The problem with such use of Biblical imagination is that it simply has no controlling story. Nothing tells us which story to use other than our own imagination (which is generally a deluded part of our mind).
Hmm. I think it's less a case of Bible as Rorschach test, and more of a case as Bible as wompom.
@31 er, yeah. (goes to look it up, and repeats to self, "highboy, highboy, highboy." In my defense, that's how my mother spelled it when she left me the durn thing (it's still sitting in the garage, currently holding craft supplies.)
@42 something like that COULD exist.
oh, you have no idea.
as many have pointed out, trying to keep things away from children strangely does not make the children less interested in what you are trying to hide.
My mother had her infamous "top bookshelf", which contained (among other titles) an anatomy textbook, THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR, and the complete works (to date) of Philip Roth.
Needless to say, I became very adept at clambering up the wall, and had plowed through them all by the time I was thirteen.
For the most part I was mind-numblingly bored with the books, and only stuck with them because I knew Mom didn't want me to read them. I suspect her of being well aware of this (she was, I discovered later, the lady who had sneaked FOREVER AMBER out *her* father's hautboy) and salting the shelf with litterachur she wanted me to read.
With my own kids, I've told them they can read anything I own, so long as they are willing to (o dread!) talk to me about it afterwards. I've been astonished at the maturity of their comments, including the observation (about SANDMAN, I think) that "I think this is a little old for me. I'll try it again in a couple of years."
@23 Actually, how do libraries figure out the correct catalog number for a given book?
(putting on pedantic hat) If you mean *cataloging* data (subject headings, specifically, there are others describing other aspects of the book) or *classification* number (Dewey, LC, others) -- most libraries rely on publisher-supplied info (if available) as a starting point.
But a real live person, preferably with a graduate degree in organizing information, does look at each and every book and make sure the info corresponds to the actual book in hand, in the context of the particular library's policies, needs, patron usage, etc.
Most library cataloging data uses controlled language, and is very very strict, structured, and resistant to change. This is why a natural language query for "French cooking" will not get you as good results as the LCSH-approved "Cookery, French." But it is also why you will not have a mishmash of tags applying "Gay & Lesbian", "Lesbian", "Women > Sexuality", "Homosexuality", "Erotica", "Sexuality", and [default blank] to different editions of the same title.
Paula @ 286:
"There are reissues of Georgette Heyer novels in trade paperback at present. It's utterly ludicrous that there are English Regency romances with Georgian era paintings used for covers,...while it's annoying, it's not going to miscategorize the content as outside the romance genre or as "spicy"/hawt content books."
Interesting that you should bring this up. I first noticed the problem on Sunday when I was looking up a new M/M romance that has just recently received rave reviews and a lot of notice for being marketed as a "mainstream" romance (FALSE COLORS by Alex Beecroft, if plugs are allowed here), and I could only find the Heyer book of the same title.
Considering that the Heyer re-releases are being aimed at the YA market, the first thing that crossed my mind when I learned a little later of the whole kerfuffle is that an upset patron complained about the "hawt" book being ranked ahead of the "wholesome" Heyer and a fix inadvertently got out of hand.
Teresa, looking at the listings for the Doyle and Macdonald books, it seems to *me* that the worst problem is that the BAD BLOOD series is unaccountably out of print.
@273: Umm, "presumption of innocence" only applies in a legal setting. Nobody (okay, very few) people are talking about suing Amazon, let alone putting the programmer in jail or executing them.
What people are talking about is *choosing to spend their money elsewhere.* It's ridiculous to act like Amazon has any sort of right to my book-buying dollars, that they have to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt before I take them to Powell's or wherever.
I can do that for any reason I like, or for no reason at all. I can even suggest other people do the same. They have equal freedom to ignore me, or not.
That's how the system works. At least as long as we still have alternatives.
Okay, here's why I think this is a Big Deal.
Lay aside my indignation about Amazon's "embarrassing and hamfisted" efforts to protect my innocent eyeballs from the Nasssssty books -- without my consent. Lay aside my rage on behalf of my friends that their very identity and concerns are somehow branded as vaguely indecent. That's all personal stuff. I don't like it, but Amazon, as a private company, is free to market their materials as they like, just as I am free to patronize their business -- or not -- as they like.
What really concerns me -- as a professional librarian (like many others here) -- is this has highlighted an unfortunate tendency to rely upon Amazon as a de facto reference source -- for release dates, for series and pseudonymns, for reviews, and for quick and dirty readers advisory.
I have tended to use Amazon this way not just because it is fast and easy (as compared to more authoritative sources such as BIP and WorldCat, for example), but because, in a very real way, I trusted in the magic of the marketplace. In other words, I ceded Amazon an authoritative status it did not deserve because I assumed that it was in their best business interests to provide me with complete, accurate and useful information.
Yes, Amazon has screwed up before, and spectacularly, and they will do it again. But for me, the issue is not so much anger at the company (although, yeah, epic PR fail) as a very real worry about the implicit assumptions that even information professionals are making.
It's rather like suddenly finding a glaring factual error in Wikipedia; my first instinct is to say "What went wrong with THEM?" But my second, and more important concern is "Why am I still using this source when I know this sort of thing is bound to happen? And how can I protect myself and others from this sort of misinformation?"
So don't assume that we are all marching on Seattle with torches and pitchforks. There's a fair amount of introspection going around, too.
