Monthly Archives: February 2008

Some things read this week, 17 – 23 February 2008

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Sunday, 17 Feb 2008

 

Decker, S. et al. 2000. The Semantic Web: the roles of XML and RDF. Internet Computing, IEEE 4, no. 5:63-73.

 

For Ontology Development.

 

Monday – Friday, 18 – 22 Feb 2008

 

 

Harris, Roy, and Indian Institute of Advanced Study. 2003. History, Science, and the Limits of Language : an Integrationist Approach. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study.

 

  • Ch 1 : The Language of History and the Language of Science (Mon)
  • Ch 2 : The Origins of Mathematics (Wed)
  • Ch 3 : Communication by Numbers (Thu)
  • Ch 4 : Language Unlimited? (Thu)

 

Friday, 22 Feb 2008

 

 

Harris, Roy. 1998. Introduction to Integrational Linguistics. 1st ed. Kidlington, Oxford, UK: Pergamon.

 

 

Re-reading this for its overview of Integrationism.

  • Ch 1 : Language and Communication

 

Saturday, 23 Feb 2008

 

 

Richards, Jennifer. 2008. Rhetoric. London: Routledge.

 

I cataloged this little book a few weeks ago. It looked interesting enough to possibly provide a decent overview of rhetoric. And it was.

 

This is not a rhetoric handbook, but more of a history of rhetoric, its ups and downs, and its re-shapings. I found it quite interesting and somewhat useful as far as putting together (for myself) a bigger, coherent picture of Western intellectual thought over the past 2.5 millennia. Also validated much of Harris’ critique of Western education on language—grammar, rhetoric, metaphor, etc.

Almost the day : Birthday Month update

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Today has been a fairly laid-back day. Considering.

I got up at 10-ish and have been on slow ever since. Pauline & Kathryn’s class was having a reading day and I decided to forego more Protégé work this evening in Allen’s class. We will be doing more next week.

So I have been giving myself a break.

Last night was my party at Crane Alley. I thought it turned out nice [some pictures someone else's]. Thanks to all who came! I hope you find something to enjoy in your presents but I know music is a very personal thing. More in a bit about the party.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) is actually my birthday but it is set to be a little more down-to-earth than last night. I have an hour massage scheduled in the afternoon and there’s a full lunar eclipse early enough in the evening and it is supposed to be clear out. Bitterly cold. But clear.

I know to be a realist about the weather here in mid-February but I have some hope. That is, 28-hour or so forecasts are starting to be admissible evidence in my world.

I’ll probably take myself out to dinner somewhere—no idea—and if anyone wants to join me let me know. You are definitely off-the-hook for buying my dinner but I’d love a little company. Probably 6 or 6:30ish.

I went and saw my friend, Eva Hunter, perform solo Friday night in Danville. Gina was there, too, so that was nice. Eva was willing to sing me a song for my birthday but unfortunately the song I want hasn’t been in her repertoire for a while now. Since before I started seeing her perform 5-6 years ago. :(

A large amount of my “free time” after work and sleep from the evening of the 13th until sometime yesterday afternoon was spent compiling these, writing notes, burning and packaging them. Everyone who came to my party got a set. [One person left their's so if it was an accident just let me know and I'll happily replace them. But if you'd rather not that's fine, too.]

I haven’t made a compilation CD since coming to Urbana-Champaign in August 2004. Actually. The last one ended in August 2003. Oh my. A time of pure hell, but a year before I left and moved here still.

This was a hasty project that took up much of my time for 5 days, and it is certainly no attempt to be comprehensive. That would be a fool’s errand. I do like it, though, as I have listened to them over and over for much of that 5 days—certainly since the playlists were finalized. Of course, getting them finalized takes a lot of listening to transitions and such.

Starting tomorrow, I need to get back on track. Sure. It’ll be my birthday.

So I won’t try and make up 5 days of work in one—another fool’s errand—but I will begin with something I enjoy like beginning a new-to-me Harris book that looks very important to my paper.

Back to the party …

Thanks so much to whomever paid for my dinner and drinks. And an especially big thanks to those who took good care of Lisa. She would not let me give her a tip. She said my friends took care of me and very good care of her. Thank you!

She then told me I could come in for dinner next Monday and give her the tip. I told her I would do my best but laughed and said it would be smaller next week.

