Talking in the Library

Are You Obscene?

With Banned Books Week still going on, it seems like a good time to discuss why it is some folks think they have the right to abridge what others can say, read, write, and even think, despite protections against such a thing as provided by the First Amendment.  And yet there's this thing with Obscenity Law.  Current US Obscenity Law is founded largely on the 1974 Supreme Court Case Miller v. California.  If you don't want to read the full text, let me break down the essentials for you: if it's obscene, it's not protected speech, and the man can shut you down.  "But what exactly is 'obscene?'" you may ask.  Well, there's the rub - it's subjective.  Chief Justice Warren Burger stated in the court's opinion:

"The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

Justice Douglas countered beautifully in his dissent with:

"The idea that the First Amendment permits government to ban publications that are 'offensive' to some people puts an ominous gloss on freedom of the press. That test would make it possible to ban any paper or any journal or magazine in some benighted place. The First Amendment was designed 'to invite dispute,' to induce 'a condition of unrest,' to 'create dissatisfaction with conditions as they are,' and even to stir 'people to anger.' The idea that the First Amendment permits punishment for ideas that are 'offensive' to the particular judge or jury sitting in judgment is astounding. No greater leveler of speech or literature has ever been designed. To give the power to the censor, as we do today, is to make a sharp and radical break with the traditions of a free society.

The First Amendment was not fashioned as a vehicle for dispensing tranquilizers to the people. Its prime function was to keep debate open to 'offensive' as well as to 'staid' people. The tendency throughout history has been to subdue the individual and to exalt the power of government. The use of the standard 'offensive' gives authority to government that cuts the very vitals out of the First Amendment. As is intimated by the Court's opinion, the materials before us may be garbage. But so is much of what is said in political campaigns, in the daily press, on TV, or over the radio. By reason of the First Amendment—and solely because of it—speakers and publishers have not been threatened or subdued because their thoughts and ideas may be 'offensive' to some."

Right on Justice Douglas.

So are you obscene?  Take this quiz and see how you rate.  Just remember, you're only as obscene as you think you are, and that's also true for everyone else.

Some little girls dream of being Miss America. I want to be a MacArthur Genius.

The 2010 MacArthur Geniuses have been announced! Looking for your name? Yeah, I'm not on the list either. Oh well, the Nobel prizes are announced in October, so maybe it will be a good year for me yet.

My crushing, yet unsurprised, disappointment aside, I avidly await the announcement of the MacArthur geniuses every year. The mix of people who are awarded the grant ($500,000!) and their wildly divergent fields is inspiring. A stone carver? An astrophysicist? A sign language linguist? An entomologist? Yep, all geniuses. Can you imagine being Jessie Little Doe Baird, who has been working to preserve and restore the Wampanoag (or Wôpanâak) language and getting the phone call saying, "Hey, we've been paying attention to all of your work. You are a genius."  

I may not be an internationally acknolwedged genius (yet), but I have an idea. I think K-State needs a genius program. We'd have to scale back the award money a little. Otherwise, we could follow the guidelines for a MacArthur Fellowship (that's the formal name, but genius is more fun to say). There are three criteria:

"exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work."

The best part is that geniuses don't have to apply--they are nominated. If you've ever had to apply for a scholarship, grant, or anything else, you know how fantastic it would be not to have to apply.  So, who wants to help me get this going?

 

Come Celebrate Banned Books Week!

Do you like people telling you what you can and can't do?  Of course you don't - it chafes a bit that others might try and decide what's best for you.  And yet, every year the American Library Association celebrates Banned Books Week, the only national celebration of your freedom to read, because certain "concerned  citizens" think they know better and petition to have books removed from the shelves in libraries nationwide.  Well, K-State Libraries and the English Department have teamed up to stick it to the man by reading aloud from these same banned books.  We'll be on the lawn between Hale and Eisenhower from 11:00am to 1:00pm, Monday through Friday of this week, so come join us in a celebration of the freedom to read!

What's old is new

True confession: I may be a librarian, and therefore presumably a print fetishist, but like most people in networked nations, things have reached the point where if it is not online, I'm not going to go find it. Sad, but often true.

