Category Archives: Technology

habitually probing generalist

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Change of blog name

I have changed the name of my blog. Again. This time it should not break any of the Internet nor should you need to change feeds; I hope.

3 years ago tomorrow I moved my blog to WordPress and renamed it Off the Mark. This was after a few years of blogging at Typepad under the name …the thought are broken…. I had put out a call for suggestions and for slightly different reasons both Walt Crawford and Richard Urban recommended Off the Mark. For those and other reasons I liked it. But over time various (possible) connotations have been bugging me. I was certainly aware of them then but I dismissed them, at least in my own mind.

A few months after renaming my blog I read an article for a class and my tagline was born. That tagline is now being promoted to the name of my blog. Henceforth, this space is to be known as habitually probing generalist.

I feel that that far better represents me and how I’d like to be known. For now, Off the Mark will be my tagline.

In the interest of disclosure, I feel that the primary reason for this change is that which I stated above—Off the Mark carries certain negative connotations which I no longer am willing to ignore and habitually probing generalist better represents the external face I want to present. Secondarily, though, I cannot deny that the phrase “off the mark” is heavily represented and used on the Internet. There is a greeting card company with that name (I have enjoyed giving a card or 3 to others from that company; check them out) and at least another blog or two, besides being a common phrase in its own right. “Habitually probing generalist” appears to be only used by me and a few others who have referenced my tagline. Thus, I am laying claim to it. Carole Palmer deserves a boatload of credit for it but I alone am responsible for this specific formulation.

Working toward this change I made myself a new favicon about 2 weeks ago. No longer is my favicon barely distinguishable pink flowers but is a blue background with a whitish “hpg” in it. I still need to do a little code editing so the fonts are switched for the name and tagline on the blog but that can wait. A looming physical move takes precedence.

With my blogging output over the last year a few of you might well ask “What is the point of a name change for a moribund blog?” Sadly, that is a valid question. I cannot make any promises but ….

CAS project

Friday I met with my academic advisor, Dean John Unsworth, about my CAS paper, for the first time in about 11 months. The gist of what we discussed is that things are settling down in my life (as much as possible for someone with a temporary job) and that I am ready, and looking forward, to beginning on the job of writing and defending this paper.

First, I must get physically moved across town and somewhat unpacked but then I should be able to devote far more time to it than I was willing to over the last year. The love of my life and I will live together and there will be no more of that whose apartment are we going to?, are you/am I spending the night?, blah blah. Perhaps more importantly, I will have research time once my 2nd year Visiting Professor appointment starts 16 August. This should make a major difference in my mental ability to focus on the task at hand. Also, S will be majorly busy and working many hours in September and October so I hope to use some of that time to get back in the flow of reading and writing towards a directed end.

My time over the last year has by no stretch been a waste! I have read far more broadly in a vast array of disciplines, topics and genres, which has better prepared me to think about and critique the actual use of language and communication. I was on a panel at ASIS&T last year where I spoke about Integrationism in regards to tagging. I also attended the 1st Ethics of Information Organization conference this May.

I now have an idea for a draft proposal for a presentation at the 2nd Ethics conference next year. This also forms a small but core portion of my critique of the uses of the concepts of language and communication in LIS. Thus, working towards fleshing this out will be a big help in a key premise of my argument. I might also be able to then expand on it or shift it a bit to present at ASIS&T or the SIG-CR preconference next year in 2010.

I also have an idea for a way to have interested parties work with me to compile a “listing” of theories of language and communication used in LIS and citations of works that explicitly use them, well or not. On this head, though, I am first doing a bit of research to seed the list and to determine what might be the best tool to use for a (small, I assume) group to manage it while making it publicly available. Stay tuned.

… and this means what for the blog?

Well, I hope that I will blogging much of what I get up to. I will need to reread many things and refresh my memory of what they say. Summarizing these for the blog is a possibility, as is comparing and contrasting ideas. Bouncing ideas and/or draft paragraphs/sections of my paper or my conference presentation ideas off of my readers are distinct possibilities, too.

No promises. But. I hope that I can claim that—for the near future, at least—I am back.

Sing a song with a friend
Change the shape that I’m in,
And get back in the game,
And start playin’ again

John Prine. Clay Pigeons.

It’s like talking to the wall

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He’s incommunicado
No comment to make
He’s saying nothing at all

Yeah but in the communique
You know he’s gonna come clean
…

[Communique - Dire Straits]

Seems I don’t have much to say anymore. We’ve all read of the death of blogging. The move to Friendfeed and Twitter. XYZ.

None of those are entirely true. I have plenty to say and a fair bit to talk about. [I have a whole series of posts about the Ethics of Info Org conference I went to at the end of May planned out and started]. But there are other things that I have chosen to give my time to.

