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	<title>Solvitur ambulando</title>
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	<description>it is solved by walking</description>
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		<title>The Courage of Misha and Amy</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=320</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=320#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Mar 2013 15:44:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>bess</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[human rights]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=320</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
I continue to be blown away by the courage in the face of bigotry displayed by the We Do Campaign. Watch the new video they&#8217;ve just released (embedded here) and contrast the self-righteous Bible quoting at the beginning with the quiet dignity and brave commitment to the path of love shown by Misha and Amy. [...]]]></description>
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<p>I continue to be blown away by the courage in the face of bigotry displayed by the <a href="http://www.southernequality.org/we-do-campaign/">We Do Campaign</a>. Watch the new video they&#8217;ve just released (embedded here) and contrast the self-righteous Bible quoting at the beginning with the quiet dignity and brave commitment to the path of love shown by Misha and Amy. </p>
<p>And then <a href="http://www.southernequality.org/donate/">go give the Campaign for Southern Equality a few dollars</a>. </p>
<p>Please also join our <a href="http://www.butchwonders.com/1/post/2013/03/mad-4-equality-is-on.html">Mad4Equality March Madness tournament</a>, which is raising money for the Campaign for Southern Equality and <a href="http://www.thetrevorproject.org">the Trevor Project</a>. </p>
<p>Chris Bourg, a wonderful colleague of mine at Stanford, wrote <a href="http://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/this-year-lets-go-mad4equality/">a great blog post about Mad4Equality</a>, in which she calls me out:</p>
<blockquote><p>And I’m calling out Bess Sadler right now to put up another $25 against my bet that my Blue Devils will dance longer than her Tarheels. Go Cardinal, Go Blue Devils!</p></blockquote>
<p>I accept. And I also back a similar bet that Stanford&#8217;s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4IxdTLFzyI">Nerd City Kids</a> will dance longer than any other team anyone cares to name. </p>
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		<item>
		<title>#mad4equality</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=313</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=313#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Mar 2013 04:52:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>bess</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=313</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
Earlier this year, the Campaign for Southern Equality released some powerfully emotional videos (see above) in which same-sex couples across the South walked up to counters where they knew they would be denied marriage licenses and asked for marriage licenses anyway. Simple acts of courage like this can make an enormous difference in changing culture. [...]]]></description>
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<p>Earlier this year, the <a href="http://www.southernequality.org/about/">Campaign for Southern Equality</a> released some powerfully emotional videos (see above) in which same-sex couples across the South walked up to counters where they knew they would be denied marriage licenses and asked for marriage licenses anyway. Simple acts of courage like this can make an enormous difference in changing culture. Furthermore, I am convinced that we need to fight for marriage equality in the south if we want to achieve it everywhere else. Why support CSE? </p>
<blockquote><p>Across the South, LGBT people lack basic legal protections, face robust opposition to our rights and have limited resources for advocacy. LGBT people in our region are also at an elevated risk of poverty. Beyond this, the South receives less than five percent of the total annual funding that goes to LGBT organizations nationally. Factors like this contribute to the commonly held belief that the South is “unwinnable” when it comes to LGBT rights.</p>
<p>But we hold a different view. First, we believe there is a pressing need for advocacy, legal and crisis response services for LGBT people in the South. Second, we believe that LGBT people and allies in the South are uniquely positioned to accelerate winning full equality on the federal level by directly resisting discriminatory laws and systems. Third, we believe that every person – including those conflicted about or opposed to LGBT rights – can become an ally.</p>
<p>As a result, we’re taking a new approach, building upon a rich legacy of civil rights organizing in the South and working in close partnership with other LGBT and civil rights groups.</p></blockquote>
<p>I grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where <a href="http://www.goheels.com/SportSelect.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=3350&#038;SPID=12979&#038;SPSID=668062">Tar Heel basketball</a> is taken pretty seriously. I have long since moved away, but March Madness always makes me homesick. This year, I dedicate my homesickness to improving my home&#8217;s culture. </p>
<p>I am proud to team up with my friend <a href="http://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/get-ready-for-mad4equality/">Chris Bourg (&#8221;the Feral Librarian&#8221;)</a> and the <a href="http://www.butchwonders.com/1/post/2013/03/announcing-mad-for-equality.html">Butch Wonders</a> blog to host a March Madness tournament, proceeds to benefit the Campaign for Southern Equality </p>
<p>The basic details are described at <a href="http://www.butchwonders.com/1/post/2013/03/announcing-mad-for-equality.html">Announcing … Mad for Equality</a>! We are planning on a $10 per bracket entry fee, with 1/3 of the pot going to the winner(s), 1/3 to Campaign for Southern Equality, and 1/3 to another LGBT equality charity to be determined by popular vote. So — head over to Butch Wonders and nominate your favorite charity. We will also be tweeting about the contest on the hashtag #mad4equality.</p>
<p>You can also donate directly to the Campaign for Southern equality at <a href="http://www.southernequality.org/donate/">http://www.southernequality.org/donate/</a>. </p>
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		<item>
		<title>Why we don&#8217;t speak up</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=308</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=308#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Feb 2013 03:57:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>bess</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=308</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Oh, Internet. There is never a shortage of anonymous cowards willing to say horrible things in secret. And this is not good for discourse, because only some of us get to receive emails like this on a regular basis:
I think the most accurate conclusion that can be drawn from all this complaining of late is [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Oh, Internet. There is never a shortage of anonymous cowards willing to say horrible things in secret. And this is not good for discourse, because only some of us get to receive emails like this on a regular basis:</p>
<blockquote><p>I think the most accurate conclusion that can be drawn from all this complaining of late is that women actually are inferior.</p>
<p>I know that, because you have a vagina, you probably have lots of dudes tripping over themselves to tell you how great you are! But, to the rest of us who do not play that game, you just look dumb.</p></blockquote>
<p>I received this email and I took a few deep breaths. I recognized that I was feeling shame. Time to unpack that feeling! Among many other reasons, I am feeling shame because we aren&#8217;t supposed to say the word &#8220;vagina.&#8221; That is one of the words I (and you, and all of us) have been conditioned to feel shame around, because we view women&#8217;s bodies as shameful. This leads to the kind of thinking that classified &#8220;pregnancy&#8221; under the heading of &#8220;disease&#8221; in the Dewey Decimal system. [1] More personally in my own life, it leads to a society where <a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=231">some of us can&#8217;t really get medical care</a> because we have medical issues concerning parts of our bodies that everyone is trained not to acknowledge. So when this anonymous coward sent me this nice little message, one of the things he&#8217;s trying to do here is re-assert the patriarchy. It&#8217;s a dog whistle to the conditioning he knows I&#8217;ve received. I feel sorry for the women in his life, I&#8217;m sure he finds lots of little ways of letting them know how valueless he believes them to be. </p>
<p>Many people get harassed on the internet, but for some of us it carries extra baggage or vulnerability. It is one of the very real reasons why many women (and queers, and ethnic minorities, and any kind of &#8220;othered&#8221; group, especially one whose members have been conditioned by violence) sometimes fear to speak up when they witness unacceptable behavior. I have reached a point in my life when I am done accepting it quietly. The consequences of ignoring this kind of behavior are too high. The Workplace Bullying Institute has a great summary of <a href="http://www.workplacebullying.org/individuals/problem/early-signs/">some of the effects of bullying</a>. I am convinced, and they show some compelling evidence, that bullying is a form of violence. This is what happens to an employee who experiences regular workplace bullying: </p>
<ul>
<li>
    You feel like throwing up the night before the start of your work week</li>
<li>Your frustrated family demands that you to stop obsessing about work at home</li>
<li> Your doctor asks what could be causing your skyrocketing blood pressure and recent health problems, and tells you to change jobs</li>
<li>You feel too ashamed of being controlled by another person at work to tell your spouse or partner</li>
<li>All your paid time off is used for &#8220;mental health breaks&#8221; from the misery</li>
<li>Days off are spent exhausted and lifeless, your desire to do anything is gone</li>
<li>Your favorite activities and fun with family are no longer appealing or enjoyable</li>
<li>You begin to believe that you provoked the workplace cruelty</li>
</ul>
<p>I want more diversity in the open culture movement, and I do not want the people we recruit to feel like that. Those of us who are here already, please join me in making your harassment public, when it is safe for you to do so, so that we can have a more useful community-wide dialogue on the issue. </p>
<p>[1] See <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_A._Olson">The Power to Name</a> by Hope Olson for many other examples of how library classification systems have repeated societal biases</p>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Creating a Commons</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=302</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=302#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:21:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>bess</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=302</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This is the text of my talk from code4lib 2013. My slides are here. Video is here.
