Hello from somewhere under this pile of hard drives I've had sitting on my office shelves for a decade or so. Why so many old hard drives you ask? The too-oft unspoken part of backing up your backup is making sure your backup lives on a newer hard drive in good working order1. And, call me paranoid, but I buy a new backup drive every two or three years2. I mean, these things hold my entire life: my writing, my family photos, my music collection, my library.
Libraries are beautiful things. Over the summer I renewed my membership at my hometown library. And, look, if you're reading my stuff, you probably already know all about the benefits of libraries, but humor me, because this was just magic for me and my kid. We spent some time going through the stacks and I got to show her a bunch of my favorite books from when I was her age and talk with her about them. We even got a couple to try out over our vacation.
If that weren't enough, my library has access to a substantial number of online services. Which is fantastic because...look, there's a huge problem in academic research and it's synonymous with paywall. As it stands right now, if I do first-hand research, write it up all nice and pretty, and am lucky enough to get published in a peer-reviewed journal, my name on the paper is all the credit I get. I don't get paid for my research time or writing time; I don't get a royalty or residual. I don't even get notified when someone cites my work.
To add insult to injury, the journals often charge access to their publications. Which means, as an independent who does not have full-time university backing, I often can't even access the very same journal that has published me without paying for a subscription. And these subscriptions are not cheap. So, I work for free and the journal makes money off my work on a continuing basis.
For a brief, shining moment, it looked like the blockchain would solve this problem for us. Attach something like an NFT to each new article published by the journal and make sure that some kind of crypto currency accumulates to the author every time their work is cited or republished. You could even break off a chunk of that to pay reviewers and editors and it would still be a much more fair system than we have now3.
So, for my library to provide access to a wealth of research and journalistic archives and research centers is just amazing. I've been playing with it for a couple of weeks now and I've just barely scratched the surface of everything available.
September is my library month for a very different idea of library. September is a planning month for me. I teach a few classes here and there, but mainly my professional obligations boil down to "get ready for the upcoming semester." Which is nice because I get to catch up on a lot of t.v.
One of my not-so-guilty guilty pleasures is watching tours of mansions and luxury spaces on YouTube4. The modern California mansion is a thing of absurd spectacle - lots of glass and polished concrete, hidden appliances, and redundant everything. After all, you can't just have a kitchen, you need a separate chef's kitchen; why have a garage that might hold a mere four cars when you could double your collection with a second garage?
But the main thing that strikes me when I watch these videos is, where is the library? All these new mansions have movie theaters and spas and gyms, sometimes even a home office or two, but no library. To be sure, there are plenty of rooms that could be repurposed as a library, but who needs that? When I say that I want a library in my house, I mean I want a purpose built, intentionally designed space for books.
More than that, I want a space where I can exist surrounded by books and records and objects d'art that are worth nothing to anyone who doesn't live in my head. I want glassed in cases to house the paperbacks I read as a kid and an elegant display shelf for all the books I pretend to have read in order to look smart. I want specially designed pull-out shelves for my records where even the most die-hard vinyl collectors will nod approvingly at the careful, artful way in which my collection is housed. And then I want more books. The big art books I can never afford, the oddly engaging joke books I never bother to bring home, the odd book with the intriguing cover I found at a flea market and just had to have. I want a fucking library.
Not that I would turn down one of these mansions, you understand. But I think the crux of the issue, for me, is that my issue of a library is a physical space and yet my library exists on hard drives and cloud networks. It's going to be a problem at some point.
I'm a technologist. I celebrated my first iPod - I could take so much music with me, and with no skipping! DVDs and then Blu-Rays fit so nicely on the shelf; they took up so much less space than VHS and yet could provide so much more content. And ebooks? Don't even get me started on ebooks5.
But the companies that produce all this media have been getting crafty about establishing that we don't actually own any of the digital products we pay for. Instead we're merely renting or leasing them long term. Which means they can take them back at any time. And with the recent news that the streaming services are going to begin pulling some content, well, seems like a good time to go back to buying physical media, doesn't it?
Librarians know about these issues and they do their best to help their institutions and we patrons to get around and through them and thank all the gods that they do because this is a problem that's going to get worse before it gets better, I think. And there's not a lot we can do about it yet, except get yourself a good, clean hard drive and start backing up your backups.
Of course one problem, and one reason I have so many hard drives is that it's hard to dispose of them safely. Unless you completely destroy the internal mechanisms of the drive, there's a chance your data can be reconstituted.
I've never lost a backup drive, but I have lost a main hard drive before and nothing will make you a convert to the church of backing up your backup faster. Also, advice from Uncle Joel: at a minimum you should have both a local backup and an offsite, secure backup from a professional service. I use Carbonite and have done for years. Not a paid endorsement, just a company I like.
If you had told 16-year-old me how dissatisfied I would become with for-profit capitalism, you would have had an easier time convincing me that scientists had bred a new species of pig that could fly at will.
To be fair, I watch a lot of architecture-related content on YouTube. As a junior high school student I took a lot of drafting and architecture-prep classes; I sometimes wonder what my life would look like if I had stayed the course and become an architect. Some things might be better, others worse, who knows? But I like watching all the house tours and whatnot.
To be honest, I'm still furious that we let the publishers get away with multiple ebook formats. We, the consumer, won a major battle when all the different companies were forced to publish music in mp3 format, ensuring that your collection would work on any device. If only we had been able to get the book publishers to do the same.
Probably a good idea at the time LOL.
I keep a long wish list on Amazon and scan it daily for sales, along with the daily-sales page. I've many a book for just a couple of bucks. Plus DelphiClassics books is a treasure trove of complete out-of-copyright collections. You can even find the complete George Orwell and Aldous Huxley!
I agree about the ebook format thing. My solution is to decrypt all my ebooks using Epubor and collect, sort, and catalog them in Calibre. I currently have about 6,500 ebooks and magazines in my Calibre.