…don’t commit suicide on or near Halloween.
…people noticed the body at breakfast time Wednesday but dismissed it as a holiday prank. Authorities were called to the scene more than three hours later.
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Still in VA
Still blogging over on the Lupton Library blog regarding the ACA Summit…tons of good stuff regarding library roles on campuses. Let me know if anyone has questions about this, or the new blog, and I’ll do my best.
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ACA Summit
For the next few days I’ll be blogging my experiences at the ACA Summit in Abingdon, VA. This is going to be a new thing, since I’ll be attempting to live blog it over at the new Lupton Library blog that I am attempting to set up. Right now it’s password protected, but that will be coming off as I start blogging. It’s VERY rough (no links out, etc) but we’ve not quite decided what we want to do with it. So be kind. 🙂
A spirited discussion sprang forth in my comments due to my post concerning authority. David Mattison (whom I was picking on in my post) swung by to further explain his position. Snippets from the comment, and my responses:
After quoting one of the FluWiki contributors as saying that they would remove the fluwiki when a comparable “authoritative” source comes along, David says:
So obviously even one of the contributors recognizes that there’s a distinction between this grassroots effort and an “authoritative sourceâ€. So much for not appealing to authority when you need to.
I think perhaps you misunderstand me…I’m not defending the FluWiki as a good source. I’m arguing against the use of authority as a measure of truth/validity. In this case, I think he’s as wrong as you are to insist on authority as a measure of truth. Later in your comment, you say:
There’s a big difference between an appeal to authority and learning how to distinguish what’s authoritative and what’s worthless information. One criterion is who or what is making the claim or stating the “factâ€.
If there is a “big difference” between those two things, I certainly don’t see it. I’m not arguing the merits of the term “authoritative” which is completely different, and refers to the information in question after judgements have already been made. I’m arguing that to judge new information by its source alone is a fallacy. One criterion for you may be who or what is stating the fact, and what I am claiming is that who or what is stating a fact is irrelevant to the fact itself. If said fact is supported by a web of like facts, then yes, I think the fact-in-itself is the item we are concerned about, not the authority of the source. You ask:
Would you believe information on a university Web site authored by an evolutionary biologist over a Creationist or an Intelligent Design Web site?
🙂 I think you picked a poor example, and not because of the speciousness of ID. I did both Master’s and a bit of PhD work in the Philosophy of Science, specifically the Phil. of Biology, specifically evolutionary theory. 🙂 So you couldn’t have picked a “truth” battle more near to my heart.
Even with that said, I wouldn’t trust a Evolutionary biologist at a .edu over an ID site at a .com because of that alone. I would trust the Evolutionary Biologists fact because I could check his sources, follow his bibliography, examine the information on other sites, and come to the conclusion that he was right and that the ID site was complete and utter nonsense. This is exactly the way that the biologist himself would operate, and is one of the manners in which science builds knowledge…test the hypothesis. Would you trust a biologist hosted on a .edu that defended Intelligent Design?
Here’s my argument, boiled down and condensed for brevity. In the past, librarians and information scientists used “authority” as a measure of truth due to time constraints…we simply couldn’t check the sources of everything that we evaluated, and instead relied on this vague, unsubstantial notion of authority to cover our assurance that this fact or that information was “good”. We no longer have that excuse. The current world of information is hyperlinked, always on, and ubiquitous.
As an Instructional Librarian, I simply feel that it’s lazy scholarship to teach our students that authority is an appropriate measure of truth. We should be teaching them critical thinking skills that they can use to evaluate information, and not acronym laden checklists.
In case you missed these links in the post below, check out a few of these authorities: Alan Sokel, Jayson Blair, SCIGen, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Finally, Justin chimed in with some very good comments…and leaves us with a great question:
Finally a question for my librarian friends: we talk of [traditional] authority as if it can be measured. But my understanding is that it’s much more in line with the Matthew effect above, in other words, it’s essentially subjective. Is that the case? Do you measure or compare the authority in some kind of empirical way?
It was brought to my attention today by uber-librarian Catherine Pellegrino that there has been a bit of a dust up regarding authority in regards to the Flu Wiki. David Mattison over at The Ten Thousand Year Blog has called into issue whether or not the information in the Flu Wiki is trustworthy/true/factual/valid. David says:
…I still question the validity, accountability and transparency of their exercise. As to their leadership, who are the editors and what expertise to this subject do they bring? The only person associated with this wiki who’s chosen to reveal anything about herself is the publisher Melanie Mattson. Why are editors DemFromCT, Revere and Cassandra still hiding behind e-mail addresses?