I got a ride over from a vixen and a ride home from a wonderful couple I wish I saw far more of. Of course, I wish I saw much more of everyone who was there. Tentative, vaguish commitments were made with a few folks. I certainly hope I see Ben around at some point. He’s at GSLIS but I just met him last night.

Rachel knit me a sweet hat during the party, or at least finished it there. Tom gave me a productive-looking book: Hickman, Larry A. 2007. Pragmatism as post-postmodernism : lessons from John Dewey. New York: Fordham University Press.

I had the butternut squash ravioli, which was OK but it was much better the 1st time. I had 4 pints of Guinness (and have felt surprisingly good today) and 3 sips and a lot of sniffs of a fine scotch compliments of El Diablo. A few other sips were had by others so it did not go entirely to waste; not that it did anyway. But more was “consumed” in the typical sense with the help of others.
Oh, by the way, the shirt I was wearing was having a birthday of a sort itself, it is 29-years old.

In between most of the above and here, I took myself out to the diner for dinner and began on that Harris book: Harris, Roy. 1996. Signs, Language, and Communication : Integrational and Segregational Approaches. London; New York: Routledge.

I’m going to close this now as I want to go back to slowly passing the evening. Tomorrow involves work and meetings and so on beginning at the normal time. But that is tomorrow still.

Some things read this week, 10 – 16 February 2008

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Sunday, 10 Feb 2008

Maxwell, Robert L. 2008. FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago: American Library Association.

 

Most of the holdup on this post was in trying to get good comments on this down. I cannot finish them right now, though, so I have cut what I did write and moved it to a separate draft review. But for now:

So far I can say that I would recommend this book, but with a few caveats. The most important is stressed by the author in the introduction and that is that is it based on several documents that are not in their final form, particularly FRAD.

This is an important book. It needs to be read by most librarian-types. But it will be more than difficult for many, including the willing, I fear.

I hope to be able to write more on this important book and even try publishing it.

Monday, 11 Feb 2008

 

Harris, Roy. 2005. The Semantics of Science. London: Continuum.

Finished this for the 2nd time.

Monday – Thursday, 11 – 14 Feb 2008

 

Kari, Jarkko, and Jenna Hartel. 2007. Information and higher things in life: Addressing the pleasurable and the profound in information science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58, no. 8:1131-1147. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.20585 (Accessed February 8, 2008).

 

 

Kirsten, Into the Stacks, pointed me to this and I’m glad she did. Thanks, Kirsten.

This was a bus and lunch article for a couple of days, which is no reflection on it s quality or whether I liked it; only of my limited contexts for reading over those days. There were several things of reasonable length that all took me a couple days to get through around this time.

Kirsten expresses some concern for the distinction between higher and lower things. I do share that concern but I think the authors covered it as well as possible. They basically say that this dichotomy is simply a useful model to address an important—but currently lacking—perspective of information use in people’s lives. And I fully agree with the critique and proposals. My main caveat is that others respect that useful but false dichotomy as the (currently) useful explanatory concept that it is. A second concern, in individual studies, would be how higher and lower get operationalized since they really aren’t that kind of concept.

For me, this article presents an important critique, especially of the “information as problem-solving” paradigm [which I too find as utterly naive], and provides much fodder for the use of domain analysis. Its critique and methods can certainly be spun Integrationally and it will, thus, almost certainly make it into my paper as an Integrationist-type critique of the concepts of information, information need, information use, et. al.

I thought Kirsten did an excellent job relating the concepts into a lived example for her and communities of yoga practice. I’m not so good at those things myself—especially on short notice— and I’m already way behind on this post. If one were to take these ideas seriously then the possibilities for info use research has just mushroomed for you. And that could and should feed back into interface design, classificatory structures, vocabularies and indexing practices, ….

Kirsten was right that they cite Hjørland quite a bit, but it is interesting how all 7 cites to 5 articles are on one page in the section on A Research Front. They point out several ways Hjørland’s ideas are useful in this area, which just supports my contentions above.

Saturday, 16 Feb 2008

 

LeBlanc, Jim, and Martin Kurth. 2008. An Operational Model for Library Metadata Maintenance. Library Resources & Technical Services 52, no. 1:54-59.

Very interesting article that presents a model to operationalize thinking about library metadata maintenance. While it is quite probable that there are other ways to model this domain, this model looks to be quite useful for helping to think through what should be considered and at what, if any, level of commitment.

