeers

I’m open to input on the Hofstadters; I can’t read both of those big books and make progress on many others. Which is the best to read first? Or comments about either generally?

I figure this is a pretty ambitious list, which includes a vast array of topics and literature. I mean I have poetry on my reading list; I can’t get much more ambitious than that. Although, I am starting with a shorter poetry book.

There’s a lot to be said for all of these, especially those on the definite list. All of those on the definite list make perfect sense for me. The first three have to do with “classification” and categorization, there’s a book about words and languages, and one about the removal of the subject from modern Western discourse. The Eliot is the only one needing any justification. I wanted to include a couple works of literature and can only have so many lengthy books, and I really enjoyed Middlemarch—one of the finest books I have ever read—so I thought a short one by Eliot would be good to include.

Narrowing down the possibilities list will be difficult [which is why I want to leave it open for now]. The easier discriminators are (1) decide on which, if either, of the Hofstadters, (2) probably not Lakoff and Johnson, nor the Tocqueville. The poetry, the Biographies of Scientific Objects, and the The Information Society Reader have a lot going for them as they are in more bite-sized chunks; certainly not snippets, but far easier to read than lengthy [book-length] sustained arguments [of which there are plenty on the lists]. The Cole would be good as I need to read more math; although the use of those words in the sub-title is really irking me. I should give her a chance, though, and read what she really means by it. Also, lots of great philosophy and sociology (both connected to how individuals and societies actually do/should live).

Anyway, any input on my list, my lack of commitment in certain quarters, or other comments on this topic are welcomed.

So much for my pleasure with myself over how I wanted to use the Calhoun Report to focus on what our “response” might be. I really wanted to discuss What can we accept from it? What needs a different scope, modal verb, etc. for acceptance? What can be added? And, the big one, how we’ll pay for it?

It didn’t turn out that way. Too many others are still at earlier stages of engagment with the report. And I honestly cannot, and do not want to try to, answer “So what did she mean by getting rid of LCSH? What exactly…?” [The best I could say to that was that they could listen to her on just that question in her own words since all of us present have access to the interview with her in Steve Oberg's Tech Services class on 2 Aug.] Oh well. I can’t really be upset; I have spent far more time with this report and various responses to it than many, many others. It took me a long time to get to the point where I wanted to use it as a catalyst to a discussion of what we need to be doing; thus, I am not faulting my fellow students. Maybe in another venue….

Truthfully, I am tired of talking about “Calhoun, the Report.” It is seriously flawed at both micro- and macro-levels. It has seriously questionable unstated assumptions. It doesn’t begin to cite where it should…. Stop! See. It’s easy to beat up on it. I hereby resolve to do my best not to beat up on it anymore. I will (try to) speak negatively of it only when I need to critique a specific flaw in a related context.

I think “we” will be living with “Calhoun, the Report” for a long time. I hope that this, “the best of all possible worlds,” turns out such that this report is known historically as a defining moment in the world of classification—that this was what “woke us from our dogmatic slumbers.”

As Edward Swanson points put in his “book review,” the Calhoun Report effectively “damaged the prospects for discussions to be conducted amicably in the near future” (LRTS, 50(4):295-6). I haven’t been the best of help in bringing this back to a good discussion either (not that I could have half the impact of Karen Calhoun). But I’m finally ready to move on. Maybe I’ve grown up some, maybe I’ve spent enough time and had enough small discussions of it and some more education on related topics and I’m now ready to have an ethical response to it, maybe I’m just getting old, maybe I’ve realized that the message I want the decision makers to hear isn’t telling itself, maybe …. Probably some of all of this.

I think “Calhoun, the Report” calls for a response. Part of that response will be “conversation,” again at least in “the best of all possible worlds.” Discussion, advocacy, education, training,…. Actual dialogue about these and other important topics. While talking is a form of doing, more active doing is also required. Test projects, standardization work, advocacy, education and training,…. I hope to be involved in this response in multiple ways.

