Fooled by Wikipedia

So, I'm feeling a little foolish right now because right after Sarah Palin's nomination was announced, I went to her Wikipedia page. I read it, and a few of the talk pages, and I noted that at soon as the nomination had been announced the Wikipedia troops had formed ranks and seemed to be protecting the page from bad editing.

I went away thinking that she didn't seem tooo horrible, as far as republicans go, and that I would probably hate the rhetorical and symbolic role she would play in this campaign more than her as a person. (This is close to the version I read.)

My feelings toward Palin are noticibly more extreme these days. And it looks like this period of wikipedia-induced calm was no accident, since someone who may have been a part of the campaign was cleaning up her page to make her look like an Alaskan mover and shaker, rooting out corruption and protecting the environment (which probably is pretty appealing to most people who would check wikipedia in those first hours). [via Derivative Work]


Of course, the current Palin wikipedia page is much much more useful, and through the use of RSS feeds, blogs, online news sources, and word of mouth I and many other people have gotten more info on the governor of Alaska than we thought we would ever want in the last few weeks.

So, yes, Wikipedia was misleading, it let me down in that one second, but this also drove home for me that these days the "authority" of a single source is much less important to me than the general practice of keeping your eye on lots of kinds of information, and knowing how they all fit together, who is writing what, and why. If that Wikipedia page had been the last thing I ever read about Palin before deleting all my RSS feeds, and saying goodbye to the internet, then yes, I would have been Misinformed, capital M, and it could have been avoided had I consulted a more authoritative source. But that's not how most of us process information these days, and so, tragedy averted.

In other news I've been a horrible procrastinator this week, downloading pretty Firefox extensions to kill time (this is sort of like buying lots of brightly colored school supplies in the fall when you know, that really, you are just going to have to do your work and the post it notes are not going to change that.)

But, if anyone else wants to procrastinate too, this turns the age old practice of gmailing yourself to-do items into a manageable and useful practice, and the google notebook extension, available here will mean you never have to write anything down again, and is good for taking notes to panopto or clipping phrases (it attaches a url automatically) that might be the answer to your search and seize questions, but probably aren't.

E-reader lust

This one is pretty cool looking...

If you can get past the slick video of the rollable! screen you see that there is no announcement yet what e-reader software it will be bundled with. The device is wireless enabled but doesn't seem to have a browser. Content can be directly downloaded through the clunkily named Content World website (which sounds like the geekiest publishing/libraries amusement park ever).

Anyway, its pretty, but I don't think I could bring myself to buy one of these that couldn't read epub files. Not that I can afford one anyway.... but they will get cheaper quickly I hope.

When the sun's over the yard arm...

It has been forever since I last posted, but here I am! Reference class has proven to be trickier than imagined, but I am looking forward to the ready reference assignment because I am very over bibliographies.

A request from my uncle and dad last time I was home, was to find the origin of the phrase "the sun's over the yard arm" to denote the time of the day to have your first cocktail.

Uncle Marc, you were right about the yard arm, but its not dock workers but tipsy ships officers, and it actually happens at 11 in the morning.

This was one of those excellent moments where you google something and the first result is a good answer to your question that is cited from an authoritative source.

The beauty of online reference interactions (on message boards and public answer services) is that google can find them for the next person who wants to know the same thing, which isn't true of in-person reference.

Summer in the Wireless City

I'm just starting to do things that aren't watch tv or sit around, which have been my primary activities since the semester ended. I've decided to keep blogging, though I doubt it will be very consistent. I enjoy keeping up with the classmates whose blogs I read, so maybe this can be a good way to keep doing that.

