Mark thinks Gorman had some important things to say, and that anyone who meets the core competencies could have said them. He’s also disingenuous and superficial.

AKA my current Facebook status.

I also figure I killed any chance of getting a job in the UIUC Library at this point. Ah well. I refuse to listen to a pompous ass belittle and ignore my friends and colleagues while being guilty of the same and worse.

He really did say some good stuff—you’ll have to take my word for it until the audio link is up—but then anyone who meets the so-called core competencies could have said them. Without notes.

And his little quip to me that due to his retirement, blah, blah, blah, his opinion doesn’t matter anymore is a bad joke at worst. Just another place where he is intentionally disingenuous. For example, he made sure to add to his introduction that he is the incoming chair of the ALA President’s Task Force on Education. But, as he pointed out in his talk as he critiqued the almost 10 years it has taken ALA committee(s) to get to this point he remarked that it is a democratic process in which “all views no matter how idiotic are welcome.” So maybe we really don’t have anything to worry about. Except that welcome part.

I will definitely have a full post on this talk and I will try to do it soon. There is so much to critique. E.g., his willfully misguided equation of all metadata with simple DC as espoused years ago. And this is definitely the Dublin Core communities fault, but he is smart enough to educate himself on the current state of Dublin Core and other metadata schemas; his hierarchy of cataloging (top), metadata, and what’s left for search engines; and this doozy: “Every time intellectual property is digitized it is being abused.”

My comment, which I asked him to address, was regarding my frustrations with the sorry state of dialogue on issues of concern to us in the cataloging/metadata communities, e.g., using a highly superficial description of a valuable but highly flawed practice to counterargue against that which he considers superficial critique of his view. I also pointed out that his view—and much of our current theory and practice—is based on the assumption that our data is complete and accurate. And that we have never had such nor will we ever.

He gave me a bunch of fluff about improved international cataloging standards and adherence, blah, blah, blah and that we could enhance records. Except for that is, again, being intentionally disingenuous as he commented earlier on the fact that academic library directors have made careers of gutting cataloging departments. I had some follow-up but at that point it was best to shut my mouth since the fact that I cannot enhance the records I should be able to is one of my current major frustrations, if not the chief one. Grrrr. Them was fighting words Mr. Gorman.

The sad point is we agree on far more things regarding the value of quality cataloging than he or even some of my friends think.

I promise to get to the newer comments on my previous blog post soon, too, but this is my one month anniversary and I am about to spend the rest of the evening on activities that involve absolutely no thought of Michael Gorman, or even librarianship, with any luck.

Saturday – Sunday, 22 – 23 Mar 2008

Mann, T. (2008). “On the Record” but Off the Track” a review of the Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on The Future of Bibliographic Control, with a further examination of Library of Congress cataloging tendencies. , 38. Washington, DC: AFSCME 2910. Retrieved from http://www.guild2910.org/WorkingGrpResponse2008.pdf.

Sunday, 23 Mar 2008

Weinheimer, J. (2008, January 1). An Open Reply to Thomas Mann’s report “On the Record” but Off the Track. . Retrieved March 23, 2008, from http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00013059/.

DeLillo, D. (1986). White Noise. , Contemporary American fiction., 326. New York: Penguin Books.

Finished.

 

You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature (285).

Technology is lust removed from nature. Oh man! Does “fiction” get any better that?

Monday, 24 Mar 2008

Levy, N. (2007). Neuroethics. , 346. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Read the Preface and Introduction to this (73 pp.) Man! This sure made me miss all my work in consciousness. Looks like it’d be a very good book, but I’m just not sure I can devote the time to the rest of it right now.

 

The introduction does a great job of dispelling many myths of self-hood and consciousness among other topics. One is the equation of the self with consciousness:

 

Many of our actions, too, including some of our most important, are products of unconscious mechanisms. The striker’s shot at goal happens too fast to be initiated by consciousness, similarly, the improvising musician plays without consciously deciding how a piece will unfold. Think, finally, of the magic of ordinary speech: we speak, and we make sense, but we learn precisely what we are going to say only when we say it (as E. M. Forster put it, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”). Our cleverest arguments and wittiest remarks are not vetted by consciousness; they come to consciousness at precisely the same time as they are heard by others (24).

Another is the myth of internal representation:

 

Our visual experience is as of a world that is internally represented. But the world is not internally represented, at least not in any great detail. There is nevertheless a sense in which we do possess a rich representation of the world. We represent the world to ourselves not by way of an internal image, but by having an external model: the world itself. Rather than take a snapshot of the scene and store it internally, we rely upon the actual stability of the world. We store our representation outside us (34).

 

Yes, I have only reproduced some claims here. Do not worry; there is plenty of science and good philosophy to back it all up.

 

Monday – Friday, 24 – 28 Mar 2008

Swift, J. (1996). Gulliver’s travels. (Unabridged [ed.].). Mineola N.Y.: Dover Publications.

For these Reasons, the Trade of a Soldier is held the most honourable of all others: Because a Soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold Blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can (185).

 

Is it really satire? And please feel free to be offended if you like. I was a soldier for over 20 years, and technically will be until I die. My son is also a soldier with over 8 years of service and is a combat veteran. Satire may well be truth.

Tuesday, 25 Mar 2008

Mazzochi, F., Tiberi, M., De Santis, B., & Plini, P. (2007). Relational semantics in thesauri: some remarks at theoretical and practical levels. Knowledge Organization, 34(4), 197-214.

Friday, 28 Mar 2008

Some articles by David Bade that have been submitted for publication. Not sure if I am allowed to discuss them yet so will hold off.

Mugridge, R. L. (2008). Experiences of newly-graduated cataloging librarians. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 45(3), 61-79. doi: 10.1300/J104v45n03_06.

I only skimmed this one so I will hold off from any real commenting. It is interesting to me as it is highly related to my original CAS topic, although I had hoped to go a bit deeper.

Friday – Saturday, 28 – 29 Mar 2008

Kari, J. (2007). A review of the spiritual in information studies. Journal of Documentation, 63(6), 935-962. doi: 10.1108/00220410710836439 .

I was hoping that this piece might serve as a piece of the domain analysis-integrationism connection for my CAS paper but I was wrong.

While it is possibly interesting to some, I think Kari is confused about several things. In particular, what is science and what are the limits of what it can study. This confusion is readily apparent in the article itself and not only in the confused critiques made of the literature being reviewed.

One example is this non-starter of a statement: “Documenting a spiritual occasion in an objective fashion is so much easier: all one needs is a video camera” (949). WTF? First off, most of the what could possibly pass for a spiritual occasion can not in any sense be documented in an objective fashion.

This is related to what seems to pass for the author’s view of what science is and what doing science consists of. While no formal definitions are provided, the best sense that I could get is that simply counting things and turning numbers into a statistic or two is science. Well, It is not. I also have no doubt that the author’s views are a bit less simplistic than this but nonetheless that is the sense I get from the article.

Another example that shows that the author is confused about the separation of science and other modes of inquiry is demonstrated in his critique of an article by Babb, and especially in this statement: “The above extract shows that Babb is well up on the matter, but also sometimes she apparently forgets to maintain the critical or objective attitude of a scientist” (955).

That comment is not only wrong but ignores what Babb was doing in her article [Babb, N. M. (2005) "Cataloging spirits and the spirit of cataloging." CCQ 40(2):89-122] Babb can easily be (and was) critiqued for using such a small sample but she was not attempting to do science. She was looking at title pages of books purportedly written by spirits and how our cataloging rules have evolved to handle such attributions of authorship. There is no serious sense in which that could ever be considered to be doing science.

I will leave you with the conclusion, which while it makes some valuable points also commits the same fallacy.

It is time for information researchers to start asking themselves not only how to exploit context in reaching a holistic picture of informational phenomena, but also what the empirical contexts are that are bona fide foreign to them and potentially significant to humanity. By doing so, we may open up new grounds for further research and thus widen the scope of information studies as a branch of science (959).

