Love the BiblioCommons logo

BiblioCommons has a website.

The site feed has changed

The New Jack Librarian feed has moved to http://www.newjackalmanac.ca/newjacklibrarian.xml
where it should have been all this time. As well, I'm moving all these files to a new server so all the 'Cogeco' links will disappear shorty. Please adjust accordingly. All apologies.

Arrested Collection Development

Inspired by the collection policies thoughts of Peter Zimmerman, I thought I would try to briefly summarize my largely antagonistic feelings towards collection development policies. That being said I should state that I have hostile feelings towards the policies I was taught in library school long ago.

From what I recall, a collection development policy can be summed up as several pages of call number ranges with words that essentially express: "we are trying to get lots of this", "we want some of this stuff", and "there's not much on this subject that we want".

Now I collect in the sciences for a middle-sized Canadian university and I am responsible for selecting books that support the research needs of our faculty and graduate students as well as learning resources for our undergraduate population. This means I collect for very specific research topics (e.g. apoptosis and nitric oxide ) and for very general areas (Chemical composition of everyday products). It is possible to describe what I collect using the above collection development method, but it is uninspiring, to say the very least.

And what does it mean to 'collect generally for the sciences' really mean, anyway? Does it mean I buy 'real science' for the faculty and 'popular science' for the undergraduates? Or does it mean I try to buy "the canon" for all the sciences and simply buy more books on local research interests? And how can I - a layperson - describe to my community what I consider 'the canon'?

And so over time I developed a one sentence description of my collection development goals: "I will collect the books necessary to follow the research of the university's faculty and to collect the books most cited by the research published in Nature, Science, and PNAS, supplemented with books dealing with local geography and ecology and well-received popular science". IMHO, I think this one sentence is more useful than a twenty page wish list of call number ranges.

Over the years, I have internalized a number of possible 'rule-based' collection development guidelines that I think could be appropriate for academic or public libraries:

"We strive to collect the books ...
- in Oprah's Book Club
- nominated for the Man Booker Prize in Literature
- published by faculty
- suggested by faculty and graduate students
- published by local authors and publishers
- on the topic of local history and geography (Windsor, Essex County, Detroit) and ecology (Tall Grass Prairie, Carolinian, Great Lakes Watershed)
- that were most frequently requested by Interlibrary Loan
- that make the New York Times 100 Most Notable Books of the Year
- are reviewed in Highly Important Journal in field in question"

Other than being clear and concise, an additional benefit of using 'rules' is that it gives you a means to measure whether you have achieved what you set yourself out to do. If you say that your library is going to have up-to-date dictionaries for the top ten languages spoken on campus, then you can measure your success at present and then again in five year's time. Your community can judge your efforts as easily as well.

I understand that there may be reticence to this form of collection development policies because it appears to hand over the collection making decisions away from the librarian to outside forces, some of them being commercial interests. While I am not in anyway trying to negate the role of the collections librarian, I do think it is about time that libraries try to align the way we decide to add material to our collections to the way that our communities decide what next book they want to read. They certainly aren't decided what to read next based on our collection development policies.

In case this goes offline...

I am going to transferring servers in the next couple of days. Should have done this properly last year.

The most impressive library-oriented business without a website

All of my misgivings about tagging in the catalogue have been made mute by the user-interface (in progress) of Bibliocommons : "Most Impressive Library-Oriented Business Without A Website".

Reading Reading Lists

I was going to write a post about a hypothetical academic library catalogue in which only faculty are allowed to tag and link items. But before I began I thought it would be best to search about aimlessly on the web on the topic of university reading lists.

You see, I have a half-baked notion in my head that a university education can be reduced to a professor helping a class work through texts to achieve familiarity in a subject. I have had this theory ever since I had a conversation with a colleague who told me that the coursework of Oxford and Cambridge is largely consumed by the act of reading and learning from daunting readings lists. And then I got distracted by all the reading lists I found online: those for preliminary reading for prospective university students, those to introduce students to the intellectual life of the university, those provided by libraries and those provided by publishers.

