Wow, lmao!!!
You accuse me of “spinning” what you said and then immediately double down on exactly what I was talking about. Sounds like you’re the one spinning here.
Calling DMS an animal shelter?!
Members “puppy petters”?
Very condescending.
How do you really feel about the members that don’t volunteer their time the way you approve? @Chris_Fazio one time made mention about the elitist mentality of the Woodshop, at the time I didn’t want to believe it, but it is starting to show a little. Be careful.
As for all your little examples, you pretend and “spin” it (hehe) to try to make it sound like half-ass attempts from the past are guaranteed failures the future. If you can tell the future and you guarantee you know exactly what’s going to happen if we don’t listen to you, what are next week’s Lottery numbers? I’m dying to know.
Every problem you mentioned is easily remedied if you just have a proper plan in place.
@jast Please close this thread because it has devolved in to a shit fight at the zoo and accomplishes nothing constructive.
Thanks!
I’d like to submit my two cents to the Makerspace library debate. I support the idea of a makerspace library or at least small libraries within committees, but I do so while remaining wary of the issues @SWA mentions. These issues are very real and cannot be dismissed. Whenever you build something for the space you are creating something that someone else will have to one day maintain. There aren’t a lot of volunteers for things that aren’t critical to the functioning of the makerspace or specific committees.
There are a couple requirements that I think need to be met for something to be in a makerspace library:
The information needs to be relatively timeless.
a) Programming books or books about specific technologies will have ridiculously small shelf-lives. We will end up having a graveyard of outdated and useless books if we don’t curate our collection very well (in other words, some volunteer has to make sure that things don’t become a junkyard).
b) Books on certain crafts that remain relatively similar over long periods of time or books on fundamental principles that are unlikely to change will often have decades long shelf-lives.
The books need to be books that are good for reference, not necessarily for learning.
a) People usually want to solve a specific problem rather than learn an entire field. They don’t have months or years of time to learn all of the nuances.
You find the online environment too sparse or chaotic for looking things up.
a) There are subject domains where google is your enemy rather than your friend. There’s a lot of noise and junk online and sometimes you just need a sacred tome dedicated to the problem domain at hand instead of having to scour google hoping for the exact answer you’ll need for your problem. If you go to the home of a professor or a hardcore enthusiast of discipline X or Y, you’ll see mountains of books. There’s a reason for that. Years of frustration has taught them the value of reference tomes.
Obviously, there has to be actual interest in the content. Science committee has a library that tends to reflect the interests of the committee. Many of them are my books because I have a long term goal of getting people interested in scientific computing and simulation. It is not a dumping ground for unwanted books. There are some unwanted books there that we plan to get rid of and there are several books that I am going to take back because I feel like their subject matter is far too specific for the space they occupy.
Depends on the book for programming. A lot of algorithms books are still relevant to this day. I believe the gang of four’s book was released in the early 90’s and is still the gold standard.
Head First Java, until it got a recent rerelease, was a good book on the introductions of the language, since the fundamentals (excluding maybe lambdas) have mostly been unchanged from Tiger (I haven’t kept up with recent releases, though, so I could be wrong.)
A python 2 book or a book on deprecated languages would be much more niche, but a lot are still decent I’d say.