Category Archives: Organizations

Library-related professional organizations

ASIS&T 2007 Annual Meeting Sessions, part 1

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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

18th Annual SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, 20 Oct 2007, Milwaukee, WI

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This was an all-day workshop focusing “on the enduring aspects of classification/subject analysis and the presence of those aspects in commonly used methods, especially those we encounter in our daily lives” (program). Papers are available in DLIST.

Welcome from Joan Lussky, Program Chair.

Keynote, Hope Olson, “Cultural infrastructure: the story of how classification came to shape our lives.” [Word doc available at DLIST]

3 main features of classification:

  • mutually exclusive categories
  • teleology
  • hierarchy

Mutually exclusive categories

  • began (traceably, at least) with Parmenides – “what is is, what is not …”
  • Jean d’Alembert – Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedie – impenetrability
  • Durkheim & Mauss – determined lines of demarcation

Teleology – Plato

  • not sure of the direct connection on this one as got caught up in her loose use of “teleology” and made no notes here. People are certainly free to do what they want with words, but if they are going to take a technical word from one domain and use it differently in another then they ought to carefully explain what they mean by it. Dr. Olson uses “teleology” frequently but with what meaning exactly? If she means that all classifications have a purpose then that is, no doubt, very true and important to remind people of. But that use is vastly broader than what Plato meant and would be much more clearly conveyed by simply saying that all classifications have and serve a purpose. This kind of (mis)attribution of a newer use of a term or phrase to someone previous is something Dr. Olson perfected in The Power to Name. It is also what caused me to stop reading a bit over halfway through.

Bacon – Hegel – Harris – Dewey

Aristotle – Hierarchy via Syllogism

more on hierarchy

classificatory tentacles reach beyond philosophy

Classification is ubiquitous – lots of interesting stuff on planetary classification, hurricane classification(s), race and vital statistics, the ICD, American Time Use SUrvey’s Activity Lexicon, etc.

Where next?

  • non-bibliographic classifications give insight to classificatory structure
  • some research has already begun, e.g., Cheryl Knott Malone on the NAICS

Questions:

Barbara Kwasnik – planets – instances vs. classes

Dagobert Soergel – mutual exclusivity is almost always artificial. (Amen!)

Cherly Knott Malone – planet example is great in relation to Hope’s early work, i.e., the “classical planets” are those from Earthling’s perspective

Morning lead speaker, Emma Tonkin, “Signal and noise: Social construction and representation.” [Word doc available in DLIST]

Em had to rush through her presentation in spots and there is much on language in it so I will sit down and give it a close reading before commenting on it. Based on the presentation I can and will recommend it.

Pengyi Zhang, “Supporting sense-making with tools for structuring a concept space: A proposal for design and evaluation.” [Word doc available from DLIST]

Not much to say on this one based on the presentation. Could be a good idea but we are a long way and several design cycles away from anything that does better than just getting in the way. And what about non-web-based sources?

Tiffany Smith, “Cataloging and you: Measuring the efficacy of a folksonomy for subject analysis.” [Word doc available at DLIST]

Compared LCSH versus top tags for 5 books in LibraryThing.

Five minute madness – descriptions of the posters and why we should be interested in them

Hur-Li Lee, et. al. “Reflecting and shaping world views: Historical treatments in classification.” [Word doc available at DLIST]

Erik Mitchell, “Organization as meta-literacy: Evaluating student use of metadata and information organization principles in the classroom.” [Word doc available in DLIST]

Bradley Wade Bishop, “Organizing geographic information: the creation of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure.” [Word doc available in DLIST]

Melinda Whetstone, ” Status of health information classification for consumer information retrieval.” [Word doc available in DLIST]

Lunch and posters

Thomas Dousa, “Everything old is new again: perspectivism and polyhierarchy in Julius Otto Kaiser’s theory of systematic indexing.” [Word doc available at DLIST]

Excellent paper and presentation that shows the value of a century old view of indexing that has much relevance for today due to its view of perspectivism and polyhierarchy.

Mikel Breitenstein, “Push and pull in ‘the attention economy.’” [Word doc available in DLIST]

While interesting, what was the connection? Sure, on one description we do live in an attention economy. But seeing as it was pointed out that this view “presents a questionable world social model” and that it “separates need from want,” that is, the “poor need attention” and the “wealthy want attention,” why should we in IS consider it a valid model in any respect? And, again, what is the connection to classification?

Afternoon break

Afternoon lead speaker, Corinne Jörgensen, “Image access, the semantic gap, and social tagging as a paradigm shift.” [Word doc available at DLIST]

Semantic gap takes many forms – her use is as the difference between the description of an object in different languages, e.g., a picture of an apple vs. a histogram of the image. [Except while a photograph may qualify as a description of the object photographed, it is debatable. In what way can a histogram of a photograph be said to be a description of the apple?]

Images are multivalent

While I am not a physicist by any means, uses “entropy” in a way completely counter to my understanding, and to the use by Bates in her 2005 and 2006 articles on the definition of information. Is this another case of people expropriating concepts from other domains and then using them in ways in which they were not meant to be used. My guess is that her use comes via or through the Shannon model of communication and gets torqued in that way.

Caroline Beebe, “Bridging the semantic gap: exploring descriptive vocabulary for image structure.” [Word doc available in DLIST]

Disconnect between the:

  • physical data (binary code)
  • conceptual interpretation (intellectual code of the searcher)

Cheryl Knott Malone, “When more is better: a counter-narrative regarding keyword and subject retrieval in digitized diaries.” [Word doc available in DLIST]

“Just read it.” Well, no. Read it and think about it.

Wrap-up: Lussky, Jörgensen, Olson, Tonkin

Jörgensen: Due to entropy, the organization of information causes loss of information [see my comment above on her paper]. What are the limits of each technique?

Olson: Two themes:

  • Context (social, cultural, individual, disciplinary)
  • Structure, or lack thereof

So, “how are context and structure related?”

All in all, an interesting day.

Quick update

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[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.

Wistful and confused

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I know I’ve been pretty quiet lately. Lots going on and not so well physically. I just seem to stay sick anymore.

Lots of things happening, though.

Bibliography class

I have a topic for my Bibliography class and I’m making great progress collecting things and entering them into Zotero. I’ve read a few previously and I read the earliest one Monday eve. I’m not yet ready to discuss my topic here for a couple reasons, but I will. As for the fancy web-based ideas I’m not counting on them happening for this project.

I am excited about being able to read this body of literature chronologically, though. It will be a vastly different experience from my normal habits.

I am focusing on one author and will attempt to situate his work (0verall themes, where drawing from, where pointing to) within the overall context of our discipline. I am starting to get a grasp on some of the overall themes, “paradigms,” and so on in the field thanks to all my reading. I hope to write an introductory essay that will sketch some of this out while firmly situating my author’s perspective(s) within it.

Zotero and Web of Knowledge/Science

Anybody out there using Zotero also using ISI’s Web of Knowledge/Science and able to get usable citations out and into Zotero? Zotero’s site claims they work with ISI but I have been unable to get anything out that Zotero will recognize.

Programming class

Just getting started with Python was really kicking my butt until yesterday evening, but I finally made a breakthrough and then made some real progress. I’m pretty sure I met all the requirements for my 1st program and it’s 9 days early. :)

I doubt it will stay this way but here’s hoping there’ll be similar breakthroughs.

Job applications

Due to budget issues, the position I was asked to apply for was put on hold until February at the earliest (along with a few other positions). I’m not sure how I feel about this exactly, but it does complicate life some. For one thing, as much as I would love the other position I applied for, I only did so because I was applying for the other. I figured that if I was applying for a job before I was really ready to then I might as well apply for a second. And since the second seemed perfect, well….

That job is at a much smaller school, though, so I imagine they are having a hard time getting the search committee together to meet at the start of the fall semester. As much as they wanted someone to start right away they may not be able to pull that off.

And if anyone from this school is reading, I am perfect for your job and would love to work with you. My above comment is only in relation to the actual decision to begin applying and not about choosing what to apply to.

The P-word

The P-word has been cropping up a lot again lately. I have also discovered an interest that is easily P-level work—if I am capable of it—and which is really calling my name. I feel like I need to strap myself to the mast and plug my ears.

