⌘f

tinfoil hats and snake oil (or: if i was a librarian how would i search)

September 1, 2008 – 1:10 pm by rachel

Recently I was looking at some of the searches that had brought visitors to ⌘f and noticed “if i was a librarian how would i search” was among them. this kind of clicked with something that’s been rattling around my head the last few days about a couple of personal search experiences I’ve had recently. reflecting on these two recent quests for information i’d be forced to answer that question, “about the same as you do now but you’d feel really weird about it and lay up at night thinking about what it means“.

Tinfoil hats

J. just got a new job that will be taking him to Argentina often. after celebrating a lot, the first thing he did was renew his passport. this means he had to trade his perfectly serviceable old passport for one of the fancy, creepy new passports embedded with an RFID chip.

(Actually, before I get into the story proper, can i just add as an aside that in some ways the RFID chip is the least creepy thing about these new passports? it’s fairly obvious that they were designed under this Administration full as they are with over-the-top patriotic imagery. actually, they are pretty hilarious. well, hilarious probably until you have to present these overwrought, childish documents at a border…”really, my passport design was not conceptualized by a large committee of extremely patriotic, but not terribly sophisticated, fifth graders”. Also, if that space image at the back was intended to do anything but send the message to me that, yes, indeed, they are watching me, Enemy of the State-style, I would be surprised…)

Okay, so, yeah, RFID chip…

We found a lot of stuff online about how to disable the chip (use a hammer) but j. didn’t really want to do that. In theory, there actually isn’t anything all that objectionable about having border officials be able to use this chip to get at your info — could make things more efficient? — and, really, since he’ll be traveling a lot for work, he just didn’t want to make his life any more difficult than it had to be. But, at the same time, no one should be particularly happy with the idea of walking around with a document in their pocket that is transmitting their personal, identifying information to any miscreant with the skillz to sniff it…which apparently isn’t that hard.

So he asked me to make him a Faraday cage (really, a Faraday pouch) to carry his passport in. Basically, something that would block the chip as long as it was in there but have the passport remain functional at borders. Yes, yes, we both know that it is possible to buy such a thing but we’re DIY-kinda people, plus broke, so I set to work finding out what kind of technology was necessary. Would I need to get some kind of metal mesh? Sheets of some specific kind of metal?  Would the metal need to be continuous around the passport or could it be joined with a seam at the side that was only fabric?

So.  I googled it.  My library probably has some books that could answer these questions with authority.  we do, after all, have a physics department and a wonderful science librarian.  But I’m not a physicist.  I probably couldn’t make use of that authoritative book, too technical.  Maybe there’s some book out there that explains these things in lay terms for tin-foil-hatters like me but, honestly, the idea of searching for it was pretty unappealing.  I just wanted some answers quickly, plus this seems like the kind of thing the Web should be great for.  And it was!  I found a bunch of tutorials.  All the tutorials called for using aluminum foil, some with duct tape.  I got to work and made a nice little pouch for him.  Got some great suede-like material for the outside and lovely silver satiny stuff for the lining.  Sandwiched some aluminum foil between the layers.  It came out great.

But will it block the chip from transmitting his info?  honestly, i have no idea.  I just found these tutorials that looked good and went with it.  but there’s no reason in the world i should think these people know anything about constructing effective faraday cages.  From what I know about RFID it seems to me it should work, but I don’t really know that much.  As a librarian, I can think of a lot of ways I could go about confirming that the tin foil would be sufficient.  I know how I could find sources with more authority.  I know why I should, especially in this case where one “go ahead and use tin foil” tutorial could have easily begat all the others giving that nefarious sense of consensus that can happen so easily on the web.  the point is, in this case, and in plenty of others, I simply didn’t.  So, how does a librarian search?  Well, I certainly found some great tutorials (passport rfid block DIY worked really well, btw) but I didn’t, really, find everything I was looking for because I was lazy.  So, yeah, a librarian searches like everyone else from time to time.

Snake Oil

I couldn’t breathe in June and July.  It became, basically, the only thing I thought about.  Because when you can’t breathe, it turns out, you’re pretty distracted.  Somewhere along the line I was finally diagnosed with asthma (yay, treatable!) but managed health care being what it is, there were a couple of weeks between my diagnosis and my appointment with the doctor who could get me some medicine to treat it.  I think, in that two week period, I probably read every webpage with the word asthma on it.  And not just “the good stuff”.  I didn’t just go to MedlinePlus and call it good.  I read every post in every support group.  I read every crazy screed out there: why i probably didn’t have asthma because doctors misdiagnose, why i shouldn’t take treatment, etc, etc.  And this behavior?  Pretty much the textbook example we use with students when we want to all agree on the kind of information you shouldn’t get on the web.  I have confidently (and now I fear smugly) said “Reading the biography of your favorite movie star is probably a fantastic use of the Web, reading information about your medical diagnosis, probably not” to more classes than I care to remember.