Work

Recently I was engaged in a project at work which involved us processing about 41,000 volumes of serials and monographic series out to our Oak Street remote storage facility in a projected 10-week period this summer. We managed to finish the project in 6 weeks.

I was the primary cataloger, 95%+ of the time. As in I was 95% of total cataloger time spent on it. This means that conservatively I had “critical eyes” on 1000 bib records a week.

I lasted just over 5 weeks before my mind shut down on me. Pretty much literally. Luckily El Diablo was there to step in and finish the project. By the time a couple days passed and I was ready to return they had wrapped it all up.

In other work-related news, I have accepted an offer for another year as a Visiting Serials Cataloger and Visiting Assistant Professor of Library Administration. Yay for knowing I’ll have a job in the near future. The current contract was over 15 August so this is none too soon. [Hopefully the Trustee's approval will be routine.]

Moving

I have met the woman I was destined to spend my life with. She is my heart and soul and shortly I will no longer live alone.

At the end of the work day, I go home to do every thing that our project team was doing. I am pulling, inventorying, checking, boxing and slinging the boxes for our move across town. “Life is grand.”

Well, life was grand. A wrinkle has been added which complicates things, to say the least. I am kind of stressing right now but will recover. I’d put my moving skills up against anyone’s. Sad as that may be.

In this department life can throw whatever it wants at me. I care little, even if it stresses me in the short-term. I am shortly moving in with the woman who I have chosen to give my time (and life) to. I shall give her as much of it as is required.

Another wrinkle has arisen in the time it has taken me to finish this post. If it appears somewhat disjointed I apologize as the several weeks it has taken has required several rewrites and as many removals and additions.

New Employee Recognition Day

A couple weeks back the library held its annual New Employee Recognition Day. Seeing as I was hired within the last year I was—like all others hired in the last year—introduced by the Dean. Based on the state of this humble blog in the past year I was horrified that the vast majority of my intro came from my About page here. My being named one of “The LISNews 10 Blogs to Read on 2008” was trotted out as I shrank in embarrassment. At least it made me realize I need to update that page.

The blog

Speaking of the blog, there are going to be a few changes around here soon. Does that mean I may finally start posting again? I can’t really say.

One of my first thoughts upon hearing the Dean tell everyone assembled at NERD (Oops, I doubt they mean for that acronym to be used) was to simply kill it entirely. Oh, yes. I did seriously consider that.

But as several other libloggers have written recently, I like having this space in case I do want to share and get around to doing so. It’s nice to know it is here waiting on me.

Was having trouble getting in to my own domain recently for assorted reasons but finally got it figured out. Thus, I just upgraded from WordPress 2.7 to 2.8.1 with one click (after backing up). Plugin upgrades also only required one click each. Wow! Can I just say “Wow!”

Anyway. Enough of this blather for now. It is time to kill this thing and just post it. With any luck anyone still out there will be hearing from me again soon.

Update: My personal journey into ebooks

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Back in March I wrote a longish post about “My personal journey into ebooks.” Things have since changed so I feel that I ought to add some commentary to those thoughts.

As a caveat, these comments only pertain to me, at least as intended. They may apply to you as an individual reader but I do not intend for them to be generalized.

I have for all intents and purposes currently quit reading ebooks on my Touch. None of the issues I mentioned in the original post are the issue though. Simply put …

I came to the realization that the circumstances in which I was using my Touch to read books were not good circumstances in which to do so. Other than as stated in my previous post, and to no greater extent, there are no interface issues that have brought about this change.

Context: I was reading books on my Touch during bus rides to and from campus, waiting for the bus at the end of the day, and at lunch. My bus rides are about 10 minutes long and my average and usual bus wait is 10 minutes.

Trying to read while watching for the correct bus or the correct stop does not make for quality reading. Perhaps if I had a longer bus ride reading on the bus would be better. But I don’t. So I quit.

[I have also not been reading much in the way of print lately either but for other reasons. I am trying to get back in the swing since between all the other things I have going on I do need to "relax" and sustained reading is good for that.]

Today I did start reading from my Touch again at lunch (The Importance of Being Earnest). Lunch is a longer sustained period than the bus waiting/riding and it is easier to choose my stopping point so retention is greatly improved. Also, truth be told, it is easier to read from the Touch at lunch than a print book. It lays flat and stays open with no problems. If I need to eat with my fingers it becomes a small problem but I eat at a place where I need a fork (or chopsticks) most days of the week.

I have no aversion to reading on my Touch at home if need be and I will on occasion. But then I also have several 100s of print books here that need reading (A very conservative estimate).

