There is no point not having a point of view

On February 3, 2005 I had a conversation with Bob that touched on the topic of plagiarism. Bob said something that I had not heard elsewhere on the matter. He thought that the real reason why most students were guilty of plagiarism was because they thought a paper was just a collection of facts and ideas that are collated into a logical order. There is no "self" in the papers that they wrote. An essay is a "third person" affair. Is it any wonder that writing papers are seen by students as a chore? Its just another form of raking leaves.

When I was in first year university I didn't know that there were schools of thought within disciplines. I didn't know that research journals were bloodied battlefields that determined what knowledge and status. It took a mandatory social science course that I took in my second or third year that exposed me to the soft human underbelly of what I thought was straightforward and objective science.

So of course I think Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View policy is laughable. I don't think we can be neutral - its biologically impossible for us to do so. We can't help but judge what is before us. Furthermore, what we think affects what we perceive which, in turn, affects what we think (Stumbling on Happiness does a great job of a quick job of summarizing the science of this. Literary theory, never quick, is also relevant here but I don't touch the stuff myself.)

When we decide not to take a stance and decide to "teach the controversy" instead, we lose something. When teachers are forced to partake in academic crossdressing and present Evolution and Big Coincidence, Global Warming and Within Parameters Warming, Armenian Genocide and a Big Misunderstanding - all side by side, with equal billing - well, more than the truth is lost. Meaning is lost. Lives are lost.

Let's throw our students into the battlefield of ideas as soon as possible.

The closest reference book on the digital shelf

A couple years ago, I was in front of a class of first year, visual arts students in a computer lab in the library where I worked. I was reviewing their answers to the library assignment that the students had been working on for the last 20 minutes. I had worked on the assignment with their professor who was, at the time, sitting in the back of the class. I mention this fact for a reason. Even though the students were in a library, using library computers that displayed the library's website, and even though the students knew that they were there for a library assignment (and while being in the presence of their professor), almost the entire class answered the question "give a definition of pointillism" by using dictionary.com.

I have to admit that the first time this happened, I blanched a bit. But I did feel somewhat better when I realized that I was being treated with the privilege of their honesty. This was how they did research.

I then introduced some of the general and subject dictionaries that were online and offered by the library and as I did so the professor did a wonderful job explaining why the definitions in these dictionaries were of much better in quality and, by the way, had the sort of detail and quality that she was expecting from their upcoming paper. Her presence and her participation made all the difference in this class. The students got to hear an expert explain why they should use expert tools as they worked to become experts themselves.

Without instruction, students won't know the differences between Webster dictionaries and Merriam Webster dictionaries. Most of them won't know the difference between the Cambridge English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. There's not much brand consciousness in dictionaries and brand consciousness is everything in this modern world.

This is why to most folks there are really only three encyclopedias: Britannica, Wikipedia and Encarta.

Wait. Sorry. I forgot the highest ranked encyclopedia in Google: encyclopedia.com

Encyclopedias down the rabbit hole

Have you tried to look for encyclopedias on your local library's website? If not, try it. I'll wait here.

Time passes.

If you can't find a page that lists the encyclopedias on your library's website, it could be due to the fact that no such page exists. It could be that you are searching the website of a library that expects you to search the library's catalogue for what you want. They have decided that they are not able to create and maintain a static website or second database of their online resources because that would require a duplication of effort. Too bad that library catalogues, or what we like to call in the library biz as OPACs... well, too bad that OPACs suck.

Another reason why you may be having difficulty finding encyclopedias in your library's website is because the encyclopedias are nestled snuggly in a section called something like "databases", "indexes", "e-resources", "find articles" or "research tools". After stumbling down this rabbit hole, you then have to search for what you want or browse an a-z list of titles in order to find something that you recognize as an encyclopedia.

Some libraries may also offer a "Reference" or Quick Facts section. Paradoxically, this section will frequently only offer encyclopedias that are freely available on the web. If you want to find the encyclopedias that your library has spent good money on, well, you have to get back to the homepage and find the right rabbit hole. Still other libraries will create annotated lists of useful encyclopedias and even break these down by subject. But these lists will be under a heading like "Subject Guide" or "Research Guide". So if a user has a question about hydrophobia, they are supposed to go to the biology section of the library's database collection (or Biology Research Guide) and search for an approprate research tool to use.