Before starting this post, I had assumed that most university reading lists were in locked in course management software (oh why did we call them 'course reserves' instead of 'reading lists?'). Now I'm not so sure. Perhaps there's still time to integrate reading lists into the very realm of reading.

The future is here its just waiting to be introduced

So I was reading this document from the near-future (the January 2007 issue of WIRED magazine to be exact) and the first article is about a new library at Chicago State University that is closed stacks. All book retrieval is done by robot.

My favourite stats from the article:

• Average time for a robot to retrieve five books: 2.5 minutes
• Average time for a student to retrieve five books: 2 hours

And then it became oh so readily apparent: academic libraries were going to back to close-stack entities. It just seemed to be the logical conclusion if you consider the following:

• academic librarians love to buy books and are loath to discard books
  
• our present day institutions rarely commission new library buildings
  
• Google, Amazon, and other organizations are beginning to scan the out of print books that make up academic library collections and make them available online for browsing
  
• consumers are used to having books and DVDs delivered to them
• the ability to browse the library shelves is largely unappreciated
  
• students want quiet places to study
• people complain about long reference numbers

I love external validation

I am part of a sad, bizarre subculture.

Hosting a Party on the web

There's been a lot of talk as of late about social networking software. To my mind, there's been too much attention given to 'software' and scant attention given to the 'social'.

So next time someone you know suggests that the website in question could benefit from a wiki, comments, or a discussion area, make sure you ask them who is going to host the party.

In this interview with .net magazine, Flickr founder Caterina Fake likens building an online community to throwing a party:

According to Caterina: "The most difficult part is not the technology but actually getting the people to behave well." When first starting the community the Flickr team were spending nearly 24 hours online greeting each individual user, introducing them to each other and cultivating the community. "After a certain point you can let go and the community will start to maintain itself, explains Caterina. "People will greet each other and introduce their own practices into the social software. It's always underestimated, but early on you need someone in there everyday who is kind of like the host of the party, who introduces everybody and takes their coat.

I recall those early days of Flickr...Stewart and Caterina were everywhere, commenting on everything. A core group of people followed their example and began to do the same, including Heather Champ, who now manages Flickr's community in an official capacity. Matt did a similar thing with MetaFilter too...he spent a lot of time interacting with people on there, taking their coats, and before long others were pitching in. [kottke]

With all the social software options out there, at least failure is cheaper now.

Back in my day (*ahem*) virtual communities were all the rage. In fact, a corporation that I was working for decided to create its own virtual community for a certain segment of a certain industry because one of the company's VPs had read this book. And after thousands (tens? hundreds?) were spent in developing the site, it was ready to launch.

I was skeptical of the whole enterprise and so I was surprised that after the first day, users were posting questions in the (empty) discussion boards. But no one in the corporation bothered to respond until later in the week. You see, while the VP didn't spare any expense in getting a great outside development team to create the site, he essentially tacked on the content responsibilities to existing employees with already stressed and busy work lives and furthermore, gave them no incentive to participate in *his* project. The site was stillborn.

Like most things, it needed love and attention to survive. And a party atmosphere.

By sharing we learn what has been lost

Today I felt a little delight and a little disappointment as I tried out some of the newest Refworks features.

I love love love RefGrabIt and the ability to create RSS feeds from RefWorks folders has made me giddy thinking of the possibilities of integrating RSS feeds into our library's website. In my eagerness to create an RSS feed of articles that I can't help but write about on my other blog, I started trolling my library's databases for some past gems. And that's when I noticed that Art Spiegelman's "Drawing Controversy" article was not available online. It's the article that reprints "the danish cartoons". I was horribly worried about this until I realized that at least the Leddy Library still subscribes to the microfilm version of the magazine so present and future researchers will not be shortchanged by the idiosyncrasies of online reprinting rights.

Anyway, this all got me thinking that library consortiums should start designating "library of last resort" status to our collective print serial collections because we can't assume that someone has a copy somewhere. Because sharing responsibility is just as important as sharing resources.

