One Copy only and its on an antique computer somewhere and they aren't allowed to copy it.
No photos today, because the day was boring and I have no pictures to really express how boring it was.
As I was driving home last night from the airport with my parents my mum got talking about the Aboriginal language which they use out in Alice Springs and the various forms of language which are still active in Aboriginal communities. From an estimated 200 or so distinct dialects there are now about 20 active languages amongst the Aboriginal people left. Most of these are dying out and have very few people speaking them today. My mum used to work as a consultant on ESL(English as Second Language) for regional schools in dealing with Aboriginal children and getting them to work in class, show up to class and understand English while retaining their own cultural identities. She was pretty passionate about it all before the latest state government kind of fired her(she was a consultant, so they really just stopped hiring her, which is totally different).
My mum was talking about how the people studying language were scrambling to get as much material and content as they possibly could before the people who spoke the most original and pure versions of these languages died. There was a story she told me about a Japanese guy who lived on Palm Island years and years ago and he had this freaky knack for learning languages so he picked up a lot of the local language over the time he lived there before moving back to Japan, now that the languages original speakers are all pretty much dead he's the only person on Earth who is anything close to a native speaker and he's pretty old. They've spend a long time with him getting every note and memory they could on the language in an attempt to preserve what little he can recall and save something from the ashes of this loss. Note: I can't attest to the accuracy of this story or my recollection of it, I wasn't really paying too much attention to my mum when she started talking about this guy.
In one of our database classes we were told that there is always a focus on information retrieval when building a database, except on one database, the Aboriginal language databases don't care a whit if they can get the data out, they're desperate to get the data in before everyone dies and they can only hope there will be someone to sort it all out later when they're finished.
A lot of Aboriginal language has been bastardised by English intrusion creating a kind of pidgin language for people to speak between each other which is slowly killing the language with the later generations.
An interesting point I didn't know about Aboriginal language; Apparently they don't have past or future tenses in a lot of the dialects, so instead of saying "I went to the shops" they would say "I go to the shops before/yesterday." or "I go to the shop tomorrow" for future tenses, or something close to that.
The other thing she noted was that there used to be a bunch of dictionaries and language guides for people out in the bush for when they had to deal with their local aboriginals and aboriginal workers. A lot of these books were basically pamphlets but they gave a good idea of some of the key words and any that are found are poured over by linguists and historians looking for anything they don't already have. Preserving and storing these types of things falls a lot under the domain of librarians and archivists.
The title of my entry today is actually a story my mum told me about this one book which may be the last copy of some language guide on earth. The last paper copy is gone, ashes falling before sunrise somewhere windy, the only remaining copy is a digital one stored on this one computer in some office somewhere. Now this usually isn't a problem but the group which owns the computer has had some major falling out with some of the preservation groups trying to save the language and they won't give it over or allow it to be copied.
They believe, possibly correctly, that the preservation guys don't really respect them and their people, they just want to get everything done while they can and hog all the credit while the owners get nothing. The politics of it all are beyond my ken and I don't honestly care about these groups all that much. What amazes me is that they're risking something which is literally one of a kind and making no efforts to really save it.
At the ALIA online conference this year there was a talk by Anna Troberg of the Swedish Pirate Party, where she talked about how there are huge gaps in culture which span decades due to copyright restrictions which prevent all but the most popular and widespread material from certain time periods from being preserved. And that giving people free access to such material as soon as is possible is one of the only ways to ensure that anything is saved for the long run. This one book sitting on a computer that is old enough to scare my mum is the only light in that missing gap and until these two groups sort themselves out they run the risk of losing it forever.
There was a great quote from the mostly good show Crusade(going from memory because the internet has failed me): "Science is a universal constant, there for anyone to discover as long as you look around, but you don't just discover an ode on a Grecian urn, Beethoven or the Mona Lisa. Once the last copy burns its gone forever." that’s how I feel about this book. I don't really care if they get to use it or not, it won't affect my life in anyway or form. But the fact that it will be lost forever is just horrible, that knowledge can't be recovered in anyway or form once it is gone.
