Dale's Nephew & My New Picasa

http://picasaweb.google.com/coral.hess/Elliot#

[2670] Reading comments and Muddiest point

I am really hoping we get the chance to use XML, for real. I've used HTML, but all of this reading about XML and schemas and stuff is not nearly hands-on enough for me to internalize any of it. It looks HTML-like, and it's all readable, I guess, but I'm not wrapping my head around how it would really be used. I want to have an XML parser in front of me and be able to build something and display it, you know?

Muddiest Point: This isn't from lecture, specifically, but I'm wondering: when is our midterm? Knowing that would help me plan out the rest of my semester a little better. Also, how are we going to handle there being 13 people and 12 computers?

Digital Scholarship and Libraries - Essay

(This isn't part of my essay, but I like to state my biases: I work in an engineering and science library, and the journal costs are debilitating. I also signed away rights to papers I wrote as an engineer and regret it.)

Changes in scholarly communication--particularly in scholarly publishing--are challenging libraries in unprecedented ways. In the past libraries bought books or subscribed to journals and kept physical copies on the shelves in perpetuity. With the advent of electronic journals and researchers' demand for 24/7 access, libraries are moving away from an ownership model and are now effectively leasing access to electronic content, with indexing and preservation done by the publishers (Borgman 68). Unfortunately, because publishers own the content, libraries are forced to pay ever-increasing subscription fees to maintain access, sometimes paying multiple times for the same content, due to “bundling” (Borgman 112).

This is particularly concerning in the sciences: to gain tenure, one must be published in established journals, but to do so, one must give the publishers all rights to her content; campus libraries then pay dearly for the right to provide that content to other faculty and students. Aaronson describes the economic side of the problem both briefly and bitingly, claiming that most of the writing, typesetting, reviewing, editing, and even archiving and distribution of papers is done by academics with no charge to the publishers, while a single journal subscription might cost a library as much as $3000 a year (2007). Willinsky, addressing the greater picture, refers to this closed access to scientific findings as “human research capacity ... being wasted or going unrealized because of ... unnecessarily restricted access to the circulation of knowledge” (34).

Happily, the open access movement is gaining ground outside of the library community: last year's ruling requiring that NIH-funded research be made public within a year of first publication (Albanese 9/5)--to give the public access to research their tax dollars had funded--was slated to be challenged in Congress this month. The issue proved more contentious than expected, with “33 Nobel Prize-winning scientists” and “47 copyright experts and professors of law” writing in support of last year's ruling, while representatives of certain publishers continued pushing Congress to overrule it (Albanese 9/19). Ultimately, Congress postponed making a decision (Albanese 9/18). The publicity given to cases like this will help publicize and gain support for the open access movement.

As Lesk points out, governmental protection of intellectual property was intended to foster innovation but has often stifled it (294). Unfortunately, a clear path out of this morass eludes us; academics are reticent to change their methods (Aaronson), despite the success of over 1500 open access journals (Willinsky 26) and various “open science” initiatives. Journal publishers add some value, but the question of how much--and whether we are willing to continue trading away open scientific dialog--is difficult to answer.

Aaronson, S. (2007, December). “Review of The Access Principle by John Willinsky," MIT press, 2005. SIGACT News 38 (4), 19-23.

Albanese, A. “After Hearing, Sweeping Anti-NIH Bill To Be Shelved—for Now,” Library Journal, 9/18/2008. Available online: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6597267.html?nid=3285

Albanese, A. “In Blunt Terms, Copyright Lawyers, Researchers, Librarians Blast Anti-NIH Bill,” Library Journal, 9/19/2008 Available online: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6597446.html?nid=3603

Albanese, A. “NIH Public Access Policy To Face Copyright Challenge in Congress?” Library Journal, 9/5/2008 Available online: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6593398.html?nid=3310

Borgman, Christine. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. MIT Press, 2007. # ISBN-10: 0262026198; ISBN-13: 978-0262026192.

Lesk, Michael. Understanding Digital Libraries . Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 2004. 2nd Edition, ISBN: 1-55860-924-5.