But our user knows what she wants to use. She wants to use an encyclopedia.

I think one of the reasons why its so hard to find encyclopedias on library's websites is because we don't organize our online material by format. I have only stumbled upon one library's website that provides searching by format on the front page and that is the University of Alberta. (Encyclopedias are listed after clicking on the Reference and Quick Facts link but these are free encyclopedias that can be found on the web. The encyclopedias that are paid by the library are to be found in their database of databases. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and the Leddy Library (where I work) took up their example and created a link to encyclopedias under a link called Journal Articles and Research Tools by Subject. We are guilty of not including some of the encyclopedias that can be found in our Research Guides).

Librarians have underestimated the public's desire to have an online encyclopedia that is always at the ready. Will we react to the public's enthusiam for Wikipedia and make encyclopedias easier to find? Or will we wait (and wait) until our library catalogues marry content management systems and give birth to more useful library websites?

Are there encyclopedias that scholars use?

Are there any encyclopedias that currently hold a important position in the understanding of a particular discipline of scholarship? The best way to answer that question would be to ask scholars directly about the matter. Another way to try to ascertain an answer is to see if scholars are citing encyclopedias in their published research.

Using ISI's Web of Science "Cited Reference Search", I searched for the term encyclopedia* to find the papers that had an encyclopedia mentioned in their bibliographies.

There are three indexes within Web of Science. The index that is the smallest - that being, covers the fewest number of journals is the "Arts & Humanities Citation Index". The index covers 1149 journals and for the period of 1996 to 2006, there are only 48 papers encyclopedias entries that are that are cited in a bibliography. Most encyclopedias in this list are only cited once and there is no encyclopedia that is cited repeatedly.

The "Social Sciences Citation Index" covers 1917 journals and from 1996 to 2006, there are 123 works encyclopedias entries that have been cited in a bibliography. Most of the encyclopedia entries are only cited once but there are a handful of exceptions when an entry is cited a couple times. There was only one encyclopedia that was cited frequently (24 times) and that was Encyclopedia Britannica.

Not surprisingly, the Science Citation Index (Expanded) is the largest index within Web of Science. It covers 6543 journals and from 1996 to 2006, 114 papers encyclopedia entries were cited in a bibliography. Unlike the other two indexes, there are encyclopedias whose entries are cited quite heavily. By far, the most heavily cited encyclopedia was "The Encyclopedia of Plant Physiology" with many entries cited over 50 times. The next encyclopedic work with similar impact is "The Encyclopedia of Polymer Science and Engineering".

Now one could make the argument that I have set up this test for encyclopedias to fail from the start as encyclopedias aren't meant to communicate important ideas among scholars. You could say that encyclopedias exist to provide an important reference to students and are meant for their use.

Incidentally, from the years 1996 to 2006, there have been 12 papers in Web of Science that cite Wikipedia.

Do mere mortals buy encyclopedias?

Other than libraries, who buys encyclopedias? And what encyclopedias do they buy?

The bestselling encyclopedia at Amazon is Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs: The Definitive Pop-Up. Barnes and Noble has a similar motley top ten encyclopedias. The first general history encyclopedia that pops up on both booksellers' lists is The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia. I had never heard of it before.

The most catalogued encyclopedia on LibraryThing is Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs. No university library in Ontario carries this encyclopedia. My local library doesn't have it either.

Because Britannica Doesn't Recognize You

When a University of Windsor student, at home in front of the family computer, accesses Britannica.com she will not get the full text of most articles because Britannica costs $12 a month. Britannica does not inform her that she can have full access to its all content through her university library. So the student must know that she has to visit the website of her university library and see if she can find a link to Britannica. She will be authorized to use Britannica using the library's link to Britannica.com once she is authenicated, that being - she must enter her PIN number on her library card before she can get to the site.

When the same student is on campus, she does not have to type in her library card PIN number because Britannica.com recognizes the IP address of the library compter she is using and it lets her see all of its content. She mostly likely doesn't even notice that that there are varying level of access and that her her access was paid by the University. She will assume that the Encyclopedia Britannica is free and can't understand the site doesn't seem to work when she's using her home computer.

