Subsections below:
An innocent question brings an important desideratum to light
Computers in Library ABC (in New York)—including flukes
Library XYZ, in a locality with a more New Jersey tone
Computer features at
XYZ—surprisingly state-of-the-art
[Edits 1/27/16. Edits 1/28/16.]
I knew I wanted to do a series
headed “Everyday People,” which I started in December; and well before this, I
had a notion to do a mini-series headed “A Tale of Two Libraries,” which originally
wasn’t going to be under the “Everyday” rubric. But I decided to fold the
earlier idea into the more recent one, in part just to get going on entries
that are other than film reviews and reflective things having to do with career
and local-economy issues.
This libraries mini-series will,
in part, be a look at local community behavior. But it also will go a distance
to describing the cultures of two different states, New York and New Jersey,
which differences may tie in to some observations I can make that are relevant
to the cultural and mood-related atmosphere surrounding the 2016 presidential
race. (That probably sounds more ambitious than I’ll end up being.)
For instance, consider what some
across the U.S. may have wondered, “Is Chris Christie’s allegedly brash style
something that eventually will be germane to constructive work in the White
House?”—whether he gets there as a member of the Cabinet if another Republican
wins the White House (which would be my bet for him) or as president himself.
Well, interestingly, the two libraries I am thinking about include one in New
Jersey where there is enough of a difference in manners between the people you
often encounter in that community and another in New York State (where the
other library I’ll profile is) that I would not be stretching too far to say
that the New Jersey “in your face,” sort-of “militant-mediocre” style is
something that may reflect a more-at-large, brewing ferment that, though New
Jersey by and large might not vote Christie into a White House slot, may (from throughout
the U.S.) still be responsible for some unexpected way the electorate chooses
its president this year.
From a far different angle (having
little to do with the zeroing in on the cultures of the two libraries that I’m
planning to focus on), I’ve thought with increasing cogency in recent times
that one cannot understand the culture of New Jersey (especially northern),
whether in the work world or in other publicly-exposed parts, without
understanding the petty mentality. Pettiness is so much part of the interpersonal
fabric here that, if one starts out trying to be as un-petty as possible, then if
one were to get anywhere with one’s career here, one ends up (as a sort of “a
fortiori” matter) adopting petty methods just to, so to speak, keep one’s head
above water.
##
I will look at the two libraries
along a few general lines: (1) the infrastructure that characterizes each,
especially the computers the public can use, as is suited to my professional
work (and, sometimes, how others deal with them); (2) the manners and other
nature of the people in each location (whether among likely patrons of the
library or amid townspeople in the immediate area); and (3) such curious
aspects of daily life as the occasional presence in the library of a group of
“adult day-care” people (especially autistic people), shepherded by one or more
social workers, ostensibly to get the disabled folk some salutary time out in
the larger world.
For this first entry, let me
look at one of the main reasons I come to these libraries, and then look a bit at the
libraries as different cultures: particularly in the computers (and certain
resources in the form of books). But I will make passing comments on the local
social tones (and these will be covered in future entries, too).
An innocent question brings an important desideratum to light
One time at the New York State library
that I go to, a young man—a higher schooler, it seemed, and by no means an AP
Scholar type—asked me, why do I come here? Isn’t there a library in my own town
(because somehow it came out that I am from New Jersey)? This struck me as a
dumb question (for one thing, plenty of New Jerseyans come to this New York
library; it’s a few minutes over the state border), and I forget what I
answered him. But I knew I’d been coming here for a darned good set of reasons
(which it was OK I didn’t have in the front of my mind to tell him).
It was sometime later that one
of the key reasons (on whatever motivation I had it) occurred to me, for
possible future use. Not that this is a practical concern the vast majority of
the time, but the New York library has a good supply of legal reference books.
And I realized that all of the public libraries I most often go to have good
sets of legal books (in definite contrast to the libraries I opt confidently
not to go to).
When I was mired in the Bauer
lawsuit in 2008, I especially liked to go to the municipal library in the
borough of Butler, N.J., which is in Morris County. I had been going to that
library for my personal reasons for years, starting around 2002 or so, one
reason being that it was on my way home from various locations of work down
Route 23. But in 2008, its legal books were among the most helpful sets I could
have located (and it contained editions [from the publisher Westlaw] of
the New Jersey state court rules—an edition of which I eventually was allowed
to take home for myself when the library replaced them with a new edition).
