Jon -
What a familiar story when dealing with nearly decomposeable
bureaucratic hierarchies (left/right hand mutual ignorance)!
When I came to LANL, the library allowed books (after a short
period of limited circulation upon acquisition) to be shelved as
long as you wanted in your own office bookshelf as long as you
agreed to allow another staff member to "borrow" it from your
shelf (mediated/tracked by the library) for the nominal designated
week or two. At some point, the library decided to eliminate
this by A) calling all of the books in; B) allowing a
free-for-all giveaway to staff of said books; C) allowing a more
generous personal purchase allowance for books; D) capping the
size of the permanent collection. Fortunately when they called
the books "home", one of the possible responses on the list of
books en holdin, was "unable to return book" implying damage or
loss, but leaving room for "I don't want to". The list of
"unable to return" books was remitted to our group leaders (middle
managers) who might consider some kind of censure, but I never
heard of any group leader even checking one's bookshelves for any
such "witheld" books or complaining to anyone. In principle, a
staff member could have turned in a book and then gone to the
free-for-all and retrieved it. I gave up my Knuth collection
from that era to someone else who coveted them even MORE.
Your anecdote makes me think that I must invite you (someday) to the "grand unpacking" of my 6x6x12 box-trailer of books (fondly known as my "two cords of books"... if packed tight, closer to 3.5 cords @ 432cf?) where I would invite any number of people to:
- Steve
PS. My greatest score ever during my rabid-collection (ending ca
2014) phase was a *full color* faithful reproduction of
Michelson's notebook (published by Bell Labs in the late 60s?)
covering the famous Michelson-Morely experiment at the St. Johns
annual $5/bag-of-books sale (2003?). I saw a stack of perhaps 20
of them and happily took a copy, coveting the other 19.
Meanwhile my partner Suzanne tripped over them as well and took 2
copies (I was surprised she didn't take all of them) as her father
was a Physics professor and the diagrams at least, were
familiar... a few minutes later, I saw another patron take the
remaining stack and drop them in his sack. I was really torn by
this act of greed, even though I had contemplated grabbing "a few
more". Later, I found Suzanne cutting up one of them for a
collage/book project, planning to vivisect the second one (I had
hidden my own copy by that time)... and talked her into letting me
make a color photocopy of the pages from the second copy she
intended to have her way with. I had a particular
colleague/friend in mind to gift the second copy to, but over the
decade(s?) since then I have ached to have additional copies to
share. I think I once did a search and found a copy for sale
online for some outrageous price (~$100) but did not find anything
(just now) with a half-hearted effort. I'm not sure if my
copy-in-reserve is still in one of those boxes or in a hidden
file-folder or if in fact I gave over and gifted it to someone
spontaneously. If I still have a copy, I would gift it to you
Jon. Stay tuned...
Steve, MAKIF'AT writes: “Books are catnip – or porn, if you want to be vulgar about it - to me, and if they’re in plain sight, well, I’m going to be looking at them. I’m also gonna hightail it out after the meeting and look up as many of the titles as I can remember to see if they should go on my wishlist. I’m a bibliophile, and that’s what we do.” I relate deeply. Thank you, Signore Eco. In another life, I would have loved to be a librarian. When Margaret retired from her position as the SFI head librarian, I asked her if I could be considered for the post. She reminded me politely that I don't have a library science degree. The more unfortunate reason, as far as I am concerned, is that I simply don't have the temperament for it. I am hot-blooded through and through. A few years ago the downtown branch of the Santa Fe public library notified me to return a copy of Richard Hamming's 'Numerical Methods', a really nice hard-cover Springer copy. I did and then waited for a day to check it back out again, but alas it was gone, and not just checked out by another patron. The entire math section disappeared! I went to the desk and asked about the book. The math section was boxed up and sent to auction. They assured me that they were to get new books soon. I asked for another copy of the book and they were sad to inform me that it was too expensive for them to replace. One month later, I returned to find that the math books had been replaced by books about mathematicians. Surely they were just ignorant, us wizards read such esoteric tomes and they cannot be responsible for knowing what it is we want or need. I walked up to the checkout desk and asked if they were hiring for a curation position, and they again sadly informed me that they were not. I haven't returned since. Please, make no mistake, Alexandria is burning. As far as Go documentaries are concerned, have you checked out 'The Surrounding Game'🀀? A co-director of the film, Cole Pruitt, was finishing up a post-doc at LANL when he and Will completed the film. Cole would join us for the Saturday Santa Fe go club meetup at St. John's to play and he was a pleasure to learn from (~3 dan?). 🀀 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surrounding_Game -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
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