Read that through once or twice and tell me you can’t see the confusion. If we want a holistic picture then we must admit ways of knowing besides science. If we are only talking the empirical then we are excluding whole realms of phenomena, of human experience, and of human knowing. Information studies is not a science (and that is OK), but if we only admit the empirical then we have excluded far more than we can honestly cover.

Saturday, 29 Mar 2008

Budd, J. (2008). Self-Examination: The Present and Future of Librarianship. , 281. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited.

Started this yesterday and it looks quite good. So far I have read the Introduction and the 1st chapter: Genealogy of the Profession.

There are a few minor issues and claims that I have trouble with but they do not have much to do with (or influence on) the larger purpose so I am trying to be forgiving. I am going to comment on one, though, as it is directly related to many of my current interests.

Early in the 1st chapter Budd writes, “In order for there to be communication there has to be language; do we know what the first language was, how it came to be, who spoke it” (3)?

Unless one is equating communication and language—actually under any account—that is a complete non-starter. They are and never have been coextensive. And, as Harris so ably demonstrates, it is communication that must proceed language. The very idea of a language (in use) requires that there be communication. The simplest refutation is that most people will agree that almost every animate being on this planet communicates between others of their own kind, and often as not with beings of other sorts. The vast majority of these people will also adamantly deny any use of language, much less the capability for language, to these creatures.

As I said, not really relevant to the larger purpose of the text, but it will cause me to keep a sharper eye on his larger arguments. I find it hard to believe that a scholar with the philosophical bent of Budd could make that mistake.

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.

Welcome new readers

On the 14th of Jan, Blake posted a story at LISNews, The LINews 10 Blogs To Read in 2008. My lowly little blog was included in that list. I have at least 29 new readers in Bloglines, which means, perhaps, 80-120 total new readers since then. Of course, the fact that the list was reproduced all over the blogosphere didn’t hurt either.

Now Blake’s recommendation is wonderful to me, but I wonder what people expect based on that description. It is accurate but such a small part of me, even the part shown here. Also note the methodology; I come recommended based on a sample of probably one, perhaps two if I flatter myself. [There's a tie-in in that previous link to the name of my first (public) blog, ...the thoughts are broken....]

So, welcome to everyone who has come this way via the list. Please check out the other folks, too.

Please feel free to comment, correct, say your piece, etc. I do not worry about whether or not you agree with me or how long your comments are. Sometimes substance requires several paragraphs.

I do moderate all first time comments, though, to cut down on spam. Links are allowed but at some number shortly after 1 your comment will get flagged as spam, which I’ll hopefully catch. I do try to address all comments, and try to do so in a fairly timely manner. But I do sometimes fail.

And you can always use the Contact Form to send me non-public comments, too [Scroll back up and use the Contact tab at center top].

Who am I?

I am finishing a Certificate of Advanced Study (CAS) in LIS at GSLIS, UIUC. I also did my Masters here just prior to this degree. Organization and access of information has been my area with a focus on classificatory structures. Some of my post-MLS classes include thesaurus construction, classification systems seminar, information modeling, humanities ontologies, Topic Maps, bibliography, and Python programming. [Full list of my 80 or so grad LIS hours is here.]

I have worked as a computer technician for the department, broadcast distance ed classes and assisted with classroom technology, both on campus and virtual, been a thesaurus maintainer, and most recently work as both the serials cataloging GA and as one of the monographic cataloging GAs.

As I hope to be done this May (my 3rd Mother’s Day graduation, hopefully) I am now on the job market. I am primarily looking for an academic job doing something related to cataloging, metadata, vocabulary work, etc. If you know of any feel free to send me a link.

I am also a “habitually probing generalist” as my tagline claims, but that may be causally based more on brain chemistry at an early age than by culturally-trained bent [Although I have assimilated much of the cultural quite well. I'm one hell of a manual citation tracking machine, for instance]. I get intensely interested in highly specific things on occasion. And in the process of diving in deep one finds so many things one did not know about. Some of that stuff is going to be highly interesting and itself lead off in other directions. What a deliciously dangerous vicious circle this is.

3rd blogging anniversary

Three years ago today …the thoughts are broken… debuted with “So, what is this about, and for?” I once had a “best posts” which I began to update quite a while back. Not a job I actually relish although I would like people to see the stuff I prefer for whatever reason I label it “best.”

Oh. Crap. That page is much older than I thought and all of the links are broken since it moved from the first blog to this one. Oh well, perhaps you can search titles if you are interested in some of my early stuff (1 Feb – 25 Oct 2005). Some day I may get that list updated but since I’m nearing 1000 posts [and taking into account other time constraints] it won’t be any time soon.

My first blog was hosted at TypePad. On 20 July 2006 Off the Mark debuted [It does include all of my previous posts at ...the thoughts are broken... but all internal links are broken]. This means I’ve been on LISHost and WordPress for more than half my online existence; that is, blogging existence and paying for hosting.

The name of my 1st blog came from a line in a Grateful Dead tune while this one was named by Richard Urban and Walt Crawford.

Since May 2006 I’ve been taking a fairly narrow path for a generalist; that is actively taking. Much of my time is taken up by this. [See this post and comments for some comments on the curse of being a generalist; and also of having an "actively wired" brain.] I am looking at what the Integrational theory of communication and language might mean for LIS if taken seriously. Thanks go to David Bade for starting me down this road.

So not an anniversary for this specific blog (although my friend, Iris, said last night that it’s the same blog with a new title. Perhaps.) but a blogging anniversary. Just to be clear.

Zotero, COinS, WorldCat, linking …

My blog has a plug-in that generates COinsS data so that OpenURL and COinS aware tools will recognize this data and do something contextual with it. For instance, Zotero (which I recommend highly) can import that data from the web page. If I click the icon [contextually variable] that shows up in my browser’s address bar the post metadata is imported: Post title, author, blog title, date of post, URL, and access date. And, no, I don’t have many of my own posts in Zotero. There are a few posts, though, that are being used in my bibliography and CAS paper so they are there.

But I also use Zotero to output COinS data to put in my posts when I cite a source, like in my weekly reading posts. And I do far more of it for print resources as it is easier and more reliable to get information in automatically. And if I can provide a resolvable URL for a web resource anyway then how important is the COinS data for them. Again, I do not have that many web-based resources in Zotero; comparatively.

I also try to link to WorldCat for stuff they have records for. By the way, they are providing data for the taking by Zotero also. A couple days ago I linked to a work record in LibraryThing that I had brought in from Oxford University being the only one in LibraryThing to have it (or claiming to have it). I got that data into Zotero from the LibraryThing work page which also gave me some data. I think, in this case anyway, that WorldCat would have been better.

So, as Blake said, I write about print stuff. I read a fair few books (mostly non-fiction) and lots of articles, to include photocopying a boatload of stuff not online. Most of it is LIS literature or related to issues in LIS.

Extraneous

Well now. I think it’s all been a bit extraneous and somehow self-indulgent so far.

My blog is both personal and professional. This state has been written about and commented on many times here and elsewhere. Consider the name of my first blog, …the thoughts are broken….

Here’s a few more lines for a bit of context:

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music
Would you hold it near as it were your own?

It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they’re better left unsung
I don’t know, don’t really care
Let there be songs to fill the air

Grateful Dead. “Ripple.” American Beauty.

This is the positive view of making best use of one’s broken thoughts. I’ve been listening to American Beauty since it came out and “Ripple” has always been one of my favorites and always deeply personally meaningful. That meaning has shifted and changed and grown over the years but it has always been positive.

The other side of broken thoughts though is know as fragmentation, depersonalization and moral minimalism. [See these posts perhaps. Actually, I do have an overview post of these issues less than a year old.]

Thus, the title of my 1st blog was both a warning to myself and a positive statement of how to make things better. Changing the name for my new blog had nothing to do with considering my thoughts to no longer be broken. That is a lifetime struggle based on the way our society is structured.