Highly recommended for anyone involved in the maintenance of library metadata.

Comcast is off to a VERY bad start

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Update 13 Feb 08 late afternoon: I have my email address, etc. back. It seems that my crime was that I was receiving too much spam. Yes; receiving and not sending.

I guess shutting down the accounts of people who get maybe 40 spam/day [that gets past any ISP filtering; and always goes into the Outlook spam folder] would be one quick way to shut off a large majority of the spam problem. Seems a bit ass backward to me though.

I ensured to ask whether it was the reception of or the sending of spam and was assured that it was the reception of. I was also warned to find a better way of dealing with or that this account will be cut off again. ‘Pleasantly’ warned, but warned nonetheless. I didn’t bother to ask whether I would get a warning or letter of concern as I fear the standard has already been set.

So I get about 40 spam/day on average that gets through anything external to my email program. And Outlook sucks everyone into the Spam folder. Now, every one of them is from my blog contact form. All in all, I think the situation is handled quite well; until I stop using Outlook anyway. Their web-based email program doesn’t recognize them as spam!

Anyway, perhaps I specifically need another WordPress plugin to help cut down on Contact form spam. I do not want a captcha. I despise those things!! Of course, spammers are what are and darn well should be despised.

Useful suggestions for reducing the only spam I know of via my contact form is appreciated. Of course, if it is spam that they are stopping and I never see or are otherwise aware of, then how am I supposed to correct the problem anyway?

As some of you may know, Comcast bought out Insight and is taking over Insight accounts.

Well, in our area it happened very recently; like perhaps this morning. I was sitting in front of my computers this AM when all of a sudden Outlook tosses up a login box (which I never see). I tried a couple things and never got back in. Closed Outlook and tried logging in to the web-based version to no avail.

Finally about 9:15 PM (a few minutes ago) I was able to call. Called my local Insight folks and got a Comcast service person. As she was trying to have a look at my account she kept speaking of an account id when I told her it was my email id, especially when it did not match my email id. She claimed they were the same thing.

It turns out that they changed my account id which also changed my email id, which also means they changed my fucking email address! Seriously! They just changed my 4-year old email address without nary a please, thank you or any other means of notifying me.

I’m not sure what I’m doing next as I am currently just sitting here pretty much stunned. I do a lot of work with my school email address but I also do quite a lot from my personal address. For instance, that’s where my blog contact form sends to and where I get comment notifications (if that was working currently). I’m also on several non-library-related listservs and it’s where I get my weekly Unshelved.

To say the least, Mark is not a very happy camper. At all.

Comcast changed my account id so I was unable to login to my email. Without telling me. And even more importantly, this change to my account id changed my email address. They changed my email address without any warning or notice.

It’s on! Birthday Bash 2008

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I don’t normally do such things for myself (or so much for others either) but I decided to have myself a little birthday party at one of my favorite local establishments. I do not plan on celebrating next year.

I was initially going for something small but I have so many amazing friends whom I do not see enough of so it was tough to weed it down to a small group. And honestly, I was hoping the (truthful) pretense of my birthday might even make some of the especially rarely seen—yet local—ones come out of the woodwork for an evening … so, I invited most everyone I know locally and is my friend in Facebook. [In fact, some of the stuff to follow better belongs there.] What the hell, right?

I went to Crane Alley tonight for dinner and $2 Guinness tonight as I am wont to do of a Monday, and to look into the issue. I had a waitress a month ago (I believe) named Lisa (I believed [names are on the credit receipts.]) who had the most amazing smile; I wanted to tell her but didn’t. I had 2 otherwise unremarkable waitresses and a week I didn’t go in between but tonight I had the waitress with a most amazing smile (and good waitress I should mention).

After dinner when she brought my 2nd pint I asked her if her name was Lisa; she was quite impressed. I told her I remembered her name because I adore her smile. [I also told her she's a good waitress.] That really brightened her day she said. :) [One has to be careful about these things. Sadly.]

I told her that approximately 20 of my favorite people and I are coming to celebrate my birthday next week from 6:30 to 9:30. She asked if I wanted to reserve the upstairs and I said definitely. I asked her if she’d be working and when she said yes I asked her if she’d be my personal waitress. I am telling you … she has an amazing smile.

