lisdom

Walt writes that he is done with C&I Volume 5. If you’re a reader of Cites & Insights, you’ve probably already downloaded and printed out the latest issue, as have I (though I haven’t read it all yet). I was particularly delighted, however, to be able to download and print out the index [.pdf] to the whole volume.

I love indexes (or indices, if you prefer). So far as I know, the C&I index is the first one in which I appear, which gives it a certain added appeal, but I like pretty much any old index.

For one thing, an index is kind of a paper version of a tag cloud. Go pull a biography off the shelf and flip through the index. Chances are that some terms will have several lines of pages listed after them, while some will have only one or two. Some will also have sub-index terms underneath, rather like the sub-subjects in the OPAC tag cloud that everyone’s been talking about. I’ve also always thought that a good index reads rather like a bit of found poetry.

And then, of course, there’s what I have always considered to be the greatest literary reference to indices: Chapter 44 of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, called “Never Index Your Own Book.”

“It’s a revealing thing, an author’s index of his own work,” she informed me. “It’s a shameless exhibition—to the trained eye.”
“She can read character from an index,” said her husband.
“Oh? I said. “What can you tell about Philip Castle?”
She smiled faintly. “Thing’s I’d better not tell strangers.”

Want to know what? Well, as we say in my readers’ advisory class, if you want to find out, you’ll have to read the book.

Technical notes for this entry: I’m trying Blogger for Word for the first time. We’ll see how it works. [Update: I wrote this in Word, but I’m going to be posting via Blogger, since so far as I can see, Blogger for Word is not for Mac. Furthermore, I was unable to cut and paste from Word to Blogger, so I had to cut and paste to Text Edit, then cut and paste from there to Blogger, then put in all the links again. Poopy.] I consulted several books in the course of writing this entry—a dictionary, because I was curious about whether there was a preferred plural form for the word index (not really, though indexes was listed first in The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), which was what happened to be closest), and a copy of Cat’s Cradle, because I couldn’t remember the exact title of the chapter, and because I wanted to use a quotation. I know there are many wonderful online dictionaries, both free and fee, plus of course that handy Google operator, define: X, but I never think to use them. It did occur to me to try out Google Book Search to see if Cat’s Cradle had been scanned, which it doesn’t seem to have been, though there are plenty of books that reference it. A search for “never index your own book,” however, did turn up this little gem, which I’d love to read. Google, oh, Google, why do you not synch yourselves with Find in a Library?

I am still on a few mailing lists left over from my time as a graduate student at the University of Iowa. The other day, someone wrote to one about her experience taking a class on Extreme Web Searching at the UI Library, and she kindly gave me permission to reprint her remarks on the experience.

I signed up for this nerdy class at the library to learn about search engines beyond everyone’s fav, Google, and to my surprise, the class was fascinating. There are a whole slew of search engines apart from Mister Google, and they’re doing remarkable things. (They also have bizarre names like Clusty, Teoma, and Dogpile.) Since many of y’all research when you’re not writing, and since others may enjoy a nice vanity-search, I thought I’d pass on the links. This page should be live for a while.

http://myweb.uiowa.edu/sostrem/xtreme.html

If nothing else, give KARTOO a whirl. I put in the name of the person I’m interviewing [for a conference] and thought I was bugging out when my results “map” appeared. http://www.kartoo.com/

One might, I suppose, take this as evidence of librarians having done a poor job of marketing themselves as purveyors of useful and cool knowledge (i.e., a graduate student is surprised by what she can learn at the library?), but I am chosing to see it in a much more positive light. You see (and I’m admitting this here for the first time, at least in print), until I actually started library school, I was one of those people who thought the library had nothing to teach me. The more fool I. I’m glad to see that not everyone is as ignorant as I was, or as unwilling to take a chance on the idea that they might learn something from “the help.”

Here’s the post I wrote in Writely sometime back. Life has become more hectic since then, but I offer this to tide you over for awhile.

Everyone has their own set of frustrations (often with technology, sometimes with life in general). I’ve had my share over the past few weeks, too numerous and dull to mention, and thus instead I offer you today my favorite frustration mantra. You can find it at the very end of The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling.

COMMISSARIAT CAMELS

We haven’t a camelty tune of our own
To help us trollop along,
But every neck is a hairy trombone
(Rtt-ta-ta-ta! is a hairy trombone!)
And this is our marching song:
Can’t! Don’t! Sha’n’t! Won’t!
Pass it along the line!
Somebody’s pack has slid from his back,
Wish it were only mine!
Somebody’s load has tipped off the road,
Cheer for a halt and a row!
Urr! Yarrh! Grr! Arrh!
Somebody’s catching it now!

Note: One should really always try searching the Web before typing. I was just trying to find a nice Open WorldCat record to link to, and I found that (not surprisingly) there are full-text versions of the whole book available from Project Gutenburg and the University of Virginia. The UVA one even includes the proper italicizations, which the Gutenburg version lacks.