maps, libraries, knitting

A few months ago during a post-departmental colloquium drinking fest several of us started talking about libraries, education, the uses of information, and the relationship between technology and physical, with-pages books. The main impetus of this conversation was the recent transformation of our library, which has become (or rather tried really hard to become) a technology-focused information hub complete with a cafe. All this would be fine if this were executed with some insight, but instead we still have perfunctory stacks in ugly rooms with dropped ceilings because books are passe.

This can be short-sighted, as evidenced by Carla Hesse's own exhuberance regarding how information and network technology changed San Francisco's library. Ultimately SF's library didn't have enough room in the stacks for books. When designing the main branch of the Seattle Public Library OMA took that information (along with a lot of other stuff) and really did something interesting and insightful with the books.

[Here I will put a place-marker for some comment on being forward-thinking and how it's not necessarily connected to drinking all the technology Kool-Aid and liking it. This is like Kierkegaard saying something like in order to live forward one must look backward.]

But the questions and points that came up during that conversations seem to be clearly to me based on this NYT article on amateurs online mapmakers. I wonder if the point that some make that physical geography is getting progressively less important is just overdetermined, and that the relationship between networks, physical location, and the trading of information is more dynamic--that perhaps we need to appreciate physical geography (and books) in order to go forward.

That's just a musing though.

Last night Mimi and I went to a presentation on crafting and craft culture. The most memorable part for me was a slide of a man in a wet white shirt--the type of man that makes one think of nothing so much as Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice. Of course the photo was from the guy's wedding. And Mimi surmised, probably correctly, that he was probably very, very happy in his marriage. Whatever.