During a recent conversation with our dean, she suggested that I read a couple of Wikipedia pages for some background information on some interesting people (yes, a librarian referring a librarian to Wikipedia; this is a sign of the end of days). While checking these pages out, I ran across a citation to an album review in a 1977 edition of Rolling Stone. Being an online slave, I trundled over--which implies movement, but required perhaps a wrist movement of .06 cm and a slight tap of the index finger--to the E-Journals page with fingers crossed hoping to find a source for RS vintage 1977. Curses! Full text coverage begins with 1992.

Long story short: I trudged the 70 yards or so to the stacks, retrieved the volume, and read the review. While doing so, the ads caught my eye, not least those pictured on this missive. With many states seriously discussing the legalization of marijuana, and at least one state perhaps on the cusp of starting a trend in that direction, these ads reminded me that this issue is hardly new and that our national relationship to the "potent herb" has gone through many phases. I also discovered the Amazing Iso-2 Machine, and will now puzzle for days over how it worked. Seems clear, however, that spearmint extract was not its intended purpose, but I could be wrong about that.

Were one writing a paper on such a cultural issue, this would be fabulous primary source material, and the kind that one cannot find online. We should all take off our "online" blinders on occasion and flip through some of the crazy stuff found on libraries' shelves.

Blogging the LOC: Class C

OK, I'm just going to admit straight up that this class flummoxed me a bit. In the end, much to my shame, I decided it was because I didn't really understand what "history" was. Sad, I know. But I'm a librarian, so I know my tools, and went straight to the OED to find this:

history: that branch of knowledge which deals with past events, as recorded in writings or otherwise  ascertained; the formal record of the past, esp. of human affairs or actions 

and while I was there, grabbed this:

auxiliary: subsidiary to the ordinary, additional.

Now we're properly armed. I think my confusion was rooted in the fact that there's a specific meaning for History (capital "H", because it's serious) the discipline that is distinct from history the word used casually by non-professionals. The Auxiliary Sciences of History are things that are little-h historical, but not capital-H Historical. That makes them auxiliary - extra, outside the normal, a supplement.

So what about that pesky "science" word? That's a turn-of-the-century thing too, just like the telephone etiquette bit from last week. A lot of areas of study started calling themselves "science" then, some rightly, some less so. You could just as correctly call things falling in Class C the auxiliary disciplines of history, and in fact, some people do. 

Now, as to what falls in Class C: lots of things you might think of as your grandparents' hobbies, to be honest, although legitimate scholars also study them. Old coins (numismatics), family history (genealogy), restoring antiques (archaeology) - all auxiliary sciences of history.

There are some real gems here, whether you're a big-H Historian, a little-h history buff, or just interested the esoteric things people research. One of my favorites falls in subclass CB, the history of civilization. All call numbers falling in CB156 are concerned with "Terrestrial evidence of interplanetary voyages". We have about 8 titles in that call number range in our collection, some with awesome tabloid-headline-style titles like "SPACE-GODS REVEALED".

Subclass CC is Archaeology, seemingly normal, but includes CC200-260: Bells, Campanology, Cowbells. Cowbells. Separate from just "bells". I can't tell you how happy that makes me.  First, because it's just fun to think of someone doing academic study of cowbells. And second, because it lets me close with this, the first logical co-location of the Library of Congress Classification System and Will Ferrell's hairy belly.

Did you miss earlier posts in this series? Check out the tag for more classification goodness.

C: cc licensed flickr photo by dasistdasende
numismatics: cc licensed flickr photo by dandiffendale

Need hot steel mind lightning? Try LibX.

Today's researchers need a little hot steel mind lightning*. In fact, if you insert "hot steel mind lightning" for "research" in the sentence, "I need to go to the library and get some research," college life becomes exponentially more interesting.

Hot steel mind lightning, I'll note, is more than an awesome phrase. It's a reality. If you want to streamline your research process and be in constant contact with the millions of resources at K-State Libraries, then find a little hot steel mind lightning via the inocuous seeming LibX toolbar. 