I did read several more books than those mentioned in my earlier post before I quit using the Touch to do so. Assuming I can find more sources of free books for the Touch I imagine I will continue to use it for reading at times where I can have a semi-sustained reading experience but it is inconvenient to carry a print book.

So I guess the main point is I realized that the situations in which I was trying to read ebooks were generally not good for reading for me.  It was the situations and not ebooks or the Touch itself that caused me to quit. I will just have to see where it goes from here.

My personal journey into ebooks

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Recently I began reading ebooks. Before I address which books specifically and related issues let me put a few things on the table.

Preliminaries:

This post is about my experiences in the recent present and not about the future of what will or might be (even if I comment on that).

I have read quite a fair number of lengthy things from desktop computer CRTs, a flat panel display, and on both my 12″ Mac PowerBook and my 13″ MacBook. I read quite a few PDFs and lengthy web pages that I did not want to print out for whatever reason, many of them from the PowerBook, back in the day when I was reading heavily in our field and writing about it here.

Several years ago I bought a PDF ebook on some computer topic from the Woody’s Watch email newsletter folks. Maybe I read it, maybe I used it as a reference book. Can’t say as I remember.

Last summer via rebate I got a 16GB iPod Touch for free when I bought the MacBook. Until recently, though, I hadn’t used it much at all. I loaned it to a friend to take to ALA Midwinter and she tested out a few apps and also discovered that our campus IT folks had finally made an “app” available that connects one to the campus network whenever you are in range.

The insta-connection made a huge difference in my willingness to use it. The other thing that made me start using it more is the app Stanza.

Stanza is a very useful app, although not perfect (more about this in a moment). I still have a paper-based book in my backpack for reading on the bus and/or at lunch, but I find that it has been remaining in the backpack more and more as I grab the Touch and go (lunch). Part of this is that I have a new winter coat and I do not have a nice big pocket to put a book in anymore. Part of it is something(s) else.

In some ways the Touch is more convenient. It certainly lies flat better than most books. It is lighter than most every book. But it also has drawbacks. No. 1 is that a large number of things I want to read are not available for the Touch, either due to format issues or period. No. 2 is that I have a ton of print things I do want to read and am not about to pay again for an ebook version, assuming one is available. And, yes, I do imagine that over time availability will change. [Note: Amazon's recent Kindle app for the Touch/iPhone will do little to make the books I want to read available any time soon, if ever.]

I am aware that if I used Google Books then I might find even more available than I think are, but until the scanning/OCR process is greatly improved No Thank You! I used to do electronic reserves work and while this work is valuable in assorted ways I hated reading even the quality work we produced. [UIUC still has a massive way to go in this arena and could learn from what we were doing.] Thus, I’m not about to routinely try reading Google Books books on my Touch. Also, I believe that requires a network connection. Sustained reading on my Touch should not require a network connection except for the occasional acquisition.

I still greatly value production value in my content, be it editorial work, text layout, or the many other qualities that go into a quality reading experience (in any medium). [See for example, Mandy Brown's In Defense of Readers at A List Apart.]

On that note, on to issues of

Formatting:

So far, I have read one purchased book and a couple free ones from assorted sources. The purchased one had the worst formatting in Stanza.

The purchased book was The Lust Chronicles from Ravenous Romance. Ravenous Romance publishes only ebooks and audiobooks and they are quite affordable [$1.99 for short stories, $4.99 for ebooks, $12.99 for audiobooks]. Their ebooks come in multiple formats and for one price you can download any and every format you need. Your purchase price allows you to download the book up to 50 times over a 50-day period. Not sure why these are the terms but they are certainly liberal.

I initially got the .epub format which they say is for Stanza. Could not make it work on either my laptop or the Touch, nor could we get it to work on S’s laptop or Touch [1st & 2nd gen Touchs, respectively]. After futzing around in the FAQs at both Ravenous Romance and Lexcycle I gave up and grabbed the PDF.

The PDF looks exquisite on the laptop either in Adobe Acrobat or in Stanza. But. It is completely wonky on the Touch. It is readable, but it is distracting. The table of contents is run together as one long paragraph instead of as a list. The formatting of the individual story titles and authors, and all white space between chapters, is thrown out and thus the stories are all kind of run together. I guess for $4.99 I cannot complain too much but it was a distraction during reading.

Turns out this is what Stanza does with PDFs, thus I have started using PDF Annotater on the Touch for PDFs. It provides annotation capabilities and allows one to read PDFs with graphics. This purchased pdf looks exquisite in PDF Annotater on the Touch.