One thing that I heard had happened while plugging through one of the papers but didn't really look into was the creation of the new Wireless Philadelphia. I haven't tried the network, but their website sounds (and looks) good. The focus seems to have shifted from business-related access mostly in center city to more widespread access for everyone. Their web site uses the term "digital inclusion" a lot. This isn't surprising now that Earthlink has dropped out and Wireless Philadelphia is a non-profit. The previous attempt at a city-wide wireless network was a great example of why corporate sponsorship for public works isn't always a great idea. This new advertising supported model will be interesting. The website talks about providing not just the network but hardware, tech support, information literacy instruction, and content creation.

So I'm sad I won't be sitting in coffee shops around the city trying to do my LIS 2600 homework anymore (uhmmm, but not really) because that would have been a good way to test this out. If and when it a reliable network, what does it mean for public libraries, schools, and universities?



Oh, and I've started writing some fiction again, which feels pretty good, and have seen most of the friends I haven't talked to for months. Vacation is sweet.

Nearing the finish line

I've reached the point where I could continue to try to make my webpage more pleasant to look at, or just call it a day and start enjoying August.

I downloaded an open source image editor, Inkscape, which was fun to play with, but it turns out that I'm not sure how to use svg graphics just yet, so I think I'm going to give up on the graphics for now and just deal with my text-only portfolio. When I feel like learning a new software program again (at least a few weeks from now) I'll look at it some more.

So here it is:

http://www.pitt.edu/~kci3/portfolio_ingersoll.html

Anyway, happy month off everyone!

Some piracy videos

Here's a ridiculous anti-piracy video from a few years ago, produced by the MPAA, which seems to posit that piracy will lead to a life of crime and sorrow.



This newer one from last year is much more savvy (at least missing the throwback computer screen and shadowed words.)



I do think its funny that the moment which rings most true in the commercial is when they all state with a befuddled look, "I never thought that it was wrong." After that the rhetoric becomes fuzzier...

(I especially like the teen straight out of an american apparel ad... nice sweatband.)

Hooray!

I am feeling triumphant after finishing my second html fragment. I had an "aha" moment last night with the css, when I stopped using the editor. I think using it before I really had any idea what css was supposed to look like was just making things worse. I guess sometimes shortcuts don't pay in the learning process.

Now that I feel like I can write basic html, something I've been wanting to learn for awhile, it actually seems kind of tedious to me. I've never really liked learning languages, and learning the html syntax sort of reminded me of the time in high school when my incredibly geeky friend tried to teach me esperanto. (except more useful.) I suspect coding will never be my thing, but at least I feel more comfortable with it now.

On Campus Visit thoughts...

The on campus visit ended yesterday and I had a really great time. I have been really happy in this program so far, finding the coursework really interesting, and being on campus really brought home another strength of the program to me.
My classmates are so interesting, and I think the fact that our program allows people who are working in such a large variety of library and non-library settings to study together is pretty cool. Its kinda hard to remember the variety that our profession encompasses sometimes, and I feel like I really experienced that this week. It made class discussions and presentations really interesting and I learned a lot!
Also, a week where I used the computer once or twice a day instead of eight to twelve hours a day was good for me, I think. The eventual goal of this program for me is to interact with the public, so people skills are also important. That said, now is the time to learn to mount web pages so I'm off to do that.
For those cohort 8 members who read this (hey Brynne) it was great to meet you all.

Koha Link

Oops, I forgot to post the link to my Koha collection. I need to read the assignments more carefully. Well, here is it...

http://pitt3.opacwc.liblime.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-shelves.pl?viewshelf=37

Open Source Classification

Library thing has a group working on building a new classification system aimed at public libraries, the Open Shelves Classification. It sounds very exciting...

Steal this class lecture... or not

The idle thought, "I wonder if I can get course cast videos onto my ipod" resulted in a protracted battle of wills with video formats that was completely unfruitful. I managed to make it through the downloading instead of streaming phase and the re-encoding to itunes friendly format stage. But was ultimately stymied by my ipod's apparent unwillingness to play anything not created by the itunes store. I am currently not amused by apple and if I didn't already have an ipod and lots of music tied irrevocably to it through sticky drm means, I would have a generic mp3 player. (In other words, you have utterly succeeded in all your plans Apple, kudos.)