[Had a nice talk with my advisor today (most of this post was written last night) and the P-word has again been banished. Whew! In fact, despite my earlier concerns over doing this topic as my CAS "project" we have decided that it is a wonderful fit.]

Confusion reigns.

Ex moving away

Friday evening I’m heading to Normal to help my ex and her boyfriend load up a moving van for their move to Georgia (his home). They’ve been talking about this for a while now and it’s finally truly happening.

I’m not sure how I feel about all this. I know I’m supposed to hate my ex but I don’t. In fact, I love her very much (and her boyfriend). We are all good friends. No; I am not in love with her and have not been for well before we were divorced. But she is important to me.

Since Sara went off to college over 5 years ago, the ex has been my only family member living anywhere near me. Heck, I have been using her as my emergency contact since she was by far the closest to me physically. Now I’m truly going to be all alone in the (local) world.

I don’t like it.

ACRL@UIUC

Karla and I did our best to get the ACRL student chapter reinvigorated this year, and while we seemed to have lots of people interested in academic and research libraries at orientation and Orgapalooza we played hell getting people to volunteer to be officers. Elections finally opened yesterday. Yay!

Karla and I both have a lot of things going on in our lives and we have given and given over the years. We did what we could this year out of a feeling of duty. [And I despise duty ethics!] We are the only two long-term members still around and we want to see this chapter flourish again and, perhaps, spawn a few others. While neither of us is interested in being officers, we can (and will) provide lots of guidance and even spearhead a few things. We started seeding the ACRL@UIUC Moodle space with suggestions and started collecting meeting times that would work for folks once we had officers to get things moving.

  • Interested in the 1st year academic librarian experience? Who do you think knows most of the 1st year academic librarians at UIUC? They were (mostly) Karla and my classmates.
  • Want to visit the Circus Collection at ISU, or ISU as a possibly more typical academic library setting than UIUC? Who worked there for 6 years and still has lots of friends there?
  • Interested in the idea of the Information/Learning Commons or gaming in academic libraries or any of the other innovative things happening in the UIUC Undergraduate Library?

We can do much of this legwork and/or putting people in contact with the right people. So I’m very glad to see us moving forward.

Good and bad

As usual, there is much not being said although, in this case, most is on different but related topics.

Clearly there is much good in amongst the bad. And this is not to claim that there is no middle. Me; I’m no 2.0topian nor a Luddite. There is a middle, or should I say there are middles?

I am grateful for friends, near and far. I am grateful to have an advisor who doesn’t push me to do things I’m not ready to do, but who believes in me nonetheless.

ASIS&T Annual 2007 is soon and I’ll get to see some of those dear far friends. I’ll also get to rub elbows with some of the “names” in our profession. Hopefully this year I’ll be a little less shy about approaching some of them. [Reminder to self and others: They have always been gracious.]

I just wish I could be well for a while.

And I sure as hell wish I hadn’t “woke up” to find myself all alone (in a direct sense) this close to the mid-century mark.

Confused and wistful; wistful and confused. Pick one.

Some things read this week, 2 – 8 September 2007

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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.

Some things read this week, 19 – 25 August 2007

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Saturday evening, 18 Aug

Nhat Hanh, Thich. Peace is every step : the path of mindfulness in everyday life. New York N.Y.: Bantam Books, 1991.

Finally got back to some of this.

Sunday, 19 Aug

Three NISO standards are up for reaffirmation so I read these this morning to provide my input:

ANSI/NISO Z39.77-2001 Guidelines for Information About Preservation Products

Abstract: Specifies the information that should be included in advertisements, catalogs, and promotional material for products used for the storage, binding, or repair of library materials, including books, pamphlets, sound recordings, videotapes, films, compact disks, manuscripts, maps, and photographs.

ANSI/NISO Z39.79-2001 Environmental Conditions for Exhibiting Library and Archival Materials

Abstract: Establishes criteria to minimize the effects of environmental factors on the deterioration of library and archival materials on exhibit. Specific parameters are recommended for exposure to light, relative humidity, temperature, gaseous and particulate contaminants, display techniques, and case and support materials composition.