Hi, I&#8217;m Bess Sadler, and I work at Stanford University Library. I build open source software for libraries, and it&#8217;s pretty important to me. This is not my first code4lib, I&#8217;ve been around for awhile. 
&#8212;-
We lost a member [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This is the text of my talk from code4lib 2013. <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/eosadler/bess-code4lib-2013">My slides are here.</a> Video is <a href="http://archive.org/details/Day3BessSadler">here</a>.</p>
<p>Hi, I&#8217;m Bess Sadler, and I work at Stanford University Library. I build open source software for libraries, and it&#8217;s pretty important to me. This is not my first code4lib, I&#8217;ve been around for awhile. </p>
<p>&#8212;-</p>
<p>We lost a member of our community this year. Aaron Swartz spoke at code4lib in Portland in 2008. His work on Open Library was inspiring to many of us, including me. He was a library hacker in the very best sense, and he brought a sense of ethics to his work that affected me deeply. I am glad to have known him, and I am grateful for his contributions. </p>
<p>In addition to his work with bibliographic data, Aaron also helped to design the creative commons licenses.</p>
<p>&#8212;-</p>
<p>I love the creative commons licenses. In case you haven&#8217;t encountered them before, let me explain that they say the same thing in three vocabularies: Machine readable, human readable, and lawyer readable. </p>
<p>I&#8217;d like to suggest that successful community developed software projects, and technology communities like code4lib, should adopt the same strategy.<br />
____</p>
<p>Machine readable means cool uris, and unit test coverage, continuous integration, and semantic markup. </p>
<p>&#8212;-</p>
<p>It means building software that&#8217;s easy to integrate, and is able to accept code contributions without breaking. I won&#8217;t spend much time on this because it has already been well covered at this conference, and in books like Practices of an Agile Developer and Producing Open Source Software. I will just say that shared engineering practices become more and more important the larger and more distributed your development team becomes, and it is an investment that&#8217;s worth making. </p>
<p>&#8212;-</p>
<p>And lawyer readable, well, we&#8217;re not lawyers, so I don&#8217;t want to spend a whole lot of time on legal contracts, except to say, yes, you really do need to figure out your governance and legal structure if you want to collaborate across institutions for very long. And it&#8217;s a very good idea to get anyone who is contributing code to your project to sign a contributor license agreement. It goes a long way toward establishing a clear legal standing for any code that is produced.</p>
<p>Being lawyer readable can make your life a lot easier, and can make a big difference in whether your software project attracts new adopters and committers. In fact, it might determine whether their employment contract allows them to participate at all. </p>
<p>Again, this is covered in the books I just recommended, and the apache software foundation also maintains an excellent guide to getting your open source software project on firm legal footing. Again, this is an investment in your project and your community that is worth making. I too love under the radar software that we develop and share informally. I don&#8217;t want to lose the spirit of informal collaboration that code4lib does so well. But we must recognize that we live in a larger context, one where major lawsuits have happened because of unclear code provenance. Be smart and protect yourself. </p>
<p>&#8212;<br />
Machine readable, lawyer readable, these are important. But what I really want to talk about today is being human readable. </p>
<p>When we build software, what are we building? Software code, certainly, but we are also building ways of doing things, a group of people who know how to work together, and the traditions they create. In other words, a culture. In other words, a commons. </p>
<p>How many people here went over to the fedora4lib house this week? Fedora4lib is a team of software engineers from several institutions, who arrived in Chicago early, rented a house together, and have been collaboratively creating the next version of fedora. They had a couple of open house events this week, which were really fun. </p>
<p>When I got over there Chris Beer had just baked cookies. This is definitely my idea of developer happiness. I talked to the developers, and the feedback I heard was that not only had they been productive and produced something that all of these institutions can benefit from, they felt closer as a team, they communicated better. </p>
<p>&#8212;</p>
<p>Hydra, in addition to being a digital repository solution, is a community. In fact, increasingly, this seems like our primary identity. What we are finding is that the ability to collaborate on common solutions is more important than any single project. This gives us resiliency, and room to experiment. I think having a community makes us feel safe enough to take risks, and sharing work frees up our time to innovate. By trusting each other, and cultivating in each other a willingness to experiment, we get to try cool experiments like fedora4lib. And I think we&#8217;ve hit on something worth doing again. </p>
<p>This intentional focus on hydra as a community has been a successful strategy. You might have noticed from the talks this year, quite a few institutions have been joining the hydra community, and it seems to be working out well for them. In fact, we realized recently that the limiting factor on our growth was our ability to hire and train people to build and run these repositories. </p>
<p>&#8212;</p>
<p>That&#8217;s one of the reasons I&#8217;ve been spending some time this year teaching for RailsBridge in San Francisco. I am thinking about how to teach digital library concepts to people who are new to programming, or new to libraries, or both. Partly this is to help meet the hiring and training needs of hydra institutions, but it&#8217;s also because I believe that building and maintaining library software is vitally important work and it&#8217;s too big a job to leave to a small group of people. We are creating the future of libraries here. I feel like the stakes are pretty high. I want the solutions we develop to be inclusive, and I am deeply worried about the fact that only 2% of open source software developers are women. I want to do something about that, and teaching seems like a way I can make a contribution. </p>
<p>&#8212;</p>
<p>But when I think about what it is I&#8217;d really like to teach people who are new to coding for libraries, what I come up with isn&#8217;t about technology so much as it is about adopting a problem solving mindset, something I am starting to think of as &#8220;hacker epistemology.&#8221; Epistemology, if you&#8217;re not familiar with the term, refers to the question of how we decide what&#8217;s true, how we construct knowledge. For example, someone might have an epistemology of received knowledge. That person would decide what was true based on what an authority figure told them was true. Here in code4lib, many of us have more of what I think of as a hacker epistemology, this magic combination of collaborative knowledge building, combined with a disregard for the mental traps of conventional thinking. We like to take things apart and see how they work. Sometimes we listen to what authority figures tell us, but we easily discard received knowledge if we gather evidence that contradicts it. I think it&#8217;s this attitude that has made code4lib so successful. We value rough consensus and working code. The truth is what works. </p>
<p>&#8212;&#8211;</p>
<p>I was very sorry to miss code4lib last year. I hear that Dan Chudnov delivered an outstanding keynote. I am sorry I missed it, but happy that I got to hear a little about it last night. If I understand Dan&#8217;s message, he was saying that it&#8217;s important for us to grow code4lib to accommodate all of the people who want to join us and contribute to our work. I couldn&#8217;t agree more. This year, we have more people here than ever before. We have taken major steps forward in making code4lib more open and welcoming for newcomers. Now I want to take a few more steps in the direction of building inclusive community. </p>
<p>I love code4lib, and I make extensive use of it, so it seems only natural to me to want to improve it. Step one in hacking a system is trying to understand the system, and looking for places where it might be possible to make a change. One way I hacked code4lib this year was by requesting that we adopt a code of conduct. </p>
<p>Having a code of conduct is becoming a recognized best practice in the open source community, and a proven way to attract a more diverse audience for conferences and communities of all kinds. I am pleased to say that we did adopt a code of conduct, and we join great organizations like the Linux Foundation and the O&#8217;Reilly conferences, in taking this step. As of January 9, the django software foundation will only sponsor events with a published code of conduct, and more and more open source projects are following suit. After code4lib adopted our code of conduct, CurateCamp adopted a similar statement. I find all of this very encouraging. </p>
<p>And… I get it, not everyone thinks it&#8217;s necessary, just like not everyone wants to sign a contributor license agreement. But having a readable consensus statement about our values, and a positive affirmation that this is a safe space, really does improve the quality of our commons. </p>
