Etymology, or, Seeing the trees for the forest

eautiful.         Pronunciation:  /ˈbjuːtɪfʊl/
Forms: beautefull, beutifull, beutyfull, bewtifull, bewtyfull, beuty-, butyful, beautifull, beautyfull, beautiful, beautifull.

Etymology:  < beauty n. + -ful suffix. Occas. compared with -er, -est, usually with more, most.

A.2.a.  Affording keen pleasure to the senses generally.

A.3. Impressing with charm the intellectual or moral sense, through inherent fitness or grace, or exact adaptation to a purpose. ¹

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.²

beauty, n.   Pronunciation: /ˈbjuːtɪ/
Etymology:  Middle English bealte,  beute, < Old French bealte, beaute,  biaute,  earlier beltet, modern beauté, (cognate with Provencal beltat,  beutat, Spanish beldad, Italian beltà ) < late Latin *bellitātem, < bellus beautiful: see -ty suffix¹.

I. abstractly: 2. That quality or combination of qualities which affords keen pleasure to other senses, or which charms the intellectual or moral faculties, through inherent grace, or fitness to a desired end; cf. beautiful adj. 3.

   A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
   I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.
   The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another run St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.
   I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil. ³

1. "Beautiful, adj. and n." Second edition, 1989; online version December 2011. <http://0-www.oed.com.libsys.arlingtonva.us/view/Entry/16680>; accessed 26 February 2012. Earlier version first published in New English Dictionary, 1887.
2. Baudelaire, Charles. "L’Invitation au Voyage." Online version 21 mars 2012 à 15:42 <http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Invitation_au_voyage_(poéme)>; accessed 30 March 2012.
3. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1964. Print.

Junk information

There's a lot that's been written lately about how much information is available to us through the internet and out in the world. It seems as though people are overstimulated and yet somehow uninspired, almost stifled by the options available. Calvin's dad once had a fit about the wide variety of peanut butters available in the grocery store. It's kind of like that. 

So there are tweets and Facebook posts at the bottom of it, meaningless snippets, but capable of sucking away half a person's day. One level up are blogs, newspaper articles (online or not) and magazines. While these are slightly more in depth discussions or examinations of a topic, a couple of pages are most often not sufficient for true thoroughness. A really well written article can, however, inspire further investigation on the part of a reader by prodding their curiosity and providing a vivid window into the subject.

Here are some bits and pieces of associated information that I've pulled together here. My favourite is a quotation from a professor Aitken, who I referenced in my thesis on childhood memory a few years ago. Aitken suggests that the best way to understand or memorize something is to love and care about it first and seek meaning in it, giving yourself context and motivation for information retention, as well as a more complex understanding of the subject through muti-layered assimilation. 

"The thing to do is to learn by heart, not because one has to, but because one loves the thing and is interested in it." -Professor Alexander Craig Aitken (Ian M.L. Hunter, “An Exceptional Memory,” In Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts, ed. Ulric Neisser (New York: Worth Publishers, 2000), 515.) 

And on the subject of tidbits versus comprehensive:

Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed? Studies by Kevin Sharpe, Lisa Jardine, and Anthony Grafton have proven that humanists in the 16th and 17th centuries often read discontinuously, searching for passages that could be used in the cut and thrust of rhetorical battles at court, or for nuggets of wisdom that could be copied into commonplace books and consulted out of context. - Robert Darnton, "Five myths about the 'Information Age" The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 2011.

Lastly, some associated bits on multitasking, technology and focus from NYTimes and elsewhere can be found starting with this here blog post.


Photo from Capitol Hill Books, winter 2011. Not junk information?

Quizzes! Games! Real Science!

It seems that the BBC (who I still find more trustworthy and comprehensive than the average US news service just because they're foreign) has a website (called Lab UK) dedicated to conducting studies on the internet through quizzes and such. Their big tagline varies along the lines of "Real Science!!" which I find quite amusing. You do what you have to in order to get your readers interested, I guess, but the biologist in me flinches when they say "Real Science!!" They have an information tab for [Real] scientists, which is more illuminating than the FAQ and info pages. Anyway, at the very least it's a more productive way to waste time playing online than the usual quizzes and games, and you still get a cute result at the end. Requires a BBC id/pword, quick registration, ostensibly to protect your answers and results. It's really fairly shrewd of whoever conceptualized Lab UK...

