explodedlibrary.info

different ways of dealing with obstacles

A few months back I went on a short walk to see Terrace Falls in the Blue Mountains. I wanted to try some different tracks in the area, a wish which led me to a track which was little better than a kangaroo pad along a steep hillside. Maybe it was once a good track and has slowly been going back to nature. Then there were all the fallen trees in my way. After scrambling over the third or fourth such obstacle in the space of fifteen minutes, I started thinking about we deal with obstacles on the path - and in work and life.

These are just six responses, I'm sure there are more ways than this, but this is all that came to me at the time. In no particular order:

- Climb over the obstacle or go under it. There are some problems which can be fixed if  enough people dedicate sufficient time and effort to solving the solution. This seems like climbing over the obstacle. There are other obstacles which appear imposing at first, but when analyzed calmly, it's easy enough to find a good and non-disruptive workaround, which could be liked to squeezing under the obstacle.

- Leave the track and go around the obstacle. Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is to take an unorthodox approach that is not in the procedures book. The danger is when you have to depart too far from the track. If you're not careful about returning to the track as soon as possible, you may get lost. Last year I helped somebody who had been lost in Sassafras Gully for seven hours, because he had wandered from the track in dense and confusing terrain, got lost and panicked. Sometimes the danger is not so much the possibility of getting lost, but dealing with hazardous terrain, as depicted in the photo.

- Go through the obstacle. Imagine your obstacle is a deep muddy bog. There have been times I've been able to pick a way through the bog without sinking in. This approach calls for extremely good observation of what you can get away with. Walking on mud without sinking in also demands particular delicacy, but if the obstacle is a mass of leaves and branches from a fallen tree, brute force and tenacity help. This approach can be risky, and it's advisable to have a Plan B. What happens if you do sink into the mud? Sometimes I've tried this approach with office politics, wanting to stay above it - sometimes being successful, sometimes not.

- Remove the obstacle. This can be the heroic option. Not only are you dealing with the obstacle, but you're making sure that nobody else has to. It's easy to do with little obstacles, but larger obstacles require something extra, be it strength or a chainsaw. There are sometimes unforeseen consequences to this. You might remove the obstacle from your path and it throw into somebody else's path or cause some environmental damage. Last week I was walking in Dante's Glen near Lawson and came across some track maintenance workers clearing fallen trees from the path. I was grateful for what they were doing, but I happened to be there when they rolled a huge trunk section off the track. It crushed several small trees and ferns on its way down the gully. I can't help but wonder if there had been a better way.

- Turn back and choose a different path. In the Blue Mountains there are plenty of tracks which look promising in the beginning but then deteriorate into animal pads leading nowhere. Some people turn back too soon, because the ideas of facing any obstacles is too scary. Other people are very reluctant to turn around ever. It seems like admitting defeat, that the initial decision to take this path was wrong. But after facing a huge and seemingly insurmountable obstacle or a depressing series of smaller annoying obstacles, it's worth asking the question if this path is still the right one. This could be the situation when somebody decides to leave a relationship or a job. Once you know that you are on the wrong path, it's better to cut your losses and turn around immediately. This can be quite disheartening, but hopefully the lessons learned from this wrong turn will be helpful in the future

Any of the above five approaches are fundamentally valid, they could be the best approach depending on the person or the circumstances. There's one other response I'd like to mention. This is how it goes: If you reach the obstacle, close your eyes. Close your eyes and try not to think about whatever the obstacle is. After a while - seconds, minutes, or even years later - open your eyes again, hoping that the obstacle has disappeared. If that didn't happen, just repeat and try again until the obstacle does disappear. The hope is that if you try hard enough at ignoring the obstacle, the better the chances of it going away. No, it's not a very effective method, but I'm mentioning it because it's very popular with libraries who don't like how their users have changed lately.

professional hunters & gatherers of information

"Well if you don't have what I'm looking for, what's the use of you?"

I've been dreading words like these for some time, and the other day, I heard them. I'm pleased to say that I was able to help the upset student who said these words, and afterwards, he was very appreciative. Some people are just more effusive, whether they're expressing gratitude or irritation. I am grateful for what happened because it made these things that I've been thinking about for the past few years seem that much more real.

People (and I guess here I'm talking about people in their late 20s and early 30s who seem to be the bulk of my business school students) have gotten out of the habit of using the library as the first place to go to find information. Many users have a strong perception that most of time, they'll be able to find what they need without using the library - whether as a place or as a collection of electronic resources. I'm not going to address the accuracy of that perception because that will get me side-tracked and is best left for a different post, but today I'm just accepting the existence of this perception as a fact.

The consequence of this perception is that most of my users use the library as a last resort, when they have tried searching for something and have failed.

This is a huge change from the pre-internet days, which I can just vaguely remember from my first years as an undergraduate, where research meant using a library in some shape or form, most often going into the library.

Searching often contains plenty of traps and deadends, which can make it quite frustrating at times. I think that this is a constant - the specific sorts of research frustrations might be different today than they were in 1990 - but the effect of the pitfalls is the same, to cause irritation.

The difference is that in 1990, the searcher was most often inside the library when encountering these difficulties, and from there, it was not such a leap to walk up to the reference desk and ask for help. Once as a student I remember feeling a little embarrassed because a diligent librarian noticed that I looked confunded (and I use this Harry Potter word deliberately, I think that all searchers are vulnerable to this) and asked if I needed any help. I said, "No, I'm fine thanks" and pretended to look at a journal for a few minutes longer and then walked out of the library. Later on I learned that I could have handled that better :) No, it wasn't a perfect system, and I certainly don't wish to return to it, but the library was optimized for this way of searching and supported it quite well.

Compare that with today. Our users are pretty much on their own at the beginning. Maybe they're lucky and they found something kinda ok early on, because if they didn't they're in trouble. The search techniques of amateurs (I use this word without being condescending - I am a proud to be an amateur blogger/writer and think that professionals ignore or look down upon the amateur at their peril, particularly in the area of search) seem particularly subject to diminishing returns. In this context, I think that professional searching can have three strengths -
1. A better understanding of how effective searches work, leading to better decisions about when a strategy should be persevered with, modified or abandoned.
2. A bigger bag of tricks - greater knowledge of the different search engines, proprietary databases, web resources, being familiar with the complexity and power (sometimes) of advanced search interfaces, chasing the target from sideways etc. 
3. Respect for the quarry - sometimes the hunt may not be easy, sometimes the hunt may even fail. If it were always easy, there definitely would never be any need for professional hunters & gatherers of information.
(Before I end this digression, I just want to emphasize that wasn't an exhaustive list, but the other things wouldn't be relevant to this post)

Anyway, as I was mentioning, most potential library users search on their own, without going through the library or dealing with librarians until it's too late. It's very easy for somebody to waste an hour or two on an unproductive search on Google. Then out of desperation, that same person might try the library's electronic collection and will get even worse results - because a) it's so easy to muck up that crucial step of which particular database you try first and b) the search techniques which will work ok in Google generally don't work well in the proprietary databases provided by the library.