The LibX toolbar is a plug-in for the Firefox and IE browsers (sorry Safari!) With the toolbar, you can always search our catalog, hook into our databases, and Ask a Librarian. Well, you can ask a librarian during our service hours. If it's 3:00 a.m., we're probably all at our various homes, asleep. Want to see the hot steel mind lightning in action? Watch this video**! 

Get your own hot steel mind lightning right now!

*A big shout out and full credit to Chad Pape, a former K-State Libraries' colleague, who coined the phrase, "hot steel mind lightning" (or at least popularized it amongst our coterie) lo, these many years ago. Of course, Chad also proposed that all library classes be taught by clowns. Evening and weekend classes would be taught by "sad clowns." That's an idea that hasn't yet found its time.

**I'll apologize right now for the annoying bit when I'm in Google Scholar, bouncing around the screen. I'd edit it out, but I'm using a fantastic, and free, tool called Jing to record and I don't have editing powers with my version.

Blogging the LOC: Class B

Class B is one of my favorite LC classes, I have to admit.  All the psychology books, all the religion books, and some whackadoo stuff thrown in.  Also, at least in Hale Library, it's convenient.  Step out of the elevators on 4th floor, and you're staring straight at the B's. 

So, officially, Class B is Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion. Philosophy and religion seem like decently cozy bedfellows, but how did psychology get thrown in the mix?  Understanding the rationale is easier when you remember that the modern science of psychology was relatively new when the classification system was created. It had not not yet evolved into the social science with biological undertones that we know and love today.  So it got chucked in here, and occupies a very tiny space, just one subclass.  A subclass it shares, by the way, with materials about ghosts, psychics, astrology, and magic, all lumped under "parapsychology".

Another fun Class B fact reflective of the turn-of-the-century zeitgeist: there's a whole number chunk (under the Ethics subclass) reserved for materials about "telephone etiquette".

Religion occupies the whole latter section of the B's from BL onward.  Clever atheists like to make jokes about the fact that the subclass reserved for the Bible is BS, but it's unlikely, given the era, that any such slight was intended.  In fact, the relative weight, subclass-wise, that Christianity in general occupies in Class B is indicative of the lens through which Americans of the time viewed the world.  Judaism and Buddhism get a subclass each, Islam shares one with a few other faith traditions, but Christianity gets 5 subclasses. It was easier for people of the time to imagine and articulate the distinctions between fairly esoteric bits of Christianity, so they did. 

Next week, Class C, the intriguingly named "Auxiliary Sciences of History".  It's History! It's Science! Together for a limited time only. 

Old Telephone: cc licensed flickr photo by Matti Mattila  
Letter B: cc licensed flickr photo by Indy Charlie

Einstein Brother’s Bagels will be closing tonight at 7 pm

Einstein Brother’s Bagels will be closing at 7pm tonight in preparation for our ribbon cutting ceremony tomorrow.

Please join us at 9 am, Wednesday, Sept. 15 as the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce will be on hand to welcome the newest business to the Manhattan community.

Einstein Brothers Bagels will reopen after the event.

Now We’re Cooking!: Library of Congress Modernizes Its Subject Headings For Cookbooks And Other Works On Cooking

It's now official. This summer the Library of Congress changed the outdated subject heading "Cookery" to "Cooking." General works on cooking, cuisine, and food preparation are assigned the heading "Cooking." Works on national and ethnic cuisines and styles of cooking are assigned the heading "Cooking" qualified by nationality or ethnic group (for example: Cooking, American; Cooking, Chinese—Cantonese style). The heading "Cooking" with an appropriate parenthetical qualifier is assigned to works on the preparation of dishes using a specific ingredient or food (for example: Cooking (Eggs)). Works about cookbooks are assigned the topical heading "Cookbooks"; actual cookbooks are assigned the genre/form heading, "Cookbooks." The heading "Recipes" was changed to "Formulas, recipes, etc." to clarify its usage for preparation of non-food items.

 

Einstein Brothers Bagels Grand Opening Today

Today is the grand opening of Einstein Brothers Bagels! First 100 customers in line get a free breakfast for a year. Check it out.  Doors open at 7am.