Some librarians see this as a "branding issue" but its really an authentication problem.

The Song of the Darnedest Stuff

Can you remember those first articles gushing about the Internet? How you could find just the strangest things there? Then came the articles waxing poetic about Google and how it could find the darnedest things. And now there are articles singing the praises of Wikipedia.

Its the same song. There are just slight variations.

Remember when the Internet was primarily filled with "homepages" of enthusiasts who documented their various arcane interests? During these early days, there were times when you wanted to link to someone's work but their other interests on the site were embarassing. Other problems: you never knew if the page was going to disappear the next day, change URLs, or freeze in time and never be updated again. Sometimes a site becomes uncomfortably political in nature.

Better to link to Wikipedia. You can find the darnedest stuff there!

Wikipedia is to Britannica as American Idol is to the Juilliard School

The latest issue of the New Yorker has a taken a little snapshot of Wikipedia (link will expire eventually) and wonders whether Wikipedia can sustain its battle against the experts. While Wikipedia is compared to Britannica several times in the article, no attention is given to the fact that Wikipedia is free and Britannica costs $11.95 a month ("Save $1,251.60 off the print Encyclopedia Britannica!"). Of course, many people have free online access to Britannica through their local library but they just don't know it.

From my understanding, public libraries are reluctant to advertise their online wares like Britannica for a couple reasons. First, they have limited marketing budgets. And secondly, even if the library could afford a city-wide campaign promoting their online databases, they choose not to because the access to such products are done on a per user basis. This means that while you are able to make three users happy at a given time, you can potentially create a lot of unhappy experiences for the rest of the people who are unable to access the same advertised database.

I work at a university library and have found that the vendors of databases are often able to temporarily waive access restrictions when a librarian wants to teach a class and demonstrate their product. It has been a while since I've worked in a public library so I don't know whether these same vendors would be willing to similarly waive access restrictions for the length of time of a marketing campaign. I would hope so because we can hardly blame the public for using Wikipedia when they don't even know that they have other choices.

Why yes, I am a model

MITA : Brain-based Leadership

A standing army is waiting for orders

When authors wax poetic on the wonders of Wikipedia, they often gush about the ability for just anyone to alter any of its pages within. But to me, that's not the wonder of Wikipedia. What makes Wikipedia so wonderful is not that you, the reader, can easily add a big, fat whopping lie to one of its encyclopedic entries but the fact that more likely than not, your big fat whopping lie will be made to quickly evaporate by one of its many nameless volunteer editors. So when there is a ripple of applause in the blogosphere because someone in libraryland created a wiki, I am frequently unimpressed. Technology is easy. Creating a community that actively contributes and edits content (and comedy) is hard.

Now don't get me wrong. I love Wikipedia. I love the fact that it is not-for-profit and ad-free. I love that it strives for a universal (and multilingual!) access to information for self-education. And while Wikipedia may not do the best job in capturing all facets of all disciplines (like history), it unto itself, captures a history of the present moment where you can see the ideas of the day negotiated in public. I think all librarians would be testifying their love to Wikipedia if it wasn't for that tricky matter of authorship. And so our massive free-standing army of fact-checkers and citation chasers stands idly by.

Imagine if you will if there was a project like Wikipedia that *did* activate just even a fraction of the world's librarians to take up the cause and actively contribute on a regular basis. I do. I dream of a digitization project (untainted by corporate interests) that librarians happily tag away at, in their spare moments. I imagine government document librarians, going above and beyond mere data liberation and moving to liberation of a broader sort.

We have a community of librarians. We can rebuild. We have the technology.

For Future Reference (Harpers.org)

For Future Reference (Harpers.org):
From a list of new Library of Congress subject headings that received Dewey Decimal numbers last year. Originally from Harper's Magazine, June 2006.

Data is not enough

So Richard Wurman is the guy who wrote Information Anxiety and is also responsible for the TED conference. Once only available to the 1000 audience members at each TED, some of the TEDtalks are now being made available online.

The first TEDTalk I checked out was by Hans Rosling - "a public health expert, director of Sweden's world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life". I was really impressed. First, it only took a matter of moments to change the way that I look at what is happening in the "third world".

