Tag: library

The House of Representatives just voted to limit the ability of the Patriot Act to gain access to library and bookstore records. From CNN:

The vote reversed a narrow loss last year by lawmakers concerned about the potential invasion of privacy of innocent library users. They narrowed the proposal this year to permit the government to continue to seek out records of Internet use at libraries.

Thanks to all the librarians in Vermont (esp. our favorite, Jessamyn) for putting pressure on Rep. Bernard Sanders of Vermont to push the legislation forward.

Virtual Reference gets a sudden kick in the pants:

Video Skype!

I can’t wait to see how this is used for reference…according to the description, it allows screencasting, sharing of screens, photos, etc, as well as actual video. Sounds like something I’ll be exploring very, very soon.

After returning from vacation, I found a ton of commentary in the librarian blogosphere about the latest Gorman issue. A short list of the comments I read/found:

• The ever-timely Jessamyn at librarian.net
• LISNews
• Caveat Lector
• The Eclectic Librarian
• Karen Schnieder: Free Range Librarian
• Librarian in Black

For those that missed this latest uproar, here’s the question and answer from the Chronicle interview:

Q. Some of your colleagues argue that libraries should become more user-friendly, and that they should change with the times.

A. Libraries are user-friendly, and we have changed. I’ve been in libraries for 40 years, and they’ve changed unutterably. Go to any campus, and the library is likely to be the most technologically advanced unit on campus. … That does not mean that everything can be dumbed down to some kind of hip-hop or bells-and-whistles kind of stuff. It just can’t be. If you want to know about the dynasties of China, you’re going to have to read a book. In fact, you’re going to have to read several books.

Emphasis mine.

This most recent public relations nightmare for the ALA has led to a number of blogging librians to decide to not renew their memberships to ALA. I briefly considered that…then decided that it would give me much, much more pleasure to stay in the ALA, and attempt to move into a position where I can actually make some kind of difference. Gorman’s comment is a best a poor choice of words, and at worst openly racist. To equate “hip-hop” to a dumbed down form of anything shows only his incredible ignorance of the culture and art forms associated with that label. Even if it is not a racist comment (an argument I might be willing to entertain, given that the hip-hop culture has crossed nearly every racial boundary) it is still an insulting one (much in the vein of his earlier blogger comment).

And this isn’t even to critique his issues with Google Print. He keeps talking about the atomization of books, and how scholarly research is about reading books as a whole, and absorbing knowledge in large pieces. If he thinks this is how Google Print is supposed to be used (that is, as a scholarly source) he’s simply not paying attention. No one wants to be able to read whole scholarly texts on Google…they want to use Google Print to identify areas of possible interest in research. If I can full-text search a wider and wider variety of texts, I can more accurately identify books that I want to read in order to gather the knowledge I want. OR, I’m looking for a fact, in which case full-text will allow me to go directly to it. Either way….all of his critiques of Google Print can be equally applied to full text searches/electronic access of scholarly journals, as far as I can tell. Can you imagine someone actually claiming:

The second big objection to me is that they say they’re digitizing articles, but they’re really not, they’re atomizing them. In other words, they’re reducing articles to a collection of paragraphs and sentences which, taken out of context, have virtually no meaning. They may contain some data, but it’s of very marginal utility. I mean, my view is that a scholarly article is an exposition. It begins at the beginning and ends at the end. It cumulatively adds to your knowledge of a topic and presents an argument.

I’m sure we’ll see more insanity from Gorman as we move through the year. I might need to add a “Gorman” category. 🙂

From LISNews originally, another person at the top of a librarian food chain who just doesn’t get it. To wit:

Lately, I’ve been wandering around Blogland, and I’m struck by the narcissism and banality of so many personal blogs, of which, if the statistics are to believed, there are millions. Here, private lives tumble into public view, with no respect for seemliness or established social norms. Here, as the philosopher Roger Scruton said of Reality TV, ‘[a]ll fig leaves, whether of language, thought or behavior, have now been removed.’ What desperate craving for attention is indicated by this kind of mundane, online journaling? Surely, one writes a diary for one’s personal satisfaction; journaling is, after all, a deeply private act.