Because, you know what?  The web was a terrific source of medical information for me.  Even the crazy stuff.  Especially the crazy stuff.  Because I get, what, ten minutes with the doctor?  Immersing myself in the entire range of dialogue about my diagnosis - from the authoritative, high-quality, physician penned articles to the emotional, superstituous, unreliable rantings of an asthma-sufferer who has not gotten the help she needs from the medical community - allowed me to really zero in on the questions I wanted answered when I finally got to meet with him.  If I’d stuck to the information I found when I consulted the “good” sources I honestly wouldn’t have had any questions for him.  All the predictable, “mainstream” questions were answered pretty well by the authoritative sources.  Also, reading all the out-there stuff that you end up finding whenever you dip into a subculture on the web really did give me more confidence in my own experience of my condition.  I had a really satisfying visit with my doctor because I went in deeply conversant in the culture of my diagnosis.  Not just the fact, but the feelings.

The bad information was good.

I like to think that every librarian, that every educator, knows that “bad” information can be good.  A growing number of us have started to think differently about the concept of website evaluation - putting the idea of the checklist in the junk heap where it belongs.  I think if we look at our own web searching experiences outside of our professional duties, if we look at how we search when we’re not librarians - when we’re in a hurry and a decent looking tutorial is preferable to a physics lesson or when we’re sick and scared and looking for solace in others’ experiences - we will have to acknowledge that sometimes a website that fails completely all the tests for quality we can throw at it is exactly what we need.  And we should listen to that arrogant voice that says “yes, but I can use the bad website because i know the right way to use it.”    Because that voice will remind us to focus more on the nature, limits, and character of the information need, rather the fixating so completely on the source outside of the context of the need.  It can remind us that “searching like a librarian” is about something much more sophisticated and important than knowing the best sources or knowing the best search strategies.

What will I say next time I’m in front of a class trying to come up with an example of something you wouldn’t want to use the web for?  Um.  I’m thinking I just won’t.  To do so would mask the subtler truth, the messier reality.

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

self-conscious critiques

August 18, 2008 – 8:49 pm by caleb

I probably shouldn’t bother, but I love to hate on American Libraries, the trade magazine of the American Library Association. In August’s issue, I particularly enjoyed tearing into Adam Bennington’s “Dissecting the Web through Wikipedia,” in which the author entreats teaching librarians to have students analyze encyclopedia entries for bias in order to teach information literacy and why traditional library sources “might be more reliable.”

A few months ago, Nicholas Carr’s provocative Atlantic Monthly article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? posited that reading online changes the way we think, and that “read[ing] deeply” is inherently difficult on the web.

Carr cites a study showing that skimming text keeps us from absorbing it, but what I think his problem actually is that he hasn’t been taught to read online media at all. When he tries to read it the way he reads print, uninterrupted, deeply, he fails. I blame Adam Bennington.

I’ve (unfortunately) thought deeply about both of these articles, and perhaps Carr would say it is because I read them both in print, or Bennington might say I was skeptical about his piece because of its lack of citations, but I have concluded that they are both crap.

Bennington asks librarians to force students to read Wikipedia entries, figure out who the authors are, verify all the citations (sometimes hundreds!), think of sources about the topic that have been omitted, and as a “final step”, sit around and critique them with their peers.

Wikipedia defines its users as the group of people who write and edit Wikipedia. This is elitist, but the idea that reading alone is not enough echoes Paulo Freire’s notion of critical consciousness: “authentic reflection cannot exist apart from action”.

Surely, the “final step” after reading a Wikipedia entry and holding it to academic standards in an assignment that would have made me quit library school, is to edit the Wikipedia article in question. Adjust the bias, add some facts, clean up the grammar, make the narrative better, or otherwise participate in the project; or else, even if students learn something other than that librarians really are wound too tight, they aren’t being taught to do anything about it.

I think that if Adam Bennington’s students and Nicholas Carr would start editing Wikipedia, and otherwise engage online media critically, they might get a lot more intellectual satisfaction out of online texts, and they just might be empowered to change the world.

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

the future of the internet and how to stop it by jonathan zittrain

August 7, 2008 – 4:49 pm by caleb

In a comment on Anne-Marie’s “secret library books” post last week I mentioned that I had started reading The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it by Jonathan Zittrain. I’m not sure it turned out to be a secret library book or not, but there is much to interest librarians.

Zittrain describes something as generative if it “fosters innovation and disruption”. Something non-generative is “sterile”, and in the context of the internet, a “tethered” device has software and services bound to the hardware. A personal computer is generative because you can reprogram it. An iPhone is not, as Zittrain points out often on his book-related blog.

Generativity on the internet is add odds with our culture and economy because of it’s disruptiveness: spam, viruses, copyright infringement, the distribution of child pornography and the proliferation of cheap cameras and microphones that infringe on our privacy all seem like super-villains in the story of the Internet. More often than not, institutional response to these is to restrict the internet’s generativity by restricting who can do what with which device. Zittrain argues that limiting generativity limits innovation.

It is curious that Zittrain doesn’t add that restricting generativity is just as damaging to information as it is to innovation. Luke Rosenberger is a systems and reference librarian I know from the days when my library contracted a company he worked for. He recently wrote that his university’s lockdown of peer-to-peer internet traffic also managed to block websites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. Extending the rationale of an executive order from Texas governor Rick Perry, the university said the sites were blocked because of the “potential risk” of sharing files.