From MemoryBlog

MemoryBlog: "From Michael Ravnitzky, a frequent contributor to The Memory Hole, comes this article on 'the Directorate of Legal Research (DLR), a little known but well-regarded and highly influential research department contained within the Library of Congress.' As with its sibling, the Congressional Research Service, the massive amounts of world-class research being produced by the DLR (almost 2,000 publications in 2004 alone) virtually never make it to the public, despite being funded by taxpayers. "

Thanks George!

Solvitur ambulando » Blog Archive » Library-in-a-Box: First thoughts: "George Soros and a host of other funders are going to pay smart people around the world to develop free and open source software for libraries, specifically targeted at libraries in the developing world. This is kind of a big deal."

I think its a very big deal indeed!

The people's history of the Marginal Librarian

I found out from Library Juice that my alma mater's publication, the Marginal Librarian has recently published another fine issue of library school goodness.

And I was pleased to see that this issue had a little section on the history of the 'Marginal'. I was there at the beginning and I can say that what is written is correct. Although, it is missing a little 'pre-history'...

Before Andre took upon the task of starting up a student publication for the library school, myself and my seat-mates in the back of the classroom would entertain ourselves during class by producing a little sloppy zine called 'The Marginal Librarian'.



I think I have all but one of the issues. I'll check with one of the other partners in crime to see if she still has the one I'm missing.

Anyway. Keep fighting the power, Marginal!

I like Wikimedia

Hey. If you are ever looking for graphics for your website, library or otherwise, a great source is The Wikimedia Commons.

I'm currently in the process of creating a website for a friend and found the site quite useful. I was in need of images of flags of a number of countries found Wikimedia most useful because it offered images in a vector format which makes for perfect rescaling to get everything just the right size.

The trouble with tagging

Am I the only person who thinks that giving the user the ability to add 'tags' to the library catalogue is a bad idea? This thought isn't completely apropos of nothing. Folks are meeting to discuss the future of the Integrated Library System. I don't want 'tagging' in our future OPAC.

Here's why:

To me, tagging makes best sense in a context where words need to be added in order to be found. Photos (Flickr) and videos (YouTube) are just two instances where tagging makes it easy and rewarding for the user to annotate their own work because otherwise it would be unlikely that the piece would be found at all. But when you are tagging a piece of text that you've written, in essence you are either duplicating the words that you already used in your piece of text, or you are using more generalized words or synonyms of the main ideas in your piece of text. Essentially you are tagging a text with words that you didn't think were important to include in the text in the first place.

Now when we think of tagging in the library context, we are thinking of a user supplementing a text record (created by a professional) to make it more complete and findable. The idea is that, with tagging enabled the library catalogue becomes social entity, being improved upon by the wisdom of the crowds. But unlike projects like Wikipedia, there is no social reward for improving a catalogue through tagging. There's no incentive - no boost to the ego. And then there's the chance for vandalism.

I think my biggest concern about tagging is that there is the understanding that tags never expire. Once a record is tagged for someone's to read list, it will stay there forever. The idea is that every record will accumulate enough "correct" tags that the signal will overcome the noise. But that's not necessarily going to happen [via]. Over time, tags clouds inevitably amount to a collection of very general words and we know, as librarians that searching for generalized words like 'history' create very large and useless search results.

All this criticism aside, I don't want to take away from the work that the University of Pennsylvania Library has done in creating a library catalogue with tags. For one, they've demonstrated that the temptation to 'deface' a library catalogue with junk tags is largely unrealized. Besides, I think they've created a better tagging service than Amazon and there are very few instances when one can say that of our library systems.

Ms. Dewey defeats Google? Hardly.

I asked Ms. Dewey if she was a librarian and judging by her response, she thought the question was quite lewd [via].

Pro-torture politicians by birth sign

I'd like to bring your attention to this page for two reasons. (It is from the Washington Post and it presents the votes of the 109th Congresss, 2nd Session on Bill HR 6166 aka The Torture Bill)

The first reason why I would like you to see this page is because I want to you to take note who voted for this atrocious bit of legislation and react accordingly.

Then I would like you admire how the page is automatically a summary but allows the user to further delve into the particulars of the information, such vote by the astrological signs of the members of Congress. (Oh Cancer, why do you have to be sooo defensive?) I would cite this as an example of a fundamental way newspaper sites need to change.