<p>&#8212;</p>
<p>I didn&#8217;t ask for a code of conduct because of anything egregious that had happened in code4lib, but because it&#8217;s a good idea organizationally, and because I wanted us to make an explicit statement about inclusiveness. Unfortunately, we as a community do not get to start from an assumption that this is a safe and welcoming space. Sexual harassment and assault have been rampant problems in the technology world, including the world of open source software. This has been true for a long time, but thanks to courageous community members who are willing to speak publicly, who make themselves vulnerable to further attacks by refusing to remain silent, these incidents are being discussed and we as a community have an opportunity to fix this critical bug in our culture. </p>
<p>If we don&#8217;t define our own parameters, we are accepting the default. And the default is terrible. We can do much better than that, and we have to let people know we want to try. </p>
<p>&#8212;</p>
<p>Another way I hacked code4lib this year was by submitting more than one talk. For those of you new to our speaker selection process, people can submit as many talk proposals as they want, but they can only give one. We periodically discuss changing this policy, but I&#8217;d like to request that we keep it. And, I&#8217;d like to invite people to use this policy the way I do. It is important to me to have women on this stage. I want diversity of all kinds, for example I would also like to see more public libraries represented in code4lib, but given that librarianship is a majority female profession, but the tech side is majority male, I am particularly concerned with hearing from more women at this conference. </p>
<p>&#8212; We are all impostors. </p>
<p>And here, this is my final hack for this year: </p>
<p>Who here has ever felt like there are some astonishingly smart people in code4lib? Who has ever felt afraid they couldn&#8217;t keep up? Raise your hand. </p>
<p>I feel like that a lot. I think all of us do. And if we just acknowledge that truth, we go a long way toward disarming that intimidation factor. </p>
<p>I was talking with a friend of mine this week about these issues. He is someone who I think of as an ultimate code4lib insider. He gives talks, teaches workshops, and writes amazing software. And yet he confessed to me this week that he often feels, especially at code4lib, that he is surrounded by people who are smarter than he is, and he can sometimes feel like he&#8217;s faking it. He told me that the way he deals with that is to bolster himself, to put on his game face, to go into the world armored with masculinity and emotional invulnerability. &#8220;Do you think,&#8221; he asked me, &#8220;it might make a difference to our ability to be inclusive, if I stopped doing that? If I just admitted that I don&#8217;t know what I&#8217;m doing sometimes?&#8221; I had to try really hard not to reach out and hug him. &#8220;Yes,&#8221; I said, &#8220;I think that would make a huge difference. We should all do that.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8212;</p>
<p>This makes me think of what researcher Brene Brown has to say about vulnerability. </p>
<p>Vulnerability is not weakness. Vulnerability is the courage to show up and allow ourselves to be seen. To try, even when we have no guarantee of success. </p>
<p>When we make our code public, when we allow others to find our weak spots and help us strengthen them, that is vulnerability that leads to strength. And when we acknowledge our own emotional vulnerability, the fact that many of us feel lost and overwhelmed, by technology, by work, by life, then we allow others to acknowledge those things too, and we create a context where we can support each other. </p>
<p>&#8212;</p>
<p>So those are my attempts at hacking on this community to make it fit my needs better. But clearly, this task is too big for me to accomplish alone. I&#8217;d like us to set up a system for accepting bug reports on our commons. The code of conduct we just adopted is our current working document for how we have decided to do that. The process can, undoubtedly, be improved further, and I encourage us all to think about how to do that. </p>
<p>My request of you, of us, is that we put on our hacker mindset when we file and receive these bug reports. For example, this week I received a bug report that the original title of my talk, &#8220;How to be an effective evangelist for your open source project,&#8221; was a little alienating to some here for reasons that, I admit, were invisible to me until a friend explained that, as someone who identifies as Jewish, he often feels made invisible by Christian metaphors. He didn&#8217;t like to bring it up, but he trusted me enough to let me know that that word bothered him. Because we were having a conversation where we were explicitly trying to be honest with each other without hurting each other, instead of getting defensive I was able to stay present, stay vulnerable, and accept his bug report. And I changed it. And now my presentation is better and I feel closer to my friend. This is a good system. </p>
<p>This community is so special to me. I joined the code4lib irc channel when I was in library school, back in 2003, before there was a conference. This community has been a source of strength to me, a place where I have made wonderful friends and developed my own skills far beyond what I once thought I was capable of. I am so happy to see the ways that we have grown, and eager to see what we&#8217;ll do next. </p>
<p>Thank you, code4lib, for another great year.</p>
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		<item>
		<title>This is the opposite of a suicide note.</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=290</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=290#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Jan 2013 19:49:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>bess</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=290</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8220;So we weep for a person who lived at great cost /
Yet we barely knew his powers till we sensed that we had lost&#8221;
&#8220;Mark Rothko&#8221; by Dar Williams


&#8220;This is the opposite of a suicide note / I plant my roots too deep in this earth to move&#8221;
&#8220;This is the opposite of a suicide note&#8221; by [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<blockquote><p>&#8220;So we weep for a person who lived at great cost /<br />
Yet we barely knew his powers till we sensed that we had lost&#8221;<br/><br />
<em>&#8220;Mark Rothko&#8221; by Dar Williams</em>
</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>
&#8220;This is the opposite of a suicide note / I plant my roots too deep in this earth to move&#8221;<br/><br />
<em>&#8220;<a href="http://www.guante.info/2012/07/guante-graham-obrien-this-is-opposite.html">This is the opposite of a suicide note</a>&#8221; by Guante</em><br/>
</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Aaron is gone</strong></p>
<p>I woke up Saturday morning to the voice of my partner telling me, gently, &#8220;Aaron Swartz killed himself.&#8221; I had a few minutes of confusion before I managed to get to my phone, open twitter, and see that it was true. I started crying. I kept picturing him the last time I&#8217;d seen him, years ago at an Open Library hack fest day, intent over his laptop, in a t-shirt that read &#8220;Design will save the world.&#8221; </p>
<p>I somehow got dressed and out the door to CalTrain, even managing to arrive early for the day&#8217;s RailsBridge hack day. I tried to focus on my work. That&#8217;s usually what I do when I don&#8217;t want to feel a painful emotion. </p>
<p><strong>Feeling my Feelings</strong></p>
<p>I have been deeply moved recently by the courageous acts of two women who are among my heroes. The first is Maria Bamford. If you haven&#8217;t seen her new comedy special, please do yourself a favor and go watch it. (<a href="http://www.mariabamford.com/">http://www.mariabamford.com/</a>) Not only is this the funniest comedy special ever conceived, it is honest and vulnerable about mental illness and suicidal feelings in a way that feels unprecedented to me. I wonder if Maria&#8217;s therapists tell her what mine always tell me, that I have to be open and honest about who I am if I ever want to get better. </p>
<p>The second inspiration came from <a href="http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2013/01/12/suicide-and-society-where-does-responsibility-for-preventing-suicide-lie/">this post</a> by Valerie Aurora, co-founder of the Ada Initiative, in which she discusses suicide the way a good hacker should, in terms of how we actually fix the problem. One of the ways she enumerates is for all of us to be more open and honest about our own experiences. </p>
<p>I am deeply concerned about addressing suicidal behavior and mental health issues among hackers, activists, and free culture advocates, because those are the people I love. And they (some of them at least) love me. And they are not going to shun me for being open and honest about who I am. </p>
<p>I have been struggling with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posttraumatic_stress_disorder">Post Traumatic Stress Disorder</a> (PTSD) for a very long time. It has been there since before my brain was fully formed. I was raped when I was twelve, and because of misogynistic beliefs I had been raised with, I responded to losing my virginity by attempting suicide. Ever since then, suicidal thoughts have dogged me. </p>