Our job as librarians is to preserve knowledge and make it accessible to the people, and going against that just rubs me the wrong way. One day they'll sort this mess out and we'll have everything we can on a dead language. Who knows, it might be useful.
My Day.
Apparently my mum phoned me at 9am and asked if I was interested in going to something in Ipswich, some kind of council jobs fair or something? But I was half asleep when she called so I have no recollection of that call or telling her I would go to it.
I ended up sleeping until about midday, which felt great because I have been deprived of sleep for the last two weeks something crazy. I'm finally almost at a normal place when it comes to sleep rates. I blame writing this thing for about two hours a night instead of trying to go to sleep when I was tired. I'm determined to get an entry per day. I'm only 10,700 words shy of the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words(which I honestly thought was 120,000 words) for the month and hope to go well and truely past that sooner rather than later. I woke up and had no recollection of the phone call, spend the morning online looking at job listings at universities in Brisbane. There are a few that I'll put my name up for, don't like my chances but I'll give them a shot.
Another reason I slept in was that I was talking to a friend of mine in the US over Gmail and we got talking about her efforts to find a new job as her current one was only for four hours a week(at a good rate of pay, but still not enough to live off of) she's sent hundreds of applications around the city to try and get work, I've sent about six maybe seven and have not yet managed to swing an interview which kind of sucks because I have no interview experience and even if I don't get the job I kind of need the practise in talking to people in a formal environment like a job interview.
She's still looking and I'm looking a bit harder today than I did yesterday. There are a few jobs going at QUT which I'm going to look at, if only because I know how to get to QUT pretty easily by car, train, bike, bus and boat. So transportation is covered at least.
My biggest problem right now is that I can't work for five weeks in August and I can't work for about a week next year in April, the latter is probably workable for a job but taking five weeks off as soon as I start would likely kill any goodwill I might be trying to earn. But I'd at least like to have an interview or two.
After I woke up properly and finished up sending my resume through the usual things I watched some Hannibal and when my mum got home she was a bit pissed at me for not going to Ipswich for the day. By the time she told me about it for the second time the fair was pretty much over so it wasn't worth the effort to go and check it out which got her rightfully angry. I was a bit apologetic, but I honestly can't remember taking that phone call and telling me about something the day of is a little bit too late for me. I usually plan my days the day before. So I know when to go to sleep, how much to eat before bed, all types of little things that make the next day flow a bit better than it would have otherwise.
So I left the house to go to University and do some more work on my ePortfolio. I was at Indro trying to get to the bank, which is currently tucked away in the very back of a construction zone and thus harder to get to than it should be, when I suddenly remembered that I went to an unConference back in 2012, the name of which escaped me at the time but I remember now was Library Camp QLD. So I have yet another event I can put in my ePortfolio now, which lowers the pressure on me because I was worried about that presentation I conducted for the Kenmore library being eligible.
I couldn't remember the name of the event so when I eventually got to the city and then walked to QUT I checked all my old emails for clues and found out the date of the unconference from a chat log I had the day after it was finished with and then searched my emails from around that period until I found its name. I felt kind of like a detective, slowly piecing together my memories of events, the dates and times and tracking them down. I found the Twitter hashtag as well and means I now have a ton of notes on the conference which will help me to jog my memory along even more.
Between QUT and the bank I had a Kebab and then parked at Chelmer station before taking the train into town. This woman was talking on her phone in the quiet carriage, I'm not sure what the social protocol is here, but I kind of wanted to just take a photo of her with the Quiet Carriage sign behind her and then point to it if she started to get angry that I was taking a photo of her. Because that would be a weird kind of social networking shame solution to the problem of people talking on the trains, but it would have been a bit rude so I didn't I just walked to the other end of the carriage where I couldn't hear her.
