Thoughts on Social Media

I know I owe some posts about learning the things a new librarian learns. I do. It turns out, being a new librarian takes up enough time that blogging about it seems excessive. (Go figure.) That said, I did find the time to write an article for NMRT Footnotes about settling in in a new place—I stand by my suggestions, though, if I'd written it a few weeks later I might have done a better job of acknowledging how tough it can be. It's weird to be in a place—and now I mean "place" metaphorically—where you have some new friends you like a lot and are pretty certain you can rely on, but you still feel kind of like you shouldn't, because you're just not sure you've earned the social capital. And you miss your old friends but feel like it's a slight on your new friends to admit it, while talking about how much you like your new friends also feels like a slight on the old ones ... I'm moving way out of librarianship, here, but I imagine any readers who have moved long distances probably have a sense of what I'm getting at. (And any friends no doubt think I'm being silly. I don't think any one of them, new or old, doubts the high regard in which I hold them.) I addressed how to meet those friends, in the article, but not how to really end up integrated, completely, into your new home and social groups. It wouldn't have been that interesting—I'm pretty certain the only thing for it is time.

Which continues to pass. ("Time is marching on, and time is still marching on. You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older....")

It doesn't help that I have two other blogs. The former is the Moving to Alaska blog, which I nominally share with Dale (he posted once), all about the trip up here and, well, all that stuff I was talking about in the first paragraph—becoming Alaskan, I guess. The second is very my-library-centric. I write it mostly for my coworkers. But if you were really interested in seeing what I'm up to, you'd be welcome to check those out. :D

Excuses aside, I have been thinking. I've composed a couple of blog posts in my head, some of them even about librarianship, but not followed through. I still owe a post about how I think scholarly communication will evolve—at least in the STEM fields—but I'm still rolling that one around.

The thing that brought me to the blog window today, though, was social media. A number of my coworkers seem interested in "this Web 2.0 thing," and I feel like most of them probably participate in some way or other. Some are on Facebook, a few have tried Twitter, nearly all of them read or write blogs... But the thing they lack—and the thing I keep trying to manage for myself—is a method for participating in multiple, but not all, of them sensibly, with as little repeat information as possible. For instance, if all of someone's tweets go to Facebook, why would I be their friend in both places? (Increasingly, the answer is, "I won't.") I continue to passionately hate the posting of piles of Twitter updates to a blog—it's not obviously inappropriate, I suppose, or nobody would do it, but I think it conflates the intended usage of each medium. Either I want to see what you're thinking as you think it—in which case, I will follow your tweets—or I want to see some [more or less] well thought out prose—in which case, I will follow your blog. If you do both well, I'll follow both. But it bugs me to see a bunch of outdated (by the time the harvester puts them on your blog) one- or two-sentence statements where I expect full paragraphs. Maybe I'm getting grumpy in my ... uh, not that old of age, actually. Either way, it's enough to make me unfollow your blog, if you are not in all other ways stunning. The same goes for those awful "feeds"—they may be useful in real time, though I personally just don't care that much about what any one person is doing online—but they are 100% pointless in a blog. If you want to archive that junk, open a blog just for it; don't torture your readers with that inanity, or you'll lose readers.

Wow, feeling a little ranty. Sorry.

I can't control what others do online, but I do have a measure of control of how I interact with it. If a blog becomes a Twitter/stream archive, or if its author is wrong all the time, I unfollow it. If a Twitter account doesn't have enough information or entertainment value, I eventually unfollow it. (I break this rule for friends. I have a couple of friends who post "I ate a sandwich" kinds of things, but I continue to follow them because I like them enough to overlook that.) Similarly, turnabout is fair play: unless you're awesome enough to be worth following with no reciprocation (I'm looking at you, Stephen Colbert), not following me back means, eventually, I'll stop following you.

I've taken to making groups in my Twitter readers, for keeping up with the people whose every tweet I feel like I should read, and I let the rest of it wash by, checking when I have time. I miss a lot—in all honesty, I feel like I'm kind of losing my grip on Twitter, not interacting with more than 10% or so of the people I follow—but I also still gain a fair bit of information, using it that way.

Facebook, I mostly catch up on 2-3 times a day. I try really hard not to send more than 2-3 Facebook updates a day, as well, because I don't want to be annoyingly "noisy" there, in the same way I might on Twitter. It's almost a Twitter "best of," for me.

Meanwhile, my Google Reader is assiduously sorted (though Future Feminist Librarian-Activist should go in "Libraries" half the time and "Social Issues" half the time—and would, if Reader had that kind of granularity in filtering); that is arguably where I'm the most heartless in unfollowing (blogs), because it's impossible to tell who is and is not following your blog; therefore, no hurt feelings. I'm only semi-heartless in unfollowing people who share with me—you have to post a whole lot of irrelevant stuff for me to unfollow you, there, given the ease of scrolling past boring stuff [and my uncertainty in telling whether it's possible to know who is following what you share]—but I'll do it, at need. (Given the number of lolcats I share, I don't feel like I'm justified in being overly judgmental about what others are sharing. ;))

But I'm not sure whether I have an overall "policy" about all of it. Or whether I need one, beyond wanting to be able to explain it, quickly and usefully, to others who want to manage their own social media floods. Frankly, I'm sure I'm not doing it as well as I could be, so I wonder if others have their own policies about all of it, or if everyone flies by the seats of their pants, the way I do. (My social media policy is as disjointed as this post, you could say...)

I'd love to compare notes on all of this, anyway. What do you folks do?

Really quickly

It turns out, I'm not the only one pondering the evanescence of today's information, though I was looking at it from a filter-the-input standpoint, while he's looking at it much more from a preservation standpoint.

Still, it's cool to see others thinking about the same sorts of things...

New Netiquette

These thoughts have been spinning around in my head—and not just mine; I admit, I'm probably repeating a few things I've read over the past six months, as well as adding my own spin—but have started to solidify into something almost blog-worthy.

Over the past few days I've been watching a mini-kerfuffle happening on LITA-L (arguably one of the more tech-savvy mailing lists in libraryland, which might be the source of my surprise), wherein a number of people wrote to the entire list to ask for Google Wave invites—and I won't pretend I didn't let out a tiny annoyed huff and eye-roll, myself, when I saw the flood of short "please give me Google Wave" messages—and a number more wrote back (with a new subject line!), expressing stern opinions about the decline of netiquette and the inappropriateness of sending "short 'me too'" messages out to a list. Then a number more replied to the stern ones, saying, in essence, "Use Gmail and get over it." Then that, too, got discussed, with the "use Gmail" mentality being boiled down, by the stern ones, to victim-blaming. I've seen this argument hashed out and rehashed on other, sometimes far less civil, mailing lists. And, I've found, my views on this subject have evolved from the stern to the, if you want to call it that, victim-blaming.

Now, like I said, I'm running the risk of repeating things others have already said, here. Looking back over my Reader feeds for the past few months, this is definitely one of the things that have affected my thinking on this. There are others. (Neal Stephenson may have had a bit of an effect, as well.) It's hard to say what all the influences in my thinking really are; I'm exposed to more information than I know what to do with, every single day. So, I hope, are you.

Which sort of brings me to my point. This isn't 1990, and to cling [and try to force others to cling] to the netiquette of 1990, in lieu of taking control of your own information influx, seems to me to be backwards-thinking. For the LITA-L list, specifically, people must know that the library field, the IT field, and the crossover between them are huge. Even if everyone follows all the old school rules of netiquette, sending only what's necessary to mailing lists, there's still so much there. And that's without Twitter and Facebook and RSS feeds and the like. Anyone who reads every message coming across every relevant list and RSS feed is clearly not getting any real work done.

What we need to be doing—and we, as librarians, should be helping to train our patrons/customers/users [that terminology is a fight for another blog post] to do—is intelligently filtering all of it, to get the very best of what's out there. There's no perfect system for doing this, yet, but we need to do what we can with the tools we have, even while keeping our eyes open for other tools. For a very easy start, nobody should be reading mailing list traffic without a mail client that supports threading. (Hint: pretty much all of them do, particularly since Gmail came on the scene. Odds are, you can have threading-by-subject in your email without ever giving over your private information to the Google Monster and without leaving your corporate Exchange server.) In this case, when a thread turns into a hundred "me toos," dump it. Easy.

Filtering in RSS readers, Facebook, and Twitter is harder. Certainly, Twitter is trying to help, with its new list functionality. And external tools like TweetDeck (and there are a million others, at this point, probably many I haven't heard of or looked at, hopefully some that do a more thorough job of filtering) can help you follow a conference (via hashtag), a set of users who consistently provide good information, or a particular word that interests you; you can even filter out any one word or phrase from the results. It's not perfect—you'll see junk, and you'll miss good stuff—but it's a start. Google Reader doesn't really seem to allow filtering, beyond which feeds you follow and what folders or tags you want to assign, but I feel fairly confident that it will, eventually, or some better tool will come along that does. I'll go a step further and say, actually, I'm fairly confident that there's already a tool that does this, though I admit I don't know what it is. Facebook is trying to intelligently filter for you, with its News Feed (instead of Live Feed), and it's doing a so-so job, at least for me; I still find that I see more of what interests me by following the Live Feed, turning off certain people, and skimming past anything that does not seem immediately useful, but the News Feed is not entirely useless, either.