I want to be involved in the dialogue. It is beginning to show up in some places. It needs to show up in more. Maybe some people will only hear the message by overhearing it, by catching it obliquely. “Whatever,” I say. As long as they are hearing “the message.”

Let me just state for the record, I despise the marketing of almost any message. I called marketers (the “industry [includes education thereof]“) the Anti…, repeatedly, before ever leveling that name at Karen Calhoun. But I am enough of a realist (or simply old enough) to have some idea of how the world works. In fact, by despising “them” I am actually giving them credit for the impact marketing has.

Many of the important ideas have been around for a very long time. They are all critical today. They are being used; by people who can afford to pay. We finally have the computational ability (affordability, primarily) to do things thought of at least as far back as 1867. Cutter and multiple class numbers, anyone? Many other wonderful ideas arose in the intervening decades. But for a long time, computing “power” was non-existent and expensive. Now that we can finally do many of the things dreamed of for 130 years, some of “our leaders” want to dismantle the whole structure. [Why do I pick so many darn underdogs? Something about being a small kid....]

So what is this “message” of mine that is going to cause me to switch to the dark side and being “marketing”? I can’t exactly say yet. I can give you some “bones” for now and maybe by Halloween I’ll have a little “flesh” to put on them. It will be fluid for awhile.

Disclaimer: I am not asking anyone to join me, there is no bandwagon, the only catchy slogan I have so far is “Free the Authorities!,” which is definitely not exactly a buzzword. And it could get old at some point. I swear there’ll be no beta, and certainly no 2.0.

Semantics will, though, be important. Nuances of meaning will be brought out when required. What I would love is some dialogue. Contribute whatever you can when you can with whatever strength or weaknesses you bring to the discussion. Question and push me.

I am unsure what form this “dialogue” might take and where I might contribute. But feel free to remind me of something I might do, such as there’s this wiki over here that needs something about “authority control,” or…. I hope to get back to the library (or more so anyway) in my “new” home here at Off the Mark.

Pauline’s classification seminar was great! The format has some issues but you’d be [choose your own nasty adjective] to not take a class with Pauline Cochrane. It has left me invigorated mentally and helped me regain a sense of hope, even if it is a small hope. Even though my Calhoun discussion went where I didn’t want it to, but knew it would, go I am looking to this report and its ilk to motivate me into a positive response. There are some stories that need to be told in our and allied fields. There are some things that need to be demonstrated. Some of this is happening in diverse places. Maybe I’ll pass some of that on here.

So here is what I’m excited about at the moment — interoperability, internationalization, actually using classification systems to their fullest, freeing authorities, new data structures, vocabulary control, thesauri, classification systems, faceted classification, classification for the Web, exchanging this kind of data, making it play well together, making good use of the installed base of LCC and DDC, faceting LCSH, …. Oh, and the questions in the first paragraph.

I don’t really know what is going to change around here. But when I get as excited as I did yesterday by the 025.431: The Dewy blog — EPC day 2: Highlights post so that I post the following to our class bulletin board after the final class of the semester, then something is up.

See this blog report about day 2 of the EPC meeting. Stuff on UDC harmonization of Religion in DDC, Dewey training,

“update on the status of our new editorial support system. We are working out the details of data conversion from the current ESS proprietary format to an enhanced version of the MARC 21 Format for Classification Data (and to an enhanced version of the MARC 21 Format for Authority Data for the Relative Index). The format conversion will facilitate improved data representation within the system, and easy distribution of data in XML and other formats.”

And “Dewey numbers in authority files.”

Maybe something of interest to you…

I’ll definitely be looking at the “enhanced MARC 21 formats.” Thanks all for a great class!

See the upcoming post for more on these and related matters.

Just remember, nothing to join and since I can’t carry a tune there’s no reason for a wagon for this band of one [Walt, thank you for making my day! You often do.]

My Akismet spam filter just caught a message about sexy Halloween costumes. Boy was that ever a tempting one to look at. I mean, seriously, anyone who can sell me a costume to make me look sexy….

Too good to be true.  So I just nuked it; but I did hesitate for a few seconds.