Feedback | Letters to LJ, August 2011
“Ebooks don’t seem to be the preferred alternative, even though they are cataloged exactly like print.... Instead, we notice an...increase in online database use” Aug 15, 2011Google-like searching
We, too, have noticed an overall decrease in book circulation at my institution—a small private liberal arts college (Rick Anderson, “Print on the Margins.” LJ 6/15/11, p. 38–39). However, ebooks don’t seem to be the preferred alternative, even though they are cataloged exactly like print items in our ILS. Instead, we notice an overall increase in online database use, which has caused us to question whether the issue really is one of format. Our mounting suspicion is that the Google-like searching used in online databases (viz. full-text searching—a stark contrast to our OPAC, which only searches title, author, keyword, etc.) is the catalyst pushing students toward these sorts of resources, not the format. Can you imagine if web search engines still worked like a typical OPAC—searching the web with only <h1> and <meta> tags like in the mid-1990s? No thanks. Because of these sorts of limitations, in some cases we’ve started encouraging students to use fully indexed services like Google Books as discovery tools in place of our OPAC—and it works surprisingly well.
In short, I don’t think that students have any aversion to the print format. In fact, I’d say most prefer it. However, searching a traditional OPAC doesn’t use a paradigm that most of our students are familiar with. As a result, print items (and ebooks cataloged like print) are ignored in favor of resources whose full text is indexed and searchable (like online databases), which use a paradigm most of our students find familiar.
—Jack Weinbender, Milligan Coll., TN
Online tracking
Having lived with the trend discussed in Rick Anderson’s “Print on the Margins” (LJ 6/15/11, p. 38–39) is why we are engaged now in a massive review of our print collections to determine just what we do need to keep on campus. And why we are shifting to more PDA-type acquisitions going forward. The important trend that we are tracking closely and that is steadily increasing is usage of electronic resources.
—Martha Hruska, Assoc. Univ. Libn., Collection Svcs., Univ. of California–San Diego
Better with an MLS
There is no information in Matthew K. Poland’s letter (“I’m one of them,” LJ 5/15/11, p. 11) that justified his appointment as CEO of the Hartford Public Library, CT. I appreciate that Poland finds his staff “incredible” and that both librarians and other members of the staff have been instrumental in raising public awareness of the nature of the library and its branches and, more importantly, have been able to raise the funds needed not only to maintain the system but to build new facilities as well. However, nowhere in the letter does Poland provide an indication of what he does and why someone with the MLS can’t do the job of leading the library as well or better than he.
—Arthur L. Friedman, Ed.D., MLS, MS (Ed), Prof. & Coordinator, Office for Distance Ed., Nassau Community Coll., Garden City, NY
Being untethered
I know how it feels to be cut off, but it is sometimes refreshing to be untethered (“Untethered in Paris,” Blatant Berry, LJ 7/11, p. 10).
—Clyde Scoles, Dir./Fiscal Officer,
Toledo Lucas Cty. P.L.
Surreal misadventure?
Lawrence Olszewski’s review of our translation of Aimé Césaire’s Solar Throat Slashed (LJ 6/15/11, p. 93) indicates that he knows nothing about French Surrealism or Césaire’s body of work. He refers to Césaire’s writing as “anything-goes-versification” as if Césaire practiced automatic writing, which he does not. Césaire’s poetry of the late 1940s is built on crisscrossing intersections in which metaphoric traceries create historically aware nexeses of thought and experience, jagged solidarity and apocalyptic surgery. A poem like “At the Locks of the Void” is a coherent display of assertions and visions based on the author’s contemplated feelings about Europe at the end of the Second World War. Olszewski also calls our translation “verbatim,” meaning a word-for-word translation, or a literal trot. Our translation went through many drafts and involved much reshaping of the original to present a text that is rigorously accurate and quite often up to the performance level of the original.
This reviewer also complains that “readers will not find help interpreting the form or the sense of the poems” and that the collection lacks “scholarly apparatus.” In the first place, this is a collection of poems and not a critical study of Aimé Césaire. In the second place, my cotranslator, A. James Arnold, the leading Césaire scholar today, contributed an extremely informative ten-page introduction that offers crucial historical information and lucid discussions of the complexities of the poems’ language. Olszewski does not have the courtesy to even mention this introduction. All in all, this is an incompetent and embarrassing review of a book that takes the French Surrealist adventure to new heights and depths.
—Clayton Eshleman,
Eastern Michigan Univ., Ypsilanti
