My friend Jess talked me into participating in JaPoWriMo, or January Poetry Writing Month. At least that is how I am parsing it out.

The idea is simply to write one poem a day. She insisted they could be a short as haiku and that there was no requirement for them to be any good. I am sharing them with her and my wife, of course and, so far, one or two with the odd other here and there.

Much of my month is taken up with my Grimm’s Fairy Tale class and editing and other magazine production duties putting together this year’s issue of the Briar Cliff Review. Thus, a couple have been about Grimm’s; I foresee one or more about editing; I have written a couple about books, those I’ve read and those I won’t be reading (end-of-2011 book post); one about meetings (after a long meeting on Friday); one about our SirsiDynix Symphony ILS (subject of said and several other meetings); one about not having a subject; and so on.

There is no need to worry—not much anyway— as I will not be sharing all of them with you here. Many of them are bad, and I doubt that any of them are actually good. But I agreed to commit to this writing a poem a day in an otherwise already quite busy month as I hoped that more writing, even if mostly tossed off, would help me in assorted ways as a poet and a writer. The bottom-line is that I am a lazy poet. Perhaps this will cultivate a habit, perhaps this will leave me with a few choice phrases or lines or ideas, perhaps nothing will come of it.

With all of that said, I would like to share two that I wrote in response to my Grimm’s class. The first was written about 15 minutes before the class met for the first time; the second was written this morning and is a conflation of “Snow-white and Rose-red” and “Little Snow White,” which we read for and discussed this past Friday, along with other generic thoughts on the role of “beauty” in the tales we’ve read so far (~10).

Grimm’s excitement today
Innocents start to play
Villains and ogres slay
Justice wins come what may

3 January 2012

Beauty for its own sake, enticement.
Or is it really entrapment?

The hunter spares her …
The wicked queen poisons her …
The dwarves domesticate her …
The prince wants her … dead and mute.

Snow-white. Rose-red. Two
Halves of the same girl.
A maiden on the edge
Of womanhood.

Tame the bear,
Emasculate the dwarf,
Remain kind to the vile.
Gentleness, purity, innocence

Retained. These are the steps to
Make oneself a woman.
Chaste, yet chargedly erotic.
Snow-white. Rose-red.

Beautiful.

8 January 2012

I may spend some time with the second as it could undoubtedly be improved. But, considering that I wrote it in about 10 minutes this morning I can live with it.

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”

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]

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

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.

Sunday, 18 Feb

Section 5, “Review of current terminology service activity,” in Tudhope, Douglas, Traugott Koch and Rachel Heery. Terminology Services and Technology: JISC State of the Art Review [pdf version] Read for Independent Study.

Henson, Jim, The Muppets and Friends. It’s not easy being green and other things to consider. Reviewed by The Gypsy Librarian.

Don’t care what they say, ’cause I know where to find my way,
It won’t be the way they said to go.

But I’m not like they say, I just want to find my way,
I’m goin’ the way I’ve got to go.

So show me a way to go and I’ll go free, I hope you’ll see
That I’m goin’ the way I’ve got to go.

Cotterpin Doozer (56)

Well, when the path is steep and stony and the night is all around
And the way that you must take is far away
When your heart is lost and lonely and the map cannot be found
Here’s a simple little spell that you can say:

You’ve got to face facts, act fast on your own
Preparation, perspiration, dynamite determination
Pack snacks, make tracks all alone
Don’t be cute. Time to scoot. Head out to your destination.

Chase the future, face the great unknown.

Gobo Fraggle (63)

Monday, 18 Feb

Lakoff, George. Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Began reading.

Monday – Wednesday, 18 – 21 Feb

Harley, Heidi. Chapter 6 “Lexical semantics” in A Linguistic introduction to English words. Not sure exactly why I had this. I had recorded that on 9 Feb 2006 a search on my blog had me at #1 and this at #2; but a search on what terms is the open question. Oh well; at least I recorded the URL.

Tuesday, 20 Feb (my birthday)

Crawford, Walt. Cites & Insights 7 (3): March 2007. I wasn’t feeling so hot come evening, so I curled up with the newest issue of C&I and read it. It was a nice”birthday present” to find myself quoted in this issue.