<p>I am no longer afraid that I will kill myself. I have spent the past few years, including a very intensive few months last year when I was recovering from a concussion and the ensuing depression, practicing cognitive behavioral therapy with an excellent therapist. I still have panic attacks, sometimes for no obvious reason. I still get anxiety induced nausea, and I&#8217;ve kept my hair trigger startle reflex. But the blinding, crippling migraines have mostly stopped, and that is a blessed relief. The <a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=231">endometriosis</a> that gave me unbearable pain for much of my life is mostly dormant these days. Life without chronic pain is good, and life with meditation, exercise, and CBT is amazing. I can hardly believe that I am the same person. In many ways, I&#8217;m not. </p>
<p><strong>Central America</strong></p>
<p>I don&#8217;t often talk about my time in Central America, at least not in any detail. On my resume, that time is written out as a list of skills and technical tricks I picked up doing IT support for human rights agencies. I don&#8217;t often go into what life was like in post-NAFTA-ravaged war-torn Mexico, in places where people attempt to live everyday life amid a state of &#8220;low intensity warfare.&#8221; It was a place where, while we weren&#8217;t being bombed (which I guess is what makes it &#8220;low intensity&#8221;), anyone who was putting up a fight, even via the legal system, against having Mayan ancestral lands stolen by American corporations might end up dead. I had no idea what we were up against before I accepted this job. </p>
<p>I was used to political organizing on American college campuses, and to impassioned conversations about the ideals of the free software movement. In my political work, we protested, we even got arrested, we even occupied buildings, but none of us ever seriously feared being harmed, or at least I didn&#8217;t. I was twenty-three, I believed passionately in the causes I fought for, and I wanted to find a contribution to make that would actually matter. I had been earning a living as an IT professional since the age of 19, and that work had put me through college and had done well for me financially. I had just started earning my first significant money as a software engineer, and I was confident, idealistic, and perhaps naive enough to believe that providing better Internet access for human rights agencies was my little corner of saving the world. </p>
<p>My slow realization that real people were dying around me, that mistakes on my part could kill, was not something I had been prepared for emotionally by my years providing IT support to bookstores and universities. I was deeply religious at the time, and my work was an attempt to serve God. My heroes were the men and women who had given everything to God in order to make peace in the world, like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianna_Ortiz">Sister Dianna Ortiz</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Jos%C3%A9_Gerardi_Conedera">Juan Gerardi</a>. When I felt that I had failed at my task, when I realized that I had probably been a security liability to the very people I had cared so passionately about protecting, I fell into despair and I tried to end my life. I took as many sleeping pills as I could swallow and washed them down with lots of wine. </p>
<p>Miraculously, and I give thanks for this as often as possible, I woke up the next day. And then, to everyone&#8217;s shock, I decided to move to Edmonton, Alberta to go to library school, and my life shot off in a totally different direction. To paraphrase Augusten Burroughs, sometimes you have to kill your life so you don&#8217;t kill yourself.  </p>
<p><strong>This is the opposite of a suicide note.</strong></p>
<p>I got into library software because it seemed so safe to me. &#8220;No one&#8217;s life will ever depend on my actions again,&#8221; I remember thinking with relief. And yet I feel now the way I felt then, powerless to save my heroes. The people I care about, the people in this movement that was my salvation, are still dying around me. At a wake for Aaron at No Starch Press in San Francisco this week, I sat around a table with some hackerspace friends and we talked about mental health issues in the geek / hacker community. This was their third friend lost to suicide in the past year. I got to sit in on part of a much larger conversation about how to better provide emotional support and mental health service access to our community. I look forward to continuing that conversation at <a href="https://www.eff.org/event/memorial-aaron-swartz-internet-archive">Aaron&#8217;s memorial service at the Internet Archive in San Francisco this week</a>. My first contribution to the effort is this blog post, an attempt to be open and honest about who I am. This is the opposite of a suicide note. This is a love letter to all the hackers and activists and artists, to all the people who do what&#8217;s right instead of what&#8217;s safe. I link my arms with yours and together we cannot be moved from this earth.</p>
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		<title>the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=285</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=285#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2013 03:10:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>bess</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=285</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When I became a librarian in 2005, most libraries were providing terrible online access to their collections, at least partly because library data itself was under questionable copyright. Everyone was afraid of being sued, and no one wanted to stick their necks out to test the law. 
Aaron&#8217;s work with the Internet Archive and the [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 210px"><a href="http://www.eifl.net/news/tribute-aaron-swartz"><img alt="Aaron Swartz. Photo taken by Quinn Norton at the Eremo (2008)" src="http://www.eifl.net/system/files/resize/201301/aaron_swartz-200x301.jpg" width="200" height="301" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Aaron Swartz. Photo taken by Quinn Norton at the Eremo (2008)</p></div>
<p>When I became a librarian in 2005, most libraries were providing terrible online access to their collections, at least partly because library data itself was under questionable copyright. Everyone was afraid of being sued, and no one wanted to stick their necks out to test the law. </p>
<p>Aaron&#8217;s work with the <a href="http://archive.org/">Internet Archive</a> and the <a href="http://openlibrary.org/">Open Library</a> played a major role in challenging and resolving that legal limbo we were all stuck in, and since that time there has been a renaissance in the world of free and open source software for libraries. We are revolutionizing library access, and Aaron&#8217;s work has been a huge part of that. </p>
<p>In 2008, Aaron wrote the <a href="http://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto">Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto</a> at a retreat in Italy hosted by <a href="http://www.eifl.net/">eIFL</a>, electronic information for libraries, an international library consortium that advocates for information access in countries with developing and transitioning economies. In 2008, I had just stepped down as the co-chair of eIFL&#8217;s <a href="http://www.eifl.net/foss">free and open source software programme</a>. I was thrilled that Aaron had joined eIFL, and although I was sad to step down, I was very happy to leave the cause I cared so much about in Aaron&#8217;s hands. </p>
<p>When Aaron published the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, the tactics he advocated gave me pause. I thought he was ethically right, but I was unwilling to put my own livelihood on the line with such strong statements. A librarian who issued a manifesto like that would be unemployable, and that&#8217;s something that should give us all pause. </p>
<p>I am ashamed that it took something like this to remind me to go back and read <a href="http://www.ala.org/advocacy/proethics/codeofethics/codeethics">my own profession&#8217;s code of ethics</a>. It reads, in part, &#8220;We [librarians] significantly influence or control the selection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of information. In a political system grounded in an informed citizenry, we are members of a profession explicitly committed to intellectual freedom and the freedom of access to information. We have a special obligation to ensure the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations.&#8221;</p>
<p>Thank you, Aaron, for reminding me of my ethical duties. I am heartbroken that we no longer have your voice in this struggle. Thank you for reminding us that we answer to a higher purpose than license agreements. </p>
<p>eIFL&#8217;s official tribute to Aaron is at <a href="http://www.eifl.net/news/tribute-aaron-swartz">http://www.eifl.net/news/tribute-aaron-swartz</a>.</p>
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		<title>Día de los Muertos</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=274</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=274#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:40:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>bess</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=274</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I don&#8217;t mean Halloween. Día de los Muertos is a distinct holiday, although Halloween has appropriated some of its trappings in my local mix of culture. Día de los Muertos is for remembering the dead, those we love, those we grieve. 
