Pardon Me! Another Thanksgiving Piece

The eternal question: what to write about for this year's Thanksgiving piece?

I haven't systematically scanned the news yet, but so far, no distinctive stories or memes seem to be rising to the surface: just the perennial banalities, with the admixture of the topical pieties, from surviving Hurricane Sandy to the welcome end of fighting between Israel and the Hamas regime in Gaza. The ever sardonic former-punk-turned-White-House-reporter Julie Mason wisely called for a moratorium on such crap (at least on social media) but she knew she was just spitting in the wind. (This embarrassing piece of pablum by Jody Rudoren of the New York Times can serve as a cautionary example to those who refuse to heed Julie's sage advice.)

President Obama duly pardoned the White House Turkey (after predictably making social-media history in a predictably trivial way by allowing the public to decide—by means of a Facebook poll—which turkey to save); yes, apparently that's what all the new media are good for. As Mason observed on satellite radio a few days ago, the President is not really a man of the people, and has little sense of humor and much less interest in the turkey pardon than his dim-witted but more jocular predecessor. Can't believe that anyone thought this was worth six minutes' of the President's or the nation's time. It's just painful to watch. Do so at your peril: You'd be better off smoking a cigarette.





Given that TV and video watching shortens your life more than smoking does: For sheer perverse delight, I far prefer this infamous train wreck of a ritual from 2008 involving the inimitable Sarah Palin. There are some surprises for her.  Just watch. Slate has the backgrounder. Their video source has vanished, but you can see the footage here. Now there's a turkey.




(Although the distant origins of the turkey-pardoning practice date back to Lincoln, it was Truman who formalized it.) In any case, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) were not amused.


And finally, there is this "Hipster Thanksgiving." It seems disturbingly realistic in many ways. In fact, only the urban architectural setting in the outdoor shot convinced me that it had not been shot right here in the Happy Valley.




Enjoy.

If all this drives you to drink as well as overeat, I note that the neo-cocktail craze, which shows no signs of abating, has answers. Along with the usual advice—which can be summarized as: drink what you like rather than what you think you are supposed to drink, and remembering that some white wines, such as Rieslings, go with everything, and, given the robustness of the overall Thanksgiving menu, a hearty archetypically American red Zinfandel is perfectly appropriate with the "white meat" of a turkey—we thus find interesting suggestions for mixed drinks appropriate to the season.

This year, some holiday cocktail recipes go fairly far toward not just matching tastes of drink and food, but actually incorporating elements of the food into the drink mixture. "Pilgrim Punch" includes honey, spices, cranberries, and Belgian wheat beer. "Pilgrim's Pumpkin," as the name implies, contains pumpkin purée, along with the liquors, spices, and fruit juices. "Cranberry Thanksgiving Pie" mixes Cruzan rum, Curaçao, and egg white along with spices, maple syrup, and juices (including cranberry; but no whole berries). Another selection of American inventions recommended by our Canadian neighbors includes "Pumpkin Egg Nog" and "Pumpkin Spice Margarita."

Like President Obama's turkey ceremony: not my taste, but if you enjoy it, more power to you. I'll stick with a basic couple of wines and a re-viewing of that Palin video.

History Channel Puts Western Massachusetts History on the Mobile App

A song of ascents:

I make fun of History Channel
For its Ancient Aliens crap,
But credit where credit is due:
I'm trying its History app.

As my followers on Twitter are aware, I have been known to poke gentle fun at the History Channel and its sibling H2 for their steady descent into banality or outright intellectual bankruptcy. Whereas they used to run real documentaries, nowadays there is hardly anything worth watching.

We all have our bugbears decide which burdens to assume for the sake of the common good. For me, it's about vigilance in the face of shows on Ancient Aliens and history—or shows that don't even pretend that they have to do with history: "Ice Road Truckers"? "Swamp People" "Shark Wranglers"? (wtf?)  For Gordon Belt, Director of Public Services for the Tennessee State Library & Archives, it's the never-ending battle against "History Buffs." We're all allies in this great war on behalf of civilization.

But one has to be fair. The Channel still does broadcast some history, and its website and Twitter feed likewise pay more attention to its supposed raison d'être. I was therefore pleased to see them announce their new "History Here" app for iPhone, described as "an interactive travel guide to thousands of historic locations across the United States."

So I decided to give it a try.

It's a fairly simple little thing, though serviceable enough in its way.

You get a Google road or satellite map with little pins that lead to descriptions of sites (with driving distance, contact information, and URLs; videos, in some cases).  One can search by location, view sites on both maps and lists, save "favorites," etc.

 Checking out those that appeared on the screen when I used my home location, I found:

Amherst

• Emily Dickinson Museum
• National Yiddish Book Center

Northampton

• Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library
• Doresey-Jones House
• Hill-Ross Farm

Cummington

• William Cullen Bryant Homestead

Springfield

• Connecticut Valley Historical Museum

Petersham

• Petersham Common (where troops put down Shays' Rebellion in 1787)

It's not always easy to tell why a given site was included or omitted.

In Amherst, of course, I expected to find the Dickinson Museum, as it has National Historic Landmark status and is our principal tourist attraction. I was pleasantly surprised to see a listing for the National Yiddish Book Center, on the campus of my own Hampshire College. But Amherst has, in addition to the 2 Dickinson houses, 5 other properties on the National Register of Historic Places, two of them open to the public: West Cemetery  (where Dickinson is buried, thus likewise one of our major tourist attractions—even a pilgrimage site), and the eighteenth-century Strong House, home of the Amherst Historical Society and Museum.

It's great that Northampton (or Florence, as the case may be) includes two sites associated with the Underground Railroad, but then one might assume it would also have included the David Ruggles Center for Early Florence History & Underground Railroad Studies. And any reason not to include Historic Northampton? Or perhaps the Sojourner Truth monument in Florence?

In the case of Springfield, the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum makes sense, not least because it is part of the larger, acclaimed five-museum Springfield Museums campus. But then why leave out the Springfield Armory National Historic Site? 

Looking to our west, it is eminently sensible to include Cummington's William Cullen Bryant Homestead but (unless I really missed something), Historic Deerfield, just down the road from Amherst, is absent. (To the east, Old Sturbridge Village made the cut). Delighted and relieved to find Arrowhead, home of Herman Melville—whose birthday and meeting with Hawthorne we marked this month—in Pittsfield, but then why not Hancock Shaker Village, located in the same town?

I was certainly glad to see the boyhood home of W.E.B. DuBois in Great Barrington, as well as Edith Wharton's The Mount in Lenox on the map. But then why not Chesterwood—home of Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial and  Minuteman statues?

It seems that the National Park Service Heritage Travel Itinerary and National Register of Historic Places were the source for many of the listings, and that is as it should be. As the example of the Yiddish Book Center shows, there were obviously also other sources of information, and one hopes that the list will be broadened. The nice thing about apps versus books is that the latter can readily and continually grow in scope as well as robustness.


Summary: Given that the thing is two years old (the first incarnation for Windows, came out in 2010), one might expect more of it. Then again, given that the new app  is described as "free and ad-supported" (see also below), you get what you pay for. (The old one cost $ 2.99; this says something about our rising expectations of apps, among other things.)

In addition, there are sometimes practical limits to what sort of data one can conveniently collect and display in software designed for small handheld devices. I just took part in a workshop on digital mapping, so I am getting a better idea of what goes into the making of these things.

Balance sheet: It's simple and useful. I didn't find every historic site that I expected (to cover the entire country is after all quite ambitious), and I didn't find a great deal of technical sophistication or even information—but I also didn't find a single alien.

That's a start. Baby steps.


Update, 20 August 

History Here, a decent but no means distinguished app, just dropped another few notches in my estimation. When I first tried it out, the ads for some reason never appeared. Now, however, they're here. Annoying advertisements appeared at the bottom of the screen. One promoting an alleged iPad giveaway, was particularly annoying and intrusive flashing incessantly. As I said, you get what you pay for.

Walking the Walk and Tweeting the Talk (Digital Humanities and the New-Old World of the Book)

I recently and ever so gently chided the Jones Library for being not quite up to date in the digital domain (1, 2)—all benevolently and in good fun, of course ("Alles in Güte und Liebe, werter Herr Erbförster, gar nicht böse gemeint!"). It's only appropriate, then, to share some further reflections on the appropriate role of "new" and "social" media in the world of the book, based on my own experience.

Specifically, I would like to speak about Twitter: Is it, as so many acquaintances dismissively say, a faddish and foolish exercise in narcissism—a sort of metaphorical modern mashup of the twentieth-century "pet rock" and vanity license plate—or, as others maintain, a valuable social, intellectual, and marketing tool? As an inveterate tweeter, I of course incline toward the latter view.

We, on the Executive Council of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), the leading international organization dedicated to the study of all aspects of the history of the book, agreed. Many of us had, by chance, tweeted individually at our last annual conference, in Helsinki in 2010. Buoyed by the results of that experiment, we decided to formalize that endeavor this year in Washington by officially promoting it and rewarding the best practitioners with a prize: in in the form of a book, of course, and in print format (though the National Book Awards finally acknowledged the onset of a new century and a new era by including, for the first time, a digital candidate; for us, the format is not important: it all depends on the content).

George Williams, a member of our governing Board, who co-edits the ProfHacker blog over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, invited several of us to contribute brief observations on our use, experience, and perception of Twitter in the context of a scholarly conference on the history and nature of the book.

Here's the beginning of my contribution:

To tweet or not to tweet? If I do not tweet for myself, who will tweet for me? If I tweet only for myself, what am I? Twitter, as one of my non-SHARP “tweeps” says, is the most misunderstood of social media. To wary outsiders, for whom it represents an exercise in egotism, I gently explain that it all depends on what you are looking for and whom you choose to follow. In the 4 years I’ve been on Twitter, it has become one of my most valuable research and networking tools. Frankly, I am much more interested in what total strangers on Twitter are reading than what my Facebook friends had for lunch or their kids did at the birthday party. . . .

Read the full post here, on the book blog.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

In yesterday's blogpost on the selection of a new Director for the Jones Library, I took the opportunity to note an irony: Although the topic assigned for the candidate talks was the library in the age of the internet and new media, the Jones Library has generally been rather remiss in taking advantage of the rapidly evolving digital culture.

Its web presence has not been very up to date in either form or content—as evidenced by the fact that it didn't even announce the choice of a new Director.

In fact, the page for public comment on the candidates was still up—and even accepting submissions—last night.

Well, no more.

Do you think they saw the blog?

Here today, gone tomorrow—or rather: there yesterday, gone today. And, as Martha Stewart would say: it's a good thing.

Of course, the homepage and Facebook page are unchanged, but: one step at a time.

Update: New Director at the Jones Library (and some advice on new media needs)

August 10

As noted in last night's brief update, the Jones Library has a new Director. Scott Merzbach of the Gazette has now provided a thorough run-down of the deliberations, which corresponds to the sense that I was getting throughout the process: Christopher Lindquist enjoyed strong support from those whose focus was on professional librarianship, financial issues, and management skills. Sharon Sharry, by contrast, was more popular among those who placed a premium on personal style and presumed ability to connect with employees and patrons.

The Library’s interim management team thus unanimously supported Lindquist, while a preponderance of staff favored Sharry. Among those with formal votes, the Search Committee favored Lindquist by 3-2, and the Trustees split 3-3 on the first ballot, but unanimously chose Sharry on the second.

Recommendation of the Search Committee in favor of Lindquist, by a vote of 3-2:

for Lindquist 

•  Trustee President Sarah McKee
•  Trustee Austin Sarat
•  Head of Information Services Matthew Berube

for Sharry

• Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Tony Maroulis 
• President of Jones Library Friends Lucy McMurrer 

Among the Trustees, President Sarah McKee, Austin Sarat, and Michael Wolff supported Lindquist on the first ballot, while Chris Hoffmann, Emily Lewis, and Carol Gray supported Sharry. On the second ballot, the vote was unanimous for Sharry.

Thus, McKee praised Lindquist for his attention to (as Scott summarized), “budgeting, long-term action planning and Town Meeting processes”—what she called “the sorts of things I want a director to know about.” Carol Gray, by contrast, was more drawn to (again, in the Gazette’s wording) “Sharry's monthly reports to trustees in Greenfield and her responses to questions about how to deal with boisterous teens and homeless people in the library.” Gray, recently returned from her studies (and adventures) in Egypt, declared Lindquist unacceptable and said she could not have voted for him: "I would have grave reservations about hiring someone like that." (not clear what "that" means)


Tough Choices

Clearly, it was a complex choice, and I’m glad I didn’t have to make it. It’s a tall order at the best of times, all the more so under straitened financial circumstances and when coming out of a period of great internal discord. In the first place, it’s a question of how one defines qualifications. In the second place, it’s a more subjective matter of personal “fit.” Comments by Trustees Emily Lewis and Austin Sarat nicely summarized the contrasting approaches to the task and the candidates:

Trustee Emily Lewis . . . was extraordinarily impressed with both candidates, but [said] that Sharry's ability to attract library patrons was evident during her public interview. "She won the hearts and minds of the community and the staff, the businesses, and the schools," Lewis said. 

Sarat said Sharry is articulate, passionate and compassionate as well as engaging. But her weaknesses were more evident in specific questions by the search committee focused on financial planning and budget numbers. Even if Lindquist did not connect with the public or staff, this was not a concern, Sarat said. "We're not hiring an interviewee, we're hiring a director, and the interview is one part of the search process," he added. 

The choice then, is both a practical and a philosophical one: a matter not just of how one views the internal and external role of the director, but also of whether to go instinctively to one’s comfort zone or to make a choice that may require more adjustment and entail some risk but offer the prospect of bolder action and long-term gains. I know that, in academe, administrators and search committees occasionally (but not often enough) worry about a tendency “to keep replicating ourselves” by safely hiring people whose profile is “just like us” rather than opening themselves to the challenging possibility of the new and different. Clearly, the Search Committee and Trustees had to grapple with precisely this issue. There is no single “right” answer, and much depends on both personalities and circumstances.

What is clear is that there were two good choices, and that both the participants and the public seem satisfied with the ultimate choice and inspired at the prospect of new permanent leadership.


Encomium

In a formal announcement of the choice to the Select Board this morning, Trustee President Sarah McKee declared, "We thus embark on a new chapter in our common, but surely uncommon, history." Repeating the analogy of the voyage two sentences later but switching images from tomes to time, she commended to us Frank Prentice Rand's history of the Jones Library (1919-1969), and observed, "As we embark on a new era, I think its opening Apologia worth our recalling":

Every library is entitled to publish its history. For a library is something more than a repository and exchange center of printed matter. It is an incarnation of the wisdom within a community, and an embodiment of the communal personality as well. Its card catalog is an index to the dominant interests of the citizenry. Thus the widely known and highly regarded Jones Library is a manifestation of the widely known and highly regarded village of Amherst, Massachusetts -- a physical revealing of the men and women, living and dead, local and distant, who by their utterances and influence have made the little town what it is today. President Calvin Plimpton of Amherst College has said: "Good libraries are the extension of great people." So this library is in various ways the extension of people of varying degrees and kinds of greatness, all the way from the Medici to Samuel Minot Jones, from Thucydides to "Tip" Tyler. Its annals are short, but not simple. 

She concluded:

Now, you will probably have to google "Tip" Tyler. But I invite you to glance back, for a moment, at the long and noble history that you all have kept alive and thriving in Amherst during the past year, day in and day out, in spite of stresses of a sort that the Jones has probably never before seen. 

My two cents' worth of advice

Now I'm sure that Ms. Sharry has more than enough to do, but at the risk of adding to her burdens, I'll mention just one pressing task: Take prompt and firm charge of the Library's digital presence. In its current state, it is both primitive and chaotic.

Money is tight, and the taxpayer is not going to pay for the glorious geothermal heating and cooling system you mentioned (I crave it, too, but Amherst College can afford that; the Town of Amherst cannot). Fundraising from private donors will be crucial for any big projects, including capital ones. Of course, before you can persuade either public or private parties to make major new investments in your undertakings, you will have to start by demonstrating that you have, at long last, put your own house in order: implement effective long-range planning (quite overdue), and finally start budgeting fully for maintenance as well as operating expenses. (The Community Preservation Act Committee, for example, is not a piggy bank. Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency need, as far as the Town is concerned.) Recent practices have not been sustainable. They need to change now.

By contrast, investment in digital media is a relatively modest expense and, if done right, gets you a lot of bang for the buck. Especially given that you were selected because of your ability to connect with current patrons and other residents, this is your real opportunity to sell the Jones—and make the public buy in. The more you publicize what the Library gives to the Town, the more its residents will be eager to use it and willing to give back.

For example, hire a good web designer. The Jones Library homepage has long been a mess: clunky, old-fashioned, badly laid out, hard to navigate. It communicates an antiquated air as well as indifference to both the taste and the convenience of the user. It's at least a decade out of date. One need but compare this throwback with the updated sites of the Town of Amherst (public) and Amherst History Museum next door (a private institution whose resources, by the way, are but a fraction of those of the Jones, which enjoys support from both a public budget of $ 2.19 million and an endowment worth nearly $ 8 million). They're not perfect or pioneering, but they are modern in look and functionality. If they can do it, why can't you?

