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caleb — Thu, 20 May 2010 06:05:00 +0000

stop talking about filtering content

caleb — Wed, 12 May 2010 07:14:31 +0000

Last week the Supreme Court of Washington, the state, not the district ruled that it was ok for a library to user filtering software on its public computers.

The problem was that the North Central Regional Library District filtered things that people wanted to look at, like Women & Guns magazine. The challenge was that such filtering is illegal under Washington State free-speech laws.

There is nothing good about internet filtering on library computers, let me get out of the way. Sarah Houghton-Jan did a piece on this topic late last week and she says it well with a ton of data and invective to back it up.

The idea with a case like this is that if he law was successfully challenged, no libraries in Washington State would be allowed to filter, hopefully setting up an awkward conflict with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, a federal law can demand that libraries do (filter).

All three opinions in the case compare the internet to a library collection. For the majority and concurring opinions, the library selects materials, so it should select websites as well. The dissenting justice opines that the library has selected the internet and shouldn’t refuse to circulate certain sites.

The justices aren’t the only ones robbing this train of thought. In Library Journal, Washington State Librarian echoes the same sentiment, saying “public libraries have long enjoyed broad discretion to select materials for their collections, and it makes sense that the same discretion would apply to the vast amount of materials on the Internet”.

Here’s my problem: the conversation here is about libraries as repositories of information, and their mythical role as gatekeepers to same, and it doesn’t serve us at all. I see a parallel here with OCLC’s 2008 study, From Awareness to Funding, that says “transformation, not information drives financial support”. In both cases, framing the library as only a provider of content or information hinders our ability to help our communities thrive.

Let’s pretend the problem is only about people looking at pornography on library computers. Porn is bad, right, and kids can’t have it, they’re too young. It’s misogynist too, so long as we’re taking the moral high ground, because pornography is ultimately about male fantasies and dominating women. So what do we do about it?

Lawrence Lessig, in Code gives four techniques for regulation: law, markets, architecture and social norms.

Internet filtering uses architecture to regulate. Filters put physical and logical constraints on what people can look at. Houghton-Jan does a great job describing how poorly this works and has the data to back it up.

Markets regulate through pricing structures and through supply and demand. If there weren’t free porn sites, the market would be a good regulator here. So would getting rid of net neutrality - it would be a lot easier to eliminate nudity on library computers if those sites’ bandwidth was squeezed out by more moral sites like foxnews.com.

Social norms regulate by having a community of people establish proper behavior. People who act outside of the norms are ostracized.

Law regulates by making it against policy, for example, to look at pornography on library computers. The law doesn’t do much on its own. It only works if the law or policy is enforceable.

Houghton-Jan reports that internet filtering doesn’t work:

it’s consistently found that 15-20% of the time, content is over-blocked (e.g. benign sites that are blocked incorrectly). And 15-20% of the time, content is under-blocked (e.g. sites deemed “bad” gets through anyway).

Could we do better with some other regulation techniques?

Here’s an example from a library I have been known to work at:

We patrons over a certain age the choice of filtered vs. unfiltered internet when they sign onto their stations. Unfiltered access isn’t a free pass, there is still a policy that says you still aren’t supposed to look at pornography or other sites that bother the person next to you.

The way it works is that if you are a patron and you are sitting next to someone and you think they are breaking the rules, you tell the nearest staff member. That person calls someone else, who asks the person stop and often to log off.

So this library regulates pornography through a combination of architecture (you can choose filtered internet access) and law. I would also argue that social norms play a regulatory role as well - using the internet at the library isn’t exactly private, and anyone sitting next to you or walking by can see what you see. Patrons are less likely to visit pornography sites in a public setting.

I’m not exactly sure how many computers we have in the building, but we report 483 in the whole system. I work in the big beautiful building that has a lot more space than the others, so call it 60 public computers, very conservatively.

Patrons are limited to an hour a day, and the big beautiful building is open 57 hours per week. Lets say they’re in use 80% of the time, which is also very conservative, so at minimum, 2,736 patrons (57 x 60 x 80 percent) use the internet at our big beautiful building every week.

Over the course of a typical week, patrons get asked to stop viewing “objectionable material” around 5 times. That’s my experience. I’m sure it is under-reported. Some patrons may not care what their neighbor is peeping at, and others may be intimidated or unwilling to give up a few minutes of their precious hour a day of internet to tattle. Let’s say that only 1 in 10 cases of gets reported, or 50 of 2,736 patrons are breaking the rules every week.

Rounding up, 2% of patrons are looking at “objectionable material” every week. Again, can I stress that I am erring on the side of “bad behavior”?

So in this case, the strategy of combining choice for patrons, library policy and social norms is at least 98% effective against pornography, if that’s really the goal, and as a bonus, never overblocks non-pornographic sites. It is far more effective than filtering.