If you click on the bill's name, you will be taken to a page with a link to more information about the bill from the Library of Congress. This information has been remastered elsewhere.

Digital Bookplates

Brown University attaches digital bookplates to the catalogue records of donated items. [web4lib] Very classy!

Ze Show Called Hackfest

I'm late jumping on this bandwagon, but I would like to sing the praises of Ze Frank's The Show videoblog (additional background info).

He's got computer and music skillz. He's humane. He's funny. He has given the best answer to "I'm going to school... what major should I choose?" that I've ever heard [transcript].

Earlier today I was going through some of the more popular shows but I stopped after hearing the brain crack show because, well, it put me in place.

For those of you who won't take my word that its worth watching a videoblog, I'll try to summarize the jist of this show: a reader asks if Ze is running out of ideas. Ze says, yes, he runs out of ideas every day. "If you don't want to run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them.... then they stay in your head forever like brain crack." He then warns us that many folks are addicted to this brain crack . These folks keep their ideas in their brains, forever imagining how great and perfectly executed these ideas will one day become. He tells us that the bummer is that most ideas suck when you do them. When Ze gets and idea - even a bad one - he tries to get it out in the world as soon as possible. And then he breaks into song. Really.

Okay, so I realized then and there that I had an addiction to brain crack. I was hoarding my Hackfest ideas. So, inspired by Ze Frank, here they are. Um, for other people to execute them.

1. Create two-player game that is not unlike Hotbooks except that its played online only. Or create a one-player game in which certain books in a library are considered horcruxes that need to be identified and neutralized.
   
   
2. Inspired by ASU's Index to Physical, Chemical and Other Property Data, I think we - the libraries of the world - should create a collective index to the best print resources (without online equivalents) in our reference collections. It could be a wiki but it could also be something else.

Now I realize that the fine folks running Hackfest may not need an overabundance of half-baked ideas but dammit, I can't lose the award named after me for another year!

A collection of thoughts on curating and libraries

My wee little mind was blown this morning as I learned about two particular libraries from the if:book blog: The Prelinger Library and The Reanimation Library. Both are new libraries dedicated to preserving visually rich material for the purposes of repurposing by artists, historians, scholars, writers and other cultural workers.

From the overview and philosophy section of the Reanimation Library:

Of particular interest to the Reanimation Library is the loss of visual information that occurs during the aforementioned process of weeding. Even though text is often accompanied by images, collection development policies generally assign little weight to the graphic dimension of a work, unless that work happens to be graphically driven (i.e. a book on a visual artist, graphic design, or an atlas). Most library collection development policies place priority on acquiring items with current textual information and replacing items where that information is lacking or outdated. This priority, coupled with the continual production of new editions as fields of knowledge evolve, create the growing fossil record of outdated books—a veritable feast for image archaeologists. The Reanimation Library is committed to building a collection of materials that are rich in visual information, regardless of the currency of their textual information. The Library serves as a repository and, more pertinently, an access point for such materials.

This is beautiful, mad genius.

Libraries, like the academic library where I am employed, must weed their Reference collections in order to give these collections meaning as a Reference Collection is defined as useful works that one refers to frequently. But if one saves the visually rich detritus of the Reference Collection and then turns this material into a collection unto itself, then these useless works become a unique collection that gains value through a new community.

I was so captivated by the idea of these libraries that over the course of the day I kept thinking about libraries and collections. When does a collection of books become more valuable than when its part of a larger library or works? Are libraries just troves of unprocessed ore? Should we think of libraries in terms of collections of items instead of concentrating on the individual items themselves?

Library exhibitions blur the line between the library and the museum. When you select items from a large collection and display them to demonstrate an idea that brings them all together, it begins sounds to me like you are curating an museum.

What's the difference between a library and a museum anyway? Well coincidently, also today Richard Akerman posted this succinct comparison:

library = community access to reusable stuff
museum = community access to unique stuff
archive = nobody/privileged access to important stuff

He also makes this important point: "'Reusable stuff' is practically the definition of online content".