So we are upstairs, 6:30-9:30+. She knows I’m only drinking Guinness and ice water. Anyone is welcome to buy my Guinness [goal of 3, 4 more likely [only if have a ride]] but I’m not drinking anything else. If anyone drinks any classy whiskey I might well like a few sniffs. I really, really need not to drink that stuff, though.

I don’t need to, as for me, it’s really even better just to smell it because it is instantaneous. And it is something to be experienced. It’s like an immediate, full brain fireworks explosion that only stimulates the pleasure receptors. Doesn’t last long as the brain quickly figures out that the actual (longer-term) effects that should be coming from an elevated blood alcohol level just aren‘t. And no hangover in the morning or acting stupid. Oh. And it’s cheaper. I do have a sip now and then but rarely. But simply smelling good whiskey is enough to cause a massive amount of pleasure receptors in my brain to fire such that it gets fooled every time, for at least a few seconds. Although I must say, the response it returns when it realizes it has been fooled is never polite. ;)

Dinner

Will it be Greek chicken pasta (salt) or Butternut squash ravioli (sweet & heavy cream) or something else?

Need a ride

I could really use a ride there and back, too. Doesn’t have to be the same folks, of course. So, I’d need a ride over about 6:30. I’m pretty anal about being on time. I’d like to say that I’m punctual, but in all honesty I am anal about being on time. I don’t expect any body to commit to 3+ hours either, though.

Tracy & Stuart, am I correct in assuming you’re more likely to be in the early crowd? If you can get me around 6:25, would you?

All are welcome

Everyone who can make it is welcome. Facebook just makes such events easy. The last few days I have been in the process of identifying and notifying those either not in Facebook or who I am not (yet) their friend [Karen] and see generally anyway. I have friended one or two.

But everyone is welcome. Let your presence be your (or my) present.

This post doesn’t so much belong here, although I do reach a few local people who I’m not friends with in FB. But, more importantly, I was so happy about how this evening went and I haven’t said much about Birthday Month since it started. It got off to a great start and I failed to blog some of that—sigh—but it unfortunately took a quick dip. Things are pretty much cool now but I wasn’t very positive there for a bit. Thus, I wanted to record some positive Birthday Month goodness.

Ooh! Ooh!

Last year my birthday was Mardi Gras. Kind of cool, but not being Catholic not such a big deal. [Quite aware of it, though, due to 10 years in Europe over 3 occasions.]

This year there is a total lunar eclipse. OMFG! Now that is something that touches me.

I am trying not to get too excited because I full well know not to count on clear skies the evening of 20 February in central Illinois. If I didn’t have this smidgen of self-control I’d be downright giddy.

Lazy web requests: Online job applications; and WordPress comments and LISHost

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I have two lazy web requests.

Online job applications

I am in the process of filling out my first fully online job application and it is not pleasant for so many reasons. Complaining is not my point here, though.

The main issues are that in several places there is not enough room to add the information I need to. For instance, in the section for references there is nowhere near enough characters in the lines for the reference’s organization and title. And let’s be honest, academics and their institutions have lengthy titles.

For instance, I run out of room at Graduate School of Library. So, should I just type as far as I can and stop? Or should I try and do some abbreviating? For instance: GSLIS, UIUC; or, Graduate School of LIS; or, ….

After filling in a million form fields, I will be able to upload either pdf or Word copies of my résumé and letter of application. Thus, there may be some mitigation of the above issue but I have no idea how those copies will or will not be employed or if they will even be viewed since I have to put much of that info into those million form fields in the first place.

Any suggestions?

Also, what is the best salutation for a woman? I do know her rank from the library’s web site. Somehow “Dear Associate Professor X” sounds a bit stilted to me, though. I could address my letter to the Search Committee Chair, I guess, but I do have a specific name.

Any suggestions for this?

WordPress comments and LISHost

This one is for anyone using WordPress that has email notification of comments turned on and is on LISHost.

After the wonkiness this past weekend I am no longer getting email notifications for comments or comments in moderation. I have checked my WP install and those options are still checked and I even forced a refresh of them to no avail.

I have spoken with Blake and he thinks that perhaps what he had to do might have had an effect but he also undid those changes last night. He wants me to get back to him if the situation does not go back to normal and I certainly will. But I was wondering if anyone else is having this issue all of a sudden. If so, perhaps it might help Blake pinpoint the issue(s) causing it.

If you have lost your email notifications from WordPress all of a sudden feel free to comment here but, more importantly, please let Blake know.