Now, there are all kinds of problems with my anecdote. What I consider conservative estimates about computer use and “mis-use” might be dead wrong. These social norms might only apply in the library with the big room full of computers. Looking for information in a public space may constrain the freedom of inquiry we are trying to enable. And did I mention we have security guards who sometimes help enforce library behavior policies?

But the point is that the conversation about pornography and other “objectionable material” in the library should center on behavior, not content.

felipe carrillo: a mild goose chase

caleb — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 08:09:43 +0000

She’s Mayan. Her face, and the face of her child, are variations on the iconography in Mayan glyphs. She’s in a factory - some raw materials are being processed. I’m not sure what’s in her basket, but political posters are on the wall: Viva Felipe Carrillo, perhaps something about a Mayan cooperative, and one other I can’t decipher at all.

So who is Felipe Carrillo? Felipe Carrillo Puerto was Governor of Yucatán from 1922 until 1924, when he was assassinated, apparently for political reasons. The Mexican Revolution is a really confusing series of events for me, and I’ll have to read up, but he is still celebrated as a hero and a martyr today. Wikipedia doesn’t say much else I can verify, so I turned to my library catalog.

Which gave me ought, so I tried WorldCat, and found his subject heading, “Carrillo Puerto, Felipe”. Nice!

I was intrigued that one of the titles that turned up is in Mayan, for Felipe Carrillo Puerto u kuxtal yetel bix u k’a'ajsa’al tu kaajil Muxupip, only WorldCat includes a record that says it is in Malay.

Catalogers!

I checked which libraries laid claim to this record, and found 6, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, Harvard, The New York Public Library, and Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, affectionately known in my family as “Yuc U”.

So which library put in the wrong country code?

You can usually find MARC records in library’s catalogs because librarians sometimes find them useful to look at. MAchine-Readable Cataloging was invented to transport information about books between libraries, so that they could save on labor costs. Unfortunately, it isn’t very HUman-Readable, so there is a movement afoot to remove MARC displays from library catalogs.

But I’m a librarian, so I went looking for the MARC record to see what I could see. Inconveniently, both Stanford and UC Berkeley are among those taking the newfangled approach of providing HUman-Readable catalog records only. Luckily, my third try, UC Riverside came through:

008    930331s1992    mx a          000 0 may d
040    NYP|cNYP|dOCLCQ|dMXYUC

Here field 008 shows the incorrect language code, ‘may’ (instead of ‘myn’), and field 040 shows, I think, that the New York Public Library created this record, making the mistake theirs.

I checked to see if other libraries copied NYPL’s mistake but haven’t found any yet. Harvard’s catalog includes that both are in Mayan, and Yuc U’s record doesn’t use a language code as far as I can tell.

Google Books has a copy also, and we may yet get to pay to see it what language they think it is in.

In the meantime, I requested two titles on the man via interlibrary loan, Carrillo Puerto, iconografía, which may be hard to get since so few libraries have it, but sounds really exciting to me - iconography is where I started this search from, and maybe it will tell me more about this piece - and Peregrina : love and death in Mexico, the autobiography of Carrillo Puerto’s lover, Alma Reed, an American on assignment from the New York Times to cover Mexico.

Here’s where the story gets incredible, as in, maybe this isn’t credible, but the University of Texas Press says that Reed’s manuscript mysteriously disappeared “immedaiately after her sudden death in 1966″, and it was rediscovered in 2001 inside “an abandoned apartment in Mexico City.” That’s 35 years later. Incredible!

While I wait, I’m reading Reed’s 1923 sensational and sardonic missives on Mexico, which ran weekly in the New York Times Magazine from March 11 to April 15, with two additional articles running May 20 and June 23 in the Sunday Times. Thank you, public library and New York Times Historical.

For the mystery that shrouds the sepulchre of the Conqueror is today the vitalizing spark of Spanish nationalism in the Republic of Mexico. It glows with the high pride of the past, the brooding challenge of the present, the quite but unswerving hope of the future. It is the holy of holies in that temple of memories and issues and traditions wherein colonial aristocracy finds refuge from “expropriated” haciendas. And the billiard players of the Casino Español are its high priests.

bound

caleb — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:12:36 +0000

From some point after its incoporation to the early 80s, the Library Association of Portland, which later became Multnomah County Library, operated its own bindery. Besides visually and texturally uniting runs of periodicals and sets of reference books on the shelves, the bindery, together with the mending department, breathed new life into well-read books.

Some of these books are easy to spot on the shelves. A solid-colored buckram spine with a stamped-on call number tells you the book has been rebound. For most, pull them off the shelf and you’ll find a repeating geometric or floral pattern adorning the cover. Many also are plain, and I find more than a few strikingly beautiful.

I’m starting a collection. My favorites so far contain intricate symmetries.

Or they have singular designs.

Or they just look cool on a book.