The Tate Museum offers a very limited means to "curate" your own museum. Perhaps libraries should allow users to create their own online "collections" from our holdings. We could even hold contests for the best collections. To me, this would be more egalitarian than the book collecting contests that are held annually at three dozen libraries, including Cornell and Michigan State University, that culminate in the Collegiate Book-Collecting Championship.

Both The Prelinger Library and The Reanimation Library chose to be libraries of physical books as opposed to dedicating efforts to digitize their collected works. They still have faith in browsing and papery goodness. Libraries don't have to be completely re-purposed.

The Special Librarian theme song

I didn't go to any conferences when I was attending library school but some of my classmates did. Over the summer, one such classmate went to a Special Library Association conference (this was in 1995 I think) and she showed off the swag she acquired on her adventure to some of us. My eyes fell on a cassette that was in the pile and I, being curious and brazen, asked if I could have it. Jealous of her hoard, she would only let me borrow the cassette. So I dutifully took it home and gave it a listen. On the cassette was a song.

I dubbed a copy of its contents, and returned the casette to her the next day. If I had bothered to write down the song's title or who peformed the piece, I must have misplaced it (this was before I was granted my degree, mind you). Ten years later, I digitized some of my mixed tapes.

And so, for your listening pleasure: The Special Librarian Theme Song !
[link expires in 7 days or 100 downloads.. which ever comes first]

The library as hand gestures

Have you ever stumbled upon something that is so obvious and yet strikes you as a deeply profound secret truth? That's what I felt when I read this passage from Worlds of Reference some days ago:

Human beings have presumably, since time immemorial, used their fingers for pointing and listing, two primary modes of referring and organizing... Although the languages we have used in the last two or three millennia do not date back directly to Cro-Magnon times, it is still worthwhile noting that we use the term 'index' for both the pointing finger and a list of a certain kind that also figuratively points...

It got me thinking.

The library can broken down into two activities: organizing (technical services) and referring (reader services).

I visit a website and its homepage is called index.html. As I move my mouse, the pointer on the screen turns from an arrow to a hand with an outstretched index finger.

You can use your index finger to point out something to someone. Or you can bring it to your lips and make a shushing noise.

Recommendations with Reservations

A copy of To Kill A Mockingbird has been sitting on my bedside table for the whole summer and its largely been untouched. I don't really want to read it. But I am determined to plow through the thing since every book recommendation engine I have ever tried has pushed this book on me. In retailation, I dissed Suggestica this morning.

I have been thinking about book recommendation systems lately. Because these systems are created by those who are trying to sell you books, they are designed to push books that you may want to read. If you like a particular book, the system will suggest other books by the same author or in the same genre. This gets boring pretty quick. While I am occasionally paralyzed by choice when it comes to my next reading selection, I already know what I like to read. What I want a system that will tell me what I should read.

Sometimes we should be reading books that challenge the ideas and personal beliefs that we hold dear. Sometimes we should be reading books on topics that don't interest us much. Sometimes we should be reading books because they will help us understand other books. And sometimes we should be reading works because our professor has assigned them for us to read.

Here's a Library 2.0 (shudder - I can't believe I just typed that phrase) application I would like to see. I would like to see an application that injests the rss feed of every university professor's class readings and keeps track of the popularity of each citation. This ranking information would then be fed back into library applications like the library catalogue or periodical databases and would tell the reader: you should read this.

My fly pentop computer

So some weeks ago, I went to Toys R Us with the intent of buying the baby some blocks. Baby got blocks. I got Fly.



My spontaneous purchase surprised myself as I'm not usually one for electronic gadgets. I don't own a laptop or PDA and my ancient cell phone is a hand-me-down. But ever since I read about the Fly Pentop computer in WIRED Magazine, I wanted one mightily. I think I was captivated by the notion of a portable organizer that was easy to use and inherently fun. I justified the cost by telling myself that I was acting on behalf of my profession as I investigated the social ramifications of infusing computing technology into paper and pen.

And so, this review.

