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What have we here?
This time around, we have a look at old technologies (horses, newspapers, and records) intermingled with the newest of the new.
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In Praise of Librarians
Both my mother and mother-in-law were librarians.
I spent a lot of time in the library as a kid. I still remember my library card number, 1018. Even after she left libraries for teaching and then later retired, my mother called herself "a librarian without portfolio." She delighted in matching people and their ideas with books. "The right book to the right person at the right time." (My mother applied to the Simmons College library program. She wasn't accepted. My father said, "We're never buying another one of their mattresses.")
 My mother-in-law drove the Holden bookmobile in the 1950s, bringing books to the neighborhoods around town.
During the New Deal, a WPA project paid the salaries of women to deliver books to Kentuckyians. Deliveries on the rugged, rural roads had to be done on horseback and, sometimes, on foot.  Cookbooks were particularly popular. In all, nearly 1000 librarians brought books, newspapers, other reading material and a familiar face to "otherwise distrustful mountain folk.”
For more pictures and details about the program, see Atlas Obscura's article, The Women Who Rode Miles on Horseback to Deliver Library Books.
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What's New on the Robot Front?
- The New York Times reported that San Jose startup, Voyage, is testing a self-driving car in a gated retirement community in San Jose. Most of the issues facing Voyage
 are not related to safety of either passengers, pedestrians, or other drivers; instead, the issues are connected to insurance and financing.
Nevertheless, the project seems like a good idea. Said one board member, “The driverless car would be far less risky than the drivers that we currently have.”
- The BBC recently published an article about the challenges facing designers, programmers, and scientists as they develop autonomous vehicles and robots for elder care. What happens when a patient refuses to take his medicine? What should a robot do? What happens when a self-driving car faces Kelley Square? It's folly to try to emulate (and then surpass) all human activity.
Robots, or whatever we call artificial intelligence combined with machinery, will probably be as ethical as we are. Will they be perfect? Of course not. Will they be better than us? Maybe. It will depend in large part on how the ethics are based on logic.
- Meanwhile, we know that our spirits can be cared for. Robots, such as BlessU-2, offer blessings upon us now and, others such as Pepper, guide us as we shuffle off this mortal coil.
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The Limits of Amateur Scholarship
In a poem in The New Yorker, I saw a reference to the Silver Streak Ballroom in Nashville. Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, and Ella Fitzgerald performed there in the 1930s. I was teaching a course on Nashville music and so wanted to know more.
 A further search led me to a 1938 issue of The Tennessean newspaper. The transcription noted a performance by Willie Bryant And His Orchestra (with a special section for White People).
The trail then stopped. To read more of the newspaper online would require a subscription to a site that has digitized this and other newspapers. The subscription would cost $8-$20/month. That's not an exorbitant price, but it's one more dip into the bucket.
Academic and public libraries have good online newspaper resources, The Library of Congress, for example, offers a great many newspapers from the late 18th to the mid 20th centuries in their Chronicling America collection. Scanning and cataloging of old newspapers is time-consuming and expensive. In the case of the Library of Congress, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities brought these papers to my computer screen. As we saw with The Tennessean, however, it would take a contribution from my credit card to help with those costs.
There has been a long-standing concern about the cost of access to research materials. Several years ago, Harvard stopped subscribing to many academic journals because the cost was too great. The fight for reasonable access cost Aaron Swartz his life.
My quest also points to a larger issue. There is a great emptiness in the historical record regarding African-American musicians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many primary sources have yet to find their way into the light and into the digital world.
Preserving our history costs money, either ours directly or by way of our government's support.
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Bringing Lacquer and Vinyl to the Digital Age
When I was growing up, my parents and grandparents listened to old Finnish folk songs on those heavy lacquer 78 RPM records. The paper sleeves were musty. In time, mostly as record players stopped being able to play 78s, the records fell into disuse. I could then use the records for target practice with my BB gun.
You can now hear many of those old 78s, in all their scratchy glory, courtesy of the Great 78 Project. Here's a link to Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys singing their hit song, Wabash Cannon Ball.
In addition, the Boston Public Library is adding to this trove with their digitized 200,000 vinyl recordings of music and spoken word.
We still have some distance to go. The Great 78 Project has just a couple of undated Finnish recordings and no recordings of Willie Bryant and His Orchestra (see above).
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Note: Often, we provide links to external web pages. The advertisements and other content shown on those pages do not necessarily represent the views of yours truly or the WISE Communications Committee.
Further, the product reviews and commentary reflect the opinion of yours truly and not necessarily of WISE, the Communications Committee, or others. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. No purchase necessary. Semper ubi sub ubi. C8H10N4O2;.
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