In the WaPo, a librarian laments that books are a hard sell, and futility tries to save them:

But as I moved along in my library science program, I found that books weren’t really our focus. Information management, database networking and research tools claimed the largest share of the curriculum. In other words, literacy today is defined less by how English departments or a librarian might teach Wordsworth or Faulkner than by how we find our way through the digital forest of information overload.

As I mentioned in my earlier post about libraries, information searches are usually for more specific information than a book offers.  Finding that specific information is tough, and a book surrounds it with hundreds of pages of noise that are difficult to search through.  Successful librarians, or information specialists, are the ones who are recognizing this and adapting.  They see their profession holistically.  Unfortunately, too many nostalgic Luddites are still wandering around library science programs trying to prolong and accentuate their love affair with the physical book.

Categories: Books, Education, Information Economics, Libraries, Marketing
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Israeli Knesset Member Yossi Beilin makes the case that Jimmy Carter said nothing Israelis themselves don’t say:

It is not that Israelis are indifferent to what is said about them, but the threshold of what passes as acceptable here is apparently much higher than it is with Israel’s friends in the United States. In the case of this particular book, the harsh words that Carter reserves for Israel are simply not as jarring to Israeli ears, which have grown used to such language, especially with respect to the occupation.

In other words, what Carter says in his book about the Israeli occupation and our treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories — and perhaps no less important, how he says it — is entirely harmonious with the kind of criticism that Israelis themselves voice about their own country. There is nothing in the criticism that Carter has for Israel that has not been said by Israelis themselves.

I think that the American Jewish Community is grossly mishandling their reaction to Carter’s book, not that I’m surprised that the organized Jewish community is mishandling something. Despite nearly unanimous criticism of Carter’s book from nearly everyone I know, and countless more in the jBlogosphere, I’ve yet to find anyone (Beilin excepted) who has actually read the book.

Categories: America, Books, Israel, Jewishness, Politics
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The most important cause of the increase in autism diagnoses was the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, a federal law that required states to provide suitable education to autistics and to create registries for them. Autism has become a trendy diagnosis, and at times a useful one to stretch. “I am incredibly disciplined in the diagnostic classifications in my research,” Judy Rapoport, a senior child psychiatrist at the National Institutes of Health, tells Grinker, “but in my private practice, I’ll call a kid a zebra if it will get him the educational services I think he needs.”

Why there’s no autism epidemic in Slate.

Categories: Books, Education, Incentive Centered Design, Metrics, Science
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The Washington Post notes that the Fairfax libraries are purging their collections to save on space:

So librarians are making hard decisions and struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes.

Library officials say they will always stock Shakespeare’s plays, “The Great Gatsby” and other venerable titles. And many of the books pulled from one Fairfax library can be found at another branch and delivered to a patron within a week.

But in the effort to stay relevant in an age in which reference materials and novels can be found on the Internet and Oprah’s Book Club helps set standards of popularity, libraries are not the cultural repositories they once were.

Later in the article,

To do more with less, Fairfax library officials have started running like businesses. Clay bought state-of-the art software that spits out data on each of the 3.1 million books in the county system — including age, number of times checked out and when. There are also statistics on the percentages of shelf space taken up by mysteries, biographies and kids’ books.

A few observations of my own:

1. It’s about time libraries started running themselves like a business. In many ways, they’re actually (sadly) one of the first government agencies to do so. Libraries face direct competition on a number of fronts, from coffee houses, book stores, the internet, and other cultural institutions. They need to adapt to stay relevant, and in doing so, they need to adopt the management practices that have made their competitors so effective. On the flipside, libraries also need to get over themselves and realize that, with all this competition, they can’t continue to see themselves the same way they did fifteen or twenty years ago.
2. The computer system only uses circulation data, but the best use I get out of a library is when I go there for breadth, rather than depth, and don’t check books out. Instead, I’ll pull a number of relevant books off the shelf and read a chapter or so of each, often because it’s all I need or all that’s relevant. I use the library as a reference service, not a lending service (in part because I’m not capable of returning anything on time). A more accurate measure of reference use would be how often a book is reshelved, and even that metric is flawed - was the book reshelved because people found it useful but didn’t need to check it out, or because they took it off the shelf and then weren’t interested? Gathering the metric with the computer system wouldn’t be difficult - add a reshelf table to the database, and before books are reshelved, scan the whole cart. I also imagine this would work better for non-fiction than fiction.
3. As the article points out, libraries aren’t nearly as much about books anymore. Fiction is exceptionally cheap relative to incomes, to the point where owning books is much easier and much more common. Books also take a long time to bring to market, so for many subjects, they can’t stay timely and accurate very long. I remember going to the library when I was little and finding two decade old current events books, or books about computers from the 60’s. At some point, these just take up space. Most of my friends who consistently use the library see it as a cheaper form of Blockbuster (but with harsher late fees). Others use it as a meeting place. The only people I know who depend on it for books are my grandparents, and even they’re starting to buy more.

Categories: Books, Business and Economics, Community, Distribution, Governance, Information Economics, Libraries, Metrics, Strategy
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To kick off the Winter of Dave Read-a-thon, I just finished the latest Pirates! adventure and a Philip Roth short story. Your after action reports:

Pirates! in Adventures with Communists by Gideon Defoe

In the third volume of the Pirates! series, the Pirate Captain is confused with Karl Marx, the hairy philosopher behind the growing communist party in Europe. The Adventure seeking pirates end up tasked with ferrying the wanted Marx to France, where he continues to be threatened by large blonde women intent on framing the communists for crimes they didn’t commit. Naturally, chases, battles, and the Pirates brilliant wit and wisdom all come out. While I was disappointed to see the libertarian Pirates! helping the Communists, rather than fighting them, I did like the way the Pirate Captain handled growing proletariat dissent among his crew - play stick swords in the agitator. I rate this the best Pirates! adventure since Pirates! in Adventures with Scientists, certainly better than their Adventure with Ahab, and a definite must read.

Special thanks to my dad, who bought the book for me as a Chanukkah present before I even knew it existed.

The Conversion of the Jews by Philip Roth

While sitting around my apartment, I picked up my roommate’s copy of Goodbye Columbus and began reading one of the short stories. “The Conversion of the Jews” follows Ozzie Freedman, a Jewish pre-teen who asks too many questions in Hebrew School. Ozzie resists hypocrisy and inconsistencies in the Rabbi’s answers to his questions, ultimately leading to an altercation where he escapes to the roof and forces the conversion of all those around him to Christianity. A quick read, and still insightful nearly a half-century after it was originally published. The Jewish Community is still grappling with the same issues Roth attacked, now as Roth’s generation struggles to pass its ties to Jewish tradition onto the next. You can find the story in Goodbye Columbus or in a number of short fiction collections.

Categories: Books, Winter of Dave
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