Somewhat sadly to me, I haven’t
gone to the Butler library as much as I used to, in recent years. This is part
of my new habits of daily life (going on for a few years now), which partly
rely on driving as few miles as possible—and the Butler library is a longer
drive from my home than either the New York library (call it, for this series, “Library
ABC”) or the New Jersey one (call it “Library XYZ”) that I still often go to.
This other New Jersey library, XYZ,
which I will talk about more, and which is also in Morris County, also has a
decent set of law books, though (as a simple matter of walkabout fact) I
haven’t had to rely on them as much as in Butler.
And interestingly, it is shocking to me that in Sussex
County, my home county, the library in my town of Vernon is almost completely
devoid of useful law books. Even the central county library in Frankford
Township, which used to have a fairly decent legal section (though some of its
features, like some crude online facility, weren’t too helpful), has been
dismantling its legal section in the past several years (basically, in the wake
of the 2008 financial crisis).
And even the Sussex County courthouse (starting about a
couple years ago) got rid of a large number of its volumes in the law library
there. Meanwhile, helpfully, the county college, in Newton, N.J., has had a
not-bad set of legal books (especially case-law “reporters”), which I also
relied on (for case law information, in particular) during the Bauer suit of
2008.
But overall, Sussex County seems to have engaged in a
campaign of “dumbing down” its libraries in terms of its legal-book holdings,
to the point that I would almost never go to any of the county’s libraries (outside
of the county college) for any law-book purposes. Morris County, in the Butler
library and in the other one I’m to discuss (and of course Morris County has
many municipal libraries), has far better infrastructure that treats patrons
like adults in having legal books for public use (whether these are court-rule
things, volumes of state statutes, or Nolo Press books for the layperson [as a
pro se litigant]).
(I could explain my situation of how I use public libraries
for legal purposes even further: for instance, in 2008, I found that different
libraries were good for different resources, and in making best use of your
time, you scheduled your stops there accordingly. Each has its own quirks as to
what legally related holdings it has. For instance, Library ABC in New York
doesn’t have court-rule books [for New York State], and I incidentally found in
2008 that for this sort of thing, you had to go to the county administrative
building in Goshen, N.Y., where they have a legal library attached to the
courthouse and related facilities there. I actually went there to do some
research pertinent to the Bauer lawsuit in 2008, and got some info about a
Google-related suit, though that info [and any other substantive info I got
there] wasn’t really important to my work in the suit. But I was glad to make
an acquaintance of that library—which in recent years has been harder to get
access to, because the building was damaged by one [2011?] of the recent warm-weather
storms we’ve had in the general area.)
I would go even further and say that one Sussex County
library, in Wantage Township, seemed on its computers not even to allow ready
access to Google. This plus the paucity of legal books means to me that Sussex
County is not a place where—as I
combine my practical reasons for going, into one bundle—I would go to use the
library for almost any purpose. (I could make other generalizations about Sussex
County that are based on my less-than-fully-satisfied experience of it since
the early 1970s, including a sly characterization of it as “Excuses County,”
but girlfriend, let’s not go there right now.)
To me, a library is (as a matter of principle) valuable
because, IN PART, it has legal books that implicitly treat patrons like adults.
This is like a public establishment that (if I may extrapolate from
western-U.S. culture in the 1800s) has a gun on the wall so that, in case of
invasion by horrible “evildoers,” you can grab the gun, lock and load, and be
ready for flinty action. Same thing with legal books. Encounter some crooked
legal shit intruding on your life? Have to hit the ground running with some
legal response (when you have no money to pay an attorney)? No need to call an
attorney, in my case. Get to the library and hit the legal books. For the pro
se citizen defending his civil (or other essential) rights (in the world of “free-floating”
litigation), it’s the “concealed-carry” option, as opposed to situations literally
requiring guns (which I am not a fan of, anyway).
But the law books, fortunately, are not something I have
lately had to value a library by in seeking to consult them in a pressing case.
My main reasons for going to a library include such homely tools as the
computers and the photocopiers. So let’s turn to these. (And this series won’t usually
be as nerdy as the following may seem.)
Computers in Library
ABC (in New York)—including flukes
First of all, Library ABC (in New York State) is only about
seven miles away from my home, one way. Library XYZ in New Jersey is about 15
miles away, one way. They are, for better or worse, the two libraries I prefer
to go to so often for my “work weeks.” (More can be said about the topography
of the area, as helps shape my decisions on why I go to the libraries I do.)
It’s ironic that the New Jersey library is actually further
from my home than the New York; meanwhile, going to the New York location means
my driving up and down a steep hill on Barrett Road, which crosses the state
border (and passes through what is now a state preserve) and which very-nearby
locals are quite familiar with. The drop in elevation as you take this road is
roughly 800 feet. No such drop occurs when I go to the New Jersey library.