The other books I have read are:

E. A. Poe, “Bon-Bon” (1832) (short story) from www.feedbooks.com. The formatting on this one isn’t too bad. Default format is fully justified which I do not like when the justifier is not good, or, as in the case of the Touch screen, the “page” size is small. I just turned off the full justification and, although the right margin is even more ragged than normal in ragged right justification, I do like it better.

Paragraph breaks exist but new paragraphs are indented a whole 1 space. Not much, but now that I left justified the text it is generally enough. With the text fully justified over to the right margin one space was not enough. All-in-all, the formatting of this short story is not bad, especially with the changes I just made.

D. H. Lawrence, Amores: Peoms (1916) New York : B. W. Huebsch (E-text prepared by Lewis Jones) www.blackmask.com [2007 Blackmask Online / Munsey's Magazine]

[Seems blackmask is now Munseys and will redirect you to http://www.munseys.com/.]

This text seems to be formatted fine but I have some concerns. Being a neophyte reader of poetry I am still trying to get a grasp of “the art of the poetic line” and the narrow screen width plays havoc with such.

Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. More than meter, more than rhyme, more than images or alliteration or figurative language, line is what distinguishes our experience of poetry as poetry, rather than some other kind of writing. Great prose might be filled with metaphors. The rhythmic vitality of prose might be so intense that it rises to moments of regularity we can scan. Its diction may be more sensuous, more evocative, than that of many poems. We wouldn’t be attracted to the notion of prose poetry if it didn’t feel exciting to abandon the decorum of lines (Preface, xi).

Longenbach, James. 2008. The Art of the Poetic Line. Art of series. Saint Paul, Minn: Graywolf.

Sure, I can rotate the Touch and get a wider line length but then am required to move forward (or backward) through more “pages.” And this forces more stanzas to be broken across pages so that the next step in poetic semantics from the line to the stanza is also seriously affected.

I’m not saying that this is a non-starter or that it is an issue for more practiced readers of poetry but it is a concern to me.

Christina Rosetti, Poems (1906) Boston : Little, Brown and Co. / Author’s edition, revised and enlarged 1876, University Press : John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. Produced by Steven desJardins, Jeffrey Online Distributed Proofreading Team. www.blackmask.com [2007 Blackmask Online / Munsey's Magazine]

Pretty much the same issues (for me) as Lawrence. Also, there are an awful lot of poems in this text so navigation by bookmarks (where every poem is a bookmark) involves a lot of scrolling.

For another perspective, “why is text on screens so ugly?,” see the post at if:book re hyphenation (or lack thereof) in e-texts.

Page navigation:

For this issue, I am not sure whether it is the Touch or Stanza. Page navigation is accomplished by touching the right side of the screen to move forward, and the left side to move backward. Sometimes the pages go the opposite way from which you are touching it to do so. Generally it isn’t too big of a deal but it is a pain when reading poetry. It is a massive deal when one is trying to read poetry aloud in an attempt to cheer up someone special. My Touch got tossed across the room the other evening when it did this several times in a row to me. Not that my getting upset helped the situation at all. Thankfully it didn’t hurt it, either (the situation or the Touch).

Metadata and citation issues:

I am a cataloger. But even before that I have lived a lifetime with “bibliographic” data and issues of citation, be they in person (oral), in writing, or on the web. [OK, the last one hasn't been a lifetime, but you get the point.]

I have been listing my albums (LPs) in assorted documents since I was about 14. Shortly after that came the books, the cassette tapes, the CDs, DVDs, journal articles, ….  Once upon a time, I practically made a living of testing assorted free- and shareware database software for cataloging one’s collections. Metadata is almost always important to me. Often I even exert the effort to control and harness it.

The web and its promises—the Semantic Web, linked data, whatever you want to call what we might one day have, and what we could even have today—give these efforts even more importance. I am not claiming we need a full-fledged librarian version of authority control for the web, but things must be what they purport to be and when that purporting comes from another linked resource then it is even more critical that the purporting be correct and not subject to change in some fundamental way that invalidates the claim.

Also, this data must be fully and easily shareable, despite the recent objections of one of LibraryLand’s overlords.

Bussel, ed. The Lust Chronicles at Ravenous Romance – This page does a decent job of giving me some useful metadata. I get a title, an ISBN, and a publication date (to the exact day). I’m less pleased by the attribution statement; “by Rachel Kramer Bussel” is true in a loose interpretation of “by” but not in the more bibliographic sense. RKB is the editor (and compiler) of this collection of  edited, slightly reworked, blog posts.  But at least the “by” name is linked so that we can easily see what else this “author” is responsible for from this publisher.

My biggest gripe with this page (and the publisher) is that they provide no machine-readable data for Zotero (or similar programs) to pick up. Sure, I can bring that page in as a web page in Zotero but then I get minimal data about the page itself and not about the book. So much then has to be manually changed (including type of resource) that it’s almost easier to just do it by hand in the first place.