Thankfully this is not a crippling issue but it does cause a definite inconvenience. Getting those email notifications is a much faster way to know whether someone has commented than checking the blog or blog admin panel.

And, yes. I have received several comments this weekend, to include a couple after I spoke to him last night. Nor is my email spam filter grabbing them all of a sudden.

Some things read this week, 3 – 9 February 2008

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Monday, 4 Feb 2008

Portrait: Charles Taylor by Ben Rogers. Prospect.

At the heart of Taylor’s thought is a critique of “naturalist” modes of thinking, whether manifest in philosophy, social science, economics or psychology. For Taylor, naturalism is the view that all human and social phenomena, including our subjectivity, are best understood on the model of natural phenomena, by using scientific canons of explanation. So wherever possible, apparently complicated social entities should be reduced to their simple component parts; social and cultural institutions and practices explained in terms of the beliefs and actions of individuals; value judgements reduced to brute animal preferences; the physical world to sense data; sense data to neurological activity and so on. Taylor believes that in the last 400 years, naturalism has fundamentally reshaped our individual and collective self-understanding. Seeing the limits of this mode of thought promises to give us a critical purchase on ourselves and our culture.

Taylor’s critique starts from the belief that you can’t understand human actions unless you make an imaginative leap into the worlds of the agents—a leap which has no counterpart in natural science. You can’t understand ethical or aesthetic values on the model of animal preferences because all human cultures give central place to some version of the distinction between “lower” appetites and higher goals by which appetites should be judged and regulated. Taylor argues, in short, that narrowly scientific, reductive approaches to the human world always prove “terribly implausible.”

I really need to look into Taylor’s views on naturalism because as much as I am a child of Big Science I, too, believe that naturalism ala Taylor is not an unmitigated good and, in fact, is quite dangerous. Science cannot, nor should it try, to explain everything.

 

Harris, Roy. 2005. The Semantics of Science. London: Continuum.

 

Re-read ch. 7: Science and common sense.

 

Brachman, R.J. 1983. What IS-A Is and Isn’t: An Analysis of Taxonomic Links in Semantic Networks. Computer 16, no. 10:30-36.

 

For Ontology Development. This article gave me the giggles in so many places; especially in the context of my current work. With this many facets of what it is to be an IS-A relationship, much less the combination of those facets, it simply boggles the mind to think we’ll ever be able to globally represent these relationships in our statements about the/our world(s).

There are several axes along which IS-A links can vary:

 

  1. type of conceptual entity that a node can represent (description, set, predicate)
  2. basic syntactic function of the link (sentence-forming vs. description-forming)
  3. for sentence-forming ones:
    • quantifier (e.g., universal vs. default)
    • modality (necessity vs. contingency)
  4. does the link make an assertion (33).

Highly recommended. Not as difficult as one might think.

Tuesday – Wednesday, 5 – 6 Feb 2008

 

 

MacDorman, Karl F. 2007. Life After the Symbol System Metaphor. Interaction Studies 8, no. 1:143-158.

 

Found at Wikipedia via UIUC Language Evolution Group wiki back in late Sep 2007.

 

Wednesday, 6 Feb 2008

 

 

Bates, Marcia J. Hjørland’s critique of Bates’ work on defining information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

 

Sent my way by Christina.

Thursday – Friday, 7 – 8 Feb 2008

 

 

Harris. The Semantics of Science. [see above]

Re-read ch. 8: Supercategory semantics.

Saturday, 9 Feb 2008

 

 

Wright, Lawrence. The Spymaster. The New Yorker. Jan. 21, 2008: 42-59.

 

Given to me by Pauline Cochrane as a possible job opportunity.

Zotero

I am really loving the newest update to Zotero. I can now drag-n-drop citations directly from Zotero into WordPress. Talk about a serious reduction in work flow! Previously I was exporting a citation as HTML, opening the web page, viewing the source, copying the piece of HTML I needed, and then pasting it into the Code view of WordPress. Now I just drag-n-drop a citation right out of Zotero into the WYSIWYG editor of WordPress and it is automatically formatted and includes the COinS metadata. Woohoo!!

The only issue at the moment is some slightly wonky formatting in WordPress. I’m not sure if it is WordPress or Zotero causing it though. I need to play with other citation formats and see if they cause the same issues. It could be WordPress though as they seem to have changed some of their HTML formatting in the version I upgraded to last week.