I did the "Web Behaviour Test:"

I am a Web Elk! (gr)

Slow-moving - Web Elks like you take their time finding exactly the right morsels of information – just like the real-world elk who carefully browses for shoots and leaves to eat.

Sociable - Real-world elks are social and stay in herds to protect themselves from predators. When you browse the web you are also a social creature, often using social networks, or other sites whose content is created by its users, as sources of information.

Specialised - Web Elks perform best when they focus on one thing at a time, rather than trying to multitask. Just as the real-world Elk is perfectly specialised for its environment, you have learned that while the web makes it possible to multitask, it’s not always the best approach.

LC-Primary Sources

I recently became more interested in exploring the Library of Congress both as a resource, an entity, and (because everything is right now) as a place to potentially work. Today I ran across this in my news feed: The Library of Congress Teacher's Page. It's intended to provide primary sources for the typical classroom lesson, and dabbles in most of the standard themes we all went through in school.

Several things struck me immediately. First, there are pre-constructed lesson plans available (there's not log in to the site, which is nice. Yay free information!). Now this may just be me, but I'd be irked if I knew my teacher was pulling something straight off the internet. However, using some of these for ideas and as support could be good. An example:

I'm interested in WWII, so I browse down the lesson plan list (by theme) to there, and find... mostly sources from the great depression. Hm. Actually there's nothing from the war in there, so I try "What is an American." This gets me a reference to de Crevecoeur (surprise), and some "life history" stories collected by the WPA. There's also an extensive, drawn out lesson plan, which (dear god) takes up classes from September to June! eesh. In any case, a teacher who knows what they want to present to the class could use the lesson plan themes to track down the sources. Kind of neat, but like most things on the internet, a lot of links to click through to find what you want.

A simple search using the search box on the front page brings up a few more hits for "World War Two", but it's still all within lesson plans and feels like it's being handed to me: This is what you should know! *ribbon on top* The point of the Teacher pages is primary sources, and if you dig a little you can get to a good chunk of information, but it can't possibly be everything the Library has. However, I do definitely support using primary sources for research, as they allow students to put more effort into reading and analyzing, unlike standard textbooks. Students will also get first hand perspectives and different voices from a primary source, which makes the experience of learning less monotonous, and hopefully more engaging.

Without the structure of a lesson plan, I think it's wildly entertaining to just browse the collections. And just in case everything the Library has isn't enough, they provide a nicely selected set of links from the outside.

Brevity and selection may be hard for me...

Alright, here's a post at last! I've been meaning to write an actual post for a while now, and have a list of subjects to discuss, but what actually spurred me to get all this down was a massive reading list on google reader this morning and a potential library job in my future. So, here's a run down of a few things I found interesting:

INTERNETS
Among all the sites on the web that "foster the qualities of 'innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration'" (according to AASL through SLJ) are a few of those that I've recently been prodding. Certainly most of the sites listed are more traditionally educational that Facebook, Google Reader and Twitter, but I appreciate the recognition of alternative learning resources. GReader and Twitter in particular are great for finding and following interesting feeds (and twits, as I like to call them. "tweeting" is just so... cute?). Clicking through links and finding more and more information can be very addictive, as demonstrated by the massive number of tabs I have open continuously.
Also on the subject of internets and social sites, apparently tagging is becoming important as a reader advisory (RA) practice. Being kind of new to this, I don't know much about RA in general, but I'd bet it's a lot about knowing your collection (and beyond) and being able to help patrons (or whoever) find things that are good for them. Apart from *actually* knowing every book you've got, there are always jacket blurbs and being familiar with an author, if not the book specifically, to help with advising on a reading choice. That said, if tagging were to be used on books, it would be.. why, it would be like the subject index in the card catalog. No? Nevertheless, imagine having a tag cloud for your library, like mine, here and having everyone find books they might like through it.

And also in the world of reference and internet and research, credo reference is gathering reference engines and working with IP adresses to make getting access easier. Haven't had a chance to look into it yet, but definitely something to keep in mind.

BOOKS
In my absence from the public library scene, it appears that a new genre has developed. Mostly blamed on the massive trend towards porphyria in fiction, urban fantasy also covers other elements of fantasy in a gritty, reality-based settting. Presumably, this brings the traditional fantasy world closer to home, elevating the believability factor and perhaps making it easy to approach for readers today.

Here's a list of books about, well, books, from Library Journal. I can't say a lot about it because I haven't read them yet, but several will certainly make it to my (epically long) "read right after I've read all these other books" list. Someday, someday.