At least the human-readable data on the page is describing the book itself.

Poe. “Bon-Bon” at feedbooks.com. Pretty much the same issues as above. No machine-readable metadata supplied. Pulling into Zotero as a web page serves little purpose due to the low amount of data, most of which needs some massaging. No ISBN.

Lawrence. Amores at munseys.com.  OK, here is where I start to lose it. There is all kinds of neat data here for “this” book. Except it isn’t. The data is purportedly brought in from LibraryThing and it is for … wait. Wait for it. The title and author are correct. But all that other neat data (Blurbers, awards and honors, epigraph, last words, people/characters, canonical title, …) is for Like Water for Chocolate. You know, that might be a good book. It might even be great. But it is not Lawrence’s Amores. I guess we’re actually lucky we can’t pull in all that bullshit data automatically.

Rossetti. Poems at munseys.com.  My first gripe is that this book on a cover internal to the file claims to be New Poems by Christina Rosetti: Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected. So what is the title? Other than that, it has the same issues as Lawrence’s Amores, except this one claims, via data also pulled from LibraryThing, to be The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

So much for linked data and/or what things purport themselves to be.

The following comments (this section) only apply to the freely available, public domain books that I’ve been reading and/or looking at.

When you browse these books at sites like munseys.com and feedbooks.com you are generally not seeing the covers that belong to the version of the text that you are acquiring/browsing. feedbooks.com looks to (possibly) be better about having the cover art that goes with their books, but munseys.com most certainly does not. The text of these books is not from the Norton Critical or Penguin editions, for instance.

Many would argue that this is a benefit of freely available cover art. I disagree. Maybe I’m just too old—a dinosaur from another age—but I feel that these visual clues are important to knowing just which text I am dealing with. This misdirection is not the slightest bit useful to me. In fact, I consider it a serious problem and would rather just see a generic cover like those available in LibraryThing [example from my library]. [Hmmm. Interesting. At munseys.com (web version) they don't show cover art. I only see them when browsing from the Touch.]

I mean c’mon. I’m browsing books on my Touch. How useful can a “cover image” thumbnail even be? Ah well; I know people will disagree. If these covers work for them then great. I consider it a disservice. At best.

Which leads to the next question regarding these books?

Which edition am I reading? [I'll ignore FRBR to avoid the wholly unresolved issues surrounding Expressions, Manifestations, and Items in the electronic world.] But in the old school world of print books, using languge that is at least nearing  a couple centuries now, which edition am I looking at? Despite the lie of the cover art, I am pretty well convinced that I do not have the text of, say, the Penguin Classic edition.

Maybe I just need to get with the new world order of no authority and information that is totally free. I.e, information that is totally disconnected from its cultural and historical contexts. I may only be reading a novel but this dinosaur wants to be able to put it into its proper context, thank you very much. And I want to be able to cite it in all the assorted ways in which I may need/want to do so.

Zotero

On the topic of Zotero, does it need a new format for ebooks? Sure, ebooks are just books. But—and this is highly preliminary as this is my 1st attempt at citing them—they need a field for URL to the book (if directly addressable as a download) and one for the provider. Those two requirements could possibly be served by the URL and Repository fields. But what about recording the format (.epub, .pdf. .mobi, …)? Anything else I’m missing?

Comments on the Works

The Lust Chronicles – This was hit and miss as one might expect of a book composed of disparate blog entries. But all in all, and for $4.99, I enjoyed it. There’s something to be said for discreetly reading erotica on one’s ebook device while riding public transit.

“Bon-Bon” – I thought Poe’s short stories were supposed to be good. Maybe I just got the wrong one. Meh. Thankfully it was short.

Amores – I quite enjoyed this and immediately looked for a print copy. It does not seem to be in print anymore and the only used copy I found was an old library castoff for a stupid amount of money. But one can get Complete Poems (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) [1088 pages], which includes lots of extra material from Amazon for $16.47, or one can get The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence (Wordsworth Pub., 352 pages) for $7.99. I kind of want the 1st one but I do not enjoy reading from books that large.  I have requested a copy via ILL of the 1st and larger one to see if it is the one I want.

Poems – This one I am back and forth on. I enjoyed some of the early poems and some from the middle and then there was a long stretch before finding some more I liked. There are a lot of poems here, some fairly long. I liked it enough to try and find a decent collection of her poems in print.

This exercise led to failures with library metadata; specifically, uniform titles in WorldCat. Telling me that there are 134 editions available but making it hard to narrow down which edition my librar(ies) hold is not a service. It is a disservice. I don’t want just any edition. But then, perhaps, I am a dinosaur. That, and library metadata issues, are topics for different posts.