Zittrain is Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University, visiting professor at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and co-editor of Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering. He is certainly aware of the limitations on speech and intellectual freedom that a “sterile” internet imposes.

The implicit argument throughout the book is that generativity is basically good and that social action will do more to combat disruptive technologies and behaviors than regulation will. Reminiscent of Lawrence Lessig’s statement in Code (version 2.0) that the internet has no inherent qualities, Zittrain says that the Internet is what it is because we made it that way. Along with everything else on the internet, disruptions like spam and viruses are not technical in nature but born of human action. He suggests we find solutions that are “light on law”.

Zittrain’s principal model for social action to support innovation without succumbing to disruption in a generative space is Wikipedia. A very simple editing process and an inclusive community has birthed a collective ethos among Wikipedians, and that is usually enough to stop vandalism, slander, copyright infringement and political grandstanding.

…Wikipedia has come to stand for the idea that involvement of people in the information they read - whether to fix a typographical error or to join a debate over its veracity or completeness - is an important end itself…

Libraries should take note that we don’t land completely on the side of the Justice League when it comes to internet generativity. I can think of at least two de-generative capers perpetrated by libraries: our brief embrace of DRM-laden downloadable audiobooks and the lack of media in multiple formats (MP3-CD, for example). Both of these limit the generativity of library materials, and ergo, of libraries as well.

Zittrain notes only that locked-down public computers are not the generative devices that open PCs with unfettered internet connections are. Even when we provide patrons with complete access to the internet, we give them little opportunity to change it.

My first job that required an MLS included changing PC BIOS settings so that computers couldn’t be booted from the disk drive. Of course, nowadays you can just run a Linux emulator from your USB flash drive, so I imagine student workers are in charge of the F1 key today.

Surely, libraries are not out to sterilize generativity. Ultimately it is cheaper to restrict public computing than to support it unconditionally, and the common strategy of wiping a hard drive in between uses allows us to preserve our role as guardians of our patrons’ privacy.

But even then, Zittrain might argue, we are guardians only of “Privacy 1.0″. In chapter 9’s case study, “Meeting the Risks of Generativity: Privacy 2.0″, Zittrain touches on the notion that generational differences in attitudes towards privacy, but really focuses on the idea that cheap, ubiquitous and mashup-able cameras muddle what is public and what is private. Texas experimented with crowdsourcing border control, facial recognition technology promises to tell surveillance cameras who they are pointed at, and anyone with a cameraphone can post an image or film of another’s bad behavior.

Our hero offers us some hope and a number of strategies, but ultimately warns us that the younger, seemingly privacy-unconscious generation may have gotten it right. Zittrain says that “privacy is about establishing a locus which we can call our own without undue intervention or interruption - a place where we can vest our identities”. Faced with only the reality of a hyper-generative space in which to do this, “MySpace pages, blogs, and similar online outposts can be repositories for our identities for which personal control, not secrecy, is the touchstone.”

I wish I could be a little more critical in this review. I found some nits to pick (am I the only one who thinks eBay’s reputation system is a sham?), but even if it’s a little dry and gloomy, the book is accessible and well-argued, and I learned a whole bunch. Zittrain even goes so far as to take his own advice. The entire text is available online through a creative-commons-licensed interactive web version of the book.

Posted in book reports | 1 Comment »

control freaks

August 7, 2008 – 12:11 am by anne-marie

So I want to confess something about this paper I wrote in college.

See, I took this Constitutional Law class in the PoliSci department.  We had to analyze a hypothetical Supreme Court case and write up a legal opinion just like we were Justices.  For this class we used an actual law school Con Law casebook for our textbook - and most of the pieces of the hypothetical situation we were supposed to rule on in this paper we could argue from the cases included in the book.  Most, but not all.

Students treated it as kind of a weed-out course for pre-law types.  With a zillion law schools out there, it couldn’t actually weed anyone out but it was still all very Paper Chase.  So there was some self-imposed pressure to do well on this paper to keep your dream of working 80 hour weeks to make partner alive.

So here’s my confession.  I can totally think like a lawyer.  I got an A- on that paper — but that’s not the confession part.

The confession part is that I wrote the whole thing without ever going to the library.  My 20-page argument was entirely based on what I could get out of the casebook.  And the reason I’m telling you about the A- is this:  I totally, obviously, knew better. I knew that parts 1 and 3 were solid and that walking the four blocks to the law school was the only way I could possibly get what I needed to un-twist the tortured logic of part 2 and still, I wouldn’t go.

So what’s the point of this?  The point is that I’ve been hearing a little flurry lately of “how do we get these kids, these kids today, to use all the awesome stuff we have for them” conversations and I’ve been thinking about how it’s all so very complicated.  Way more complicated than “they want fast, they want easy, they’re Millennials dontcha know.”  It’s about so much more than technology - it’s about the discourse, and the scope and query, and even about affect or emotion.

Which is what I want to talk about a little bit today - that affective, emotional piece.  I think we librarians sometimes show a tendency to assume that our users actively don’t want to use the library, don’t want to talk to us, don’t want to use our stuff.  If we’re in a bad mood, we might assume that they’re deliberately voting thumbs down on us.  If we’re in a better mood, we thnk more that they just don’t know - don’t know what’s available, don’t know how to use it, don’t know why they should use it, don’t know how to recognize it.