Secondly, it struck a nerve in my librarian self. Hans makes a quiet but strong case for the need to make publicly available data interesting and useful to the public. And they aren't using libraries to get the data out: they are using software and the internet. Its another example that drives the point that it is no longer enough just to make public information available in a library somewhere. Public information needs public software to make the information work for the public.

Let's put it another way. Which would you rather use: this or this?

Cartoons published in Harpers

When the whole Mohammad cartoon controversy was in full broil, it passed my mind that eventually libraries would have to obtain a copy of the cartoons so that future historians, communication studies folks, and just the plain curious would be able to see for themselves what caused the riots, the deaths, and the handwringing in early 2006.

The trouble was that no one was publishing the cartoons in North America. Sure, you could find the cartoons on the Internet but how could you be sure that you were seeing what was actually published in the Jyllands-Posten? Recall that many of the images circulating the Middle East during that time which were proported to be from the Danish newspaper were actually collected from neo-Nazi groups, eager to fuel the fires of hatred.

Sure, a thumbnail of page three of Jyllands-Posten's culture section from September 30, 2005 is available on Wikipedia, but that image has been slightly altered. One cartoon's Danish caption has been replaced with one that has been translated into English. And I know this because the June 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine has published a thumbnail of said page in an article entitled "Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage" by Art Spiegelman.

The gift of storytelling

The baby was getting a little fussy as it was approaching his bedtime so we picked him up and took him to the front porch to calm him down and enjoy the early evening. Unlike most evenings, there was no clamour of small neighbourhood children about and so the baby was entertained by watching the occasional car go by when he wasn't pulling my hair.

And then the little girl next door wandered out. She was the shiest girl on the block and also the one most desperate to have someone to play with as her little brother was just a baby. We'd frequently see her standing on her front lawn forlornly waiting for a neighbour's child to emerge, waiting with pure ache. When she did play with the other children, she would happily but wordlessly follow them along and mimic whatever game was at hand. This was not just because of shyness; she was a recent immigrant and English was her second language. Like most children, she paid little attention to adults but over time, she overcame her shyness to occasionally join us on the porch so she could silently stare at Mats, the baby, up close. It was yesterday when she spotted us, she stopped, stared at us for a moment, and then bolted back inside.

Moments later she emerged with a stack of small books and she ran to our porch, stopped dead in front of us and looked expectantly. Ghengis took the pile of books, picked one, and began to read to her. You could see her brighten with delight. Reading fed her happiness.

I noticed that all the books had come from the Windsor Public Library. It is moments like these that make me proud to be a librarian.

Mistress of my own domain

Hey. I finally coughed up the cash for my own domain.
New Jack Librarian lives at: http://www.newjackalmanac.ca/newjacklibrarian.html

Unfortunately, the URL cloaking is a little too robust. For example, if you click on New Jack Facts or the motherblog, New Jack Almanac, the URL doesn't change.

In the Age of the Overamplified, a Resurgence for the Humble Lecture - New York Times

In the Age of the Overamplified, a Resurgence for the Humble Lecture - New York Times:

"'I feel like I'm running a rock concert series,' he said (though unlike at rock concerts, the performers at the library are rarely paid; many do it because they have a book to plug). 'I wanted to go beyond academic discourse and speak to a very large public, and to the common reader.'"

The reflective fox

I don't really have a true specialty as a librarian but most of my interests as of late fall into the broad categories of information literacy and the social life of information. What I realized today is where these two venn diagrams intersect: the reflective person.

This idea was a two day process.

Last night I began to slowly make my way through the constructionist theories presented in Seeking meaning : a process approach to library and information services. What I've read so far rings true to me and what I think about information literacy: students write better papers when they take the time to reflect and reconsider what they've learned during the research process. More broadly, it also makes for better learning.

Coincidently, better learning is the same reason why I blog. By taking the time to reflect and write about what I've read, I learn more, I feel that I've done something more than just consumed something, and I make myself eligible for egoboo. Bloggers, wikipedia volunteers, Amazon review addicts - they are all reflective users.