And, my favorite bit:
But would you trust your life to information on a wiki? How could you guarantee that the information you’re reading is authentic and trustworthy even if the people are identified? How do we know these people are who they say they are? This is one of the most problematic areas with information from the Internet, whether you can trust it. A wiki simply compounds this issue to the point where the information ceases to be of value unless you yourself happen to know that it’s true.
My question would be: Do you trust your life to the information from any single doctor? If your physician told you that you had an inoperable tumor and 1 month to live, I’d be willing to bet that you’d probably get a second opinion. Why? Because, as I’ve said so many times in the past, no single source of information should be trusted.
In one of his comments on a comment, David says:
Again, the questions of legitimacy, accountability and authority all come to mind, and are concepts librarians and other information professionals stress when it comes to accepting information on the Internet.
Speak for yourself! As one of those librarians and information professionals, I certainly do not stress authority as it pertains to accepting information on the Internet. Actually, I think that Melanie is much closer to the root of the matter when she says:
We’ve established our credentials with the quality of the information. I spent the day watching PhD scientists and MDs making complete asses of themselves all over the blogosphere. The credential is the quality.
The credential IS in the quality of the information..and in the ability to check sources of said information. This is, I believe and will argue, the key advantage to a wiki structure in judging its infmormation quality. The ability to link out from the wiki to other sources builds a web of information that is stronger than any single “authoritative” source could ever be. It is this coherent web of information that lends credence to any single piece of information on the site, and allows a judgement of truth/validity to be made. Not “does the writer have a PhD?” Not “is this published by a reputable source?” Those questions give false support to facts…this is why, as scholars, we insist on a bibliography. We want to be able to verify the information for ourselves, and track back towards the originating facts.
This is part of the intrinsic nature of the web…the ability to cross link information into supporting webs of information. This is what makes the Internet such an amazing source. Not whether the person posting a page is an expert, but the ability to quickly and easily check other pages on the subject and determine if the person has support for their position. This is the key to judging information in the current age. In the age of print, it wasn’t easily done..scholars spent years traveling from library to library, painfully piecing together fragments of material in hopes of building a case. Now the case is built for you, because of the very nature of the information structure. This is something that I feel strongly that librarians and information specialists will have to come to accept if we are to stay abreast of the new, collaborative, bottom-up sorts of information sources that will be the rule, and not the exception, very soon.
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WordPress.com
It appears that the gang behind WordPress is launching a blogger-like hosted blogging solution over at WordPress.com. I got a sneak-preview invite to it, and here’s my thoughts.
The admin area looks much like the standard area for the “standard” version of wordpress, and includes the Dashboard area. I’d love for this area to include the ability to personalize the RSS feeds coming in…we’ll see if that pops up in the full release.
They’ve snuck a couple of fancy new AJAXy features in to the Write panel, including a drag-n-drop photo area which takes the guesswork out of dealing with photos.
For some reason, the presentation aspect of the site is very limited…only a very small number (8) of different themes to choose from, and no ability to format the CSS/HTML directly (unlike blogger, where you can make changes to the actual HTML of a given template). According to the FAQ, they’ll be changing that in the future to give people more control.
They’ve made WordPress categories more “taglike” and included a useful little popup that suggests other “tags” when you create a new category (much like del.icio.us).
Overall, it’s an interesting option in the hosted blogging world. I’ve been using the server version of WordPress for a long while now (since the .9, I believe) and have been incredibly pleased. If they can carry over the same usefulness to the hosted version, it should be an excellent option.
Looks like wordpress.com is in league with Flock…an interesting pairing. They certainly seem to appeal to the same demographic.
If anyone got this far, and wants an invite, it looks like I’ve got one to give out. Give me a yell if you want to use wordpress.com as your blog, and I’ll send it your way.
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Zombies!
Madison is the next city to face the shambling undead hordes.
At 2pm on Saturday, October 22, zombie fans will assemble in full costume to kick off Zombie Lurch 2005. Join us! We’ll meet on the Capitol steps (Carroll/Mifflin side), shamble down State Street with stops for tasty brains and beverages, and end at the Union Terrace for even more beverages.