Thank you Apple, for turning watching a class video on an airplane into some sort of samizdat -esque operation that ultimately failed. I made life very exciting for a moment or two.

The myth of the Jeffersonian cataloger...

Sites like librarything and vufind and other library catalogs provide a glimpse of what OPACs will probably look like in the next few years. Standardized metadata, usually pulled from OCLC or a similar service, enhanced by user generated finding aids such as tags, reviews, and recommendation algorithms.

Its a good model, one that makes sure the reliable metadata is in place while allowing for the finding aids that patrons like. But am I alone in feeling slightly... jealous... of the patrons?

At this point things are rarely classified at the local level, and soon it may be mostly the purview of users. Of course, this is a great thing. There is an obvious need for a user friendly, population and geographic area-specific subject system. Creating this for just one library is the work of a lifetime for one person, so in terms of locally specific cataloging web 2.0 technologies are a savior.

I'm just a little sad, I guess, to have to surrender my romantic image of the lone local cataloger, a pale, eccentrically dressed access point to information for thousands s/he never sees. But I think that probably actually disappeared in the 60s, so web 2.0 is a good chance to get a little of the magic back.

A digital repository for whistle blowers...

I stumbled upon the wikileaks site today, during research for a class presentation. Its a wiki that posts leaked documents from around the world, along with articles and analysis.

In their about page they state:

"Wikileaks opens leaked documents up to stronger scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency can provide. Wikileaks provides a forum for the entire global community to relentlessly examine any document for its credibility, plausibility, veracity and validity. Communities can interpret leaked documents and explain their relevance to the public. If a document comes from the Chinese government, the entire Chinese dissident community and diaspora can freely scrutinize and discuss it; if a document arrives from Iran, the entire Farsi community can analyze it and put it in context."

Its an interesting example of a digital repository system. The page for each document gives a link to access the document, lists the document info, then links to related analysis, summary, or context provided by participants. In some cases the discussion about whether documents are real is almost as interesting as the documents.

Also, their submissions page is an interesting glimpse at what it takes to cover your tracks in a digital transmission.

Delicious Tutorial

Here is my tutorial about installing the delicious extension for firefox. It can be downloaded here.

Library Thing

Have been reading the Wealth of Networks for LIS 2000 and thinking about the types of volunteer production that Benkler attributes to the networked information economy.

In the context of library-like activity this had lead me back to the librarything website. I haven't been spending a lot of time at the site recently because these days between my full time library job and school, I don't want to spend my downtime cataloging, but I had some fun reading the blog and catching up with some of the exciting things happening on this site.

One cool thing I found was the i see dead people's books project, in which librarything members catalog famous people's book collections using source bibliographies of various types.

If you are signed in to your librarything account, the main profile page will tell you if you have any books in common with the famous people in question. Also you can see author clouds and a list of what librarything would recommend to the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Sylvia Plath, or Tupac Shakur. Good nerdy cataloging fun, and one could imagine useful to scholars and fans.

Digital documents in non-library settings

I was talking to my housemate the other evening about her research activities for her job. She is a paralegal for habeas hearings for death row inmates. These hearings require massive amounts of research into defendants pasts, all the way back to childhood. My friend frequently has to travel around the state visiting various correctional facilities and social service agencies collecting any sort of documentation on her defendant's past inside and outside government systems.

She was describing to me the state of the digital collection at a prison in PA, and told me about a particular document, which was hundreds of pages long, saved as a separate pdf file for each page, with incomprehensible strings of characters as the file names. The digitization of files had been done by a staff member also in charge of many of the other administrative functions of the office, and this was clearly not a major part of her duties or where her expertise lay.

