The Jones Apophthegm

I feel the need to claim credit for the development of a new axiom that will come in handy for librarians and others who work in social services and non-profit agencies. I was writing my lecture for last week's class, using as a basis many of the students' observations of library governance. (They had all been to board meetings a few weeks earlier). Their descriptions of the various issues facing those brave citizens who sit on library boards swirled around in my mind for a few days, till finally I was able to sum up the situation this way:
On the day someone offers you $2.2 million to construct a building, what you will actually be in need of is $2.2 million in operating funds.

You see, a local library was made a gift of a very large amount of money to refurbish some space. But they are not allowed to use the money for running the space one it's built. I always wonder how people who make these kinds of bequests think the library is supposed to operate without operating funds. Apparently, people with money to donate to libraries have a list in their heads of things they like to underwrite, which in order of preference are:

• Buildings
• Collections
• Computers
• Classes
• Operations

(Digital initiatives, I should point out, are probably the very easiest to fund, but for such ridiculously short periods of time that it hardly counts.)

I have no data for this list, by the way. Let's call it "observation." But it seems to me donors prefer things they can put their names on, whether a brass plaque or a bookplate. And one of my students pointed out that things that are material and lasting seem to rise to the top of the list too, whereas library work is by its nature ephemeral. What's a library to do? It's hard to turn down that much cash. But when someone offers you $2.2. million, do try to convince them that, having built the building, it would be good if it had heat, lights, staff, and were kept in reasonable nick. This is one of those situations where a library board member's life can't be easy.

The whole issue reminds me of the time some years ago when I had six student employees working for me--I believe they were all in that liminal summer between high school and college--and I came in one day looking, I suppose, rather downcast. One young man asked me if everything was okay.

"Yes," I said, "just take my advice and never sit on a Board."

He looked concerned. "Did you get a splinter?" he asked.

Unlimited Growth Increases the Divide

That's what the sign on the building in the foreground says. That's BC Hydro looming over it in the next block. In the years we've been gone, there has been a fair bit of unlimited growth, all right, and its ugly stepchild, unlimited demolition. Note that the building in the foreground is surrounded by ... well, empty lots.

I took this picture on a long walk from Strathcona to the Vancouver Community Net offices on Dunsmuir, so I walked past this scene on my way to this scene on the next block:


the tranquil oasis that's the public space in front of that same BC Hydro building. "Unlimited growth increases the divide" is actually art-speak for "the contraditions are sharpening & deepening."

Fast Acting Essence of Kangaroo

My mind is reeling from trying to figure out what "essence of kangaroo" might be (some sort of hormonal derivative?) and also imagining the situation in which it entered traditional Chinese medicine as a remedy for sexual problems. There are no kangaroos in China. Of course it also made me think of my sister down under, who reports having eaten kangaroo on occasion.

Over the weekend I joined Facebook. I had actually been resisting this because I spend so much of my personal time blogging, maintaining a web site, another web site, and another web site, in addition to the work time I spend populating online content and contributing to my class blog; so I thought, give this one a miss, Faith. Be sensible.

It's all Juliet's fault, really. Her and the Littwomen. The social pressure was unbearable. I caved. And what did I discover? That I have 32 "friends." That I can have a virtual garden that requires no care at all because my friends do all the gardening. That people I haven't seen in ten years are happy to send me messages via Facebook when I'm quite sure an email wouldn't raise much of a response. (Is it the picture in my profile? Does it remind them that they like me?)

And then today on my igoogle home page, the feed from wikihow was "How to Quit Facebook." I felt strangely attacked. But I just joined! I can't quit yet! Not until I've given myself carpal tunnel and spent god-knows-how-many hours during the meat of the semester avoiding marking!

We'll see how this all works out. I'll keep you posted. Juliet will be called to account if my right arm falls off.

Unrelated picture, above, by you know who. Hens and chicks courtesy Shirley and Lachlan, who are also on Facebook. Damn it, did everyone jump on this bandwagon before me?

Well That Explains It

Walking at SFU the other day, I passed two professorial types deep in conversation. One was saying to the other, "You mean to say, 60% of the lawyers in the world are in the U.S.?"

I did not overhear the answer, nor have I checked this factoid independently, but if true it would explain a lot.

Picture of fish for sale in Chinatown, above, by Winnifred.

Unintentional Art Installation

Guess we overloaded the sheet-fed scanner.

You see, students with visual impairments are entitled to an "accessible PDF" of their textbooks. This allows those with some vision to blow them up huge on a computer screen, as well as to have the computer read it to them out loud. This is actually one of the few legal uses of reformatting of in-copyright works that we are allowed under Canadian law. The problem is, with technical or scientific textbooks, such as this precalculus tome, which has a lot of symbols and formulae, the OCR software doesn't know how to interpret them. Adding to the problem is the use of coloured ink to separate parts of the equation from others. This is probably a great teaching strategy for fully-sighted students, but really bites when you've got a visually impaired student struggling to read the symbols in the first place. Textbook publishers: could you put a sock in the coloured ink thing?

Anyway, we were trying today to figure out some alternative scanning practices that might make the formulae machine-readable. The textbook had already been sliced to allow us to sheet-feed it through the scanner; later it gets rebound in spiral for the student as a back-up to the electronic version. But the student's got a test in a few weeks so we really had to get this to her soon. We stuck the whole thing in the sheet feeder and set it up to capture high-res, high-contrast colour scans. An hour later when I emerged from my office, I saw what you're seeing above in the scanner's out-tray. I guess when the tray gets full the rest of the sheets bump into each other, creating the cornucopia effect. It was so beautiful I left it there to enjoy. Tomorrow some poor student employee is going to get stuck re-ordering those pages.

Meteorological Dissonance

Thursday I had my first real taste of the Burnaby Mountain weather syndrome. You're going along thinking you know what the weather is, then you get exactly half way up the mountain and you're inside a cloud. It was very wet and clammy at the top of the hill.

Unfortunately, Thursday was also the annual Terry Fox Run (although most people walked). This is a very worthy event raising money for cancer. Terry Fox came from nearby Port Coquitlam and attended SFU. I stepped out of the library to run an errand on the other end of campus, and found a hundred adorable children singing to about 1,000 people who were signed up to run. You couldn't actually hear the kids over the canned music pouring from the sound system, but they sure were cute. I'm guessing they came from Terry Fox's old elementary school.

It turns out that rain is the B.C. analog for "mad dogs and Englishmen." British Columbians go running in the pouring rain, yes, carrying umbrellas when necessary.

They were urged on their way by a bagpiper, an SFU tradition. There he is by the statue of Terry Fox. SFU has had the world champion bagpipe team for as long as anyone can remember.

The statue of Terry Fox isn't the only art on campus. A short distance away I came across this enormous avocado, which put me in mind of the Geostationary Banana Over Texas, which, sadly, appears to have been stalled for about a year.