In the meantime, I try to keep my chin up and gently coax a few of those thoughts into being coherent and whole. As Robert Hunter wrote 38 years ago:

Let there be songs to fill the air.

Sunday, Oct 21

Who Is Tagging Information? – Edward C. Lomax (Georgia State U), Hsin-liang “Oliver” Chen (U of MO-Columbia), and June Abbas (SUNY-Buffalo).

Lomax spoke about Social Tagging in K-12 Education; Chen spoke about Social Tagging and Newspapers; Abbas spoke about Tagging and Libraries and Museums.

The panel was down two members so that had some impact on the program.

I’m not going to get into details as I took few notes but despite June’s best efforts this panel was only the first of several that really left me depressed about this portion of my field. I later had a conversation with June (and have had a few on other occasions) and I know she gets it. But what the heck is most everyone else’s problem(s)?

There are fundamental issues with tagging (as with anything else) in libraries and, in particular, as a means of access and retrieval. But these can be dealt with. Anyone who reads me regularly well knows that I am quick to play devil’s advocate and ask the tough questions while all the cool kids are espousing how great something is. But good God! Can we please move forward with some real research in this area? I most certainly do not mean to disparage June’s or Margaret Kipp’s (and a very few others) here. They are doing good work, but can we please support them?

My conference roommate was also quite disturbed by the state of research in this area and it was having a serious impact on his view of his first ASIS&T. When he questioned me as to why this was it sounded like he was putting much of the blame on the researchers. But this is not the case at all. Tag researchers in no way control the systems (OPAC, tag systems,etc.) that (may) implement these tools. Let’s hope PennTags is doing something useful with their data; even better would be if they’ll share that data with outside researchers.

Another big issue in this equation is that large-scale, easily implementable tag systems are fairly new. Certainly far newer than the 10 years of research in tagging.

Here are only some of the disparate reasons why my roommate and I are so depressed about this:

Much is based on audience reaction(s): complete misunderstanding of tagging and/or how it even works [researchers have to give demonstrations of how tagging works in a session before presenting their research or the audience will be completely lost]; what about Internet predators?; do tags need to be vetted?; what about bad words?; are we just going to throw out privacy?; we can’t have the public adding things to our records, ….

In some cases it is the presenters themselves who are not really prepared to investigate such a multiply complex topic that they have happened to find interesting. One of the presenters in this session offered Amazon.com as the gold standard of tagging sites. Excuse me? There were several other non-starters offered up by two of the panelists but perhaps in the sake of mental health I have repressed them.

Yes, there are serious issues to be addressed in this area. I do not mean to make light of them. But if we cannot move further quickly now that we have systems that will allow us to do some real and useful research then we are failing ourselves and, more importantly, users.

Can someone please provide funding and access to a quality system to folks like June Abbas and Margaret Kipp?

Theoretical/Methodological Exploration (Papers)

Megan A. Winget (UTA) – “A Methodology and Model for Studying Boundary Objects, Annotations and Collaborative Practices: Musicians and Musical Scores.”

Jason M. Turner (Air Force Inst. of Tech.) – “Towards a Social Affordances Perspective of Media Capabilities and Interface Design.”

Miles Efron (UTA) – “What Crossword Puzzles Teach Us About Information.”

Upfront admission, I went to this session primarily based on the crossword paper. Boy, was I ever surprised!

I may not be a musician but Winget’s presentation was fascinating! I look forward to reading the whole thing. She looked at score annotations across amateur, semi-pro, and professional musicians in chamber group and orchestra settings. Annotations are almost always fascinating and this area was especially so.

As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the few must reads from the sessions I attended. Get your hands on the proceedings and read this one.

Efron on crossword puzzles was, for me, a big disappointment. As far as I’m concerned his title is a complete misnomer and a big unanswered and unaddressed question.

He took a mathematical approach to determining the difficulty level of the weekday New York Times crossword puzzles. As you may know, the difficulty level of the NYT puzzle (generally) increases from Monday to Saturday. The puzzle editor is the one to determine which puzzles are printed on which days. This work is an attempt to formalize that determination.

On one hand, it is kind of interesting and it works reasonably well. He also made sure to restrict his claims to being able to determine the difficulty level of a puzzle as to which day of the week it should be offered on and not as to the difficulty level of a specific puzzle for any individual puzzle solver. Kudos for that! Nonetheless, it really doesn’t seem to teach us anything about information and, more importantly, this sort of mathematical approach to word play is an anathema to me and many other word lovers. Color me mostly disappointed in this one.

Dinner at The King and I (Thai) with Karen, Wei and Gina (fellow UIUC students).

Welcome Reception/SIG Rush.

Monday, 22 Oct

Assuring Quality in the Information Professions – Nancy Roderer (moderator), Ann Prentiss (for José-Marie Griffiths), Charles Henry (CLIR), and Libby Trudell (Dialog)

Prentiss presented some early results from a 2006 IMLS study for Griffiths who could not be there at the last moment. Due to this we couldn’t get much beyond the slide content and it is early results. There may be something interesting to come out of this study, and I hope there will be, but not so much yet.

Henry as the President of CLIR had some interesting things to say.

Context: higher education, specifically the profound changes in HE, and the continual redefinement of libraries in HE

1 Rise of cyberinfrastructure – 3 major reports recently on the sciences, social sciences, and humanities are all in agreement

• technical layer
• software
• new kinds of expertise [these 3 are the definition of cyberinfrastructure]

leads to new research methods and new intellectual strategies [CLIR is more interested in these, along with the incredible collaboration that arises (from Q&A)]

2 Rise of new disciplines

3 Rise of undergraduate research

4 New models of scholarly publishing – books and articles less and less as growth of knowledge, more and more as accreditation

Trudell (Senior VP at Dialog and on SLA Board of Directors)

Context: Information industry and the role of info pros in business

Roles:

• Service supply side: large number of roles
• Product development end: design, QA, editorial, product documentation
• Senior management roles

Professional competencies across this broader perspective:

• core competencies
• people skills
• business savvy
• strategic perspective
• attitudes – assertiveness, proactiveness, flexibility, driver for change

Spectrum – varies by role

technical vs. content

knowledge of particular target area, e.g., pharma, …

Person should have an interest in a wide variety of ways info can contribute to success of the organization.

How can industry contribute?

• expand core curriculum
• partner in creative ways
• professional organizations, continuing certification, advocate for values of profession

What is role of service provider?

• on-going education and training: product/content, “Quantum program”/leadership development
• provide support for prof. orgs./library schools to do their jobs

Key is vendor participation in prof. orgs., not just as vendor display & funding, but as colleagues, and investment in education.

Q&A

Archivists and info managers are much more embedded in orgs. than libraries.

What about the downsides?

• HE doesn’t study itself closely. Info pros see these changes more clearly. Thus, we have an opportunity to lead. Onus is on us to do so.

Plenary: Anthea Stratigos, Outsell, Inc.

I took a few notes that I am not going to reproduce. This was highly disappointing on so many levels. ASIS&T is full of corporate and business types along with academics and practicing professionals, but I resent being sold a message of the market economy, which is all this boiled down to!

She really rubbed some of us the wrong way when she started off the section on the Library Environment with a slide with a picture of a card catalog and the caption, “It Used to be Simple.” While there is some truth to what she was trying to get at there are much better ways to get at that truth visually. There simply is nothing simple about the card catalog as a technology and/or information environment! While I am well aware that many of my colleagues think there was, it only goes to show their lack of education and understanding of history and systems.

I was so proud of Karen for going up during the Q&A and correcting Ms. Stratigos on this point. Oh, one should know that Karen is highly mathematical and her research focuses on the application of logic in our field. Way to represent, Karen!

One of her main claims is that libraries are not keeping up and/or moving fast enough. Of course, this claim was across libraries broadly. Enough said.