This really brought home to me the myriad of important documents that are currently being digitized outside of libraries. And while digitizing academic and historic materials is a worthwhile task for professionals with knowledge in digital libraries, so are the types of government documents that may eventually be used to to decide court cases, including death row cases. I just wonder if many of these government document collections will ever see the attention of someone who is trained in digital librarianship and who also doesn't have myriad other more pressing job duties to attend to (such as those involved in the administrative side of running a correctional facility.)

Is some sort of cooperation on these issues a possible future function for public libraries? This raises funding issues. Also, these are "collections" that are not public in the traditional sense, but it is part of the general public interest of a functional and fair justice system to have these records available to legal researchers. The information science community, which already expends a great amount of intellectual energy addressing the issues of digital collections, might as well include the documents that fall outside its traditional domain but within the "public good" in these discussions.

The Internet is like a drunken librarian...

... who won't shut up.





Maybe this cartoon should just be posted at reference desks...

Where is the metadata?

Its been a week of minor annoyances that have been adding up, but the first came last weekend when I was finishing up a paper for class.

Library Journal prints its articles on its website, which is great, but it does not have metadata like volume, issue number, or page number immediately visible, just the date. I ended up having to log into the vpln at the pitt library system, search the library science databases for articles I already have, and find the bibliographic information I needed that way. Maybe I'm just ignorant of the specifics of electronic citation, but this seems silly. (This rather mild assessment of the situation is something I have arrived at after several days of distance, trust me.)

Is this a travesty, stripping an article of its metadata when it appears on the web? Or am I simply searching for the wrong type of data? This seems to me like leaving the house without your cell phone (something I also did this week.) You are out there, and you may have important things to tell someone, but no one can find you. Or maybe this is like when people ask me why I don't have a land line number and I give them a crazy look. Why would I need one, I have a cell phone?

Collision of worlds

This will be more meaningful to those also working on the LIS 2000 essay, on scholarly communication and digital libraries.

When I got to work the other day I found out we were going for a tour of our book distributor's warehouse. It was pretty interesting, but also jarring to be pulled out of thoughts of digital documents, cyberinfrastructure, and online publishing and find myself in a warehouse full of actual books, discussing how they are organized for easy access and shipping.

Well, rest assured, at least in this corner of the world the infrastructure for getting physical books on medical library shelves is very well developed. In case you were worried.

"The triumph of data over common sense"

Tonight I was listening to the May 9th episode of This American Life, an NPR program (also available in itunes and rss).

The episode is called The Giant Pool of Money and it is a simplified look at the subprime mortgage crisis that someone with no understanding of finance can grasp. I particularly liked the interviews with people at all levels of the mortgage industry and with homeowners facing foreclosure.

I would recommend it for anyone like me who has recently tried to follow this story and been stumped by the finance issues. I mention it here because of a moment about 27 minutes in where someone from Morgan Stanley describes the conflict between the gut feeling that high risk loans were unlikely to succeed with data from software that predicted that this finance model could succeed. The software analyzed data from previous years that didn't take into account recent changes in the mortgage business. Adam Davidson, and NPR correspondent, called this "the triumph of data over common sense."

Open Access Journals

Since using databases only accessible through the Pitt library website with services like connotea and zotero is turning out to be a headache, I've been exploring open access stuff to "trap." I've found more journals using this model than I expected, and I have just grazed the surface. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)has been my main portal so far.

I wonder in what ways the open access publishing community and the more traditional scholarly publishing community interact. Are there separate spheres developing, or are they intermingled? A quick search of the university catalog where I work told me that students using the journal finder will be directed to the DOAJ if they search for a specific journal within it. Of course most students start from a topic in something like PubMed, as opposed to starting from a journal title.

Anyway, it would be interesting to know what percentage of articles cited by students and professors are open access. I'm sure someone out there has answered this question, but for now I better get back to tagging.

How many books about aardvarks can one library have

Just in case all of you also taking LIS 2000 need a break from discussing the role of libraries in the context of structuralism, take a look at Levar Burton and Kermit the frog's take.