Wednesday, 21 Feb

Sections 6 & 7, “Standards” and “Conclusion,” in Tudhope, Douglas, Traugott Koch and Rachel Heery. Terminology Services and Technology: JISC State of the Art Review [pdf version] Read for Independent Study.

Wednesday – Thursday, 21 – 22 Feb

Original Penguin Classics Introduction by Q. D. Leavis to Silas Marner. Seems I was confused last week about the intro and the original Penguin intro is hidden away as an appendix. So, both the current and the original intros are very good.

Thursday, 22 Feb

Finished Chap. 2 and read chap. 3-5 of Women, fire, and dangerous things.

Willpower Information. Thesaurus principles and practice. Very basic description of the use of thesauri for the museum field. Read for Oranization and Representation.

Mai, Jens-Erik. “Contextual analysis for the design of controlled vocabularies.” ASIST Bulletin Oct/Nov 2006. Read for Oranization and Representation. Did not find the slightest bit useful; sort of like “feeding” a starving man a savory aroma—no real substance.

Friday – Saturday, 23 – 24 Feb

Chapters 5 and 6 of Svenonius, Elaine. (2000) The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization. These are for Representation & Organization this week.

Saturday, 24 Feb

Olson, Hope A. The Power to name: Locating the limits of subject representation in libraries. Began this; read Preface and Chapters 1 and 2. For fun.

See. This is exactly the crap I’ve been complaining about! I might like to buy this book for myself, but it is $103.00! One hundred + three dollars! That is so freaking wrong.

And please spare me the lectures on supply and demand. I do get it; I truly do. And if I didn’t, I’d ask either my sister or her husband (both Econ PhDs working at the Federal Reserve).

It’s still wrong.

Sunday, 11 Feb

Henricus Cornelius Agrippa. Declamation on the nobility and preeminence of the female sex. Translated and edited by Albert Rabil, Jr. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series. Read pp. 13-65.

The resemblance [of sons to mothers] is often evident in their physical appearance but it is always present in their character: if the mothers are stupid, the sons are stupid; if the mothers are wise, the sons breathe wisdom. It happens otherwise with fathers, who, even if intelligent, very often beget stupid sons or who, stupid themselves, produce wise sons, provided that their mother is wise (57).

Tuesday, 12 Feb

Finished the above book. It is actually pretty good, although I have 2 small complaints. First, is the that translator/editor claims that the book is primarily for undergraduates. Maybe. It is extemely heavily footnoted; thankfully. But if we are to believe any of the stories told about people’s reading habits that will be a definite turnoff. I am certainly not saying it is above undergraduates; that is far from the truth. I am only wondering about whether they would engage with it. It is actually a fast read, especially if you avoid the footnotes, unlike me. Second, it is heavily biased towards beautiful, upper class, European, white women, and not necessarily all women. But considering it was delivered as a speech in 1509 and first published in 1529, it is a master work and an extremely important early work on “the querelle des femmes, the “Woman Question.”" Some more quotes:

Women, to the contrary, have invented all the liberal arts, every virtue and benefit, which the very names of the arts and virtues—being feminine in gender—show better than anything. Another remarkable fact is that even the terrestrial globe itself is called by women’s names, the nymph Asia, Agenor’s daughter Europa, Epaphys’s daughter Libya, also called Africa (76).

But in order that no one doubt that women can do everything men do, let us show it by examples; we shall discover that there has never been any exceptional or virtuous deed of any kind performed by men that has not been executed by women with equal brilliance (79).

Are not philosophers, mathematicians, and astrologers quite often inferior to country women in their predictions and diagnoses? Is it not often the case that a small, aging midwife outstrips a doctor (84)?

But since the excessive tyranny of men prevails over divine right and natural laws, the freedom that was once accorded to women is in our day obstructed by unjust laws, suppressed by custom and usage, reduced to nothing by education. … And so these laws compel women to submit to men, as conquered before conquerors, and that without reason or necessity natural or divine, but under the pressure of custom, education, chance, or some occasion favorable to tyranny (94-5).