Willinsky, John. The Access Principle: the Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. MIT Press, 2005, ISBN: 0262232421.

[2670] Week 4 Reading Responses

From Border Crossings (which I rather liked, in the sense that I'd like to sit down and chat with the author over a beer, despite the article's constant references to things I knew nothing about), "The answer [to the problem of metadata creation by untrained users] is that almost nobody will spend the time, and probably the majority of those who do are in the business of creating metadata-spam. Creating good quality metadata is challenging, and users are unlikely to have the knowledge or patience to do it very well, let alone fit it into an appropriate context with related resources. Our expectations to the contrary seem touchingly naïve in retrospect." -- Really? I thought we'd been finding the opposite. At least, that's what I recall Weinberger stating, in Everything is Miscellaneous. Del.icio.us was given as a specific example, wherever I saw that (although I have some doubts, I admit). Perhaps that's worth another look.

"People have to know and trust one another, which generally requires face-to-face engagement: transporting ourselves and our ideas to other time zones, surviving frequent-flyer-flues, finding the means to support travel costs, and missing baseball games of our children." -- My pulling out this quote is less relevant to metadata and more relevant to my opinions about the "online collaborative experience" Pitt tries to sell. More on that later, without the 2670 tag.

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"Although metadata is arguably a much less familiar term among creators and consumers of networked digital content who are not information professionals per se, these same individuals are increasingly adept at creating, exploiting, and assessing user-contributed metadata such as Web page title tags, folksonomies, and social bookmarks." -- Oh, hey, Introduction to Metadata suggests that maybe users aren't so bad at this. There you go, then; the truth is somewhere up in the air.

Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) -- Want to find out more about this.

"As enunciated in Principle 6 of "Practical Principles for Metadata Creation and Maintenance" (p. 72), there is no single metadata standard that is adequate for describing all types of collections and materials; selection of the most appropriate suite of metadata standards and tools, and creation of clean, consistent metadata according to those standards, not only will enable good descriptions of specific collection materials but also will make it possible to map metadata created according to different community-specific standards, thus furthering the goal of interoperability..." -- Well, that isn't good news, precisely. I admit, I love panaceas.

I liked this reading; it contained loads of useful information and was both accessible and scholarly--a tricky thing to pull off. (Not sure I feel the need to drink beer with the author, though.)

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I liked how the book reading (I won't bother with bibliographic information here; nobody who doesn't already know this stuff will care to go find the source) said AACR2 is "almost persnickety." Just "almost." Right.

LaTeX is fantastic, by the way.

I also liked the discussion of automatic recognition and extraction of metadata. I wonder how much of this will be considered relevant for, for instance, our midterm...

Shameless Procrastination - and my schedule

It occurs to me that I never posted my schedule. It also occurs to me that, by doing so now, I am pretty much forcing it to change. I'm OK with that.

• Monday - In Oakland 12-6. Homework for Tuesday thereafter.


• Tuesday - In Oakland 10-3 and 6-9, usually doing reading in Oakland in between.


• Wednesday - Homework or errands in the morning, in Oakland 2-5, homework for Thursday thereafter.


• Thursday - Homework all day, including reading for Friday. Watching video of class when it's posted.


• Friday - In Oakland 10-4. Every other Friday evening, gaming. (I'm not up for homework on Friday nights, really; that's my designated fun night, I think.)


• Saturday - Reading for Thursday class.


• Sunday - Writing for Monday assignments (some of which are for Thursday class, as well).

I had an Exalted game that was slated to happen every other Thursday night, but that fell through. The ST got promoted at his job and just doesn't have the time anymore. I'm happy for him but sad for me; I put some time and effort into that character. And I find Exalted satisfying in a way that I just haven't found some other role-playing systems to be. (No offense to my Facebook D&D group, who is awesome, even if they are letting my character lay on the ground and bleed, right now. ;)) ... I wish I could convince someone to run Shadowrun 4e, or a different Exalted game, on opposing Thursday or Friday nights; that would be the best thing ever. Games at someone's house is much more within my budget than going out to dinner or drinks, and it's escapist in the same way as fiction is--only without the "I should be reading library stuff, not this fiction book" guilt--also it's just, you know, fun. (Side note: There are plenty of library folk who appreciate the value of games, so I don't feel super weird about coming out of the gaming closet on this blog. I only feel a little weird. :)) I realize my game-running karma is low; when I have a full-time job-and-no-school, or I'm in a graduate program where my schooling and work are integrated better, I will have to pull together and run a game of my own. But for now, for time reasons, I must rely on the kindness of friends.