If such a person does approach the library reference desk after this ordeal, they deserve better than to be subjected to a reference interview which assumes that they've hardly thought about their subject at all. I'm not against the reference interview per se, but the sort of interview which worked in 1990 is not what we need in the twenty-first century. The whole interview-research transaction is stilted and obsolete (unless you're a special librarian and your job is to do research for somebody else, with no pretensions that you're teaching research skills). I think it better to sit with somebody, listen to them, see how they search, gauge their technique and then suggest an alternative which will point them towards what they're looking for as well as demonstrate a better way of searching which they can use in future searches.

I'll end this by restating the situation. In the past 20 years, the way that people look for information has been turned on its head. How have libraries responded to this? For the most part, it's all been by improving the library resources - we've worked hard to improve online catalogues (yes, they're not great, but they used to be much worse), create websites, provide access to electronic resources such as journals, directories and databases, and more recently, things like federated search. But improved resources alone are not enough to stop people from wondering what we're useful for. While paying attention to improving resources, we've neglected services. Before, a well-maintained collection was the service. It's different now because people have access to tremendous information resources, what they're lacking is someone to help them use these resources effectively to find what they're looking. What is needed a fundamental repositioning of what librarians are about, we provide services to help people find, evaluate and use information effectively. Maintaining a collection and providing resources are still relevant, but only in so far as they support the main purpose.

the writing games

This may have happened when I was in my high school’s badminton team. We were a bunch of friends playing together and badminton was a good excuse to hang out, but we weren’t exactly a great team. I think the only times we ever received any points was when the other side forfeited. One day we booked the gym for some badly needed practice. We showed up and found that there'd been a mixup with the booking and our court had been double-booked with the volleyball team. My badminton team wasn’t exactly super-dedicated, we may have walked away if it wasn’t for the volleyball team’s superior attitude, just assuming we’d defer to them. We ended up both stubbornly playing in the space. The two games shared a similar net and similar sized court - the different sets of lines were already drawn into floor. Having two different games being played on the same court was not an ideal situation. One of my friends had a volleyball pelted into his shoulder. But I guess that it's not nice to be hit on the face with a badminton shuttle or hit on the elbow with a badminton racquet. The joint practice was not a success. After that the two teams generally loathed each other.

This is not a real allegory where every little detail has meaning. The chaotic image of two different games happening in the same space recently came to mind when I was thinking about the relationship between blogging and other writing forms – particularly academic writing and journalism.

No analogy is ideal. This writing as a game analogy may suggest that writing is a trivial activity, that it's just a game. But I think games are important microcosms of reality. Each game has its own distinct ways of winning and losing and participation. The different games require different skills and attract different sorts of players. Some people play to win, others do it for the money, some just like to show off their skills. Some people play simply to have fun or because the game is a group activity and they like the camaraderie with the other players.

Each game regards itself as more important and interesting than the other games. Often the players of one game may have a negative view of the other games. For example, a blogger may view academic writing as anachronistic and elitist. An academic writer may view blogging as a meaningless low-brow game or a hideously bastardized version of their own game.

One way of looking at these different forms of writing is to be relativistic – each of these games serves different functions and attracts different sorts of people. Actually I’d better stop right now. In the next part of this post ["why I choose blogging", written on 15 August 2007], I’ll explore the non-relativistic path.

chaos and order in libraries - initial musings

Does chaos have any place in a library – other than as a negative or entropic force which must be subdued by the librarian?

The traditional view is that libraries are places of order, where we organize information and hence give it meaning and make it more usable. I vaguely remember the days before the internet and each library was its own closed system. Then it was obvious that each library had to apply order to its collection, otherwise, what was it for?

With the internet and online databases and search engines, all that changed. There is still a need for order in libraries, there always will be. Even if there were no books or physical items, online information still needs to be interacted with in some shape or form.

But now there’s another need. It’s not a need for chaos, that would just cancel out the need for order. It’s the ability to work with chaotic systems, which requires some tolerance and ease with chaos.

Please indulge me with this little allegory. Once upon a time, all libraries existed on solid orderly land. With the internet, there has been a thawing and now chaotic waters are encroaching on our space. I can only think of 3 ways of responding to this. One way is the flight response – accept the loss of our territory. Retreat to the mountain tops where the flood will never reach. Another way is to fight the flood. Using whatever tools available, build dikes to protect the traditional library from the chaotic waters which are an anathema to us.

Flight is a defeatist response which will leave librarians a diminished shadow of what we used to be. There will still be some librarians, in the same way that there are still some stonemasons and blacksmiths. Fight is even more dangerous. It may seem to work for a time, but there is no way of controlling the flood. Should the strategy fail, should the dikes be breached, we will all be swept away.

The third way, the only viable response is learn how to swim, build boats and navigate the chaotic waters. This is the other need, the ability to navigate chaotic systems.

open mic blogging

Last Sunday afternoon I attended a poetry reading at the Republic Bar & Cafe in North Hobart. On Sunday there was a formal programme consisting of four female Tasmanian poets, in observance of International Women's Day. Then there was an open mic session.

It struck me that blogging is like an open mic session. It's done in public usually by a particular group of amateurs interested in language, playing with it, pushing it. Although anyone is allowed to attend, much of the time only a small self-selected group participates in the venture. Although writing is a solitary activity, these activities give writers a chance to share their work with each other, and encourage each other.

The uploaded word is different from the printed word and different from the spoken word. It will be a long long time before blogging is accepted as a respectable form of writing, just ask photographers. Photography has been around for over a century, but sometimes photographs are still not considered to be real art by those who paint or draw or sculpt. I have realized that it is a waste of time to struggle against this directly. Better to ignore it entirely and keep moving forward.

That last sentence was about the medium. When it comes to content, struggle is just fine.

beyond purple cows in blogging

Purple cow was an apt metaphor for the first wave of blogging. Many of the first bloggers were purple cows.

Now that there are so many blogs, purple cow isn't so helpful. After all, we can't all be purple cows - not unless purple is the new brown.

Yes, every blog and blogger is unique in the same meaningless way that every person is unique.