Under What Does this All Mean? we get the claim that all of this is “creating a permanent shift in consumer habits.” Sorry, Ms. Stratigos, but there is nothing permanent about this shift (these shifts, would be truer, also)! Shifts have happened before and will happen again. Shift may be permanent, but this shift is certainly not.

Under A New Order Emerges we get the shift from product-centric to market-centric. We also get Information as Entertainment and Entertainment as Information (ala Richard Saul Wurman). As something to celebrate. Perhaps I ought to learn to play the fiddle at this point?

Essential Actions gets summarized in the statement, “Be a digital marketer delivering a digital experience.” Um, no thank you.

So, yes, a marketing talk delivered by a marketer.

Lunch at the mall with Christina Pikas.

Poster Session II

Most interesting to me:

How Incorrect Information Delivers Correct Search Results: A Pragmatic Analysis of Queries. Jin Ha Lee and Allen Renear (UIUC)

What Exactly Is an Item in the Digital World? Ingbert R. Floyd and Allen Renear (UIUC). How often do you find research with two different views presented?

Tag Decay: A View into Aging Folksonomies. Terrell Russell (UNC-CH)

Tagging the Tags … Process, Observations and Analysis of Conversations in Metatagging at an ASIS&T Interactive Poster Session. Jennifer E. Graham and June M. Abbas. (SUNY-Buffalo). This was an initial follow-up to their amazing poster at last years ASIS&T. [Photo from about the mid-point.] Great stuff!

Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) Standards – Marcia Zeng (Kent State U), Margie Hlava (Access Innovations), Jian Qin (Syracuse U), Gail Hodge (Information International Associates), and Denise Bedford (World Bank Group)

Zeng covered some of the work that the ASIS&T Standards Committee did this past year [I am a member of this committee].

Hlava covered KOS standards, focusing primarily on the US and British controlled vocabulary standards.

Qin covered Encoding KOS: Languages for Machine Understanding and Processing.

Hodge covered KOS in the Government Environment: From Traditional Thesauri to Standards Integration.

“Agencies are interested in how better management of semantics can improve organization and access.” This quote makes me smile (as long as I ignore a literal parsing of “management of semantics”).

Bedford discussed Popularization and Use of Standards at World Bank. This was real-world usage on a vast scale across many languages. Fascinating stuff. My jaw about hit the floor when she said they use MultiTES! Primarily due to its reporting capabilities. Now MultiTES is just one small part of a very complex system, but still ….

I was also quite impressed when she said that recently one group within WB wanted to add an area to the system. Something like 91,000 terms reduced to under 15,000 and properly related in something like 2 weeks! Clearly she has better systems and more people than when I was doing real-world thesaural work, but I still find that amazing.

Standards Committee meeting

Dinner at The King and I with Edward Corrado, Heather Pfeiffer, Emma Tonkin, Margaret Kipp and Qiping Zhang.

Tuesday and Wednesday to follow

[This was started and mostly finished early Friday morning, with some additions Saturday morning.]

Things are normal here—great in some areas, horrible in others.

I am almost completely exhausted after Dr. Hjørland’s visit (more in a moment). I have not been sleeping well, and despite it going well it has been a strain. I have come home the last several days completely exhausted. I even have been in bed by 8:30 the last 2 nights.

Communication backlog

I owe several people replies to comments, emails, etc. Unfortunately, some I owe email replies to will not see this.

Nathan, your comments and email are great! And fine. I will do my best to respond as soon as I can, but no promises as to timeliness and/or how comprehensively. But I greatly appreciate your efforts.

Versifying

For those who have seen my photo and what I will very loosely term a poem … please do not worry. Certainly no more than normal. I have no desire to explain it but, yes, it is about me (and much more). These sorts of things are always below the surface roiling around and once in a while they bubble “up.” The “scary” part for me is not the thoughts themselves but that I actually recorded them. And then shared them. It would be silly to claim that I rarely think in verse; it is just that it is usually other people’s verse.

Dr. Hjørland’s visit

Dr. Hørland’s visit went wonderfully for me; hopefully it was great for him. But for some reason it was quite a bit more stressful than I’d have thought. Not in the direct sense and certainly not in interpersonal interaction, but more in the surrounding spaces. Not sure why; but it left me exhausted.

I went to the student brown bag lunch, the Research Fellow lecture, helped lead Metadata Roundtable (MDRT) with David Bade’s more-than-able help, and then had my personal meeting with him.

During MDRT I was given a writing assignment. More about that in the future.

LEEP Weekend / Python class

This weekend is LEEP weekend meaning the distance students are here. My Python class is a LEEP class and I have my all day oncampus class today. This also means some of my friends are here. I look forward to hanging out with them (assuming I have the energy to do so) this weekend.

Python regular expressions have so far evaded me. I compiled my re just fine and I’m even pretty sure it is doing what I think it is supposed to (i.e., what I coded it to do). I know it is matching the strings I am asking it to, and it knows full well where they start and end. But. The use to which I am then putting my matches is failing, though. It seems that I am not actually capturing the string(s) I am matching.

I have had various suggestions, checked the textbook, the web, spoke with the instructor and banged it all with some very big rocks. Nothing is making any difference and it is all syntactically “correct.” Still. Something that needs to happen is not happening.

Having spent over 20 years in the Army I know full well how to bang lots of things with rocks and bang things into and through rocks (e.g., ground stakes and tent stakes). I have a lot of respect for “rock banging!” But at the moment it serves me no purpose. I need an explicit answer to what is missing from my program to so that I can make use of my re. That is the only thing which will allow me to make any conceptual progress at all.

Once it is working, I have plans to make it break so that I can start banging away again. And from that banging I shall learn much about how regular expressions actually work.

As several folks have said, one should have lots of methods to attack learning problems/situations. And I agree that usually learning mostly by dint of your own efforts is a good thing. But once in a while you are at a point where the only way forward is to have something shown and/or explained to you. Even if I were to somehow stumble on what the issue is in my program I would not conceptually understand why it is the case that that is what was needed. I will only (perhaps) know that it is needed. And while the one is far better than nothing, it is still pale in comparison to actually understanding why it is that way.

Perhaps I am a bad learner and/or bad librarian, but I need an answer.

==Saturday finish to the post (although I changed a few words above)==

Near the end of class we had a chance to ask about anything Python related that we were just not understanding. Having little shame or pride I was more than happy to ask about my re issues.

With a version of the program I did not turn on the screen and a class of approx. 30 folks looking at it it took about 25 minutes for the instructor to recognize what the issue was. Turns out I made a most illustrative error for the edification of the whole class. Dave promised them all that they would make a similar mistake at some point. Always happy to serve as an example. Perhaps they learned something; I know I did. And now I can go on an finish the simplistic thing I was doing with regular expressions and then do something much more useful and complicated for my next program. In fact, something in which beating with rocks will again make a lot of sense.

ASIS&T

ASIS&T 2007 Annual Meeting: Joining Research and Practice: Social Computing and Information Science is in less than a week. At this time next Saturday I will be at the 18th Annual SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop. I am really looking forward to it.

Lots of things to be done to prepare. Lots of things to catch up on. I have lots of things on the slate for today and tomorrow and I will be happy if I can get most of them done along with some relaxing with LEEP friends each evening.

Sunday, 2 Sep

Bade, David. “I Know Where I Am Going, Do You?” Remarks at the ALCTS Serials Section, Continuing Resources Cataloging Committee, Update Forum “Continuing Resources Cataloging: Where in the World Are We Going?” ALA Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, June 25, 2007. [pdf available at E-LIS]

You folks do have the E-LIS feed in your readers don’t you? Lots of good stuff, much of it in languages other than English, comes across this feed.

Of course, you probably ought to be subscribed to the dLIST feed, too. Or you can choose to sub by subject. See this page. Maybe you can sub to E-LIS by subject, too, but I have no idea. I prefer to see it all and thus not miss things in a subject I might not normally focus on.

