Monthly Archives: March 2007

Some things read this week, 18 – 24 Mar 2007

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Sunday, 18 Mar 2007

Machery, Edouard amd Luc Faucher. “Social construction and the concept of race.” Philosophy of Science 72 (5): Dec 2005 Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Part I Contributed Papers, ed. by Miriam Solomon: 1208-1219.

[BTW, if anyone noticed the discrepancy in my comment that I received this issue on 16 Mar and the date of this issue, well, PSA has had some issues with their publication schedule "lately."]

This is an interesting article which tries to provide a framework that allows for the integration of the constructionist approach and cognitive/evolutionary in the domain of race. I believe it is probably a good step forward. Even more interesting, this paper is much more anthropological than philosophical, and especially good at pointing out where empirical research supports a hypothesis and where more empirical work is needed.

Thus, not everything in this journal is pure mental masturbation, which is probably one of the main reasons I still am a member of this organization. Plus, it’s cheap! $25/year for students. I’m sure I could get the contents online, but for that low price I get to indulge my highlighting and marginal writing proclivities.

Chang, Hasok. “A case for old-fashioned observability, and a reconstructed constructive empiricism.” Philosophy of Science 72 (5): Dec 2005 Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Part I Contributed Papers, ed. by Miriam Solomon: 876-887.

Quite an interesting article which takes on the current consensus “that observability is an attribute of objects rather than of qualities” (877). Very readable, and I find myself pretty much in agreement.

As another example of the wonderful snarkiness exhibited in philosophical writings, here is Chang commenting on the privileging of vision (“ocularism”) in observability:

Vollmer (2000, 361, 365) says that caffeine is an observable entity because we can discern its molecular structure through X-ray crystallography. I say caffeine is observable through the buzz I feel after I ingest it (and indirectly observable through the unimaginable number of people who stay awake at philosophy conferences) (879).

Svenonius, Elaine. (1988) “Design of controlled vocabularies in the context of emerging technologies.” Library Science with a Slant to Documentation and Information Studies 25 (4), December 1988: 215-227.

While somewhat dated, this is a short paper that would be good for many in our profession to read discussing the potential role for classification schemes and thesauri in online systems.

Sunday – Monday, 18 – 19 Mar

Tudhope, Douglas, Ceri Binding, Dorothee Blocks, and Daniel Cunliffe. (2006) “Query expansion via conceptual distance in thesaurus indexed collections.” Journal of Documentation 62 (4): 509-533. doi 10.1108/00220410610673873

Intriguing. I’m finding Douglas Tudhope one to watch or, at least, to read.

Monday, 19 Mar 2007

McCallum, Andrew. (2005) “Information extraction: Distilling structured data from unstructured text.” Social Computing 3 (9), Dec. 2005. Available online.

Pribbenow, Simone. (2002) “Merynomic relationships: From classical mereology to complex part-whole relations.” In Green, Bean and Myaeng, eds. The Semantics of relationships: An interdisciplinary perspective. Information Science and Knowledge Management series, v. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002.

Yes, another Green item; for fun and enlightenment. This is the companion volume to Bean & Green 2001.

Wednesday, 21 Mar 2007

Intemann, Kristen. “Feminism, underdetermination, and values in science.” Philosophy of Science 72 (5): Dec 2005 Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Part I Contributed Papers, ed. by Miriam Solomon: 1001-1012.

An excellent article showing that, unlike argued by some, the Duhem-Quine thesis and underdetermination do not leave a logical gap between theory and observation that might be filled with feminist political or social values. She does, though, go on to show how it might be the case that feminist contextual values can play a legitimate role in science.

My claim is that whether contextual values could play a legitimate role in justifying or applying constitutive values will depend on the content of the goals of science, or on whether contextual values can promote the aims of sicence, and not as a consequence of underdetermination (1010)

Thursday, 22 Mar 2007

Bollen, Johan, Marko A. Rodriguez, and Herbert Van de Sompel. (2006) Journal status. [pdf at arxiv]

OK, it’s only taken me a year to get to this; found at Christina’s LIS Rant last March. Interesting article, maybe I ought to go read this discussion about it, which is what she was really referencing….

Thursday – Saturday, 22 – 24 Mar 2007

Veltman, Kim H. (2004) “Towards a semantic web for culture.” Journal of Digital Information 4 (4) [abstract]

Found 10 March 2007 while doing a Google search on Carol A. Bean. Excellent article that points up many of the issues in knowledge organization not addressed by the Semantic Web vision, much less most of our current KO structures.

