Owen Cobey - LIS in Isolation

LIS and Life in Isolation

This is an older/outdated page I'm leaving up for interest & posterity's sake.

During the COVID shutdown in New York, I used this space to document my personal talks with the librarians in my life working remotely and in isolation due to coronavirus. Their comments are their own and don't represent the views or official commentary of their institutions.

In addition, this page hosted some of my own personal thoughts and the small things I did that helped me continue to think and create during 2020.

This is a chat with my dad, who's the assistant director for technology at a Virginia public library with twelve outlets. We discussed what he and his library have gone through during the past few months.

As IT Director, he had to quickly allot devices for remote work to all staff
One of the main issues was to make sure all patrons and potential patrons had access to e-resources, including issuing new library cards.
Previously, they would have remotely issued by mailing physical library cards, but because of physical contamination worries, they're now emailing library card numbers and PINs to people, and the whole process is complete in just a few hours. They've actually issued 900 library cards remotely from home.

Their transition has been massively simplified by the fact that they've been using Google Apps for their online/storage infrastructure already, so everyone was familiar with Meet/Drive/etc.
One of the big human challenges has been the fact that non-urgent work correspondence comes in at all hours, which my dad and many of his coworkers had trouble acclimating to because they were used to weekend/4am things needing to be dealt with right away. This meant they were actually working more and at off hours and their work/life balances got more work-focused rather than less. The Director ended up having to revise their original plan (of just paying people to work remotely and take time off when needed within that paid time) to have people take vacation days where they would cut themselves off and be absolutely outside of the loop in terms of work.

I also talked to my mom, who is the sole school librarian at a Virginia public high school.

Her school has closed for in-person learning and had a period of optional attendance for students but has now re-opened for learning, not with mandatory attendance but with mandatory modules to be completed when able/possible.
When her school was open, she was working one-on-one with students or in classes, but now her position has really shifted to support of the teachers.
She has been sitting in on all department meetings for every department to be more connected and to learn what resources they need
She's also been updating the library web page - it had been out of date for a long time because she has been for several years the sole librarian in a position that used to belong to two full-time librarians, serving a school of more than a thousand students.

She's also been adding e-resources to the library web page as she finds them, including resources which are temporarily free or accessible during this time.
One of her big struggles is redefining her job, since the largest part of her role before was connecting with the students but now their only contact with the school (if any contact) is through their teachers and online learning modules.

"I would definitely encourage everyone to reach out to their faculties ... Even in the regular year, teachers forget what we have, so it's even more important to promote what we have now that they're desperate for something beyond what they have."

She's been working twice as much doing a lot of the teachers' technical work, making sure teachers' modules are working, connecting them with e-resources for use in class, troubleshooting camera and microphone issues.
She's also working with the IT department to give out laptops to students who need them
The tight-knit community of fifty-ish teachers and faculty/staff for a thousand or so students means they have a fairly close network which is serving them well in isolation, but she still feels as though she's lost the organic element of meeting teachers in the hallway and being asked for help with random issues.

"Everyone should delve into their specialization now."

I'm also remotely taking a conservation and preservation lab class, but since that's entirely a hands-on class, we've lost the opportunity to do a lot of the work in person. Instead, we're watching videos and our video classes, hosted on Webex Meetings, are hands-on demonstrations by our professor while we watch and ask questions. What my professor doesn't know is that I've been following along as best as I can at home.

This is my handmade book with a marbled cover. Here's my writeup of how to do a similar project - feel free to contact me with any questions if you're interested!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JtnHAHekG8rrB6Y84Ojlmobl3xj-BgygXrzawjPOAl4/edit?usp=sharing

A really beautiful use of information to create art is GANbreeder, recently renamed ArtBreeder.

The way it works:

A generative adversarial network (GAN), briefly, is a machine learning framework.
This website brings together multiple GAN frameworks, each trained on a different visual element, which separately generate images based on what they've been trained on. So the "green snake" GAN has been fed thousands of images of green snakes and can spit out totally new images based on the previous images. Sometimes it generates a totally believable green snake, other times its approximation is... less accurate, more horrific.

The result is something you can use to train an algorithm to create images from scratch with the visual you want. You can breed images with each other, animate them, and explore each one further to create a "family tree." It's all free, but you have to give it your email, and you only get 10 high-quality image downloads ever, which is a distinct drawback. However, you can download as many images as you want in slightly lower quality by opening the image by itself and saving. It's worth messing around with because even if you don't think of yourself as an artist, you WILL make beautiful and mysterious things that venture beyond description.

Here are some things I've created:

And here's a page with all my creations (just hit the "created" tab to see everything). Use and change them if you want, but go make your own! The process is strange, at times frustrating, and really wondrous: it really takes you into the mind of artificial intelligence.

artbreeder.com

Another site I use similarly, which also works with AI / machine learning and images, is the Deep Dream Generator. Here, you upload your own picture and the algorithm brings out patterns it perceives in the lines and values of your picture.

Be warned: the interface and limitations are even more frustrating than GANbreeder. Free accounts only get eight "dreaming" iterations per day, but once you've started a deep dream, you can modify it as much as you want, so if you're interested, be sure to upload and first-iteration all your images before you dive deeper. Load times are also longer than over at GANbreeder because the r processing power is much higher. You can make some unbelievable things, though. Here is one of mine, which just started out as a picture of my hand.