Conclusion

I will keep reading some ebooks and PDFs on my Touch. In fact, I downloaded several more titles the other night. I already had the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. So I grabbed Emerson’s Essays, Wells’ Tales of Time and Space and The Time Machine, Wagner’s The Simple Life, and one or two others.

Hopefully some of the issues I complain about above will work themselves out. My concern is whether they will be solved or whether I (and others) will simply adjust to this brave new world. Either way works, I guess. But I fear the second leads to the loss of something meaningful.

4th blog anniversary

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Back on 29 January 2005 …the thoughts are broken… debuted. That link now goes to the 1st post of this blog since I migrated to WordPress in July 2006.

Wow! Four years already. I haven’t been doing much here since about the middle of last year and I’d like to get back to it. But. I have more important things (to me) going on in my life nowadays.

#1 is the love of my life. She found me in an alley and my life will never be the same. Thankfully.

Other things keeping me quiet: my job, complexity of the issues in my area, issues of communication, lots of reading, reading & writing poetry, trying to learn more broadly from others, and other things.

I am still participating in the larger conversation, though, just not so much here. I am reading and commenting on blogs and am fairly active in FriendFeed.

Another thing keeping me rather quiet and introspective is the major birthday I have coming up in a few weeks. But that is only (somewhat) responsible for the current quietude.

According to Walt, my blog had 47% less posts in 2008 vs. 2007, and -12% words per post. If those time slices had been a quarter or two later in the year then the decrease would be far more dramatics. Oh well. The issues have been touched on a couple times in the few posts I’ve made since August or so.

No idea what the future holds for this blog, or for me. But for the 1st time in a long time I have serious hopes for, and am actually actively looking forward to, the latter. And that is the biggest thing keeping me quiet here. And I am perfectly OK with that.

I would like to say “Thank you!” to those still around and reading and to those all over the past 4 years who have read, commented, encouraged and challenged me. Thank you!

(Personal) Change

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(Personal) Change

Some say that the zebra cannot change his stripes.
Some say that everything is change.
Some say “But, Baby, I’m willing to change ….”

The best change is not that which one thinks is impossible,
Nor that which is inevitable.
It is not even that which one desires.

The best change is that which you notice in hindsight.
In the presence of someone else you were allowed to be.
Different. Better.

It took no work; required no thought.
It was natural.
The change just was.

You know that this is how you were meant to be,
But knew not how to be this;
Nonetheless, you look back and find your being changed.

This is the best kind of change.

11 January 2009 by mrl

Some things about the new year

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Not sure where this blog is going this year. I said some things last year about where I wanted to take it / thought it might go and it got nowhere near any of those places.

I read through all of my posts for 2008 on the 1st and 2nd. Wow! What a year! Talk about ups and downs. The reading went much quicker for the back half of the year seeing as I had but a handful of posts over the last quarter of the year.

I did and still do have some things to say. But for many reasons I chose/choose not to and/or am unable to do so—both good things and not so good things.

Things are really good in my life in some ways as I enter a new year and rapidly reach the half century mark. But I don’t get to say much about those.

I am in love and have the love of an amazingly wonderful woman. ‘Nuff said.

Some things are not so good; but really no worse than for many.

I have a job. For several more months anyway. But better than some, I knew from the start that it would end [on 15 August 2009]. At the time I got it there was a very good chance that it could be extended. With the economy tanked that is highly unlikely, though. So now I truly am on the job market—with many others—in an extremely poor economy.

It was a year of growth—some painful, some pleasant—and recognition of some areas which need improvement. In some cases I have a good idea and plan for how to work on those areas. Some are still too amorphously vague to have a plan; but awareness—or working towards awareness, at least—is the first step.

I have been working on a long post on the books I read this past year and WordPress is giving me fits. Apoplectic fits. Not sure if/when it will get posted anymore. The formatting keeps changing as WP sees fit from moment-to-moment. As soon as I figure out how to work around what it is doing it does something else. And now it is pulling out assorted COinS data. It is all becoming too much. [Hopefully it will be following on the heels of this one. ::fingers crossed::]

Also, one of the things I came across in re-reading my blog posts was my comments on censoring myself in my post “Some things read this week feature is over.” Now, none of those reasons have gone away although I was managing to ignore them as I constructed my Books Read in 2008 post. This morning [Saturday], in a different context, I was reminded that perhaps I am putting too much out there. So now I have to decide what to do with that post on top of trying to fight with WP.

I have no idea what this year will bring. I do have some hopes and desires but it is also a time of great change for S and for me.

