VALISblog

Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

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Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Wikipedia debate rumbles on  
 
Though it's fairly one-sided, actually.

Corante has a good summary, and discusses issues of authority (e.g. of named bloggers vs. anonymous Wiki editors, and concludes that both have authority, though of different kinds).
Caveat Lector has a VERY interesting post, pointing out that the evaluation methods we are taught in library school are heuristics, not holy writ, and that therefore we shouldn't be so certain to judge what is authoritative and what isn't. (The issues I raised in my previous post are similar).
The original article has shown up in my Bloglines feed:
Wikipedia is not what many casual Web surfers think it is. It's not the online version of an established, well-researched traditional encyclopedia.
Well, yes. As you would have known if you'd paid any attention to the site, at all, in the first place.
Christina Pikas adds some new points:
....the school librarian should 1) not have used Wikipedia as an example of a bad resource and 2) a more nuanced, sophisticated method needs to be taught when dealing with new resources. Evaluating print materials is pretty much under control. How to evaluate wikis, blogs, and new types of electronic resources is not well taught.
I agree, although I feel that the training I received in evaluating internet resources was pretty good.

Rafe Colburn points out that this "backlash" is a sign that Wikipedia must be catching on. I think he's probably right.

And here's something very interesting. Alex Halavais conducted an experiment where he falsified 13 Wikipedia entries. All changes were identified and corrected within a few hours. (Christina has some criticism of this methodology for its use of deceit).

Whatever we as librarians think of Wikipedia, I think that we have to be aware of it. It's being used as an information resource by our users or potential users, and we'd better have the knowledge and understanding to tell them about its good and bad points, or we'll only be assisting in hastening our own redundancy.


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Monday, August 30, 2004
Hey! Pointless articles about iPods  
 
The NYT has an article on iPod users who are convinced that the shuffle mode on their players isn't really random. As proof, they offer vox pops with several users, some of whom claim the shuffle isn't random because they always get songs that fit their mood, and others who claim that it isn't random because they always get songs that don't fit their mood.

OK. So Apple has very cunningly designed its iPods with advanced pattern recognition software or something (someone in the article speculates about Bayesian filters and relevance ranking) and then decided to give some of its users exactly what they want, and the rest exactly what they don't want. Sure. That makes all kinds of sense.



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No blogging please, we're the IOC  


Still more Wikipedia  
 
Looks like a number of bloggers are interested in the news story I mentioned below. Stephen, Matthew M. Boedicker, and Colin Brooke (an assistant professor in the writing programme at Syracuse University - Syracuse being the town where this story started), all discuss the issue, and Resource Shelf provides this link to Wikipedia's rebuttal page, where they respond to criticisms.

Random thought: Delmore Schwartz taught writing to Lou Reed at Syracuse. Makes me want to go listen to Sister Ray.





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More Wikipedia (and evaluating online resources)  
 
Haven't written for a while, but there's been some interesting discussion around the Wikipedia issue (basically: can we trust it? should we trust it?).

1. In my comments, Violet discusses her experience as a collection developer for weblinks:
my argument for not including this one... is that just anyone can contribute to it.
2. Seen on the ever-interesting Boing Boing, a link to a Techdirt story about a newspaper article criticising Wikipedia, and Mike@Techdirt's attempts to correct some of the reporter's more obvious mistakes. The comments section is very interesting, and basically comes down on the side of Wikipedia, as far as I can see.

3. Portals and KM discusses my original post, having seen Steven's response

The wikipedia is great but I think the level of fact checking needs to be acknowledged. I often see the source for a wikipedia entry when I search on a topic, especially when I have been looking at people like musicians. The wikipedia entry is simply pasted from another source but you do not know this source. For this reason, the wikipedia information should be seen as clues that need to be verified.

I discovered this in doing family history research where hundreds of family web sites would repeat the same unsubstantiated information until it became an accepted “fact.” I challenged some people on “facts” that had no primary source and they had become true believers because these “facts” were “well known.”
These are good points, of course. Generally accepted "facts" often aren't as correct as everyone had thought. Clearly, "the wikipedia information should be seen as clues that need to be verified" is good advice.

However, I still feel that there's validity in the Wiki model, and that this validity arises out of a consensual approach to decision-making. For example, taking a subject that might reasonably be expected to excite controversy and bias in Wikipedia contributors, politics - specifically George W. Bush. Let's look at how Wikipedia handles differences of opinion over content: through discussion and rules. Sure, it's not perfect (the Bush debate still looks heated, as one might expect) but it provides a consensual approach that allows for a balanced, objective encyclopaedia.

There's further support for the idea that multiple contributors may make the encyclopaedia stronger, not weaker. Look at open source software, as I mentioned previously. Look at the Oxford English Dictionary, which was originally built by volunteer contributors (and indeed still is).

On the other hand, there are plenty of supposedly authoritative sources online that are just plain wrong. Take for example some postings on MedHelp Q&A, by a doctor no less. This one, while generally accurate, contains two basic errors: MDMA is not a hallucinogen, nor is it a "designer drug" (designer drug has a very specific meaning, and MDMA is not one). This one is just plain dangerous - developing acne after MDMA use can be a sign of liver damage. It's worrying that doctors can give such generalised advice ("drugs are bad") and yet miss out on an actual sign that something may be seriously wrong. On the other hand, Erowid would appear on the surface to lack any credibility, at least according to standard library-school-taught evaluation criteria, yet it is actually incredible accurate and respected, even by government agencies. Point being, "official" sources aren't necessarily the most accurate, either. [Background: I'm a health librarian with a degree in psychology, I've read the original research on these topics and I know what I'm talking about].

Going way out into left field here, I have a gut feeling that, as the size of a group involved in such a project increases, the accuracy of the information contained will increase also, as good information drives out bad. I have no idea why I believe this, and I don't have any evidence for it either - but it would make an excellent research subject, wouldn't it?


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Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Part 3: bibliographic control  
 
Stephen mentioned some issues about using wikis (the second link is a reply to my first post on social software), including bibliographic control.

My first thought: someone could come up with a controlled vocabulary. My second thought: that would mean someone imposing their own ideas on the group, which defeats the whole point. My third thought: why not an open controlled vocabulary, then?

This is exciting me, even though I can't quite see where it would go. We know that open source software can work just as well as traditional, closed, IP-protected software. So why couldn't the same be true for open-source books? After all, there's already an open-source textbook in the works.

Another problem Stephen mentions: what if the whole group is misinformed? This is surely a possibility - but Wikipedia seems to work OK. It would seem to me that this problem is more likely in small groups, where one individual can exert greater influence on the majority, and where the liklihood of there being a true expert in the group is reduced. No way of empirically proving that, though. Hmmmm...thinking back to my psychology degree - there's a lot of social pressure on people to conform, and people will conform with others, even against the evidence of their senses. BUT, in a looser group, one that interacted online and not in person, and not directly (e.g. through asynchronous communication like email, rather than chat or VoIP), maybe that conformity would be reduced. People would be more likely to express opinions, meaning the quality of the debate would have to be raised...

One can hope, anyway.



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Social software part 2: no sympathy for the record industry  
 
That last post wasn't particularly well-formed (I really must learn to set aside time for posting, if I'm going to post, rather than trying to fit it in at work). Anyway....no luck with either Smart Mobs or The Wisdom of Crowds at the library - both on loan. Time to try the university library, I think....

The application that's really got me thinking about social software isn't one of the conventional ones. It's an internet radio station - www.lastfm.com. The interesting thing about this is that it's personalised - it syncs in with iTunes (or whatever other, inferior media player you use) and creates a personalised playlist based on the songs you listen to (so you get your own radio station, wherever you've got net access, and don't need to lug around CDs or an iPod or whatever. It's legal too, they paid the copyright license fees, which helps people like me who live in countries where format shifting is still illegal).

Anyway, the interesting thing for me is the way it automatically creates communities - assigning you 'neighbours' with similar listening taste. So you can cross-reference, triangulate, and find new music that you'll probably like. And it's not being forced on you by a record company. That's key - instead of some marketing manager figuring that, because I like the Clash, I'll like Good Charlotte because they're a "punk" band, I get real, obscure, off the wall, interesting recommendations, from people who care about music, like I do. It's like suddenly finding 50 new friends with cool and interesting taste. And it's not just about seeing someone else's music collection - the site has message facilities, so I can talk to my friends and neighbours.

(There's parallels with the MP3 blogging community, I think. Note the way that music blogs started off worried about being sued, and are already being co-opted by record companies for marketing purposes. And it isn't working. Because the only thing the bloggers have going for them is their reputation, and their only motivation is to share music they like, and have some fun. Sure, they could take kickbacks from the majors to promote their groups - but after a few dud choices their reputation would be shot, so what would the point be?).

This excites me. All along, whenever someone touted the argument that downloading music would destroy the need for record companies, I asked who would act as gatekeepers - how would we ever find decent music among the millions of tunes that would no doubt appear online, most of them not worthy of a large audience? Now I've got my answer - we will all be the gatekeepers. We'll build this thing from the bottom up.

Like the idea of lastfm.com (or already have an account)? Look me up.



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Social software  
 
OK, I'm well behind the curve here - Stephen has been discussing this in-depth for the past few weeks and once again I find my interests tagging on behind his (the first time being RSS, when reading Library Stuff got me interested in the subject in the first place).

Anyway, I've been very interested in some of the social tools I've been playing with recently. I made my first contribution to Wikipedia a few days ago. What's interesting to me is the whole notion of group accountability. The traditional approach to creating and organising knowledge assumes that this should be the task of experts - and this is what we're taught in library school - when we evaluate resources we look to the credibility of the author/editor/publisher. Now Wikipedia challenges that - it's not "organised", and contributions are made by anonymous posters, who could be anybody. Yet it works. Sure, anyone could edit a record to reflect a partisan agenda, or as a prank. But dozens of other people would correct it. A self-correcting system. Smart Mobs or The Wisdom of Crowds probably explain exactly why this works. Which means that they've just been elevated 5 or 6 rungs on my reading list.

More follows....



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Sunday, August 08, 2004
Kurt Vonnegut loves me  
 
Or us, anyway. From In These Times, I love you, madame librarian

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

The article suffers a little bit from Godwinisation - the Bush/Hitler comparison is poorly argued. But nice to see someone praising librarians.



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Thursday, August 05, 2004
The DoJ, official information, and libraries  
 
No need for me to repeat the whole story here, but briefly: the (US) Department of Justice told libraries to remove certain government publications from their collections (claiming they'd been issued by mistake). Librarians refused. The DoJ backed down.

What I found really interesting was how much coverage this is getting in the blogosphere. A lot of posts are showing up in my aggregator from blogs that have no connection with libraries. It's clear that these librarians have really touched a chord with their actions. Bravo to them!


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Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Swamping: Amazon vs WorldCat  
 
Walt Crawford has an excellent article in EContent, discussing the problems of swamping when searching large datasets. Amazon's look-inside-the-book function leads to searches returning many extraneous hits, as does Google, and federated searching only makes things worse. He suggests some ways that searchers can overcome swamping.



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Monday, August 02, 2004
There's service, and then there's service  
 
I'm in a cynical mood today. I'm finding it interesting to compare the responses I've had to various dealings with service organisations.

Item: Fiddling around on a certain university library website, I realise that I can access (at least some of) their full-text databases via their OPAC without providing any authenticating information to prove that I'm actually a student. I check this on another machine to make sure that my machine hasn't got a cached record of me logging in to the database. Nope. So I do what any good student librarian would do and email all my friends to invite them to access someone else's intellectual property for free.....Nah, just kidding.

I email the library and explain what the problem is, and point out that this puts them in violation of their Terms of Use in their deal with [incredibly huge and well-known database provider who would probably eat them for breakfast if it knew that they were doing this]. Five days later. No reply. No acknowledgement. No thanks. And most importantly, no fix to the bug.

Very disappointing. (I'm not mentioning the university because I'd probably get charged with hacking, or with aiding and abetting copyright breach, or something like that. Actually, I'm lucky I don't live in the US or the INDUCE Act would probably make it illegal for me even to mention that this was happening at a library anywhere).

Item: an ISP that provides the ability to do almost anything online via its website - except cancel your account. It gives you detailed instructions on how to cancel, by phoning an 0800 helpline. Great. Except that, after queuing for half an hour, I get a recorded message that tells me the accounts desk is only open till 5pm (even though the website says 9pm). I don't get the option to speak to an operator, I'm locked into a automatic phone system and can't get out of it other than by hanging up. So I email them. Four days later I get a reply that doesn't offer a word of apology for their incompetence, but presents a terse list of demands for information that I must supply before I can stop being their customer. Some of this is OK (it's personal verification information) but some of it is just rude - I resent being told that I must explain why I wish to close my account, before they let me do so. I'm a customer guys. It's my prerogative.

The guilty party? IHUG.
The good vendor I'm with now? Woosh. Not much more expensive, and it's faster, and doesn't tie up my phoneline.

Item: I still haven't had any response to my email to that record company, asking if my credit card payment had gone through. Suggestion: if you're going to have an email address on your website, it helps if you, you know, reply to the emails you receive. Do they want my money or not?

Item: email a publisher to order books late this afternoon. Two hours later I have a reply saying that the books will be in the mail tomorrow. That is what I want to hear. Credit to them (Exisle Publishing).



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