Guest Post: The Danger in Bohemia by HE Kollef

by

Thanks to It’s About the Book!

It's About The Book

index

Hello! My name is H. E. Kollef and I’m here to tell you a little bit about my new book, The Danger in Bohemia, which came out from Dreamspinner Press on March 23rd. I’d also like to say thank you to It’s About the Book for having me on!

The Danger in Bohemia was written in two countries (The Czech Republic and South Korea), neither of which I live in anymore. Most of the story takes place in Prague, where I lived for almost two years as an English teacher. Prague holds a very special place in my heart. It was my first time living abroad for so long, the first phase of my independent, grown-up life. I fell in love with the city and all its gothic romance. The Danger in Bohemia is almost as much a love letter to Czech culture, food, and Prague itself…

View original post 855 more words

New Twitter! But follow the old for LIS.

by

So after a lot of thinking (and consulting with some trusted friends and mentors) I’ve decided to split my professional and romance-writing selves into two twitter accounts. My main account, @braveworldgirl, will be kept for All Things Library/Information Science simply because I’ve already made so many connections there while doing this master’s program. For my writing, I’ve started a new twitter, @HEKollef (primarily romance writing at the moment).

And yes, I do wish I’d made this decision before sending out my first two blog tour posts for this book. Ah well. Many an email to write, a website to update.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled LIS programming with a link to a really excellent article about Big Data and education:

Your High School Transcript Could Haunt You Forever: How big data could create an inescapable “permanent record”

This article articulates (does that count as a pun? alliteration?) all of my fears about Big Data and the modern move towards increasing data collection. I understand the benefits, especially for and LIS sector fighting to prove its (considerable!) worth. But I can’t help but be uneasy at the implications of all this data collection. What happens when your past can no longer be forgotten? Should we not learn a lesson from the prisoners, released from prison in the USA, only to be unable to get jobs or start new lives because of the records that follow them around?

In an age of big data, do we lose our Right to be Forgotten not through choice but because it’s simply no longer possible to accomplish (recent legislation illustrates the difficulty of maintaining this right, even with legal backing)? Is it ethical to collect data for analysis when you know that the government might pass legislation that could violate individual’s rights that you, the librarian, have been taught to protect? Where does convenience run into the wall of personal privacy?

A lot of questions, and no answers, I know. Chime in below if you’ve any opinions on this.

Introducing the new editor at the #CityLis Blog!

by

#CityLis has a new editor, James Atkinson (@jamesatkinson81)! He’s fantastic, and I’m looking forward to what he’ll do with the blog. Get in contact if you have any ideas for the blog–here’s an excerpt of what James is looking for:

Students!  Have you visited another library or an LIS exhibition that you would like to tell us about?  Have you been to a conference?  Or read an interesting book or article?  Get in touch and share your reviews and reports.

Alumni!  Let us know what you have been up to since you left – current and future students would love to hear about the profession that awaits them.

Academics!  Lecturers and PhD students – you won’t get let off the hook!  Let us know what you’re up to and we’ll add it to the Reflections and Research section.

– See more, including how to contact #CityLis, at: https://blogs.city.ac.uk/citylis/2016/02/25/citylis-news-blog-an-introduction-to-the-editor/#.VtDBWZOLSRu

SCIN Materials Library: An exciting peek into an unusual catalogue

by

Today, Tom Ash from #citylis and I were treated to a tour & fascinating chat at the SCIN Gallery, home of the UK’s “largest independent materials library and resource library”.

(That’s pronounced /skin/–turns out I’ve been saying it wrong for a few weeks now!)

What the heck is a materials library? In their own words:

“We are a materials Sourcing and Advisory Gallery. We find new materials and show them to Architects, Designers and Specifiers in an inspirational and informative way.”

Basically, they collect samples of materials from anyone–large corporations, architect firms, global startups, charities working with NGO’s and small businesses everywhere from Stirling to Capetown. They then organize and display these materials based on the type &/or qualities of materials. Boxes included ‘cork’, ‘upcycled’, ‘coconut’, and ‘food waste’.  You can see some of their boxes below. These boxes are easily accessible–all you do is pull them off the shelf and have a look inside.

Materials Library in the heart of London

The Green Room @TheSCINGallery

For architects, designers, and builders, the SCIN library is a dream come true. Here they can come to see either a specific material, or browse for inspiration. It’s also a place of wonder and delight for those random passersby (like me) who stumble upon it, amazed that such a place exists. SCIN melds their function as a library for materials with a sense of art and design, and even features some works of art with materials themes.

Melted wax bricks, art on display

Melted wax bricks, art on display

Perhaps most interesting were all the materials made from animal poop.

Yep, you heard me: poop. Giraffe, Rhino, and Ellie (elephant, maybe?) poop to be exact.

20151111_132011 20151111_132045 20151111_132048

The Materials Library was housed in the basement and the first floor, where they had the ‘green’ room. This room featured only materials made from naturally sourced bases (such as our poopy papers above).

On the upper two floors were the galleries, where the companies and designers who paid to be members of the library had their particular wares on display. Here were all sorts of interesting design ideas. And, again, some were made of…poop!

My particular favorite was the tile below, made of snail poop. The process is simple: Snails eat colored paper, their poop, now bright and rainbow-hued, is gathered, placed through a machine that somehow compresses it, and out comes a tile. The tile has a soft, rubbery feel. It was definitely one of the more unique materials on display.

20151111_134337 20151111_134341 20151111_134450

Here are some more that I found to be really interesting. The first is a glass container filled with delicate chunks of bone china and a soft light embedded inside. The second is self-healing concrete, which is filled with a bacteria that somehow fixes the concrete as it is broken.

Bone china, all aglow

Bone china, all aglow

Concrete infused with concrete-healing bacteria

Concrete infused with concrete-healing bacteria

From a librarian’s perspective, I was interested in the way they displayed their wood, glass, and metal samples in the galleries. You can see an example below. These diagrams were created to represent the ‘DNA’ of the various materials in the library. Here you can see Sedimentary Rock, and the various other stones that belong to this category. I liked the intuitive, almost organic style of display & classification. I wondered if it were possible to expand this type of classification to the rest of the gallery–with materials organized like a tree, with master headings, such as ‘rock’, branching into ‘sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic’, which would then extend further and further…

20151111_133947

Adele Orcajada, the gallery manager, was kind enough to sit with us afterwards and answer some of our questions. The SCIN gallery is closing this month to move to a new location in London, and won’t be open until September. During the next 6 months Adele will begin the exciting process of updating the SCIN’s catalogue, and I for one can’t wait to see the changes she makes. She walked us through their current system, and we talked about some of her ideas for updating it.

I’m looking forward to learning more about cataloguing materials. There are so many dimensions to consider–unlike books, where you have only a few: Author, Title, Subject, ISBN. Materials have so many ways they can be classified. Process, content, place of origin, use, color, shape, texture, size, sustainability, rate of reproduction… I can go on. The challenge is deciding which categories will connect the most users with the materials they need. It will be interesting to see how the catalogue develops over the next few months.

I’m developing a strong interest in unusual libraries and archives. If you have any you’d like to suggest, or you think would be worth a visit, please comment below!