I left central and walked to the Queen Street Mall and then on to the university library. I was most of the way there when I realised I only had $50 notes in my wallet and the vending machines don't take them. I tried finding a shop that was open and wasn't a kebab shop but the campus book store/cafe was closed and I didn't want to buy another Kebab so I'm stuck with all these fifties. At some point in the near future I'm going to have to go get some change but not right now.
Since then I've been sitting here, working on my portfolio(I wrote up a reflection on my time in the SLQ preservation labs but didn't post it because it wasn't very interesting and wanted to get my thoughts about the whole lost copies and languages thing out before I forgot about it), writing this entry and slowly dying of boredom. I think I'm going to leave as soon as the library closes and have a few beers in the city, take a bus straight home and pick up my car in the morning, either cycling to get it or cycling to Toowong/The City and then taking a train back to get it.
I'm pretty sure I have nothing on tomorrow that I can't skip out on, hell I'll probably just come right back here tomorrow and do some more work. Although I might shake it up and go to Kelvin Grove again.
My biggest problem right now is that my password/login on the QUT network keeps bugging out every hour or so and then suddenly working again. Last time this happened was at Kelvin Grove and I had to reset my password, which is the biggest pain in the arse you can ever imagine online. We have to change our passwords every three months and I perpetually forget my newest one and have to reset it. This time however I know I haven't forgotten it, I'm just in a weird limbo on the QUT server and it occasionally kicks me off before remembering that I'm cool.
If you can see this, then it means that I've managed to get the internet working again... or I took my laptop and ran to the city to steal someone’s Wi-Fi.
I took the Dewey Decimal Quiz mentioned in this weeks Alia newsletter.
Andrew Holles's Dewey Decimal Section:
108 Kinds of persons treatment
Andrew Holles = 144853852259 = 144+853+852+259 = 2108
Class:
100 Philosophy & Psychology
Contains:
Books on metaphysics, logic, ethics and philosophy.
What it says about you:
You're a careful thinker, but your life can be complicated and hard for others to understand at times. You try to explain things and strive to express yourself.
Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com
YouTube Clip of the day.
For fans of the show this is pretty close to what they do. Its still better than their "Next Time on Mad Men", which at this stage has to be an elaborate form of self-parody.
As I was driving home last night from the airport with my parents my mum got talking about the Aboriginal language which they use out in Alice Springs and the various forms of language which are still active in Aboriginal communities. From an estimated 200 or so distinct dialects there are now about 20 active languages amongst the Aboriginal people left. Most of these are dying out and have very few people speaking them today. My mum used to work as a consultant on ESL(English as Second Language) for regional schools in dealing with Aboriginal children and getting them to work in class, show up to class and understand English while retaining their own cultural identities. She was pretty passionate about it all before the latest state government kind of fired her(she was a consultant, so they really just stopped hiring her, which is totally different).
My mum was talking about how the people studying language were scrambling to get as much material and content as they possibly could before the people who spoke the most original and pure versions of these languages died. There was a story she told me about a Japanese guy who lived on Palm Island years and years ago and he had this freaky knack for learning languages so he picked up a lot of the local language over the time he lived there before moving back to Japan, now that the languages original speakers are all pretty much dead he's the only person on Earth who is anything close to a native speaker and he's pretty old. They've spend a long time with him getting every note and memory they could on the language in an attempt to preserve what little he can recall and save something from the ashes of this loss. Note: I can't attest to the accuracy of this story or my recollection of it, I wasn't really paying too much attention to my mum when she started talking about this guy.
In one of our database classes we were told that there is always a focus on information retrieval when building a database, except on one database, the Aboriginal language databases don't care a whit if they can get the data out, they're desperate to get the data in before everyone dies and they can only hope there will be someone to sort it all out later when they're finished.
A lot of Aboriginal language has been bastardised by English intrusion creating a kind of pidgin language for people to speak between each other which is slowly killing the language with the later generations.
An interesting point I didn't know about Aboriginal language; Apparently they don't have past or future tenses in a lot of the dialects, so instead of saying "I went to the shops" they would say "I go to the shops before/yesterday." or "I go to the shop tomorrow" for future tenses, or something close to that.
The other thing she noted was that there used to be a bunch of dictionaries and language guides for people out in the bush for when they had to deal with their local aboriginals and aboriginal workers. A lot of these books were basically pamphlets but they gave a good idea of some of the key words and any that are found are poured over by linguists and historians looking for anything they don't already have. Preserving and storing these types of things falls a lot under the domain of librarians and archivists.
The title of my entry today is actually a story my mum told me about this one book which may be the last copy of some language guide on earth. The last paper copy is gone, ashes falling before sunrise somewhere windy, the only remaining copy is a digital one stored on this one computer in some office somewhere. Now this usually isn't a problem but the group which owns the computer has had some major falling out with some of the preservation groups trying to save the language and they won't give it over or allow it to be copied.
They believe, possibly correctly, that the preservation guys don't really respect them and their people, they just want to get everything done while they can and hog all the credit while the owners get nothing. The politics of it all are beyond my ken and I don't honestly care about these groups all that much. What amazes me is that they're risking something which is literally one of a kind and making no efforts to really save it.
At the ALIA online conference this year there was a talk by Anna Troberg of the Swedish Pirate Party, where she talked about how there are huge gaps in culture which span decades due to copyright restrictions which prevent all but the most popular and widespread material from certain time periods from being preserved. And that giving people free access to such material as soon as is possible is one of the only ways to ensure that anything is saved for the long run. This one book sitting on a computer that is old enough to scare my mum is the only light in that missing gap and until these two groups sort themselves out they run the risk of losing it forever.
There was a great quote from the mostly good show Crusade(going from memory because the internet has failed me): "Science is a universal constant, there for anyone to discover as long as you look around, but you don't just discover an ode on a Grecian urn, Beethoven or the Mona Lisa. Once the last copy burns its gone forever." that’s how I feel about this book. I don't really care if they get to use it or not, it won't affect my life in anyway or form. But the fact that it will be lost forever is just horrible, that knowledge can't be recovered in anyway or form once it is gone.
Our job as librarians is to preserve knowledge and make it accessible to the people, and going against that just rubs me the wrong way. One day they'll sort this mess out and we'll have everything we can on a dead language. Who knows, it might be useful.
My Day.
Apparently my mum phoned me at 9am and asked if I was interested in going to something in Ipswich, some kind of council jobs fair or something? But I was half asleep when she called so I have no recollection of that call or telling her I would go to it.
I ended up sleeping until about midday, which felt great because I have been deprived of sleep for the last two weeks something crazy. I'm finally almost at a normal place when it comes to sleep rates. I blame writing this thing for about two hours a night instead of trying to go to sleep when I was tired. I'm determined to get an entry per day. I'm only 10,700 words shy of the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words(which I honestly thought was 120,000 words) for the month and hope to go well and truely past that sooner rather than later. I woke up and had no recollection of the phone call, spend the morning online looking at job listings at universities in Brisbane. There are a few that I'll put my name up for, don't like my chances but I'll give them a shot.
Another reason I slept in was that I was talking to a friend of mine in the US over Gmail and we got talking about her efforts to find a new job as her current one was only for four hours a week(at a good rate of pay, but still not enough to live off of) she's sent hundreds of applications around the city to try and get work, I've sent about six maybe seven and have not yet managed to swing an interview which kind of sucks because I have no interview experience and even if I don't get the job I kind of need the practise in talking to people in a formal environment like a job interview.
She's still looking and I'm looking a bit harder today than I did yesterday. There are a few jobs going at QUT which I'm going to look at, if only because I know how to get to QUT pretty easily by car, train, bike, bus and boat. So transportation is covered at least.
My biggest problem right now is that I can't work for five weeks in August and I can't work for about a week next year in April, the latter is probably workable for a job but taking five weeks off as soon as I start would likely kill any goodwill I might be trying to earn. But I'd at least like to have an interview or two.