Traces the meaning of meaning, the definition of definition, classes of relationships, etc. over the last 2500 years and shows why the Semantic Web, AI, E-R diagram types, etc. have a very impoverished understanding of what it is that they are attempting to do.

Recommended for anyone interested in meaning, relationships, culture, the Semantic Web, databases, and/or KO.

Friday, 23 Mar 2007

Crawford, Walt. (2007) Cites & Insights 7 (4), April 2007 [pdf]

Saturday, 24 Mar 2007

Cordero, Alberto. “Contemporary nativism, scientific texture, and the moral limits of free inquiry.” Philosophy of Science 72 (5): Dec 2005 Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Part I Contributed Papers, ed. by Miriam Solomon: 1220-1231.

Wow! A philosophy article that everyone I know ought to be able to read and understand. It’s a pretty good article addressing an argument by Philip Kitcher that research into Darwinist psychology may very well have adverse effects on peoples already disadvantaged and, thus, that such research should be (somewhat) proscribed. Cordero puts forth a pretty good defense, but I think he clearly misunderstands typical human behavior (in our current social climate) to misuse scientific understanding—through laziness, willfulness, or any other factor—along with having too much faith in the “scientific method.” Worth the read, though.

Beghtol, Clare. (2001) “Relationships in classificatory structure and meaning.” In Bean & Green, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. 99-113.

Re-read this while working on my book review. Originally read 1 Feb 2007. Begthol’s premise is:

that changing knowledge structures and the increased globalization of information exchange require rethinking all aspects of bibliographic classification systems, including the kinds of relationships we habitually include in the systems (99).

While it rarely seems as radical as that statement sounds, she does a good job pointing out many of the limitations of relationship structures within our classification systems, and the kinds of new structures (very generally) that we need. This article fits quite well with the Veltman article (see above).

Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read:

George Herbert, “Church-monuments”
George Herbert , “The Quip”

Some things read this week, 11 – 17 Mar 2007

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Sunday, 11 Mar

Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read:

Shakespeare, The Ghost’s Speech (from Hamlet)

John Donne, “The Flea”

Green, Rebecca. “Relationships in the organization of knowledge: An overview.” In Bean & Green, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. 3-18. Re-read for Representation & Organization.

“Mereology.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Read because Allen Renear suggested I do so in relation to my trying to elucidate the difference between P88 and P89 in the CIDOC CRM. I made a rather lengthy class forum post trying to elucidate this difference, and will probably write my first paper on it.

And, yes, portions of it were beyond my current abilities. And other portions were beyond the work I was willing to put into it. But he also said, “You don’t need to read all to get the basic introduction to standard axioms for mereology.” So I was going “above and beyond” again. Glutton. Punishment.

Monday, 12 Mar

Thomas Gruber. (2005) Ontology of folksonomy: A mash-up of apples and oranges. For Representation and Organization, with nice overlap for Ontologies.

Good, but simple [not simplistic] article about the development of an ontology for tagging. I’ve had thoughts along this line myself on occasion, so I was happy to read this. I found myself wishing for a bit more in way of technical details, though; perhaps a little XML or RDF, say. But I imagine that is to be found at http://tagcommons.org/. Oh well, another blog added to my aggregator. Then again, I promised myself I’d look into more projects and actual practical things and remove some of the biblioblogosphere echo chamber.

Tagging for me, though, is at best secondary and perhaps even tertiary. But since I can actually get my mind around an ontology for tagging it may be a good project to use to learn more about ontologies, XML, RDF, and whatever else they are using to implement.

Smith, Barry and Achille C. Varzi. (2000) “Fiat and bona fide boundaries.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LX (2), March 2000: 401-420. [pdf]

Same as my entry on “Mereology,” except Barry Smith recommended, in general, for his work on bona fide and fiat boundaries.

Smith, Barry and David M. Mark. (2001) “Geographical categories: an ontological investigation.” International Journal of Geographical Information Science 15 (7): 591-612.

See above entry. Excellent article that happened to be an awesome congruence of ontologies, categorization, Lakoff and CIDOC CRM. I’m not sure how much of this mereology stuff I’ll actually use in my paper on P88 vs. P89, because I honestly don’t think some of the ultra-analytic philosophy issues need to be gone into to clear up the CIDOC CRM issues, but there is some useful material in this paper. The issues can be easily cleared up with some reference to basic thesaural principles and other KOS work, and experiential work in categorization, without anything useful being contributed by “deep” philosophical analysis of mereology. Even the bona fide vs. fiat boundary issue—while immensely interesting and useful (in some sense)—is not directly applicable. This paper, though, brings the best of all those areas to bear and, while not necessary to the defense of my pulling P88 and P89 apart, it can add something to the discussion.

