So I’m reinventing this as more of a personal blog, though maybe focusing on music and books and travel more than the day-to-day minutae of my life. I’ll still be mentioning library-related news that interests me, but it won’t be the main focus of the blog.

With that, I thought I’d post a few pictures from the Library of Alexandria, which I visited last month while holidaying in Egypt.

The library from Fort Qaitbey across the harbour.

Front of the library

Three NZ librarians outside the library

The library (known as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina) is fascinating, a very impressive architectural project that is clearly intended to evoke the original Library – “dedicated to recapture the spirit of openness and scholarship of the original”, as the website says. As well as a large multi-lingual book collection, it contains museums with impressive collections of Egyptian antiquities (not as large or impressive as the huge museum in Cairo, but nonetheless very interesting). There are also art galleries/exhibitions, research centres, and even a copy of the entire internet. Yes, the Bibliotheca contains a mirror of the Internet Archive – apparently the only one in any library, worldwide.

The Internet. The whole thing.

The library collection itself is housed over multiple staired floors, each without a ceiling, so that one can stand on the highest floor and look down to the bottom, like standing on the top of a pyramid.

Interior view looking upwards

The books are shelved by Dewey, which leads to some interesting problems. One of the more well-known flaws of DDC is in the 200s (Religion) class, where Christianity takes up almost the entirety of the class. As the Bibliotheca is in a Muslim country, it shouldn’t be a great surprise that books on Islam, which is allocated a solitary number in DDC,  predominate (to the point that 297 takes up probably 90% of the space allocated to the 200s).

A fraction of the shelves devoted to ‘Koranic interpretation’ (Dewey 297.1226).

The collection itself is also interesting, being multi-lingual but mainly Arabic and English. I can’t speak for the Arabic books, but the English collection left me curious about the collection development policies. Under the American literature section there are the usual suspects that one would expect in a research library – but also several shelves worth of Sweet Valley High books.

I got the impression that the collection had been built by donations as much as by a serious collection policy; a shame considering that a lot of money and design expertise had gone into the building itself.

I was pleased to see New Zealand represented, even if only a little – the NZ history section contained Michael King’s popular and acclaimed Penguin history of NZ; and a Claudia Orange book on the Treaty of Waitangi – both of which would be among my first choices for a NZ history collection. The only other book was a biography of [former Prime Minister] Helen Clark. I found a few examples of New Zealand literature – Patricia Grace seemed popular.
 

 Study section, with computers 

I have no idea how I took this picture, there aren’t really florescent lights in the sides of the shelves. This another part of the 297s.

All in all it was quite fascinating to see inside this brand new, internationally-focused library. It’s definitely one of the highlights of a visit to Alexandria. Unfortunately the entry fee (yes, really) means that poorer Alexandrians might find it difficult to access their own library. (4 Egyptian pounds is about £0.50/£.075; a significant sum where average wages are around $10/day).

Homo Britannicus by Professor Chris Stringer, a groundbreaking historical biological work about the origin of humans in Britain, was met with confusion at Manchester University, where librarians have filed all their copies in the “gay and lesbian” section.

Source.

Not sure where they get ‘all their copies’ from as the catalogue shows one holding only, and it seems to be shelved in 913 (Ancient World)….presumably the power of the Observer’s scorn has corrected any classification errors [Still, one wonders where the error could come from; either the cataloguers are copy-cataloguing from an authoritative source, or they’re doing it themselves by carefully cataloguing from the item; either way they should see what it’s actually about….)

Comments should be turned back on now, as well.

Interesting article from Read Write Web, noting that search queries are getting longer, or, at least, that the number of 7 word or 8+ word search queries has increased. Worth pointing out that though the increases are reasonably large in percentage terms (12% and 22% respectively) they are small in real terms – only around 6% of all queries are 7 words or longer. A case of increasing sophistication among search users, or the opposite – users typing in long and unformed questions? One commenter suggests autocomplete could be the reason, noting that typing curi in Google will give you the option of ‘curious case of Benjamin Button’. This makes sense – pre autocomplete, I’d bet a number of searches would type curious case button or some similar combination of words from the title, knowing that such a search would be ‘good enough’.

