Musing's musings

Touching history

There are days when it's good to be me. (No, really!) And I had one of them last week. After pigging out on an assortment of outstandingly good frozen custard from Ollie's at the annual meeting of the Friends of the NIU Libraries (on whose board I've served for the past year), I literally got a chance to touch some history--some history that I helped get for the library.

Let's go back a few months to the end of the spring semester. At the end of a fiscal year, the library will often have some money left over--savings from purchases that turned out to have bigger discounts than anticipated, book purchase funds that weren't fully spent, and the occasional gift that comes in and can't find an immediate use. When that happens, all the librarians (and anyone else who wants to put an oar in) are asked to submit prioritized lists of "expensive purchases." "Expensive," in this context, means an item that costs more than $250, if I remember correctly: the sort of thing that even libraries have to think twice about adding to the purchase order, unless they're the University of Illinois or Yale or Harvard.

After the requests come rolling in, a committee is formed to go over the requests and recommend funding priorities, and the library will work its way down the list, buying things until it runs out of available money. The lucky ones get their items, and the unlucky ones have to wait another year, or try to find a less-expensive source, or come up with some extra cash. But we're usually able to get quite a lot off the wish-lists. This year, I got picked for the committee. We met and did our job, and the money was duly spent.

One of the items on this year's list was a cuneiform tablet dated to around 2000 B.C.E.--and costing around $2,000. Some members of the committee balked at spending that much for an item that's about the size of a large postage stamp and which nobody at the university (to our knowledge, anyway) can even read. I, on the other hand, thought it was a fantastic idea, and argued successfully to keep it on the list. It was duly purchased and now lives in our rare books and special collections area. And after the Friends meeting, the RBSC librarian let me hold it. Right there in my own little hands, this chunk of baked clay with wedge-shaped indentations all over it--and I do mean literally all over it--front, back, and all four edges all bore some kind of marks.

You know the feeling you get when you take out a family heirloom and look at it? Multiply that a few hundred times, and that's the feeling I had while I held that scrap of human history between my fingers and turned it around and around and looked at it, wondering who had written it and for what purpose, what it said, and how it had managed to survive for four thousand years.

It's true that there's little real practical use for this tablet at NIU. We don't have a big classics program, and neither is the history department known for its focus on the ancient world--particularly in that part of the Middle East. Sure, nobody on our faculty can read the thing. What of it? I'm sure we can get someone from the Oriental Institute in Chicago to tell us what it says--though I'm not sure that won't kill just a little of the mystery, especially if it turns out to be little more than somebody's tax receipt or a laundry list. (Though wouldn't that be cool, too?)

I'm sure many of the same arguments could be made about just about any item in the library's collections. It doesn't do to waste money, but I don't feel the funds we spent to buy this little tablet were wasted--far from it. There are bigger issues to consider than sheer utility. There's the "Oooh!" factor--and that's very big for something like this. Cuneiform tablets aren't something you're likely to find in many libraries, and they're fairly rare in museums too, unless you're talking someplace like the Louvre or the British Museum. Cuneiform is among the first forms of writing ever to be discovered. Every book, every journal article, every database that involves text that NIU's library now owns traces its lineage back to something very much like this little clay tablet--and that's an important lesson to teach to our students, for many of whom books are something of a novelty, much less something that had to be written out by hand and then baked to preserve it.

It's not likely to be something that the library staff hand out to just anybody, though I'm quite sure it will be featured in a number of displays and classes, and probably go out to local schools and community libraries as part of our outreach programs. But at least a few of us will get to handle this relic from long ago and far away--and for a few minutes at least, I got to be one of those people. And that was a good day.

Cry havoc!

OK, we can skip the part about letting slip the dogs of war. But do get out your pens and stationery, or fire up your e-mail clients. It's time to make some noise!

Here's why. The Hedgemony has just presented Congress with a ginormous, bloated budget request for Fiscal Year 2009. The bottom line? Three point one terabucks, or $3.1 trillion (with a "t"). It's loaded down with all the usual Bu$hevik specials: tax cuts for the hyper-wealthy, corporate welfare galore, weapons systems that even the Pentagon doesn't want or know what to do with, and all the usual boondoggles.

Apparently stricken with a fit of conscience (or something) over all the red ink his budget contains (to the tune of about $400 billion in deficit spending--and that's before we put the soaring costs of Bush's wars into the mix, by the way, so effectively double that), the Boy Who's Almost Done Being King has announced his intention to slash or eliminate funding for 151 federal programs. About a third of those programs are educational in nature. (That sound you just heard was caused by irony meters around the world wrapping their needles around their pins as they went off the scale at the thought of a man who could famously inquire, during his first presidential campaign, "Is our children learning?" deciding to cut funding for education.)

One of the programs targeted for elimination is the Inexpensive Book Distribution Program, an initiative of Reading is FUNdamental. For a paltry $25.5 million a year, the book distribution program gives out 16 million books a year to nearly 5 million children and their families around the country, in an attempt to encourage them to read. In a world where fewer and fewer adults ever crack another book after they finish their education, I'd say anything we can do to put books in the hands of kids who want to read them is a good thing. And at a cost of about a buck and a half per book, it's cheap at ten times the price.