Tuesday, 13 Mar

Budd, John M. (2006) “Toward a practical and normative ethics for librarianship.” Library Quarterly 76 (3), July 2006: 251-269.

Stumbled over browsing the current issues of print journals in the LIS Library. Pretty good, all in all.

Noy, Natalya F. and Deborah L. McGuinness. Ontology development 101: A guide to creating your first ontology.

Re-read for Ontologies. Read 30 Nov 06 for Information Modeling.

Lakoff, Chap. 14.

Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read:

John Donne, Holy Sonnet I

John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV

Wednesday – Thursday, 14 – 15 Mar

Green, Rebecca. (2000) “Locating sources in humanities scholarship: The efficacy of following bibliographic references.” Library Quarterly 70 (2): 201-229.

Re-read. Originally read 22 Jan 2007. Maybe I’ll get it blogged this time.

Just went back looking for the link to my previous mention of this article. I had forgotten that this was the article that led to my “Intellectual crushes and more mature relationships” post. It’s amazing what a good article, a quiet bar on a Monday evening, and $2 pints of fresh Guinness will lead a boy to say. :)

Foucault, Michel. The Discourse on language.

Made a lot more sense than the book it comes in, The Archaeology of knowledge.

Friday, 16 Mar 2007

Kemp, Rebecca. (2007) “Catalog/cataloging changes and Web 2.0 functionality: New directions for serials.” The Serials Librarian 53 (4): 33 pages. Preprint found via post at NGC4LIB list 14-15 March 2007.

Worth the read; is actually much shorter as it is a double-spaced Word doc converted to pdf.

Asheim, Lester. (1983) “Selection and censorship: A reappraisal.” Wilson Library Bulletin November 1983: 180-184.

I was quite excited when I found out last night that Asheim wrote a follow-up to his famous article 30 years later. One of my earliest posts was on an Asheim article. I probably should’ve gone back and read the original, but didn’t. The follow-up deserves a read, though.

Beall, Jeffrey. (2007) “Search fatigue: Finding a cure for the database blues.” American Libraries March 2007: 46-50.

Not a bad article all-in-all. The shame is that it even needs to be written in this day and age, and at such a basic level. But it does, and I find that truly sad. Honestly, any degreed librarian ought to be able to write that article in its essence! The sad truth that they cannot is attested to by the Calhoun Report, numerous blog posts and posts on assorted list servs.

Other than the general sad state of affairs just mentioned, I have 2 small complaints with this article.

First, there is really nothing “natural” about alphabetic order. It is simply a historically contingent arrangement of symbols, which admittedly seems natural since most literate folks are used to it, but it is in no way natural. And relevance ranking (Oh, please don’t get me started on that!) is not the only alternative.

Second, while I fully agree that quality metadata can compensate for the weaknesses of keyword searching, it is not the case that “every document” is assigned the correct indexing terms, nor that “no relevant information is excluded from the results” (49). There is the issue of interindexer consistency, failure to provide retrospective indexing when new or changed terms are introduced, and other issues which affect the quality of metadata enabled searching. The professionals within our field who seem to think that keyword indexing is all that is required are (usually) well aware of this, and ignoring the issue entirely only provides them with (perceived) ammunition. Please, do not do this! We have rock-solid ground to stand on, but we cannot ignore the sometimes rock strewn ground that makes the footing a bit unstable at times.

Shapiro, Lawrence A. “Can psychology be a unified science?” Philosophy of Science 72 (5): Dec 2005 Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Part I Contributed Papers, ed. by Miriam Solomon: 953-963.

I got this issue the mail yesterday and, yes, I am a member of the Philosophy of Science Association despite the fact that much of what these folks are after just baffles me. And while some of it is beyond me (one sense of baffle), it is mostly the fact that they actually pursue these things which baffles me. Much of it is so vastly disconnected from the world and what goes on it that it is hard to believe that it is, in fact, the world that they are trying to describe and reason about.

This is a mighty big issue, of which I’ll only read some of. Just over 800 pages big. There are 3-4 papers (generally) on all of the following topics: Topics in philosophy of biology; Topics in philosophy of physics; Quantum mechanics; History of philosophy of science; Observation and experiment; Causality, confirmation and inference; Philosophy of social science; Gender and science; Topics in evolutionary theory; Realism and underdetermination; Natural selection and evolution; Decision theory; Race and science; Science models; General relativity; and Structural realism.