First off, the Flypen will not become my PDA of choice as you can only associate three words with each scheduled event. This makes it an appropriate reminding tool for students (PRACTICE MATH EXAM) but not grown ups who live in the land of acronymed sub-committees (UCRPLM PRESENTATION REVIEW). And since the Flypen is designed for students in grades 6 through 8, I'm hardly in a position to complain. So I will try to review the system keeping its official mandate in mind.

In short, the Flypen is an educational toy and as such, it is a slave to two masters. No one can serve two masters well, and when it comes down to it, the Flypen does a better job serving education as opposed to serving up fun. That is, certain kinds of fun.

One of the most mind-blowing tricks you can do with your Flypen is to draw a keyboard on some Flypaper and then "play" the piano (you tap the pen onto the drawn keys and the pen makes the appropriate sound). You can also draw a little drum set and play/record buttons and compose a little ditty. But making music is the only form of "unstructured play" that the current Flypen system provides. Most of the fun is provided in the form of games embedded in Flypaper that you have to buy.

I have only been able to play the Fly Games that came with my initial start up package and so I haven't been able to try some of the more intriguing ones. I've played the geography games, the matching games, hangman, and the quizes. Some of the quizes reminded me of the Invisible Ink travel activity books sold along highways (and they were just as disappointing). But the quizes that were simple personality tests really impressed me -- not because of any insights into my character -- but because the ability to embed the answer key in the paper means that there is no opportunity to cheat and the results take no calculation on your part.

So its not surprising that the ability to practice math, spelling, and even tests from standardized textbooks is the real strength of the Flypen system. I can see how the Flypen system could inject both instant and helpful feedback into rote learning and I think a child struggling with a subject could appreciate its infinately patient, non-human help. And if I was a student learning Spanish, I know I would love the pen's ability to identify words written in English and announce and spell its translation, since I learn best by writing things down. Whether Leapfrog will develop what I really would like - "Fly Through French" - I suspect depends on whether the Flypen franchise will, ahem, fly.

One of the things that I have learned from thinking about the Flypen is that having an amazing technology, unto itself, is not enough to become a successful product. The potential of pentop computing and smart paper is so massive and yet its unlikely to be realized because the technological change is *too* great. We have invested thousands of years into "normal" pen and paper and that's a lot of cultural inertia. Educational software may be the best way for this technology to get a toe-hold into our world. That's the strength of the promise of potentially better marks at school... which is pretty scary when you think about it.

Hotbooks - turning the library into a game space

From kottke I found out about the The Come Out and Play Festival - a "festival dedicated to street games. It is three days of play, talks, and celebration, all focused on new types of games and play." I want to go out and play but I'm housebound at the moment. So instead I can only read about the festival on the web...

Its being held in New York City and on September 23rd there's a game afoot in the New York Public Library called Hotbooks. From the "Come out and play" description:

Libraries are dying spaces. Hot Books is a game designed to bring life back into libraries by forcing players to explore, discover and share the deserted and unexplored spaces that make up a library.

Hot Books is a game where players “attach” books to each other. The game play of Hot Books takes place over the internet. Each player starts by creating a profile for himself. Other players then attach book titles to that profile and gain a point. If a player wants to detach a book from his profile, he has to go to the library and find a specific word in that book, which allows him to detach the book. Once the player detaches the book, he can attach it to any other player.

The game augments the library into a social space –where books are re-imagined into social markers that creates a new experience of exploring a library.

The game was designed by Nick Reid for a game design class at UC Berkeley and the game The game was inspired by the unused, lost and forgotten book(s?) in UC Berkeley's Doe Library. My favourite part from the original description of the game is this:

The critical moment of the game occurs when the real world and digital space no longer coincide, which happens when a book is lost in the library. This creates an impossible situation for the player, since the player must be able to find the book in order to obtain the key to detach it. If the player cannot find the book, then the play of passing the books stops. This critical moment, and the dilemma it present when the player cannot find the book, illustrates the fragility of the physical world of books.

Recently I've noticed a number of these events where a public space is turned into field of play. Why today on Boing Boing I learned that there will be an "alternate reality game" set in Toronto called Waking City -- "a kind of city-wide ongoing scavenger-hunt and puzzle where clues and collaboration come over the net".

And evidently, for more details, one must attend an information session being held at The Lillian H Smith Library.