Every year around this time I start to think about Bob Sheldon. Besides everything [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I don&#8217;t mean Halloween. Día de los Muertos is a distinct holiday, although Halloween has appropriated some of its trappings in my local mix of culture. Día de los Muertos is for remembering the dead, those we love, those we grieve. </p>
<p>Every year around this time I start to think about <a href=" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalist_Books">Bob Sheldon</a>. Besides everything else he did (labor organizer, anti-war activist, info-shop visionary), Bob was a really nice guy. He was even nice to pudgy fifteen year old bookworms who didn&#8217;t have many friends and loved to hang out in his bookstore. When he was killed&#8230; well, I got really sad. It seemed to me that first I had glimpsed that there could be something right and true in the world, discovered this miraculous source of dangerous knowledge, and then I had seen how casually that thing was snuffed out. And no one caught. And everyone knew but no one could prove anything.</p>
<p>Fifteen was a very low year for me. The bright point was when I heard rumors that the store would re-open, that people were organizing a collective to keep it running. I was among the first crop of volunteers. And that fall we held a Día de los Muertos vigil, for Bob, but also to mourn, together, for all of our lost loved ones. </p>
<p>The night felt holy. I dressed up, and felt like I was going to church. The crowd shuffled quietly among the ofrenda tables. Shorter than most of the crowd, the candles people held at their chests were at my eye level, and I viewed the scene through too-bright spots of light. On one of the tables there was a picture of Bob in a brass frame, surrounded by meaning-loaded objects people had left there. A stack of books, of course. I left the letter I had written to him and started to walk away. And then I stopped and started looking at the other tables. </p>
<p>There were so many dead to mourn, among the exiled, the fled, the refugees of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiapas_conflict">war</a>, of colonialism, of &#8220;free trade.&#8221; I spoke to people who had lost huge close-knit family networks, people who had lost children, family farms, holy places. They told me why they had brought a certain trinket, a child&#8217;s drawing, a favorite dish. We heard of massacres. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acteal_massacre">Acteal</a> hadn&#8217;t happened yet, but the story was similar in other places. Pregnant women cut open with machetes, because although their people had lived there since before reckoning, someone &#8220;owned&#8221; the land now. </p>
<p>I felt what I now can name as <a href="http://ccare.stanford.edu/programs/science-compassionate-mind-psy-212">compassion</a> for the people I met, and they, those who had lost so much more than I had, recognized my grief and welcomed me to their circle. We mourned together, and somehow it helped. </p>
<p>On this day of the dead, I remember Bob Sheldon and the people whose stories I heard that night. I remember those I grieve, and I feel compassion for the suffering we all feel in the face of death. And I also feel gratitude for those who pick up the pieces, even in the face of grief. Who find a way to come together and build something new out of the ashes.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m flying back to Chapel Hill tomorrow, to celebrate my sister&#8217;s wedding. I can&#8217;t wait to swing by <a href="http://www.internationalistbooks.org">Internationalist Books</a>. </p>
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		<title>Brain Injuries, Science Fiction, and Library Discovery</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=248</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=248#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Oct 2012 04:17:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>bess</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=248</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Note: This post is adapted from a talk I gave at Access 2012 in Montreal. Slides available here: http://www.slideshare.net/eosadler/brain-injuries-science-fiction-and-library-discovery
When Amy asked me to speak at the Access conference this year I said no at first, because at the time I was off work on disability leave, recovering from a head injury. Usually I give conference [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Note: This post is adapted from a talk I gave at <a href="http://accessconference.ca">Access 2012</a> in Montreal. Slides available here: <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/eosadler/brain-injuries-science-fiction-and-library-discovery">http://www.slideshare.net/eosadler/brain-injuries-science-fiction-and-library-discovery</a></p>
<p>When Amy asked me to speak at the Access conference this year I said no at first, because at the time I was off work on disability leave, recovering from a head injury. Usually I give conference talks about whatever software I&#8217;ve been working on that year. But 2012 for me has been mostly about trying to understand how brains work. My own, as I recovered from this head injury, but also in the bigger picture, understanding what neuroscience is telling us about how people process information, answer questions, and make choices, and how we might apply that in libraries. </p>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 410px"><a href="http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/archives/2011/Jan"><img alt="Serotonin and dopamine: Technically, the only two things you enjoy." src="http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/013111/serotonin-and-dopamine.gif" width="400" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Serotonin and dopamine: Technically, the only two things you enjoy.</p></div>
<p>There&#8217;s an exercise that I&#8217;ve encountered a few times, first in library school and later in management retreats and similar situations, where you try to get at the root of what motivates someone. You keep asking &#8220;why?&#8221; until you get to a primary motivation. When I was in library school, we were all encouraged to try this in order to figure out why we wanted to be librarians, and it usually came down to something like &#8220;I feel good when I help people.&#8221; Generally, we are all doing the things we do because they feel good to us on some level. We&#8217;re getting some reward for the activity, and that reward, at its most basic level, happens in the form of neurotransmitters. </p>
<p>When you engage in an activity that is intrinsically motivated, you&#8217;re not looking for some outside reward. Those of us who are very lucky are able to find paying jobs that sometimes involve flow activities for us. When I&#8217;m really in the zone, writing software can be a flow activity for me, but other days, when I&#8217;m slogging through something, it&#8217;s that paycheck that keeps me going. And I believe that most library users are the same way. Of course we&#8217;ll always need to serve folks who are slogging through a paper they don&#8217;t really want to write, but I&#8217;d like to spend some time thinking about how we might enable as much flow in the library as possible. I want to figure out how to make our collections genuinely pleasurable to use.</p>
<p>This shouldn&#8217;t be hard. Academics are the most autotelic people I know. This shines through when you really engage someone in conversation about their research topic. I&#8217;ve worked with a lot of faculty members and PhD students over the years and not a single one of them was in it for the money. The people we serve care about their research, and they care about library collections, and archival collections, and museum collections. I find my work as rewarding as I do because I care about those collections too. We are all otaku, as Aaron Cope reminded us on Friday. But I&#8217;ve got this nagging feeling that something important is missing from the online access we provide to those collections, and this talk is my current thinking about what that might be. </p>
<p>I first got suspicious that something important was missing when I conducted interviews for <a href="http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1589320">a research study</a> about how graduate students in the humanities and social sciences were using the library. One thing that really stuck out to me as I conducted the interviews, and later as I coded the transcripts, was first, how important browsing was to them, and second, the language that these students would use to describe physical browsing versus online access to the same content. </p>
<p>When describing physical browsing, people used emotional words. They felt joy when they encountered that serendipitous find in the stacks. They felt tranquility when they browsed the new books shelf in the reading room. One sociology PhD student described to me in loving detail her favorite place to study in the library. She described the lighting, the smell, the quiet, the beauty of her surroundings, the pleasure she felt at running her fingers over shelves of books on her favorite subject. Another student told me, with clear distress and frustration, that he used to spend every lunch hour in the new journals room, happily browsing, but now felt at a loss because the library had cancelled their print subscriptions and he had to rely on online access. If he knew what he was looking for already, he said, online access was very fast and efficient for getting it, and there were times he really appreciated that. But he also felt he had been robbed of a great pleasure, and one of the ways he felt most comfortable staying current with research in his field. </p>