Unless anyone's interested in Parlor Larps? (If you click that link, don't read too much about Snow White or All Saints Eve. I have those two.) I'd run one of those for interested people--not as well as Henry did, but I'd do my best.

Libraries and the Internet

Q: Historically, librarians have served as custodians of recorded knowledge and gatekeepers to information resources. To what extent has the rise of networked information services begun to change the roles that librarians play? What other factors, if any, are contributing to changes in the roles of librarians?

A1: Before the rise of networked information services, the library was the only place to find certain kinds of information; as Elizabeth Mahoney pointed out in lecture, librarians in the past were expected to possess a great deal of knowledge, and, much like they do today, they knew their collections and could guide patrons to the right resource to answer their questions. Today, there is discussion of brick-and-mortar libraries facing "competition" from the Internet, especially Google, and there is some belief that librarians might be supplanted (Borgman p. 39). This concern is largely unwarranted: "Almost everything that is best about a library catalog is done badly by a web search service" (Arms). Put another way, someone with training and expertise is needed to choose and catalog information if it is to be retrieved in a meaningful way. Certainly, for many uses, Google and Wikipedia are probably sufficient, but as anyone who has tried doing real research with Google knows, there is a great deal of irrelevant and incorrect information available. This is where librarians come in: we provide authoritative and relevant information, both in the physical spaces of our libraries and in digital collections. Our job, as described by John MacColl of Edinburgh University, is "running pleasant study environments, containing expert staff, providing havens on our campus which are well respected, and building and running high-quality Web-based services" (MacColl). [Word count: 227.]

(A few days pass. I read everyone's responses to the question, and I formulate a response to their responses.)

A2: As several people's essays correctly pointed out, many users do not know how to use library resources or the Internet to get the information they need. Neal Stephenson, an author and technology expert, recently commented on the informational divide: he pointed out that, while many of us have "a sixth sense" about what is a credible source and what is not, many simply do not, and he believes the gap is increasing. Remedying this problem, I believe, is the key goal of the modern information professional, but to do so effectively, our efforts must extend beyond our libraries' physical and virtual walls; we must find ways to reach out to those in our communities who are being left behind.

Of course, that is not our only job. As one of my colleagues pointed out, to serve as effective gatekeepers, we must choose our libraries' electronic resources wisely; if we filter digital content, we should do so just as cautiously as we would when filtering books.

I disagree with the implication some people are making, perhaps unintentionally, that the problem of authority originated with the rise of the Internet. Certainly, the ease of "publication" on the Internet has deepened the problem, but books have long been published more for their potential sales value than for their factual content; choosing authoritative sources has never been trivial. Even Encyclopedia Britannica fails to impress, when compared to Wikipedia (Giles). [Word count: 235. I'm cutting out roughly 80 words and posting what I get after that, to get into the ballpark of the 150 word limit, but it will sound stilted and sad. I share my real thoughts with you, readers!]


Arms, William Y. “Automated Digital Libraries, How Effectively Can Computers Be Used for the Skilled Tasks of Professional Librarianship?” D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2000. 6(7/8). Available online: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july00/arms/07arms.html.

Borgman, Christine L. From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World. MIT Press, 2001. ISBN: 0-262-52345-0.

Giles, J. "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head." Nature, 438, Dec 2005. pp. 900–901.

GoodReads Author Interview, Neal Stephenson. Available online: http://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/14.Neal_Stephenson?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Sep_newsletter. Retrieved Sept 21, 2008.