What does it mean then? For me, the blog is not meant to help me do or achieve anything, rather the blog helps me to exist/be in this other place, the blogosphere. Could it be that one day,  we all might be expected to exist in this way to fully participate in life? It's impossible to know the answer. All I know is that I like this form and that's good enough for now.

asymmetric information in libraries

“My research on the economics of information showed that whenever information is imperfect, in particular when there are information asymmetries—where some individuals know something that others do not (in other words, always)—the reason that the invisible hand seems invisible is that it is not there. Without appropriate government regulation and intervention, markets do not lead to economic efficiency.” Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work, W. W. Norton, 2006, quoted by Andrew Leonard, "The perfect imperfection of markets", How the World Works.

This quotation and the rest of that post got me thinking about how asymmetric information might apply in libraries - seeing that the exchange of information is what libraries are about.

1. When the librarian has information which the library user lacks

This is both commonplace and normally a no brainer - in this situation the librarian's job is to make sure that information flows freely to the user. When somebody asks how to use a particular database or how to find a book in the library catalogue, the correct answer is not "that's for me to know and for you to find out."

But sometimes there are complicating factors. For example, if a student comes to me wanting all the answers for a research assignment, I am not going to spoon-feed the answers. I will give appropriate information and advice about how to find the information required by the assignment. Still sometimes it's a murky area because I would like students to learn that librarians can help them find things, but I don't want librarians to be expected to all their work for them (undermining the whole point of the research exercise) and be everybody's underpaid uncredited research assistants.

2. When the library user has information which the librarian lacks

Librarians are trained about their role in the reference interview, but library users are not. Sometimes people only want to provide the bare minimum information, which they think will be enough for the librarian to work with. Sometimes this can work, but other times it can waste everybody's time.

What seems most relevant to the user is not always what is most helpful to the librarian in developing a strategy for finding any given information. This is the reason why librarians need all those extra questions, which sometimes may seem nosey or even judgmental. It is not meant to be an intimidating process - but I can understand how people think that it is. If a librarian asks whether you know a particular piece of information about your search topic, and you don't have this information - remember that we ask these questions not to form opinions about you but to simply do our job, of helping to locate the information.

This aspect of asymmetric information is more acute with faculty, who might have extensive, amazing knowledge of a particular subject area, but only scant knowledge of current research processes. One way around this problem is for the librarian to obtain more knowledge of the actual subject, but that will only alleviate, not remove this knowledge differential. Another option would be for the information to flow in the other way - the general research skills from the librarian to the subject specialist, but this is often complicated by the fact that there is usually a power  differential between the librarian and the member of faculty.

3. When a library vendor has information which the librarian lacks

This may shed some light on the seemingly irrational outcomes which happen in the library services marketplace. In my work, I don't have much direct contact with vendors, so I can only think of two examples of this.

When a database vendor knows more about a how library uses its database than the library. If the usage is low, the vendor will be reluctant to reveal this information. But I am guessing that if the usage is high, the vendor will look into ways of getting more value out of the library - whether by raising prices, reducing services or cross-selling or up-selling additional products.

When libraries are shopping for an ILS (integrated library system), they can never know for sure what they are buying. An ILS is not car which you can take out for a test drive. Even if vendors allowed libraries to have a real test of their software (wait, I imagine that Koha would), I can imagine that those test drives would be so traumatic that after a few of these, the library would have had 90% staff turnover and lost 50% of its users. So basically, the information which the libraries have access to is the marketing from the vendor and word of mouth. This is not a vendor bashing post, but no ILS vendor would be so stupid as to provide information which libraries really need to know - what sucks about your product and what sort of customers are not suited to it. Sometimes word of mouth can be effective and I hope that blogs can have a role here, described as "word of mouth of steroids". But sometimes I wonder how many people would be open about saying that their ILS is a total lemon, that they felt they were conned by the slick sales presentations and that their ILS is holding back their library like a ball and chain. Ranting like that is not going to to solve many problems, it's providing the details which is one way of removing this aspect of asymmetric information in libraries.

On Vox: the accidental

   
   

It is the most natural and comfortable thing in life to sink into a rut. Our routines aren't usually just blind habit, they usually develop that way for very good reasons. I don't think that ruts are bad per se, but that it is good to be aware of them. Sometimes the only way to know that you've been in a rut is the intense feeling of oddness which occurs when for whatever reason, you step out of the rut.

» Read more on Vox

blogospheres

Although the term "blogosphere" is used as if it means the entire blogging universe, I think that this is true only in the most exceptional of circumstances. Usually "blogosphere" is a contextual word, as in the political blogosphere, the libr* blogosphere, the legal blogosphere, a.k.a. blawgosphere. Usually when the media talks about a particular meme or scandal sweeping the blogosphere, they are referring to the political blogosphere.

I have travelled through different blogospheres during the four years of my blogging life. I started out in libraries and law. I have also spent some time in the US (left) political blogosphere (via Salon.com), and the Sydney local blogosphere. I have found that although a subject may diminish in importance, it is never truly left behind.

The amazing thing about blogging is that finding a new blogosphere is like travelling to a new country. This week I have started investigating the business school blogosphere - the blogs of business school faculty and MBA students. Maybe I haven't yet found the movers & shakers in this area, but it seems to me that the business school blogosphere is not as developed as say the blawgosphere is.

Proportionally, there don’t seem to be as many academic blogs as in the blawgosphere. Many of the student blogs that exist seem more personal with the MBA experience in the background rather than being about business school. Which is fine - I'm just noting the difference.

And being so new in this subject area, maybe I haven't yet found the best ones. If any of my readers follow any business school blogs worth recommending, please let me know ...

Expect to read my travel notes soon.

the ugliness of certain crowds

I have at times thought that flash mobs were more about people desperately trying to find a use for new technology than anything else. Now I wonder how long the innocent random chaos of the flash mob phenomenon will persist, now that there's been a foreshadowing of what a flash mob with a passionate purpose can cause.

Yesterday's race riots in Cronulla, Sydney - which spread to other suburbs such as Maroubra (close to where I work), Brighton le Sands and Rockdale and Tempe  (close to where I live) were fuelled partly by broadcast sms messages, emails and discussions on electronic forums. Of course, the role of this technology is very minor compared with the mainstream media, particularly the Daily Telegraph and talk back radio, the influence of alcohol and the usually buried but ever-simmering racial tensions in Australian society (in saying  this, I am in disagreement with our Prime Minister). I think that Australia has real racial problems, but then I think most places in the world do, it's just the problems aren't as obvious where the population is more homogenous.

A mob of 5000 is very substantial, but bear in mind that the population of Sydney is over 4 million. It looked huge on the TV, and it has shocked me and everybody else whom I've spoken to about it - but nobody has been very surprised that it happened. I wonder if there were many people who just wanted to make a non-violent but assertive stand to "reclaim the beach", as it seemed to be at the beginning, before it got out out of hand and the crowd took on an ugly life of its own. I don't excuse them, I'm sure that most knew that there was an extremely high likelihood that such a mass gathering could degenerate into violence, even if they weren't planning on throwing the first punch.

