la pa'leer

shall i tell you?
i work in the library at the u.
i really like it, even though it can be a little monotonous.
one thing i really like is that i go through all the periodicals when they come back from the bindery. i have to make sure their records on the computer match up and everything is correct.
from an outsider's view i'm quite certain it looks like i'm just flipping through magazines all day.
however, like the conscientious employee that i am, i don't read the articles. i merely look for the pertinent information and move along. when i find one that catches my fancy i add it to my list of the pa'leer, which you have below. sometimes i would add a note to remind me what i liked, other times i wouldn't. now i'm mostly baffled, but i'm sure i'll be pleasantly surprised when i once again open them up. you'll notice that there are lots of architecture magazines...and not so many science journals. sorry, jo.

today i was feeling bad about not following through on my plan of working my way through la pa'leer on friday afternoons. and i was daydreaming the littlest bit about finding a desk and browsing through the wealth of treasures available in the biblioteca and then reality hit and i realized what i had been doing for all the months i've been working at the lib: i've been preparing all the records so all the serials can be loaded into the "arc." which means: NO BROWSING. certainly i can still get all of the books i want, but i can't just walk through the stacks and find something new. AND i can't have all the issues of one magazine together.

and this raises the following ethics of library science question: when is it too much? are libraries relics of the past? should libraries embrace the "digital age"? i can't tell you how many "08CAN"s and "CANFLIP"s there are (how many journals we no longer receive whether because we have subscriptions to the online version or because of lack of funding for buying hard copies.) my environmentalist side thinks this is good. my technofascinated side thinks this is cool. but my eyes hurt and my sentimentality longs for the time of dusty, heavy tomes of knowledge.
nobody even notices the books in the library. i don't think anyone but me has noticed that all the books have moved into different locations. the only thing anyone uses are the cushy chairs and the computers. don't you just want to cry?
it's great that we now have robots working at the library and all, it's great that we have so much more space now that the robots are taking over, but we can no longer browse through our old serials. if you want to read an article, you have to know what article it is and request it. no more discoveries in the stacks, no more found gems.
i think that is a sad tragedy of life.

but not to leave you on a sour note, with no further ado, i give you the pa'leer, all the books i wanted to browse that i will now have to use a computer and robots to get. (in roughly chronological order. oddly enough.)
:

world of interiors

sight and sound

japan architect

rivista di studi italiani v.21:no.2(2003:Dec.) -italo calvino

dwell

journal of semantics www.jos.oxfordjournals.org

casabella

journal of soil and water conservation

arkitektur

american heritage (esp.2006:june/july)

design news- v.61:no12

wired v.14:no.11(2006)-faceblind

techniques et architecture

chemistry world (2006:Feb)
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2006/January/09010601.asp

(l')arca

american lit. hist. v.18:no.4 --the courtship of henry wikoff

neophilologus (v.90:no.1 -a little noticed english construction pg. 107-117)

http://economist.co.uk/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9249262

riba journal

detail

volume

achis (2004:no.4 "murdernity")

acta orientalia v.64(2003)

domino

metropolis v.25:no.6 --greenest building ever. library at free university in berlin

i.d.

news photographer

o.g.