I sincerely hope that I can continue to be the man I want to be in this relationship and that I can continue growing as that man.

I hope that I can be better at some things than I was in the past year. There were several issues that I wanted to comment on and had told others that I would that I never got to. Finding a way to discuss these issues in a more positive way is a big desire of mine. Finding a way to discuss them in a way I feel “safe” doing so is a hope.

I hope that I will be better at working on my breathing and perhaps find a way into yoga and other forms of exercise. I also hope I take up running again as soon as spring allows.

I hope to have a job after 15 August. And that it be interesting, challenging and with good people in a nice setting (work and non-work) is a desire.

Staying in better touch with assorted, but specific, people is a hope. Toward that end I am now in FriendFeed as it allows for a different kind of conversation than blogs or facebook. That, of course, is not enough and I must truly work harder at this.

I have many other hopes and desires for the new year. Some are concrete and some are still pretty abstract.

Besides hoping that everyone can be the person they desire to be in this year, my biggest hope and desire is that I actively and continuously work at being/becoming the person I want to be.

Pathways for communication : a mini-review

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Foskett, D. J. 1984. Pathways for Communication: Books and Libraries in the Information Age. London: C. Bingley.

 

I read this lovely little book [128 pages] last week. In many ways it has a lot in common with John Budd’s Self-examination and with Patrick Wilson’s Two Kinds of Power. All in all, it falls in a sort of middle ground. Budd’s book is both broader and narrower, and certainly far longer, while Wilson’s is much narrower and about the same length. Oddly, this book, though 16 years more recent than Wilson’s essay, feels far more dated. More on that in a bit.

Its chapters are entitled: Information and understanding, Communication and chronicles, Communication and society, Information and the psychology of users, Keepers and finders, Technology and culture, Theory and practice, Memory and anticipation, Looking for answers, and A reading society.

As I said above, this book feels a bit dated. Strange things is, though, I did not read that book. Early on when I noticed its datedness I asked myself what would Foskett say about that in the context of today? And somehow I managed to do that throughout the book. In fact, I got so good at it that I often just seemingly read what I think that answer would be. Thus, I may not even be qualified to comment on the book as such since that is seemingly not the book that I read.

In that regard, I think this is an important and an excellent book. Or, at least it is for one who can also manage a similar trick. For the unimaginative who can only read what is printed on the page then perhaps the book would be less valuable. I will say that if I ever teach an LIS course where some or all of this book would fit it will be assigned reading with the explicit goal of having the students update Foskett’s views; that is, apply Foskett’s criticisms and analysis to the contexts in which we find ourselves today. That, I venture to bet, would be a valuable exercise for all but the most dull among us.

Much of this book spoke to me regarding debates, discussions and contexts in which the profession finds itself today. One of Foskett’s primary critiques is that of confusing means for ends. One particular piece which I happened to note [and wish I had marked others] was the following:

The opposite of progress will occur if our effort are stultified by nonsensical theories leading to stupid practice. If ‘information’ becomes reified into a commodity subject to the laws and forces involved in commodity production and distribution, there is a real danger that quality will be sacrificed to quantity, and the information industry will produce and process large quantities of rubbish in order to prove what vast quantities it can process. We do not belong to the dismal and defeatist school of ‘more means worse’ if we wish to oppose the apparently attractive but actually meretricious school of ‘we must do it because we can’. Once more, means are in danger of becoming ends (111-112).

Communication, that is, human communication, looms large as the title would suggest.

There is also a lot of reference to the ‘paperless society,’ as that was a leading concept of the time. But it also one which still has pundits and while the term is rarely explicitly referenced anymore nonetheless it has significant impact on the thinking of many.

Another theme is the danger of contrasting the ‘librarian’ and the ‘information officer.’ In essence, they both deal with knowledge of source materials, whether or not their favored sources are physical objects.

As dated as this book may seem to some, I maintain that it is of immense relevance atill as the opening of the chapter, ‘Theory and practice,’ demonstrates:

The headlong progress of computer technology over recent decades has carried along all those of us engaged in communication at an exhilarating pace. Learned societies, publishers, librarians, have all become convinced of the necessity of making publicly available every last thought, no matter how commonplace or trivial, so that it may be indexed, abstracted, put into machine-readable form, and displayed on a visual display unit.

The benefits of the new technology are indeed not to be denied, and it would be foolish to try to keep it out of libraries. But if technology is not to become the master, then library and information science requires an advance in its theoretical foundations, and this must play an important part in the preparation of future members of the profession (75).

As I said, perhaps I did not even read the book in front of me; I read a different book. I am not sure how or why I managed to read this book far more forgivingly than many others I have read. But read it I did. I also recommend it as a valuable exercise for those who can generously apply Foskett’s critique to a more up-to-date context.