I think it’s worth remembering that sometimes it’s not about us — not that that means there’s nothing we can, or should, do about it.  At root, though, not about us.

There’s an article from a few months ago - in the Journal of Academic Librarianship* - looking at how some of these emotional, affective factors relate to how students perceive and use information sources.  It considers how students feel about themselves and their problem-solving — how well they do it, if they like to do it.  And even beyond that - how they understand their ability TO solve problems - if they feel in control of their feelings about it and their behaviors.

So, what did they find?

Confidence is key — confidence connects to users’ perceptions about the quality of information sources, how comprehensive, useful or even interesting they think the sources are.  Basically, users who don’t feel confident in their own problem-solving abilities are more likely to perceive a source as boring, sketchy, or not useful.  They are more likely to perceive a tool like a library catalog or database as useless than their peers with higher confidence levels do.

The researchers also examined how these students perceived their own willingness to engage in problem-solving in the first place  This factor - the approach/avoidance style - turns out to relate to how accessible students perceive information sources to be.  Users with high avoidance, who avoid problem-solving activities, perceive inforamtion sources as less accessible than their peers with low avoidance.  Isn’t that interesting?

In other words, approaching this from the perspective of “how do we get them to use our stuff,” it’d be really easy to write these students off as the worst stereotype of millennials or net gens.  After all, it’s true that these students probably don’t have great things to say about our stuff — if they lack confidence, they doubt journal articles and criticize library catalogs.  If they are highly avoidant, then they think our stuff is really hard to get.

And they probably say so.  If they talk to us at all, they probably tell us that the journal article is no good because it’s not about the pros AND the cons of gun control.  They probably tell us that the database has nothing on their topic.  But the interesting thing about this research is — that these affective characteristics apply to way more than just library stuff.  On that emotional level, these students aren’t drawing a “library stuff bad/ internet stuff good” distinction.

Students who lack confidence are also more likely to be skeptical of web sources, and they are more likely to have problems with how search engines work.  Highly avoidant students even characterize information from friends and family (friends and family!) as less accessible than their low-avoidance peers do.  It’s about them, not us - except to the extent that understanding them will help us reach/teach them.

So that’s all fascinating to think about, but the factor I found the most interesting was the users’ perception their own control.  This was the only factor that significantly affected how a student chose their sources.  The more out of control a student feels, the more likely they are to choose sources based on how easy those sources are to use, or how familiar those sources are.  “Accuracy” comes down below “easy” and “familiar” to these users.

Now this is a little bit about us, in that classic library anxiety way - if the environment is unfamliliar or intimidating (virtual or face to face) the user will tend to favor what they are familiar with before trying something new.  But it’s a slightly different way of thinking about it - at least of thinking about the solution.  Instead of thinking of ways to make the library friendlier, or the librarians more approachable or accessible, or the online interfaces more google-like and familiar, this way of thinking about the question suggests that we should be thinking of ways to put the users back in control.  To let them define their own questions, their own stories and their own interactions.

But it goes beyond library anxiety as well, because a user can feel out of control of the situation, even when the do know what it is they need to do, and even how to do it.  This is especially significant for students, I think, who ARE out of control when it comes to a lot of their information needs.  They don’t have control over their tasks, their timelines or even their conditions for success.

And its not just students.  Lots of people who come to us with information needs are out of control of something in their lives - they have problems, they need information - at that moment they are almost inherently out of control of something.  The search for information is in itself a desire to assert some control over whatever that problem-solving situation is.

This control question made me think of another study, one that Kate and I used to better understand some pieces of the virtual or IM reference transaction.**  In this study, the researchers found that flexible forms of communication that can be both synchronous or asynchronous are attractive to teens when they are trying to talk about emotional topics because they allow the teens to assert a lot of control.  They can control the pace and duration of the conversation, and even the identity they choose to present within the conversation.

I have no idea if this research really applies to IM reference - which usually isn’t all that emotional - but I think there’s a good chance that it does.  It seems logical to me that library users, feeling out of control and vulnerable because there is information they lack, would be attracted to a communication style that allows them to assert some control over how they get help?  I find this just as plausible than the more common interpretation I hear, that they choose IM because they’re in a hurry and they have no time and they want someone to just give them the information they want.

Not that I would have IM’ed those librarians at the law library at Penn.  I totally knew how to use the systems, and where the stuff I needed was in the building.  But back in the 1980’s, there was a definite sense that the law school did not really want the undergraduates anywhere near their library.  They had restricted hours, they had a we’re only letting you in at all because we have to attitude.  And asserting some control over my own process, I decided not to deal with that.  So yes, some of that emotional, affective response I had had something to do with the library.

But some did not.  Some was about taking control of: my timeline, my scope, the amount of energy I spent and how I balanced that project with all the others.  Some was about taking control of the project - I was most interested in part 3, and wanted to spend my time there.  And on some level, it was taking control of the outcome - defining my own conditions for success.

Which is where these two studies, and these ideas, connect in my head. On the one hand, the idea that it’s not about me or about my library.  That sometimes our users are dealing with a lot of stuff that has nothing directly to do with us - so there’s no need to take their frustration personally.  On the other hand, that we can do some things to let our users control their stories, their questions, and their interactions with us and with our resources.  And in so doing, alleviate some of those frustrations.  Here I’m fuzzy on the details, yes.  But I think we have been and will be talking about them around here.