MacColl, J. "Google Challenges for Academic Libraries." Ariadne, Issue 46. Feb 2006. Available online: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/maccoll/

[2670] Muddiest Point

I don't have a muddiest point this week, beyond the question of whether we can use Picasa instead of Flickr, which has already been asked. It probably doesn't matter, since 5 pictures and 5 thumbnails is hardly a giant amount of information, but my Flickr account is getting full; pictures will start disappearing if I add too many. Anyway, I'm going to have a super cute feed, since I got to spend time with a less-than-one-day-old baby yesterday. I'll post here to let you know when I have the pictures up. :)

Whoa

Blogger apparently went nuts this morning. It told me my most recent blog post didn't get published, and then it published it three times. Awesome.

Review of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Bit of a preface: I hated this book. It contains some really good ideas, which are totally worth discussing, but the whole thing is so much wordier and denser than it needs to be (this, coming from me!); seriously, the ideas put forth in this 200-page monstrosity would have been better shared in a 5-10 page article. Still, we were assigned to read it for LIS 2000, Understanding Information, and asked to write a 400-word review, describing "how the content of this book relates to the information professions. Why do you think this is assigned reading?" followed by a 250-word addendum today, restating our opinion and describing how it had changed in reading the other students' essays, so I tried my best to get through it. Although I'm a little embarrassed to post this--and nervous that people who already took the class will say "No! You are so wrong! You'll see!"--I still think it might be useful to do so. I can't change my answer now (or, well, not after 11pm--but I promise not to, now that I've made this public), so I'm curious what people who've been through this hazing ritualbook have to say.

When we were assigned Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and asked to define its relevance to the information professions, I falsely assumed my professors were implying that our field is undergoing a "paradigm shift." Certainly, that argument can be made: With the Internet making information simultaneously more plentiful and harder to find, the effectiveness of distributed tagging and its effects on discussion of cataloguing, and the popularity of digital libraries and plans for automation thereof, nobody would seriously assert that our field is in any way stagnant or unchanging. On the other hand, paradigms point to fundamental thought patterns, and to suggest that our "paradigm" is in flux seems questionable: We still believe that information should be freely available to all, and we still strive to provide it in the best way available to us; that, I claim, is our true paradigm. That we have one at all shows the applicability of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; certainly, we make assumptions about the world and about information, and we consider questions relevant or irrelevant based on those assumptions. Just as scientists are not the impartial observers that we are told they should be, we are not the impartial information providers that we would like to be.

Although Kuhn has many interesting and widely applicable ideas, I do not agree that his is the best way to think about science and progress. Certainly, the book has its fans (London 2008), but I was pleased to see that I was not its only doubter: Weinberg (1998), for instance, disagrees with nearly all of Kuhn's central assertions. I do not go quite so far. As a scientist*, I believe that science, taken as a whole, does progress with time--to argue that our understanding of the universe today is not fuller than it was 200 years ago seems ludicrous--but we should be cautious in treating any one scientific finding or theory as "progress," in and of itself: First, a scientist's paradigm and her puzzle-solving nature restrict what questions she considers asking (p. 37), and second, the explanations provided by a new theory or paradigm may not be any closer to truth than those of its predecessor (see discussion of opium, p. 104). I think the latter point also applies to the information professions: We may find that any one of the "advancements" we make is really a step back, hampering access to information.

------

With the help of my colleagues' reviews and Dr. Tomer's lecture, my views about Kuhn have changed over the last week. While I stand by my assertion that the information professions, like every field, have sets of accepted viewpoints ("paradigms") at their foundation, I no longer contend that that is Kuhn's sole applicability. Information Science is, after all, not really a science.

Rather, I believe that Kuhn's description of incremental advances--and of new paradigms overwriting, if you will, previous work--is relevant to us in our capacity as guardians and gatekeepers of knowledge. A Kuhnian view of progress requires us to remain both vigilant and flexible in our maintenance of the scientific knowledge base; we must catalog the day-to-day work of "normal" knowledge accumulation in every field, particularly science, but we must also be aware that the rules and accepted facts are subject to change. As such, we must struggle to provide the information that daily practitioners of the field will deem relevant, perhaps in addition to previous "advances," or perhaps instead of them.