I read the Shapiro article because he was taking on Jaegwon Kim’s argument that there cannot be a unified science of psychology due to multiple realizability of mental states. I used to read a lot of Kim on consciousness, multiple realizability, supervenience, and so forth.

This is actually a pretty good article and, despite my rustiness in these areas, it seems well argued. Even better, it may actually have some impact in the world even though many of these arguments do not.

One good reason to continue reading philosophy is that “these kids” know how to argue and call each other names in a highly civilized and humorous manner. Many of us could learn a lot from them. I absolutely loved this put down by Shapiro:

I hate to rest on reductio arguments, because there is a disturbing trend among philosophers not always to agree with me about what is absurd, but this will have to do for now (958).

Masterly and snarky, all at the same time.

Well, I can’t swear that I won’t read anything else this week, but I should be writing and perhaps re-looking some of the mereology stuff so I can write. But writing is my mission at the moment.

See you next week.

A little Friday irreverence – Mr. Deity

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You won’t often find me linking to internet video because I don’t watch much of it. But if it were all this funny—luckily it’s not—I’d get no work done at all.

This is some of the absolutely funniest stuff I’ve ever seen in my life. “Swear by mr.deity.”

To my friends who don’t appreciate religious humor, well, don’t watch it.

mr.deity

I think Episode 7 (Mr. Deity & the Tour de Hell) may be my favorite, although they all have moments of brilliance. All I’m saying is adulterers deserve the Hokey Pokey.

There’s even a free podcast available via the iTunes store or a RSS feed available.

Check it out. Absolutely brilliant!

Originally found at sivacracy.net

My Spring Break has begun, with a whimper

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Despite working, and schoolwork which needs done, my Spring Break actually began yesterday with my last class of the week.

After class, I attended Metadata Roundtable as I’m wont to do on Wednesdays. Yesterday’s topic was on the Dublin Core Eprints Application Profile. I wasn’t sure I was going at first, but I’m glad I did as it was one of the most interesting (for me) MDRTs so far, and I was able to participate more than normal. They have adopted FRBR or, more realistically, a FRBR-like model. But it also differs from FRBR in several ways, which makes it quite intriguing, particularly since it is dealing with electronic “items.” While FRBR is supposedly format agnostic, I have my doubts about how that actually translates in practice, especially with electronic stuff.

Once I got home I took a nap. Early in the evening I was trying to decide whether to go to the Blind Pig and have a beer or two in celebration of Spring Break while working on my Ontologies paper, which is due during break, or to go to a movie. I eventually decided to go see the movie, 300. It was OK; typical action movie. I don’t think it reflects so badly on the “Iranians,” as “they” are trying to claim, but it certainly over-glorifies the Spartans. While the battle depicted in the movie is certainly one for the history books into perpetuity, the Spartans were a savage group of human beings. Their way of life is not one that should be in any way glorified; especially in this day and age. Anyway, glad I skipped the beers.

Yesterday, I seemed to be fighting a headache all day again and this morning when I woke up I still had it. Ate breakfast and had some of my coffee. Time kept passing as I was supposed to be eating 2nd breakfast and finishing the coffee, then it was time to be in the shower. But these things weren’t happening. I couldn’t find the energy, or motivation. I emailed work and said I might come in later, but I was sick today. I put myself back in bed (after 2 cups of coffee) at 7:33 and got back up at 11:54. And, yes, I still have a headache and not much energy.

So, yay! Spring Break. I guess it only makes sense. Those goddamn ants had me pretty stressed. I (sort of) get some time off from school. Thus, once I get a bit of a break my body is going to let the stressors have their day, even if they have technically gone away.

As for Break, I don’t really have much of one. My trip to OCLC never worked out, which is disappointing, but probably for the best as it would only increase my stress levels, in both good and not-so-good ways, of course, but increases nonetheless.

I have a lot of class work to get busy on. I have an Ontologies paper due on the 20th, I need to write my book review and decide on—and begin—a final project for Representation & Organization, and I need to put some serious work into my independent study on terminology services.

Of course, I have 2 jobs to work, and now another 5 hours to make up at one from missing today. Oh, and my 3rd part-time, temporary job needs some serious efforts over Break.

I really shouldn’t even bring up the more personal things like working on my personal website, going to the dentist (nest Tues.), etc. as those only add to the load.