I'm actually leaning towards the clueless metadata glitch theory myself, except for one thing -- as near as I could tell, all of the Kindle editions of titles had the exact same "objectionable" metadata, and they all retained their sales rankings.
Unless somebody thinks that this incompetent programmer actually put in a line of code specifying "Except for KINDLE!!!" or some such (I'm no programmer, obviously), how could this have been automatic?
You can touch me apples, me bananas, and me pears
Me tangerines and nectarines and all me other wares
Though for a treat
It might be sweet
To share them with your chums
You've been told
They're icy cold
So don't touch me breakfast plums!
Another mostly lurker / rare commenter, adding my mite of good thoughts, positive karma, and heartfelt prayers speeding towards all of you.
Oh! How could I have forgotten Stephen Donaldson playing My Word-Hoard Surpasseth Yours!
A friend of mine and I used to make a contest of spotting the oh-so-casually-dropped tidbits, designed to send the abashed readers scurrying to the OED like so many roynish ur-viles...
It can't quite compete with all the delightful lubricious extracts already posted, but when I'm particularly depressed, I turn to Joan Windham's delightful martyrology, MORE SAINTS FOR SIX O'CLOCK to cheer me up.
A snippet can't begin to convey the cumulative hilarity, but here's an extract from "St. Dorothy" (capitalization original):
"Well, what Happened was that Theophilus and his friends finished having Tea and then went to the Governor Fabricius, and the Pagan Ones said that they'd turned into Christians, and the Others said that they were sorry they'd Stopped Being Christians and that they were going to Be Them Again, and the Governor Fabricius gave them to Lions to Eat, and so they were Martyrs too! Dorothy and All the Others were pleased to see them when they got to Heaven! Well, there seem to be Rather a Lot of Martyrs in this Story, don't there?"
abi@186: "Shorter me: Don't hate me because I'm 2.0!"
Oh, I don't, I don't. What I hate is the indiscriminate, unintelligent adoption of 2.0 -- e.g., the incorporation of Amazon-style "rating systems" into library catalogs, which almost always end up binary, polarizing, and useless -- which is of course not where you're going.
Like almost everything else controversial, it's not a matter of good v evil, but of two conflicting goods -- I'd say in this case Ranganathan's Law #4 v #5, with a tasty frosting of #1 on both sides.
And with THAT incredibly librarian-geeky allusion, I'll fade back into the background, to continue to take notes on how to rilly rilly offend people on two different continents.
abi, your explanation of the software's purpose does alleviate a lot of my concerns. I do think the idea of "flagging" rather than "blocking" offensive tags is an excellent one, though.
I must confess, I do hatehatehate Library 2.0 -- that's what the idea of incorporating user-generated content into library systems is called here, I don't know if it's an international term -- despite the fact that it is very much the hip and fashionable trend.
It's not concern about "naughty" tagging, or some sort of huffy notion that *of course* librarians will provide superior tags than the Great Unwashed. (For heavens sake, this is the same crowd that took nearly a century to crawl from "aeroplane" to "aircraft" to "airplanes" in the subject headings!)
It's just that one of the great contributions, imo, of the library database is the very strictly controlled language. It is one of the few ways to remain sane in the onslaught of information overload; and if it limits flexibility in access, it also forces precision in querying. I think any reference librarian will attest that "not really thinking through what I'm asking and thus getting too much" is a far more common problem at the reference desk than "knowing exactly what I want and not finding any."
But that's not the fault of your list. And is hardly relevant to your query, although it is a definite pleasure to vent...
But I must respectfully note that anyone who thinks "the number of librarians who want to spend a lot of time discussing whether "fuck" covers "motherfucker" or not is limited" has definitely not spent as much time as I have on cataloging listservs.
Oh, and I'll add that any library software that blocks access to Conrad's NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS, not to mention Langston Hughes's poetry, deserves to be burned in bonfires whilst lovers of the English language dance around it.
Unfortunately, that includes the software that my library has installed...
abi, as a librarian (although in the USA, so perhaps not a client for your company) I would almost certainly not recommend this product for purchase.
We already have enough problems with filters on our city-provided internet computers that it literally interferes with our work, and most staff bring in their personal laptops and piggyback on external hot spots just to answer simple reference questions -- just today I was blocked from looking up the weather in Edinburgh, for no obvious reason I could see, but surely some "stemmed" word triggered the filter.
We also had the very not amusing problem of personal names prevented from being entered into our patron database -- many Thai names end with -porn, for example, and "Van Dyke" is not an uncommon surname.
Obviously you can't tell your bosses "Nah, forget it." But if you let them know that at least one potential client swears that your product would make her shoot her computer, it may give them pause.
"An' it's who'll squash ye this time?
Who'll squash ye noo?"
Etc.
Or not.
That's pretty close to my zucchini bread recipe, but I add a LOT more spice -- not just cinnamon, but mace, cardamom, nutmeg, clove...
I also slice zucchinis very thinly the long way and use them instead of noodles in a meatless lasagne.
Mostly, however, I slice them into rounds (along with yellow squash) and barely steam them, with lots of good pepper. Yum!
(Yes. I leave my car unlocked in the summer. Give me your tired, your poor, your unwanted squash by the sackful...)
My physics teacher taught us "Figure out what units the answer should be in, and then apply conversion factors until you get the right one."
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