Is the Internet making my newspaper dummer?

I haven't read Chirs Anderson's The Long Tail yet and so I don't know whether he would apply long tail dynamics to newspapers. But I did read a recent article on Slate (How the New York Times Makes Local Papers Dumber) that suggests that there are other forces at work that tend to concentrate subscriptions to the biggest newspapers at the expense of local papers:

Never mind Times print expansion for a moment. What about the great Web incursion, which is looting educated readers from local newspapers everywhere? The Web editions of the Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Time, CNN, the Guardian, and many other news sites appeal to the same demographic that defects to the Times.

Speaking of which, have you seen the digital version of The Guardian? If not, you should try out the demo because I defy you to find a more beautiful and useable interface to an online newspaper. By the way, at $20 per month, it is $10 cheaper than cost for home delivery of the The Globe and Mail, which, I must say, I am beginning to find boring.

How I found Ambient Finadability

We are said to live in "The Information Age". But unlike say, "The Bronze Age" when Bronze was valuable, its not information that's valuable. Its attention. Your time (which has always been finite) is now considered a precious resource.

So I was almost immediately disappointed by this passage from the preface of Peter Morville'’s Ambient Findability:

So, what's this book about? That's a tough one. I could tell you it's about information interaction at the crossroads of mobile computing and the Internet, or claim it opens a window onto the singular cultural revolution of our time... But I won't. Instead, I'll ask you to read it, for aboutness lies in the eye of the beholder.

That was the first warning sign. If the author can't be assed to give you a good reason to spend some time with his thoughts, then why should you? I was also off-put by the matter of citing the Internet as the "signular" cultural revolution (umm... 9/11 anyone?). I bristle at technology inspired hubris.

But I did preserver and read this book because I was captivated by the book's tagline: What We Find Changes Who We Become (which is way sexier than the line that I use when teaching about online searching, What you ask for is what you get so be careful what you ask for). And it should also be said that I gave the book a chance because of Morville's reputation. Peter is considered as a "founding father of information architecture" and he is a librarian to boot.

So I read this 179 page book. The only part of the book that addresses the promise of the tagline can be found on page 169:

Which brings us to graffitti theory, my corollary to both memory-prediction and broken windows, which suggests that all information that flows through our senses continuously and unconsciously shapes our memories, beliefs, predictions, decisions and behaviors. We are born with instinct, but in matters of intuition, we are lifetime learners. Information is data that makes a difference, literally. It changes our minds, physically.

Peter is not a cognitive scientist. I'm not either, but that's not going to stop me from saying that this is flat out wrong. From what I learned from Daniel Gilbert, we don't perceive everything and we don't remember everything. The only way Peter's theory works is by circular logic: if we define information as something that changes us, then all information changes us.

So what is the aboutness of this book? I'd describe it as a buffet table of stories from the disciplines of computer science, linguistics, urban planning, library science, graphic design and others, done in the name of Information Architecture... err sorry, Ambient Findability. Search engines, information literacy, web page navigation, maps, ants, city design, the semantic web, are invoked in this book. It's a quick tour, written for the business man as opposed to the academic, the is writing light and lively, and one is sure to find at least a couple items that will amuse (my fave: Info-overload harms concentration more than marijuana).

But, on the downside, I found the whole exercise very gimmicky. Morville litters the book with interesting excerpts from books popular in the blogosphere. That's fine but sometimes, like when he summarized stories from Freakonomics and The Tipping Point, they feel like diversions from the topic at hand. And the irrational exuberance for all things Internet frequently made me cringe. Nowhere does the cultural-name dropping and techno-cheerleading gets as painfully silly as this passage:

We hear this same rebel yell in the ancient markets of the cluetrain manifesto, the mobile thumb tribes of smart mobs, and the disruptive technologies of peer-to-peer. We embrace the hidden power of social networks and the emergent wisdom of crowds. We are small pieces loosely joined in persistent disequilibrium, gloriously and gladly out of control.

What I couldn't find in this book was the reason that brought all the stories and examples together. I couldn't find an argument being made or a point of view being advocated. I got the feeling that Morville was taking Williams Gibson's "The future is here. Its just not evenly distributed yet" as a guideline to structuring his book.