Bates, Marcia J. “Information and knowledge: an evolutionary framework for information science.” Information Research 10 (4), July 2005.

This is one of the Bates’ articles that Hjørland was responding to in “Information: Objective or Subjective/Situational?” [see below and previous post]

Wow!!

This is a doozy, in many ways. Bates is attempting to use the ideas of evolutionary psychology to gain a better foothold on the concept of information.

Sunday – Monday, 2 – 3 Sep

Bates, Marcia J. “Fundamental Forms of Information.” JASIST 57 (8): 1033-1045, 2006. doi: 10.1002/asi.20369

This is one of the Bates’ articles that Hjørland was responding to in “Information: Objective or Subjective/Situational?” [see below and previous post]

I think I am going to have to write a separate post on the ideas in these two articles by Bates.

Monday, 3 Sep

Hjørland, Birger. “Information: Objective or Subjective/Situational?” JASIST 58 (10): 1448-1456, 2007. doi: 10.1002/asi.20620

Originally read 11 August 2007. If you care why I re-read it, look at the comments on the post it was included in.

Furner, Jonathan. “Information Studies Without Information.” Library Trends 52 (3), Winter 2004: 427-446. [Available in the usual places or in UIUC's institutional repository IDEALS]

Cite by Hjørland (above) as arguing “that all the problems we need to consider in information studies can be dealt with without any need for a concept of information. He suggests that to understand information as relevance is currently the most productive for theoretical information studies” (fn7, p. 1454).

Fairly thought-provoking, but I felt that explication of ideas became a little terse near the end of the paper. There were a few places where I wrote, “Huh? How/when did we realize this?”

To the extent that he accepts the concept of information, he seems fairly conflicted whether or not potential informativeness counts or not. The discussion seems to waver back and forth, and then we get a decently explicatory paragraph on 441 that outlines why we need to include potentially informative/relevant messages into our conceptual definition. But then the paragraph ends with this thought (to which I fully subscribe): “In any case, it would appear that determining the extent to which a message is relevant to hearer a at time t is what is more important.” So. Which is it?

In the discussion of The utterance as information we get the following:

In effect, this view commits one not only to the proposition that information is anything that is interpretable—i.e., anything that is capable of being interpreted—but also that the interpretability of an entity does not depend on its historically having been interpreted. Entities can thus be classified as information on the basis of their potential to inform (439, emphasis mine).

OK. I agree that the view espoused in this section commits one to everything in the first sentence. But where did that thus in the second sentence come from? It does not seem to me to follow logically. It is simply a stipulation; perhaps a stipulation based on something along these lines:

If we undertake an inventory of all entities in the world that are potentially capable of being interpreted and decide which are, in fact, interpretable—and moreover, we state that all entities are capable of interpretation—then by the very act of our inventory—and our stipulative definition—we have thus interpreted (and defined) every entity as being interpretable and thus all entities can be classed as information. In fact, there is no need for the inventory or the subsequent classification based on potential interpretability. All entities just are information.

So, perhaps it does follow logically, but in a fully circular way.

In fact, this is highly similar to what Bates has said in the above articles. “Information is the pattern of organization of matter and energy.” The only thing not information for Bates is pure entropy, as it has no organization.

A highly philosophical and thought-provoking article, as I said.

I am grateful for a short discussion on pp. 440-441 which touches on information as uncertainty reducing, amongst other things. This may be helpful in formulating my response to Hjørland.

Monday – Tuesday, 3 – 4 Sep

Cornelius, Ian. “Theorizing Information for Information Science.” ARIST 36 (2002). Medford, NJ: Information Today. 393-425.

This is a pretty good lit review that ends with the following wonderful comment:

However, as we make further attempts to tether the ass of information to the tree of knowledge, we should reflect that, until we know what it is that we cannot do without a theory of information, we will be unlikely to get one (421).

Tuesday – Wednesday, 4 – 5 Sep

Harris, Roy, and Christopher Hutton. Definition in theory and practice: Language, lexicography and the law. London: Continuum, 2007.

Began Part III. Definition and the Law. Read ch. 8 “The Definition of Law and Legal Definition” and ch. 9 “Strategies of Construction.”

Thursday, 6 Sep

Harris and Hutton. See above.

Ch. 10 “Linguistics, Science and Meaning.”

Friday, 7 Sep

Harris and Hutton. See above.

Ch. 11 (Conclusion) “Definition, Indeterminancy and Reference.”

This was a good book; one which bears re-reading. I only wish it wasn’t so God-awful expensive!

Rowley, Jennifer. “The wisdom hierarchy: representations of the DIKW hierarchy.” Journal of Information Science 33 (2), 2007: 163-180. doi: 10.1177/0165551506070706

Suggested by my advisor Wed. when discussing my newest venture into the concept of information.

This article looks at “the data-information-knowledge-wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy by examining the articulation of the hierarchy in a number of widely read textbooks [in information systems and in knowledge management], and analysing their statements about the nature of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom” (abstract).

Overall, this is a reasonable article. It just isn’t very good for my purposes. While it has a fair few sources, a third of them are textbooks in either information systems or knowledge management. Notice that does not say “information science.” They are also, of course, by definition heavily business-oriented.

I know that I get myself into pickles with what I say sometimes and as much as “knowledge management” bugs me silly I realize that I have yet to settle on definitions of these concepts that work for me in the work I want to do in this field, but “wisdom management”? The article doesn’t quite go that far, but it sure seems to be pointing to it.

It does ask some useful questions about the relationships between these concepts, and suggests that inverting the DIKW hierarchy (pyramid) might be “more evocative” (176). More of a “wisdom funnel” (176). I’m still undecided on the DIKW hierarchy since I have yet to fully suss out these concepts for myself, but if I accept it at all my guess is that I would prefer the inverted form.

One other small concern is that the few textbooks that even address wisdom situate “in the context of leadership. Wisdom is seen as a desirable and even essential characteristic of executive business leaders” (177). While on one hand this is probably somewhat true, I think these few textbook writers are out of touch with the reality of much business leadership. Also, the dearth of authors of these texts even addressing the topic is in my favor.

Wisdom has been spun as having a highly ethical component, as it probably should be. So from the corporate viewpoint, leaders should be wise in regards to how they conduct their personal lives as representatives of their companies, but I have a hard time believing that many large corporations want their executives to lead with a focus on wisdom in its ethical mode. I, on the other, wish they would. [See Jackall, Robert. Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. for more information on "how corporate managers think the world works, and how big organizations shape moral consciousness" (blurb from back of paperback).]

Perhaps that is why the focus on “wisdom management.” Wisdom and its ethics re-interpreted from a corporate standpoint is what they want, but certainly not wisdom in a Socratic vein.

Saturday, 8 Sep

Weiss, Paul J. and Steve Shadle. “FRBR in the Real World.” The Serials Librarian 52 1/2, 2007: 93-104.

Found via The FRBR Blog 6 Sep 2007.

Hjørland, Birger. “Theory and Metatheory of Information Science: A New Interpretation.” Journal of Documentation 54 (5), December 1998: 606-621.

Cited by Bates (2005) “Information and knowledge: an evolutionary framework for information science.” See above.

This is an excellent article that discusses the role of epistemological theories in IS. I know that many folks avoid philosophical discussions like the plague, but this article is quite understandable by all. Another reason many folks avoid these sorts of discussions is that they want answers. But as Hjørland writes:

Epistemology has no final answer, the is no consensus about the scientific method. Insight in epistemology can, however, provide you with knowledge about the merits and weaknesses of the different solutions, and progress in the scientific method as well as classification must be based on the historical evidence gained in epistemology and science studies (613).

For anyone interested in Dr. Hjørland’s forthcoming visit to UIUC I highly suggest this article.

For everyone else, I also recommend it highly as a good, balanced and easily understood overview of how and why epistemology is central to our discipline.

Monday, 13 Aug

Wilson, Patrick. “Situational relevance.” Information Storage and Retrieval 9 (1973): 457-471.

