Feedback | Letters to LJ, June 15, 2011
"The concept of library is moving from passive to active... library is becoming more a verb than a noun, more a search than a location..." Jun 15, 2011Libraryize it
Googling may be one of the first steps a librarian may use to answer a question, but it is by no means the only place a librarian looks for a complete answer—to completely “libraryize a question.”
Buried at the end of the definition of library in the Oxford English Dictionary is the verb “libraryize”: to place in a library. The example from 1847 implies an evaluation process by the librarian to add a book to a collection for the patron’s benefit. The same concept could apply to evaluating an online database to add to a library’s list of online resources, i.e., to “libraryize” a database. Further, if you focus on this evaluation process itself, it is the same applied process a librarian uses to match information with patrons every time, whether it leads to books on shelves or websites online. To “libraryize a question” is to evaluate it against myriad print, online, and media resources and crunch the choices into an answer for the patron.
As a professional librarian for over 21 years, I have participated in the concept of library expanding from being a place in a building to also a place in a computer. Although print books still command 97 percent of the market and ebooks three percent, according to Ken Auletta of The New Yorker (bit.ly/9ky7ED), I notice that the concept of library is moving from passive to active. A patron’s question spurs a sequence of searches that jumps to the librarian’s mind. In other words, library is becoming more a verb than a noun, more a search than a location; hence the use of the term “to libraryize a question.” Googling a question is only one step in the process of libraryizing a question.—Larry Guthrie, Washington, DC
The library’s purpose
I loved John Berry’s “Libraries Misunderstood” (Blatant Berry, LJ 5/15/11, p. 10). Of course, he is preaching to the choir. However, it was one of the better summations, if not the best summation, of the purpose of libraries I’ve read in the last year.—Carolyn Phillips, Cataloging Specialist, Main Lib., Grand Rapids P.L., MI
Robertson’s Atlas
Naturally, I was happy to read the complimentary review of my Atlas of the Peninsular War, 1808–1814 (LJ 4/1/11, p. 107), but—if only for the record—I trust you will forgive me pointing out several aspects of it that are somewhat misleading, albeit unintentionally.
Without wishing to detract in any way from the work of Martin Brown in bringing the Atlas to fruition, I must emphasize that the entire project was my conception, not his. I was the author of the entire complementary text (some 55,000 words, including the historical introduction, glossary, etc.). Every detail of the mapping of the terrain and troop positioning throughout the Atlas, although drawn by Brown—a very fine and experienced military cartographer—was done under my direction and constant supervision.
Certainly, despite the distance dividing us geographically—he in central England, I in southern France—he has well displayed his technical virtuosity in providing a comprehensive series of 77 maps and plans in full color, animating clearly and graphically the course of that long war. This was not always easy, the problem being resolved by a constant shuttle of drafts and their several revisions by emails, PDFs, JPEGs, and what not, between us, together with occasional telephonic pow-wows over a period of two years, with—to me—miraculous results. As one critical military historian has remarked, “Yale [has] produced it superbly, and the maps are the best I have seen in a modern Napoleonic book.”
Apparently, your reviewer was unaware that there has been nothing approaching similar coverage, nor of such cartographical quality, available on the Peninsular War for both historians and scholars for very many decades, indeed since 1930. That was when the last volume of Fortescue’s History of the British Army was published. It was this very lack of good mapping in so many books published in the intervening period that, with the essential collaboration of a resourceful professional cartographer—found in Brown—I resolved to remedy....
I can only hope that this Atlas...will neither exasperate the perfectionist or expert nor lead Peninsular War buffs too far astray...and that discriminating readers will consider it worthy of the subject.—Ian Robertson, France
Fixed bayonets
Perhaps without realizing it, book reviewer Randall Miller was right on the mark in his recent review of the new Smithsonian-DK title The Civil War: A Visual History (“It Began 150 Years Ago,” LJ 3/1/11, p. 88), when he wrote, “this fact-filled and richly illustrated history brings the war fully to life.... for those wanting to smell the sulfur and hear the thunder of guns.” In the foreword, editorial consultant James G. Barber [this writer] reflects upon his underwhelming experience at the 1961 Centennial reenactment of Bull Run, in which he states, “too few soldiers charged with fixed bayonets and too few cannons spewed plumes of white smoke.”
I was amused to read that I had finally experienced my Civil War battle.—James G. Barber, Historian, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC
