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Feed: THE AARDVARK SPEAKS
Just another lame librarian blog. Essence, effervescence, etc. Established 2002. ISSN 1726-5320
Strč prst skrz krk
24-Jul-10
Czech may be the language of most of my ancestors, but unfortunately my grandmother decided to not teach a single word of it to my father, so I am isolated from this potential facet of my cultural heritage. A recent visit to Prague has revealed that most of the language is a total mystery to me. Even after acquiring a few of the quintessential words necessary for survival (e.g. vepřové pečeně), the pronunciation is still something of a challenge. It's not so much the numerous diacritics on the consonants, it's more that the language seems to rely much less on vowels and that the consonants appear in perfectly tongue-splitting combinations, such as in Plch zdrhl skrz drn, prv zhltl hrst zrn or in the sentence that serves as the title for this blog entry and which seems to be famous enough to even have its own wikipedia entry.
They all speak English too. I'm not surprised, considering how many tourists they have to cater for. It would have been fun to hear more of these tourists twisting their tongues while trying to utter something in Czech, but none of them (except myself) did. Cowards. Not that anybody understood much of what I was trying to say, and I also gave up soon enough. I did get the vepřové pečeně and the pivo though.
Air
15-Jul-10
The newspapers tell me that the current heat wave in Vienna is caused by hot air from North Africa that is swept into Austria via the Mediterranean. I'm fully inclined to believe this, not only because it's incredibly hot and humid, but also because the air has quite an unusual scent. At the moment it smells of sea water and pine trees in front of my house, just the way it smells in Crete, despite the fact the the sea and the nearest pine trees are several hundred kilometres away.
Zweifelhafte Getränke
13-Jul-10
Soll ich dieses sogenannte "Bier" probieren oder nicht? Kommt wohl drauf an, was es wirklich für ein Getränk ist...
No certificate
12-Jul-10
When I took the law exam that was part of my professional training course as a government employee, the examiner asked me what rights civll servants had as opposed to regular government employees. I came up with all sorts of things, from health insurance to pension schemes and whatnot, but he still kept on asking me the same question over and over again. When I finally couldn't think of anything anymore and gave up, he said: "well, the right to use an official title of course."Any book about Austria will dwell upon the Austrians' obsession with official titles, be it the obsession over academic degrees or titles that denote your status in your profession. Every nation has ranks in their police force and military force, such as sergeants, captains, colonels and so on; in Austria, even civil servants in administrative positions have similar titles. Even though the law regulating civil service did away with the ranks of Kommissär (commissioner) and Rat (councillor) ten years ago, there are still Oberrat (senior councillor) and Hofrat (court councillor) -- the latter despite the fact that the court was abolished along with the monarchy as long ago as 1919.
Anyway, when I was made a full civil servant a couple of years ago, I received a certificate signed by the Minister of Higher Education stating the fact that I was now a civil servant and had the right to use the title Beamter (civil servant), which was nice in principle, but a somewhat anticlimactic title; it was kind of weird that the certificate should even mention it.
Two weeks ago on July 1st, if my maths is correct, I should have been promoted to senior councillor. In fact, the staff database says that this is indeed what I am now. Curiously, I have so far not received any kind of piece of writing confirming it. In a country as obsessed with titles and formalisms, this seems very, very odd. Either they forgot about it, or they're all on holidays already, or - God forbid - they might even have come to their senses.
Whatever the matter, a piece of paper would still have been nice.
In order to survive
10-Jul-10
I've lived in this particular part of Vienna for a little over ten years now. It's an urban area, close to the city center, in a district with a Green Party majority, but virtually no green, no parks, and no ponds or other bodies of water.
Up until a few weeks ago, this topographical predisposition has meant that this area was virtually mosquito-free. In fact, I don't think that I've ever had mosquitos in my flat, and I cannot remember ever having been bitten by these pests when sitting outside one of the many cafés and restaurants in the area.
This has changed dramatically. Due to heavy rainfall a few weeks ago, this area is now inundated with mosquitos. In fact it's so bad that you're close to being sucked dry if you leave your house after 6pm without wearing thick layers of insect repellent. Early this morning I woke up from a high-piched buzzing noise next to my right ear. They had arrived in my bedroom.
Today, I mounted a fly screen on my bedroom window and scorched the place with an insect poison that's purportedly harmless for humans (to be on the safe side, I left the room immediately, and then opened the fly-screened window wide to get some of the poison out).
It's as if I was living in the countryside, which is odd in an area without the slightest touch of countryside about it.
In fact, it's a lot worse in the countryside right now. A colleague of mine at work told me he hasn't been able to sit on his balcony even once this summer; first because it was so cold, then because of the heavy rain, and now because of the mosquitos.
My own complaints seem to pale in comparison.
Zap tally
23-Jun-10
For my new book Things I Learned From Watching TV After Midnight, I stayed up one night and spent 90 minutes zapping through 79 TV channels between 00:35 and 02:05 hrs, taking notes of everything I encountered. It was an interesting, if at times somewhat absurd experience. I'm still trying to make sense of some of the scenes, which, written down as notes, seem to make even less sense than when I was watching them. Take for example this bit, which I saw between 01:08 and 01:10 hrs:
A peculiar spiral-like form is turning against a white background. A man is leaning against a black wall. He begins to scream. A different man is lying on the tiled floor, not moving. A woman is smiling, saying: "Now I know what love is."
I'm seriously mystified. I also made a kind of tally, enumerating some of the things that I saw. Considering that I zapped through the channels rather quickly, usually spending no more than 20-60 seconds on each channel, it is probably significant that I still became witness to two murders while they were being committed (actually there were four, but a fisherman killing a fish and a spider killing an ant don't traditionally count as "murder". Anyway, two people were killed while I was zapping around, and I saw five dead bodies of people that had been killed before I zapped in.
In other statistics, I encountered at least 21 policemen (there may have been more, but the 21 were instantly identifiable), at least 13 thugs, 12 weapons of some sort (of which six were handguns). Considering the fact that night time television is commonly considered the haven of soft porn, it seems interesting to note that I saw only 9 pairs of breasts.
Dinge die ich vom Nachtfernsehen gelernt habe (Things I Learned from Watching TV After Midnight) will be available in bookshops and online booksellers (e.g. Amazon.de) in late July.
The past
04-Jun-10
 Some things reveal their significance immediately at the first glance; others are highly significant for one person, whereas they are an impenetrable mystery for everybody else.
Essential exam accoutrements
31-May-10
Revision bears, Study Skills for Dummies, Red Bull, caffeine pills.
Seen at a bookshop that's affiliated with a university library. Not our library, but we might be considering.
Now that puts my mind at ease
23-May-10
How very reassuring that they're not using any fake ingredients for this. Or virtual ingredients. Or whatever other frightening non-real substances there might be.
Where do we go from here?
18-May-10
Every time I get to see other libraries, like I did extensively last week, I re-evaluate what we are doing at The Library. Following last week's visits, I am now convinced that The Library isn't a library at all. It's a book storage facility.
A real library is something like this:
What you can see here is: books, computer access, people studying, using the library's computers, using their own computers, taking notes, talking to other people.
In other words, a library is a study and research environment that is also an information hub that allows people to instantly access information from all kinds of media -- be it as books or print journals form directly from the shelf, or from databases, Internet sources, e-journals or e-books via networked computers.
It also gives the users ample space to process the information, by means of study desks for self study in quiet study areas, by providing group discussion areas, and by providing the necessary infrastructure to connect computers.
Apart from information media, it also offers assistance in the shape of information specialists, i.e. librarians, that not only create and maintain this infrastructure, making sure that the best and most up-to-date information sources are available; they also can be consulted so that library users can use all these resources more efficiently and more extensively.
A library that cannot offer all these things, and ideally also function as a social space where students and researchers can also take breaks nearby,
pretty much loses its purpose. A book storage facility like The Library, without adequate computing infrastructure, without adequate study areas, without group discussion areas and without social spaces, is in danger of losing its justification.
Plans to invest in The Library's infrastructure have a tendency to never materialise, and it is obvious why if you regard The Library not as a library, but as a book storage facility: with the increasing importance of electronic publications, a book storage facility is a thing of the past. At some point in the future, The Library will indeed no longer need significantly more additional storage space. The Powers That Be seem to see this happening within the next five years, whereas my own estimate is something like fifteen years; still, the truth still stands that a book storage facility is a cul-de-sac, a thing of the past. It will doubtless still have its uses in the future, but it will not primarily be what we will use libraries for.
In an era of information overload, myriads of unreliable sources and confusing user interfaces for information access, a "real" library is probably more important than ever as a controlled academic information hub with trained information specialists is more important than ever. It is therefore vital that the transition from book storage facility to library be made sooner rather than later.
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