I would add that I do not think we can expect to determine, entirely on our own, precisely which scientific information is worth keeping; as Kuhn says, people outside of a sub-field stand little chance of understanding the literature, and even people inside a field cannot predict with certainty which research direction will lead to a paradigm change. Rather, we should maintain a dialog with the experts and seek to improve our collections in collaboration with them.



Kuhn, T.S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

London, S. (2008). Book Review. Retrieved September 9, 2008, from http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/kuhn.html

Weinberg, S. (1998, October 8). The Revolution That Didn't Happen [Review of the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions], The New York Review of Books, pp. 48-52.



*As a post-script, separate from my review, I feel it necessary to point out that Kuhn would disagree with my assertion that I am a scientist. My formal training was in engineering (p. 30), and I am female. Both seem to count strongly against me, in his estimation.

Troubling times - Internet anonymity at risk

Any readers who follow New Basement Tapes will have already seen this, or at least the headline. I think it's important to spread this information far and wide, though, so I hope people will forgive me for the repeat: A UN agency is drafting a "trackback" standard, to remove anonymity from Internet communications. This seems, to me, like a pretty big deal, particularly in places where saying the wrong thing about the government on the Internet can mean jail time or worse.

Already, we know some portion of our Internet activities are watched, something many people suspected for a long time but couldn't be sure of until recently. But at least getting to who was sending any given packet was tricky--and made trickier by certain software.

The right to private communication is implicit in the First Amendment and explicit in the ITU's constitution (they are an agency of the UN); for an agency of the UN to be creating such a standard--and, as the linked article points out, to do so with the help of the NSA and the Chinese government, is unethical and hypocritical. The "technical" arguments in favor of this standard are extremely weak, and I find them unconvincing.

The beauty (and, yes, horror) of the Internet is its truly democratic nature. It is the one place where every person can express his or her opinion anonymously--without fearing reprisal from his or her government. That right is worth preserving. So I will be following the development of this story and posting updates here. I imagine there will be a petition coming out soon (if not, I suppose I'll have to write one), as well.

[2670] Muddiest Point

Muddiest point: Users of DLs are still in a client-server relationship, even if two DLs are in a p2p relationship, right?

[2670] Week 3 - Digital Object Identifiers

I am a cynic and a skeptic and a pessimist, and I'm aware of it. So it's no surprise to me--and if you've been reading for long, probably not to you, either--that I have very little hope for the URN or DOI idea ever really working out. (That is, the idea of giving every digital object a unique identifier, along the same lines as an ISBN/ISSN, instead of relying on URLs, which are subject to change. An important point about these identifiers: they wouldn't necessarily specify where to go to get any given Digital Object; they might just make one clearly discernible from another. Or a URN might resolve to multiple URLs.) I think managing something on that scale--a scale greater than that of DNS/URLs, since each object would be identified, not just each server--is going to be, to put it very plainly, more trouble than it's worth. There would be benefits to such a system, if it were ever fully deployed, sure, but how could it be done meaningfully?

Is this blog post a Digital Object (in the sense of having its own identifier or URN, in the hypothetical scenario where there is such a scheme)? And if I change it a year from now because I think my writing style is embarrassingly informal, has it become a different Digital Object? If you copy it down and put it into your blog--hopefully with attribution--is it the same Digital Object or a different one? (By my reading, it's the same, at least in the URN scheme. But when I go back and change my wording, it won't change the wording of the copy on your blog.)

As the authors of this article say, near the end, there's an awful lot left unresolved about this whole set of ideas. I think it's very pie-in-the-sky, a bit like Semantic Web. (Yeah, i went there.)

Loving this weather

I probably have nothing deep or thought-provoking to say today. It's lovely out here, on the Mall or the Cut--whatever CMU calls the area between the UC and Purnell--and the drama students are providing me with immense entertainment. I like this almost autumn-like weather; my energy level is highest at this time of year, when it isn't yet dark most of the time but the air is cool enough that it's pleasant to wear long sleeves. (I'm looking into job opportunities in Seattle and Vancouver when I get out of here.)