Considering the possible embarrassment of being seen in the pig section of the library, Kermit might prefer a digital option he can access from his home...

Multitasking is sweet...

I am gradually getting adjusted to the stress of school, and relearning to ignore that voice that says, "You'll never get caught up so you might as well panic instead of trying," and actually get some things done.

But the podcasts have helped a lot with this because being "in class" while riding the subway to work is probably the best thing ever. Sometimes on the subway I wonder what the people around me are listening too. Unlike with books, you just can't tell.

Bandwidth in the UK

So I am finding the DC 09 textbook to be a useful reminder of the ways the internet actually exists as physical materials and various types of connections between machines, not just as an amorphous sphere.

There is currently a controversy in the UK about who will pay for rising bandwidth use resulting from the BBC's new iPlayer. The larger issue at play here, especially when dealing with privately owned content providers, is net neutrality, (here's a recent bbc article about this) an issue I've been struggling to grasp for a while now.

Also involved is the digital divide, which may become more complicated as applications and streaming media that demand higher bandwidth become more ubiquitous. (When will having a personal website and a hypertext resume become necessary for employment? How will citizens be required to interact with government websites in 5 or 10 years?) Being unconnected will still be an issue, but being less connected might be a more widespread problem that will default to public libraries to solve.

Camping and Blogging

Have been using the family vacation in Minnesota as a time to catch up a bit. I was surprised to find that the campground we are in has wireless. I can blog from Kamp Dells in Waterville, MN which is a sure sign that wireless internet has become the norm. This is reassuring to me because my internet usage has increased greatly in the last two years and now I am awfully lost without some sort of connection.

I have found that reading the student blogs for the course is reassuring, nice to hear other people's frustrations and discoveries! Putting all those feeds in to my reader at once was tiring though. Wasn't so long ago and I was really amazed at RSS, and now I find myself thinking, "Isn't there and easier way to do this?" So greedy!

I've also been wrestling with the decision of what to print and what not to print with the course readings. I read so much on a screen these days that I think I could avoid printing all of the readings out. There's something to be said for reading on the subway or anywhere you want, though, and I can't afford a kindle quite yet. Maybe someday.

It may seem hard... but it's easier than it used to be

I wanted to post about a great graphic novel that I recently came across. Bookhunter, by Jason Shiga was a random find in the book store. I opened it up and knew immediately that I was going to love it. It tells the story of Special Agent Bay with the Library Police as they track down a rare bible stolen from the Oakland Public Library. Using circulation records and library security technology they track down the book thief just before the library of congress shows up to reclaim its traveling rare book display. The story is a hilarious and engaging combination of police procedural and library culture.

I find this comic particularly interesting as LIS 2600 begins because the story takes place in 1973, and Shiga painstakingly reconstructs library technology of the period. The agents use card catalogs, circulation cards, record drums and other old tech items I couldn't even begin to name to solve the crime. Not only does this provide a fascinating look at the old way of doing things in a library, it is also reassuring to me. Sometimes the technology aspect of libraries seems daunting, but the old style technologies in this novel are even more obscure and incomprehensible to anyone outside of the IT or tech services department.


The interactive web, as well as other recent information innovations allow public service oriented librarians to be closer to the more technical aspects of library service. They make things easier, they really do. And Shiga's exacting recreation of a bygone library era in this book is a good reminder of that. Not to mention, who can help but smile and secretly rejoice as the library police flash their badges, conduct a high octane chase in the bookmobile, and keep the world and library materials safe from vigilante censors, thieves and vandals.

The book is available to read online or buy at Shiga's website. Its worth a look.

Hello all

Just a first post to say hello. The title of the blog is a bad pun that comes from cribbage terminology. The original phrase is two for his knobs (sometimes two for his nibs) and is a favorite around my house.

I'm looking forward to exploring library technology and web 2.0 this summer!