Based on the evidence I’ve collected so far, decorated buckram cloths were used starting in the late 1950s up until the mid 1980s.

I’m not sure that these books tell a story besides the ones between their pages, but there are at least three stories I think you can tell and include these books.

One is the history of the local library and the book trade. Certainly the Library Association of Portland didn’t operate the only bindery in town. There are binderies operating today. What happened to the art and craft of binding in the 20th century?

Another is simply the story of the designs themselves. There is geometry here, but also Art Deco, flowers, and an echo of Mayan glyphs.

The third story is the shift in library policies and values from preserving a bruised book to replacing it, and even sometimes replacing it with a different book on the same subject. I don’t know that one is always better than another, and there is something painful and messy about seeing the stitches in a rebound book.

There isn’t a whole lot you can tell from the covers themselves, but the longtime staff have been nice enough to explain where to look for markings and stamps in the books that indicate when the book was bound. For example, the book’s acquisition date was often stamped or written on the page after the verso (I don’t know what its called), and the bindery date was stamped on the verso itself. Sometimes you’ll find a bindery number instead, and this can also be on the title page.

In this example, the book was acquired February 18, 1958 and visited the bindery just 27 months later.

You really can’t know why the book was rebound - was it so heavily used it fell apart, or was it shoddily put together in the first place? “c.1″ in a call number today would suggest multiple copies and high use, but in 1958, it may have just meant that extra copies were only anticipated, and cataloging staff put it in the book in the first place to save the trouble of having to add it later.

I don’t know. But I love these books, and I am going to keep trying to find out about them.

More books about books

caleb — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 07:39:47 +0000

The book I’m almost finished with now is Proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain by Maryanne Wolf. Wolf is a neuroscientist who studies dyslexia, which she says is catch-all phrase for problems learning to read.

I’m not terribly impressed with it - the opening chapters make weak and culturally biased arguments about the importance of alphabetic writing, and the brain science after that is a little dry. The good part is part three, where she summarizes a century of research into the biophysical basis for dyslexia.

She loves the Ancient Greeks, and especially Socrates and Plato. Socrates the great orator, and Plato who wrote it down. I was never clear on this - wasn’t Socrates, as Plato wrote him, partly the invention and voice of Plato? Again with the cultural bias: writing is not necessarily the definitive version.

But anyway, Wolf compares Socrates’ concern that literacy will corrupt young thinkers if they learn to read before they learn to think to modern day concerns about young people having access to the internet. She is validating Socrates’ concern vis a vis the Internet, which I disagree with, but also sets off a light bulb moment for me on page 221:

Throughout the [written] story of humankind, from the Garden of Eden to the universal access provided by the Internet, questions of who should know what, when, and how remain unresolved.

Intellectual freedom, filtering pornography, information about birth control, the bombing of Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War - all of these things touch on this question, and it struck me that my particular brand of librarianship answers it in the exact same way every time: everyone has the right to know everything, now.

And Socrates? I can’t think of him without thinking of Saukrates.

mobots4lib

caleb — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 10:15:28 +0000

One thing can lead to another, and it usually does. My last aside questioned David Weinberger’s quote in American Libraries that humans are hard-wired to externalize knowledge (e.g. writing), and suggested that it must have a social basis instead. I wanted to learn more and began reading Being there: putting rain, body, and world together again by Andy Clark, the book Weinberger references.

I’m about halfway through, and Clark does seem to be leading up to a link between intelligence and external knowledge, and in particular that our intelligence comes from the interaction between our brains, bodies, and our environment, but the first half of the book is stimulation enough.

The first models of artificial intelligence were based on the idea of the brain as a central logical controller. These systems were limited because they could only be intelligent about the information stored in the “brain”. A chess program is useless for small talk.

Clark writes about a present shift in the field of robotics (Being There was published in 1996), where robotocists began to design machines without central controlling systems, and instead programmed their individual moving parts to work independently and communicate with one another. These were sometimes called “mobots” for “mobile robots”.

For example, an insect robot could be programmed to walk by giving each leg a few simple rules, such as, “if the leg opposite of you goes back, swing forward”. If you’re reminded of the documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, good job - Rodney Brooks, the roboticist featured in that film is referenced heavily in this book.

This, also, is often how insects work together - each one gets the same job. When ants find food, they leave a strong trail so that other ants can follow it. The next ant that finds food in the same place builds up the trail, and eventually, all of the ants in Oregon know where your cat food dish is.

So. Libraries. How would we apply this idea? What do we do centrally that might work better if we each followed a few simple rules?

In the summer of 1995, I got my first job in a library, at the university library in the interlibrary loan office. I loved it, and it lead me into librarianship. I loved the reciprocity and I loved the processes and all the wacky rules and procedures.