I'm old enough to remember when RIF got started back in 1975. I didn't need their services growing up, but that doesn't mean I don't think they're vital. As a librarian and bibliophile, as an educator and an educated man with a personal library of more than 2,000 volumes, and as an American citizen, every bone in my body cries out at this outrageous action. RIF has been continuously funded by every president since Tricky Dicky, and now our "edumacashun" president and the husband of an "ex-librarian" wants to end it, just so his buddies in the boardrooms don't have to forego one latte a week.

So let's get on the horn, folks. Tell your friends and family. Tell your congress-critters (RIF has an action site up if you want some help). Tell your blogging buddies. And let's get those funds put back in the budget, pronto.

(Hat-tip to GoldnI.)

Funny, this doesn't look like the Opernplatz

Let this be a lesson to you, Messrs. Bush, Bennett, Falwell, Dobson, Robertson, Frist, Hastert, et aliae. This is the kind of thing that happens when you insist on demonizing people who are gay and lesbian as second-class citizens and less-than-fully human beings:

Chicago police are investigating a fire in a Chicago Public Library branch on the North Side that damaged about 100 books, most of them in the gay and lesbian collection.

According to library staff, around 90 books of the approximately 1,000 in the branch library's gay and lesbian collection were damaged in the fire, as were about 10 books from the African-American history collection. The damaged materials will be replaced, which puts the city of Chicago at least one step ahead of this crowd from 60-odd years ago:

(Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration. Photograph #68984.)

That's not the picture I wanted, but it shows the same event: the burning of "un-German" books in the Opernplatz in Berlin on 10 May, 1933. Among the books tossed on the bonfire that evening were the entire research collection of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for the Study of Sexuality), the first-ever collection of books and materials devoted primarily to homosexuality.

Perhaps those in power who are inclined to make political hay out of the denigration of their fellow Americans who just happen to be gay or lesbian should be reminded of what Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821, words that ring just as true today, nearly a century and a half later:

Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.

Wherever they burn books, they'll end up burning people as well.

--Heinrich Heine, Almansor

Then there's also this quote, from someone those allegedly fine and upstanding Republican men I named earlier all claim to revere:

καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐρεῖ αὐτοῖς· ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐφ' ὅσον ἐποιήσατε ἑνὶ τούτων τῶν ἀδελφῶν μου τῶν ἐλαχίστων, ἐμοι ἐποιήσατε.

Then the Ruler will answer and say to them: "Amen I tell you, as often as you did this to one of the least of these my brothers or my sisters, you did it to me."

--Matthew 25:40, my translation

Persecution ninnies redux

Oh, those poor persecuted conservatives tighty-righty wingnuts. They just can't get no respect from nobody. WingNut Daily (of course I'm not going to link there!) is currently pissing and whining about a tsimmes at the Mansfield campus of The Ohio State University.

The WingNut Daily (so take what follows with copious amounts of sodium chloride--and a holy water chaser, if you're so inclined), is shocked--shocked, I tell you!--that Scott Savage, a reference librarian at the campus, is under investigation for having dared to recommend a few conservative books as required reading for incoming freshmen students. Now, given that ConWebBlog (the source of the linked story, above) states that nobody at WND bothered to contact anybody at the campus to get the details, I have a sneaking suspicion that there's more to this tsimmes than meets the eye. And because all reputable universities don't release the details of internal investigations while they are still underway, I doubt we're going to get much in the way of hard data for some time to come.

The wingnuts allege that the librarian, whom they describe as a "pious Ohio Quaker who drives to his job in a horse and buggy" and as a "'plain Christian' ... [who] eschew[s] modern technology to a large extent," was disturbed by the alleged leftist bias of several of the books recommended by the faculty for inclusion on the freshman required reading list for next fall's incoming class. So he offered a few suggestions of his own, including a book by someone named Kupelian entitled The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom. Again according to the WND account, several gay professors (they insist on using scare quotes around that word, but I'm not going to copy them for obvious reasons) then filed charges of sexual harassment against Savage. After some conservative legal group sent the university a "cease and desist letter" at the end of March, the faculty voted 21-0 (with nine abstentions) to go forward with the investigation.

I wonder how you'd catalog that?

I spent three semesters getting up very early in the morning to confront the nearly 700 pages of AACR2R when I was in library school. (That's Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second edition, 1988 revision, to you non-librarian types out there.) It's the set of rules used for decribing and cataloging everything that goes onto a library's shelves.

There is a section in the book (Chapter 10, if you're following along in your hymnals) entitled "Three-dimensional artefacts and realia," which gives instructions on how to cope with "objects of all kinds ...including models, dioramas, games ...braille cassettes, sculptures and other three-dimensional art works, exhibits, machines, and clothing," among other things. But somehow I doubt the good folks of the American Library Association, the Australian Committee on Cataloguing, the British Library, the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing, the Library Association, and the Library of Congress who put together the book ever imagined a library would need to provide a catalog entry along these lines.

The Malmoe Library in southern Sweden allows patrons to "borrow" a live person for up to 45 minutes for a conversation in the library's coffee shop. The library collection "includes" a Muslim imam, a gay person, a journalist, and a Gypsy, and five others. The nine volunteers will be paid a small fee for their participation, and if interest proves sufficient, the project may be repeated next year.

If they tried that in this country, if my own experience in libraries is any indication, the gay person would be either mutilated or stolen unless kept in a secure location. These days, the same might be true of the imam and the Muslim woman. But wouldn't it be kinda neat to be able to "borrow" someone to ask all those questions you've had floating around in your head forever but didn't know where to turn for answers to them?