After I woke up properly and finished up sending my resume through the usual things I watched some Hannibal and when my mum got home she was a bit pissed at me for not going to Ipswich for the day. By the time she told me about it for the second time the fair was pretty much over so it wasn't worth the effort to go and check it out which got her rightfully angry. I was a bit apologetic, but I honestly can't remember taking that phone call and telling me about something the day of is a little bit too late for me. I usually plan my days the day before. So I know when to go to sleep, how much to eat before bed, all types of little things that make the next day flow a bit better than it would have otherwise.
So I left the house to go to University and do some more work on my ePortfolio. I was at Indro trying to get to the bank, which is currently tucked away in the very back of a construction zone and thus harder to get to than it should be, when I suddenly remembered that I went to an unConference back in 2012, the name of which escaped me at the time but I remember now was Library Camp QLD. So I have yet another event I can put in my ePortfolio now, which lowers the pressure on me because I was worried about that presentation I conducted for the Kenmore library being eligible.
I couldn't remember the name of the event so when I eventually got to the city and then walked to QUT I checked all my old emails for clues and found out the date of the unconference from a chat log I had the day after it was finished with and then searched my emails from around that period until I found its name. I felt kind of like a detective, slowly piecing together my memories of events, the dates and times and tracking them down. I found the Twitter hashtag as well and means I now have a ton of notes on the conference which will help me to jog my memory along even more.
Between QUT and the bank I had a Kebab and then parked at Chelmer station before taking the train into town. This woman was talking on her phone in the quiet carriage, I'm not sure what the social protocol is here, but I kind of wanted to just take a photo of her with the Quiet Carriage sign behind her and then point to it if she started to get angry that I was taking a photo of her. Because that would be a weird kind of social networking shame solution to the problem of people talking on the trains, but it would have been a bit rude so I didn't I just walked to the other end of the carriage where I couldn't hear her.
I left central and walked to the Queen Street Mall and then on to the university library. I was most of the way there when I realised I only had $50 notes in my wallet and the vending machines don't take them. I tried finding a shop that was open and wasn't a kebab shop but the campus book store/cafe was closed and I didn't want to buy another Kebab so I'm stuck with all these fifties. At some point in the near future I'm going to have to go get some change but not right now.
Since then I've been sitting here, working on my portfolio(I wrote up a reflection on my time in the SLQ preservation labs but didn't post it because it wasn't very interesting and wanted to get my thoughts about the whole lost copies and languages thing out before I forgot about it), writing this entry and slowly dying of boredom. I think I'm going to leave as soon as the library closes and have a few beers in the city, take a bus straight home and pick up my car in the morning, either cycling to get it or cycling to Toowong/The City and then taking a train back to get it.
I'm pretty sure I have nothing on tomorrow that I can't skip out on, hell I'll probably just come right back here tomorrow and do some more work. Although I might shake it up and go to Kelvin Grove again.
My biggest problem right now is that my password/login on the QUT network keeps bugging out every hour or so and then suddenly working again. Last time this happened was at Kelvin Grove and I had to reset my password, which is the biggest pain in the arse you can ever imagine online. We have to change our passwords every three months and I perpetually forget my newest one and have to reset it. This time however I know I haven't forgotten it, I'm just in a weird limbo on the QUT server and it occasionally kicks me off before remembering that I'm cool.
If you can see this, then it means that I've managed to get the internet working again... or I took my laptop and ran to the city to steal someone’s Wi-Fi.
I took the Dewey Decimal Quiz mentioned in this weeks Alia newsletter.
Andrew Holles's Dewey Decimal Section:
108 Kinds of persons treatment
Andrew Holles = 144853852259 = 144+853+852+259 = 2108
Class:
100 Philosophy & Psychology
Contains:
Books on metaphysics, logic, ethics and philosophy.
What it says about you:
You're a careful thinker, but your life can be complicated and hard for others to understand at times. You try to explain things and strive to express yourself.
Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com
YouTube Clip of the day.
For fans of the show this is pretty close to what they do. Its still better than their "Next Time on Mad Men", which at this stage has to be an elaborate form of self-parody.
Click to view