ANSI/NISO Z39.82-2001 Title Pages for Conference Publications

Abstract: Explains how to structure title page information for conference publications so metadata and bibliographic citations can readily access the publications. The standard applies to all disciplines, to all conferences (e.g., meetings, symposia, institutes, colloquia, workshops), and to all formats (e.g., printed documents, videos, Web sites). It applies to published conference proceedings in various manifestations (e.g., papers, abstracts, summaries) and in all languages, subjects, and formats.

Z39-77 and Z39.82 are quite interesting in that we are attempting to tell others what to do. Now, yes, if they do what we ask then it should be mutually beneficial.

Libraries are more likely to buy a company’s products if they can easily identify that it meets their needs. There are a few more benefits I could guess at but they would all be highly related to the first. Seems to be a fairly direct benefit to those wanting to sell preservation products to libraries.

The benefits to publishers/distributors of conference proceedings provided by accurate cataloging of their products by libraries seems a fair bit less direct, though. Sure. There’s the random, odd freak like me who likes to buy his own copies of these things after discovering them in the library, but I truly have to wonder what carrot we have to offer publishers to follow these guidelines. And what is the compliance rate? And then there’s the citation formats, and they do some vastly different things even when a proceedings follows this standard to the letter.

Interesting stuff, nonetheless.

Litwin, Rory (mostly). Library Juice Concentrate. Duluth, Minn: Library Juice Press, 2006.

Read the introductory matter and “Section One: Foundation Building,” which includes (all by Litwin except as noted):

  • “The Library Juice Manifesto.”
  • “Neutrality, Objectivity, and the Political Center.”
  • “Classic and Neo-Information.”
  • “Why Our Relevance Lies in Not Being Information Professionals.”
  • “Questioning the Techie Mission.”
  • “Print Virtue and the Ontology of Bo-ring.”
  • Rosenzweig, Mark. “Aspects of a Humanist Approach to Librarianship… A Contribution to a Philosophical Foundation.”

I believe that I read them all in their original manifestations (not sure about the Rosenzweig), but there is value in re-reading them. Which is to say, that there is value in them.

If I had time I would love to engage with Rory at a deeper level, particularly on “Classic and Neo-Information” and “Why Our Relevance Lies in Not Being Information Professionals,” but I doubt either of us have time for that. I do look forward to meeting and talking with this clearly deeply thinking librarian someday.

If you have not read this material before then you ought to have a look. In the case that you do not prefer to read lengthy arguments, do not worry, as all of the above fits into less than 38 pages.

I do not expect you to agree entirely; if at all. I do not agree entirely. But I guarantee that it will make you think.

In the spirit of the old Library Juice serial, I leave you with one of Rory’s “Selected Quotes of the Week”:

The more we try to get a grip on information, the more it slips through our fingers like a ghost. Information, in fact, is the ghost of meaning, and our society’s worship of the ghost signals a continuing loss of meaning. – Stephen Talbot (quoted in Library Juice Concentrate, p. 197)

Tuesday, 21 Aug

Crawford, Walt. Cites & Insights 7 (10), September 2007

Wednesday, 22 Aug

Litwin, Rory. Library Juice Concentrate. See above.

Began Section Two: Librarianship: Professional Issues. Read:

  • Litwin, R., Luis Acosta, Mark Hudson, and Margaret Myers. “Critical Discussion of the Better Salaries Initiative of Mitch Freedman’s ALA Presidency.”
  • Litwin, R. “Undone by Flattery.”

There are some interesting points made by all in the Better Salaries discussion, but I have to wonder about something Luis Acosta wrote. At least at the time (mid-2003), Alcosta seemed to firmly believe in the looming, or even then extant, shortage of librarians and crisis in recruitment. He also made a direct connection between better pay and having an adequate number of MLS students. Perhaps perceived low pay is an issue in recruitment to the profession.

My main issue is with his contention that by having a large crop of entry-level workers to go into better paid positions when the huge crop of pending retirements happens library administrators will be less willing to replace these retiring librarians with non-MLS positions or not at all.

Besides all the other factors that go into whether or not a position is filled and with whom, and the problem of replacing (mostly) upper-level positions with entry-level ones, I really am having a hard time understanding just how having to pay more is going to positively effect whether management hires someone with an MLS. Seems the opposite is more likely.

Thursday, 23 Aug

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

Read Preface & ch. 1 “On Stipulative Definition.”

Friday, 24 Aug

Harris and Hutton. See above.

Read ch. 2 “On Definition and Common Usage” and ch. 3 “On Real Definition.”

Litwin. See above.

Finished Section Two: Librarianship: Professional Issues. Read:

  • Litwin, R. “On Google’s Monetization of Libraries.”
  • Litwin, R. “The Central Problem of Library 2.0: Privacy.”
  • “Rory Litwin interviews Barbara Tillett.”

Read all of these in their original manifestations, also.

Saturday, 25 Aug

Zelle, John M. Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science. Wilsonville, OR: Franklin, Beedle, 2004.

Finished ch. 1 (began Thurs. eve) and read ch. 2.

Litwin. See above.

Read Section Three: Intellectual Freedom and Media Independence and began Section four: Librarians: Culture and Identity:

Litwin, R. “Four Popular Errors About Free Speech …An Attack on Complacency and Dissociation.”

Oliphant, Tami. “The Invisibility of the Alternative Media.”

D’Adamo, Chuck. “Some Alternative Press History.”

Horne, Doug. “Information-Seeking During Wartime: Reconsidering the Role of the Library in Increasing User Sell-Sufficiency.”

Litwin, R. “A Librarian’s Confession.”

Downey, Allen, Jeff Elkner and Chris Meyers. How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python. Green Tea Press. [Ha ha, I was drinking green tea when I read this.] Available here in assorted forms.

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

Read the final chapter, “Semiotics for Information Science.”

What can I say about this book that I haven’t already over the last few weeks? I don’t really know. Perhaps a little recap will suffice.

This is, by far, the most poorly edited book I have read in an extremely long time! This is a shame.

I feel that this is an important book and yet I cannot recommend it. Perhaps in a discussion with a specific individual and for a specific purpose I might, but otherwise no.

I am glad I read it and I would like to own a copy for future referral, but I will wait until I can find a good used copy for cheap.

Style is certainly an individual thing, but I feel this could have been written much more clearly.

In its defense, it did provide me with a long list of references to many good sources.

According to the Preface, this “book was written with beginning LIS students in mind; it should be accompanied by the reading of contemporary journal articles from the literature of information science” (vii).

I wholeheartedly disagree! Please do not inflict this book on beginning LIS students. And while I do agree that it must be read along with accompanying articles I question the use of contemporary. If this means the last 40 years (at least), then OK. If that means more like 5-8 years then No. Many of the important articles to this discussion are not exactly what I’d call contemporary, although there certainly are some.

LITA membership update

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Perhaps there are “better” ways to affect change than those I sometimes use. The truth is, I did not really expect any change on my behalf; I did want it for others, though. But, it seems my griping was noticed and change is happening.

I got a nice phone call today from Mary Taylor, Executive Director of LITA, regarding some comments I had made about having not heard a word in any manner from LITA for 6 months after I joined.

Proactive steps are being taken to keep this from happening again. Thanks to Mary’s efforts I will be sticking around LITA for a while longer and hopefully even looking to get involved once I sort out this little life of mine.

Some odd current in the ether or something caused a fairly major problem with my LITA membership. None of us are quite sure what it was but, as I said, steps are being taken to prevent it from happening to anyone else and I have been personally welcomed into the LITA family.

It seems like the right thing to do to say this publicly. I am grateful that this might not happen to anyone in the future. Thank you, Mary (and those who will implement the new procedures), for reaching out and for reminding me that there are people who do care.

P.S. I have added a new comment to the few places I commented/posted on this so that others know that I consider this situation happily resolved. If anyone is aware of one I missed please do let me know so that I can set the record straight.

AACR2r is an ALA Bestseller!

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Perhaps I missed this in earlier editions, but according to my ALA Editions Spring/Summer 2007 catalog that arrived a few days ago I see that AACR2r is an ALA Bestseller! [That ! is their's, not mine.]

While I have no doubt that this is factually true—my guess is that it is even their biggest bestseller of all time—just what information is that knowledge supposed to convey to me, or anyone else?