I had this epiphany as I was working through my thoughts generated by reading Dan Chudnov's personal mission: ("Help people build their own libraries") that I found via Lorcan Dempsey's post entitled hedgehogs. I immediately loved the concept and it seemed to fit keeping in mind the recent flurry of library-building endeavours currently underway (RefWorks/Endnote/Procite, LibraryThing, weblogs, A9 stream capture, WebDAV, coins).

But the more I thought about this mission of the library, the more I was becoming unsure of it. Was this The Library's hedgehog concept before the Internet? I don't think so. And does the average public library user necessarily want to create their own library of leisure reading? Again, I'm doubtful.

But should The Library help people (the students, scholars, journalists, activists, bloggers) build their own libraries? Absolutely. Why? My first thought is that reflective users are our core constituency... but I'm going to have to dwell on this a bit more.

Anti-social Software: The book

Daytime television is so unbelievably bad that I regularly choose to watch TV shows about video games rather than suffer the constant chirping of celebrities, even though I'm not much a gamer myself. I'm treating it as a learning experience.

One thing I've learned by watching video game review shows is that there is a very strong emphasis on multiplayer gaming. If a hot new PC, console, or handheld game doesn't doesn't allow you to play over the web, connect to a service like XBOX Live, or allow wireless play, then the makers of these games are called on the carpet. No one is content playing just against a computer anymore.

I thought of this as I was reading Everything Bad is Good For You. Steven Johnson imagines a world that's identicle to ours except that video games are invented before books. He then guesses what teachers and parents would have to say about reading:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of sensory and motor cortices.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new "libraries" that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sittle alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers...

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. . . . This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to "follow the plot" instead of learning to lead.

While Steven Johnson is trying to make a point how much video games have been demonized by parents and pundits, I think we can still take some of the passages at pure face-value. To an outsider, reading looks terribly anti-social. To a non-reader, the library wouldn't been seen a social place (much less as a lauded "third-place") but as somewhere where people can be alone, together.

If we want libraries to be perceived as social places (and thus, have a place in a society where TV channels are dedicated to video games), we are going to have do more than provide chairs where people can read.

Gang of Four

4 books I stumbled upon in my local library that changed me good

1. computer lib/dream machines
   
2. whole earth catalogue
   
3. forget all the rules about graphic design (including the ones in this book)
   
4. how to raise your iq by eating gifted children
   

4 movies

1. I heard the mermaids call my name
   
2. crouching tiger, hidden dragon
3. trust
4. the nasty girl

4 websites visited daily (other than bloglines)

1. kingdom of loathing
   
2. doonesbury
3. songs to wear pants to
4. cardhouse
   

4 things on tv

1. attack of the show
2. this is daniel cook
3. world cup soccer
4. the office [bbc]

4 songs

1. "hollow log" by beck
   
2. "you're going to make me lonesome when you go" by madeleine peyroux
3. "polegnala e todora (love song)" by le mystere des voix bulgares
4. "bossa bye baby" by songs to wear pants to [mp3]
   

4 food groups

1. bread & grains
2. fruit & vegetables
   
3. meats
   
4. dairy

4 places to eat

1. baccus roti, toronto
2. three: a tasting bar, windsor, ont
   
3. bonnington cafe, london, uk
4. schwartz's, montreal

Amazon Approval Slips

I've never had much fondness for third-party approval plans for buying library books because I haven't had much luck with them. Now, I understand that many of these approval plan companies are revamping their products and I haven't tried these next generation systems yet. For their collective sake, I hope they come up with something as simple and as powerful as Amazon's Approval Slips.

I just realized that only librarians will read the phrase "Amazon Approval Slips" and know that slips is meant as a noun and not a verb. Library jargon can sound so silly.

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

I learned from The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture that it is thought that 30% of the web is porn. I was also reminded of the time before Google when most search engines would regularly have porn sites in their results of even the user had the most benign of intentions. That pretty much stopped once Google and its vastly superior indexing algorithms appeared on the web and well, then pretty much took over.

John Battelle begins the book not the conventional way that I have done by mentioning the superior results that Google first brought but reminds us that every search begins with an intention and that Google has, in its sea of servers, the largest database of human wants the world has ever seen. This is just one of the reasons why Google is increasingly becoming a conduit for business on the internet and why businesses like Amazon are getting into the business of search.