This discussion goes beyond email, RSS, and social networking services, though: even if Google Wave supplants all of these, or if we all eventually end up only accessing the Internet through something like World of Warcraft or Second Life, instead of a browser, we're still facing a different information age than the one in which "netiquette" could save us all. As an information consumer in today's world, everyone has the responsibility to filter their own content; sometimes, yes, this means adding tools to their tools (here, I fight the meme urge). And, for the next few years, yeah, it's going to be patchy. We will all have to master the art of letting go; you will not see every message in your Twitter stream, either because you are a master filterer or because you have mastered the Zen necessary to read 20 messages here and 20 there, wherever you have time. Nor will you see every message on every mailing list, every post on every blog, etc. That's the world we live in.

What I'd like to see, instead of librarians arguing about netiquette, about listservs vs. fora, about blogs vs. Twitter, and the like, is librarians helping other librarians—and through them, all of the people we should all be helping—to get a handle on the tidal wave of information coming to all of us through all of these media every single day. Perhaps we should be building tools to do some of this filtering, even.

(If I hadn't exhausted myself, I would now be expanding this discussion to metasearch of libraries' collections and the sheer volume of material produced about pretty much every subject under the sun, nowadays. Thing is, if we can't all master this viewpoint for our own information needs, we're not going to implement it to help our users, are we?)

File-sharing: not just for kids

I'm still wrapping my head around this; it's a report about a bunch of medical professionals setting up a file-sharing forum for articles from non-open access (NOA) journals. Techdirt reports that the site had 100,000 users and that 83% of requested articles were shared—over 5000 articles in a 6-month period. I went to look at the original report and saw a lot of talk about OA vs. NOA journals, but, interestingly, no discussion of institutional repositories. I would love to see an analysis of how many of those articles, despite being published in NOA journals, were freely available online, to begin with.

More broadly, though, this seems like some sort of failure, on some level, by someone. Does the blame fall on publishers for charging too much? (Unsurprisingly, I'm inclined to suggest that's a piece of the problem, yes. The study gives the average "value"—I'm going to use the term "cost," instead—of an article as $30. Seems a bit steep, to me, given that the writing and editing were done for free, from the publisher's standpoint.) Does the fault lie with libraries for failing to make interlibrary loan into a faster, better-used, better-marketed service? Maybe, but, then again, with this kind of volume, mightn't libraries be running into cost and copyright pitfalls, anyway? I'll show some ignorance, here: perhaps public libraries don't offer article-level ILLs; I admit, I've never tried. On the other hand, it's hard to say how many of these researchers already had access to academic or medical libraries that could get these articles for them and opted to go this route, anyway; I would assume a very small percentage, but what if I'm wrong? Do we blame institutions—and, yeah, academic libraries—for failing to build repositories of their scholars' works? Maybe, a little, but a fair portion of the publishers in the biomedical fields seem (by my unscientific sampling) to insist on pre-print only archiving, as well as 6-month to 1-year embargoes. That's a non-ideal scenario, even with 100% participation in institutional repositories, which is, itself, a pipe dream.

I thought this quote, from the original study, was pretty fascinating: "From the participants’ comments made in the forums, however, there does not appear to be any vindictiveness on the part of the participants against the journals or holders of copyright, but a mood of togetherness, of openness and sharing, and communal assistance." So, scientists acting like scientists are supposed to, sharing information freely? The devil, you say!

I don't have any new solutions to offer—that I think social networking tools could make some of this discussion moot is probably no secret [though it may be worth its own post, later in the week]—so perhaps I shouldn't go so far as to say this: journal publishers are now, more and more obviously, getting in the way of scientific progress. Perhaps not as directly as stupid intellectual property policies—companies owning genes and chemical formulas and the like—but, certainly, it's happening. Scientific discussion should be open and accessible, and as libraries struggle with decreasing budgets, while publishers increase the price of journals, that discussion is getting more and more closed, forcing researchers to, in this case, build their own file-sharing networks, to get the information they need. This is a pressing issue for the library, scientific, and academic communities—which, I realize, overlap significantly, though I would argue that sometimes scientists-as-scientists are open to different solutions than scientists-as-academics: the bulk of my favored options require some changes in the tenure system, for instance.

At any rate, have a look at that study, and tell me what you think in the comments. (Maybe one day I'll get Google Wave working with this blog, and we can chat about all of this in real-time.)

More CSS troubles

It's just come to my attention--by my happening to look at it after posting to the CIT Library Blog--that my blog looks bad in IE. One problem with developing on a Mac is I can test with Firefox and, when I think about it, Safari, but IE is a whole other ball of wax. And given how well MS Office for Mac works, I'm not inclined to risk installing IE:Mac.

It's interesting that it would mess up like that, since I really just took one of Blogger's templates and modified it to my uses. I feel like, since the core of it is theirs, it should have stood up better against browser changes.

It kind of makes me want to rebuild my site in--and therefore export my blog to--Wordpress. There's some good information out there about Wordpress-as-CMS, and I'd kind of like to give it a try. Then again, my current page [with the exception of this blasted blog] does a good job of showcasing my XHTML/CSS development abilities. ... I'll have to think on this.

I'll fiddle with it this weekend, or as soon thereafter as I get a chance. In the meantime, my apologies if you're an IE user. (By the way, it's OK to contact me with stuff like that--even in the comments of unrelated blog posts. Feedback is always useful, even if it's "negative," or the way I see it, constructive.)

Twitter Howto

Last week SLA's Pittsburgh chapter had a "Reverse Mentoring" meeting, where library students showed professional librarians the Web 2.0 ropes, as it were. I was the designated Twitter person. We also had someone to cover blogging/RSS - Blogger and Google Reader, social networking sites - Facebook and LinkedIN, social tagging - del.icio.us and LibraryThing, collaborative workspaces - Google Docs and wikis, and a Kindle (not that that's very "Web 2.0," per se, but people were still really interested, and I feel like librarians should all get our hands on ebook readers if at all possible). It was very well-received, and I think everyone--including the presenters--learned a lot.

I thought I'd share my handout with you, in case you were curious about basic Twitterisms (e.g. retweeting, replying vs. direct messaging, hashtags) and applications (e.g. TweetDeck, TwitterGadget for Gmail, Digsby, and a couple you may not have heard of). There are a couple of links on there, to more information, as well.

I didn't talk as much about Twitter for job searching as I meant to, but overall, I think it went well.

Ebook readers - a primer, a rant, and a call for pertinent discussion

Getting the facts straight

Even now, a year and a half after the release of Kindle 1.0--not even the first or most innovative of ebook readers--I keep seeing bloggers and other Web folk (many of them librarians or engineers who should know better) spouting off opinions like "why not just buy a laptop and read on that?" or "screens hurt my eyes." And that bugs me. Clearly, there's a huge failure in marketing happening on Amazon's (and Sony's and iRex's) part. But I'm not sure what else they should be doing to educate consumers--nowadays, you can go a Target store and play with a Sony Reader in person; even some libraries have Kindles (link goes to my review of one of CMU's Libraries' two Kindle 1.0s), so trying one out isn't insurmountably difficult. Nearly every article about these readers points out that they use E Ink, though, yes, most reporters have started taking for granted that people know what that means. I just don't get how people who care enough to have an opinion on this don't also care enough to educate themselves a little bit. </rant>

In hopes of preventing my engineering and librarian colleagues from making similarly inane statements, I'd like to tell you something very important: ebook readers like the Kindle, Sony, iLliad, and upcoming Plastic Logic reader do not have bright backlit screens like monitors or iPhones. Instead, they have what looks like a printed page, pretty much. If you'd like a familiar comparison, it's a bit like reading a large scientific (or most any other) calculator, but with much better resolution and a far less shiny surface. It really looks like a printed page. E Ink is black-and-white, until probably 2010, when color devices should start coming out. And it has no backlight; you have to find a lamp if you want to read in the dark.

Other facts: the refresh rate on the newer devices is similar to the time lag of flipping a page--it was slower on Kindle 1.0. As you read, you can add bookmarks and annotations, stop at one page and start back at the same place, and in all other ways treat it like a book. On the Kindle, there's even a tiny status bar at the bottom of the screen that tells you how much of the way through the book you are. But it's a little bit better than a book, in that the font size can be changed, and you can run a search for a particular word or sentence you remember. I find it attractive that something the size of a large paperback or a magazine--depending whether you go Kindle 2.0 or Kindle DX, for instance--holds thousands of books.