Telling me that Carrie Russell’s Complete Copyright: An Everyday Guide for Librarians, or even that Robert Maxwell’s Maxwell’s Handbook for AACR2: Explaining and Illustrating the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, through the 2003 Update are bestsellers actually tells me something.

I’ll leave it up to you to determine whether and what the knowledge that AACR2r is a bestseller imparts to you and whether it is useful, or positive.

ASIS&T 2007 Annual Meeting program posted

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Thanks to Christina, I was alerted to the posting of the program for this years ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Milwaukee in Oct.

It looks really exciting! Some time slots have a lot of competition for my attention, some not so much. I also know my interests will change some between now and mid-Oct. Nonetheless, it looks like my poor brain will be overloaded with amazing amounts of information.

The full-day, Friday pre-conference, Taxonomies in Search, looks like it could be amazing but this kid doesn’t have $245 on top of conference registration!

Saturday, is the SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop pre-conference.

This half-day pre-conference on Sunday, Information Architecture 3.0 with Peter Morville looks good. But $300 for a half-day? Hahahaha. Dude, I already bought that piece of crap “find me” book of yours! People tell me Morville is a librarian; I say he is a huckster. I guess when I can charge people $600/day to hang out with me then I’ll be a professional librarian and not a minute sooner. Update: This is far too much money for me to pay, but my overly snide comments were perhaps inappropriate. My current state precludes me from deciding if they truly constitute a “nasty personal attack” or not. Either way, they were found offensive by the subject and for that I truly apologize.

On to the real conference and people more on my level:

Sunday, Oct. 21

Dang it! June Abbas is up against Michael Buckland, et. al. Tagging vs. History and foundations applied to the current situation (you know, that little bugaboo of mine).

The late afternoon session looks a little weaker as regards my interests, but crossword puzzles could be interesting.

Monday, Oct. 22

Everyday classification in the AM. Or, perhaps, live usability testing with Dorothea and others.

Early afternoon has several interesting presentations, like these folks who claim some LIS schools are teaching us about social computing, but I’m not missing danah boyd.

Late afternoon has another presentation with danah boyd, which I’m guessing jennimi will be at. An interesting presentation on personal info management by my friend, Christina Pikas. And a 3rd one on KOS Standards. Seeing as I’m on the Standards Committee ….

Tues, Oct. 23

Early AM: Kind of open at the moment, but probably this on the applications of traditional & non-traditional KM.

Mid-morning: Oh, boy! Improving Online Dating with Virtual Dates! I am so not there. Pretty much open at the moment. Break time is always good.

Mid-afternoon: Social epistemology in LIS.

Late afternoon also seems kind of open for now.

Evening: SIG CON. Woohoo! And notice, my friends, it is labeled “Tag Me!” Seems a certain rogue group had some influence last year.

Wed, Oct. 24

AM looks like tough choices: Next generation catalogs, Christina and others on blogs & wikis, or another look at Randall Kemp’s humanitarian relief organizations work and the traveling road show of Renear and Dubin on FRBR Group 1 entities in a slot entitled “Standards/Restrictions/Reinterpretations.”

I’ve heard sketches and pieces of this argument and I agree:

We examine the conceptual model of the “bibliographic universe” presented in IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and argue, applying the ontology design recommendations developed by N. Guarino and C. Welty, that three of the four Group 1 entity types should be considered roles (relationships) rather than types. We then show how this analysis generalizes the solution to a previously identified puzzle in entity type assignment and is supported by John Searle’s notion of a cascade of social facts established through collective intentionality — which we take to be confirmation that this re-factoring results in a more accurate picture of the bibliographic domain. Finally we make some suggestions as to why it seemed that these entities were types rather than roles and note that in specific applications there may in fact be good practical reasons for models that treat types as roles.

Mid-morning: Plenary with Clifford Lynch.

Early afternoon: Digital natives research or social capital. Probably the 2nd since I have serious issues with most claims made about the 1st.

Late afternoon: More social capital stuff, or perhaps time to head home?

There is so much more going on and as I said my interests will shift. Dorothea will be there. I sure hope she’s staying for more than her presentation. Other friends who I’ve seen more recently than Dorothea will also be there.

I’m so excited and it’s only a little over 3 months away. Alright, GSLIS students. Time to do some serious planning!