##
Library ABC, as apparently is the case with all libraries in
the Ramapo/Catskills network of which it is a member, has public computers that
you sign into by entering your library ID number (yes, I have a card for this
library; it costs $75 a year, for an out-of-community person). You then are on
a time limit, two hours per person per day (though the library staff can extend
your time at your request, and per their discretion). It is something like
being on a taxi meter. So, because of the time limit, I have a sense of working
here of needing to be organized with my time, to get done what I need to (in
the order appropriate for the day), to not be interrupted by my time running
out….
Of course, I can always extend the time (the staff is good
with me about that), but given the time-limit situation in general, I try to be
compliant by not spending more than two hours at a time on the computer here,
too often. (Sometimes, but not often, this can be a matter of other people
waiting to use the computer.) (The main season in which my spending more than
two hours on the computer would happen, fairly often, is the summer, when I
have seasonal freelance work that can total more than two hours of solid—if not
continuous—work a day.)
Another nice thing is that the computers in the Library ABC
are arrayed so you have some level of personal space, if not complete privacy.
You don’t seem to “sit on top of one another,” which actually is more the case
at the Library XYZ (in New Jersey).
##
This (at Library ABC) is all when things are running well.
In a period from about November 2014 to maybe midsummer 2015, there was a
freakish situation at Library ABC of the possibility of a given computer
suddenly dropping you from the electronic signup that you’ve duly already gone
through—you would be suddenly closed out (without your two hours being up,
often by a long shot), and in the process you lose new, unsaved content that you had already typed into whatever documents
you had open at the time (while the versions saved on your Flash drive were OK).
This—not instigated by anything fluky you did—could happen for some larger-systemic
reason that no one on the library staff seemed able to figure out (more on such
attempts at mitigation below).
This periodic problem started happening following when the
library had changed to a new system of computers in November 2014. With the old
computer system (which also had a signup mechanism), which I had used for at
least three years, this problem hadn’t happened.
Over a period of at least eight months, the dropping from
the signup happened to me about a dozen times, at least. Sometimes (in a
several-day period) it happened more frequently than at other times (several-day
periods). Early on, it was frustration-making, but I quickly learned to do
things like save changes in documents more often, as not to lose content if I
was suddenly bumped off the signup. (This problem, of course, happened to other
people, too. And as many times as various of us patrons pointed out yet another
occurrence of the problem, the library staff—when they did not sometimes, on a
given day, seem in talking with you to overlook or deny the problem a bit, as
happened early on—could only deal with it [I’ll be summary here] in an ad hoc,
pragmatic, and never conclusive manner.)
An IT department outside of the library’s physical plant, meant
more for the overall library network, was consulted on this issue now and then,
but I don’t think they really pinpointed the source of the problem. There was
be a situation with me, once, where an IT person would be (not in the library
itself) “live” from his or her remote office, able to monitor the function of my
computer while I worked on it, but this was a little like trying to stop by and
watch when a mouse ambled into your kitchen at night, which you could never
predict. Suffice it to say that, in the several months this problem was apt to
happen, I would schedule when I appeared at Library ABC based on how much, for
a given project, I wanted to deal that day with the drop-from-the-signup problem,
versus dealing with the pause-giving characteristics at Library XYZ (and of
course other reasons for going to one town versus the other would also be in
play; I’m good at scheduling my locations for multiple purposes).
I had thought this problem had finally disappeared (sometime
in later 2015, maybe by about September), but it reoccurred to me, once, this
month (January 2016).
By the way, the computer system here at ABC is a sort of
“client/server” system, as far as I understand; there are individual desktops
with apparently a full desktop’s worth of hardware, but some aspects of the
software (I don’t think all) seem to
depend on (emanate from) some central server. The signup function does seem to be a central-server matter,
but why the dropping-offs from the signup—which happened only one computer at a time—were happening,
I’m not sure. (As you can tell, I’m not a programming person. I can feel out
some aspects of the nature of a problem without knowing exactly what it is,
similar to being able—with an automobile—to distinguish an ignition problem from
a fuel-pump problem, without knowing how to fix it.)
Library ABC also uses Firefox for its browsers, which has
its pluses and minuses (as far as their interaction with some products of
Google I use). This choice of Firefox is a library-system policy.