Nonetheless, this is a massive improvement in functionality and will probably encourage me to actually input more stuff into Zotero in the first place.

Omega and Alpha

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The end approaches and Tuesday I spent preparing for it.

A few weeks ago I sent in a petition to the Grad College to move my “additional” 2 hours from my MS (42 vs. 40-required) to my CAS. That was approved last Friday (Feb 1st).

Seeing as I had 72 completed hours that put me at 32 for the CAS and as I’m doing (fingers and toes crossed!) my 8-hour paper this semester I applied for (another) May graduation (also 40-required hours).

I did finish my Bibliography class last month but it remains ungraded so I will have an additional 4-hours at the end after all.

I also have what I continue to think of as an Incomplete (4-hrs.) but it is actually an F now. That could be changed if I could turn something in but that is looking unlikely. It is the independent study I was working on last spring on Terminology Services.

I’m still immensely interested in many aspects of the topic but even though my advisor and I went into the semester thinking I could probably do something she could grade we agreed Tuesday that I best just focus on my CAS paper. So I also filed a petition to have the grade changed to a W for Withdrawn. It’ll remain on the transcript—Independent Study will be so illuminating—but have no effect on my GPA. Current impact? OMG!!

[Of course, it's all relative. As UIUC grads know, here an A- will reduce your GPA. I got one and it was deservedly so (last MS semester). So I had a 3.96 last graduation and now I have 3.76. Ouch!]

Don’t confront me with my failures.
I had not forgotten them.

Jackson Browne. These Days. For Everyman. [WorldCat]

I do actually have a terminologies idea but it is way too deep for a semester paper, especially if I’m actually trying to graduate ….

… and find a job. [I once ended up in the Army for quite awhile trying to avoid finding a job.]

As to the topic, I’m not even ready to talk about it here. I’ve put a couple of feelers out and I’m noticing bits here and there and trying my best to record them for now. My 1st coherent comments on the matter came in an IM conversation with my good buddy, Iris, who was so kind to “listen” as I tried to “say” something coherent. Thanks, Iris. All in all, all I have at the moment is one half of a hypothesis that seems pretty uncontroversial (but how it is fleshed out might well matter to some) and another half that is the vaguest hand waving in the direction of something that is hard to state even in skeletal form. To me it sounds like it couldn’t be the slightest bit controversial in skeletal form (but I know better). As to how it’d play if actually coherently fleshed out I cannot begin to say. But I sure as hell would like to.

I am pretty certain that what I am claiming is so. The question is whether or not the differences make a difference. Finding those differences will involve falling down a couple of rabbit holes once the descent of the current one begins to slow down.

Seems I now have a “research agenda” as a future academic librarian. I just need to find the job interview way of saying it. :( Luckily I am pretty much there now with the current one, which I foresee going on for a long time, at least the Integrationism bit.

Which brings us back to the Alpha. It seems that I am officially on the job market and looking for a job. There is no way that I can rely on staying here no matter how many people might tell me they want me to stay. All I can say is “Show me the job(s)” then. Cause I’d be happy to stay for the right job.

One of the problems with UIUC is the fact that we have an LIS school and a large academic library (40 some odd truthfully). Lots of folks stick around here for assorted reasons—townies all along, spouse still in grad school, …. Despite the size of our library there are not that many full-time openings available, nor do they tend to hire our own grads.

But one of the benefits of being large is we get lots of grants and there are all sorts of grant-funded Visiting Professorships in the library. There might also be hourly work available, but that means no benefits, which might be OK if you have an employed spouse. I really have little doubt that I could stay, at least for a while.

I have told my bosses (and others) that as much as I’d like to stay I certainly do not have to. I also have no need to take any job just to stay. Nor will I.

Personally, I think I could do the institution a lot of good if they kept me around. Not just for UIUC or the Library but for GSLIS, too. Just an opinion, mind you.

I can go anywhere, technically. I have no restraints. I’m pretty certain I don’t want to be in a major city, though. Nor do I want to be at a school with 400 students in the middle of nowhere.

Most of the above was written a couple days ago but I am having a hard time finishing this as I need to be careful. I don’t want to seemingly rule something out so that someone on a search committee can say, “That describes us so he doesn’t even want to be here!”

I am a long way from applying for any jobs that I don’t want (as best as I can tell from all sources short of visiting). In fact, I doubt I’ll get to that point. That behavior has never made sense to me.