To add a particularly Madisonian touch, it’s not just a Zombie Walk but a Zombie Protest. Fight for zombie rights by bringing a protest sign, sandwich board, or customized t-shirt. With slogans like Let Zombies Walk!, The undead are people too! Open your heart and mind to zombies, or even an eloquent ARGH, we’ll raise public consciousness for the plight of our cannibalistic brothers and sisters. What do we want? BRAINS! When do we want it? BRAINS!
I’ve got a couple of friends in the area (hey Chris and Heidi!)…you guys should totally take pics of this, or join in.
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JMLA
Really great article examining the trade-offs for Open Access by T. Scott Plutchak, the editor of the JMLA. The opening paragraph is a great illustration of the sorts of surprising audiences you get when you open up your content.
Between June of 2004 and May of 2005, the number of unique users accessing the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) and its predecessor, the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association (BMLA), on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central (PMC) system averaged just over 20,000 per month. When I first saw these numbers on the PMC administration site, I was astonished. The members of the Medical Library Association (MLA) itself (who we might presume are the main audience of the JMLA) number only about 4,500, and the print run of the journal is generally in the neighborhood of 5,000 copies. It seemed likely to me that the number of unique readers in any given month would be just some fraction of that core audience.
I find the article really refreshing, especially since I somewhat unfairly critiqued the JMLA in my Master’s Paper for not going Open Access. While I know my little diatribe didn’t have an effect on it, it’s refreshing to see Mr. Plutchak singing the praises of OA anyway. We had a bit of a discussion after the publication of my Master’s Paper, and he was very kind in pointing out areas where I had possibly mis-represented the JMLA and its stances. I was grateful at the time, and remain so.
Very nice article…I’d love to see more and more of this cost/benefit analysis going on. I’ve been saying for years now that the benefits of OA far outweigh the doom-and-gloom that publishers sometimes espouse.
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Testing Flock
So I just got an invitation to try out Flock, the new Firefox based browser that promises a ton of neat features. One of which I’m abusing right now…a blog interface, where you can create/edit blog posts from a special interface that includes a Flickr panel for dragging/dropping pics, as well as a blog panel for dragging/dropping mp3s or other files that need to go with the post.
So far, the browsing itself is smooth…I ran it thought a bunch of pages, and it seems to handle most of my daily browsing with ease. I’ll play with the more advanced features over the course of the week, and see what I think.
If anyone wants to try it out, give me a yell, and I’ll see if I can hook you up with a download.
So I got an email yesterday from Shel, asking me my thoughts on ripping audiobooks from a library:
..I was wondering the other day though – I checked out a Jimmy Buffet audio CD from the library and ripped it to listen to my iPod. I then, honestly, felt guilty. Like I was somehow cheating the library or something – or more accurately, using the library inappropriately when the library had always been my friend. Have the Powers That Be just not thought about all the media sitting on library shelves, there for the taking/ripping/copying? Have libraries somehow slipped through the cracks? Just curious on your take on the situation.
She also pointed towards a BoingBoing post, originally from Neil Gaiman’s blog where a reader asks for Neil’s take on the copying of audiobooks from a library to an iPod or other MP3 player. His response:
What a wonderful ethical question. I feel almost rabbinical pondering it. No, I don’t believe you’ve broken any law. If you’d checked out the MP3 CD from your library you’d be expected to put it onto your iPod, after all. There’s a weird sort of ethical fogginess, in that I suspect that part of the idea of libraries is that when you’re done with something you return it, and of course once you have your MP3 on your computer and iPod you can keep it forever. But I think this is just one of those places where changes in technology move faster than the rules.
If you’re listening to it, and you’ve got an iPod or suchlike MP3 player, you’re almost definitely going to listen to it on your iPod. That’s how things are, and it’s a good thing (it’s why I got Harper Collins to release American Gods and Anansi Boys on MP3 CD, after all).
Probably wisest not to pull it off your iPod and give it to other people, though. Let them at least take it out of the library themselves.
I’m so happy to see an author who at least understands the perception of his readers…of course we’ll copy the files to our portable devices. My take on it? Well…it’s not to hard to figure out that I’m a copyright liberal. I feel like the consolidation of the media companies and their lobbying power in Congress has created a copyright situation that is completely out of control. And I do think that copying audiobooks that you have checked out of a library to a portable media device (MP3 player, mini disc, etc) counts as fair use. It’s format shifting. I can’t currently get a lot of audiobooks in a purely digital format (ie..downloadable), and I certainly can’t check them out of a library that way! There have been some experiments with digital audio books in libraries, but I don’t think they are widespread, nor do I think they are going to crop up across the country.