For example, if someone requested a book, first we checked the three-college catalog, then we checked our filing cabinet to see if we had requested the same book in the past two years. We didn’t want to ask the same library for the same book twice in a two-year period, and keeping the requests let us track who we had requested from. In the spirit of reciprocity, we didn’t want to lean too hard on any other single library, and especially not one belonging to an institution more ivied than we were, or for that matter a public library anyone had heard of - those public libraries are just too busy. The next January, it was going to be my job to go through the drawer to remove and destroy the older-than-two-years records.

We filed away all of our article requests as well, and these took up the rest of the cabinet. Attached were not just the institutions we requested them from, but their holdings for the title as well. Nothing was worse than getting a request for an article in a volume of a periodical you didn’t own. It wastes everyone’s time. Besides, when a professor in the psychology department is angling for tenure and wants several articles from the same publication, it helps to spread the work around.

What made both of these tasks possible was the fact that my time, at $7.50 an hour, was less valuable than the interlibrary loan librarian’s, or his assistant, who spent hours at a DOS terminal connected to Dublin, Ohio on a dedicated line: the central brain.

But all this is just an excuse to talk about my first library job, I don’t actually want to reinvent interlibrary loan, though I think any system can always be improved. Besides, ILL has been reinvented enough; Docster is still my favorite.

Instead, lets consider collaborative virtual reference.

Today, there are few models for libraries to share virtual reference questions with each other. OCLC’s 24/7 Cooperative has everyone get in the pool together, then each library answers whatever questions they find in the sludge. Oregon’s statewide collaborative works much the same way, except we’ve got it set up so individual libraries can have their own pool that overflow into the big one when no one is paying attention. It’s just like Terwilliger Hot Springs.

We also collaborate with our sister service in Ohio, though instead of sharing a pool, we each have our own (like Bagby Hot Springs!), and the front end of our software asks a couple of questions in making a decision about where to send each patron: Is an Oregon librarian online? What day and hour is it?

I am still a huge fan of the 24/7 Cooperative, and cooperative reference in general, but the main problems are that librarians are assigned shifts on the virtual desk where nothing happens and that smaller libraries often end up picking up the slack for the larger statewide systems.

Could we avoid these problems if, instead of a central controller routing patrons, we had each library operate independently?

An example that comes to mind is Aardvark, a question and answer service which routes questions to experts, based on the subject and other parameters set by the experts (a ‘brain’). If an expert can’t or doesn’t want to answer a question, they can pass, making decisions independent of the central controller.

As a librarian, Aardvark befuddles me. I can answer questions about anything, ok? My two areas of expertise are regular expressions and /.*/. As far as Aardvark is concerned, they can’t believe anyone could be so arrogant. For mostly other reasons, I don’t answer questions through Aardvark, but I know someone who does sometimes.

So what would it look like if libraries answered virtual reference questions for each other, but without a central controller, not even in Aardvark’s style?

First of all, it could work independent of software. Virtual reference starts with HTML forms, and I could easily redirect my HTML form to any other virtual reference service.

So patrons submit questions using HTML forms and a controller program - can I call it a mini-brain? - makes a decision: do I answer this question, or do I refer it to another mini-brain? If it answers, a chat is initiated. If not, the next mini-brain makes the same decision.

Now, a couple of things here: a mini-brain has to know how to talk to other mini-brains, and it has to have some information to make its decisions: Are you there? How long is the wait? How long is the wait upstream? It also has to store this information for when another mini-brain asks it the same questions.

Different mini-brains - okay, I better just call them nodes - could be programmed with different logic, but basically, it will forward the question to the node with the shortest wait (or shortest upstream wait). If a node is not available, it can still forward questions to the next one.

    Z   E
    |   |
B - A - C - D

So, node A gets a question, but is busy. It asks nodes B and C for help. Node C has a shorter wait time, so the question goes there. Node C checks in with nodes D and E and decides to answer the question. All this happens in microseconds and the patron doesn’t know, or care, what is going on.

There’s a problem though, if one controller-mini-brain-node initiates a disproportionate number of questions, then it’s neighbors will see heavy traffic too.

One solution might be just to do nothing. As the questions come in, the availability and wait time locally will change, and questions will be routed elsewhere.

Another solution is the dosey-doe. The dosey-doe rule says, “after forwarding a question to a node, change places with it”. After node A sends it’s question to node C, node A would be connected to nodes C, D and E. Node C would be connected to nodes A, B and Z.

Square dance aficionados will note that that this is not what ‘dosey doe’ means, and contra dancers will insist on spelling it differently as well, but here’s the diagram after the switch:

    Z   E
    |   |
B - C - A - D

If a new question came to node A right away, it would be unlikely that node C was available or less busy.

In this way, libraries could provide collaborative virtual reference independent of software, with no need for scheduling, and be able to distribute traffic equitably without a central, controlling system.

lists of listmakers and the lists they make

caleb — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:25:40 +0000

My attention span is dwindling.

A few weeks ago - no - a week? I don’t know.