Of course, telling what kind of job it really is based on a job ad/description is a crap shoot of the highest order.

So. I want an academic position; tenure is not important. I could take it or leave it. I will pursue continuing opportunities to learn about interesting things and to share that with others via formal and informal publishing whether or not I am required to do so.

I want to do cataloging/metadata work, preferably descriptive and classificatory work of resources more towards the individual end than in the aggregate. Vocabulary work and other forms of classificatory structures are also on the table.

Serials do not scare me. In fact, that is where most of my current experience lies, although I also do monographs now. I do not think I am ready to be an electronic resources librarian but I do hope to learn more of what I need to feel qualified, along with many other things that I am interested in but have little or no experience with yet.

Working with people who are interesting, hopefully fun, and who are actively engaged in helping each other learn their craft so as to provide better service to their patrons and to move the profession forward are all important. I am not out to save the world (20 years in the Army demonstrated the futility of that endeavor) but I do want to make it a better one.

Anyone knowing of anything they think I might be interested in is welcome to point me towards them. :)

30 mostly spurious benefits of ebooks

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Thanks to lifehacker I discovered that Read an Ebook Week is in early March. The Epublishers Weekly blog has a post which covers “30 Benefits of Ebooks,” which while containing some bits of truth, if you will, is mostly IMHO made of up bad logic and spurious reasoning.

I will not waste my time deconstructing all 30 reasons but will comment on a few of them.

1. Ebooks promote reading. People are spending more time in front of screens and less time in front of printed books.

Uh, how does this follow? We (even I) may be spending more time in front of our screens but we might just be looking at photos on Flickr, watching YouTube videos, surfing for porn or any of 1000s of possible activities which have absolutely nothing to do with reading an ebook. And while much of our online activity does involve reading it may not include reading books.

2. Ebooks are good for the environment. Ebooks save trees. Ebooks eliminate the need for filling up landfills with old books. Ebooks save transportation costs and the pollution associated with shipping books across the country and the world.

And the manufacture of all these electronic devices and the electricity to power them, including all of the many highly toxic components and manufacturing processes do no damage to the environment at all?

3. Ebooks preserve books. … Ebooks are ageless: they do not burn, mildew, crumble, rot, or fall apart. Ebooks ensure that literature will endure.

Ha ha ha ha ha. This is one of the funniest, utterly stupid comments I have ever heard. Digital preservation issues anymore? Format migration?

7. Ebooks are portable. You can carry an entire library on one DVD.

So those books I carry with me pretty much everywhere are not portable? Certainly ebooks are more portable in quantity is the point but make it more clearly then!

14. Ebooks are free. The magnificent work of Project Gutenberg, and other online public libraries, allow readers to read the classics at no cost.

“Right!” said with a proper Bill Cosby accent cause my public library charges me $5 just to walk in the door. Not!

21. Ebooks, with their capacity for storage, encourage the publishing of books with many pages, books that might be too expensive to produce (and purchase) in paperback.

Perhaps true, but it goes against any and all conventional wisdom that I’ve heard or read about the length of electronic materials read by people. I guess one could make a 2500-page PDF but who the hell is going to read it?

27. Ebooks defeat attempts at censorship. All these works were banned: Analects by Confucius. Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Ars Amorata by Ovid. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio by John Milton. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne. Wonder Stories by H.C. Andersen. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Ulysses by James Joyce. … Many of these books were confiscated, burned, or denied availability in libraries, bookstores and schools. Ebooks guarantee that readers maintain their right to read.

All I can say to this one is “Seriously WTF are you on about?” I bet I can find everyone of those at both my public and academic library. And censorship certainly exists on the Internet.

Now clearly there is some value in this list. Some of the author’s points seem perfectly valid, although there are more I could pick on. But the ones I did highlight seem egregiously spurious to me.

I would like to see the proliferation of more widely available ebooks that are cross-platform, free of DRM, and in formats that are easily migratable to new formats when required. I would also like to see some of the possibilities that the author says may come to pass do so.

Nonetheless, this silly list will do nothing to change my reading habits. I read both online and in print and I print a lot of stuff that came to me electronically. Both have various affordances even now, but many of the affordances that the author claims for ebooks are nonexistent for most ebook formats at the moment.

I despise most marketing and spurious marketing really gets my goat!

So read ebooks if they work for you. If they don’t then don’t worry so much about some of these reasons.