In addition to books in various formats--and, no, the formats aren't currently all that interoperable between devices--Kindle DX and the upcoming Plastic Logic reader will both read PDFs natively. (For older Kindles, you first have to convert them to the Kindle file format, which may or may not cost $0.10, depending who you ask.) This alone makes me consider getting one, because I read an awful lot of academic articles, wasting an awful lot of paper (and carrying an awful lot of it around) in the process. Plastic Logic will also read Word docs, Excel files, and Powerpoints, and is said to have some touchscreen capabilities.

For most people, the really exciting thing about the Plastic Logic reader, due to come out in late 2009 or early 2010, is that it will be flexible. Holding it really will be just like holding a closed magazine, though I am not certain it will roll up as well as a magazine does. For 8.5x11" documents, you can hold it upright, and for books you can hold it sideways, just like the Kindle DX. It will have wireless capabilities, though perhaps not the same ones as the Kindle; both will allow for auto-downloading of the day's newspapers and blogs, for a fee.

For more information

For a comparison-and-contrast of several ereader technologies, circa December 2008 (so, before specs were released on Kindle 2.0), feel free to look at my LIS 2000 group's poster on the topic, here.

And to see what articles I'm reading (even weeks or months after I post this!) about ebook readers, feel free to check out my del.icio.us links on the topic: http://delicious.com/artificialinanity/ebooks - admittedly, a few of the links in there are about actual ebooks, rather than the readers, but it's pretty easy to tell the difference. If you want to follow the articles I read about just the Kindle or just the Plastic Logic reader, you can do that at these two links, respectively: http://delicious.com/artificialinanity/kindle and http://delicious.com/artificialinanity/plastic_logic.

The debate the library community, including users, should be having

I apologize for being all ranty, but I really think it's time we move on to the substantive part of the debate. "The aesthetic quality of reading a book" is not lost in any appreciable way with most of these devices--they feel like a book to hold and look like a book to read. You can spray them with book perfume if you miss "the smell of books." (I know I sound like I'm jeering here, but I just don't think this part of the debate is worth holding. I'm trying to lay it to rest.) And, inevitably, the prices will go down--they always do. The ebook is here; the ereader is coming; we will eventually stop printing books. Not now, but very possibly within our lifetimes. So, let's drop the sentimental arguments and move on to practical discussion.

Let's talk about how we will fight the restrictive DRM on ebooks (so that I can move my purchases from the Plastic Logic 1.0 to the Plastic Logic 5.0, given my rate of upgrading--or maybe to the Kindle 7.0, if I want to switch brands--and so, eventually, my library can buy one interoperable copy of a book, rather than four proprietary ones); let's decide whether it's worthwhile to lend out ebook readers in the near term; for the long term, let's figure out how to work with publishers to make the ebooks our patrons currently have to use monitors or printers to read accessible on their ereaders (perhaps for limited periods of time!); let's think about privacy and financial protection in the case of lost or stolen ereaders.

More broadly, let's decide on the library's role and what shape it will take when everything outside of archives is digital. Because that's where we're going, book-smell or no book-smell.

Synechdoche

I was going to write about The Darien Statements, but I find myself distracted by one point and unable to focus on the whole.

"As librarians we must:" one section begins (less than grammatically), and below it are bullet points. The one, in particular, that's got my attention? "Choose wisely what to stop doing."

Whoa.

It resonates on a personal level, certainly, but looking at it as advice for the profession at large, I can't help thinking of Steve Martin's "How to be a millionaire without paying taxes" joke. I mean, any advice that begins "choose wisely" is probably not specific enough to be helpful. How should we choose? How can we know? Should we leave Second Life because it is clearly not going to be the paradigm-changing phenomenon its creators might have hoped? Or do we keep doing it, as training for the next big technology? How can we know whether text-a-librarian will catch on, unless we try it? Are institutional repositories the big fix we need for scholarly communication and archiving of the scholarly record, or are they a flash in the pan? (Trust me on this: one can find papers that say both. ... And I should wrap up this post and get back to my paper.)

How do you determine what is the "wise" point to give up on any given initiative or technology?

For that matter, how funny is it that I immediately jumped to technology, as the context in which that question operates? I can think of several others, but I did not, immediately.

It's a question worth thinking about and discussing--good on them for bringing it up!

I sound my quasi-heretical yaw over the roofs of the world

(I typed that "foofs of the world" and almost left it.)

The Dialog event today--I hesitate to call it a "training," since it was not focused specifically around learning to use the tool--was interesting and fairly enlightening. (Heads up to any readers in SLAPSG: we may have a Dialog tutorial in the works. I have no more details than that.)

To back up a bit: The word "library" used to bring to mind the public library, for me. Like many MLS-seekers, past and present, I spent a large portion of my childhood in a public library (though I think I had the grace not to say so on my application to library school). But I've been pretty academic-library-centric in my LIS education, thus far, for a variety of reasons that I may or may not get to later in this post. I work in an academic library (or three, depending how you count), I am taking Academic Librarianship, and my classes thus far have all been taught by academics of one stripe or another (even a practitioner in an academic institution is still an academic, I say). This immersion--which I made reference to, in a different way, in my last post--has kind of colored my thinking on the field of librarianship.

Today's event really drilled into me a different way of thinking about the library field, though. Certainly, as an SLA member and technically-inclined person, I was aware of corporate librarians--I have even applied to work as one--but I never really sat back and pondered to myself whether my philosophy about librarianship as a field applied to corporate libraries. Today I realized it does not, and that is exciting.

Whereas, for a variety of reasons*, I think the long-term goal of academic and public librarians (field-wide more than individually) should be to build tools that allow for nearly complete disintermediation: as opposed to continuing to fail at making the "but you don't know how to find things! Google doesn't have everything!" sales pitch and leaving most of the population with a poor view of us and poor information, to boot, the goal should be ... something else. We need to talk about what that something else is--do we team up with Google? Do we build our own tools to search our collections? Do we buy Serials Solutions' very, very sexy new Enterprise Search tool? I don't know, yet, and it's clearly going to take more than just me to figure that out. But before we can get there, we have to drop the self-indulgent view that computers will never compete with us (hey, they already are, and even if they aren't doing as good a job as we could, they're winning in market share) and the self-interested view that having a job is better than not (nobody likes that programmer who writes deliberately-confusing, uncommented code in hopes of retaining his or her job; let's not be that guy). We owe it to the general public, college educated or not, to build them tools that make information accessible to them without our interference. Because, increasingly, they are uninterested in asking us for help.

I'm not totally crazy, though. While I do think most authoritative information can be made accessible this way, and I even think it's a fairly affordable undertaking if we stop working so hard to recruit technophobic liberal arts majors into our ranks and instead beef up the "bright technical mind" bastion of librarians--not a small group, already. (Let me say, I dearly love several technophobic liberal arts majors. I do. But I still don't think they should become librarians unless they can lose the fear of technology.)

Anyway, as I was saying, not totally crazy: I think there will still be a need for professional data finders. Take the consulting firm I used to work for: great firm, hired some great people. But I had and continue to have a fundamental disagreement with their approach to professional development. They believed that a consultant should be all things--good with whatever engineering/IT specialty they had, good with people and management and customer handling, and also good with writing and presentations. We did our own research. I can see where they are coming from, and it seems to work fine for them ($4 billion in income a year is nothing to sneeze at). But, from a gaming perspective, I believe there's a real benefit in min-maxing. I think, if you have a really brilliant technical mind, there's no good reason to stick you behind the proverbial typewriter, as long as you can communicate the technical details to some genius writer you have on staff. Similarly, why would an engineer waste a bunch of time doing research for a literature review when an information specialist could do it for her, freeing her up to go to the lab? Why would a marketer waste time finding statistics that an information specialist could find faster? ... Having everyone trying to do everything is inefficient. Sure, there should be some overlap; the writer has to understand technology, and it helps if the information specialist (you see how I'm not calling the person "librarian" anymore? the word is rooted in the idea of books; no wonder people see us the way they do!) has some domain knowledge. It also helps if the engineer or marketer has a clue how searches are constructed. But each person has their area of expertise, and they spend the bulk of their time really excelling in the work they enjoy, rather than muddling around with things they aren't as good at.

I think corporate librarians will prove themselves indispensable, and I think they will bring some of the esteem back to our field. One day, people won't immediately assume an MLIS means shelving books and "being paid to read." I'm kind of excited about that.

(I'm also not sure I'm going the corporate route. I've sent out applications to several very different jobs. Only one is corporate, and I would love to do that job. The others are all, so far, academic, and I would love to do any of those jobs, too. I get so excited about each job, as I apply for it, and it's kind of hard to realize that I'm not going to hear back for a little while, and I need to keep looking. On one hand, it's a little rollercoastery and a little hard on the motivation, both to keep applying to places and to keep working on homework. On the other, hey, wow, there's a lot out there that I'm really excited to do. That's great, right?)