The March weather has returned and I had to close the window. But we had two days of 70 degree weather and I got to wear shorts two days in a row. The flowers are starting to come up, and while they are other people’s flowers I can enjoy them nonetheless.

Quick update

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I know I owe a couple folks a personal note, which I will get to, but I wanted to offer a quick update for those who are worrying about me.

I’m doing OK. For the moment, anyway.

I had the exterminator come out this afternoon and spray pretty much everything. Best I can tell, the only ants I have at the moment are dead ants. Of course, I killed a few of them myself over the last week and the little bastards just kept coming back.

Anyway, so much better for the soul to let someone else do your killing for you; even if you have to pay them. All that active killing—especially this time of year—was doing me a world of harm. Add in all the other small things and I was sinking rapidly.

For those who do not know what the heck I’m talking about the short of it is I generally experience severe cyclical depression this time of year, and have for the last 8 years. I’ve been thinking about posting about it, as depression is something that needs to be talked about more in our society. Maybe I will; but as I was falling off the cliff was not the time to do so.

After the ‘terminator got done filling the apartment with strange smelling liquid I put on a pair of shorts and sandals and went to Aroma Cafe where I hung out for about 4.5 hours.

Sandals. Shorts. In Central Illinois. On March 13th!

That alone is a good start towards recovery. But I’m also hopeful the ‘terminator did the job. I need to believe and, more importantly, I need it to be so. Now if the smell would only air out a bit more. Ah well, I have two windows open and they have been for a couple days. :)

By the way, it has nothing to do with sunlight, or the length (or lack thereof) of the day, although winter’s gloom can get a bit overbearing sometimes. But that I can deal with.

I’d like to thank Iris for allowing me to use her lovely ice crystal photo as a header on my posts for the last couple months, but I think now maybe I want something a little more “hopeful.” Of course, I owe her for far more than that…. “Thank you, my friend!”

Some things read this week, 4 – 10 March 2007

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Sunday, 4 Mar

Zeng, Marcia L. and Yu Chen. (2003) “Features of an integrated thesaurus management and search system for the networked environment.” In McIlwaine, I. C., Subject retrieval in a networked environment: Proceedings of the IFLA Satellite Meeting held in Dublin, OH 14-16 August 2001 and sponsored by the IFLA Classification and Indexing Section, the IFLA Information Technology Section and OCLC. München: K. G. Saur. 122-128.

Cited by Zeng, Marcia L. and Lois Mai Chan. 2004. “Trends and issues in establishing interoperability among knowledge organization systems.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55 (5): 377-395. Cited by Vizine-Goetz, et al. (read last week)

Freye, Elisabeth and Max Naudi. (2003) “MACS: subject access across languages and networks.” Also in the above, and cited by the (indented) above. 3-10.

Kuhr, Patricia. (2003) “Putting the world back together: Mapping multiple vocabularies into a single thesaurus.” Ditto, ditto. 37-42.

This article is about H. W. Wilson’s merging of their 12 individual thesauri into one megathesaurus, much of it algorithmically.

Re-read: Olson, Hope A. and Dennis B. Ward. (2003) “Mundane standards, everyday technologies, equitable access.” In McIlwaine, I. C., Subject retrieval in a networked environment: Proceedings of the IFLA Satellite Meeting held in Dublin, OH 14-16 August 2001 and sponsored by the IFLA Classification and Indexing Section, the IFLA Information Technology Section and OCLC. München: K. G. Saur. 50-58.

Monday, 5 Mar

Nicholson, Dennis and Susannah Wake. (2003) “HILT: Subject retrieval in a distributed environment.” Same source and citation as the 1st 2 articles in this list. 61-67.

Bean, Carol A. and Rebecca Green. (2003) “Improving subject retrieval with frame representations.” Same source as above. No citation though; just stumbled over an article by the duo of Bean and Green while retrieving the other cited articles. More importantly, it’s a Rebecca Green article. 114-121

Tuesday, 6 Mar

Cayzer, Steve. (2006) What next for semantic blogging? Hewlett-Packard. [LIS: Michael Habib 23 Nov 06.

Tuesday – Wednesday, 6 – 7 Mar

Cordeiro, Maria I. (2003) “From library authority control to network authoritative metadata sources.” Also In McIlwaine, I. C. (see above). 131-139. This was a good article, but poor editing led to approx. one-quarter of its cited references not being in the reference list.