I found this book a waste of time.

13 Ways of Looking at Wikipedia, Encyclopedias and Libraries

There! I did it. I managed to untangle my confused thoughts and feelings on Wikipedia, libraries and encyclopedias into digestible parts.

13 Ways of Looking at Wikipedia, Encyclopedias and Libraries:

1. A standing army is waiting for orders
2. Wikipedia is to Britannica as American Idol is to the Juilliard School
3. The Song of the Darnedest Stuff
4. Because Britannica Doesn't Recognize You
5. Do mere mortals buy encyclopedias?
6. Are there encyclopedias that scholars use?
7. Encyclopedias down the rabbit hole
8. The closest reference book on the digital shelf
9. There is no point not having a point of view
10. Many hands make crappy work
11. One search box to unite them all
12. Wikipedia is War
    
13. Why do we keep buying print encyclopedias?
    

No more for a while. I promise.

Why do we keep buying print encyclopedias?

From 1996 to 2006, there were 285 encyclopedia entries that were cited in Web of Science. During that same time period, the Leddy Library of the University of Windsor (where I am employed) acquired 580 encyclopedias.

Some of these encyclopedias include: "Blackwell encyclopedic dictionary of human resource management", "Cambridge encyclopedia of hunters and gatherers", "Contemporary youth culture : an international encyclopedia", "Encyclopedia of ageism", "Encyclopedia of Arab women filmmakers", "Encyclopedia of fire", "Encyclopedia of local history", "Encyclopedia of relationships across the lifespan"... (Wot? No "Encyclopedia of the Enyclopedia"?)

I have to admit, I am dubious of the value of these works. It's not that that I doubt their scholarship. I just have a hard time imagining that the perceived value of these works are so great that they would draw a student in their dorm room to walk across campus and into the library in order to look at them. Not when Wikipedia is a click away.

I'm not saying that the print encyclopedia is dead or, by proxy, the library's reference collection is dead. It just smells bad.

There is valuable material in our reference collection and if we really want to make the material available we are going to have to put some effort into showcasing it. What I envision is an online index to the table of contents of our print reference collection. This revelation came to me after I had stumbled upon the ASU's Index to Physical, Chemical and Other Property Data which is simply magnificent.

Since so many libraries have similar contents in their reference collections, I imagine that it would be best if only own such index would be created and maintained any librarian interested. Library holdings information would automatically appear by means of a COinS Dialtone.

And it goes, almost without saying, that the platform would be a Wiki.

Wikipedia is War

Its not enough to make a contribution to Wikipedia on a topic that you care about. If you really care about your subject you are going to have watch over your pages, ever-vigilant.

I realized this after reading a short but amusing interview with Bearcat - an individual who has dedicated considerable time adding and editing Wikipedia entries about the CBC. My favourite part was this:

There was an American editor who first popped up during the CBC labour dispute last year. He didn't know very much about the CBC, but seemed to have heard on NPR that there was a labour dispute, and this somehow inspired him to make a complete muck of CBC articles on Wikipedia. First he *removed* the program schedules from the articles, and then asked us why the articles didn't provide detail on CBC's programming. Then he started writing articles himself on CBC programs that didn't have articles yet; naturally, given his lack of knowledge, they mostly consisted of vague equivocations like "Music and Company is a program on CBC Radio Two that probably plays classical music."

He also tried more than once to propagate the theory that Toronto'’s CFMX (Classical 96) should take over CBC Radio Two, which he did mainly by changing the call signs of CBC stations to make it appear as though his fantasy takeover had *already* happened...

Wikipedia, needless to say, can be a real education in human psychology at times.

Its a recurring theme to my readings on Wikipedia. You must have patience, persistence and...

You have to be able to suffer a lot of foolishness to work on Wikipedia. You really do. And for most people who were brought up in academic discourse, the way people behave just isn'’t acceptable. But you have to balance that against the efficiency of producing the largest encyclopedia in human history over the course of five years.

When the truth goes to whoever has the last edit, the editing will never end.