Cited by Raber in The Problems of Information, ch. 9, en13, p. 186 for the whole article in support of:

While many people, for example, may share the same problem or at least the same kind of problem, it does not mean that the same information will be useful to each of them in exactly the same way. As a result, relevance must be regarded as individual and situational, depending on the user’s perceptions, concerns, preferences, current state of kowledge, and view of his or her situation (186).

I like a lot about this view of relevance, except for its reliance on question answering. Perhaps parts of this view can be used while expanding beyond the question answering, but probably not without throwing out the question answering logical basis. I am unsure whether the logical basis is supposed to be prior to, or whether it is, or could be, after-the-fact. I feel that it should be, primarily, after-the-fact, that is, the sort of post hoc conditionals that I was complaining about last week.

Froehlich, Thomas J. “Relevance Reconsidered—Towards an Agenda for the 21st Century: Introduction to Special Topic Issue on Relevance Research.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45, April 1994: 124-134.

This is the intro to a special issue on relevance research. This article and many of those comprising this issue are cited by Raber in ch. 9. This article in end notes 11, 14 and 22.

Sets a good stage for the articles in the special issue, and serves as a good summary itself. Worth a read by itself.

Priss, Uta. “Formal Concept Analysis in Information Science.” In Cronin, Blaise, ed. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) 40, 2006. Sorry, can’t give a full citation since I read a draft version and it’s 11:30 PM, but I verified it here.

I read this due to something my advisor pointed me at but I sure hope this isn’t what she meant. She’s on a very well deserved vacation so I’ll have to wait a few more days to find out. [As I suspected, it was not.]

I have no doubt that this technique can be useful but it just perpetuates many of the things that I am beginning to see as wrong with what we do in LIS. Just because something can be done easily in a computer is not a good reason to do it that way. And, honestly, the mathematicalization of language and concepts is just too much.

Formal concepts in FCA can be seen as a mathematical formalization of what has been called the “classical theory of concepts” in psychology/philosophy, which states that a concept is formally definable via its features (draft 11).

The advantage of formalizations, however, is that notions are defined with absolute precision within the formal realm and that they therefore may be implementable in software (draft 12).

Ugh!

Svenonius, Elaine. “Reference vs. Added Entries.” [link] Paper presented at Authority Control in the 21st Century: An Invitational Conference, Dublin, OH, March 31-April 1, 1996. [originally read 11 May 2007].

Directly suggested to me by Bryan Clark Campbell [Sorry, Bryan. Losing my mind.]. I just wish this paper didn’t end in the “middle.” Not sure how much is really missing, but it clearly ends abruptly.

Tuesday – Wednesday, 14 – 15 Aug

Raber, Douglas. The Problem of Information: An Introduction to Information Science. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 2003.

Ch. 10. on “Information as a Social Phenomenon.”

Wednesday, 15 Aug

Jin, Qiang. “Eliminating redundant entries in bibliographic records.” Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services 29 (2005): 412-424.

Also suggested by Bryan Campbell along the same lines as Svenonius, that is, pulling apart the function of references vs. added entries.

Thursday, 16 Aug

Ellis, David. “The Physical and Cognitive Paradigms in Information Retrieval Research.” Journal of Documentation 48 (1), March 1992: 45-64.

Cited by Raber, ch. 9 en15, regarding the physical and cognitive paradigms not exhausting the ways in which to think about information as a theoretical object.

I guess I should add that I read a little of David Bade’s The Theory and Practice of Bibliographic Failure, Or, Misinformation in the Information Society each day. I guess you could label it my “bus ride” book, although I do read it on a few other occasions. One shouldn’t rush through a book on errors, though, it seems to me. T’would be an error; would it not?

Friday – Saturday, 17 – 18 Aug

Frohmann, Bernd. “The Power of Images: A Discourse Analysis of the Cognitive Viewpoint.” Journal of Documentation 48 (4), December 1992: 365-386.

OMG! If only Raber could write like this. At least he cited it 4 times in ch. 10.

Lots of connection to Dr. Richard Stivers’ work and the things I did with him. Will have to go back and re-read a few things of his.

This is an incredible analysis of the cognitive viewpoint in LIS.

Highly recommended, but you really ought to read up a bit on the cognitive viewpoint first. Frohmann does outline it, of course, but in a fairly cursory way. I would not have been as impressed with the analysis if I hadn’t already had a good idea of what was being critiqued.

Saturday, 18 Aug

Robertson, S. E. “Between Aboutness and Meaning.” The Analysis of meaning : informatics 5 : proceedings of a conference held by the Aslib Informatics Group and the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group, 26-28 March 1979, The Queen’s College, Oxford. Maxine MacCafferty and Kathleen Gray, eds. London : Aslib, 1979: 202-205.

Cited by Raber, ch. 7, “Representation of Information,” en5, p. 133. “On one hand we can say that the purpose of information retrieval systems has little to do with answering questions, satisfying needs, or even resolving anomalous states of knowledge. Rather, its ultimate purpose is to retrieve texts that will help users of the system do these things.”

This is what this short paper claims, but I’m thinking this is a bit narrow. Perhaps it is because I am, in a sense, inside the system, but I often use our systems as a typical user and as a cataloger (another kind of user) to do just that. I frequently look up a surrogate of an item (on the web and in the OPAC) to answer a question, satisfy a need, and/or resolve an ASK. I have no real desire in the document itself sometimes, just in a specific piece of metadata about it. For instance, I may look up a record of an item so I can import it into Zotero. Or, I may need to know if we have a previous edition of an item so I can assign the same call no. Or, do we have another item on this topic by the same author so I begin with the same cutter. In these cases, I could care less about retrieving the item itself.

As we expand our concept of information retrieval systems beyond the idea of an OPAC and databases these sorts of examples should proliferate. How about it? Can anyone think of any other examples of using an IR system (typical library or web 2.0 or otherwise) in a more direct fashion? That is, not to retrieve the document or text but to answer the question directly, resolve an ASK, etc.

Looking something up in Wikipedia fails as one is retrieving a document there. I guess one could argue that the surrogate that I retrieve in the OPAC is also a document. Sure. In one sense, I agree. But I think that’s fundamentally different than a Wikipedia article, say. And I think if I let the above view off the hook so easily then we are unnecessarily restricting our vision of what an IR system can be and be used for.

Any thoughts?

This morning I read a post at Nicole Engard’s blog, What I Learned Today…, about a Library Camp session. The post is titled “Library Camp – Weinberger & Cataloging.”

Before I begin, I want to make explicit that I am not picking on Nicole, the participants in this session, or anyone in particular. I may well use a few straw man arguments. I am not claiming that anyone is making these specific arguments, or that they might not nuance things a bit more if pressed.

My concern, though, is that they are making assumptions about language, language use, human behavior, and transferable benefits for which they have nothing but anecdotal evidence. By allowing these (usually) unstated assumptions to stand, they are, at best, collapsing some very important distinctions and, at worst, are, in effect, making the arguments I am suggesting.

This is one of those things that has been niggling away at me for a while which I have been unable to formulate coherently. Again, I am not claiming that anyone is overtly making these arguments; only that they are assuming too much. Nicole’s post and some of those cited in it are only “guilty” of helping me finally sort out my thinking some on this. There is much of value reported in Nicole’s post and it sounds like it was an interesting discussion. Thank you, Nicole.

I want to state from the start that I am for tagging. I tag. In many places. For several reasons. I am not advocating an either/or position. I want formal cataloging for resources that require that level (I should say, those levels) of description, and I want tagging for pretty much all resources.

A few quotes in particular that are useful to my concerns:

• - Our users don’t think in subject headings (Kate)
• - People tag for personal reasons – allowing them to build meaningful collections for themselves. (John Blyberg)
• - Will patrons really come in and tag items? The power users who are passionate about something will come in and tag. Those casual users may not be tagging, but they’re benefiting from the tags. While it’s just power users tagging – they’re still not librarians – they’ll use the lingo that most people understand – the tags are not just geared toward them like subject headings are just understandable by librarians.