Recently, Twitter started letting you make lists. I sort of wondered, why?

Well I guess we all have different strategies for monitoring our social networks. I have a friend who only follows 50 people on Twitter. I’m not one of them, and the hell with him anyway. Personally, I use a handy desktop application to group together the people whose twits I don’t want to miss.

But other folks apparently were creating multiple Twitter accounts to group their friends. So, lists.

The thing I don’t like about making a list, and making it public is that it feels a lot like middle school: someone else is always telling you what group you belong to.

Which is really opposite from how other popular social networks work. You join groups. Clay Shirky says so. I am not so much of a group-joiner, but I do count myself as a subscriber of many things.

Anyway, I think there’s a big difference between deciding what groups you belong to and having someone else tell you.

So I started making Twitter lists. I mostly know about librarians, so I made lists of those. There are 50,000 librarians on Twitter, and I needed to narrow it down some, so I decided to focus on male librarians. My first impulse was to group together the cool kids, just like middle school.

I started grouping male librarians into a list of interweb guybrarians. But that was silly. Male librarians on Twitter didn’t seem distinctive enough. So I narrowed the list to male librarians on Twitter who make lists on Twitter, and added myself, since I was now making a list. Now I felt less guilty about throwing random strangers in with some people I have met and admire.

And I started looking at what kinds of lists they made:

The most common kind of lists that librarians make is of other librarians:

Mark Dellenbaugh’s “library-folk“
Bill Drew’s “librarians“
Brad Czerniak’s “librarians“, “librarians2” and “librarians3“

This seems pretty utilitarian, but I can’t imagine trying to keep up with 100 or 1,000 people chattering away about mostly the same thing.

Other folks made multiple lists for different groups of followers. Andrew Finegan makes list of tweetups, real-people, writers, comedy, cabaret and librarians.

Exploring further, I was finally able to confirm my middle school thesis (ok, it was more of a topic sentence) in David Lee King’s list “cool-peeps“. My take is that David has a lot of followers, and follows a lot of people, and that he probably wanted to focus on the people he is really interested in hearing from, and that’s fine. But to make it public, and to use a value-based label? It makes me want to spend recess listening to my walkman with the girl with purple hair and clothespins all over her body.

Part of the problem here is the way people are encouraged to follow each other as part of a reciprocal exchange of social network capital. I don’t know if this is really what is going on, but if King didn’t feel the need to follow 1,700 people in the first place, there would be no need to narrow it down. And note, I’m not saying it’s his fault. It’s peer pressure!

Michael Stephens, another internet guybrarian has a similar number of followers as King (minus 1,000), but follows only 194. His list, “lis768” has only 13 people, and from the title, I’m going to guess they are students in one of his classes. I can’t think of a more perfect opportunity to make a public list. You’d like to communicate with a group and encourage the group to communicate with each other, and it is just small enough that it might actually work.

To be sure, there are other kinds of lists. John Kirriemuir’s” men-with-beards” is a prime example.

When I decided on the final criteria for interweb guybrarianship, I had to remove a bunch of non-listmaking male librarians. What to do with them. Inspired again by Jason Scott (aka Sockington, I decided to classify them as “library-hunks“.

As it turns out, at least according to my schema, male librarians are way more likely to be hunks than interweb guybrarians.

The fallout so far is that I’ve gained a few followers from the second list and I don’t think any from the first. I feel like a middle school tool, getting attention any way he can. I’m really sorry about that.

If I’ve put you on either of these lists, it doesn’t mean I think you are particularly attractive, or geeky, it just means that during the 20 or 30 minutes I spent making them lists, I happened to find you, probably from someone else’s list of librarians.

Some searches I have going on in the background of my Twitter client tell me that I made a few people’s day by putting them on the library-hunk list, and one person was excited to be an internet guybrarian, and seeing that feedback might have made it all worthwhile.

If you withheld feedback, I probably think you’re great. If we’ve met in person, I probably like you. if we haven’t met, we should get together. To hell with lists, I’ll keep them up for another week or month then zzzt.

adventures with Aardvark

rachel — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:33:37 +0000

i signed up with the q/a service Aardvark a few months ago out of curiosity and some professional sense of “i should know about this”. my experiences with it have ranged from unremarkable to amusing to somewhat upsetting. I know a lot of librarians out there “slam the boards” or otherwise participate in non-library question answering. I have to admit that after some dabbling in the early days of the now defunct Google Answers, I never have.