…, the field of authority work appears as one of immediate feasibility and effect by which libraries can gain ground in the Internet environment. It does not represent investments from scratch, it carries an added value that is almost a library exclusive and it has a strong learning and linking potential for the integration of traditional library activities in the interactive network reality. It is like finding a market niche for owned and under-exploited values, with the advantage of contributing to help libraries’ penetration in the WWW environment, while maintaining their traditional role of bibliographic control, extending it to the Web resources, at their own pace (137).

Wednesday, 7 Mar

Lakoff. Chap. 13 of Women, fire, and dangerous things.

Thursday, 8 Mar

Farmer, Linda. “Automatic categorization: What’s it all about?” The Serials Librarian 51 (2), 2006: 91-101. doi:10.1300/J123v51n02_07

Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read the Introduction.

Friday, 9 Mar

Spiteri, Louise F. “The Use of folksonomies in public library catalogues.” The Serials Librarian 51 (2), 2006: 75-89. doi:10.1300/J123v51n02_06

Shakespeare and Paglia. Sonnet 73 and Sonnet 29, and accompanying commentary. In Paglia, above. 3-11.

Friday – Saturday, 9 – 10 Mar

Wilson, T.D. (1994). Information needs and uses: fifty years of progress, in: B.C. Vickery, (Ed.), Fifty years of information progress: a Journal of Documentation review, (pp. 15- 51) London: Aslib. [Available at http://informationr.net/tdw/publ/papers/1994FiftyYears.html]

The other half is back online

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Several days ago, my PC decided to get stupid. I tried to turn it off right before heading out the door to catch the bus in the morning. It had decided to lock up and whole crap loads of stuff had to be forced to quit. Being in a hurry, I didn’t notice everything that was causing problems.

When I got home in the evening, the computer was reporting that a network cable was unplugged. Over the last several days I have tried all sorts of things short of a hard reset of the router, although I did turn it off a couple times. Seeing as the wireless connection was still good and the router was reporting the wired connection was good, and knowing when I moved the cable to another port or unplugged it I was in no mood to lose my entire connectivity.

This morning I pulled the case on the computer and cleaned it out and had a look around. Seeing as I had a power light on the NIC but an amber connection light when the cable was plugged in I decided maybe the NIC was bad. My friend, Jenn, who has been awesome at helping me troubleshoot during this whole escapade reminded me that NICs are pretty cheap. So after cleaning out the computer I put it back together and figured out how to disable the built-in NIC.

A quick trip to Best Buy for a $25 NIC (and two DVDs and a CD — yes, I’m depressed again) and I’m back online. I probably ought to run the router configuration and make sure every thing is locked down as good as it was, but for now everything is working and I do have ZoneAlarm installed.

This whole episode shouldn’t have been as hard as it was for me, but when something like this happens only every 3-4 years it is hard to remember everything one needs to do to troubleshoot a problem. Plus, I did not want to lose my wireless connection for the Mac.

I guess it’s about time to look into replacing the stupid PC. I don’t have the money but, so what? I don’t think there’s much, if anything, that I use that’s PC only anymore. I do use Outlook for my non-school email (that is, the email that comes from here and elsewhere), but I have no doubt that I can learn to use Mail, or Thunderbird or some other thing. Like Iris, I have a few things in Access, but not much. Well, actually I have a lot—data on about 700 CDs. But I haven’t been able to use the program that runs on top of Access for a couple years now, so I guess all that data is lost to me.

ZoneAlarm is PC only, but after what their online renewal thing did to me last time I swore I’d get rid of the PC before I had to renew again anyway. There’s one or two other things that aren’t that important as long as I can export the data in some form, and I believe I can.

I believe I’ll look into a Mac Mini or an iMac. The Mac Mini would be a lot less as I have the 19″ widescreen LCD monitor I bought several months back, and I have a wireless keyboard and mouse that could be used with it. If I was to go with a 17″ iMac the price goes up almost $300, although the processor speed bumps up a tad and the hard drive doubles in size. But I’d really want a 20″ one. And that would be another $300 more with another bump in processor speed and another doubling of hard drive size. In other words, almost $600 more than a Mac Mini. Can I justify either one of those choices? Would I be happy with a Mini?

nothing on my tongue and so much in the ground

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got a garden of songs
where i grow all my thoughts
wish i could harvest one or two
for some small talk
seems like i’m starving for words
whenever you’re around
nothing on my tongue
and so much in the ground
nothing on my tongue
and so much in the ground

Ani DiFranco. “this bouquet.” Not A Pretty Girl.

Looking back at the last dozen (or more) posts, I see that I have said very little about any LIS-related topic. At best, I’ve commented on some of the many articles I’ve read, but rarely in any depth.