<p>Around the time I was conducting that study, Stanford University was asking similar questions of its faculty members. For various reasons, Stanford had decided to close certain on-campus physical libraries and move those collections off campus, and a group of faculty members were asked to respond to this. </p>
<p>Here&#8217;s what they said, verbatim from the report. First, browsing is very important to them too:</p>
<blockquote><p>“&#8230;the single most repeated comment we received from faculty across the University was the importance of browsing to their research, and their concern for its survival&#8230;”</p></blockquote>
<p>And further, they let us know exactly what they mean by browsing:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Browsing is a spatial practice within a physical domain described by an immediate research question. It is a process of discovery intimately shaped by the structures of a vertically-integrated library: at once human in scale (a reader’s body moves physically through a library), and psychologically satisfying for its moments of insight. Libraries of the future, whatever technologies they embody, should be mindful of this tradition and be designed to enhance the benefits of browsing, not render it obsolete.”</p></blockquote>
<p>I would really like to figure out how to do that. </p>
<p>So… why IS browsing so important? I think it helps to understand a bit about how our brains process information. </p>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 394px"><a href="http://www.mystrokeofinsight.com"><img alt="Jill Taylor" src="http://www.mystrokeofinsight.com/resources/_wsb_384x242_2297169387_9eb20a229b.jpg" width="384" height="242" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Jill Taylor</p></div>
<p>When part of the brain is suppressed, like it is when damaged, it allows different parts of the brain to become dominant. Jill Taylor is a neuroanatomist who suffered a stroke in the left side of her brain, and she has written a fascinating and illuminating description of her stroke and her recovery in the book &#8220;My Stroke of Insight.&#8221;  If you don&#8217;t read the book, at least watch <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html">her TED talk</a>, it&#8217;s great. </p>
<p>Because the left side of her brain was damaged, she has a lot to tell us about what the right side of our brains do when left to their own devices. Here&#8217;s what she says:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;As the dominating fibers of my left hemisphere shut down, they no longer inhibited the right hemisphere, and my perception was free to shift such that my consciousness could embody the tranquility of my right mind [...] in the absence of my left hemisphere&#8217;s analytical judgement, I was completely entranced by the feelings of tranquility, safety, blessedness, euphoria, and omniscience.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Okay, I know she&#8217;s having a stroke, but doesn&#8217;t that sound kind of great? When you hear that, don&#8217;t you want to learn how to tap into your right brain more? Preferably without brain damage?</p>
<p>She explains that our right brain sees how things are intuitively related, while the left brain sees how things are categorically different. When her usually dominant left brain was injured, she became much more able to see relatedness between things. Here&#8217;s another direct quote: She says her &#8220;consciousness soared, into an all-knowningness, a &#8216;being at one&#8217; with the universe.&#8221; That sense of &#8220;tranquility, safety, blessedness, euphoria, and omniscience?&#8221; That&#8217;s inside all of us all the time. But most of us are left brain dominant, so we don&#8217;t get to experience our right brain consciousness very often. Which is a shame, because it&#8217;s very powerful. And here&#8217;s something interesting: Your right brain not only makes you happy, it makes you smarter.</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 210px"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow"><img alt="Thinking, Fast and Slow book cover" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c1/Thinking%2C_Fast_and_Slow.jpg/200px-Thinking%2C_Fast_and_Slow.jpg" width="200" height="298" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Thinking, Fast and Slow book cover</p></div>
<p>Daniel Kahneman, who is an economist, not a neuroanatomist, describes the brain in terms of how people make decisions. He shies away from right brain / left brain terminology, and instead uses the terms System 1 and System 2. </p>
<p>System 1 is fast, instinctive, emotional, and subconscious. System 2 thinking, on the other hand, is slow, logical, and under our conscious control. It&#8217;s more predictable, but it takes a lot of effort. </p>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 243px"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/pennstatelive/4948410444/"><img alt="Parking Meter face photo by pennstatelive" src="http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4091/4948410444_1355186208.jpg" width="233" height="350" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Parking Meter face</p></div>
<p>Have you ever noticed that we tend to see faces everywhere we look? We have a powerful System 1 algorithm for facial recognition, and it kicks in without our conscious minds deciding to recognize a face, it just happens.</p>
<p>So when you see a parking meter, and it looks like a face, that&#8217;s because your System 1 facial recognition system is so fast, it&#8217;s already happened before your conscious brain has a chance to catch up. It can trick us, and much of this book is about irrational decisions people make because their System 1 is being fooled. But System 1 is also an immensely powerful part of our ability to think. Another way of saying that someone is &#8220;expert&#8221; in an area would be to say that their System 1 runs that particular bit of brain software. Another way of describing why we practice a musical instrument, or a tennis serve, would be to say it needs to transfer from our System 2, where it is slow, effortful, and conscious, to our system 1, where it is fast, effortless, and unconscious. </p>
<p>I also think of System 1 as &#8220;the big guns.&#8221; A lot of our long-term problem solving, the really difficult stuff that takes a long time to sort through, the kind of problem that we gnaw at for weeks or months or years, is constantly running as a background process in our brains. Have you ever been stuck on a problem, and then you sleep on it, or take a walk, and when you come back to it the answer seems obvious? You just did some background processing! I suspect, but now I&#8217;m on shakier ground in terms of what I have evidence for, that this is what we&#8217;re observing in the phenomenon of serendipity. Something in you that is not conscious feels drawn to a certain book or article, and lo and behold it turns out to be exactly what you needed, but what you didn&#8217;t consciously know you were looking for. </p>
<p>System 1 is also where our emotions come from, and we are just starting to realize how vital they are in our ability to make decisions and solve problems. </p>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 322px"><img alt="Emotional Design book cover" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51N3RSWG30L.jpg" width="312" height="475" /><p class="wp-caption-text">Emotional Design book cover</p></div>
<p>If you want to learn more about how our emotions affect our cognition, I highly recommend the book <a href="http://www.jnd.org/books/emotional-design-why-we-love-or-hate-everyday-things.html">&#8220;Emotional Design&#8221; by Donald Norman</a>. The crux of the book is that emotions change the way the human mind solves problems. Emotions influence how we think and how we choose, even for decisions that don&#8217;t seem particularly emotional. </p>
<p>“Emotions, we now know, change the way the human mind solves problems&#8211;the emotional system changes how the cognitive system operates.” When we are experiencing positive emotions, it&#8217;s easy for us to engage our associative memory and to see the interconnectedness between things. On the other hand, when we are experiencing negative emotions, such as stress or frustration, we shut down our peripheral vision so to speak. We focus on the task in front of us, and on our pre-conceived ideas of what the answer is. This narrow view of what answers might be possible is not a path toward creative problem solving. Kim Martin told us in her Access talk that &#8220;A prepared mind is a pre-requisite for serendipity.&#8221; I think part of that preparedness must be emotional state. If you&#8217;re in a frustrated, goal-driven state, you won&#8217;t be able to recognize the opportunity that on another day might have been flash of insight.</p>
<p>Indeed, without our emotions, we become completely unable to solve even very simple problems. Most people, if asked to imagine someone totally cut off from their emotional system, might picture someone like Spock. Coolly logical, untroubled by any inner conflict. But in fact, people cut off from their emotions, say, through brain damage, become cognitively impaired, unable to function, paralyzed over minor, trivial choices. Not only does emotion make you smart, as Donald Norman puts it so succinctly, we cannot function without it. </p>
<p>So what does all of this mean for library discovery? </p>
<p>What would library discovery look like if we adopted some practices from emotional design? I would like us to consider the idea that “&#8230;the emotional side of design may be more critical to a product’s success than its practical elements.” </p>