And from the conclusion:

I have shown the preeminence of the female sex according to her name, order, place, and material of her creation, and the status superior to man she has received from God. Moreover, I have demonstrated this with respect to religion, nature, and human laws, and [in each case] through diverse authorities, reasons, and examples (96).

Amen, brother. “Down with the patriarchy!”

Neelameghan, A. “Lateral relationships in multicultural, multilingual databases in the spiritual and religious domains: The OM Information Service.” In Bean & Green, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. 185-198.

More Foucault.

Eliot, George. Silas Marner: Weaver of Raveloe. Read all introductory matter and first two chapters.

Wed-Thursday, 14-15 Feb

Finished Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Thankfully! I’m sure there was something of value in there; but I’m damned if I know what it was.

More Eliot.

Friday, 16 Feb.

Finished Silas Marner. An excellent book. I am definitely going to have to read more Eliot having only read Middlemarch and now this. The Introduction by Q. D. Leavis was also quite good. Eliot’s psychological insights are no less insightful here than in Middlemarch.

His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of an end towards which the functions tended. The same sort of process has perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when they have been cut off from faith and love — only, instead of a loom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite reasearch, some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory (20).

Hmmm…?

A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic (39).

And I dare say, quite a few not-so-dull minds also.

Satija, M. P. “Relationships in Ranganathan’s Colon Classification.” In Bean & Green, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. 199-210.

Saturday, 17 Feb

Mitchell, Joan S. “Relationships in the Dewey Decimal Classification System.” In Bean & Green, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. 211-226. Which also means I have now finished reading this book. I will have more to say about it in the future, as this is the book that I am reviewing for Representation & Organization this semester.

Garsol, Lars Marius. “What are topic maps.” For Representation & Organization.

Durusau, Patrick. “Babel and topic maps.” [pdf] For Representation & Organization.

Pepper, Steve. “The TAO of topic maps: Finding the way in the age of infoglut.” For Representation & Organization.

Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. Started on Read this novel, which my friend, Mo, gave me last October. Pretty good so far, but no George Eliot. Holy crap! I just read a whole book in one day, and all those other things, too.

Holy balls! I’ve read 8 books already this year. This is absolutely incredible for me. I guess it’s time to turn to the 400-600 page books at this point; those will properly slow me down, no doubt. Or I could actually start producing for my classes instead of just reading.

Sunday, 4 Feb

Farrugia, James. (2003) “Model-theoretic semantics for the web.” In WWW 2003, Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on World Wide Web, ACM: 29-38. Read for Ontologies and author visit.

Frege, Gottlob. (1956) “The Thought: A logical inquiry.” Mind, New Series LXV (259) July, 1956: 289-311 [via JSTOR] Read for Ontologies.

Section 4, “Activities with TS,” in Tudhope, Douglas, Traugott Koch and Rachel Heery. Terminology Services and Technology: JISC State of the Art Review [pdf version] Read for Independent Study.

Monday, 5 Feb

Classification Research Group (1957) Appendix 2: “The Need for a faceted classification as the basis of all methods of information retrieval.” Proceedings of the International Study Conference on Classification for Information Retrieval London: ASLIB, 137-147. Read for Representation and Organization.

Tuesday, 6 Feb

El-Hoshy, Lynn M. “Relationships in Library of Congress Subject Headings.” In Bean & Green, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. 135-152.

More Foucault.

Thursday, 8 Feb

“Definition of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model.” Version 4.2, June 2005: i-xix. For Ontologies. [pdf]

Molholt, Pat. “The Art and Architecture Thesaurus: Controlling relationships through rules and structure.” In Bean & Green, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. 153-170.

Friday-Saturday, 9-10 Feb

Doerr, M. “The CIDOC CRM – an ontological approach to semantic interoperability of metadata.” For Ontologies. [pdf]

Saturday, 10 Feb

Pew Internet Project. “Riding the waves of “Web 2.0″: More than a buzzword, but still not easily defined.” Oct 5, 2006. Read for Representation and Organization. [pdf]

O’Reilly, Tim. “What is Web 2.0.” Sep 30, 2005. Read for Representation and Organization.

Vickery, B. C. “Ontologies.” Journal of Information Science 23 (4) 1997: 277-286. Read for Representation and Organization.

Berners-Lee, Tim, et. al. (2001). “Semantic Web: A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities.” Scientific American May 2001. Re-read for Organization and Representation. While I do not find it quite as laughable as I once did, it still is pretty funny.

Decker, S., et al. “The Semantic Web: On the respective roles of XML and RDF.” IEEE Internet Computing. Read for Organization and Representation. [pdf]

Nelson, Stuart J., W. Douglas Johnston and Betsy L. Humphreys. “Relationships in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).” In Bean & Green, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. 171-184.

Henricus Cornelius Agrippa. Declamation on the nobility and preeminence of the female sex. Translated and edited by Albert Rabil, Jr. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series. Decided to begin reading this because Foucault is becoming even harder to get through. I only have about 40 pages left, but every time I pick it up I just put it right back down. Read the Editor’s Introduction to the Series, the Foreword, and Notes on the Text.

I also read a lot of things that were cluttering up my Bloglines account today. Way too many more to go….

I received my pre-ordered Ani CD, reprieve, in the mail today. Yay! It’s not due in stores until August 8th.

I’ve been “listening” to it over and over while writing the previous post. That said, it’s been mostly serving as background music for now so I’ll refrain from saying much about it.

As a preliminary response, though, I will say that it seems a bit like revelling/reckoning, both musically and attitudinally. This is not to imply that there is no growth here, or that the themes are the same. Certainly not what I’m saying!

Of course, there is plenty here that addresses the issues of gender discussed in the previous post, including the title track.

…
feminism ain’t about equality
it’s about reprieve.

Heck, in the kind of timeliness that only Ani can address in my life, she even has a response to Michael:

such an intent stare
one eye at a time
your talons like fish hooks
you are a rare bird
the kind I wouldn’t even mind
writing in the margin of my books

“in the margins”

Now that would be a rare bird, indeed!

I am definitely looking forward to spending time getting to know, and really listening to, this new offering from Ani.

Maybe none of you are asking this question, but I have to admit it has been pestering me a lot lately. The sad part is that I honestly don’t have an answer.

I have been pursuing my own self-education this summer amid all the apartment hunting, moving preparations, job searching, relaxing and whatever else I’ve been doing. I just haven’t been writing about it, although I have intended to.

I have finished two monographs and am about halfway through a conference proceedings:

Elaine Svenonius, The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization.

Richard P. Smiraglia, The Nature of “A Work.”

Ann M. Sandberg-Fox, ed., Proceedings of the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium: Confronting the Challenges of Networked Resources and the Web.

I have also read and re-read the Calhoun Report, engaged in discussions of it, and have read several responses by Thomas Mann, and one to Mann by James Weinheimer.

This upcoming week I will be calling Karen Calhoun on the phone as a guest speaker in the Tech Services distance ed class that I am a tech for. To say that I am excited about this would be a complete understatement.

My views towards the report she wrote using my (and your) tax dollars have become a bit more moderate, although I still have major issues with her use of business metaphors, her equating the researcher with a typical Google searcher, some of her rhetorical strategies, and the choice of experts that she chose to interview. Despite the many flaws in this report, there is some definite “truth” in it. The problem is that someone needs to embrace those few nuggets of reality and then rewrite the entire report. Ah well, hearing what she has to say should be quite interesting. By the way, no one needs to worry. I will be performing my official duties, and thus representing my school and my university; I will not embarass them, nor myself.

Some of the other articles I’ve recently read include:

Daniel Rosenberg, “Early Modern Information Overload.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (1), Jan 2003. (via Project Muse) This is an excellent overview and synthesis of the other articles in this special issue on information overload in the Early Modern period, which also asks some great follow-up questions. While being a good article overall, I highly recommend it to those who do not believe in “information overload” for its highly nuanced approach to assorted contributions to the feeling and experience of information overload.

Lynne C. Howarth, “Metadata and Bibliographic Control: Soul-Mates or Two Solitudes?” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 40 (3/4), 2005.