Let me assure you that I have plenty on my mind! I have one blog post in draft, and many things in draft in various text files. Some of the topics I’m thinking about and working on are: the current state of “cataloging,” in many of its facets; several of Hope Olson’s writings; several topics within and around FRBR; CIDOC CRM; Terminology Services; and so on.

I want to do some research and considered writing on all of these topics.

The biggest problem, though, is that my semester is, in a sense, finally starting. My first set of products are finally coming due. To date I’ve only had to be prepared for and to show up to class. Now I need to produce; and school production gets in the way of other efforts. In fact, my first “graded” product was a presentation/leading of discussion in Representation and Organization this morning.

Last night when I was supposed to be sleeping, and perhaps I was and was dreaming, I spent most of the night thinking in, with, and about FRBR and CIDOC CRM, with a bit of Terminology Services mixed in for good effect. I just wish there was a good way to recall large portions of those self-”discussions” after-the-fact. I can only hope that some of all that mental processing finds its way into retrievable memory.

Thus, Ani’s metaphor is quite apropros.

got a garden of songs
where i grow all my thoughts
wish i could harvest one or two
for some small talk

I really hope that everything on my mind doesn’t end up tabled until after the semester. I’d really like to do some harvesting for both some “small talk” here on the blog, and for some more formal “talk,” that is, publication.

nothing on my tongue
and so much in the ground

Another upgrade…

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I just completed the upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2, so please let me know if you notice anything wonky.

In case you haven’t heard, if you upgraded to WordPress 2.1.1 in the last week or so—or at all for safety sake—you should immediately upgrade. It seems the downloadable file was hacked. See “WordPress 2.1.1 Dangerous, Upgrade” at the WordPress site.

My previous upgrade was earlier than their suspected hacking period, but I would’ve done it even sooner if I could’ve gotten the stupid backup to work before this evening.

Some things read this week, 25 Feb – 3 Mar 2007

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Saturday – Sunday, 24 – 25 Feb

Lakoff, George. Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chaps 6-8.

Sunday, 25 Feb

Vizine-Goetz, Diane. 2004. “Terminology services: Making knowledge organization schemes more accessible to people and computers.” OCLC Newsletter 266 (October/November/December). Available online from http://www.oclc.org/news/publications/newsletters/oclc/2004/266/ in either pdf (PDF:181K/1p.) or html formats.

Vizine-Goetz, Diane, Carol Hickey, Andrew Houghton, and Roger Thompson. 2004. “Vocabulary Mapping for Terminology Services.” Journal of Digital Information, 4,4 (March), article no. 272, 2004-03-11. Available online at: http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v04/i04/Vizine-Goetz/

Gardner, Tracy. 2001. “An Introduction to Web Services.” Ariadne Issue 29. October 2001. Cited by Vizine-Goetz, et al.

Zeng, Marcia L. and Lois Mai Chan. 2004. “Trends and issues in establishing interoperability among knowledge organization systems.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55 (5): 377-395. Cited by Vizine-Goetz, et al.

Olson, Hope A. The Power to name: Locating the limits of subject representation in libraries.

Began this; read through 1st half of Chap. 3 (long chapter). For fun.

This quickly became not-fun. I am writing about this is a separate post after quitting 100+ pages in.

Monday, 26Feb

Chaps. 9 – 10 of Lakoff.

Gilreath, Charles T. (1992) “Harmonization of terminology – An overview of principles.” International Classification 19 (3): 135-139. Cited by Zeng & Chan.

Tuesday, 27 Feb

Olson, Hope A. and Dennis B. Ward. (2003) “Mundane standards, everyday technologies, equitable access.” In McIlwaine, I. C., Subject retrieval in a networked environment: Proceedings of the IFLA Satellite Meeting held in Dublin, OH 14-16 August 2001 and sponsored by the IFLA Classification and Indexing Section, the IFLA Information Technology Section and OCLC. München: K. G. Saur. 50-58.

Wednesday, 28 Feb

Olson, Hope A. (2001) “Sameness and difference: A cultural foundation of classification.” Library Resources & Technical Services 45 (3):115-122.

Re-read. More on this in another post.

Le Boeuf, Patrick. (2001) “FRBR and further.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 32 (4): 15-52.

Good article discussing various international critiques and suggestions to improve and extend FRBR. Almost all of the many sources are available online. Thanks to Tom Dousa for suggesting this to me.