I'm behind on all the things I want and need to get done, but I'm also getting used to that and becoming a lot more Zen/it-will-get-done-somehow on the whole thing. Maybe this is finally my chance to take the laid back approach to schooling that I wish I'd taken as an engineer: maybe I will finally learn to chill out and enjoy the learning process, instead of constantly worrying about having the very highest of grades, at the expense of sanity, health, and a life outside of school and work. (Am I where I am in life because I worked so perfectionistically, as if that were a word, in my previous education? In a manner of speaking, yes. But maybe if I'd slowed down and chilled out, I would still have found this path, or an equally rewarding and socially productive one.)

Out of curiosity, readers, would you say it might be an interesting and useful thing to do, if I were to go to another country and teach English for most of a year, after graduation? My logic is, at its core, "internationalization! and teaching experience!" (I'm deathly afraid of groups of more than ten people. I hate giving presentations. I love one-on-one teaching and fear the classroom. And academic libraries are all about the teaching.) I'm considering it. It would also give Dale more time to really dig into the work he's doing for his current job, you know? But perhaps taking a year to do something more or less entirely unrelated to libraries isn't the right choice, right now.

Anyway, I guess I should eat some of the lunch I bought. I work 2-5 this afternoon and then may retire to a coffee-serving establishment for some quality writing time. I hope the weather's still as pretty when I get out of the library.

Not All Ponies and Roses

So, I set out to chronicle my experiences in library school, with an eye to my background in engineering, because, you know, there aren't a million blogs about that out there already. (Maybe not the engineering part!) Having that goal, I feel like I should make some effort to write things up as they occur, good or bad.

The good: our reading list for LIS 2000, Understanding Information (which is a class with 120+ people in person and at least as many online, taught by more than half of the faculty), is still full of awesome books. Seriously, I'd like to read everything on it, at some point.

The bad: I've gone through and figured out the due dates for the largest assignments in all of my classes. Most of my classes are pretty reasonable, with a few small things due throughout the semester and a large project right near the end--nothing unexpected. As I mentioned, I only have one midterm. It's all... you know, busy, but reasonable.

And then there's 2000. This week, we have a 400-word review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I have managed to convince myself that it is, at least on the surface, relevant to Library and Information Science, and I will be able to write my essay saying as much, with my tongue only slightly in cheek. (I may "treat" my blog readers to what I really think after I've written up my formal review, perhaps in point/counterpoint format.) Next week, we have a short essay to answer some discussion questions, based on some articles we're supposed to read, and the following week we have a 400-word review of two or three books. (What one can say that is meaningful about three books in 400 words, I'm not sure. I suppose I'll find out.) This seems like a bit much to me, honestly. However, as the semester progresses, we will find that there are two two-week periods when we are expected to read and review six books.

I never thought I'd complain about having to read for classes. I would have loved to have reading and a book review as an assignment in engineering school, just to break up the monotony of problem sets. I loved reading in high school, even the lame stuff. But I'm no prodigy. I'm not even much of a skimmer. Two books one week, followed by four the next, is not something I can do, at least not while working part time in addition to school. I was pretty freaked out after I examined my schedule in this light.

Today, though, I've talked to large numbers of my classmates, both people who are taking the class with me and people who have taken it in the past. Maybe this isn't the sort of thing one should say in a blog post that her professors might see, but every student I've talked to is in agreement that our professors are not actually expecting us to do all of this reading. At best, they must expect skimming. (This is not a skill I've acquired, but I should work on remedying that.) Most likely, they're aware that we'll read perhaps one of these books out of each bunch and look at reviews and summaries of the others. In fact, since we are expected to cite others' reviews, I tend to agree with my classmates that this must be the plan, and my general level of freaked outness has decreased significantly.

I still wish--and will express as much on my course evaluation--that the faculty had showed greater selectivity and restraint in choosing our reading list. I am sincerely interested in reading these books, but I wonder if skimming most of them over the course of this semester is going to prevent me from working up the motivation to read them fully later. I wonder if I am the only one who feels that throwing such a large pile of books at us is actually doing us all a disservice.

