Gratia Countryman on Outreach

I took a look at Kate Roberts' "Minnesota 150; the people, places, and things that shape our state," (2007) and found Gratia Countryman among the 150. The book quotes a 1935 Minneapolis Journal article, as follows:

"Minneapolis loves and honors Gratia Countryman most because she traveled and tramped its streets in the early days to study the reading needs of each of its little outlying districts; because she has had thought for the bedbound, the povertybound, and trouble-bound, and has offered them her greatest solace, books; because she has believed and still believes that taking books to people who need them is her job; because she does that job with the sympathetic understanding which makes a book a benediction."

Something to think about as we consider cutting the Children's Readmobile and some of the Outreach programs.

Everything is Miscellaneous

I was really taken with David Weinberger's book, Everything is Miscellaneous. Here are some quotations and summaries from the book.

The CEO of the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. . . found that wikis reduced emails about projects by 75 percent and halved meeting times.

Books externalize memory. Databases externalize factual memory. . . Third-order information externalizes meaning. The content and metadata are all digital. This enables us to bring any set of content next to any other, whether through relationships intended by the authors, crafted by the readers, promoted by the companies, or created by the customers. This makes the digital miscellany fundamentally different from previous miscellanies. The value of the potential, implicit ways of ordering the digital miscellany dwarfs the value of any particular actualization ...

Our assumptions about order: simple, uniform, comprehensive, orderly, explicit. Not in third-order order, web 2.0.

Jorge Luis Borges's essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins." He invents a Chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, that divides animals into:

(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

Our assumptions about lists: that they have a purpose, that they have a similar relationship to the heading. (Borges list violates both assumptions.)

Everything is Miscellaneous

Click here to read my review of David Weinberger's book, "Everything is Miscellaneous," posted July 8 under "Oh, Freedom" on Paper Baubles, my other blog.

Information wants to be free? Weinberger says information wants to be miscellaneous!