Minor issues first:

I am fairly certain that the vast majority of catalogers do not think in subject headings, either. The same holds for most librarians. Are we more adept in using them than the typical patron? Certainly. Can we employ them—perhaps even, “think in them”—when it is a good tactic for us to do so? Certainly.

Actually, this statement is so removed from the context in which it was uttered that I probably shouldn’t say anything. But my point—admittedly purely anecdotal—is that likely no one “thinks” in subject headings. We think about subject headings, when and as appropriate. And maybe (most?) of our users do not. Maybe the distinction that I am trying to draw is “pure semantics” in some folks’ book. OK. I am talking about meaning; I’m perfectly happy with it being a semantic distinction.

Based on some of the research that is beginning to come out (E.g., M. Kipp, J. Abbas), and on anecdote, people tag for a variety of reasons. Some of these are personal and some are social. I am overjoyed to see the realization that tagging is not only social as many seemed to think initially. But let’s please not go too far the other direction. There are multiple reasons that people tag, and they are not all personal. Various reasons are often employed synchronously and they will often be hard to pull apart. Again, this is minor.

My major concerns are about the assumptions contained in the last quoted bullet point.

(Some of the) Assumptions:

• Librarians and all others constitute some sort of natural and distinct classes.
• Librarians are of a different language use community than others.
• Powers users/taggers and casual users are of the same language use community.
• Non-tagging users benefit from the tagging of others.
• Non-tagging users (and power users) do not benefit from traditional subject cataloging.
• Subject headings are understandable only by librarians. (Explicitly stated here.)

Keep in mind that I am critiquing many “arguments” that I have seen along these lines. I am sure that I have failed to extrapolate a few from this example and that—if I wasn’t too lazy to go find them—I could obtain more assumptions from other examples. I’m fairly sure that we’ve all seen a few examples like this one, though. [And I am generally using the language used in the post. I do not necessarily equate power users with taggers.]

I do not think that any of these assumptions can stand without real empirical data. I am more than willing to accept that (some) non-tagging users benefit from the tagging of others, but only if folks are also willing to accept that (some) users also benefit from traditional subject cataloging. The amount(s) and type(s) of benefit from each and for certain users in specific contexts is certainly an open empirical question, or set of questions more likely.

But my concern is the unstated AND between those two assumptions as I listed them.

As for the assumption (outright statement in this example) that subject headings are understandable only by librarians … well, that is simply ludicrous

Yes. There are certainly problems with various forms of subject headings, although I imagine the main issue is with LCSH. You will not find me doing a lot of defense of LCSH in its current instantiation. You will find me defending using controlled vocabularies (and other means) as appropriate for subject indexing. LCSH has many problems, as will any controlled vocabulary, especially one attempting to cover such a broad spectrum of topics. But uncontrolled vocabularies also have problems. They generally have other problems, which is one reason why we need both.

But to say that only librarians understand subject headings goes completely against the experiences of many library users of the last 100 years! Yes, they can be difficult. Especially in this day and age when we are all agreeing that people only want to dump one or two keywords into Google and be done.

But see. I don’t agree with that. And if I could learn to use the card catalog at the age of 5 then so can others who are not librarians. And please do not tell me that I must have used the Author file because you would generally be wrong. I was 5 years old! How familiar could I have been with “the literature.” Perhaps I could look up Syd Hoff, Dr. Seuss (See …), and a few others, but they certainly did not exhaust the topics I was interested in. Yes, topics. Displayed (and searched!) in a card catalog by subject headings and subject strings. No keyword searching allowed. So I must have “understood” subject headings, or at least how they worked. As do many others!

As for this binary division of the language community:

First off, to assume that there is one homogeneous community of language use within librarianship is simply laughable. Many of my good librarian friends and I would do better talking about TV shows (which I do not watch) than trying to communicate about our respective areas of librarianship. There are many communities of language use within librarianship!

By the way, please do not assume that I would be happy with a division of librarianship into catalogers and others. I would not! Take a 5-minute glance at AUTOCATs recent archives, for example, to see how vastly many communities there are even within catalogers. We are not all the same either!

To assume that there is a division of language use between librarians and all others is also fairly laughable. Two primary reasons. First, see two paragraphs above. Second, we ARE the others. We all belong to many different communities of interest and practice. We all belong to multiple language communities.

Yes. I fully realize that there seems to be some sort of difference between librarians and users. Call it professionalization or something else. We do—sometimes—speak differently. Just as I would speak differently if I was to discuss role-playing games than would someone who does not. There are good reasons for this. And, yes, it often gets in the way. But I am more than willing to totally ignore this with anyone who is willing to assume that this difference is greater than any of the other language differences between ourselves, our users, and our users and us.

Even if, and especially if, you disagree with me about the importance and location of these differences in language use then the burden is on you to show that the power user/tagger and casual user (non-tagging tag user) are in the same language use community. In fact, I maintain that this is one of the most critical points that needs to be shown by research in tagging.

Language in use (overt behavior) is pretty much all we have to go on regarding the study of people’s use of language. It seems pretty clear to me that the null hypothesis in this situation ought to be that these are (at least) two different language using communities based on the overt display of their use of language.

Taggers tag. They apply language to describe and otherwise label information resources. Whatever kind(s) of analysis employed, whatever reason(s) they do so, whatever benefit(s) they perceive for themselves or others … they use language to assign, attribute, credit, impute, associate, link, relate, classify, et. al. things with words. (These words may well be concepts, but that is a whole ‘nuther ball game.)

Non-tagging users of others’ tags do none of that. They use the labels, categories, links, etc. that others have assigned. No matter whether they use others’ tag or others’ formal subject analysis they are using decontextualized language. I would argue, though, that use of tagging (by others) is more decontextualized than, say, LCSH.*

This seems to me to be two vastly different (overt, demonstrated) ways of using language. On what basis can we even begin to say that they are the same (“they’re still not librarians – they’ll use the lingo that most people understand”) language using community? Please. Can anyone actually support this contention?

Also. Many taggers are librarians. I have no idea what percentage of taggers are librarians, nor do I have any idea what percentage of librarians are taggers. But until someone who wants to make these assumptions that I am critiquing proves otherwise, I am going to assume that the percentage of librarians who tag is higher than that of taggers in the general population.

Some of us taggers are even catalogers. You know, those people who think in subject headings. This seems to me to put those folks (me, for instance) in the same language using community as the taggers, but not that of the non-taggers. “Dang, what happened to my black and white divisions?,” you should be asking about now.

My point is not that there is nothing at all valid in these assumptions. There may well be, and probably is. But they are also highly flawed, and when they remain unstated and more importantly, unquestioned, they are dangerous. They blind us towards other ways of looking at the situation because we have already (unquestioningly) assumed that the situation is some way it may not, in fact, be. They are, to put it simply, simplistic.

The main point is that the world is not this simple. You cannot simply divide it into “us and them.” Language use, religious belief, sexual preference, whatever. Binary divisions rarely exist, except as unquestioned beliefs in individual minds.

• All librarians do not speak the same language.
• Nor are those languages always and completely different than that of users.
• I maintain that anyone making the assumption that taggers and non-tagging tag users are of the same language community while librarians are not is making a major mistake.
• People tag for lots of reasons. Some are personal, some are social. Pulling these apart will be hard, and often impossible.
• I am not arguing for a solipsistic view of language. I believe that we generally do manage to communicate. But whether you call them communities, sub-communities, jargons, argots, or whatever, we all belong to multiple language use communities.

So can we please stop with all the anecdotes and, in particular, those founded on faulty assumptions? A simple perusal of an article such as “Folksonomies: Tidying Up Tags?” by Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin ought to persuade anyone that even considering the power users/taggers as a single, coherent language community is a non-starter.

Again, I’d like to thank Nicole and those she cited for helping me clarify my thinking.