The article also points to an increase in the use of Google, from 66% market share to 72% between Jan 2008 and Jan 2009.

RWW also reports that citation manager Zotero is embracing cloud features, enabling users to sync between machines and backup their databases automatically online. More interestingly, it’s enabling social networking so you can connect with other users.

A poll on Law Librarian Blog indicates, unsurprisingly, that most law libraries are expecting budget cuts over one or both of the next two years, and most expect to manage this by cutting collections.

Techdirt has an article arguing that social pressure can solve the problems of copying/copyright infringement, even without the existence of formal copyright measures. I’m not sure that I totally agree, though they use an interesting example of online copying of content from Metafilter to another website. It’s mainly of interest to me because I’ve met the Metafilter member whose work was copied.

Techdirt also argues that the Google Books settlement was a bad move, because it has priced other players out of the market for scanning and indexing books. The argument being that prior to the settlement, there was at least an argument that such scanning could be fair use. Now that Google has set a price, it indicates that any other market entrant would have to pay a similar price. The result is an effective monopoly for Google.

Another Techdirt article discusses the Wall Street Journal getting rid of its research librarian. I won’t preach to the choir here, but note that the comments are (a) mostly supportive of the work that special librarians do and/or (b) posted by librarians [depending on how cynical you feel].

Interesting article on copyright in the age of YouTube, from the ABA Journal, via Law Librarian Blog. The article discusses fair use considerations in relation to YouTube takedown notices, safe harbour provisions under the DMCA, and discusses various recent cases.

Susan got in touch to tell me that the study had been published; available for purchase for $28, or for download for free, from here.

I’ve downloaded it, and I’m really looking forward to reading it. Obviously not everything will hold true for my students, but I’m sure I can learn something about how I can try to understand their needs.

Meredith asks if any libraries are assessing their use of social technologies.

Annoyed Librarian on deprofessionalisation: “Many librarians want to turn libraries into community centers, but there’s one interesting thing about community centers that a lot of excitable librarians haven’t noticed. Community centers don’t need librarians. They don’t need people with “advanced” degrees in libraries or information or whatnot. They just need people to staff the cafes and plan stuff.”

Micheal Lorenzen on teaching with Wikipedia.

Jessica Hupp lists 25 useful social networking sites for librarians.

Lee LeBlanc on online vs offline education: “What I’m tired of is hearing outdated opinions about how horrible all online education is. That’s just not true.”

I’ve taken a couple of online courses, and I have to say I found them hard – I sometimes had problems hearing the lecturer or my classmates; we often spent time dealing with the technology instead of communicating; and the lack of visual cues made class discussion harder (face to face, you can see if someone wants to talk, and speak up if no-one does. Online we often sat politely in silence wondering if someone was going to speak). And yet: I enjoyed both courses more than most others I’ve taken, and I got my best grades in these courses. A product of the content/the lecturer? I don’t know. I still feel as though the online courses weren’t as good as the face-to-face, but my performance suggests that they may have been.

Kyle at TameTheWeb on putting virtual reference in the user’s pocket (via cellphone): also a guest post by a librarian, Joe Murphy, who has done just that. I’m still not convinced of the value of 160-character reference transactions, but for short simple questions there’s clearly a role for SMS (me, I need more than 160 characters just to say hello).

Dorothea Salo on (among other things) why writing works better for her onscreen.

Connie Crosby on whether wikis belong in law firms.

Freakonomics on whether social networking is good for society. There’s an interesting suggestion that people might form more homogeneous friendships if they form them online, “cut[ting] themselves off from serendipitous encounters with those who are superficially different from them, ethnically, socio-economically, and even in terms of musical taste.” If anything, I’ve found the opposite: I’ve met people online who I could not (or would not) have become friends with in real life.

Infonatives on ten brainless things an online academic library can do.

Chris Wilson at Slate points out that most edits on social-media sites are actually performed by a small percentage of users. Yep. While it’s true that a large percentage of those who go online have participated in the read/write web, most of them haven’t done so to any large degree, in spite of the rhetoric.