The Library web page is an embarrassment. The only exception is the award-winning Digital Amherst, which shows what one can do—and it's an instructive example. That took luck and energy, but relatively little money because it was the work of a dedicated and creative visiting employee funded by an outside grant (acting on the ideas and with the guidance of head of Special Collections Tevis Kimball, of course). Take a lesson there.

First of all, though, make sure your current new/social media presence is up to date. It is ironic that the topic assigned to the director candidates was the library in the age of the internet and digital media—and yet, the news that the Jones has hired a new director is nowhere to be found on its web presence.

• The Library homepage is its homely self. A visitor would have no clue that the search had been successfully completed (or even taken place).

• A visitor who knew the URL of the page for feedback on candidates would be no better served: That page informs us that it was last updated on July 19, before either candidate spoke, not to mention, before the feedback deadline was extended to August 3. And there is of course no indication that the search is now over.

[Update:] In fact, I just visited the page again, and was able to submit feedback even though that deadline passed more than a week ago and the new director was chosen yesterday. Ouch.

The Facebook page is not much better: It is now a week out of date. Thankfully, this one (but why not the candidate feedback page?!) does tell us that the time for public comment on the search has been extended to August 3. However, the last entry, from August 4, deals only with a staff reading recommendation about cancer survival (uplifting, I am sure). Nothing more about the search, the final meeting, or the outcome.

The Library should have led with and controlled the story of the hiring of its first new director in 30 years. That it somehow failed to do speaks volumes (to use a metaphor drawn from the era of print) about its strategic reasoning and positioning in the modern world.

The news of the hiring of a new director should have been trumpeted to the public via all new media as well as old: Library web page, Facebook updates, Twitter. As we've seen, the Library does not pay proper attention to the former two and apparently does not yet use the latter tool, though almost everyone else in the field of public humanities and cultural tourism now does. In fact, Twitter is ideally suited to quick communication of breaking news: a few moments and 140 characters, and your story is out there.

One might take as a counterexample the Springfield Library, a reasonably typical midsized New England small urban library: Its web page, though not a model of design or execution, is at least clear and contemporary—not revolutionary, but not antediluvian, either. Above all, you can actually use it easily. And its Facebook page is not only up to date (revised 10 hours ago, last I checked): It reports news of general literary-cultural interest, not merely local happenings, e.g., the appointment of the new Poet Laureate, Philip Levine (Jones Library, take note). In fact, it's even got a special teen page (a model that would interest Trustee Carol Gray, I assume), and a lively Twitter account, which I gladly follow.

The thing about modern digital media is that, once one starts to employ them, one has to do so regularly and consistently. We expect these resources to be up to date, and when they are not, users become frustrated or lose interest, or both. Even if one does not rush headlong into use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking tools (after all, the activity has to be purposeful, not mindless), one can at least keep the website up to date. (Example: at least take down the public feedback page after the candidate has been hired.)

It is a rather revealing state of affairs when our public library lags behind the Amherst Brewing Company in its use of new/social media. The latter, an almost equally beloved institution, has a rigorously maintained website, Facebook page, and Twitter account. Why should residents of Amherst be able to get day-by-updates of the move of a private microbrewing enterprise from North Pleasant Street to University Drive—but not of the search for the Director of a publicly funded cultural institution? It's really an irony and a disappointment.

Fortunately, that's easy to remedy. In any case, that's in the past, and we should look to the future.

Let's combine the best of both topics: raise a foamy glass in toast to the library, with best wishes for a successful partnership between the new director, her staff, patrons, and the town.

Recent Posts

• Initial report on the choice of Sharon Sharry as Director
• Report on candidate presentation by Sharon Sharry
• Report on candidate presentation by Christopher Lindquist

[11.VIII. update: new screen shot]

Updated news coverage:

• Diane Lederman covers the story here: "Amherst trustees offer Jones position to Greenfield Library Director Sharon Sharry," Springfield Republican, 11 Aug. (posted Wednesday evening on masslive.com)

• Scott Merzbach offers further coverage in the current issue of the Amherst Bulletin (12 August) as "New Jones director impresses staff, public." This version contains a few additional quotations.