Thus, it appears that, while the bibliographic control community is advancing theory to inform its longstanding and extensive application, the metadata community is learning from experience to inform its conceptual frameworks. Hence, opportunites for learning from one another abound, and will prove constructive to enhancing the overall goals of quality description for effective resource discovery (51).

M. E. Maron, “On Indexing, Retrieval and the Meaning of About.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science Jan 1977. I came to this article via footnote 54, chapter 3 of Svenonius (see above) where she is discussing the concepts of “aboutness” and “subject.” This paper, described as “a classic,” defines “aboutness behavioristically, in terms of beliefs, opinions, or psychological states of mind” (46). While it contains some good insight, it also has limitations as any attempt to operationalize the individual searcher’s intentions, desires, contexts, etc. does.

Lou Burnard, Metadata for corpus work. A link to this paper was left in a comment on my post, TEI is too metadata! Parse that link out to get a somewhat out-of-date home page for Lou Burnard, Assistant Director of Oxford University Computing Services, among other things. Serves as a good overview of editorial, analytic, descriptive and administrative metadata, particularly in the context of TEI and corpus work. Thanks for the interesting read, sir.

I have, of course, read or re-read an untold number of other things; some re-readings were intentional and some accidental (Rosenberg).

In the realm of liblogs I have either written or considered writing some lengthy responses and then decided otherwise.

One of the ones that almost but then did not get written was a response to Michael McGrorty’s (Library Dust) recent book-fetishist screed, Read Only. I generally like most of what Michael writes, and have said so publicly and to Michael himself. But that little screed was asinine, to use the same word he does to describe my belief that I own my books.

I’m not sure what uber-socialist world he’s living in, but they are my books. I most certainly am not any book’s “foster parent.” And yes, I do argue with the TV; just one of the many reasons I choose not to watch it. And what kind of asinine analogy is it to ask if I “annotate paintings in museums?” If we were talking library books or someone else’s book, then it’s not such a bad analogy, but I don’t own the works of art in a museum. My books, as several pointed out in the comments, are mine.

I had a much better response, and even a bit more gentle one, to Michael that included pointing him to some very good research on note-taking and annotation. I wonder if he’s aware that there are books that are valuable precisely for the annotations that they contain and not particularly for their published content?

I did write a lengthy response (me, really?) to Karen Schneider’s aside in her comment on her own post (Free Range Librarian), It almost goes without saying. In her comment, Karen states “(In fact, an interesting gender question is whether women bloggers read different blogs than male bloggers.)” While I agree that it is a very interesting question, I also think it would be very hard to actually answer in a “scientific” manner and, that more importantly, it would not actually tell us anything useful.

Simple reasons are that there are lots of reasons for which blogs are read by somoeone (that is, there are far more and possibly more important variables than gender), and even more reasons as to why a certain individual reads certain blogs. I listed lots of examples of both.

The draft post also contained my attempt to join the conversation(s) surrounding gender issues, sexism, homophobia, and all the other angles brought up recently in librarianship, especially systems librarianship, and in society in general.

I have, though, decided not to post it. To many, I am just a middle-aged white male and thus have nothing to contribute to the conversation. A few, and I am including Karen here, would encourage me, I believe. The problem for me, though, as I see it is that many would misconstrue my confused, but sincere, attempt to learn and grow and to figure out how I can better contribute to making the kind of world that these women, and many men, would like to see, and so richly deserve.

I guess in a sense, I have nothing to contribute to the discussion. Maybe I feel somewhat silenced myself (as do many men, I think.) And that is just so wrong. People like me are needed as allies, but without honest and open discussion that will only happen very slowly, if at all.

So, although I have frequently written about gender here, I will stay out of this (fairly public) discussion for now. That does not mean that I am ceding my chance(s) to learn. It only means that I must rely on the more personal, and dare I say intimate, discussions that can occur between friends and/or face-to-face. Emily, Jenica, Jenny, my baby girl Sara, Miss E, and others, I sincerely hope you will continue to help me grow into the kind of man the world needs more of.

I would say that I promise more of “the library” here in future, but then I never thought I’d be asking myself where it went in the first place.