Thursday, 1 Mar

FRBR, Final Report. Chaps. 5 – 7, “Relationships,” “User Tasks,” and “Basic Requirements for National Bibliographic Records.” [pdf]

I read portions of this and skimmed others over lunch. It had me highly confused as it talks about obtaining a manifestation. See Lee, Renear and Smith below for more.

Thursday – Friday, 1 – 2 Mar

Chaps. 11 – 12 of Lakoff.

Friday, 2 Mar

Fallgren, Nancy J. (2007) “Users and uses of bibliographic data: Background paper for the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.” [Lorcan Dempsey.

Weinberger, David. “Taxonomy out of the box.” (IA Column) ASIST Bulletin Feb/Mar 2007. Probably not worth the (small) effort to read.

Friday – Saturday, 2 -3 Mar

Four Danish libraries. “The hybrid library: from the user’s perspective.” pdf – English February 2006, issued in English September 2006.

Very interesting from many perspectives! Unfortunately, it has a very small sample and is thus not generalizable. They intend to do a follow-up quantitative study, but if it is out I do not believe it is in English yet. Worth watching for. Lots of things in here that go counter to much of the “new” librarianship; maybe an artifact of Danish higher ed, or the small sample size, or the fact that much of the statements used to justify the new views comes primarily from surveys and librarians’ views of the matter.

Saturday, 3 Mar

Lee, Jin Ha, Alln Renear and Linda Smith. “Known-item search: Variations on a concept.” In Grove, Andrew, Eds. Proceedings 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) 43, Austin (US). Retrieved from E-LIS 3 March 2007.

Saturday evening while at the LEEP Dinner I was complaining to Allen Renear that FRBR seemed to blow it in the last few chapters as they talk about obtaining a manifestation and skip items completely. His ever generous self suggested it was perhaps inadequate editing and not a mistake, and suggested I read this article because he didn’t think they made that conceptually confused claim. [My words, not Allen's!]

Or, at least, I think this is the article he referred to. ‘Twould be funny indeed, based on the content of this article, if it wasn’t the “known-item” I was, in fact, looking for. So as soon as got home I found this article online, printed it out and read it.

Well, they are much clearer about it. Items, or an item, is the thing being obtained.

I have gone back and looked at the FRBR chapters and perhaps it is mostly editing, although I still think they have some muddled concepts. In Chap. 6 on “User Tasks,” [Section 6.2.4 Obtain an Entity] they talk about obtaining manifestations and items, and note that obtain is not applicable to works and expressions.

In Chap. 7 on “Basic Requirements for National Bibliographic Records,” at the end of Section 7.1 they do mention, “It should be noted that inasmuch as the recommendations in this chapter relate to records created for listing in a national bibliography and such records normally do not reflect data pertaining to the item, the user tasks related to the item are not addressed” (98).

OK, maybe went past that note a bit too fast the first time; explains why there is no chart about obtaining an item. I still have issues with obtaining a manifestation. I think it has to do with the muddled FRBR explanation of manifestations and items as physical. Manifestations are not physical in the same sense as items. The items in a manifestation [elements in a set] are physical; leaving aside the issue of fully electronic items at the moment. But the manifestation qua manifestation is a fully abstract conceptual entity. There simply is nothing physical about a manifestation. There is a level of abstraction that the FRBR report glosses over in several places. I could, as always, be wrong, but I think this is one of the most confusing points for people who want and/or need to understand FRBR.

Lee, Renear and Smith state the case far more clearly, although I am changing their “searching for” to “obtaining”:

  • (a) …obtaining a particular copy (e.g., one desired for its scribal marginalia, provenance, or the passport used as a bookmark and forgotten).
  • (b) …obtaining a copy which exemplifies a particular manifestation (e.g., the 1851 NY Scribner’s edition).
  • (c) …obtaining a copy which exemplifies any manifestation that embodies a particular expression (e.g., say the emended text of the 1851 edition).
  • (d) obtaining a copy which exemplifies any manifestation that embodies any expression of a particular work (e.g., Moby Dick) (10-11).

Maybe this reads less well narratively, but it far more ontologically clear. And if we are going to try and impose entity-relationship diagrams on the everyday librarian (or anyone else) then ontological clarity is of the utmost importance.

So, in the end, I think the FRBR committee probably full well understand what they are trying to say, they just aren’t saying it very well. They are probably trying to keep the document as narratively simple as possible so more people will read it and perhaps internalize it, but this only leads to confusion. Clarity should not be sacrificed for simplicity.

Except in some odd cases, most of which I am not ready to spend time elucidating yet, there simply is no obtaining of a manifestation, at least not in libraries.