________

*Kyung-Sun Kim and Sei-Ching Joanna Sin (December 2007), Perception and selection of information sources by undergraduate students: Effects of avoidant style, confidence and personal control in problem-solving.  Journal of Academic Librarianship, 33:6, 655-665.

**Dominic E. Madell and Steven J. Muncer (2007), Control over social interactions: An important reason for young people’s use of the Internet and mobile phones for communication, CyberPsychology and Behavior, 10:1, 137-140.

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

depressing: bill patry stops blogging

August 4, 2008 – 10:25 am by rachel

William Patry’s announced on friday that he would be ending his blog; breaking my heart into tiny little pieces.  In the public discourse about copyright issues in the US, Patry’s voice has always been one of the clearest, most reasoned, erudite, passionate, and scholarly.  Whenever some copyright related issue has come up that I haven’t quite been able to get my mind around I’ve hoped that Patry would blog about it, knowing that if he did I would get an intelligent, thoughtful analysis that would help me understand just what the heck was at stake. I also consistently read the comments on Patry’s blog because he could always be counted upon to respond to even the most unhinged commenter with patience, tact, and, of course, his dazzling intellect.  I had intended to link to some of my favorite posts from the archives to illustrate but it seems he’s removed all the archives and left only his sad goodbye post.  I guess one of these days I’ll see what the waybackmachine can offer up in the way of solace.

Georgia Harper, another breathtakingly intelligent observer of copyright, writes movingly about her reaction to the news that Patry is stopping his blog.  She focuses on the second reason Patry offered for quitting his blog - the fact that the state of copyright is just so bloody depressing that he couldn’t stand listening to his own negative tone anymore.  I think she says everything I could think to say about that reason and, of course, says it better so I’ll focus on his first reason, the reason that makes me want to cry salty little tears of despair.

Patry’s blog was, from the beginning, the personal blog of a super-smart copyright geek.  In Patry’s words:

“I started the blog when I was still in private practice with the above goals in mind and one more: I felt there was no blog devoted to the geekery of copyright; meaning a blog where people who loved copyright could come and discuss copyright issues in a non-partisan way.”

This worked out pretty well until Patry took a new job.  As senior counsel for Google.  Patry put a disclaimer on the blog, making it clear that the blog was in no way associated with Google and that the opinions he expressed were not Google’s opinions.  He was strict with himself about never writing about cases involving Google.  He did, essentially, everything he could do to make it clear that he was writing as Bill Patry: Private Citizen.  But that distinction between Patry the man and Patry the Google-lawyer was, far too often, ignored.  Again in Patry’s words:

“When other blogs or news stories refer to the blog, the inevitable opening sentence now is: “William Patry, Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel said,” or “Google’s top copyright lawyer said… .” There is nothing I can do to stop this false implication that I am speaking on Google’s behalf. And that’s just those who do so because they are lazy.”

He goes on to talk about those who misdescribe the blog intentionally, for partisan reasons, but I want to focus on the laziness here.  Because its this laziness that worries/enrages me more than anything.  People are, or at least can be, pretty good bullshit detectors when it comes to deliberate manipulation of the kind that Patry describes but we’re far less adept at coping with the kind of laziness in reporting that ultimately brought down the blog.  After all, it’s true.  Patry is Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel.  Patry said the things that the articles say he said.  But he didn’t say those things as Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel.  The kind of vigilance required on the part of the reader to call bullshit on that kind of reporting is kind of unreasonable. All of the hand-wringing about people getting bad information from bad writers without an editor by using things like blogs and wikipedia and whatnot ignores the fact that the traditional media is filled to the brim with this kind of malarky.  Because it wasn’t just fellow-bloggers that did this to Patry, it was also old-school mainstream media.  A quick search in Academic Search Premier and in Lexis Nexis turns up quotes of this sort in articles from the Washington Post, Business Week, a number of law reviews and journals, Information Today.  And I really have to conclude that we’re doomed, just doomed, if the press continues to fall down on its job on just every, every front.  I mean, we’ve seen pretty damn recently that the press failing to do its job can lead to some serious badness like, oh, unnecessary wars.  But Patry closing up his blog shows us how these smaller, quieter failures that seem like nothing, just some sloppy reporting, can have really ugly consequences.  The loss of Patry’s regular honest commentary on copyright is a real loss.   It will, without a doubt, diminish the public conversation about copyright in this country.  We all know people who have been told by their employers that they cannot have a public blog, even if that blog is personal and done on their own time.  These attempts to stifle speech have seemed to me to be among most objectionable intrusions on employees, like drug testing.  But Patry’s experience would suggest that people really aren’t able or willing to honor those kinds of distinctions between personal opinion and the opinion of an employer.  Which, as I believe I mentioned before, makes me want to cry salty little tears of despair.  Goodbye, Patry blog.  I will miss you.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

cuil and rumors of cuil

August 1, 2008 – 1:15 pm by caleb

In my West-coast hidey hole, I missed all the hullabaloo about the new search engine Cuil’s official launch this week. Everyone was talking, but no one was particularly impressed. The site was down. People didn’t find what they expected. Pictures of the wrong things showed up in the right places. No one can expect to compete with Google. Blah, blah.