<p>I would like us to consider the idea that we perform a significant portion of our thinking and problem solving with our bodies and with our senses. We choose where to go next by following our gut instinct. We remember where we found information by using our spatial senses. And at this point, I think it&#8217;s worth repeating what those Stanford professors are telling us about what they want from a browsing experience: </p>
<blockquote><p>“Browsing is a spatial practice within a physical domain… It is a process of discovery … at once human in scale (a reader’s body moves physically through a library), and psychologically satisfying for its moments of insight. Libraries of the future, whatever technologies they embody, should be mindful of this tradition and be designed to enhance the benefits of browsing, not render it obsolete.”</p></blockquote>
<p>So what might these libraries of the future look like? </p>
<p>Let me start with a few things I think we&#8217;re doing right, in the present moment, and then I&#8217;ll move on to where I think this might take us in the future. </p>
<p>We are making great progress on the problem of replicating and even improving shelf browsing in the virtual environment. Many library discovery systems have shelf browsing now, to some degree. This is what some of my colleagues at Stanford have implemented for our <a href="http://projectblacklight.org">Blacklight</a> instance, and it&#8217;s been very popular and well received. </p>
<p>This is the detailed view of a book in <a href="http://searchworks.stanford.edu">SearchWorks</a>, our main discovery interface. You can see over on the left that you get a quick glance at what would be on either side of this book on the shelf. And if you click the &#8220;show full page&#8221; link you get an expanded view, a virtual shelf list with your current item in the center. </p>
<div id="attachment_262" class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 310px"><img src="http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/browse_by_call_no_1-300x189.jpg" alt="Browse by call number in SearchWorks" title="" width="300" height="189" class="size-medium wp-image-262" /><p class="wp-caption-text">Browse by call number in SearchWorks</p></div>
<p><img src="http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/browse_by_call_no_2-300x177.png" alt="Browse by call number in SearchWorks" title="Browse by call number in SearchWorks" width="300" height="177" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-264" /></p>
<p>You can immediately see some ways we have enhanced the benefits of browsing. We&#8217;re seeing a virtual shelf list that spans physical collections. So even though the book we started with was in Green Library, we can also see, as if they were nearby on the shelf, books in other libraries on campus, books in remote storage and books that only exist digitally. </p>
<p><img src="http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/gryphondor1-300x148.png" alt="Collections from the Stanford Digital Library in SearchWorks" title="Collections from the Stanford Digital Library in SearchWorks" width="300" height="148" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-265" /></p>
<p>Another thing we&#8217;re doing right is surfacing more and more of our collection in our main discovery interface. So here are some Ancient Greek papyrus fragments that are part of our collection. Physically, you can&#8217;t browse these without getting special permission, so I think this is a clear example of enhancing the benefits of browsing by extending it to new areas of our collection.</p>
<p>Below the papyri fragments you see a collection of digitized medieval manuscripts from the Walters Art Museum. These are physically housed at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, so they would not otherwise be easily browsed by researchers in California. And you can not only see the metadata about the manuscripts, you can actually read them… </p>
<p><img src="http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/walters_mss_page-300x228.png" alt="Detail page view for medieval manuscript in SearchWorks" title="Detail page view for medieval manuscript in SearchWorks" width="300" height="228" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-266" /></p>
<p>Here&#8217;s a detailed view of one of the books. Again, this is a huge step in the right direction. Digitized collections give us more flexibility than ever in acquiring or pointing to digital versions of items our researchers want. </p>
<p><img src="http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/salt1-300x196.png" alt="Screen shot from SALT project" title="Screen shot from SALT project" width="300" height="196" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-267" /></p>
<p>And we&#8217;re starting to bring some of these advances into archival collections, too. This is SALT, the Self-Archiving Legacy Toolkit. This is an archival collection that we&#8217;re using Blacklight to browse, and we&#8217;ve also used entity extraction to identify the names, places, and organizations mentioned in the collection. I think this kind of semi-automated metadata creation is going to get better and better as machine learning develops and becomes easier to use as a technique. I think historians and archival researchers in particular are going to benefit from better browsing access, especially since more and more archives are in digital form from the beginning. </p>
<div id="attachment_268" class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 308px"><img src="http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/hypatia1-298x300.png" alt="Screen shot from Stephen J. Gould papers" title="" width="298" height="300" class="size-medium wp-image-268" /><p class="wp-caption-text">Screen shot from Stephen J. Gould papers</p></div>
<p>For example, here&#8217;s an item from the Stephen Jay Gould papers, but it isn&#8217;t paper, it&#8217;s a floppy disk. The notion of physical browse access for this collection breaks down entirely, so getting it online and providing any kind of browse access to the files on those floppy disks is another clear example of enhancing the benefits of browsing by extending it to new kinds of content.</p>
<p>And finally, something I think we&#8217;re doing very well is positioning ourselves to allow for future innovation. We are building robust infrastructure for our collections, we are building local expertise in our staff, and we are building our core software collaboratively. Our core software, by the way, is available at <a href="http://projectblacklight.org">http://projectblacklight.org</a> and <a href="http://projecthydra.org">http://projecthydra.org</a>, if you&#8217;d like to check it out, including many many other examples of great library, museum, and archives collection interfaces. </p>
<p>BUT… in spite of everything we&#8217;re doing right, I still feel like something is missing. Partly it&#8217;s that I really identify with those grad students I interviewed, who felt joy when browsing stacks and sorrow when they lost the reading room full of paper journals. I think we&#8217;re still falling short of a full replacement for physical browsing. I think we&#8217;re still falling short of providing the kind of emotional, physical, and spatial sensory experience that shelf browsing, at its best, can provide. </p>
<p>This is where my talk might get a little wacky. If it&#8217;s too far out there for you, just remember, I had a head injury recently and I live much more in my right brain than I used to. I think the solution will come to us if we keep watching the developments in humanities computing, 3D video games, and science fiction. </p>
<div id="attachment_269" class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 195px"><img src="http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/rainbows_end-185x300.jpg" alt="Book cover for Rainbow&#039;s End" title="" width="185" height="300" class="size-medium wp-image-269" /><p class="wp-caption-text">Book cover for Rainbow's End</p></div>
<p>Rainbow&#8217;s End by Vernor Vinge is one of the best books I&#8217;ve read about libraries. It won the Hugo award in 2007. I think anyone who builds digital libraries should read this book. In one of the many sub-plots, UC-San Diego has decided to digitize all of its books and remove access to the physical volumes. The way they go about doing this has some sci-fi elements, but it&#8217;s ultimately not too different from our current situation, where many libraries are replacing physical access with digital access. </p>
<p>This move to the digital realm is seen as a catastrophe by some of the university professors in the book, and hijinks ensue, but it&#8217;s seen as an opportunity by the students, who mostly engage with the world via augmented reality, and are excited to include the library in their augmented reality belief circles. </p>
<div id="attachment_270" class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width: 310px"><a href="http://forum.smallworlds.com/showthread.php?t=42996"><img src="http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/unseen_u_library-300x149.jpg" alt="Unseen University Library, rendered in video game" title="" width="300" height="149" class="size-medium wp-image-270" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Unseen University Library, rendered in video game</p></div>
<p>So these students who use augmented reality are really excited about the library becoming digital, because it means they can use the library collections as if they are using the library in Hogwarts, or Discworld, or any of the other fantasy worlds that they choose to inhabit. And I adore this idea. I mean, first of all, these students are really excited about their university&#8217;s digital library interface. This is my kind of escapist fantasy. But also because, this seems kind of do-able. We have an API that can give us a virtual shelf list now, we&#8217;d just need to render it in a 3D game engine. Actually, someone already made a video game that includes the Unseen University Library from the Discworld books. </p>