*Most of it comes down to "Not everyone attends information literacy classes, even on a college campus. Too many people are slipping through the cracks." Honestly, even tenured professors don't all know how to use the tools we provide, or to come to us for help; how many students do we miss? UVA and CMU both missed me (for real, my Master's thesis is online; I haven't had the gumption to go back and look, but I'm sure you can see how abbreviated my literature search was), even though I was one of those people fortunate enough to earn both an undergraduate degree and a Master's degree. What about all those folks who didn't, whose parents didn't take them to the library as a kid (or who were, like me, too shy ever to find out what a reference desk was [I know now :)]) and therefore don't even know librarians exist to answer their questions? How many people are finding bad medical, legal, or other information on the Internet, even as you read this? It's too big a problem to ignore, just for our own egos' sakes.

On technology, generally

So, the IR software spazzed out for a couple of minutes, leaving me with some time on my hands. I could do some reading for class, but I've got a blog post burning to get out, so I figured, why not set it free, out into the Ether, so that others (all 7 of you :)) might share their thoughts with me.

I figure, it must be a late winter thing, with people cooped up indoors too long and getting cranky and nobody out making real news (OK, not that last one), but it seems like everybody is obsessing about technology and how scary it is. the.effing.librarian points to a study of questionable merit, suggesting that TV watching leads to depression, right around the same time that Techdirt points to an article about an even weaker study (and, by the way, the bulk of this author's recent studies have samples of 83 adolescent girls--does she just keep testing the same ones, or what?) suggesting that girls who co-ruminate [over social media?] are in danger of depression. (Note: t.e.l and Techdirt were making fun of these articles.) To the study author's credit, the issue of social media does not come up in the paper's abstract; maybe the article's author was stretching to get links?

On top of that, I was sent to look at an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education (who should be posting something more worthwhile, I think), talking about people coming to bad ends on Facebook. Sadly, the article was not written from the standpoint that should concern us--what they and all the various applications do with our personal data--but was, instead, yet another horror story about someone [forgive my casual tone, here] talking smack about their coworkers and getting called on it. It was just a very long way of saying "Use common sense." Does nobody remember these same articles about e-mail? (I'm not blaming the person who sent it out; reminders to set your privacy settings and keep in mind who might read your stuff are never a bad idea. But shame on the Chronicle for posting something so obvious!)

Folks, it isn't the technology. Teenagers will be teenagers; adolescence is not a fun or easy time for anyone, but I don't see how it is made significantly easier or harder by the advent of Web 2.0 technology. On the whole, I suspect it all balances out, being easier in many ways and harder in others. (I could talk a bit, here, about my troubles as a teenager, but you don't care. Suffice it to say, Web 1.0, such as it was at the time, was generally a positive thing for me--not always, but generally.)

Further, people will be people. I can only imagine, when cave painting was invented, someone drew the chieftain of their cave being chased by a mammoth, or something, and had to go live in another cave as a result. Ditto books--no doubt, there's a good reason why the book after Look Homeward, Angel was called You Can't Go Home Again. Seriously, we've been talking about people behind their backs since we've been able to speak--possibly longer--and while it's not a good policy, it's probably human nature. The only difference is, with social media, it gets back to people faster.

So, as always, if you're going to talk smack, be smart, and don't do your cave painting, or talking, or typing where it can get back to the person you're talking about. Better: don't talk smack about your coworkers, because it will get back to them eventually.

A reflection on distance education (part two)

(A continuation from here.)

So, the solution? First, retool online courses: convince your video software provider to offer real-time streaming (ideally with a text chat function, though that could be obtained elsewhere and kludged in), or move to a different vendor. I understand that this removes some of the benefit of a distance course--namely, the flexibility of timing--and, yes, I would support a recording feature for students with exceptional circumstances. But I believe that attending school--particularly graduate school--should require some tradeoffs in one's schedule. Frankly, recording a course for students to watch later is not even remotely comparable to teaching them interactively, and to treat a distance education provided in this manner as equivalent to an in-person education is dishonest.

With classes held in real-time, the professor can stop to address comments coming in via the text stream. (Specifically, I would support a plan whereby the text stream shows up on the screen with the Powerpoint slides, by the way. That seems to be the best way to do it: no need for repetition of the question, and I believe that knowing everyone could see their comment would encourage students to treat it similarly to in-person questions.) The feedback of facial expressions is still lost, in the case of online-only courses, but when they are given the opportunity to do so, students can be trusted to ask, if they really need further elaboration. In "blended" courses, where there is a video camera in a classroom full of students, any school that is serious about providing distance education needs to find the money, somewhere, to purchase microphones for the student seating area. In the meantime, at least for Pitt, the text stream and a handheld mic could be treated as a stopgap measure; online students can remind those who are there in person that they can't be heard and to use the microphone.

As for course discussion, I think the signal-to-noise ratio is going to stay low in the electronic realm. I think it's a feature of the medium, and while it might be combated in any individual course, if a professor cares enough to enact a strict "commenting culture," no easy global solution presents itself. I figure more-comments-than-sense is probably a given, but whether it is or not, I still support mailing lists or multi-contributor blogs, rather than discussion boards--yes, my opinion on this hasn't changed since last semester. If anything, my classes with monolithic discussion board structure, this semester, have cemented this opinion. I follow AUTOCAT and ten other mailing lists, and I follow more than 60 RSS feeds; I could certainly handle the amount of traffic my classmates would generate, if it came in an easily digestible format, such as e-mail or RSS. But it is overwhelming when it occurs in an interface like Blackboard's (slow, poorly threaded, not customizable [for students], with notifications of updates turned off by default).

I am beginning to like the idea of wikis, when professors want students to see one another's work in a way that is not e-mail or blog friendly. I'm thinking of our most recent cataloging assignment, where each group turned in one or two answers, and we were asked to compare and examine them in light of some really finicky punctuation rules (you'd be surprised at how different they were). It is impossible, in a Blackboard discussion board, to hold two submissions up against one another without opening up multiple tabs. Far better would be for each group to add their answer to a single page on a collective wiki, or even a collective blog, so that any two answers are an easy scroll away from one another.

Anyway, now that I have started to lay out what I think is an implementable solution, I'm curious what others think. Any ideas? Additions or deletions to my ideas?

A reflection on distance education (part one)

Now, folks, I'm pretty clearly in the technophile camp in most discussions. I still hold the (naive?) belief that it's possible to write an interface that library users could actually use to harvest articles, or at least citations, from all of a library's various books and databases, without needing librarians' intervention or hours of training in syntax. I have a laptop that runs OSX and Windows, an iPod, a cell phone, and a digital camera, and I know how to use them all. I spend significant time playing on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, and a good four or more other Web 2.0(ish) applications. I live by Google Reader and Google calendar, and five different e-mail accounts all filtering into my Gmail (invisibly to the people who e-mail me). I've built a digital library, I add content to a digital repository every week, and I contribute to four blogs. I am very good with technology. I like technology. I think technology can fix many of our problems.

Furthermore, I have successfully coordinated documentation and scheduling for a team of 60+ people spread over multiple organizations spanning four timezones. I have also designed a wireless system with colleagues in Michigan and California (I was in Virginia), and I worked almost as much from home as I did from the office. I am beginning to think digital reference is the single most important service an academic library can offer, and I truly enjoy my weekly one-hour IM reference session, as well as my coverage of e-mail reference. I'm good at distance work.

So when I tell you that distance education, as it is currently done, is not a good alternative to on-campus education, believe me, I'm not being a short-sighted technophobe or a touchy-feely "communication has to happen in person" drip. I'm serious, and I'm probably correct. Better: I've got a suggestion for how to begin to solve the problem (because I'm also not stupid--I know distance education is not going away). Let me tell you about my coursework now, and then I'll begin to lay out a solution in my next post.

Two of my classes have serious online components, this semester; one is online-only and is taught by one of the best professors I've ever had the opportunity to study with. I know, from taking her class last semester, that she's fantastic. This semester, though, I've found that I get very little from her lectures, or, in fact, her class, and I think I've put my finger on why: it is not sufficiently interactive; she talks into a microphone, and there are Powerpoint slides, but there's no way for me to raise my hand in real time and ask a question or make a comment as it occurs to me. I can't walk up to her after class and comment on something she said. She can't tell when half of the class is staring at her, dumbfounded by what she is saying, and we can't go off track into those wonderful side discussions where, in most courses (and my course with her last semester was much more the rule than the exception), the real learning occurs. We listen to the lecture, and there are discussion boards where we can post comments and questions after the fact. Our assignments are given to us over Blackboard, returned to the professor via Blackboard or e-mail, and presumably graded in Blackboard. Sometimes, our assignments require that we post to Blackboard, so we can see what other students are doing, if we care to read through 40+ other students' comments.*

My other class is also taught by an excellent professor--admittedly, I have less experience with her classes, but from the semester so far, I have to say, I like her style. I always get something out of her class. Except for that one time when I was too sick to go in and watched the course on Panopto. That was terrible, because, like any good professor, she is interactive in her teaching style and tries to engage her students. She asks questions and encourages students to ask questions of her. It works excellently for people who are there in person, but for someone watching the recorded version, it is terrible. You can't hear the in-person students' comments, so you're getting half-conversations, which is actually worse than if the professor just stood up there and lectured. She could repeat everything the students say, perhaps, but I suspect that would wind up annoying everyone involved. And there is still a Blackboard discussion component to the class, which is non-ideal, as well.