The first thing I noticed about Cuil was that it did not conform to the list of things model for displaying information that libraries and famously successful search engines use. Sure, sure, the results screen is ordered somehow, but the searcher can browse the group of things in more than one dimension. Sometimes, the results include the groups to which your search might belong. That’s one or two points for the good guys at least.

Ordering search results in a list not only implies hierarchy and value, it implies a direction that the information-seeker should take. When we search on Google, we click on the first hit or scan the first few results before making a decision. When what we want is not there, we’re often at a loss. After the first few hits, the order of search results might as well be arbitrary because there is no clear direction to follow. The 34th hit is often as good as the 19th.

Google is good for looking things up, then, and I gather that Cuil is trying to fill the niche of what Google is not good at: serendipity and discovery.

Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it a little differently.

One of my biggest problems with Google Web Search is that it presents the illusion of quality via rankings. That linearity undermines the important yet frustrating aspects of research: you don’t always know what you are looking for or know what is best for you.

Siva gets this and so many other things so right that I was considering just writing a love letter. What compels me to write about Cuil instead has been librarians’ reaction to it.

On discussion lists like Web4Lib and Publib, as well as on library blogs, three themes have really emerged.

One theme is, “if you think Cuil is neat, you should try SearchMe”.

SearchMe may fill some of the same discovery and serendipity niche that Cuil is vying for, but its immediate appeal is that it looks a lot like Apples’ “Cover Flow” browse interface for the iPhone/iTouch (and something similar in OS X 10.5). There is an obvious ranked order, which infodoodads Jane points out is helpful, but still means that browsing is an essentially unidirectional journey.

Somewhat dishearteningly, most of the posts I’ve seen about SearchMe get no reaction. No one seems to be interested in analyzing what search engines are good for, only whether or not the interface is nice and if the results are good. The second theme in librarians’ reactions to Cuil is that the main way that we’ve gone about evaluating Cuil is by searching for our own names.

On Web4Lib, Dan Lester wrote (and read the whole thread if you want),

Doing a little vanity searching, I searched

dan lester boise

and found lots of stuff….well, some….almost all of it from old
newsgroup postings from 93 and 94. Well, I guess that’s a rich
source of fodder to build stuff up, but hardly exciting or
convincing.

Connie Jo Ozinga did a similar search and discussed it on the Publib discussion list (again, check out the whole thread if you want), concluding that the search results did not reflect her current position: “…if you search for me on Cuil, don’t think that is me you are seeing.”

Here is a kind of irony; Cuil is claiming the moral high ground by treating user data as completely private, and yet librarians complain that they are too anonymous in Cuil’s results.

I admit it, I searched myself on Cuil also. The initial results tell you a lot more about where and who I’ve been than where and who I am now, and that’s just the opposite of what Google values. Google’s paradigm props up the newest and the most popular web pages and clearly defines a hierarchy of value.

Cuil doesn’t seem to care as much. Librarians should love this.

We are always complaining that people value online information over print, digital over analog. We worry that too many people “satisfice” their information needs with the first few hits from Google. Some of us even worry that ordering results any way but alphabetically implies too much value to the resources at the top of the list and limits patrons’ freedom of inquiry by devaluing everything else.

And when it comes to search engines - at least for those of us blogging and sending e-mail to discussion lists - we won’t have it any other way. The third theme is a defense of Google as a gold standard for search engines.

OhioLINK’s Thomas Dowling wrote,

I must have missed the welling dissatisfaction with Google’s search results that would make anyone think a new search engine is their path to fame and fortune.

I could probably discuss a fourth theme, the comments on downtime, mismatched photos, dead links, and missing pages, but I think this points only to a static expectation of what a search engine should do and how it should perform. If it’s not Google, it’s not Google-enough.

Where the talkative librarians dismiss Cuil on these grounds, Siva Vaidhyanathan raises the question of what search engine results should be. After comparing the prominence of his own self in Google results for “Siva” with the mild lack thereof in Cuil, Vaidhyanathan comments,

There are almost a billion Hindus in the world. Don’t you think that a search for the name of a Hindu god should be dominated by references to that God? Sure, I am one important Hindu! Don’t get me wrong. But I am not as important as any god, Hindu or not.

A few messages down in the Web4Lib archive, Dowling argues that Google does it this way because it’s what people want. True, but maybe not true enough.

We’re ignoring that people want it that way because Google does it that way, and we’re ignoring the fact that other ways to do it produce different results and are good for different purposes.

It’s time we started treating search engines like reference sources: pick them up, feel the weight, read the introduction, look for specific sample entries, even read random ones, gauge the editorial position, check out the index and other appendixes, and finally think about what kinds of things we would use it for.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

secret library books

July 29, 2008 – 12:50 pm by anne-marie

So I’m really entranced by this idea I saw on this game design blog - books that you know in your bones are really about your thing, even though on the surface they claim to be about another thing –

I am building a list of the “secret” books on game design. These are books that are not explicitly written about games, but which any game designer who reads them just knows that they are really about games.