<p>I would happily spend many hours exploring library collections in a beautiful virtual setting and I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m alone in that. By tapping into video games we could tap into spatial reasoning and memory, aesthetic pleasure, and all of the visceral reactions that the video game industry has put so much work into. </p>
<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/nJam5Auwj1E" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>Video games that focus on providing beautiful scenery and a feeling of tranquility are out there. Flow and Flower are two that come to mind. </p>
<p>And I can&#8217;t help but wonder what would happen if we could take something like <a href="http://rose.english.ucsb.edu">RoSE</a> or <a href="http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/orlando/">the Orlando Project</a>, these fascinating projects that are creating huge webs of linked data representing authors and works in the humanities, and plug that data into an immersive 3D experience. </p>
<p>I&#8217;d like for us to go through a design process together. How might a digital library catalog make the user feel embodied? How might it allow emotional responses? How might we browse for information with the powerful System 1 we evolved for exploring a landscape? </p>
<p>Science Fiction is full of compelling ideas about how libraries of the future might work. Humanities computing research is full of fascinating explorations of information landscapes. And the worlds of 3D gaming, virtual reality, and augmented reality are becoming more sophisticated and powerful all the time. I don&#8217;t know yet where we&#8217;re going next. But I believe that if we keep having the conversation, if we keep having hackfests and Access conferences and ideas that seem crazy at first, it&#8217;s going to be somewhere very interesting.</p>
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		<title>In Memoriam, Adrienne Rich</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=240</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=240#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Apr 2012 06:18:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>bess</dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Adrienne Rich has been an important figure in my life. I first encountered her work in my early teens, on the shelves of Internationalist Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She said of her own work, that although she had been born a woman, she &#8220;was trying to think and act as if poetry&#8211;and the [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Adrienne Rich has been an important figure in my life. I first encountered her work in my early teens, on the shelves of Internationalist Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She said of her own work, that although she had been born a woman, she &#8220;was trying to think and act as if poetry&#8211;and the possibility of making poems&#8211;were a truly universal&#8211;that is, gender-neutral realm.&#8221; </p>
<p>I switched my major from women&#8217;s studies to information systems largely because I encountered the free software movement (also in Internationalist Books!), which blew my mind with a radical re-conceptualization of what the means of production could really mean. Like Adrienne and poetry, I felt the thrill of loving something enough to work hard at it. And I believe that I have been able to (try most of the time to) think and act as if my chosen field is truly universal because Adrienne Rich showed me how. </p>
<p>Thank you, Adrienne. Rest in peace.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/books/adrienne-rich-feminist-poet-and-author-dies-at-82.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/books/adrienne-rich-feminist-poet-and-author-dies-at-82.html</a></p>
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		<title>Dear Planned Parenthood</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=231</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=231#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Mar 2012 01:28:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>bess</dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Dear Planned Parenthood,
You saved my life when I was seventeen, and although I&#8217;ve thanked you by being an annual contributor ever since I&#8217;ve been financially able, I&#8217;ve never thanked you publicly and I believe it&#8217;s over due. 
This is not a story about abortion. This is a story about endometriosis. This is a story about [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Dear Planned Parenthood,</p>
<p>You saved my life when I was seventeen, and although I&#8217;ve thanked you by being an annual contributor ever since I&#8217;ve been financially able, I&#8217;ve never thanked you publicly and I believe it&#8217;s over due. </p>
<p>This is not a story about abortion. This is a story about <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001913/">endometriosis</a>. This is a story about why having contraception covered by health insurance isn&#8217;t as much about sex as Rush Limbaugh seems to think, and why even people who feel morally torn over abortion should proudly support the work of Planned Parenthood.</p>
<p>From the time I was twelve years old or so, my period brought with it terrible pain. So much pain I couldn&#8217;t walk. So much pain sometimes I would thrash uncontrollably or black out. By the time I was seventeen I was in so much pain that I would lie in bed for days at a time, unable to move, dreaming of suicide because I knew I could not endure the pain much longer. </p>
<p>My mother was extremely conservative, particularly in her attitudes toward sex and the importance of virginity for unmarried daughters. The way this translated into the healthcare I received as a teenager was that I didn&#8217;t really get any. I went to the doctor a few times for &#8220;severe cramps&#8221; and was prescribed midol. One doctor suggested birth control pills (which would have worked!) and my mother freaked out and never let me see that doctor again. She preferred the doctor who told me that this pain was &#8220;a normal part of being a woman.&#8221;</p>
<p>When I was 17 I found Planned Parenthood. The doctor there immediately recognized endometriosis and gave me depo provera as hormone therapy. They had a sliding scale so that I could pay for my medicine even with my minimum wage paycheck. It changed my life. I&#8217;m not at all sure I&#8217;d be here today if not for the people who helped me then. </p>
<p>When I was 23 I moved to Canada, and while I was there I had surgery to remove the worst of my endometrioma growths. The surgery had been recommended years before, but it had been denied by my North Carolina college student health plan because endometriosis surgery was classified as fertility treatment. The Canadian doctors were horrified that I had been left without treatment so long and that was when I first started to understand the permanent damage that had been done to my reproductive organs and my nervous system as a result of leaving my endometriosis untreated for so long. </p>
<p>So here I am at 35, struggling again with endometriosis pain and the infertility and nerve damage it has wrought over the years. I&#8217;m also struggling with why I apparently need to explain to some of my fellow Americans that while, yes, technically, I do take &#8220;birth control,&#8221; that doesn&#8217;t make me some kind of sex fiend. In my case, it isn&#8217;t even to prevent pregnancy. Honestly, the whole thing is incredibly painful and I much prefer not to discuss it, but I don&#8217;t think I have that option right now. Right wing legislators in Virginia, the state where I was born, think a blastocyst has more right to personhood than I do. And elsewhere, the right wing machine has decided to attack access to birth control again, and Mitt Romney is vowing to destroy Planned Parenthood, one of the few medical safety nets we have in this country.</p>
<p>I know that if all of the women and men who have been helped by Planned Parenthood stepped up and said thank you, it would change the political climate in this country dramatically. But unfortunately, these matters are difficult to discuss publicly. Rush Limbaugh might call you awful names on the radio, for example. Not everyone feels like they can handle that, and who can blame them?</p>
<p>I want to write a special plea to the Catholic and Evangelical Christian mothers of the world. I grew up among you. I am your daughter too, and I&#8217;ve been through hell. Remember the little girls in good Christian homes who can&#8217;t get reproductive healthcare, who I know many of you help because I&#8217;ve seen you do it. Planned Parenthood is there for them when no one else is. Until we get around to overhauling the violence and patriarchy out of Christianity, I think we need to compromise on this one. If I had had access to reproductive healthcare as a teenager, if I had reached Planned Parenthood sooner&#8230; Well, a lot of things in my life would have been less painful and I might have been a mother myself.</p>
<p>Thank you, Planned Parenthood, for helping me when I was seventeen and had nowhere else to turn. I just took your pledge (the one at <a href="http://www.womenarewatching.org/get-involved/take-the-pledge">http://www.womenarewatching.org/get-involved/take-the-pledge</a>) and I hope anyone who comes across this blog post will too.</p>
<p>Yours very truly,<br />
Bess Sadler</p>
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