Perhaps online courses are the great equalizer: fantastic professors are brought down nearly to the level of their most sub-par colleagues (I had a couple of worse in-person experiences in engineering school than these online courses, I admit), and even the most excellent students are reduced to passively watching the lecture and waiting anywhere from an hour to a few days for any comment they might make or question they might be asked to be acknowledged and given a response. Their active engagement in the content is not encouraged, and so they do not provide it to the extent that they could.

*A sidebar: I love the democratic nature of the Web, the fact that we all have a voice and can all post our thoughts and opinions. I believe that some of the other students have things to teach the class, and perhaps, for in-person courses, it's a shame when only the people who are brave enough to speak up in class have that opportunity. On the other hand, people only speak up in class when they have something they feel is worthwhile to say, and discussions in Blackboard do not work that way. We are encouraged to post--in fact, our participation grades count on it--and although we are told "do not post unless you have something meaningful to say," there still seems to be an awful lot of noise to it all. The quality level is definitely lower, and the benefits of the "discussion" are dubious at best.

(Continued here.)

Current courses and other topics of interest (to me, at least)

I've been meaning to give an updated run-down of the classes I'm taking and my general opinions of them, but school and life and bronchitis (yeah, again, but I'm on the mend) got in the way, like they do. To make it up to you--and because I am waiting for my wonderful SO to come pick me up so I don't have to stand in the cold and watch full buses go by--I'll talk about extra-curriculars and such, as well.

Retrieving Information: I should have taken this course last semester. (I really mean this course; I can't speak to whether or not I should have taken the version of this course that was actually offered. It had a slightly different teaching staff and some different assignments.) The textbook is pretty good and kind of surprisingly useful to me, specifically: I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I don't know the difference between certain kinds of library resources, and I'll be learning that very basic knowledge through this course. Had I known this stuff, going into my internship at the Engineering & Science library, I think I would have done a better job last semester. (Not that I did poorly. But there's always room for improvement.) Just generally, I think it will make me a better librarian. I also like that it's taught by a practitioner--if any course should be, it's this one.

Introduction to Cataloging and Classification: No surprise that I like this class. I liked grammar in high school, too. Also, it's taught by a really fantastic professor. Now, from recent discussions off AUTOCAT, I'm kind of in a tizzy over the oldness of FRBR and RDA and the relative lack of implementation--or alternatives--put forth by the library community. And so I am studying this not just for the nitty-gritty rules of cataloging, which interest and intimidate me, but perhaps even more for the sociological understanding of how catalogers think and why change is so hard for the cataloging--and library--community at large. Also, you know, I kind of still want the title "Metadata Librarian." I liked scripting, in limited quantities, and would be interested in doing some serious data wrangling; this class will bring me one step closer to being really qualified to do that.

Issues in Academic Librarianship: Another fantastic course, exploring various ... well, issues faced by academic librarians and academic libraries. The professor is great--she actually treats us like graduate students, which left a few of us in mild shock and will require readjustment, after last semester's freshman seminar. (Yeah, still bitter.) Her co-instructor and TA will bring some excellent insight to the class, as well. There's a lot of reading, a fair bit of discussion, and a complete split between the in-person and online versions of the class. I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am that she decided to run the course that way.

Resources for Young Adults: Dropped. Would have been a really good course and almost* entirely worth my time, if I had it to give, but the amount of work required was all out of proportion to the likelihood that I'd ever get to use what I learned. I'm probably going to be an academic librarian, and, furthermore, I'm probably never going to be a parent; there's very little reason I need to read 20+ YA books and discuss, in depth, the issues facing today's youth. Though, yeah, the 20+ books would have been fun. ... Also, I've just got too much else going on to be able to give my full attention to four courses.

Field Placement: (Institutional Repository at CMU.) This is going well, although I feel like I'm moving very slowly and taking up a lot of my site supervisor's time. I've uploaded 15+ documents, all but the first 5 without supervision, as well as harvesting a few more than that, some with supervision and some without. I think I pretty much understand the whole workflow and can really begin to contribute, now. So that's exciting.

As for the Aviary, which is not actually a course (though I do hope I can make it count as a field placement for the summer), that's going pretty well, too. I have the bulk of the journals organized and inventoried, and I've been comparing the collections against Worldcat and Science Direct, to see where the gaps are. There are a surprising number of older ornithological publications available online, which is pretty nice. I'm sad that I won't get to see the library reach its full potential: the construction work for the Aviary's expansion won't be done until 2010, so my library will continue to be scattered across multiple rooms. I did have a pretty heartening thought: probably not that many librarians can say with certainty, "I have touched every single book in my library." Although I'll never be formally employed by the Aviary, so it is not in all senses "my library," I will still be able to say that, at least until the quarter after I leave, when the new journals come.

Other general news: 1) I'm VP of SCALA and am co-directing the Book Kart Drill Team. We're still picking songs and putting together a routine, not to mention thinking of funding options. We aren't much past square one-point-five, I think, right now. Lots of work to be done. 2) I'm still Membership Coordinator of SLAPSG. We'll be doing a special tour at the Aviary on Monday, which is pretty exciting--and has pretty much nothing to do with my volunteering there, except I happened to ask about both at the same time. 3) I'm trying to do a little bit of crafting, to help maintain my sanity. I'm going to have a separate blog for that and other not-at-all-library-or-engineering-related things, but it's not up yet. 4) I'll send you a gift and sing your praises in my blog and, if you want, answer a hard reference question for you if you can figure out why my CSS doesn't work with Blogger and how to fix it. (I don't care whether it's a javascript workaround that you write me or whether it's a Blogger setting I tweak or whether it's just some added CSS; I just want it fixed, without breaking the rest of my site.) The class I call "content" is the problem; everywhere else, it auto-sizes properly, but it just won't auto-size through Blogger. (It did, for a while, briefly, and then it just stopped.) I've got a number hardcoded into my template, which is not just inelegant but actually causes problems (say when someone resizes my text, or views a single entry on its own, or I forget to update the number after I write a longer- or shorter-than-average post). If you're up for the challenge, I will happily send you my Blogger template, and you can probably find my CSS file yourself.

*It did have several essays-in-300-words-posted-to-Blackboard, with required responses of 150 words, the latter of which is only a small step above "utterly useless," in my experience.

A little essay I cooked up

I've been pretty bad about posting my class essays up here, for a number of reasons. One of the big ones is that they are so specific to the questions, and I make kind of lazy references to books that I don't expect everyone on my blogroll to have read. (Let's be honest--I haven't read all of them. Four books in a week? Really? With a full course schedule and a part-time job? Hah, right.)

In this case, I just use articles, most of which are worth your time to check out, and for good measure [and because I refer directly to it], I am going to post the question, as well. It's still a little cramped, I think, because I had to get it in under 275 words (it's 271). Anyway, enjoy. And comment. And let's discuss. (And sorry for a second post in a day!) And, yes, you could argue that I ignored half the question, but I am actually pretty comfortable with that; knowing my professor, I suspect most of the question was a red herring.

Question:
In the United States, copyright law promotes the public good and protects the exclusive limited rights of copyright holders, in that order. If the copyright law fails to protect the rights of copyright holders adequately, how is the public good affected? Would it be better or worse if the United States adopted the standard for copyright protection in the rest of the industrialized world, whereby the primary purpose of such statutes is to protect the rights and interests of copyright holders?

Answer:
I believe the change referred to in the last sentence is already occurring--and has been for twenty years. Copyright law was written to prevent corporations from reproducing works without permission--something they had the tools to do--in the interest of encouraging innovation by making it profitable. However, the advent of consumer technologies that could make copies, then the Internet, has effectively put the same tools into the hands of individuals, making copyright law into a seriously flawed and poorly patched joke (Lessig). In 1982 Jack Valenti, a lobbyist for the film industry, compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler in front of Congress (Frel and michael). Clearly, this comparison is overblown; in fact, the film industry saw gains from this technology; it makes over $25 billion per year from videotapes and DVDs now (Frel).

Nevertheless, the same logic continues to stream out from their lobbyists, leading most recently to the PRO-IP Act, which "relaxes the standards under which extended prison terms of up to ten years can be given to repeat felony copyright infringers" (Ehmke). Just for comparison, the minimum prison term for rape in Pennsylvania is 4 years (McGill); yes, one could serve more time for copying a CD than for brutally attacking another person. I fail to see how this is "in the public interest."

I'm out of words but have much more to say. So, I would like to point you to an article by Cory Doctorow, which claims that what is at stake in the fight against draconian IP laws is nothing less than our culture itself: http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/11/cory-doctorow-why-i-copyfight.html. Please give it a read. He's right.

Works cited:

Ehmke, A. "Pro-IP Act Signed into Law." Haynes and Boone's News Room. Posted October 15, 2008. Available online: http://www.haynesboone.com/pro-ip-act-signed-into-law-10-15-2008/ Accessed November 20, 2008.

Frel, J. "The Revolution Will Be Downloaded." AlterNet. Posted April 20, 2005. Available online: http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21817/. Accessed Nov 20, 2008.

Lessig, Lawrence. Speech: "The Internet at the Crossroads." The Politics of Code - Shaping the Future of the Next Internet, Oxford Internet Institute, 2003.

McGill, A. "Cluck sentenced to four years in prison." The Daily Collegian Online. Posted August 23, 2007. Available online: http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2007/08/23/cluck_sentenced_to_four_years.aspx Accessed November 20, 2008.

michael. "Valenti's "Boston Strangler" Testimony." Slashdot. Posted on Fri May 31, 2002 03:12 PM. Available online: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/31/1622232.

West, J. "little pieces of things that might interest you." librarian.net. Posted November 20, 2008. Available online: http://www.librarian.net/stax/2561/little-pieces-of-things-that-might-interest-you/

A quote I ran into while I was looking for best practices on citing Slashdot (which is something I do tend to avoid): "... citing slashdot on patent issues is like citing Soviet propaganda to find out about the US Constitution." --FallLine, , posted to Slashdot on Monday January 15 2007.

Oh noes!

I've discovered a real problem, folks: most of the people I really want to work with--whose books, ideas, blogs, and podcasts have most influenced my thinking over this semester and who I think have the greatest chance of effecting real change in technology policies and practices (if anybody would just listen to them)--are pretty much all lawyers. (Why are lawyers the ones writing all of these books? Why isn't it librarians? I think this is something worth discussing and would love to hear from some library-related folk why they think we're falling so short on this stuff!)

I just don't know that they want an engineer-turned-librarian following them around all the time, no matter how smart or devoted to their various causes I might be, since they all work in law-related organizations--with quite a lot of overlap between them, if you look at the whole timeline. I also don't think I've got the wherewithal to go to school for three more years, at $100k+ a year, to then end up working with them and the EFF and never paying off my loans. It took some soul-searching to go from engineering to library science and to take on the loans I have. Also, I am really kind of pondering a PhD in LIS, instead, though the question of "now or later?" is still very up in the air--and very dependent on who has the coolest/best/most socially relevant projects for me to work on next year.

(A post to come soon: I identify people within the library field who are also working on interesting and relevant things, of similar importance, in a very different way. I've got a couple, already.)

Stopping the OCLC Power Grab

I found out about this by way of librarian.net and want to pass it along to anyone who might be interested.

By way of explanation: OCLC, the not-for-profit that provides library services around the world, has gone too far. Originally, it was a library collaborative -- one library could catalog a book, upload it to OCLC, and then other libraries could save time by reusing the catalog information. But as the price of such technology has fallen, its prices have risen. It charges membership fees, record retrieval fees, user support fees, and fees for all sorts of additional services. But now it wants to set the terms of use for every library record ever retrieved through OCLC, so that it can maintain its monopoly in the field. In a very real sense, they're trying to steal our libraries. We have to make them stop -- please join me in signing the petition "Stop the OCLC powergrab!" You can do so right now at http://watchdog.net/c/stop-oclc

For more information, see this wiki page: OCLC Policy Change.

I still hate Greenstone, but I got it to run

For folks in 2670, I hope this helps. For folks outside of 2670, I recommend against using Greenstone Digital Library software, but if you find that you have to, I hope this helps you install it, at least for local use.

If I find any good tricks for using Greenstone, after it's installed, I'll share those, as well. I hope my classmates will do the same. :)

Assuming the moon's alignment with Venus was not what did it, here's how I got Greenstone to run:

1) I installed VMWare Fusion on my Mac. (This is unnecessary if you already have Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2. Skip to step 3 in that case.)

2) I installed Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2. No, XP x64 won't do it; I tried.

(Steps 1 and 2 were necessary because, to be blunt, I refuse to put this buggy software on the native operating system of my only computer. If something goes horribly wrong in my VM, I can just blow it away, without losing important data.) Please note: I did the rest of these steps before installing anything else on my Windows VM, including Firefox or Office or anything; I can't promise that this will work with anything other than IE 6, or in any order other than the one I give below; given how many times I went through failed installs, I've developed a little bit of irrational superstition about the order of operations...

3) I downloaded and installed Java Virtual Machine on my computer.

4) I downloaded and installed Java JDK, specifically JDK 6 Update 10 with Java EE. There's some weirdness with Java's download manager software, but don't worry overmuch. Just do what it tells you to do.

5) I downloaded and installed ActivePerl. I did what it told me to do and was rewarded with cute lizard icons and a properly-defined Perl PATH.

6) I downloaded and installed ImageMagick, specifically ImageMagick-6.4.5-5-Q16-windows-dll.exe. Choose only the default options; don't add more. Seriously.

7) I installed Greenstone, Windows Distribution (Latest). I went with all the defaults, including "Local" rather than "Web."

8) Here's where it gets a little tricky. Perl correctly sets its own path to what Greenstone Librarian Interface expects, but Java does not, for some reason. (I guess first try running Greenstone Librarian Interface. If it works, you don't have to do this step. It didn't work for me, so here's what I did to fix it.)

Go to C:\Program Files\Greenstone\gli, and right-click on gli.bat (it is an icon that looks like a window with a cog in it). Choose Edit. Scroll down to the three lines that look like this:

:findJava
:: ---- Check Java Exists ----
set JAVAPATH=

Now, go find java.exe. On my computer, it's in C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin. Paste that path in (yours, not mine, though they are probably the same); on my machine, the above now says

:findJava
:: ---- Check Java Exists ----
set JAVAPATH=C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin

Close the file, and click "Yes" when it asks if you want to save. Now Greenstone should run just fine. Ideally.

Musings on Next Semester

So, I picked my classes:

LIS 2002: Retrieving Information (required core course, blended format)
LIS 2405: Intro to Cataloging and Classification (online only course)
LIS 2690: Information Visualization (blended format)
LIS 2879: Academic Librarianship (blended format)

You'll notice two things about them. One, it's a pretty fun and interesting set of things to study. Two, everything is online, or at the very least, blended.

I'll be honest: this upsets me. I dropped everything to move to Pittsburgh for this degree. More than that, Dale dropped everything and took a job he doesn't like as much as the job he had in Virginia, to move to Pittsburgh, so I could get this degree. Which is made up almost entirely of online courses. I am paying through the nose for this degree, and yet, I am looking at another semester of fighting the discussion boards in our sub-par distance education software to have artificial "conversations" for the sole purpose of making the off-campus students feel that they're part of the community--a misguided effort, to be sure, as they are no more fans of the discussion boards than we are. ... I hope I'm wrong and all of next semester's professors will understand that the enforced-online-discussion model wastes students' time, brings down the level and the sincerity of discourse, and ultimately decreases the value of the degree we are earning.

I was going to muse/rant some more, but I have some digital library software I am trying desperately to learn to use (getting it to run would be a start--curse you, Greenstone!), before I go to bed tonight. Tomorrow and Sunday, I'll be on the road, attending a wedding. (Yay, weddings!)

Coral waxes philosophical on Week 8 Readings for 2670 (and Muddiest Point)

I loved the following quote (from our Week 8 Readings):

Google has taught us, quite powerfully, that the user just wants a search box. Arguments as to whether or not this is "best" for the user are moot—it doesn't matter if it's best if nobody uses it. Moreover, as both Google and Amazon have demonstrated, users have a funny way of determining for themselves what is best for them. --Todd Miller

Right on! I mean, I love highbrow, ivory tower discussion as much as the next girl, but what it really needs to come down to is, "How can we engage the user? What will they use?" And, not to get too far off topic, but this is an issue that's really been on my mind a lot lately. You see, before I started seriously considering librarianship as a profession--and admitting this out here in the open is a little weird for me--I didn't go to the public library. At all. (There's this whole thing about how the library in my hometown was my favorite place in the world until I turned 12 or 13, and then suddenly I realized the librarians were looking at me with ... some negative emotion I didn't bother defining, at the time. Having worked in a public library, myself, and having thought about it a bit, I realize it was probably dread. Teenagers are scary, because they're hard to relate to. We remember being teenagers, but we also remember what we thought of adults. You know what I mean?) I dearly loved the library at my university, but I retained my fear of librarians. How sad! I had absorbed that common misperception of librarians as cranky, bespectacled old ladies with book carts and stern expressions, and it didn't occur to me to ask them questions--even the obviously not old, not bespectacled, sometimes not even female librarians at UVA. Then I went to graduate school, where the Engineering & Science Library (where I work now!) was good as a silent study space, between classes, on days when I could deal with the oppressiveness of it all--something the students who wanted silence exuded, not something inherent to the library itself. (That part of it is still a problem for me. I hate walking past the study carrels. Though as time goes on, I become more sure of myself, and I imagine to myself that they realize I have work to do, to keep the library running.) I didn't know the librarians were super friendly and wanted to answer my questions! I wouldn't have dreamed of bothering them! I did all my searches online, in a combination of Google Scholar and IEEE Explore (which, admittedly, did pretty much encompass my research).

This is all a very long-winded lead-up to the question: how do we deal with potential patrons like I was? I was too shy to ask for help. Frankly, I was too shy to venture into the library, except to study. I was intimidated by the catalog and by the shelves upon shelves of books. ... I guess therein lies a lot of the benefit of digital libraries; if shy patrons can find us online, at least they'll have access to some of our resources. But I'd like to address the bigger question, as it relates to brick-and-mortar libraries, at some point in the future. I'll keep thinking on it. Your comments are welcome!

Now to the much more relevant idea of federated search. I am interested in this. I was considering applying to PhD programs and trying to get funding to build a search utility that would go through a library's catalog and all of its databases, because <rant>the current way we do things is so backward and involved and frustrating. Why, after 8 weeks of doing reference for at least a few hours a week, am I still feeling less than confident in my ability to find absolutely everything in our system? That's absurd. There's no excuse for it. Sure, if you know the name of the journal you want to search, I can help you. And I have a passing familiarity with a growing subset of our journal offerings--and the databases that house them--so that I can find certain types of articles pretty well. But why should I have to know what every journal/database contains, in order to help a patron find the answer to a question I understand? [I get why I have to understand their questions.] Why can't I just type something in a search box?</rant> (I realize I'm proposing something that might end up putting some of us out of jobs, if ever implemented well. I think this is a noble goal, really. We're smart people; we'll find something to do. What's important is that information can be retrieved--ideally by everyone--right?)

It seems to me this is what federated search is out to solve (slowly, and with great limitations). I'm a little embarrassed that I thought nobody else had tried to solve this problem, admittedly, but I guess such is the dilemma of a grad student. Better that I'm thinking of solutions, even if they're already implemented (in some form or another) than that I ... don't? Eh.

There are still, clearly, significant hurdles to be overcome in all of this.

The D-Lib article was published in 2004; I wonder what academic libraries have done, since then, to respond to this problem--for those who don't feel like clicking, the problem is a lack of acknowledgment, on the part of academic libraries, of the tremendous amount of academic resources on the Web. My guess: not much. (I love academia, but I acknowledge its imperfections, slowness being a major one.)

Muddiest Point: Does the Greenstone installation on the lab computers do anything besides show us the demo library? Can we build libraries and burn them to CD at the lab? (This is of great importance, since Greenstone isn't installing properly on Dreamhost, and I have a Mac. Also, an unwillingness to install Apache on my Mac.)

Long Delayed Musings

I've been meaning to post a "State of the Schooling" kind of thing for quite a while, as the six week mark of the semester neared and then swooped past--it's funny how "six weeks" still has meaning to me, nearly ten years removed from high school as I am. Having a report card might not be such a bad thing; there are several post-graduation job openings with deadlines in the next few weeks. What, precisely, should I show them, in lieu of a degree, or even a transcript? (A cover letter and curriculum vitae, I suppose. Speaking of, if anyone would like to do a CV review for me or give me some academic library-specific tips for cover letters, I would be most grateful. I still don't feel like I know what goes in either.)

It isn't that I don't have work to do tonight, by the way; I had reserved today to work on a grant proposal for my Management class, but I was tackled to the ground by a cold. I'd like that to be more metaphorical than it is, but I think I've spent 18 of the last 24 hours asleep on an air mattress, where I collapsed last night and again this afternoon. My head is achy and stuffy, and I'm just kind of vaguely miserable and totally wiped out. Fortunately, though I don't have the wherewithal to work, I have it to blog. And blog I will!

There are some really fantastic things going on, schooling-wise, and some really not fantastic ones. Let's start with the good before we move on to complaining, shall we?

I love my Organizing Information class. It's one of the five "core" courses people in the general, academic, or digital track are required to take before graduating, and the professor who teaches it is just so great. She obviously cares very much about the subject, but she doesn't take it so seriously as to take the fun out of it. Actually, it isn't even just that she cares about the subject: she cares that we understand it. After every assignment she asks us if we learned from it and thought it was worthwhile, and she seems to really listen to our feedback. I think I will take the Cataloguing class next semester because her class has been so good; honestly, I'm really thinking about going into metadata librarianship (of the "data wrangling" variety, as Mike Bolam put it in his guest lecture, not the really hardcore cataloguing). ... Which sounds so flakey, as I re-read it. But it isn't just that I like the professor; I really find the subject interesting. I liked English classes because I liked grammar. The structure--diagramming sentences--really pleased me. I think engineering and computer programming--and sorting through data with Matlab (which, inexplicably, I miss very much)--appealed to me for the same kind of reason. There's just something very comforting about hierarchies and trees and structure. (Not that I apply any organizational acumen to my own life, but I imagine that's part of what appeals to me about studying the subject.)

My Digital Libraries class is also pretty good; I'm frustrated with trying to use the poorly-documented digital library software (I admit, Dreamhost's CGI support page is above my level), and I'm kind of nervous about the midterm, but there's a lot of good content in the class. Some of the topics are a review, but even that isn't a bad thing. I wish I had time to sit down with Lesk's book (Understanding Digital Libraries), to just read it cover-to-cover. Honestly, I'd settle for the time to really do the assigned readings in depth, rather than skimming through them in a hurry. (I'll get to that in a minute; honestly, the time requirement for this class is very reasonable, and I'm selling it shorter, in the time I give to it, than I would like.) But our professor encourages us to ask questions, lets us use blogs (instead of horrible, horrid, nasty Blackboard) to communicate with one another (as you know), and is just generally very understanding and accommodating. It's a good class.

My Management class ... isn't bad. I mean, I've never liked fuzzy business speak. It brings my hackles up and evokes a feeling of distrust in me (yes, even after a couple of years of consulting in the DC area... especially after that, actually). The assignments are kind of poorly defined, which I found frustrating until I started seeing the grades (both mine and the averages); I think perhaps the expectations for the assignments are also poorly defined, so the grading is fairly lenient. On the up side, two of the three group projects we're doing for the class are really relevant and useful to us in a real-world way; we will be writing a "management portfolio"--with a needs assessment, mission statement, vision statement, staffing plan, budget, and business plan--and a grant proposal (which the professor keeps referring to as though it is part of the other assignment, but very few of us joined up with partners who are in our management portfolio groups; also, most of the class seems to have gone out and found real-world grants to write up, whereas our management portfolios are all fictional). The irrelevant project is a slide show put together with a group of 5-6 people, to share with our "virtual groups" of 15 people chosen randomly from the in-person and online students. We're supposed to discuss these slides in the group discussion boards, but nobody cares; most of my group logged in, made a token comment, and never checked back again, the week my slideshow went up. (My feelings weren't hurt.)

The big downside of the Management class, other than the vague hand wavyness of it (that's a management class for you) and the fact that most of it is repetition from my two-day Project Management class at BAH, is the fact that the management portfolio and grant proposal are to be done in groups of five and two, respectively, on very different topics (which, again, the professor doesn't seem to realize?), and turned in on the same day. The five-person group is deliberately chosen so that on-campus and online students are grouped together--one physical meeting will happen, less than a month before the project is due, for no more than an hour, and everything else is to be done online. I know the professor thinks this is a beneficial look into real-world working conditions, but I've done real-world distance collaboration, and there's usually a little more in-person, or at least teleconferenced, interaction. So that's frustrating. But group work in school is always frustrating; I've gone through worse.