And I’m even more taken with the idea because Malcolm Ryan, the game design person, points to Scott McCloud’s fantastic book about reading comics as a game-design book.

I know that I have done this. That I’ve read something in another field, something that’s fiction, seen a movie and gone - “that’s about libraries!” or “that’s about information!” or some other version of “that’s about why what I do is important!” But I’m totally blanking on examples.  This is why I don’t have a Ph.D — because when the chips are down I’m all “you know, it was that one book - it’s on the tip of my tongue.”

I was going to wait to post this until I had broken through this block, but then I thought - why.  I’ll promise to update with an ETA when I come up with some ideas - but maybe this will resonate with some of you too -  and a collective list would be cooler?

What are your Secret Books of Libraries (and Information Science)

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

The September Project

July 22, 2008 – 12:31 pm by anne-marie

The amazing David Silver asked me to help spread the word about The September Project as September draws closer and closer. And I couldn’t think of a better place to talk about it than here - because this project connects so closely to the things we’ve been talking and writing about — about how our libraries connect and contribute to our communities.

Here’s the project in David’s words –

Welcome to the 5th annual September Project! The September Project is a grassroots effort to encourage events about freedom and democracy in all libraries in all countries during the month of September. September Project events are free and organized locally.

In 2004, we began the September Project to break the silence following September 11, and to invite all people into libraries to consider topics of patriotism, democracy, and citizenship. Initially, events focused on September 11 and largely took place on September 11. As the project evolved, events spread throughout the month of September and focused on issues of freedom and democracy.

To date, public, academic, school, and government libraries around the world have organized September Project book displays, community book readings, childrens’ art projects, film screenings, theatrical performances, civic deliberations, voter registrations, murals, panel discussions, and so much more. What will this year bring?

How can you participate? Organize an event at your library, and tell us about it! We’ll post all events on this site as they develop around the world.

One of the many great things about the September Project is that it’s both distributed and connected - and draws strength and power from both of these sources. Each library designs its own program and events and those can be and should be deeply connected into the unique communities that make up those libraries. But there’s something really powerful about all of this activity happening in all of these communities, in all of these libraries, all over the country world.

Here’s what some other libraries have done -

Multnomah County Library — events and booklist

University of Washington Libraries

I’ve just sent off the email to try and get on board this year. We don’t start classes until the end of September so timing might be tricky, but I’m excited.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

backyard poultry raising

July 11, 2008 – 6:12 pm by caleb

The first thing I did when I decided to raise chickens was put a hold on every book in the library with chicken or poultry in the subject heading. By far, the most informative and entertaining one I read is John Festus Adams’ Backyard poultry raising: the chicken-growing, egg-laying, feather-plucking, incubating, caponizing, finger-licking handbook, published in 1977.

Judging a book by its cover, in this case an astounding 70s design complete with an iconic chicken-as-farmer, I knew I was going to like it. I did. The book provided me everything I needed to know about raising chickens with no direct instruction at all, or none that I remember anyway. What makes this book such a rare treat are the author’s anecdotes about raising various birds - chickens, turkeys, ducks, an owl, an eagle - and the pervasive idea that anything can happen, it usually does, and it’s a blast.

Right at the start of the book, Adams warns us not to take chickens too seriously.

The reasons any particular person keeps, or wants to keep, chickens will be found to include one or more of these three options: for eggs, for meat, or for the hell of it.

When I went around talking to my neighbors of my fowl intentions, they each asked, “for eggs or for meat?”, seemingly oblivious of the third option. I plan to get both, and sure, there’s something to the back-to-the-yard movement’s desire to know where your food comes from, but Adams’ attitude provides the most enduring reason to raise chickens or do anything else: to enjoy it.

Adams was then a professor of English at Washington State University and the consummate homesteader. Besides his book on chickens, he wrote about gardening, beekeeping, and homebrewing, translated Anglo-Saxon poetry and published a novel. He’s both renaissance man and country boy, and all of his books that I’ve been able to get my hands share his easy style and irreverence for taking anything too seriously.

His book on homebrewing includes hangover cures, and discussing gardening, he’s the only writer I’ve known to include sex as one of the reasons home-grown foods are better than store-bought.

Even the lowly potato, freshly dug, suddenly has a flavor, a distinct, unique and subtle earthiness, suggestive of native mushrooms or the mysterious wild. My wife says there is something erotic in their earthiness. I always grow lots.

- The Epicurean Gardener (1988)

Adams’ point of view is grounding, and if it weren’t for that, he might have been some kind of 70s and 80s Michael Pollan, the gardening writer turned food writer now drying out as a food activist urging readers to start a garden to save the environment. Thank Dog.

It’s no wonder that Adams is able to inspire his readers to similar irreverence . My library’s 30 year-old copy is riddled with stickers and dog-ears, and scribbled in pencil at the beginning of a chapter is a simple instruction, “If you love chickens, call Ruby 503-233-9740″.

When I read this, I smiled. Ear to ear. I imagined a library service that brought together readers by hiding messages in books. I dreamed I was going down the rabbit hole of a chicken-centric alternative reality game. I looked up the number in Reference USA and found no one named Ruby. I waffled. I waited. I grew to love my chickens, and finally called the number.