[2670] Week 2 Reading Responses

Overall themes: interoperability, modularity.

A Framework for Building Open Digital Libraries has me totally sold on the ODL concept and on the extension of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI_PMH) to build every future Digital Library ever. I think it's a great idea; interoperability is a desirable thing. My one critique is that their very simple mock-up and animated gif detracted, a little bit, from the picture they were painting. Perhaps I am unnecessarily picky.

Architecture for Information in Digital Libraries is interesting enough, but I'd love to know what they've done in the last decade. As I was reading, I found myself wondering if the meta-object to object link worked in the opposite direction; that is, whether pulling up an object would pull up a link to its meta-object (for instance, if the object is part of a larger collection). I would think it would come up on the catalog page when a search is done, but I was just surprised not to see them point that out explicitly.

I smiled when I saw that they based RAP on CORBA. That was the big thing, back then. And it stayed big for quite a while; I imagine it's still fairly widely used nowadays, even. (Though I admit, I really don't know. I hear something [neither a protocol nor a language] called "SOA" is in vogue, now, but I don't delve into specifics.)

As I read through Interoperability for Digital Objects and Repositories, I begin to be grateful that our reading list was put in the order it was. They just whip through those acronyms. But I like the structure of their experiment, and I admit, I was holding my breath, a little bit, wondering whether they would find their systems interoperable--even after extending them (if that's the right conjugation of the verb that goes with "extensibility"). Again, I began to get worried, until, finally, in their last paragraph, they mentioned their plan to add access management. (I know if I were curating a DL or DA, I wouldn't want to grant remote locations the ability to add digital objects except in very specific ways.)

I decided that the broken link in Blackboard must have meant to refer to this particular description of the Internet.

I'm pretty familiar with web technology, so I didn't find too much to say about this article. I think he's a little bit overzealous in his defense of Internet-as-proto-DL; the truth lies somewhere between his statements and the statements he derides. There's hope for the 'net, but I could definitely see it going either way, at this point.

(A lighthearted aside: "Recently, attempts have been made to rewrite the history of the Internet ... and for individuals to claim responsibility for achievements that many shared." Hey, now! That quote was taken out of context! He was joking!)

I have another aside, not strictly relevant to this article, but the discussion of Los Alamos brought it to mind. I've seen several articles--including a required reading for Understanding Information--that suggest that the sciences are all progressive, all sharing their information immediately and collaboratively over the Web, but I just don't see it. At least in engineering, which, despite Kuhn's disparagement in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is a subset of "the sciences" (seriously, ask me about my research), we tended to hold our papers--and with it our most recent research results--until a conference accepted them. And then the conferences (really, the IEEE) required that we not post the papers anywhere else. (That's what I recall, anyway.) With conference deadlines being six months or more before the conferences, themselves, I really feel that this "real-time collaboration" people talk about it is not particularly widespread.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm in favor of it. But the current methods of determining tenure, hooding, and so on would have to change significantly before a "share and share alike" system will really become tenable.

Internship Excitement

Two weeks after my internship started, I am finally beginning to get the hang of it and feel like I really belong. I show up on the Staff Directory (under Science Libraries - I don't know where the phone attached to my name is, but I'm sure it's in the library somewhere). I have successfully answered several reference questions. Yesterday, I even had my very own project to do! I helped process gifts for our CS Librarian. She was amused at how interested I was in the books; most IAs aren't actually science or engineering people.

Tomorrow, I'll be helping our Materials Science Librarian with some instruction--I won't have to instruct the groups that are coming in, but I'll do little administrative things like making copies or running to get the projector, to make her job easier. More generally on Fridays, I will be doing some web design projects, which I think is super exciting.

I'm still a tiny bit afraid to be at the Reference Desk alone, but usually IAs have backup of some sort, in case there's a really hard question. And to be honest, I'm also pretty anxious to try it, to see how I do. I know our catalog fairly well (not perfectly, but that probably takes years), and although I'm a little weak on some of the journals, I at least have a vague sense of what's there. And what's where in our library. So I think I'll do OK. Even if I am over-reliant on Google.