No, Blaise…you might write a diary for your personal satisfaction. Journaling, for you is a deeply private act. Plus: “…no respect for seemliness..”? What sort of bizarro 1950’s world is this supposed to be? We create our own established social norms here on the ‘net. Virtual communities derive their own set of performance standards and codes, and it doesn’t matter how “public” or “private” the delineation of those communities may be. Bloggers who choose to reveal their personal lives online do not all do so out of some form of deep narcissism, nor from any exhibitionistic tendencies…except, of course, those that do. They do so for their own reasons.

One wonders for whom these hapless souls blog. Why do they chose to they expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism? The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace. Undoubtedly, these are the same individuals who believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better.

Wow…”sententious drivel”? And your comment about the Wikipedia is unbecoming of someone who once published a paper entitled Bowling alone together: Academic writing as distributed cognition. The Wikipedia is the ultimate form of distributed cognition. And this is one librarian who most assuredly knows nothing of the sort. Your “time-honored editorial and filtering functions” are going the way of the dodo thanks to the distribution of publication power, personal publication and archiving, folksonomic tagging/syndication/massive metadata collaboration, and other technological innovations. Those functions can be (and I would argue, will be) filled in other ways very, very soon.

Admittedly, some blogs are highly professional, reliable and informative, but most are not.

The same is true of, oh….every form of communication known to mankind.

So in a recent entry, Jessamyn talks Wikipedia and how librarians are going to have to get over their love affair with authority:

The debate we’ve seen happening over the authority, or lack thereof, of collaborative information systems such as Wikipedia is just scratching the surface of the debates we’ll be seeing in the years to come. Librarians ignore Wikipedia, and by extension the new face of information, at their peril. Keep in mind I’m not saying that we all have to run to the Internet to answer our questions, just that if we fail to see the impact these systems are having, and the openness and transparency they bring with them, then we fail to learn something crucial about the downsides to the inflexible authority of print.

Indeed…in a talk I gave the other day, I discussed a lot of new hip and trendy things in LibraryLand, but it never fails that I get gasps of astonishment when I show academics the Wikipedia. I’ve never been fond of authority as the answer to our information instabilities, but I’m even less so now with the living antithesis of authority on hand (and so remarkable!).

I blogged a bit ago about an academic paper I’ve got rattling around in my head having to do with new ways of viewing information sources as relating to the Coherence Theory of knowledge. Spoke briefly with Jeff Pomeratz from UNC regarding my idea via email, who said:

I agree, librarians are too hung up on authority as a criterion. It reminds me of the story I remember reading about early Renaissance scientists trying to discover how many teeth horses have. After checking all books that might have a reference to horses’ teeth & coming up with nothing, it was decided that it was an unanswerable question! That said, I don’t think authority as a criterion can be dismissed: I’d trust the accuracy of a statement on a topic from an expert on that topic over a statement from a non-expert any day. But why? That I leave to you to answer in a philosophically principled way. So I’d argue that authority has to be positioned relative to other criteria.

Authority as a criterion may not ever go away completely…as I said to Jeff, when I’m sick, I go to a doctor, after all. But as an end point for deciding validity or truth, it is clearly not the only answer that should be given. In libraries, we have the concept of a “subject expert” who is responsible for things relating to that subject…selecting books, answering tough reference questions, producing research guides. That’s an authority concept that I don’t really mind. Would it be better if they did this work in concert with other “experts?” I would argue yes…the more brains on the problem, the better.

When making arguments for a position, I think that examining the web of interconnections to that position is a better form of support than simply a reference to authority.

This all seems so self-evident to me, that sometimes it is difficult to present well. I’m re-reading stuff on coherence theory now, and hopefully can more fully form some actually arguments at some point. I’d love any thoughts that anyone might have to spur my brain in the right direction.

Walt Crawford has a blog! Welcome to the blogosphere, Walt…I’ve been a reader of Cites & Insights for some time now, and (like many, many others, evidently) asked you at one point about why you weren’t blogging. Now that you are, I look forward to adding you to my daily reading list.