Posted in book reports | 2 Comments »

liberation + stupidity = awesome

July 10, 2008 – 10:56 am by anne-marie

As is my wont, I just happened to read two things that I think are talking about the same thing and it’s a thing that I think is kind of important, so I’m going to talk about that thing a little bit more.  I’m re-reading A Pedagogy for Liberation right now (highly recommended, BTW) and I will probably end up having a lot of things to say about it.  But today, just the one thing.

Yesterday, I came across Martin Schwartz’s short essay in the Journal of Cell Science (thanks FemaleScienceProfessor!)  The essay’s called The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research — and if we push it just a little further, I think what Schwartz is saying is pretty much in line with what Freire and Shor advocate.  And pushed a little bit further, Schwartz does a good job articulating some things we need to keep in mind as librarians and some reasons why what we do is important.

Basically, I want to talk about this one piece of PoL here - Friere’s concept of the gnosiological cycle — or a cycle of knowing.  Basically, Freire argues that there are two, just two “distinct moments in the way we learn.”   These moments are distinct, but dialectically related — one is the moment where new knowledge is produced.  The other is the moment where new knowledge is known, or perceived.

One of the real problems with traditional classroom education is that these two moments are not treated as distinct but dialectially related, but as entirely separate. The moment of producing knowledge happens way far away from where students are expected to learn/know/perceive that knowledge.  This cheapens the cycle - it becomes not a cycle of knowing or learning, but instead of cycle of transference.

So what does this have to do with feeling stupid?  A whole lot.  Schwartz argues - kind of passionately, elegantly and wonderfully - that feeling stupid is a necessary part of producing knowledge.  Ph.D candidates come in unprepared for that.  Their coursework doesn’t prepare them to be knowledge producers; it doesn’t teach them that research is hard - it inherently means going in and dealing with stuff that you don’t know yet.

In fact, he argues that coursework does the opposite.  It makes people who are good at science feel smart, not stupid.  They get the answers right, they get good grades on tests.  They read about other people’s discoveries and they understand them.  Then they get to grad school and BANG - they are expected to be the ones making the discoveries and they are entirely unprepared for that.

“I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn’t know how to solve the problem I was having in his area.  I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Tabue knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate).  If he didn’t have the answer, nobody did.

That’s when it hit me: nobody did.  That’s why it was a research problem.  And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve….

….The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite.  That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating.”

See, the kind of smart supported in courses and classes isn’t the cool kind of smart, and we can’t get to the cool kind of smart without feeling stupid.  He calls this “productive stupidity.”  He even uses the “liberation” word to describe it, right?  But for us, I don’t think this essay goes quite far enough.

Where I think he doesn’t go far enough is - why wait until the Ph.D level to start thinking this way?  Why talk about managing the transition from all of the other education to doctoral education — why not start re-thinking all of the other education?  Or in PoL terms - why keep those two moments in the way we learn separate until grade seventeen?  And, most importantly, why leave almost everyone there is out — out of this knowledge-producing moment?

And this is why this matters for libraries.  Because that’s what we do.  That’s what we’re for. To let anyone who wants to engage in both moments - knowledge producing and knowledge knowing.  We do it because knowing that you can make your own knowledge is liberating, and it is important.  And I think we’re some of the best advocates there are for pushing education where it needs to go to make this happen for more than the future professors.

When I was doing my first degree, one of my mentors used to tell this story about old-school history education.  There was a famous professor in his department who would teach the best of the best students and who was well known for almost never giving out A’s.  Once there was an undergraduate student who wrote a paper about which this professor waxed almost poetic.  Nothing was wrong with it - it was wonderful.  When asked why the A- instead of the A, the professor looked over the top of his glasses in utter bewilderment.   “Well,” he said, “it wasn’t publishable.”

We heard this story mostly as a “you don’t know how good you have it getting your A’s for your non-publishable papers,”  But truthfully, even a lot of scholars who would laugh and shake their heads weren’t too far different themselves in that they didn’t think of their students as producing knowledge.  I’ve been in a lot of conversations over the years with scholars who actively resisted calling what undergraduates do “scholarship” because it isn’t original, it doesn’t contribute to the disciplinary bodies of knowledge we’re all building.  I think that’s the wrong way to think about it.  I think that we need to recognize that even though undergraduates are rarely going to be ready enough, or lucky enough, to engage in research that truly represents something new - it’s new to them.  Even if they’re not fully-fledged scholars, they need to learn how to create new knowledge for themselves.

And it’s not like that’s an easy process.  We do have to learn how to do it.  We need guidance and support as we do it, and we need to do it early and often.  That’s the other reason I think these ideas are important for librarians.  We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make the mechanical processes of research easier for our students, our users, our citizens - and we should do that.  But we need to remember that there’s more to research than the processes of finding a book on the shelf, or the full-text of an article.  Research is hard.  It makes you feel stupid.  It makes you uncertain and it makes you anxious.  Nothing we can do to our systems, our services, or our collections will change that.

For all that, though, we all need to know how to do it.  Whether we’re in school or not.  Libraries - public, school, academic, whatever - are places where we should be able to do it, and places that celebrate the knowing we produce.

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »