Today, I had an oral exam in "library law" (comprises copyright law, media law, monumental protection, data protection, university organizational law...) which I passed with distinction, although having started to learn as usual on Saturday. Yes! By passing this exam, I finished the so-called "Grundausbildung für den Bibliotheks-, Informations- und Dokumentationsdienst" (~ basic education for people working in library & information science) provided by the Austrian National Library. I had only to do the legal thingies (constitutional law, administrative law, labour law, library law) - I was given credit for everything else because I had learned it before at FHIB.
Doing courses at the Austrian National Library is very nice... they have nice premises and very good lecturers. The seminars within the basic education costs 24 € per day for guest students like me as I didn't attend the whole training.

"allzu große Vortrefflichkeit"

Yesterday, I spent a few hours browsing through older issues of the "Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen". I found a lot of articles about the occupational image, job descriptions, troubles with salaries... Especially interesting to me are the texts about female librarians. For example, in 1939 Ernst Koch wrote that women librarians had a bad memory, that they weren't familiar with technical-scientific bibliographies and that they were incapable of accounting. His conclusion: He is proud of NOT having any women in the clerical grade in "his" library.
In the next issue, another male librarian, Otto Glauning, presented his view about female librarians in clerical grade (=middle-level service, "mittlerer Dienst"). In original language: "Unzulänglichkeiten waren nur eben soviel vorhanden, daß man nicht zu besorgen brauchte, sie möchten eines Tages wegen allzu großer Vortrefflichkeit auf einem feurigen Wagen gen Himmel geholt werden" :-)

I've found an interesting database via a link in the "Education Librarian Weblog": the "Science Fiction & Fantasy Book List". It is "a comprehensive bibliography of science-fiction and fantasy authors and their books" and is updated monthly.

There was an interesting case of bibliomania in Germany I read about in the Salzburger Nachrichten, in the mailinglist Inetbib and in Yahoo News: Because of an alleged pipe burst, the fire brigades opened a flat in Kaiserslauten. But they had troubles with entering, because the whole apartment, including the bathroom, was crowded with books up to the ceiling. Only to the kitchen which seemingly also served as bedroom, a small passage was left void. As the building was acutely impending to collapse, the fire brigades and the police had to remove several tons (!) of books and store them temporarily in a depot. When the owner came home in his also crowded car, he suffered a nervous break-down and had to be supervised by a psychologist, as he couldn't bear the evacuation of his beloved books.
Apropos: You can read an article in the magazine "Spiegel" about the "Messie-Syndrome" or Eugene Fields "The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac" online at the University of Virginia Library's Electronic Text Center.

ePSIGate is building up a database on national legal frameworks for the exploitation of Public Sector Information in the EU member states. ePSIGate, an Accompanying Measure funded under the EU eContent programme, is a portal whose objective is knowledge-sharing, alerting & advisory service targeted to the needs of all PSI stakeholders. There is a conference and a workshop named "Commercial exploitation of public sector information (PSI) in order to boost the private content- and multimedia sector" in Vienna on the 24th of October, 2003.

Nominations for the "Library Journal Librarian of the Year" are currently sought by the Library Journal Editors, "to honor a professional librarian for outstanding achievement and accomplishments reflecting the loftiest service goals of the library profession". I remember other rankings & ratings, for example the "Internet librarian Hall of Fame".

Ifyou want to read other library-related weblogs, have a look at the LIBDEX overview. There is just one Austrian library blog listed, namely the one of Horst Prillinger, a librarian at Vienna University. His blog is named "The Aardvark speaks".

Some of Murphy's Library Laws (found within the humour section on the IFLA website):
- When a teacher recommends a library book to a student, you can be certain that the teacher has checked out the only copy and has lent it to a friend in Peru
- Make 17 subject headings for a book and you will find that you should have made 18
- If it's a good book, it's out of stock. If it's an excellent book, it's out of print
- If you made the system foolproof you discover that everybody has suddenly become geniuses
- No matter how long you keep an article or piece of information you will never need it till you throw it away
- Students always require a 400 word article for a 500 word essay

Attention, advertisement: My best friend Barbara Mayer, a trained kindergarten teacher, offers something called "Bilderbuchkino" (~ picture-book cinema) to children who are between three and eight years old. What is that? The pictures of the book are projected on the wall, and the story is read to the children, who are thus able to see details in the pictures and are fascinated by the huge projection. It is a nice idea to have for birthday parties, kindergarten, public libraries... If you are interested, please have a look at her website and contact her for details.

I'd like to recommend to you the magazine "New Scientist". New Scientist has terrific stories and amusing columns like "last word" (Q & A on everyday scientific phenomena, e.g. "Why are the ends of your fingernails white?") and "Feedback" (Strange but true tales from the world of science).
This issue's cover story deals with infinity. Quote: "In anyone's book, infinity is paradoxical. If your bank has an infinite number of pounds in the vault, you can pay in one pound, take out a million and the bank won't have lost any money. And that's just the beginning. There's even a way you can take out an infinite number of pounds and the bank still won't have lost any money. Confused? You should be. When we start thinking about infinity, we are on dangerous ground. But it's not just philosophically threatening - it's also a problem in maths. Mathematicians would gladly banish the infinite from their minds, were it not for one thing: infinity is far too useful to do without…" (Source: New Scientist Print Edition e-zine, 29 September 2003)

I've just finished an article I wrote with a colleague (well, let's say: my colleague wrote it with me), and I've just sent it off to the editor. Nice feeling :-) The text is named "Electronic governmentality in Austria: 'Governance Work' between self-bureaucratisation and central surveillance" and will be published in the book "e-Democracy: Technology, Law and Politics" edited by the Austrian Computer Society OCG.

Last Monday, I attended a DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification) introductory course during the ODOK conference in Salzburg. It was really interesting, and I think that the possibilities DDC offers (for example facet indicators) are useful. But then a fellow student pointed to the following article: "Hotel Being Sued for Using the Dewey Decimal System" (via Slashdot)
It says that OCLC is suing the Library Hotel in New York for trademark infringement. The cited Library Hotel "in New York City is the first hotel ever to offer its guest over 6,000 volumes organized throughout the hotel by the DDC. Each of the 10 guestrooms floors honors one of the 10 categories of the DDC and each of the 60 rooms is uniquely adorned with a collection of books and art exploring a distinctive topic within the category or floor it belongs to." Nice place to be :-)
I think it might be dangerous to subdue oneself to OCLC's business practices - maybe libraries will be awaited by the same problems they currently have with electronic journals... What if Austrian libraries change their shelf classification to DDC, and suddenly OCLC imposes a price increase that libraries can't bear with their increasingly limited budgets...

A few reading recommendations:
- Chuck Zerby: The Devil's Details. A History of Footnotes. Touchstone 2003
- Katia Roberto / Jessamyn West (eds): Revolting Librarians Redux. Radical Librarians speak out. McFarland 2003
- Heather J. Jackson: Marginalia. Readers writing in books. Yale University Press 2001
A few listening recommendations:
- The Librarians: The Pathetic Aesthetic. The authors of this quite funny CD don't seem to be librarians themselves, but they also sell T-Shirts showing the imprint "the librarians" as well as a picture of spectacles, which my colleague and me bought at once and wear at library events.
- Kate Bush: Sensual World. An album I didn't like at all when first listening at it, now being addicted to it. Special recommendation: the song "Reaching out".

James Gunn wrote an essay about "Libraries in Science Fiction" wich can be found here.

Believe it or not - you can study Science Fiction! The University of Liverpool offers a M.A. programme: "The course provides a framework for the study of a broad range of Science Fiction texts in their formal, stylistic and thematic characteristics. At the heart of Science Fiction lies a speculative energy which will be examined in relation to such critical and theoretical issues as gender and the limits of the genre. The course material will mainly be twentieth century and written in English, though European writers such as Yevgeny Zamyatin and Stanislaw Lem will also be considered." (website)
Also in Liverpool, there is a great & big SF library, the "Science Fiction Foundation Collection". "The Science Fiction Foundation Collection is the largest collection of material relating to Science Fiction in the European Community and one of the two or three most important outside the U.S.A. It was established as the research library of the Science Fiction Foundation, created in 1970 by George Hay with Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin as patrons. It has been built up over the years thanks to the generosity of writers, publishers and fans and is well established as the most important centre for study and research in science fiction within the UK." (website)

There was an exhibition called "Zukunftsbilder" (~ pictures of the future) in the Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek (~ library of the city and province of Vienna). You'll find some information in German on this website, for example about the Austrian SF author Erich Dolezal, utopian films, social fiction, the history of SF, Thomas Morus' "Utopia", Perry Rhodan...

I'm currently reading the SF novel "Krakatit" (picture) by the Czech author Karel Capek. There is the chemist Prokop who discovers and develops explosives; his fellow student Tomesch who wants to sell Prokops formula; atomic energy seething in everything; a humankind which can easily destroy itself... a very thrilling book, written in 1924, published 1940 in English and 1981 in its German version in the GDR. I bought the book on a flea market, but there are several books of Capek still available in German and English, for example "War With the Newts" = "Der Krieg mit den Molchen" (picture), the trilogy "Hordubal; Der Meteor; Ein gewöhnliches Leben" (picture), "R. U. R. and the Insect Play" (in which the word "robot" apparently occured for the first time)...

Fed up with books

I never thought I would ever say something like that, but currently I'm quite fed up with books and libraries :-| The library I work in moved to new premises in August and was merged with another library. It is really difficult to unite two organisations that had developed independently - it's really a clash of cultures... We have a new shelf classification, so we had to apply new labels to about 11,000 books; and we will get a book-security system, so we had to glue security stripes to all these 11,000 books, and then we had to carry the boxes with journals and books around on the ground floor and up to the first floor *yawn* So I really need a vacation...
Well, certainly that doesn't prevent me from reading at home. Yesterday it was a great delight to read again act 2, scene 3 from "Much ado about nothing" (William Shakespeare), especially nice when you remember how Kenneth Branagh, Denzel Washington, Robert Sean Leonard et al. play it in the splendid picturisation from 1993. It's really one of the most funny, most eloquent texts I've ever read.

The work place of my dreams is certainly the MIT Science Fiction library which is by its own account "the world's largest open-shelf collection of science fiction". The website is here, the catalogue here.
There is also an interesting library in Germany, the "Phantastische Bibliothek" (phantastic library) in Wetzlar which collects science fiction, fantasy, horror, utopian literature, myths, fairy tales... Here's the website.

Yesterday in the mailinglist INETBIB, Karl Dietz pointed out bibliographies about science fiction published in the German Democratic Republic. You'll find a pdf document with bibliographic references here and more information about German science fiction here.