Aaaand... I saved the class I like the least for last. (Say that five times fast.) It's required of every single person who enters the program, regardless of their "specialization." This semester, as an "experiment," they have something like 250 people in the class, half of them online. There are roughly ten professors running it, and as nearly as I can tell, each one was allowed to pick a book or two that they'd like us to read. They didn't, you know, whittle it down after that discussion, either, or choose a set of topics to really focus on: we are expected to read 15 books, on various subjects, clumped together in a sometimes arbitrary fashion. We are asked to write 400 word essays about these sometimes arbitrary clumps of books, citing outside reviews, roughly every other week, and to post them in our randomly-chosen "group"'s discussion board. This week, we wrote about two books; next week (actually next week, not two weeks hence), we write about four. Roughly zero percent of the class [I've asked something like thirty people] reads every book, or even half the books, before "winging it," as I say, and it kind of shows in reading their essays... (Sorry, my group! I am sure you're very smart people, and I'm sure my essays also leave something to be desired.) Anyway, on the off weeks, we're given big lists of articles and asked giant questions ("How has the WWW influenced the way in which ideas, information, and knowledge are exchanged? .. blah blah, Semantic Web"), which we are to answer in 250 word essays. Every Thursday, we turn in the "big" essay, and every Monday, we are expected to write a response agreeing with one of our colleagues' points and disagreeing with another. And then there are various other discussions we're supposed to participate in, on Blackboard, as well. I think they also expect us to go to lecture, though I'm not sure how many people still do that. (Which is a shame. I actually really like the one professor's lectures, but because of the class size, they had to move it to the far side of Oakland, near nothing else that interests me and up a smoker-filled hill from the closest bus stop. I'm not kidding; half the nurses at UPMC seem to smoke, and they all do it between the bus stop and class. The two times I went, I was miserable with asthma for half of the two-hour lecture. So, I decided to watch them online. But the online software is buggy, so the times I've tried, it's often frozen on me part-way through. So I'm sporadic in watching it, now.) This kind of workload isn't really conducive to, you know, having multiple classes and a job, and I find their lack of selectivity and realism--and particularly their lack of flexibility in the face of students' complaints--deeply frustrating.

My big complaint about the program overall is that it feels very undergraduate. No kidding: we have to have our advisors' signatures on our class signup forms--1) we have forms, rather than doing it online, and 2) I didn't have to have an advisor's signature even as an undergrad, that I remember. (I think I had to certify that I'd met with him, but he didn't sign anything.) There are no research assistantships available--internships, most of them outside of Pitt, yes, but those are only allowed to provide up to half our tuition--and we are stuck into a 250-person lecture, then graded on our participation in discussion boards. I realize the program lets in pretty much everyone who applies, so they have to do a certain amount of hand-holding, but couldn't there be, I don't know, an "advanced class," for people who've worked in the real world and don't need to be condescended to?

My second biggest complaint is that the focus--at least this semester, in the particular classes that are taking up the bulk of my time--seems to be on technology, rather than on library skills. Now, it isn't that I don't care what effect Google is having on libraries, or what we should expect the future of the printed word to be, but those things will be different in five years. Also, you know, I already understand technology fairly well. I think it's fantastic that my colleagues with less technical backgrounds are getting this kind of exposure--we need more technical knowledge in the field!--but it is really frustrating to me: I learn technology in my free time; I want to learn about libraries while I'm at school.

My third complaint is about Blackboard. I'll tag this post with the "Blackboard" tag so you can click it and go read all about that, if you care to. Part of that, which I did not cover in the previous post, has to do with changing our in-person classes around and making the bulk of our class discussion happen, as they like to say, virtually. This bothers me. I just don't see the same candor, or quality, in the discussions we have on Blackboard, possibly in part because the professors are watching and grading us on our comments; people are hesitant to criticize or make mistakes. I really think the quality of online classes is lower than the quality of on-campus classes because of it.

Next up: how's the internship going? (Far less complaining in that post. Spoiler: I am enjoying it and learning a lot.)

[2670] Interesting article

LibraryJournal covers some of the controversy around Google Books:

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6601209.html?nid=3285

Hopefully H.G. Wells and Vannevar Bush had more insight than I do

I confess: I do not believe in a Semantic Web. I sincerely hope to be proven wrong--we should all hope to have information resources that powerful--but I do not believe, given my understanding of the way the Web works, the way search engines work, and computers' consistently poor understanding of natural language, that we should expect anything like Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila's (2001) almost utopian ideas of information retrieval systems within our lifetimes. I also have serious doubts about Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) or Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) ever being implemented consistently, correctly, and for large enough portions of the Web to make a real difference; again, I want to be proven wrong.

Brooks seems, almost, to agree: he discusses the untrustworthiness of user-supplied metadata and search engines' habit of ignoring, or at least devaluing, it. In the past, indexing was done by trustworthy experts, who "possess[ed] a special skill for denoting the meaning of text," and if they failed, they could be found and held accountable. Indexing now is done by various algorithms looking at the content of and links between web pages--and it is imperfect (2004). For the Semantic Web, as Berners-Lee et al. (2001) envisioned it, indexing would be done by the content creators, whom Google correctly distrusts, or perhaps by users of the content, via social tagging/bookmarking. This last approach has shown real promise (Wu), though I have a theory--unexplored in any papers I could find--that the Matthew Effect would apply, and most content would remain untagged by anyone except its creator.

Despite my skepticism, I find the topic fascinating and would love to design technology to mitigate some of these hurdles.


Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., and Lassila, O. (2001, May 17). "The semantic Web: A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities," The Scientific American, 284(5), 34+ [Available here]

Brooks, T.A. (2004). "The nature of meaning in the Age of Google," Information Research, 9(3) paper 180. [Available here]

Wu, X., Zhang, L., Yu, Y. "Exploring social annotations for the semantic web," Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland

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.

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/

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] 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.)

[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.

On Blackboard and Blogs

I'm going to be honest: I don't love Blackboard (Bb). Certainly, it fills a niche, and I agree that something like it should be used. But I'm just not sure Bb is the be-all, end-all solution for every problem, in every class, in every university. Honestly, course webpages are, in many ways, an improvement. Let me break it down:

Bb Pros:

• It's a great place for storing course-related files and assignments, that students and professors can access 24/7 (mostly).


• It is customizable, within certain parameters.


• It is 508 compliant.


• It is massively improved since 1999.


• The professor does not need to learn HTML or gain access to web design software (or a TA who knows HTML) to build a course page.

Bb Cons

• The discussion boards are painfully slow, at least from off campus.


• There is no way to set content to "push" instead of "pull." More plainly, it is a waste of the student's time to have to go to each and every course's (sometimes multiple) discussion board(s), read all the new posts (which, I reiterate, do not load all that quickly), comment where they choose to, rinse, and repeat. And to check it constantly. Whether there is new data or not. Because catching up on it, if you get behind, is a nightmare. RSS is not new technology; fixing this should be trivial.


• I'm harping, now, but, for that matter, how difficult would it be to implement e-mail functionality in the discussion boards? We'd have a better discussion with Google Groups than we do with Bb, and it would be equally easy for our instructors to watch--easier, I imagine, since they must get the same headaches as we do, using the boards.


• The organization of each course's Bb page is completely different from that of each other course. In one of my courses, I click the tiny "Communications" link at the bottom of the page to get to the Discussion Board. In another, I click the "Discussion Board" button on the sidebar. In one other, that button goes to course-wide questions, so to get to the Discussion Board I'm usually interested in, I click "Groups," in the side bar, click my group number, and then click "Discussion Board." When we're put in groups for projects, as I understand it, there will be other Discussion Boards opened up to us. It's a little confusing, when I'm going class-to-class, keeping it all straight. Honestly, I'm pretty worried that I'm going to ignore one Discussion Board altogether and lose 10% of my grade, or something, for "not participating."


• Presumably, the university paid money for this clunky monstrosity. I wonder whether it was more or less than site-wide license of HTML creation software (spoiler: that link goes to a list of free products) and a web site for each faculty member (this is already in place, although storage space usage would go up; then again, if we dumped Bb, that would free up some server space, I bet!).
  

In short, I'm thoroughly convinced that the old-school[ish] way of dealing with course administrivia--making a webpage for the course, with the syllabus, assignments, and so on all there--is in most ways equal, if not superior. (Robots.txt it and password protect it, if you want to keep outsiders out of it. It worked great for many of my classes, undergrad, so I know the technology is there. 508 compliance isn't hard; just don't make the site stupid fancy and colorful, or use frames, and that will more or less cover it.) And I really feel that we are not well served, using Bb as a discussion platform: a Google Group for each sub-group of the class would lead to--I am certain--better communication between the students than pull-only discussion boards.

I really, really like what we're doing in 2670, where each student has to keep a blog and post the feed link to the Discussion Boards. We're doing all of our "virtual" discussion of the readings that way. (As I understand it, we'll also discuss in class.) I put all of the feeds in a folder in Google Reader, and I see the updates that other students and the professor make as soon as I sit down at my computer. It's fantastic. I wish all my classes would do something like this, really. I'll do my part and post my writing assignments here, as well as in Blackboard (I'm aware that it'll turn up a hit if they're using automated anti-plagiarism software--you wouldn't believe how quickly Google indexes my blog posts--but I trust my professors to investigate and realize that this blog belongs to me). This is a little nerve-wracking, honestly, because I don't have a lot of faith in my writing skills. (Brevity, for one thing, seems to be completely beyond me. I know.) It took me three years to get up the guts to let CMU post the full text of my Master's thesis; I still haven't had the wherewithal to go look at it. But I assume that I'll have some ideas worth sharing, once in a while (I mean, most people do), so I'd like to start putting my thoughts out there, even the naive ones that mean I just haven't learned enough, yet. This blog will grow with me, and hopefully my writing ability will grow with it.