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...