This book is more than a simple history of a business - and not just because Google is positioned to be more than just another company. At the moment, Google is the best "Yellow Pages" of the Internet but in the future it could very well become a new layer of Internet infrastructure. Ironically, after reading the book, I'm more wary of this future because Google now seems much more human to me. Recommended.

Asking Metafilter

I have recently become enamoured with Ask Metafilter:

Ask MetaFilter is a discussion area for sharing knowledge among members of MetaFilter. There is also a filtered view of this page showing just questions with "best" marked answers and another page of fantastic questions and answers suggested by members.

Last year, when I did information literacy sessions for first year students I would frequently begin by asking the class where did they normally go when they need answers to their questions. They would answer: friends, google, professor, library, parents... and with some pressing, they would then expand their answers a little to include such things as The Yellow Pages. One reason I liked beginning this way was it let the students know that we knew that the library was just one of the places they went for when they needed help.

No one answered "my virtual community".

I haven't even heard the phrase virtual community in years. Years ago, I once worked a company that tried to build one (inspired by this book) and it failed miserably. I think the phrase died because it was too grandiose and community is a very hard ideal to meet. So the phrase doesn't describe what I think Ask Metafilter is. But its close.

Ask Metafilter Its an active (almost too active) discussion area where there are (mostly) intelligent, confounding questions and (mostly) intelligent, insightful answers. I think Ask Metafilter works because it has a large population filled with folks from all different parts and varied different backgrounds and because the one time $5 donation to join in keeps most of the bozos out. As a librarian who is obsessing over questions at the moment, I love Ask Metafilter but I know I'm late to the game as jessamyn from librarian.net has been answering questions there for a while now.

Which got me thinking. I think a public library of a city with a relatively large population should try hosting a local copy of Ask Metafilter. The set-up would be exactly the same - with a possible exception or variation of the $5 manditory donation. There would be librarians partcipating but unlike "traditional online reference service" any library user could answer anyone else's question. The more I think about the idea, the more I like it. It would demonstrate that the library is a place where conversations occur and questions are raised and answered. And it would recognize and reward the everyday experts in the community. Librarians have to recognize that sometimes the fastest way of getting an answer is not to pick up a book, but to pick up the phone and call that someone you know who's read that book.

While I'm relatively optimistic of such a project in a public library, I don't think this could work in an educational setting as there are too many students already that don't parse their assignments properly into bite-sized questions. These are the types that bomb mailing lists and such with their assignment verbetim. But then again, an Ask LibraryFilter may be a way to demonstrate the benefits of being able to ask a good question.

I should Ask Metafilter to see what they think of its viability.

Predictions for 2006

I'm taking up Karen's request for Top Trends that will affect libraries.
Here's three ideas:

1. More discussion about The Long Tail will ensue

I'm cheating: I know there will be *some* further discussion of this idea in 2006 because Chris Anderson has expanded his influential essay in WIRED into a book due to be published in June. I know librarians will be talking about it as librarians have responded positively to the idea of the Long Tail because its a new way to explain the value of libraries. As libraries are storehouses of rarely used out-of-print material, we are the original long tail. But there are greater ramifications of this theory as Lorcan Dempsey suggests in his presentation at Access 2005. The Long Tail suggests that we have to distribute "deep" goods over a "wide" audience. Will this further drive consortial partnerships or collaboration with OCLC?

2. Google will lose a bit of its luster

I'm wagering that Google's honeymoon period is going to end soon. Granted, my thinking is coloured by my recent reading of The Search but recent developments hint that the general public is eventually going to realize that Google's is a search engine that is meant to drive the vehicle for commerce and that whole "Don't Be Evil" shtick was just engineer hubris. Libraries will look more favourably to Amazon because of its A9 service.

3. Someone is going to develop automatic tagging

Or structured blogging is going to emerge. Or GoogleBase will be re-designed so it will make more sense to its users. Or some other attempt to bring about the labeling necessary to bring rise to the Semantic Web is going to come about.

New Jack Librarian is so very 1999

The only incidence of New Jack Librarian that I can find on the web is from 1999. Concidently, in 1999 I started my current job at the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor. So I think it will make an appropriate title for this blog on some of my thoughts on libraryland.