“god, you’re such a librarian”

my early experiences with aardvark were really frustrating. i’d get questions and go to work researching the answers and would usually lose the questioner by the time i’d found some good leads for them. When Dave asked for triathlon training groups in the Bay Area, I searched for triathlon training groups in the Bay Area. When Allen wanted to know if those air-filled shipping pouches are recyclable in his community, I waded through his city’s municipal web pages looking for the answer. When Britta wanted articles about depictions of digital fabricators in fiction, I set to work in our databases. In short, I acted like a librarian. I was lamenting to J. one day that Aardvark was taking me a lot of time with little pay off, he was surprised. J:”Why is it taking you a long time?”

me: “Well, I spend all this time researching the answer and by the time I’m done the person is either gone or they’re not really interested in being directed to sources and seeing how I got the answer”

J (laughing): “you’re not supposed to do research! you just answer it if you know it and pass if you don’t”

me: “what?”

It honestly never occurred to me that researching and providing sources was optional let alone undesirable. In my work as a librarian, I never answer questions from personal knowledge. People come to the reference desk and say something like “what does ‘inveigh’ mean?” and I go to the dictionary rather than answer even though if anyone knows ‘inveigh’, it’s me.

J: “God, you’re such a librarian”

“Well, you know, I’m in Canada so Google doesn’t work”

I’ve also had a number of interactions with people that I found kind of upsetting from an information literacy perspective. Most of the questions I’ve gotten have been easily answerable with a little legwork but I’ve accepted that lazyweb aspect. Some of the questions are not really well-suited to the format but are plainly people just wanting to strike up a conversation, eg. Questioner: “Do you think that ultimately all information will be freely distributed in society?” Me: “No”. But some of the interactions have flat out baffled me. The exerciser in Montreal who works out all the time, feels weak and tired all the time, and can’t seem to lose the weight he wants to lose. I suggest he see his doctor and a nutritionist. He says “I’d like to see a nutritionist but I don’t know how to find any around me”. Thinking he means he doesn’t know how to find a good nutritionist, I suggest he could interview a few before picking one. he replied that he didn’t know how to find any to interview. I suggested he could just search for some in his area. Then he hit me with “Well, you know, I’m in Canada so Google doesn’t work”. Huh. I don’t know. I can find a lot of nutritionists in Montreal using google.ca. At this point i just ended the conversation, going against every librarian instinct in my body. But, this one I had recently is the one that really wigged me.

Q: “Is it a copyright violation to talk about a Flickr picture in Twitter?”

Me: “you’re just talking about it and linking to it? not copying it?”

Q: “Yes, just want to talk about it”

Me: “no, it’s not. copyright doesn’t really come into it”

Q: “Okay, cool, what about if I talk about it in my livejournal? I’m not going to copy it or anything, just want to talk about it”

Me: “you’re fine”

Q: “Great! just curious, what are your legal qualifications in case I ever get in trouble”

Me: “none”

Q: “hahaha! well, thanks anyway”

Honestly, I don’t even know where to start. Disturbing: that the questioner wasn’t sure if it was okay to even talk about someone’s copyrighted work. it was a great inspiration for the copyright talk i was giving the next day where i would be talking about how copyright could be used to control speech. Disturbing: that the questioner seems to believe that counsel she has recieved anonymously over the internet will be of some help to her in a court of law.

Like looking at search terms in logs, playing around with Aardvark has been a bizarre peek into how people ask questions to, well, not-librarians. We know, as librarians, that questioners frame their questions in terms of what they believe we can answer so it’s always fun to see questions asked in other contexts.

I sort of enjoy Aardvark now. I pass on most questions but find it gratifying to use when the questioner is asking an appropriate question (I have some creme de cacao, what’s a good cocktail I could make? What restaurants in Portland have nice patios?). I think being a librarian remains a liability for me when I use it. When the questioner just wants an opinion, it is fun, but when they actually want information about something I find it really difficult (emotionally) to just tell them something without directing them to sources. Partially, I just find it difficult to relate to the mind that would prefer to just get the information without sources. I know it means i continue to basically “miss the point” about “social search” but I guess that’s something to talk about later…

geocities, you will not be forgotten

caleb — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:38:49 +0000

I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the passing of Geocities. This coming Sunday, October 26th, Yahoo! is shutting down the site for good. I am not going to tell you I learned HTML with Geocities, or wax nostalgic on how awesome it was that they let anyone have a website for free, and I’m not going to reflect on Geocities’ idealistic “geography” where site owners sorted themselves by concept into communities of interest.

And really, I don’t expect to do anything about it either - Yahoo! claims the Internet Archive is working on making a copy, but the effort I’ve heard about is by angry historian Jason Scott, who, along with the Archive Team (tagline: “We are going to rescue your shit”), has been crawling and archiving every Geocities URL they can find since Yahoo! made the announcement in June. The fact that they aren’t done tells you a lot about how much Yahoo! is throwing away.

It all sounds like some cartoon scenario, contrived to be solved in 30 minutes on a weekday afternoon, with plenty of time for commercials. And that’s what I’d like to focus on today.

My two favorite Geocities sites are now, and forever will be the Home of the Animaniacs Cultural Reference Guides and Stanley Lui’s Transformers On-Line Encyclopedia. If you’re reading this after October 26, 2009, don’t worry, you’ll find both sites in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

I began paying attention to these sites, along with non-Geocities entities such as The Bagpipes go to the movies as references of dubious value. To some extent I considered their value dubious first because fans lack authority, but I don’t think I believed that even then. I did believe, and still wonder, just who would be referring to these sites.

ACRG is a list of jokes in the Animaniacs cartoon:

** Show #28 ** 

"Moby or not Moby" --
  +  "Captain Stuebing" was of course the captain on "The Love Boat."  (WBB)
  -  The Ernest Borgnine comment probably refers to the sitcom "McHale's
     Navy", where he played a Naval captain in WWII.  (MB)
  -  Amazingly, both Gavin MacLeod (who played Stuebing) and Borgnine
     co-starred in "McHale's Navy".  (ML)
  +  The Warners mention *Star Trek IV* in their song to Ahab.  Whales had a
     large part in saving Earth in that movie.  (WBB)
  +  The "Don't Kill the Whales" song is sung to the (familiar?) tune
     "(What Shall We Do With A) Drunken Sailor".  (SS)
  +  Dot's "High C on the High Seas" is a tribute to Louis Armstrong. (BrettM)
  -  Starbuck looks a lot like Scotty of Star Trek.  (RJR)
  +  The "stroke" bit -- as in "stroking one's ego", the sycophantic things
     that Y,W,&D were saying to Ahab.  (SS)
  +  Ahab sees Pinocchio in the whale because in the movie, Pinocchio had to
     rescue Gepetto from being stuck inside a whale.  Saw that one coming a
     mile away.  (WBB)
  +  Ships are:  SS Minnow, the Titanic, and the Edmund Fitzgerald.  (WBB)
  +  "The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald" was a song in the 70's, by
     Gordon Lightfoot.  About a Great Lakes ore ship that sank and
     everybody died.  Tres depressing material for a hit tune.  (SS)

Like Wikipedia, ACRG is a group effort. Each contributed reference is credite to an individual (and sometimes groups), with pluses and minuses by the editor of the work saying whether the fact is verifiable or not. Unlike Wikipedia, disputed and dubious contributions are included.

Oddly, sometimes obvious references are excluded - we can tell from context here that this vignette is a parody of Moby Dick, and the title is a pun on a line from Shakespeare. Animaniacs fans presumably all know this. Likewise, viewers of the show (and readers of the Internet) will know that the SS Minnow (Gilligan’s Island) and the Titanic (from the film Titanic) are famous shipwrecks. The Edmund Fitzgerald is a less famous wreck to the audience, so it bears explaining.

To my question of what the value is of this work, the answer is (to me, now) clearly that contributing to it was rewarding. In a community of Animaniacs fans, you could gain standing by contributing to the collective knowledge about the show, but I don’t think it was only about prestige. People loved this show, and by adding to the ACRG, they expressed that love.

Transformers is the editorial work of a fanatic, Stanley Lui, who along with some other contributors wrote biographies of robots and other characters from the Transformers universe, documenting differences between the US and Japanese TV versions, as well as the US and UK comic books. There are graphical and text-only versions of the site, reminding us of the good old days of dial-up. Look closely and you won’t see much difference between the two. I could be mistaken, but from what I remember, the site used to have images taken from TV scans - there are some from comics but not nearly what I remember. Ah, the good old days of corporate cease and desist letters (I speculate).

A typical entry, gives a character’s biography as it appears in each Transformers “continuity”. Here is the beginning of the entry for Bumblebee, who was a playground favorite:

Bumblebee (Goldbug)

Function: Espionage. Transforms into a Volkswagen Beetle (”Bug”). At some time in all continuitites, he changed his name to “Goldbug” following a major body rebuild. In the comic continuities, he has since changed his name and body back to “Bumblebee.”

Cartoon Bio (US):
Bumblebee was one of the Autobots on the Ark when it crashed into Earth. He was involved in many battles, but was mainly known for being a friend to the humans Spike and Sparkplug Witwicky. He fought in many battles but was not immensely useful very often because of how small he was. However, his conversion into a supercharged Volkswagen Beetle made him a useful Autobot spy. He was changed to Goldbug when the Quintessons rebuilt him during the madness plague.

Cartoon Bio (Japan):
None submitted.

Comic Bio (US):
Shortly after being awakened on Earth, the Autobots decided that they needed to make contact with the Earthlings as quickly as possible. As a result, a number of them, led by Prowl and including Bumblebee, entered Portland, Oregon. There, they mistook a group of cars at a drive-in movie for the dominant lifeforms of the planet, not realizing that the humans inside were actually the species they wanted to meet. In enthusiasm, Bumblebee attempted to make contact with an “Earthling” by bumping into the back of one of the cars. It turned out that the car belonged to Buster Witwicky, who immediately got out to find out why the accident happened…

Contrasted with Bumblebee’s Wikipedia entry, the Transformers On-Line Encylopedia is very light. Perhaps because it is the work of fewer people, or because the Transformers story continues to be told, but I also noticed that Lui created the site with a specific scope in mind, attempting to represent the world of Transformers in a limited way:

“In the spirit of the Star Trek Encyclopedia, a reference source solely about the “official” storylines, categorized by characters, technology, places, etc. I have no episode synopses, tech specs, or toy information.”

The encyclopedia is then a completely descriptive reference to the the Transformers “continuities” as perceived by the viewer or reader. There is no analysis, no ancillary texts, no merchandise, no artists or actors. It is a reference to the stories only, for fans of the stories and the Transformers Universe.

What is most astonishing to me about Lui’s site is that roughly half of the sites he links to are still active. For example, on his page for “links to toy information“, there is one link to an official Hasbro site, one to a top-level domain (with a fancy Drupal site that is “best viewed with Internet Explorer”), and six to fan sites, all hosted on user pages at various colleges or internet service providers. None of the 4 with a tilde-fied username in the URL are still active, and of the last two, the only one that is a valid URL is hosted at Geocities competitor/knock-off FortuneCity.

So in other words, if your site is going to be on the internet for any amount of time, you had better figure out how to pay for hosting.

YOUR STUPID LIBRARY BRANDING HERE pts. 1 and 2

caleb — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:28:55 +0000

Aaron wrote recently about EBSCOHost Connection, a service from EBSCO that puts their source material into search engines, then lets end users log in through their library.

Nice idea. It’s something I’m interested in: how do we get the library materials into the search engines?

Sometimes you see hits from JSTOR or PubMed also, and searching around, I’m catching journals from Wiley as well. There are probably others, and like Aaron, I hadn’t heard of the service from EBSCO either.

Aaron found the EBSCO hits when he was searching for “Triumph Triple Connection” - from what I can tell, is some kind of branded textile used for making motorcycle leathers. Aaron is like 7 feet tall, has lots of tattoos and commutes from Portland to DC on a motorcycle, so this makes total sense.

But what doesn’t make sense is why an article without the word ‘connection’ in it would show up in the search results at all, until you notice that EBSCO puts the words ‘EBSCOHost Connection’ at the beginning of the HTML tag for every article they let the search engines index. By branding their material this way, they destroy most chances anyone ever had for finding the material. I’m going to assume there are no accidental searches with the word ‘EBSCOHost’ in them, so either: a) your search includes the word ‘connection’ and an irrelevant article shows up (’crater lake connection’, ‘connection section election’) OR b) your search includes the word ‘connection’ and there is already reliable information on the web about the subject (’electrical connection’, ‘french connection’) [so hits from EBSCOHost Connection are ranked way low] OR c) you search doesn’t use this word but search engines think it is so important to your page that it ignores you. OR d) you accidentally type the word connection twice (’french connection connection’) and you’re golden. I noticed that JSTOR and PubMed and Wiley don’t have this problem, but for the most part, their products still have stupid names. Here are my favorite (as in least favorite) branded library products. Disclaimer: jokes may only be funny to me: 10. Anything you named your library catalog (as much as I loved you, Barton, Albert and Wili). Lucky us, this trend appears to have subsided. 9. CQ Researcher: Like other products listed here, your acronym doesn’t make any sense to people who have never heard of your product before. Don’t use the acronym! On the internet, text is cheap. Say what you are. 8. Serials Solutions: okay, it is a fine name for your company (now their company), because you provided a solution to a problem with serials, namely, knowing what periodicals are indexed where. The solution? A big list. It is not something libraries should say and expect people to know what it is. Say ‘big list of what periodicals are indexed where’. 7. Computer Database (from Gale): I am pretty sure that Computer Database figures prominently in a 1980s spy/robot thriller. How about a nice game of chess? 6. MasterFile Premier: I can’t say this without trying to do my best James Earl Jones pronunciation. What’s in this one, again? 5. InfoTrac: I get the info part, but don’t quite follow the Trac. InfoTrek? That sounds like it is going to take a long time. 4. MAS Ultra (from EBSCOHost): It was years before I realized that this database wasn’t in Spanish. And that it wasn’t an add for a monster truck show. ultra, Ultra, ULTRA! 3. ABI/INFORM: I don’t even know what to say here. ABI/INFORM makes ‘Business Source Premier’ sound like a stroke of branding genius. 2. ALLDATA: ALL of it? rly? 1. EBSCOHost : Half corporate acronym, half zombie army, EBSCOHost is coming to get you. I can mostly really only make fun of databases I use, and for complicated reasons, I am not commenting on the names of any statewide reference services. If that sort of thing gets to you, please don’t hesitate to mention it on my account. What are your favorites? </article> </main></body></html>