Some things read this week, 27 January – 2 February 2008

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Sunday, 27 Jan 2008

Nonmonotonic Logic. Leora Morgenstern. MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science.

Suggested by fellow classmate Tom Dousha for additional elucidation for Ontologies Development. Highly understandable resource for non-experts in logic, although having a basic grasp probably helps.

Sunday – Wednesday, 27 – 30 Jan 2008

Harris, Roy, and International Association for the Integrational Study of Language and Communication. 2006. Integrationist Notes and Papers : 2003-2005. Crediton, Devon, England: Tree Tongue http://www.librarything.com/work/details/26156294 (Accessed January 26, 2008). Discover UIUC Full Text
[more info here] [WorldCat]

  • 6 : Synchrony and Diachrony
  • 7 : Integrationism and Philosophy of Language
  • 8 : On Determinancy of Linguistic Form
  • 9 : Integrationism and Arbitrariness (Tue)
  • 10 : Integrationism and Etymology (Tue)
  • 11 : Signs and Stories (Tue)
  • 12 : Meaning and Experience (Tue)
  • 13 : On Holistic Models of Language (Wed)
  • 14 : Integrationism and the Foundations of Mathematics (Wed)
  • 15 : Integrationism and Godspeak (Wed)

I believe this is the 1st book I have finished this year.

Thursday, 31 Jan 2008

Markey, Karen. Users & Uses of Bibliographic Data. [paper presented in lieu of her attendance at the 1st LC Working Group Meeting, March 8, 2007]

This is a very interesting statement that ought to be taken seriously. Once we see the data in the forthcoming article: Markey, Karen. In press. 25 years of research on end-user searching. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology.

One should check … actually it was published in two parts in JASIST 58(8), June 2007: 1071-1081 and 1123-1130.

Markey, Karen. (2007) Twenty-five years of searching, Part 1: Research findings.

Markey, Karen. (2007) Twenty-five years of searching, Part 2: Future research directions.

Downloaded the pdfs and imported the data into Zotero. Will need to read them soon.

Looks like Wiley-Interscience is making some improvements on the ASIST Digital Library. Whoever is responsible, thank you.

Friday – Saturday, 1 – 2 Feb 2008

Harris, Roy. 2005. The Semantics of Science. London: Continuum. Discover UIUC Full Text

Re-read Chap. 6 : Mathematics and the language of science

Another rather light week as I was trying to finish my Harris and Hjørland bibliography and essay by Thursday. I did make this deadline thankfully. In the end, neither are what I was particularly envisioning. They really area far cry from what I thought I was aiming for; which leaves me quite ambivalent about it.

I most certainly did not give “just a school assignment” to Dr. Krummel as one simply does not do such things. But in some ways it does seem as if I am far closer to that end of the spectrum than what I wanted to be.

Thus, I don’t know if or when I will post any of it. I have a hard time imagining anyone would actually be very interested in any of it. This is not to say that I think no one should be interested in the topic, whether or not they care what I might have to say about it, but that I just don’t think that many are. If you truly do care I will happily email you the 2 small Word docs. By the way, at 1097 words the essay is far shorter than many of my blog posts. The bibliography has 34 entries in the final count, I believe; there could have been so many more. It is a tad over 13 pages and is 4115 words. Both are definitely much shorter than my natural bent.

But. It is done. So it is time to move forward now.

Today [Sunday, 3 Feb] is the 3rd day of Birthday Month. This year’s Birthday Month—which I intend to attempt to celebrate to the max—is off to a good start. It was welcomed in with a decent snow storm on the 31st-1st; I am a Midwestern, mid-Winter baby so one must have a decent winter storm once during Birthday Month.

There has been a couple decent movies this weekend after finishing the bibliography stuff. I watched Balls of Fury which is pretty good as a ping pong cum-kung fu movie. I also watched Once but I am really ambivalent about the movie. I am better disposed to it after watching all of the extras, but extras should not determine what we think of a movie and perhaps only deepen our understanding and/or appreciation of it.

One that I will highly recommend, though, is the French movie, Blame it on Fidel! This was an very good movie and the kids who star in this movie are simply incredible. Watch the extras and this feeling can only deepen. There is a pretty good description at IMDB but I think it also contains a spoiler about the end of the movie. Perhaps it is not a major spoiler but I certainly am glad I hadn’t read it before watching the movie. Highly recommended.