Given how much people like to talk about the wisdom of crowds, and the power of folksomonies, it's interesting to see such a graphic illustration that sometimes crowds are very destructive things. This isn't to attack the legitimacy of the whole concept, just to point out that it is not an absolute. Sometimes the crowds are wrong and sometimes they should be avoided.

Currently playing in iTunes: Jets by Decoder Ring

MPOW and other linguistic atrocities

A couple of weeks back, Steven at Library Stuff wondered why some librarian bloggers refer to their place of work as MPOW.

I think it's interesting how language develops in little subcultures. Bloggers are so used throwing around terms like blogs, RSS, XML, feeds etc - terms which we all know about and understand, but can be confusing and alienating to outsiders.

That said, so bloggers may have their own jargon, but does this mean that anything goes and that we'll all going to end up writing in leet (a.k.a. l337 and l33t)?

New words and terms and acronyms will always be flowing in and out of our vocabulary. I can imagine that sometimes the new words might be good and welcome, and other times, the word might appear stupid and contrived and designed to exclude outsiders (which was my initial opinion of the word "blog"). But generally there's little one individual can do to stop an annoying new word from taking - a group of individuals, that's another matter. And once the word has taken, give up on that lost battle. Focus your energy on repelling the next linguistic atrocity.

Like many of the commentors on Steven's post, I think that sometimes MPOW serves a useful purpose for people who want to blog about their work and workplace issues without naming their workplace. Why would people want to do this? The main reason would be if the blogger knows or senses that the her/his workplace would not appreciate being named.

Read the extended version of this post.

Currently playing in iTunes: Four seasons in one day by New Buffalo

stress and the cold

Despite its recent glorious weather (speaking as a former Tasmanian and Minnesotan, I can say that winter in Sydney isn't worthy of the name, it's just a welcome respite from the hot weather), it seems like Sydney is stuck in the worst weeks of the flu season. This morning at work I had an eye of the storm moment where I briefly glimpsed this insight amongst all the busy-ness of the morning. We can’t control the stress and problems belonging to other people – but it helps to understand them. When somebody else’s stress or problems or pain spills over onto me, it doesn’t have to infect me and cause me to do the same unto somebody else. Sometimes it will happen, just as once in a while I will catch a cold, but other times I can resist it, especially if I’m aware of what’s happening.

pondering the rant

My DSL service has finally switched on at my new place! I've been wanting to go on a big rant against my ISP which had been bungling the transfer of my DSL service to my new apartment. It's been particularly annoying because I had a few ideas for posts in this month, and being stuck on dialup - on a fairly busy shared phone line - has made this difficult. I'm postponing my goals for July (testing trackbacks, moderated comments and ads) through to the end of August, because I just haven't been able to do enough blogging in July. I guess that off-line blogging (as discussed in my post here) is possible, but it's not the way that I like to blog. It creates a disconnect between reading and writing. Maybe this could lead to more considered posts, but it also diminishes the spontaneity which is one of the possibilities of blogging. Even worse is that it separates the research from the writing - I now realise that I research as I write, or more accurately, that the processes for these two things are so deeply intertwined now that it's difficult when I try to do these things separately.

But back to the ranting, I was tempted to castigate this company. From time to time, I've had a mind to vent my spleen at a few other companies, banks, retailers etc., but generally I've decided not to. For one thing, there are legal issues. I am concerned about the impact of defamation on freedom of speech, particularly now that I'm living in Australia again. I don't agree with our defamation laws and think that truth alone should always be a defence and that breaches of privacy should be dealt with separately, but that's what the law is right now in NSW - and the law should generally be respected and obeyed even when it is being an Ass.* [I'm resisting the urge to digress into jurisprudence and discuss the limits, if there should be any, of our obedience to unjust and immoral laws]

But matters of law aside, I just don't want to be wasting my energy on these negative issues any more than I need to. If bloggers gradually accumulate positive credibility, I think that every negative post about a company or person has a chance of backfiring, and damaging the blogger as much as her/his target. Maybe it's possible to get away with a few attacks, but after a while, people might start to think, "He's just another ranter/hater/troll" - and the credibility plummets. (Unless of course, one's credibility is based on negativity, in which case the opposite would apply.) This all sounds terribly amoral - of course there are moral arguments that are relevant, but that's opening another can of worms.

Of course I'll still be negative sometimes, especially towards ideas and generalities which I disagree with. I just hope that on this blog at least, I'll make myself pause and take a deep breath before ranting at specific targets.

preparing to leave Tasmania

It’s Spring in Tasmania. This has been the first time in my adult life that I’ve ever really been able to enjoy the Spring here. When I was living here before, the months of October and November were blighted by end of year exams and the studying for them. As I mentioned in my other blog, Tasmanian spring is not as dramatic as its Minnesota counterpart, but it still has a subtle and diffuse beauty of its own. I have seen an amazing number and variety of wildflowers on some of the walks that I’ve taken this week.

Once again, I am preparing to leave Tasmania. The last time that I did this was a very melancholy affair indeed. I truly loved the place, and I was going to separated from it by the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains, so that I would only be able to visit the place every few years.

This time the parting is a lot easier. Of course, I’m not going to be going as far away. Sydney is only a 90 minute flight away from Hobart, and the airfares have gone down recently. The other thing is that this time my decision to leave Tasmania is completely my own choice, based on what’s best for me.

One reason why I felt so homesick for Tasmania while I lived in Minnesota was also homesickness for Australia in general. Another reason was that I felt I had not yet exhausted the possibilities which the island offered me.

inside information about being a smart call centre customer

There were two really important things that I have learned while working at Vodafone. I now have a much better idea about what customer service means. I also understand how a call centre works. This is what I’d like to write about today.

Call centres are virtually an inescapable part of modern western life. Having worked in one, I have a better idea of how to act the next time that I need to call one.

- Expect to wait to talk to someone. Be pleasantly surprised if you don’t have to wait for very long. Arrange to do something to keep you busy while you’re waiting, such as surfing the web, browsing a magazine, doing some ironing, or watching some mindless reality TV (no, I don’t hate all reality TV – we all need mindless entertainment sometimes). Anything to keep your mind occupied and to stop yourself from getting annoyed by the long wait and possibly hanging up. Hanging up while waiting in a phone queue really is a pointless waste of time, because you were advancing in the queue but then you gave up all that, and you’ll need to try again some other time.
- If you were waiting for a long time, don’t get mad at the call centre worker about it. That doesn’t achieve anything – when it’s really busy, believe me, we are all very aware of this. On the other hand, there is no harm in saying (without exaggeration) how long you waited for. That is helpful information to know, so we get an idea of just how busy it is. It’s also quite appropriate to ask if there are times of the day when it’s less busy. At Vodafone, this was usually between 12:30 and 4:30 pm on weekdays, and first thing in the morning on weekends.
- If you’re really mad about the long wait at a call centre, ask to complain to a manager about it. You may also ask if you can be compensated for your time and the overall inconvenience. You won’t always get much – or anything – but sometimes you will, depending on who you’re speaking to.
- No matter how angry you may be at the company for causing the problem that you’re calling about, don’t take it out on the call centre worker. It is true that you’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar. If customer is being mean to me, I will try to put them on hold and then do the absolute minimum to get them out of my hair, so I can end the call so that I’ll never need to speak to them again. If another customer is being nice, I will go out of my way to help them.
- Always have a pen and paper with you. Make a note of the name and number of the person you’re talking to. If they’re bad, you need their name to complain about them. If they’re good, this is the key to contacting them again, which can be helpful for some particularly complicated problems.
- If early on in the call, you realize that you have no confidence in the person you’re talking to, do one of two things. Ask to speak to their manager or end the call immediately before they cause any damage. If you call back, chances you’ll get to talk to somebody better next time – of course, this is only a good idea when it’s not too busy.
- If you are very happy with the way that you’ve been treated, consider asking to speak to the worker’s manager so that you can pass on a compliment. The value of these compliments within the call centre cannot be over-estimated. What’s in it for you? Well, that worker will bend over backwards to help you should your paths ever cross again. Also, a worker is more likely to go the extra mile if there is a chance that this will be appreciated and rewarded.
- Don’t assume that all the details of your previous calls are meticulously noted and that the person you’re speaking to will have perfect recall of this information. On the other hand, don’t make the mistake of assuming that your previous calls are never noted, especially if you call again and again about the same issue, are rude, hang-up, or frequently beg or demand freebies.
- At any call centre, the magic words are “churn risk”. If you make it clear that if your problem is not resolved promptly to your satisfaction, you will switch to a competitor, the rules of the game switch and the call centre worker is usually authorized to give you what you want, so long as it’s possible and you’re not being totally unreasonable. Don’t play the churn risk card very often with the same company though, or the response will soon be, “well go then, and good riddance!”
- Don’t choose kinky passwords like 6969. It doesn’t impress anyone, it just marks you as a bit of a dork.

what does "yes, no" mean?

About a month ago, I read an article (or heard something on the radio) about the pervasiveness of the “no, yes” and “yes, no” expression in Australian English, and how in an inversion of what usually happens, this expression has started infecting American English.

I have hardly any recollection of the article, if it was indeed an article. If someone could locate it for me, I would be eternally grateful.

After receiving that information, I started paying attention to these expressions. I realize that I say this, my co-workers at Vodafone say it, even my Dad says it (but not my Mum, but she's hardly ever uses colloquialisms in her speech).

It’s a great new mystery. Logically, “no, yes” and its variants means absolutely nothing, just as the sum of +1 and -1 equals zero. Could it be that saying, “yeah, no” means indecisiveness or only very tentative agreement or disagreement? Maybe but somehow I doubt it.

My thought is that “no … yeah” is like saying “umm” or “uh”. A kind of meaningless padding that’s used in spoken language. It’s not usually used deliberately.

photos of Maria Island

I've added a little album containing some of my photos from my visit to Maria Island. The highlights of this trip were seeing the Painted Cliffs, having the sun break through the clouds for a few minutes on the top of Bishop & Clerk, and having a lovely devonshire tea in the restored cottage of Diego Bernacchi, hosted by some friends of my sister who run the Maria Island Walk.

etiquette on the usage of mobile phones in libraries + other wireless musings

I have definitely not been an early adopter when it comes to wireless/mobile technology. When mobile phones first came out, I thought they were just a luxurious and extravagant toy for the very rich. As they became more prevalent, they started to annoy me more. It seemed rude when people would receive a call and then totally ignore whoever they were actually with. And of course, the irritation of phones going off in movies and plays. Fortunately in Australia, there have always been laws against driving while using a non-hands free mobile phone. I don’t know how many near misses I had in Minnesota because so many drivers were distracted because of their mobile phone.

One of my pet hates as a librarian was when somebody would leave her or his mobile phone on a study carrel, go off to the toilet or to find a book, and then the phone would ring. The phone wouldn’t be answered and so would ring a lot – usually with a very obnoxious ring-tone. This has happened numerous times – once with a horrendous version of Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries blaring for several minutes in the library.

Let me digress to say a few words about mobile phone etiquette in libraries. Some libraries are very unfriendly to mobile phones. This undermines the work of librarians of demonstrating to (mainly) younger people that libraries are relevant, and far from being made obsolete by technology, libraries harness and improve on new technologies with human intelligence.

On the other hand , it is also true that mobile phones can make life unpleasant for other people in the library. Here are a few tips on how to reduce these problems.

1. Always keep your phone with you. This will make it less likely to be stolen and prevent your phone from annoying people should it be called in your absence.
2. Try not to carry on conversations on mobile phones in the library. If you get a call, do one of the following:
a. Ask to text that person back (turning off the text sounds), and have a text conversation. Texting is an effective and unobtrusive way of staying in touch within a library!
b. Carry on your conversation outside the library
c. If you must, have a brief conversation in a toilet cubicle, but don’t get mad or be embarrassed if there are any loud toilet noises (odd as it may sound, this has been an issue in my previous job)
3. Common politeness really, but when you’re checking out a book or are otherwise dealing with a real person, please suspend your conversation on your mobile.

It has been very interesting to return to Australia from the US, and see how much more prevalent mobile phones seem to be here. Especially the use of text messages.

Now that I am working for a mobile phone company, it is time to bring myself completely up to speed with wireless technology applications. I am on a bit of a learning curve here.

Because I get some generous employee discounts, I decided that I could afford to get a much nicer phone. So yesterday I bought a Motorola V525, one of those phones with a built-in camera that can also connect to the internet. It’s been a great little phone so far. I’ve experimented with taking photos, sending text and picture messages, voice-activated dialing, downloading different ring-tones, wallpaper and games (cool games with a lot of colour and sounds). This phone is also Bluetooth enabled, so I’ll be experimenting with that too, once I get my iBook some equipment for this.

I am now pondering the idea of starting a moblog concerning my current job. Either that or updating this one by mobile occasionally.

musings of a downshifting librarian

There are many blogs about being unemployed. One that I've been reading is the Tasmanian dolebludger blog. I found it interesting that there are no “unemployed librarian” themed blogs. Maybe I’m getting sloppy in my searching, but I couldn’t find any – please let me know if I’ve missed anything. I have found some blogs (librarian.net, Open Stacks, Tour Guide of Coffeehouses) which were written by librarians who were once unemployed, but unemployment did not seem to be the main focus of these blogs and they each found work.

Maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised at the scarcity of unemployed librarian blogs. Having just been through over two months of unemployment myself, I did not seriously consider making unemployment one of the major themes of the exploded library, despite the fact that it would be a great niche for readership. Even if there are very good reasons why somebody happens to be unemployed, he or she feels usually ashamed of this diminished status. Speaking for myself, I was reluctant to advertise the fact of my unemployment to the world unless I really had to. I was also worried that I would come across as self-pitying.

Even now, I only feel able to write about this now because I have just been offered a job. But I want to write about my experience of being unemployed while it is still painfully fresh in my mind.

Oh, and my new job isn’t in a library. So I guess in a way, that I am still an unemployed librarian, because I am not working in the profession. Although I am glad to say that librarians do usually have a variety of skills which are marketable in the event they ever need to work in a different field. I’ll continue to keep my eyes open for library jobs, but I do so relieved at having any job that I may give Vodafone at least a year out of gratitude.

I find it interesting how people drift in and out of librarianship. No doubt there is somebody who always wanted to be a librarian, but all of my former co-workers as well as my fellow students at library school had an indirect path to library work. Librarianship seems to be an accidental profession. People enter the profession accidentally, and sometimes they leave the profession in a similar way.

Libraries in Australia are less funded and have fewer employees than their American counterparts. At least that has been my experience. I worked for a time, on a temporary basis at the University of New South Wales law library, which is one of Australia’s best academic law libraries. It is amazing that the UNSW law library has fewer staff and fewer volumes than my previous employer, the Hamline University law library. As much I really liked working at Hamline, it was a small private law school in the fourth tier of American law schools. Yet its law library was better equipped than one of Australia’s best academic law libraries! And my own law school, the University of Tasmania, has an even more meagre library. Just one professional librarian, yet it is certainly within the top ten of Australian law schools.

Of course, education is a lot more expensive for students in the USA, notwithstanding the changes in the Australian tertiary education system. I’m not saying that the American system is better overall, just that it seems to result in better funded and staffed academic libraries.

Maybe I’m not comparing apples with apples, because in Australian universities, the law library is usually just a branch of the main campus library system. Technical services is often centralized. Whereas in the US, the ABA rules require that the law library be separately administered. I think it is these ABA standards for academic law libraries which cause this disparity between Australian and American law libraries. The standards are fairly detailed and actually have teeth. If a law school’s library is not up to scratch, that law school will not be accredited – it’s as simple as that. That sort of external pressure helps the American university administrators from neglecting their law libraries too seriously.

Then in Tasmania, there are very few law libraries and special libraries (the two areas where I have the most experience). Most of the library jobs are in the public library system, the University of Tasmania or in the school system. I would be happy to work in a public library or non-legal academic library, if they would have me. Never in a school. I think that school librarians have a very important calling, but the way things are, the library is usually the least-valued and supported part of a school system which itself is already underfunded – nothing could entice me to work under such difficult and depressing circumstances.

It is a very small job market for librarians in Tasmania, and once somebody gets a library job here, they generally stay in it for a long time. Especially for law librarians, openings only happen when somebody dies or retires – and that’s if the employer doesn’t see this event as opportunity to replace the librarian position with a library assistant or technician.

I knew it would be more difficult to find library work in Tasmania, although to be honest, I did not think it would be this hard. I had forgotten that networking is of such crucial importance for finding work amongst this small close-knit group of librarians here. I do not have much of a network here and am not very good at using networking as a job-seeking method.

I know that if I moved to somewhere on the Mainland like Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, I would eventually be able to find a good library job there. I may end up doing that, but not right now. If moving up the ladder as a law librarian was the most important thing for me, I would have stayed in the USA. But I decided that the quality of life in Tasmania was more important, even if moving back would involve downshifting my career. I was prepared to be unemployed after my arrival – which happened. I was also prepared to be underemployed – which is happening now.

How much value does one put on natural beauty, the proximity of family, and a slower pace of life and friendlier strangers? What sort of sacrifice is appropriate to obtain such a thing?

Before I finish, I’ll talk about how my work changes may affect this blog. I still feel as if I am a librarian, and I still think like one, especially in my approach to blogging (lawyers make much of the ability to “think like a lawyer”, but I think that “thinking like a librarian” is just as real a concept). Only at the very beginning did this blog try to be a law library blog. I found that approach too constrictive and changed my focus to a librarian’s perspective on particular issues – some of which were at the heart of the profession, while others had little or nothing to do with librarians. For the time being, I think I’ll be able to continue this. After all, I hope to return to the profession within a year or two, and blogging will be one of the best ways of keeping in touch with the changes in the library world.

movie promotional blogging templates + digression on illegal art

I remember the controversy when film studios and other intellectual property owners forced numerous fan sites off the web. I'm thinking particularly about Star Trek and Harry Potter - which was a particularly mean-spirited example, seeing that most of the fansites were created by children and were about the books, not the film version.

So it's now very interesting to see that Sony is providing free templates to bloggers that promote Spiderman 2. These promotional templates are available for Blogger and LiveJournal. There are also RSS feeds on the movie's website.

In addition, LiveJournal users can download animated icons with characters from the movie.

I wonder if this is a new trend and an advance in the mainstreaming of blogging, or if it's just a quirky marketing idea which is just a dead end. A number of LiveJournal users already have icons which promote particular movie & TV characters, singers and other personalities. Of course, all of those icons are unauthorized. So is this one Hollywood studio thinking, "if you can't beat them, join them" and attempting to get some good-will from bloggers as well as free advertising? It's also a sign that the business side of big media is starting to notice the blog medium. One implication of this is that they will try to work with us and use us - and maybe there is some chance of a win-win situation here. But does this mean that bloggers will need to be more careful about recycling intellectual property? For example, I can imagine that some bloggers might download these Spiderman templates and alter them in a way which subverts their marketing purpose. What would Sony do then? Would it follow Starbuck's example in suppressing the Corporate Whore parody?

Incidentally it is a lot more difficult to find the Corporate Whore logo than it used to be. Go to the Illegal Art website, take a glance at the hilarious click-through agreement, and go into the Visual section. Salon also wrote an article about illegal art, which is well worth a read.

fictional blogging

Jim McClennan, How to write a blog-buster, the Guardian (8 April 2004). I found this to be a very interesting article and am linking to it so I can read it again - and some of the fictional blogs mentioned.

This is something which I would like to do, but I'm still pondering a manageable and sustainable way to approach it. I did dabble with This is not me and New Dark Ages, which I've discontinued and taken off the web. It is more difficult to maintain a blog "in character", at least for me. I tend to be more self-conscious about my fiction writing, which makes it more difficult to create even 1-3 entries a week.

To succeed as a fictional blogger, I would need to appreciate that it is a fundamentally different and paradoxical form of writing. It is part improvization. It needs to be good, spontaneous and most importantly, not belaboured or over-edited. I believe strongly that fictional blogs should not be revised in any significant way after they have been written. It will have flaws which fixed writing would never countenance, but this is what makes them real and engaging. Although it possible to publish a novel, short story or poem on blogging software, this would only be an innovation in the means of publication, not an innovation which took advantage of any characteristics of the blog medium.

I certainly would like to try this again. I'm mulling over aspects of characters, setting (as a real blogger, this is something I don't need to invent) and plot - and how to change these artificial ingredients into something that's real.

librarians for the forests

Tasmania’s ever-present forestry debate has recently become a lot more heated. On Saturday, I attended a rally and march for preserving what’s left of Tasmania’s old-growth forests. It was very successful, and the attendance was estimated to over 10,000 (10,000 was the most conservative estimate – I have seen other estimates of 12,000 or 15,000 people attending). This was answered by an opposing rally on Tuesday in Launceston, where up to 10,000 people gathered to support the forestry industry. Some of the people who attended the Launceston rally did so on company time – they could do their regular work or go to the rally and be paid either way. This brought accusations of “rent a crowd” by the Greens.

Digressing from the environment for a moment, I have to say that after living in the post-9/11 USA, there was something very refreshing about attending this protest. The good thing was that I was able to join a very large group in front of the Tasmanian Parliament House, make a lot of noise, and go marching through the streets of down-town Hobart without any fears of a violent police crack-down or that environmental concern would be interpreted as unpatriotic and supporting the terrorists (see this Salon.com article, Outlawing dissent).

One Tasmanian commentator has likened the ongoing environmental debate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – because of its longevity and intractability . I don't agree with that analogy – we don’t have suicide bombers and state-sanctioned assassinations going on in Tasmania. There have been some acts of vandalism, violence and intimidation, but certainly not any wars. All that notwithstanding, this is a very deep-rooted and polarizing conflict.

Both sides claim the middle ground. Environmentalists don’t hate the workers of the forestry industry, we don’t oppose responsible and selective logging, we support the manufacture of value-added timber products in Tasmania – as opposed to just woodchipping the lot to sell for a pittance so somebody smarter can make the paper for us.

For its part, the forestry industry says that it is committed to conservation and that it has the statistics to prove it. Then the debate gets very murky, with both sides producing statistics to show there is or there is not enough protection of Tasmania’s old-growth forests.

I met somebody from Lawyers for the Forests in this rally. I gather that they provide some pro bono legal assistance for the Green movement in Tasmania, as well support the movement in other ways. I might join Lawyers for the Forests. My sister’s a member of Doctors for the Forests, a group which has been around for a little longer and has been even more effective at getting out its message.

Why isn’t there a group of Librarians for the Forests? Yes, in the eyes of the general public, librarians are a lot less important than doctors or lawyers. But who cares?! The forests are our common heritage and citizens who are librarians have just as much right to express their views about this as any one else.

Many novels and books of poetry have been inspired by forests and end up in libraries. The biodiversity of forests have produced medicines which have been written about in science journals, which end up in libraries. The library is the record of our changing perceptions of the environment, from the times when “improving land” meant chopping down and burning all of its trees, to storing information about the first environmental controversies and the development of environmental law.

I was imagining that if such a group ever happened, it could have a few different purposes. Similar to Lawyers for the Forests, Librarians for the Forests could support the Green movement with their research skills. We are trained to find all sorts of information and evaluate the sources of information. This could be very helpful.

Another focus would be within the library profession. Of course libraries hold and consume a lot of paper, and I know from first-hand experience that we waste a lot of paper too. How much paper do law libraries discard from loose-leaf services alone? I’m not saying that paper loose-leaf services should be cancelled as soon as electronic alternatives are available, but that a library’s environmental footprint (which includes everything, not just paper consumption) should be a factor in its decisions. Of course, serving the information needs of our users would always be the reason for our existence, but there is no harm in trying to do this in a more environmentally friendly way. This way we will be doing our part.

barkfall - why are there four seasons?

Depending on how you look at it, Tasmania may have the typical four distinct seasons. At least this description is less artificial when applied to Tasmania than to other places in Australia. For example, the leaves of the European deciduous trees which have been planted on the island do turn gold or red before starting to fall. The leaves of deciduous trees in Sydney just seemed to suddenly turn brown and then drop onto ground, all at once. The further north you go, the less sense that four seasons seem to make in Australia – until you get to the tropical areas which only have the two seasons – wet and dry.

On the other hand, I’ve talked to people from the Northern Hemisphere who are convinced that Tasmania doesn’t have four seasons, but only one – which is spring, because it never gets too hot or too cold over here. It’s true that the seasons here are more subtle. The leaves on almost all of the native plants look the same whether it’s summer or winter. There can be snow and freezing weather on the mountains in summer. Yes, summer is usually warmer than spring which is warmer than winter, but the degrees of temperature difference between the seasons are minute when compared with a continental climate like Minnesota.

It never ceased to amaze me how place that gets so cold in the winter as Minnesota, could be so hot and humid in the summer. It would dismay me how short (although delightful) spring and autumn could be there. One day in October it might be 65F and then only a few days later it would be 30F.

As I’ve been pondering whether the four seasons template works everywhere, I’ve been thinking that Minnesota really has five seasons, because it gets a second helping of winter. I’m talking about the dreary time of year when the snowbanks start to melt, the days are a bit longer, but any day there might be a nasty snowstorm and the flowers and greenery of spring seem a long way off. I’m basically talking about mid-February through to mid-April.

Of course, the extreme weather keeps away the bad people. Why didn’t anybody mention that to Arlon Lindner? Well if thinking such things helps Minnesotans get through the month of March, I won’t be so cruel as to argue with them.

I remember hearing something on ABC radio about how most places in Australia can’t really fit into four seasons. In some places there might be six seasons, admittedly fairly subtle.

Although eucalyptus leaves don’t fall at once, I have noticed that eucalyptus trees in Tasmania begin to shed their bark in late February. It’s very pretty actually, the ground is littered with the freshly fallen bark, often colourful on the underside. The new bark on the tree trunks and branches looks light, soft and clean – it hasn’t yet been sunburnt or weathered the many fierce storms in store for it.

Could this be a subtle sign-post for the start of a new season? I wonder that other ones there might be.

moral rights and the grey album

Well this is what happens when I skip checking my aggregator for a day - I miss Grey Tuesday! See synapse's informative post about this. The New York Times also covered this.

Other than missing out an opportunity for changing this blog's colours to grey, I guess that there isn't much that I could have done *sigh* Being on a dial-up connection, it's too painfully slow to download an album, let alone host it.

It seems that today copyright is about two things: money and control. I am not so concerned about the money side of it - within reason. Artists, like anyone else, deserve to fairly compensated for their works. I will be so presumptuous to say that this part of the debate is almost over. Of course there are disagreements about what fair means in this context.

My real difficulty lies in the controlling aspect of copyright law. Like not being able to hear something like the Grey Album just because the suits at EMI don’t like it.

To play devil’s advocate for a moment, there is a reason why a copyright holder should be able control their creations and be compensated when their work is sampled or otherwise incorporated into someone else’s work.

Remember DNA’s remix of Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner? Suzanne Vega deserved to get a cut of DNA’s very successful remix. Really, all DNA did was add some beats, and a few sound effects. If Suzanne Vega hadn’t got any money or attribution for that use of Tom’s Diner, that wouldn’t seem fair.

On the other hand, it wouldn’t have been fair if her record company had arbitrarily forbidden DNA from selling and broadcasting the remix.

does the marketing by Lexis and Westlaw have an effect on librarians?

One of the things about my job that I'll sometimes miss is being courted by the two mega legal publishers, Westlaw and Lexis. Law librarians get presents from them all the time. During the two and half years in my job in an academic law library, I've received numerous travelling cups, t-shirts, fancy pens, a flashlight, a clock, and several other things which I'm forgetting. I've only been to one AALL conference in that time - but librarians going to those can pick up even more goodies. I got a toy moose which my niece loved when I gave it to her. Then there's all the free food - from the pastries when our Westlaw or Lexis rep visit, to the huge box of chocolates we received in December.

As an academic law librarian I am of two minds about legal publishers, especially the Big Two.

trivia about me and this blog; LiveJournal community for the private journals of public bloggers

I would be an absolutely atrocious cataloguer because I seem to have no consistency about what I call things. I can't even maintain consistency in the name of this blog. Is it the exploded library, explodedlibrary, or explodedlibrary.info? I use all three permutations regularly - I guess that it depends on my mood. So if you link to me, don't worry about getting the name right, because I don't.

This isn't meant to be anonymous blog. When I first started blogging on Radio Userland, I didn't know how to make the blog anonymous. So that's how it started - and when other bloggers first welcomed me, they always included my name.

There have been, and continue to be debates about anonymous blogging. It's not for me because I would live in fear of having my true identity discovered. And it would be much more difficult for the benefits of blogging to spill over into my real life if I was anonymous.

will brute political power subvert the US constitution?

[update on 28 March 2005: This article has been followed-up on and partially retracted here]

Among constitutional scholars there was a big divide between those who think that the best safeguard of democracy and human rights is to have a strong written constitution - and those who prefer an unwritten constitution.

I tend to think that when things are going well, a good written constitution will almost always be better. It can help provide a good check on goverment by those without power. But any written constitution is only as strong as a nation's citzenry, courts, law makers, and law enforcement willingness to be bound by it, even when it goes against their immediate wishes. It is so easy for a written constitution to be misinterpreted and marginalized and ultimately ignored. There are numerous examples where a country's constitution's is not so much of a fundamental binding legal document, but a wish list. For example, look at Part II chapter one of the Sudanese constitition. Such a huge gap between the words and the reality! I worry that the US has started to head in this direction.

I could name countless examples , but I'll limit myself to three, concerning each of the branches of goverment. ...

a little announcement

I'm going to be moving back to Australia, probably at the beginning of February 2004. I plan to continue working on this blog, although it's very likely that my focus will shift a little, so there will be more postings directly about Australian topics. But I certainly won't cease writing about those American issues which have ramifications for Australia and the other small countries (politically speaking) of the world. American domestic laws and politics, whether we like it or not, have a great effect on Australia. ...

11 September 1803, 1973, 2001 + why do things fade into history?

September 11. This automatically bring most of us back to the terrorist attacks of 2001. It seems that this is not just a day, but a shared emotion and the beginning of a new epoch.

But this is not universal. For the supporters of those responsible for the atrocity, this day is a glorious victory.

And for others, 11 September 2001 is dwarfed by what happened on that same day in other years.

There's 11 September 1973. Thirty-years ago, Chile's democratically-elected leader Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup staged by Augusto Pinochet. The coup was supported by the Nixon administration, and led to Pinochet's 16.5 years of harsh dictatorship, during which time over 3,000 citizens were killed for political reasons and many others were tortured.

For the Tasmanian aborigines, 11 September 1803 is remembered as the day that whites first settled in Tasmania, which lead to one of the most devastating attempts of genocide made against any people.

musing about the role of erosion and cataclysm in history

There's a danger in dividing events between what's current/relevant and what's historic/old, because really everything should be in the past tense, whether in an event is only seconds old, or hours, years or centuries old. Also, everything in the past is somehow relevant to the present, in some way or another.

Still, people tend to forget and ignore the past, and focus on current events So even if it's not the best way of viewing happenings, I want to explore how "news" becomes "history."

So when does an important event become relegated to history? Although it happened two years ago, 11 September 2001 seems very much like a present event, because it was the cause of so much that is happening in the world right now. What started on that day is still playing out right now.

What about the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989? I imagine that its impact would be more enduring and relevant to people in the former Eastern bloc, because that was when their world underwent a seizmic shift and it hasn't really changed to such an extent since then.

But as the strains in the trans-Atlantic alliances between the US and Western Europe are showing, World War Two seems like a long time ago now. Was this caused by the passing of time or the end of communism - or both?

I want to explore this geological view of history for a moment. Most of the time, the landscape is continually being changed by gradual erosion. But every so often, an extraordinary event happens such as an earthquake, volcano, meteorite which tears up the existing landscape and remakes it in its own image. The impact of this event will persist until the next extraordinary event happens, or if enough time passes to allow erosion to erase almost all of its traces.

Applying this to history, an extraordinary event like 11 September 2001 will stay current and relevant until the next cataclysmic occurence or enough time passes (50 years? 100 years?) to wear down its importance and relevance.

Just as in geology, what's relevant and current will vary from place to place. The big event of one place is not going to be the big event of another place. It's the same with people and history.