I highly recommend this book but with the caveat that you attempt to read it as if it were written today. And with that, I want to leave you with one more quote, this time from the final chapter.

What is much more dangerous is that the whole concept of Information Technology in this narrow sense means the development of a society which is thoroughy superficial in its attitude to knowledge, and which has no stability because its existence depends, not on the security of the shared points of view which add up to a cultural heritage, but on a continuous flow of separate bits of information. The individual will have no time or opportunity to digest and assimilate all these separate bits, or to build them into a coherent and integrated structure. Society will become a behaviourist paradise, and human beings will behave as if they were machines only able to act in response to external stimuli. Power will reside in those who provide the stimuli, and unless they have the time and the will to form considered judgements, progress in the global village will consist in a succession of crisis responses to the latest bits of information, no matter what their source or validity (123).

Tidbits and tidbytes

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Book review submitted

Wednesday I finally submitted my first book review for publication.  Thanks, Walt, for recommending me to the editor. The book I reviewed is:

Budd, John. 2008. Self-Examination: The Present and Future of Librarianship. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited. [WorldCat]

 

The short version of the review I would have liked to write is this:

Read. Discuss. Rinse. Repeat.

With serious emphasis on the discuss and repeat. I just hope the review is acceptable. I am reasonably satisfied with it but it was harder than I thought and certainly took longer than I expected.

New toys

To reward myself I went and bought a new computer, which I have been thinking about for a while now. But the first stop was to get a new phone since my 2-year contract was expiring with Verizon.

So …

My new phone is a LG enV2. A fairly basic phone has served me well for the last 4 years (actually 2 different basic phones) but now I have someone to text with and normal phone keypads really suck for even the simple messages I send and I generally refuse to “speak” in text-ese.

New computer and iPod Touch. Got a MacBook with 4GB of RAM to replace my desktop PC. My thinking is that if/when the PowerBook dies I will already have a laptop to replace it.

Seeing as the Apple Education Store is giving rebates on either iPod Touches or Nanos ($199 = base 8GB Touch) I got myself a 16GB Touch.

Today I went back to the Apple Store and picked up an external keyboard and mouse, an AirPort base station, and a 1TB LaCie d2 quadra external drive for backing up both Macs.

I, unfortunately, needed a new wireless router since mine got fried along with most everything else in the signal path a couple months back in lightning storm. Perhaps I need to get an uninterruptable power supply/surge suppressor with coax connectors for the signal. My current, otherwise excellent, UPS only has CAT5 connectors.

Pictures to follow at some point once I get my workflows restructured.

10th anniversary of my Army retirement

Today, 1 August 2008, is also the 10th anniversary of my “retirement” from the Army. I think “retirement” is a crazy word to use—wrong sense, at a minimum—as it doesn’t even come close. 

Nonethless, whatever it’s called some truly amazing things have happened in the last 10 years.

Mark has been Off for 2 years

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… but broken for much longer.

This blog, Off the Mark, is 2 years old today. I shall refrain from calling it an anniversary, as such, since last year we sort of decided that my blogging anniversary ought to be from the start of my 1st public blog, …the thoughts are broken…, which debuted in January 2005. It was “decided” that this is really a continuation of the first and I cannot really disagree, even if I could employ serials cataloging and FRBR terminology to show otherwise. ;-)

Here’s what I wrote on my 3rd blogging anniversary back in January of this year.

There appear to have been 157 published posts here in the last year. Forty-seven of those were “Some things read this week …” posts, while there were another 8-10 that commented on that “column.” I posted 2 of the 3 poems that I wrote; “fallen” and “Stargazing.” Wow, what vastly different views of the world!

In the larger scheme of both blogs and my blogging overall, I have 961 posts, 5 in draft, and I’m remembering 3 specific ones that were published and then pulled at some point [not a light decision]. Will I reach a thousand posts by the end of the calendar year, or perhaps my 4th blogging anniversary in January? Who can say? Based on historical statistics I will easily. Based on current output and current thinking I would say no. We’ll see.

Things have been somewhat quiet around here lately and I expect them to stay that way for several reasons for a while, at least. I am doing some serious thinking about and work on my communication styles. I want to change a fair bit about how I say some things. Topics will probably stay much the same, although much of the personal productiveness and questioning of personal narrative will (has) generated some “new” topics for me; i.e., new for the blog.

So, while I really do not want to mark this as an official anniversary I do want to take this moment to note some of this and to say “Thank you” to any who read, comment, and critique. I take feedback here quite seriously. I simply cannot grow without the voice and help of others.

Quick shout-out to LISHost for hosting and support for the past 2 years.