Library XYZ, in a
locality with a more New Jersey tone
Now let’s start to look at the Library XYZ, in New Jersey,
which is located in an area close to a military research facility, as well as some
state preserves (with the per-chance presence of various bears that wander
through the area) and other charming semi-rural features. This is in a township
that may seem to the casual eye a pretty rural area, but because (as one
measure it might take too long to explain, to those who don’t get this) it is
close to Route 23, a major artery leading from Sussex County and nearby
townships in other counties (Passaic and Morris) to the more urban areas (and
higher-paying jobs) to the southeast, there happen to be no small amount of
people living here who have fairly decently paying jobs (white-collar, often).
I mean, Sussex County alone is famous for having about 60
percent of its workforce needing to commute out of the county to get to work
(which is usually white-collar). This is fairly true, also, of the Morris
County township at hand, which is one of that county’s townships closest to
Sussex County (discussing this sort of economic stuff on a fine-grained level
is something I hadn’t anticipated getting into; for one thing, I don’t have
stats for this Morris County township the way I can for Sussex County). But
there is, as a broad feature, a definite uptick in socioeconomic level among
the people at this Morris County location (as is certainly suggested by the
tone of behavior, which I can strongly attest to) compared to, say, Vernon
Township, which (at several miles away) is among the neighboring townships in
Sussex County to the north.
Now, not all people in this Morris County location are
highfalutin’ white-collar types. There are definitely blue-collar types here.
But these latter, I think it’s fair to say, are types who mainly work for
service-economy type companies. This township does not contain a huge number of workers of the
industrial, mining, construction, or similar segments. So, you could encounter
people that might be a little rude because they’re blue-collar types, but they
could also have a certain arrogance about them, because they are
entrepreneurial types (or otherwise in demanded-on service jobs), and their
income level isn’t bad.
And this phenomenon also coheres with the more at-large New
Jersey manner of being “in your face,” along with posing (to you, the onlooker) the implicit question
of “Where do you stand, O dubious one?”
That is, to the extent this town
reflects New Jersey personal style, this manner is very much more evident in
this particular New Jersey town, even within rambling-bear territory, than you
see in the more placid New York State area (containing Library ABC) that I go
to, to the north.
More exactly, the “in your face” stuff is more prevalent in
the Morris County town among the blue-collar types, less so among the
white-collar; the people here are generally nice, but it’s interesting how
there is such a difference in tone between them and the people near Library
ABC, along the lines of New Jersey style.
Computer features at
XYZ—surprisingly state-of-the-art
Despite the New Jersey tone being present here—and sometimes
when planning for a day’s outing, I do take into consideration how much I want
to deal with the New Jersey tone versus the nicer upstate New York tone—Library
XYZ’s computers in some ways are clearly superior to Library ABC’s.
For one thing, XYZ’s do better printouts (including of
color), and the printouts are cheaper (by 33 percent, for both color and
B&W [correction: 15 cents for B&W and 25 cents for color at ABC, 10 cents for everything at XYZ]). There is no electronic signup at XYZ, which sometimes can be a major determinant
of whether I go there on a given day. XYZ also offers the option of using
Explorer browsers versus Google Chrome browsers; for my purposes lately, the
Chrome browsers can be better than anything else available at XYZ or ABC.
XYZ also has a better hookup—high-speed, maybe
top-of-the-line fiber optics or some such thing—while ABC’s is a little more rickety
(I won’t go into further details on this latter, because my phone service is
through the local telecom entity that probably provides Internet access to
Library ABC, and I generally am satisfied with this telecom company for what I
usually seek from it regarding my home account).
Library XYZ also seems to have recently changed some (if not
all) of its computers to using a Microsoft Office suite that is no longer on
the individual computers but is in some outside, “cloud” configuration—which I
have some reservations about (and I’ll leave discussion on this aside).
As you can see, there are some advantages with the XYZ
computers over the ABC. The biggest drawback, by far, also parallels some
aspects of how the community is there, in general. When you work at one of the
dozen or more computers at XYZ, you seem to sit on top of one another, almost
literally. Especially in the summer, when I have a high volume of freelance
work—but when local kids are out of school and they gravitate to the library to
play games on the computer, or such—this can be a grubby, somewhat distracting,
privacy-eroding situation.
Also, when I work at Library XYZ away from the computers, I
can use a “study carrel” I often sit at, and there is a certain amount of
privacy. But here, there can be limitations.
The “in each other’s lap” flavor of working at Library XYZ
can perhaps best be appreciated when I talk about how the “adult day-care”
folks sometimes (led by one or two social workers) come in and “occupy
themselves” for an hour or so. This will be covered in a future entry (and a
version of this can happen at Library ABC, also).
Be patient with this series. It will take me time to get
out.
