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.

 
Mamamusings is spreading an interesting meme.

Type each letter of the alphabet into the address bar of your browser. See what link is suggested.

Mine:

A = All Music Guide
B = Blogger
C = CricInfo (number 1 information site for the sport of cricket)
D = The Prison Dictionary (discussed on MeFi a while ago)
E = Erowid (drug information website)
F = Football365 (that's football as in soccer)
G = Google
H = The Beastles (mash-up album of the Beatles vs the Beastie Boys)
I = Internet Movie Database
J = Jihad Unspun (I have no idea, either)
K = Keenspace (a website for web comics)
L = LISNews.com
M = Metafilter
N = Newsnow feed for Manchester United Football Club
O = Office Museum - the history of paper clips (another MeFi link)
P = Google Print
Q = There is no Q
R = Reinvigorate.net (blog traffic site)
S = the address of a private board I post on, which I'm not going to post here because it's private
T = The Onion
U = United Rant (a Manchester United weblog)
V = The database page of my university's library
W = Woosh (my ISP)
X, Y and Z are all absent.

| posted by Simon at 8:17 pm

 
Members of Parliament are tiring of the email bombardments they get from supporters and opponents of issues such as civil unions and prostitution law reform....Cabinet ministers and MPs are saying they now give more credence to letters and faxes than to emails on some major issues.

One of the negative aspects of the internet is that it sometimes makes communication too easy. In this case, supporters or opponents of particular causes create websites that allow visitors to email every member of Parliament. Which is really barely distinguishable from spam. It's hardly any wonder that these emails get ignored.

From the New Zealand Futures Trust, via The Dominion Post. A similar point about electronic activism, aka slacktivism, is made on Snopes.

(The article also has some unkind words for the NZ Government portal).

| posted by Simon at 8:25 pm

 
Walking Paper has these suggestions, probably most suitable for public libraries. Good, common sense, and using the same technologies that patrons are already using themselves.

| posted by Simon at 5:34 pm

 
And he isn't very complementary about it - citing it for shallow coverage and for failing to provide information about what sources it actually searches.

Peter's right that (at least at present) Google Scholar is clearly not sufficient for the needs of professional researchers, though he acknowledges it could be 'good enough' for a casual user wanting 'a few good hits'. Let's remember, too that not every professional has access to every database - as a former special librarian in a small organisation, GS would have been useful to me in picking up reasonably useful material in subject areas outside our specific area of interest.

| posted by Simon at 2:41 pm

 
ALIA can do it, what chance LIANZA? After all, they already have a wiki.

| posted by Simon at 1:08 pm

 
A rather nifty post on BoingBoing about Xeni Jardin's experimentation with the automatic filter on Microsoft's blogging tool. While seemingly innocuous titles like 'pornography and the law' were banned, other, far more scatological ones made it through.

This is the reason I oppose automatic filters - they make too many mistakes, denying access to legitimate content, and failing to block some objectionable content.

The original contains some words that may be offensive. It's here.

| posted by Simon at 7:08 pm

 
Steven pointed this out - FeedFire is a free tool for creating RSS feeds from websites that don't already have them. Crucially, it enables you to scrape sites that aren't maintained by you. It's fairly easy to work (though you have to register) - in only a few minutes I'd created a feed for the Victoria University library's news page. Copy the feed into Bloglines, and I'm automatically tracking updates from the library.

I like it.

| posted by Simon at 7:06 pm

 
Thesestickers parody the weird and scary "evolution is just a theory" disclaimer sticker, actually used in Georgia, USA.

"This textbook contains material on gravity. Gravity is a theory, not a fact...."

"This book was anonymously donated to your school libary to discretely promote religious alternatives to the theory of evolution. When you are finished with it, please refile the book in the fiction section."

| posted by Simon at 12:44 pm

 
Steven Cohen points to an article by Roland Tanglao on avoiding information overload caused by excessive use of RSS.

Steven points out that he himself doesn't believe in information overload - "We are not forced to subscribe to over 500 feeds, or have thousands of messages coming into my inbox every day from electronic mailing lists. If we didn't read anything, we wouldn't suffer from IO"

I'm not so sure. It's true that much of the information we take in is discretionary. But it's also true that the amount of scholarly literature has increased vastly in the last 50 years or so. This, I think, makes it impossible to read everything that is relevant to our area of interest. At best, we can hope to read a few key sources thorougly, and skim through others.

That said, I'm going to take a close look at what both Steven and Roland have to say, and see if I can be more efficient as I try to keep current.

| posted by Simon at 8:42 pm

 
A very useful set of short reviewsof different RSS readers. Very pertinent for me, as I've been looking for a reader I can recommend to non-techie users, that will integrate with Outlook. Looks like NewsGator is the way to go.

Personally, I still love Bloglines, and Amphetadesk works fine if you want to fire up another application, but I want something really, really simple.

Via Blog Without A Library.

| posted by Simon at 8:26 pm

 
The Kinky Librarian takes aim at some library myths.

| posted by Simon at 7:21 pm

 
Google Scholar is Google's search tool for scholarly literature, including journal articles, theses, books, abstracts etc. Since a "large fraction of scholarly literature is still offline", quite often it links to citations for books, rather than the full text (well, you could have guessed that, anyway, right?). But what it does do is take you seamlessly to WorldCat, so you can try to locate the book in a library in your area.

I've only had a *very* brief play with this, but it looks like it could be very useful. Not a substitute for proper bibliographic or full-text databases, but there's an awful lot of us who don't have access to those.

| posted by Simon at 12:45 pm

 
Over on Wired News Xeni Jardin interviews Jeff Tweedy of the wondrous Wilco. Most of the discussion is about Wilco's support for filesharing, and retells the story of how having their album available online before its official release helped their sales.

It's nothing new to me, but I'm a fan...you should definitely check out the interview (and the band). Tweedy's argument is that filesharing helps bands get heard, which helps them sell albums and concert tickets. I think he's right, as I've said before - I've spent a fair bit of money buying albums that I'd already downloaded - because I wanted to give something back to the artist....

| posted by Simon at 8:16 pm

 
Somewhat hyperbolic article from Tech Central Station on Wikipedia, written by Robert McHenry (a former editor of the Britannica). It's perhaps unsurprising that someone with his background would be critical of the Wiki model, but frustratingly he doesn't offer much in the way of hard evidence - Wikipedia must be bad by its very open-source nature. He does finish by examining a specific Wikipedia entry in detail (that on Alexander Hamilton, which does seem from his comments to contain some weaknesses.

This, I think, is the key to evaluating the Wikipedia...not abstract arguments as to whether a large enough group of editors can compensate for the fact that any idiot can edit it, but actual analysis of the site's content. It is, though, instructive that the errors he pointed to have already been corrected.

| posted by Simon at 10:49 pm

 
Following on from the revelations that Google was censoring search results within China comes another disappointing piece of news: Google Image search is censoring pictures of Abu Gharib, reports a poster on AnandTech.com .

I saw this on Metafilter, where posters have pointed out that Abu Gharib related results are turning up fine on Altavista and Yahoo.

We should, of course, all know not to trust one search engine or information source. But when the other engines are returning relevant results this is a little disturbing.

OK, as I was typing this, a few other MeFi posters pointed out that it could be a failure to keep current when indexing the net, rather than a deliberate act of censorship. Still not good for Google, though.

| posted by Simon at 8:23 pm

 
Great news for fans of Metafilter:

"Almost there! I'm currently moving the metafilter server to two new (much more powerful) servers, and when the migration is complete, signups will be back on for a small donation, which should help offset the hosting costs (which will now run in the hundreds of dollars every month).

So stay tuned, signups will be back soon."

/me does a little happy dance.

| posted by Simon at 7:11 pm

 
English DJ John Peel has died aged 65. He is unarguably the most influential English DJ ever, and probably one of the most influential worldwide. His commitment to championing new and exciting bands played a key part in the development of English alternative music and was a huge influence on my own musical taste. Think the Smiths, Joy Division, the Fall and thousands more.

Break out your copies of the Undertones' Teenage Kicks (his favourite song ever) and listen to the Fall (his favourite band). It's a sad day.

YNWA John. RIP.

The Independent (thanks to James for the link).

| posted by Simon at 12:37 pm

 
I'm late (very) to this, so I'll just point you to John Battelle's Searchblog for a good, lengthy article.

And mention that I downloaded the application, but had to unistall it after some driver problems. Which I'm not certain were linked to this app, but only appeared after I d/l'd it, and disappeared as soon as I uninstalled it. Mind you, Battelle says it only works in IE, and I think I was trying to run it in Firefox. *shrug*. Probably worth a look - I liked the results I was getting in the brief play I had with it.

[edit: fixed spelling in first line, "too" to "to"]

| posted by Simon at 8:23 pm

 
A good overview of leadership identification and development in libraries. Lots of practical recommendations.

| posted by Simon at 10:43 am

 
The LIANZA (Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa) conference was over a month ago, so I'm somewhat slow in getting around to this, but my excuse is that the conference papers have only been posted on the website for a week or two.

Anyway: Weaving Threads to Hold Across the Reference Desk (PDF, 110kb), reports an investigation into how well Auckland University library is meeting the needs of its large population of Asian students.

Some interesting points about how libraries differ between Asian and Western countries (the former are more likely to be closed stack, librarians may have lower status, and students may expect libraries to provide them with the answer, rather than the tools to find the answer). Also a brief discussion of Asian learning styles, problems with language barriers, and the library's need to market services such as interlibrary loan more effectively (something that would probably apply to most user groups).

| posted by Simon at 10:06 am

 
Interesting article in Business Week (11 October 2004, p. 210) on the effect of DMCA and (possible effect of) Induce on the tech industry in the US. Also discusses how academics are being dissauded from investigating certain problems in computer-security related research, and of tech companies being coerced into cutting features from their media software. Something worth remembering from the article:

In time this could threaten the delicate balance between copy protection and technical innovation. The intent of copyright law in the U.S. is to promote learning and innovation while giving artists, musicians, and writers a limited monopoly on their work. The goal isn't to assure that artists or intellectuals make oodles of cash.

| posted by Simon at 2:15 pm

 
Mainly for my own interest - I've been meaning to read this and here it is, available at oreilly.com , available in Creative Commons-friendly PDFs or glossy print (you pays for the print version, tho').

| posted by Simon at 3:23 pm

 
Scorpio: (Oct. 24—Nov. 21)
The other librarians will alternately praise your audacity and criticize your recklessness after you redesign the Dewey Decimal System on a drunken dare.

From The Onion Horoscopes.

| posted by Simon at 1:34 am

 
From the Ministry for Culture and Heritage comes the October edition of Te Ara Hiko (The Digital Pathway), the newsletter of the online Encyclopedia of New Zealand.

The big news is that the Encyclopedia will be launched on 9 February next year with material from the first 'theme' - New Zealanders, telling the story of the different groups who have settled the country. The site will also feature a complete, searchable version of the 1966 Encyclopedia of New Zealand.

More on the Encyclopedia, which will take nine years to complete, here.

| posted by Simon at 11:23 am

 
Google has launched a new feature that will enable "users [to] see book excerpts alongside ordinary Google Web page search results. The book excerpts will carry a link to buy the book from a choice of online book retailers." (Reuters).

Fairly similar to Amazon's 'Look inside the book' search feature, as far as I can tell.

I'm not totally convinced by this, at least as it stands, for the fairly obvious reason that it relies on free-text searching, as far as I can see. Free-text searching is problematic enough when applied to the internet - imagine the problems we'll have when we try free-text searching of our libraries.

Meanwhile, Brewster Kahle is promising universal access to all human knowledge (Boing Boing) at the Web 2.0 Conference. Something along the lines of digitising the entire Library of Congress (it'd fit on a bookshelf, take up 26TB and cost US$60, 000 for the disk space). No mention of indexing or subject access. Which initially made me think it was a non-starter. Except....duh! It's LoC. Subject access (LCSH) and metadata already exists. Oh, that, and the fact that Kahle is the guy who founded the Internet Archive.

Thanks to Bridget for the link to the first story

| posted by Simon at 5:03 pm

 
Exactly what it says on the tin. Looks full of sensible advice to me.

Via librarian.net and Librarian in Black.

| posted by Simon at 2:32 pm

 
Recently posted on the New Zealand government's e-government site, a paper advising government agencies not to adopt DRM, with specific reference to MS Office 2003.

(The main reason being that it impacts on agencies' abilities to fulfil legal requirements such as archiving, legal deposit, and Official Information Act requests).

| posted by Simon at 9:56 am

 
One of the coolest hacks I've ever seen. Whitelabel.org has created a proxy for the BBC News site that creates automatic hyperlinks from the news page to articles in Wikipedia (e.g. if the text mentions Iraq, there should be a hyperlink to the Wikipedia Iraq entry - it's not working 100% at the moment, but that's the idea).

Just as good, the proxied page contains a sidebar of blogs that link to the story. So you not only get the BBC's take on something, plus their links to other news sites and to background information, you also get the opinions of other interested individuals.

Almost certainly illegal, but such a useful development that it should be protected. Surely.

(The link to the proxied page is here).

I saw this on Boing Boing. I think.

| posted by Simon at 9:35 pm

 
Over at Smart Mobs, Harold Rheingold points to Seedwiki, a site offering free, personal Wikis. I've signed up for one. I've got absolutely no idea what I'm going to use it for though. If I think of anything, I'll post it ;-)

| posted by Simon at 9:29 pm

 
A manager explains to new librarians the reason they aren't getting the job. Much of which seems fairly obvious. But I'm making a note of it to remind myself things that I need to do, next time I'm looking for work.

Having just interviewed a couple of people to replace myself in my current position, this one struck me:

[quote] You at no point could show any knowledge or curiosity about important topics affecting the library world. [/quote]

We asked both applicants what they knew about the organisation. One: "Nothing. Except what I know from having worked at [organisation that was the predecessor of the predecessor of this organisation, nearly 30 years ago]".
The other: "Well, I've heard about it in the news from my work with [news organisation]. I've seen ads for [brand name] of course. I looked at your website and I see that you...."

Guess which one got the job?

Link via Confessions of a Mad Librarian (also on Librarian.net).

| posted by Simon at 3:02 pm

 
A disappointing ruling here, which the LibrarianInBlack points to:

[quote] ...the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld a lower court's decision from October 2002, which concluded that Web sites cannot be required to comply with the 1991 disabilities law. An advocacy group for the blind had sued Southwest Airlines, seeking a redesign of its Web site. [/quote]

I've become more interested in accessibility recently, and it's a big issue for NZ government agencies. Pity that this court seems to be reversing the trend towards greater access.

| posted by Simon at 2:40 pm

 
A few weeks ago Lisa Williams discussed Frassle, a new(ish) weblog tool that enables you to both build a personal blog and manage your subscriptions, all in one. What's interesting, though, is the way it facilitates networking among bloggers - if you post a comment to another Frassle blog, your comment shows up in your own blog, as well.

Even better, it learns to build relationships between the terms that different bloggers use to categorise items they post.

[quote]Consider for example this article from the New York Times. I would categorize it under "library science" and "search". If you categorize it under "librarians" and "reference", frassle can learn a correlation between my categories "library science" and "search" and your categories "librarians" and "reference".....

That's the basic power of frassle—it discovers agreement between people, and helps each of them utilize that agreement. By sharing our categorization information this way, we can each contribute to the other's directory, without any prior planning. [/quote]

I like the look of this. Definitely sounds like it's worth playing around with. (The absence of an easy way to sort posts by category, rather than strictly reverse chronologically, is my main regret about Blogger).

| posted by Simon at 11:48 am

 
Kirk McElhearn is worried that A9, Amazon's new search engine, holds too much data about users. If you're an Amazon customer, it stores cookies to track your search history, AND ties these to your Amazon account - it therefore knows your name and address, etc.

My first thought was that this was a benefit, not a problem. The more Amazon knows, the more relevant the search results and ads I see will be (I like Gmail for the same reason - I actually get ads that are vaguely related to my interests).

Kirk makes the point that "[this may allow] third parties to [get] access to this information, and use it for nefarious purposes.

Say I do a few searches for single-malt whiskeys, or for information on specific medical conditions I suffer from. And say a hacker gets a hold of this information by breaking into Amazon's servers, or say Amazon sells this information. And say — again, we're just in the realm of hypotheticals here — my employer, or a potential employer, discovers this, and considers me a risk. Or my health insurance company.."

While he's right that this is concievably a risk, I think he's probably overstating things. The fact that I look at a website on medical conditions doesn't mean that I suffer from those conditions - it could be a friend who suffers from that condition, or I could be writing an essay, or anything (in my case it would be work-related). The data mining needed to track down alcoholics or people who are so sick that it would affect their work would surely be too much effort - it'd be easier to identify them by their behaviour at work or whatever.

Still, an interesting point, and one that I'd missed in my initial enthusiasm for A9 (it's a nice little search tool).

Link via Phil Bradley's Blog.

| posted by Simon at 11:17 pm

 
Good news from Telecom New Zealand, who recently announced a significantly faster broadband option for home customers (2mb/s with a 10gb monthly limit).

Bad news for me, seeing as I just signed up for wireless broadband with Woosh, which is excellent (certainly compared to my old 56k dialup), but maxes out at 256kb/s. Oh well. Maybe Woosh will increase their speeds in response. [crosses fingers].

| posted by Simon at 1:40 pm

 
Four men appeared in Christchurch District Court yesterday after a major police operation targeting alleged attempts to steal library books. (The Press).

| posted by Simon at 11:33 am

 
The aim of the Australian Digital Theses project is to create a national collaborative distributed database of digitised theses produced at Australian Universities. (Link from New Zealand Education Review, 9(37), 22 September 2004).

| posted by Simon at 1:34 pm

 
John Battelle's Searchblog carries an update on this story:

"Google made the decision to omit a small number of Chinese government banned sites (about eight) because to include them would create a damaged user interface experience. Google China users would see results and links, but be unable to click through to the actual pages, because China in fact filters those sites"

Better, but still not totally defensible.

| posted by Simon at 5:33 pm

 
Cool! My favourite newspaper, The Guardian (UK) has added a set of RSS feeds. I've been subscribed to their Online Blog for a while, but I think I'll definitely be subscribing to some of their other feeds.

| posted by Simon at 9:12 am

 
New Scientist carries an article claiming that Google News is censoring news stories that are critical of the Chinese government, for computers based in China.

Google admits to omitting some news sources within China but says this is meant to improve the quality of the service.

"In order to create the best possible news search experience for our users, we sometimes decide not to include some sites, for a variety of reasons," says a statement issued by the company. "These sources were not included because their sites are inaccessible."

So when I suggested they come up with a way of de-duping their news, so I didn't have to scroll through 10 pages carrying the same AP or Reuters article, reprinted in 100 regional newspapers, they couldn't do that, but they can censor sites on behalf of a government? Grrrrrrreeeat.

| posted by Simon at 9:27 am

 
Bloglines has quietly added a few useful new features.

One is a 'Keep New' checkbox after each post - this means that you can mark posts in your feeds that you don't want to disappear after you've read them. Very useful - I often browse my feeds for posts to read later, and I've been "clipping" those posts as a means of preserving them. Now I can just check the 'keep new' box and they'll still be there next time. Simple, but handy.

The other is a 'related feeds' feature - although it doesn't seem to be working too well at the moment.

| posted by Simon at 1:31 pm

 
The latest version of Firefox (Pre-release 1.0) is out now. I've only just downloaded it and I'm not enough of a tech-head to give a full review, but one feature seems very very cool indeed:

Live Bookmarks are basically RSS feeds that sit in your Bookmarks folder. Subscribe to a feed, and the feed becomes a top-level bookmark. Any posts within that feed become sub-bookmarks, under the feed. And they update in real time.

Not 100% necessary for me, seeing as I use Bloglines and check it regularly if I'm online, but this is still a cool app, and obviously not everyone wants a Bloglines account.

| posted by Simon at 6:12 pm

 
From eTaiwanNews.com comes a report of a Brown University study that places Taiwan first for e-government services.

"Other countries that scored well this year include Singapore (43.8), the United States (42.9), Canada (40.3), Monaco (39), China (37.3), Australia (36.7), Togo (36), and Germany (35)."

Togo? New Zealand is getting beaten by Togo? We've got some work to do.

Link via Smart Mobs.

| posted by Simon at 4:57 pm

 
Confusion over open-source.

OCLC's 2004 Information Format Trends Report discusses the "top trends in content and what they may mean for libraries in the next five years".

One of the key trends listed is "Legitimacy of open-source publishing (e.g. blogs)".

Since when did blogs become open-source? (OK, I'm sure some of them are, but that's not a defining characteristic of the software). Later on, it becomes clear that the report is talking about open content, and social publishing. Which is somewhat different. Their definitions here are vague, as well.

Similar experience recently in class. My lecturer was explaining that libraries have been slow to use open-source software for OPACs and ILSs because they don't want their data to be available for just anyone to access. Funny, I thought it was the source code of the software that was available in open source, not the data that you entered into a particular open source application.

Sigh.



| posted by Simon at 1:03 pm

 
Matapihi is a new, free service offering access to digital images from some of New Zealand's premier cultural organisations. It includes material from two of the largest New Zealand public libraries - Auckland and Christchurch City Libraries; from the Auckland Art Gallery; the Otago Museum; and the Alexander Turnbull Library - the archival library dedicated to preserving New Zealand's heritage.

Matapihi holds around 50, 000 images, sounds and objects. I haven't had time to play with it much yet, but it looks like a good resource. My only objection so far: it doesn't work well in Mozilla - something for the designers to consider addressing.

| posted by Simon at 2:04 pm

 
I got back yesterday from the LIANZA conference in Auckland. It's the first I've been to, and I think I got a lot out of it. I made contact with quite a few people, mainly those I already knew, but managed to get introduced to a lot of other librarians through them. I can already see that if I stay in this profession for a while that I'll build up quite a strong network of peers. Which is great.

The other highlight was re-discovering my motivation and desire to do my job. I managed to find three or four things to do differently that should improve what I do, and basically got an all-round sense of motivation to do so. In this respect, the actual content was probably less important than the attitude of the presenters. I didn't hear anything really earth-shatteringly new at any session, but I did pick up on some more traditional things that I hadn't been doing, or got reminders of things I already knew, but wasn't really doing.

Also important was the speech from Penny Carnaby, the National Librarian. Her speech was a celebration of where we are, and the things we've achieved recently - and listening to it, it was hard not to be impressed, and proud. Knowledge and culture appear to be on a true high in New Zealand at the moment, and libraries are contributing to that - the EPIC project was cited as an example of something we're doing that hasn't been achieved anywhere else in the world, and NZ librarians took a lead role in the World Summit on the Information Society. We've also had the National Library Act (1.2 nb PDF), passed last year. When we add in factors such as a supportive and knowledgeable minister, and the current excellent job situation for information workers in this country, it's a good time to be a librarian (my classmates from the MLIS last year have all got good jobs, and didn't take long to find them).

Penny also looked forward to the future, and mentioned a few possibilities for the next year. The thing that excited me most was the possible upgrading of the National Union Catalogue to include "Amazon-like" information. I'm devoutly wishing that this occurs - one of my big gripes has been that I can get more comprehensive information about books from Amazon than from the NUC - sure, the NUC's information is "better", but Amazon's is often more useful (depending on the user's specific needs). If the National Library can take the best from Amazon and incorporate it into a properly bibliographically controlled catalogue, it will be an impressive and useful achievement.

| posted by Simon at 1:41 pm

 
Newswise reports:

Having trouble finding quality health information on the Web? You might ask your doctor to write you an "information prescription." A University of Iowa study shows the nearly no-cost, quick effort is an effective way to put people in touch with quality health information on the Internet.

| posted by Simon at 1:24 pm

 
I think this is the first blogpost from a New Zealand library conference. So here I am, posting from a New Zealand library conference. It's been good, though nothing has been really cutting edge. I guess that's to be expected at a mainstream conference, though.

I've got lots of notes to write up and reactions to speakers, but that will have to wait till I'm home.

| posted by Simon at 10:28 am

 
Jessamyn weighs in in favo(u)r of Wikipedia:

Does this [Alex Halvais's experiment, discussed previously] prove that the Wikipedia is authoritative? Not necessarily, but it's one more data point explaining how the system works to people that aren't familiar with it, and one more data point to use with naysayers who think that having a resource be freely editable means that by definition it can't also be authoritative.

On the other hand, Karen Schneider (director of Librarian's Index to the Internet and ALA council member) criticises Wikipedia:

I am the director of a digital library that is the anti-wiki. We put our labor into "information you can trust," and we're doing that to save librarians time....Would you really want a librarian to hand you ten resources with the comment that "some of this is crap, but you figure it out?"

I don't have an issue with wikis, but if I'm going to do the legwork to check the authority of a resource, then I'll use an authoritative resource in the first place....All information is questionable. That's what real librarians believe. And some information is better-packaged and more authoritative than others.

I see wikis are useful in the other direction. Wikis are good tools for checking up on the "authoritative" sites, to find out the rest of the story, the other perspective, the slant you don't get from oh-fish-ul resources. But I wouldn't assume that the wiki is correct; I would assume the wiki is opening the door to further queries.

Finally, the TANSTAAFL principle applies....

I'm not so sure I agree with Karen. I don't see LII (which is a wonderful resource) as an anti-Wiki - the two are closer than she seems to think. From the LII About page:

While the bulk of our work activity is performed by the LII staff, we also have over 100 Contributors from libraries in California and Washington State....

We have a rigorous commitment to data quality. Every site entered in the LII database is reviewed at least twice--sometimes three or four times--before it goes "live." An active weeding program keeps us current--while sites change and die all the time, LII almost never has more than 100 "dead" sites.

So both Wikipedia and LII use a team of volunteers. The key differences (as far as I can see) are that LII's volunteers are all professional librarians; and that LII has a formal review and weeding procedure. Whereas in theory anyone can edit Wikipedia. However, I still believe the nature of Wikipedia offers an informal means of achieving this same end. The Recent Changes page is constantly watched by many users, in order to identify and correct egregious changes.

And, while most contributors clearly aren't information professionals, they may yet be subject experts. (It's difficult to imagine what motivation a non-expert or troll would have for writing about wave-particle duality or other scientific or technical topics. And Wikipedia has proved itself to be far more accurate in its coverage of my own country (New Zealand) than some official electronic encyclopedias supplied by highly reputable companies. (If you're reading this, there's a high liklihood that your library subscribes to them). Likewise, the MDMA (ecstasy) article on Wikipedia is more accurate and comprehensive than almost any other such article I've seen online.

In sumnmary, I think the bottom line is: is this an accurate source? I have seen many criticisms of Wikipedia based on its nature, but I've yet to see one based on its content. Obviously, I wouldn't take it as gospel, but I think that we need to see some actual examples of flaws in Wikipedia's content, before we dismiss it out of hand.

Oh, and I didn't recognise the acronym Karen used, which I've quoted above. Guess where I went to find out what it means?

[edit: added link to Karen's post which I'd left out originally]

| posted by Simon at 12:07 pm

 
Long live Re-Invigorate, a very impressive and easy way of tracking site traffic, with lots of extras such as browser, screen resolution, OS, whether user has cookies set, and referring URL, as well as a rather nifty looking graphic representation of where your traffic comes from, by time zone. Only caveat, the text size is a little small and the colour scheme isn't the greatest to my eyes, but overall a good (and free, and open-source) product.

| posted by Simon at 12:06 pm

 
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.


| posted by Simon at 12:42 pm

 
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.



| posted by Simon at 10:23 pm

 
For some reason, athletes were banned from blogging at the Olympics.


| posted by Simon at 10:17 pm

 
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.





| posted by Simon at 9:58 pm

 
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?

| posted by Simon at 12:53 pm

 
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.



| posted by Simon at 8:29 pm

 
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.



| posted by Simon at 8:14 pm

 
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....



| posted by Simon at 1:11 pm

 
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.

| posted by Simon at 3:50 pm

 
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!


| posted by Simon at 12:30 pm

 
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.



| posted by Simon at 10:26 am

 
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).



| posted by Simon at 8:22 pm

 
Let's say you're promoting a film festival (the major festival for the year) in New Zealand. What domain name would you choose, given the choice? filmfestival.co.nz? Something like that, nice and obvious?

Nope. You'd choose www.enzedff.co.nz - because obviously when people try to guess your website address, that's the first thing they'll think of, isn't it?

Honourable runner-up is the Wellington City Council's guide to what's on in Wellington - www.feelinggreat.co.nz

I bet someone got paid a lot more than I am to come up with those names, too.


| posted by Simon at 12:57 pm

 
2. What criteria do users of corporate libraries use to evaluate the performance of those libraries?

3. The purpose of this study is to identify the important aspects of corporate/special libraries for their users. It follows the LIBQUAL model (a tool for evaluating what aspects of a library's performance are important to users) which has previously been successfully applied in academic library settings. It is hypothesised that these criteria will vary from those identified in academic libraries, with corporate library users placing emphasis on different qualities of the library. The study will follow the LIBQUAL model, with questions administered by anonymous survey at two or more corporate libraries in the Wellington region. Results will be compared with those of previous studies that focused on academic libraries, in order to determine how the needs of these user populations differ.

4.


| posted by Simon at 8:58 pm

 
[Again, if you aren't me, you might find this boring].

Review Questions.

1. - What is meant by bibliographic organisation?
Arrangement of descriptive information about a given item/document, in order to permit access to that item (either physical or intellectual access, e.g. either locating an item within the library, or understanding its contents).

- Why is it important to organise bibliographic information?
Fairly obvious. Find stuff.

- Is there a distinctive New Zealand practice in bibliographic organisation and control?
Interesting. We do obviously follow AACR, and the vast majority of our libraries use either Dewey or LCSH. On the other hand, there's a move towards the creation of Maori subject headings, which is obviously unique to NZ. And its possible that our interpretation of AACR is subtly different from either the UK or the USA, in the same way that those countries interpret it differently (c.f. the discussion about the British Library and the Library of Congress, who both interpret the rules of AACR quite differently, in Oddy. [1])

- What are the major systems for bibliographic organisation?
bibliographies, catalogues, indexes, the internet [2]

-Should the characteristics of the ideal surrogate record be the same for printed sources of information and electronic sources?

Harvey and Hider (p.14) set out the characteristics of an ideal surrogate record: it uniquely identifies information resources; it identifies the resource's subject; it is brief; easily duplicated; standards-compliant; transferable to another system (e.g. MARC). So yes, the characteristics of an ideal surrogate record are the same for print and electronic resources. Though clearly the contents of the record could be different (electronic resources would need to include information about access that would be unnecessary for print resources).

2.

What were the primary reasons behind the way in which early libraries organised entries in their catalogues?

Essentially to enable users to physically locate the documents. Included titles, number of lines in the work (Alexandria, Rome), and an attempt at colocation - subdivision by language (Latin vs Greek) and by subject, and then by author (Rome, with influences from Greece).

Which library first applied the modern principles of authorship?

The Bodleian (Oxford University), in its 3rd edition, 1674.

What are those principles?

-bibliographic control of the author's name - e.g. selecting one standardised form.
-cross-referencing from psuedonyms to the real name.
-entering translations under the name of the original author
-treating anonymous works systematically

Why did cataloguers draw a distinction between providing descriptive and subject access?

3.

- Why did Cutter say 'no code of cataloguing could be adopted in all points by everyone?'

Because the users of that code will have widely different needs - he draws the distinction between libraries for study and libraries for reading (presumeably by "reading" he means reading for pleasure, e.g. public libraries). He's right. Small libraries don't need to catalogue to the same level of detail as LOC would.

- Why did he say cataloguing was an art, not a science?

Presumeably because there were always going to be subjective, intuitive elements to it, and no amount of rules could ever enable someone to blindly catalogue, it would always involve human input and interpretation. We'll never get automatic machine cataloguing. I agree with him, in other words.

4. Will cataloguing codes still be necessary in the future?

Oh yes. Just look at the development of standards within the computer world, and what are they but cataloguing codes? (see especially Dublin Core). The only way cataloguing will become unnecessary is if we develop text/data mining that is far, far more sophisticated than we have now. Possibly to a level that isn't even possible, although a lot of things have taken place that weren't thought possible.

5. Bibliographic community - farsighted in use of standards?

Why, because if they hadn't been it would be very difficult to catalogue consistently now, which would mean that we would be unable to share resources (especially bibliographic records) to the extent that we now do. I generally agree, but should note that the early adoption of standards can leave you with a poor standard. Look at DDC or MARC, both of which would be far, far different if they were built from scratch now.

6. Should all libraries adhere to standards?

-no, well not to the same extent, anyway. Smaller libraries don't have the same need to dot every i and cross every t, and in some cases it may even be counterproductive (e.g. the use of [2003?] instead of 2003 for a publication date, when the date is known but not explicitly stated, might just confuse users).

7. Will NZ be a winner or a loser if the bibliographic economy becomes increasingly market-driven?

Probably a loser. We're too small. The only advantage might be in that we are English speaking, and, as the world becomes dominated by Anglo-American processes (see the adoption of AACR by non-Anglo countries) we might be at an advantage here.

8. To what extent is NZ affected by the emphasis on mainstream North American and European culture in bibliographic practice?

Not as much as some countries - we're English-speaking and come from a Christian tradition and worldview, which fits in with Dewey (especially) better than Middle Eastern or Asian cultures do. The effect is probably greatest on Maori culture - bear in mind that concepts of individual authorship aren't as appropriate for Maori culture as they are for Western culture. It's also important to realise that all cultures (even American/European ones) are affected by the use of rules and systems developed 100-odd years ago - Dewey and LCSH aren't perfectly appropriate for modern Western culture, either.

[1] Oddy, Pat. 1998. "Bibliographic Standards and the Globalization of Bilbiographic Control" in Technical Services Today and Tomorrow (2nd ed)., ed. Michael Gorman (Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited).
[2]Harvey and Hider. 2003. Organising Knowledge in a Global Society: principles and practices in libraries and information centres (Wagga Wagga, NSW: Centre for Information Studies, Charles Stuart University), p.18

| posted by Simon at 9:39 pm

 
Good article from b/ite magazine (Mar/Apr 2004) discussing trends in blog searching, and giving tips on how to locate blog articles. Notes that results from the main search engines had previously been dominated by blog postings, due to the number of blogs and the frequency at which they are updated. Mentions that most engines have tweaked their search algorithms to de-emphasise blogs. Describes how to locate blog posts using major search engines - e.g. use [subject] ~blog inurl:archives if searching Google.

Describes the limits of current blog-specific search engines, noting they are in a similar developmental stage to search engines prior to Google. Notes that some search RSS feeds, rather than blogs themselves - problematic as some blogs don't have feeds, some use ATOM not RSS, and some have only partial feeds. Discusses advantages and disadvantages of different search tools.

Interesting.

| posted by Simon at 4:47 pm

 
Hey, I'm back to posting my rough thoughts for each week's class here. Probably of zero interest to anyone who isn't me.

LIBR 528: Research Methods

Week One: Introduction to LIM Research

Exercise Two – List of Problems for a government library

• How are staff using the current awareness bulletin? What items are especially interesting, or not?


• Are staff using the electronic databases to which we subscribe? How effective are their searches?


• How would staff use of the library improve if the catalogue was available for them to search via the intranet?


• How can we evaluate the effectiveness of the information provided to staff?


• Is there an objective measure of the quality of the collection?


• What aspects of the library do staff consider to be most important? What aspects need most work? (e.g. LibQual).

Exercise Three – Research Priorities for LIM in NZ


1.Why do people not use the library?
2.Which groups of people do not use the library? How could libraries better meet their needs?
3.Are the mainly US devised guidelines for the reference interview suitable for use in NZ?
4.How effective is the ILL system as operated by NZ?
5.How useful will the introduction of broadband to libraries, via Project PROBE, be?
6.Are libraries successfully helping to bridge the digital divide?
7.What is the place of filtering in the public library? Should libraries provide access to everything, or should they filter objectionable material? Can they do so effectively?
8.How well is the EPIC project serving the needs of users? Is it being marketed correctly?
9.If we're supposed to be information professionals, how come so many of us are unable to follow basic instructions on using mailing lists? Eh? NZ-Libs and NZ-Records, especially?
10.Is there an appropriate budget split between electronic and print resources? Or between expenditure on the collection and on staff?

Unnumbered Question

The most commonly employed research methods are likely to be survey research, case studies, and bibliometrics.

Exercise Four – Choosing a Topic

1. LibQual in a corporate/special library (survey)
advantages: the methodology exists, just need to adapt it.
Hasn't been done before, as far as I know, in this setting
disadvantages: hasn't been done before, so nothing to fall back on
survey – needs a certain number of respondents, can we get this many?

2. Use of electronic databases (historical research)
advantages: easy to get the data, unobtrusively
disadvantages: small sample size, merely looking at usage data doesn't tell us how useful staff found it. Would need to interview people.

3. Use of filtering software in NZ public libraries (survey)
advantages: fairly easy to construct a survey and draw some conclusions from it; little exists in the literature in NZ (I would guess) but the US data is large, even if much of it is anecdotal
disadvantages: response rate? Would this be high enough?

4. A New Zealand context for the reference interview (qualitative)
disadvantages: I have no idea how to go about this
advantages: it would be freaking cool



| posted by Simon at 9:10 pm

 
Scary stuff, if true...the National Council for Research on Women has a Misinformation Clearinghouse which details the disappearance of information from (US) government websites. The implication is clear that this is done to support a political agenda at the expense of scientific accuracy.

I had a discussion with my boss today about this sort of issue - she pointed out that our website contained old PDFs that contained some outdated information. I argued that we needed to leave this material online, somewhere, in order to maintain the historical record. I think I'm correct in that argument. But if so, how to ensure that the information we're presenting isn't out-of-date?

| posted by Simon at 6:25 pm

 
US$380 gets you an e-book reader with print quality equivalent to newsprint (Excite News) - assuming you live in Japan.

Problem: you can't shift documents from one reader to another, they cost $3 to download but scramble after 2 months. Not a content model I'd want to buy into.

| posted by Simon at 6:11 pm

 
This is such a great idea, wonder why I haven't heard more of it before?

The University of Minnesota library has established a programme where "any U of M student can start a blog. Even more interesting, they’ve linked their library databases to the blogging system – so if a student or researcher finds a book or resource they’re interested in, they can save pointers and citations for it to their blog with one click." They're using Movable Type.

I love this! One to bring up when people tell you blogs are pointless.

Only objection? It was hard to find this from the library's homepage - I had to use the search function on the university's homepage. That's a minor caveat, though.

via Learning the Lessons of Nixon (the delightfully titled blog that features posts classified by the Dewey Decimal System).

| posted by Simon at 9:07 pm

 
Now this is cool...Smart Mobs reports on the OpenTextBook.org, an attempt to develop a textbook using the principles of open-source and freeware publishing.

The most interesting thing about this is that up till now, as far as I know, the move towards open-access publishing has been in the field of scholarly journals, e.g. Biomed Central. We'd been taught (as part of our class on Scholarly Publishing) that it was unlikely that monographs would be available via open-access publishing. Looks like the lecturer may have been wrong.

(So far, the textbook is about 50 pages long, mostly mathematics, which I'm not knowledgeable enough about to critique - but it looks like a great idea).

| posted by Simon at 9:01 pm

 
Good news for Americans (and anyone who sends email to or via America, which is probably all of us): the New York Times (registration or sacrifice of your infant children required) reports "that federal wiretap laws do not apply to e-mail messages if they are stored, even for a millisecond, on the computers of the Internet providers that process them - meaning that it can be legal for the government or others to read such messages without a court order."

Oh. Good. Of course, the rumours that abound about Project Echelon suggest that the US government (in association with most of the rest of the English-speaking world) already is reading our mail. So really, should we be that worried that apparently they have limited legal rights to do so?

And for that matter, most of what I commit to paper (or screen) is on this blog or its sister anyway. Which are easily Googleable or traceable via their feeds. So if I'm getting paranoid, I'm easily enough found, anyway.


| posted by Simon at 8:45 pm

 
Techdirt is fast becoming one of my favourite sites out there. It bills itself as "easily digestible technical news", and it delivers. Definitely worth adding to your reading list (and they have an RSS feed, so there's really no excuse not to).

They have a good article on the social aspects of information technology at work, arguing that employers should permit the odd personal use of the internet. The logic being that this allows staff to recharge their batteries, take care of personal business, and come back to work focused on what they're paid to do. This totally fits in with how I view the world. I spend a lot of time online, working. I can't keep concentration for that whole time, so the odd bit of personal or quasi-personal surfing is good for me. (Quasi-personal is what I'm calling my library weblog reading, seeing as it helps me and my employer).

We need to move beyond the notion of work as something that you do from 9-5, with no overlap with your personal life. I'll clear emails from home on a Sunday. I'll also buy CDs and book travel online from work. It's a trade-off, and I think if you treat people with respect they tend not to abuse this sort of thing.

| posted by Simon at 8:38 pm

 
You know you have problems. Following the recent, well-reported security problems in Internet Explorer, Microsoft's Slate recommends switching to Firefox. I've been using Firefox 0.9 at home for a while, and I like it. Others with more tech-savvy than me disagree, claiming variously that Mozilla (David) or Firefox 0.8 (Sri) is the way to go. Whichever way you cut it, for a piece of software that hasn't even hit version 1.0 yet, Firefox is pretty good.

My only problem? I've just switched over to wireless broadband with Woosh, which is a great improvement on dial-up, but doesn't play well with Firefox. So I'm typing this in IE. *spit, curse*.

| posted by Simon at 8:27 pm

 
A list of fictional books that are mentioned in the text of real ones - sorted by (real) author or title. Would be nice to have also sorted by the fictional author or title, but one can't have everything, and apparently these weren't much used. A good range of source books, from 1984 to Remembrance of Things Past to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

| posted by Simon at 12:27 pm

 
More for my own reference - been playing around with the California Digital Library, a service of the University of California Libraries. Some interesting material, including 1400 books available online - mostly only to staff and students of UC, but a fair number are public, too.

| posted by Simon at 12:21 pm

 
It's fairly common knowledge that librarians tend to the liberal end of the political spectrum, for good or bad. We're expected (if only by ourselves) to have fairly similar, and liberal, views on issues such as censorship and intellectual freedom, and client privacy (second link via LIS News).

Which is why I was surprised by some recent discussion in one of my classes. We were talking about internet resources, and whether anything should be done about the availability of pornographic material online. A topic we're all familiar with, I'm sure. What was interesting was the number of people who came down in favour of using filters to block access to explicit sites. As has been stated before, filtering isn't anywhere near perfect.

Nonetheless, a significant number of my classmates were of the opinion that filtering was a good thing - with one comment being along the lines of "we shouldn't provide access to anything that we wouldn't purchase in hard copy. We don't subscribe to Hustler, why should we allow patrons to access porn?". Well, yes, but the issue isn't that simple. When it comes to a choice between denying patrons access to legitimate websites, or permitting them to potentially access pornography, I think it's clear that librarians need to stand up for the widest possible access to information. A further point to consider is that censorship is a slippery slope - we shouldn't be giving any ground to those who wish to silence opposing points of view - it may start with pornography, but it could easily move on to gay rights, or unpopular political views.

No censorship of any kind. Let the patrons decide.

| posted by Simon at 12:27 pm

 
Sweet! The Coaching Info Service has added an RSS feed of new articles. This is perfect use of the technology - the site carries really useful articles, but they are posted erratically rather than to a fixed schedule, so I often forget to check back. No need to worry about that anymore.

| posted by Simon at 10:41 am

 
As I'm typing this I note that Wilco's A Ghost is Born is currently the number one selling Music CD on Amazon. This is in spite of the fact that the album's been available on P2P for a long time (I've had it for weeks - I just ordered the CD as well) or via their website.

Wow! Band supports filetrading. Band sells progressively more albums.

And I need to mention JustAFan here again. It's a site set up by fans of Wilco, as a means of showing thanks to the band for its support of filesharing and for trusting its fans by making material available online prior to official release. The organisers are taking donations for Doctors Without Borders (Medicins Sans Frontiers) as a means of demonstrating their thanks to Wilco (Wilco were involved in choosing the specific charity). When I tried to donate a few weeks ago, their PayPal account was playing up, so I made a direct donation to MSF. Worthy cause, and a great way of showing support to a forward-thinking group of musicians. (Who also make incredible music).

| posted by Simon at 12:18 pm

 
I wanted to point out that I first heard both the Ladybug Transistor and the Magnetic Fields via downloaded MP3s. I now own pretty much all the Magnetic Fields' records, and I'm working on acquiring the rest, and Stephen Merritt's other work. I had heard of them before I downloaded them, but I probably wouldn't have bought the albums unheard. As for the Ladybug Transistor, they are completely unknown here, and I wouldn't have been able to find their albums even if I wanted to.

My point? P2P filesharing got me interested in these artists, and made money for them and their record company. (Or at least it would be if the record company website actually allowed me to order and pay for the CDs).


| posted by Simon at 12:07 pm

 
I've been experiencing some frustrations with attempting to purchase goods online recently. I've been trying to order some CDs by a relatively obscure New York band called the Ladybug Transistor. I can't find their records on the best NZ online stores - Smoke or Real Groovy. Eventually, I track down their record company's website - Merge Records. I see that Merge also releases some of my favourite artists - the Magnetic Fields, the Clean, etc. So I order me some CDs.

I get all the way through the ordering process, supply my credit card details, and the site tells me I've entered too many characters in my address line. Now, newsflash guys - I typed my address there. That's how it's written. If I wrote it any other way, it wouldn't match the records on my credit card. But it tells me this after I've entered all my CC details, and tells me to hit the back button and make changes. So if I do that, I get a "this page contains post data, do you want to resend?" message. And if I do that, I run the risk of resending my credit card details and paying twice.

So naturally, I don't do that. Instead, I email them, asking if they've received my order or not. Guess what? No reply. Which really leaves me wondering if they want me to buy their records or not.

As an aside, people building international websites need to realise that not everyone does things the way they do in their country. For example, the US uses 5 digit zip codes. New Zealand uses 4 digits, but they aren't required and hardly anyone bothers with them. The UK uses anything from 2 to 8 alpha-numeric characters. Web forms need to be flexible enough to allow for this (my favourite was the site that had a drop-down menu for you to select which country you were in, but also REQUIRED you to select a US state or territory!).

| posted by Simon at 11:54 am

 
So I hadn't had a chance to play with the new features in Blogger till yesterday. The main item of interest is the profile section. Much like Friendster (and probably other social networking services, I don't know) it lets you list interests, hobbies, favourite books and music, and click through to see the profiles of anyone else with the same interest.

Using 'location' as a hyperlink, I managed to find a blogger in the same town as me, with similar tastes in music and even working in a library. Interesting, I was still under the impression I was the only NZ librarian blogging...obviously not :-)

But the really interesting thing to me is how this could function as a social networking tool. I've already browsed profiles of a lot of people with similar interests, and the means are certainly there to contact them if I wanted to. Just another way of interacting with people I could never get to know otherwise. I wonder if anyone's using it for this purpose yet? They must be...

| posted by Simon at 12:35 pm

 

Testing out photoblogging. Me, last year. My hair is longer now, and I don't normally wear a pink neck scarf (it was a team-building exercise, OK?) 

| posted by Simon at 8:19 pm

 
I'm sure this has already been blogged to death, but I didn't see anything (it was probably posted while I was on hiatus in the USA). But I did look at searchenginewatch.com, and there isn't a review of it up there, yet.

A9 is a new(ish) search engine, courtesy of Amazon. It's also got a nice little directory, based on The Open Directory. So far, so standard. What's interesting are the enhancements, available when clicking on site info, which utilise the same features as seen on Amazon itself. Site ranking and usage statistics, site speed measurement, inbound links, site description and screenshot, and, coolest of all, a 'people who visit this page also visit' feature.

Here's
the profile of this blog. WHat I find interesting is that I'm not familiar with some of those sites, so this is a great way of getting recommendations of new sites to check out.

I'm impressed.

| posted by Simon at 7:19 pm

 
Library Journal has an article titled Born with the Chip, which discusses the characteristics of the new generation of library patrons - those who were born into the digital generation, and have different expectations from the rest of us. I feel like I'm on a cusp between the internet and non-internet generations. On the one hand, I'm comfortable on the net/web, I'm old enough to remember making the switch between text-only and graphical browsers. On the other, I'm still not really comfortable with chat, TXT-speak, etc. But these are things I am going to have to be able to work with.

Maybe I should start referring to myself as part of the 'Cusp Generation' (I'm a year or so too old to qualify as NexGen, apparently).

| posted by Simon at 5:34 pm

 
"this is what librarianship is not:

* It is not about checking books in and out.

* It is not about sitting at a reference desk and hoping people will ask you a question.

* It is not just picking a bunch of books for the library or adding a bunch of links to the website.

* It is not merely working 8 to 5 or putting in time.

* It is not getting that MLS and figuring you're done with education."

Source: Canby, Susan Fifer. 2004. "Librarians and Leadership". Information Outlook May 2004. Vol. 8, Iss. 5; pg. 24, 4 pgs.

| posted by Simon at 5:00 pm

 
"This web site provides links to a report and graphs from a research project aimed at determining the impact of digital information resources on the role of research library collection managers in 5 English speaking countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States."

This research was conducted by Daniel Dorner of the School of Information Management at Victoria University, where I'm studying. The survey and the report are online. (The report is 38p, PDF).

| posted by Simon at 12:58 pm

 
In the "this should be bleeding obvious" department - a student from Essex in England is suing his university (Evening Standard, 27 May 2004) for failing him on the grounds of plagiarism. His argument being that he wasn't punished until his third year. He seems to be claiming that because he got away with it for that long, it's OK.

I wonder how well the plagiarism issue was emphasised by the university? I know for my courses it would be almost impossible to claim ignorance, it's really hammered home.

So OK, I'm back posting. I was on hiatus while I went to the US, and after what happened there* I didn't feel much like posting or updating here. Things are looking a bit brighter now, and I've taken a reassessment of my life, and what I was doing with my time online. I guess this is a better use of my time than some of the things I was doing, so I'm continuing, but trying to shift away from just linking to the same stories everyone else is linking, and hopefully add more of my own thoughts.

*I went over in an attempt to further a long-distance relationship with someone I'd met last August. It didn't work out. Such is life.

| posted by Simon at 6:16 pm

 
Another MeFi link, I'm afraid. This time the discussion is more interesting than the link - Fucking Google It!. Basically it's a webpage you refer someone to when they ask a "stupid" question:

"Google Is Your Friend
All Smart People Use Google
You Appear To Not Be One Of Them

Someone thinks you are an idiot because you were too stupid to check Google before asking a question. They gave you a link to this site as a joke. The fact that you followed it pretty much proves the point.

Hope that helps."

What scares me is the assumption, both on this site and by some in the MeFi thread, that Google is the answer to everything. And this comment, in an otherwise sharp post:

"The same is true at your local library. I can look up creationism and come away with a dozen books doing their damndest to dress up religion as science. At least on the web I'll get some counter arguments."

Ouch! So much for our cherished belief that we're putting accross both sides of an argument. I do somewhat sympathise, though - my local public library, while generally good, has a large section of books which enthuse about graphology (handwriting analysis) filed in the psychology section. Now, anyone who's studied industrial psychology, as I have, knows that the literature shows very, very poor results for graphology as a predictor of job performance. But there doesn't seem to be much support given to this viewpoint in the library's collection.

Makes me wish I had a MeFi account though, so I could provide an information professional's perspective (also to correct the claim that Yahoo! uses Alltheweb's database, when according to Greg Notess it uses a modified Inktomi db.

(Yes, I know Jenny posted this before I did, but I saw it on MeFi before I saw it on her site, I just didn't have time to post this because I was at work. Honest ;-) )

| posted by Simon at 6:05 pm

 
The Two Things - "For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.� Via Metafilter.

Some interesting suggestions for various disciplines. I spent, ooooh, at least two minutes trying to think what the "Two Things" might be for Library Science. Those two minutes took me as far as Ranganathan:

1. Books are for use
2. Save the time of the reader.

I think that actually works - you can assume that the other three laws ('each book its reader', 'each reader his [or her] book' and 'libraries are growing organisms')are applications of those two. OK, I'm on slightly shaky ground with the last one, but if you assume that "growing" means "evolving" rather than "ever-incrasing in size" then collection development/management is really an application of the first two laws (we're getting rid of unused or useless resources, so we can replace them with more appropriate ones, because books are meant to be used, and so that we can save the reader's time).

While it's more of a humourous exercise than a genuine attempt at epistimology, I think there's some merit in this Two Things theory.

| posted by Simon at 5:55 pm

 
I'm off to New Mexico in about three hours. Likely to have other things on my mind than blogging. I'm taking Martin Amis's Time's Arrow and Marylaine Block's How to Manage the Unintended Consequences of the Internet as my alternative to inflight movies. Interesting to see how many names I recognised from Marylaine's book - I guess that's one of the greatest things about the internet - I feel much more in touch with who the key figures in my field are, far more so than when I was previously studying (psychology). Weblogs and websites enable anyone with a passing interest in a field to keep current, whereas in the Dark Ages (pre-1996) I would have been reliant on reading a decent handful of academic journals. Reading blogs lets me skim the surface of the field, to at least be aware of what is going on, and gives me the option to read more deeply where I choose.

| posted by Simon at 4:26 pm