* This is due to the fact that—with a little work—some context can be retrieved from working with a group of resources that have been assigned LCSH. Some tagging systems also allow for some retrieval of context with a bit of work, but many do not. This could change as our systems—both formal and informal—evolve. My point is simply that none of this is simple.

Sunday, 5 Aug

Gnoli, Claudio. “Progress in synthetic classification: Towards a unique definition of concepts.” UDC Seminar: The Hague: 4-5 June 2007. Preprint of the paper published in Extensions & corrections to the UDC, 29, 2007. Available at dLIST.

Tuesday, 7 Aug

Miksa, Shawne. “You Need My Metadata: Demonstrating the Value of Library Cataloging (A Response to the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control). pdf

Rest of week, read more in both:

Raber, Douglas. The Problem of Information: An Introduction to Information Science. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 2003.

Bade, David W. The Theory and Practice of Bibliographic Failure, Or, Misinformation in the Information Society. City of the Red Hero [Ulaanbaatar]: Chuluunbat, 2004.

Saturday, 11 Aug

Hjørland, Birger. “Information: Objective or Subjective/Situational?” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 (10): 1448-1456, 2007.

An interesting article, which consists primarily of showing that the view of information put forward by Marcia Bates in two recent articles is ill-suited to LIS.

It seems JASIST is also slipping into weak editing. So far it is minor, and I hope it doesn’t go any further. [Found a bit more in the next article I read today from JASIST. ]

Also good in that it influenced me to track down many of its citations. Yay! I love productive sources.

I have one gripe with something Hjørland writes. Honestly, though, it is something I am noticing in lots of places lately. Raber is prolific at it, particularly in his ch. 9 on relevance. I had intended to critique that chapter but may let it go in the spirit of vacationing.

Here is the quote from Hjørland:

To say about something that it is informative means that this thing may answer a question for somebody. The informativeness is thus a relation between the question and the thing. No thing is inherently informative. To consider something information is thus always to consider it as informative in relation to some possible questions (1451, emphasis in original).

No! No! No! No!

I agree with everything in those statements except the reliance on question answering. Information does not only answer questions and may, in fact, often only generate them. It also “does” other things. Information may impact us, it affects us, it may even change us, and it can answer questions, and/or generate them.

Perhaps Hjørland only means that a post hoc conditional can be constructed along the lines of, “If P had had this question, then this information would have answered it.” These sorts of post hoc conditionals could be constructed for the other things information “does” in my view, also. But they are wrong and useless. At best, they confuse the matter as to what kind of theoretical entity information is. They are philosophical child’s play and serve no useful function in the kind of analysis we need. I am not claiming that they are not useful constructs in other situations and/or arenas.

I do not think Hjørland means this, though, as it would seem to run counter to some of the arguments I have seen him make. I also (like to) imagine that he would agree with an expanded role for information than just answering questions. Thus, despite the natural tendency to collapse nuances, and the limited space in a peer-reviewed journal article, can we please not do this when the point is to explicate the concept itself?

Raber (see above) does something similar at one point in his chapter on relevance (ch. 9):

At this point, from the perspective of a user of information, the conceptual distinction between relevance and pertinence breaks down. Information is either useful or it isn’t (186, emphasis mine).

No! No! No! I do agree with his analysis of the break down between relevance and pertinence for the user. I do not agree, though, that, even from the user’s perspective, information is either useful or not.

What possible definition of “useful” could one possibly be using that is this broad? I accept that many people think that one this broad exists; I do not think there is a useful definition of “useful” that is so broad, though. [I am well aware of what I just did, but I think I can rely on you to properly parse what I meant. Isn't language lovely?]

A second issue with using this term (and probably most others one could find) is that it immediately becomes, “Useful (or whatever) from whose perspective?” Well, we were considering it from the user’s personal perspective, so …. There is much that I would personally consider as relevant to me that I would not define as “useful.” While you might use that term, and I might also in the same sort of post hoc conditional that I critiqued above, I would use a much narrower term to describe the effect, or the relevance, of the information on or to me. Perhaps one could consider such terms synonyms from a gross perspective, but that gross conflation of terms is one I find not very relevant.

I am having a hard time finding specific examples that others might accept. [One of my weaknesses which needs addressing if I am going to continue in my analytical mode....] The best I can express my point at the moment is to say that human language and psychology are both far too complex to reduce the fact that something is relevant to some individual to its being useful to them. That is, it may be anything but useful at the time and only later come to be described as useful. Perhaps, rarely, never to be so described by the said individual. Thus, any attribution of “usefulness” is made by another, which has already been shown as irrelevant to the individual user.

My argument as to broadening information past simply answering questions applies to relevance. That is, something is relevant to us if it affects us, impacts us, or changes us, and not just if we find it useful.

I think Raber actually knows this as displayed later in the same chapter.

Given what we have discussed so far, we must now ask what difference does the use of information make to me? Am I any different after its use? Note that I need not be any better off for using information for it to be relevant. In the presentation of relevance, the only issue is whether or not the use of information will change me, my situation, or both (189, emphasis mine).

By the way, I think a large part of the issue here (above) is this use of the concept of “use.” Clearly, we can often be said to use information, but I do not think all of our interactions with information can be adequately described by this concept. It is far too general a concept and, perhaps, implies intention to use. I vehemently disagree that all of our interactions with information involve intention.

Raber adds a few pages later:

If, on the other hand, the text leads me to change anything about my thinking, i.e., it makes a difference to me, then the text becomes relevant information (191).

Hmm? So are all differences to me useful differences?

I apologize if much of this thinking seems highly confused. It is. And I do not like it. But I am (have been, really) embarking on a serious quest to understand the most fundamental concepts in our field and how they “work” in reality, that is, with real individual experiencing subjects who are situated in a social (and historical and political) context.

We, as a field and as a society, have inherited some really flawed ways of viewing many things, but most importantly, for the work we do, we have a seriously flawed view of how language is employed.

Most of our fundamental concepts, and the concepts we use to talk about them, are highly complex, and confusing. Concepts such as information, relevance, aboutness and meaning that are key to what we do in LIS are a complete mess. We generally get by using them in everyday life because the implications of (minor) differences in use have little consequence, but in our field it is different. Those difference in use have almost completely stifled our field. All of these terms have objective (and/or inter-subjective) and subjective components. The same goes for use and many of the other terms we employ when talking about our core concepts.

I am currently unable to say exactly why, but I feel (and think) that these differences in use of our core theoretical concepts are today of much greater import than they were in the not too distant professional past. Something about the interaction of people and information, how much of it is available, from many more sources, shifting notions of authority and authorship, etc. are making these conceptual issues of far greater import.

I was just finishing reading Raber’s ch. 9 and was coming to the conclusion that perhaps in LIS that it is OK to talk (primarily) about the use of information, seeing as how we are dealing primarily with recorded knowledge. I still felt that was too narrow, but that perhaps we should narrow down a bit on the types of information we are really concerned with. But Raber made me regroup.

These needs then begin as something felt rather than something thought. As of now we really don’t know how or why we become conscious of and capable of articulating needs as complex as the need for information. …

Given a human reality that is necessarily constructed from the not always knowable or predictable relations between self and others, we must grant that the final goal of information seekers may be as affective as cognitive. … To be meaningful, information science must be inclusive. It must focus its attention on a wide variety of information, information users, and information use if it is to assert a legitimate claim to be a science about all information and its users (199, emphasis in original).

So perhaps library science can retreat to explicit information use (although I do not think so), but information science a la Raber cannot! I do think information science needs to rein itself in some as to what kinds of information and information use it considers its domain (see Hjørland article above for some of the ideas that make me think this). Nonetheless, both library and information science need to consider information in its non-formally recorded modes and also its interactions with individual users in a sense broader than “use.”

Fonseca, Frederico. “The Double Role of Ontologies in Information Science Research.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 (6): 786-793, 2007.