This post is for all of you running WordPress blogs.

The short version:

These guys rock hard! Buy this book!

Longer version:

In case you do not know it, there is a blog called Digging Into WordPress which puts out a lot of valuable information on all aspects of WP.

A while ago they released a book and an ebook (pdf), also entitled Digging Into WordPress.  The ebook was $27 and comes with a lifetime of free upgrades.  I bought the book back in March and had all kinds of ideas on how to use it.  As my regular readers know a couple of marriages and a move 10 hours further westward got in the way of a lot of things.  But I have read parts and skimmed many others and I’m here to tell you that this book is useful.

Eventually along came WP v. 3 and their book was out-of-date.  But unlike lots of software books that are released at the same time as, or before, the software itself—and thus how accurate can they be?—they waited until they could do it proper using a fully functional release version just like you and me.

Well, that book was released just a couple of days ago.  I saw the blog post 2 days ago right before bed and noticed that they said everyone who had previously bought it had already received the download link to the new version via email.  But I had not.  So in the morning I checked into it.  According to comments on the announcement post it looked like lots of people had not gotten their emails either, primarily due to overaggressive spam filters.

We were supposed to find our original email receipt and email it to them.  Well, I found an email and started replying and then came up short.  This was the email I got when I put my name on the preorder list in Nov 2009 and was for a $9 discount.  Sadly, I had failed to use that discount.  I found my pdf and accompanying files (comes with some templates) and doing a Cmd-I I got the Finder Info where I had added a note that I got it on 28 March 2010.  I also verified that date in my Google Doc that I keep of all book purchases.  So I sadly and tentatively wrote my reply stating that this was all that I had, the date and price I had paid, and asked if there were some other way of proving I had purchased the book.  Within a matter of hours—keep in mind this is 2 guys and they’re handling lots of email and blog comments due to what in most cases was overaggressive spam filters—I had a gracious and courteous response that my update email had gone to a long gone email address and should they resend it to my gmail address?

So long story a little shorter, I got my updated ebook and I got it with a minimum of fuss. I have since realized why I never got a purchase receipt and why the update email went to an address that I no longer had well before I bought the book.

Godamn PayPal!  I purchased the book with PayPal.  Well, not really true as I was trying not to but it took over anyway.  Grrr!  Well, my PayPal account is stuck with an email address that I am not allowed to change because I cannot reply to the email they send there to verify that I want to change it.  Seriously!  I understand the need for protection of your users but then there is idiocy.  I no longer have that email because my (previous) ISP changed it.  It was my Insight email and Verizon Comcast bought them out and hamfistedly changed everyone’s email addresses.  They also just killed those accounts in full after 30 days.  No forwarding after that date; just dead.  Now even Verizon Comcast isn’t my ISP because I live somewhere else and thankfully no Verizon Comcast here. [Corrected 5 Sep 2010 upon realizing my brain fart.]

So all of this was caused by PayPal not allowing me to update my email address because they asininely assume that we all have perpetual access to every email address we have ever used.  Brilliant.  And so utterly wrong.

Anyway, Digging Into WordPress and Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr are excellent! They did me right and they did so graciously while under fire from many others for these same sorts of technological issues that are often out of our control.

So if you are running a WordPress blog buy Digging Into WordPress v. 3.0 You will not regret it!

A friend who was unhappy with her previous attempts at book clubs, in-person and virtual, decided a book club where we each read whatever it is we want to read might work better. Thus, 12 Books, 12 Months was born.

Here are the rules for the 12 Books, 12 Months Challenge:

• Pick 12 titles from your To Read Pile.  These should be titles you currently own in whatever format you prefer.
• Acquisition of other formats or translations is permitted.  So, if you have a paperback but want to read on your Kindle, you can get a Kindle copy.  If you have a library copy but want to buy your own, that’s kosher.  Heck, if you own a copy and want to check another out from the library, I’m not gonna stop you.
• Post your list in your public space of choice by September 1, 2010.  If you prefer not to post, you can just leave a comment with your list.
• Read all 12 titles between now and September 5, 2011.  Might as well tack on an extra long weekend at the end for cramming.
• When you finish a title on your list, post about it in your public space of choice.  If you prefer not to post, you can just leave a comment with your review.
• Once a month, I’ll post a round-up of the reviews posted from that month so that we all know what everyone else has read.

My list:

1. Ronald Gross, Peak Learning I am trying to find some kind of structure (best word I can think of at the moment) to help me get a grip on my own pursuit of lifelong learning and am hoping this might have some ideas that I can (and will) implement. I know goodreads says that I am currently reading this but that was months ago and I will need to start over. I hadn’t got very far anyway.
2. Catherine C. Marshall, Reading and Writing the Electronic Book I am interested in e-books for a variety of reasons and while I love print books I also think e-books can one day provide immense value over and above the mostly “convenience factor” that they now provide.
3. Carol Collier Kuhlthau, Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services Even though I expect to disagree a fair bit, I did like some of the ideas from a short bit of Kuhlthau that we read in 501 (intro course), and, really, the title says it all for me. Also, seeing as Kuhlthau is one of the major players in this area I need to know her ideas better if I am going to be critiquing work in this area of the field.
4. Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening This is another one that I started a while back. I got almost halfway through before being “interrupted” by a couple of weddings and a move. Going to start over. I am interested in Buddhism and its tenets, at least the non-mystical kind. I have another of his books on my TBR shelf that I am also looking forward to reading.
5. Michel Meyer, Of Problematology: Philosophy, Science, and Language This came recommended by David Bade via his citing it in a couple of places and then some f2f discussion. What is problematology”? The study of questioning.
6. George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor Metaphor and poetry. ‘Nough said.
7. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History From the inside jacket blurb: “The weapon of pedants, the scourge of undergraduates, the bete noire of the “new” liberated scholar: the lowly footnote, long the refuge of the minor and the marginal, emerges in this book as a singular resource, with a surprising history that says volumes about the evolution of modern scholarship.” I have been wanting to read this for several years and finally acquired a copy earlier this year.
8. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information I have been wanting to read this ever since it was brought to my attention in LIS501 Fall 2004. In fact, I probably acquired this copy back then so that I could. ::sigh:: Oh well, I’ve had books in storage for this long that I acquired in the mid-80s and still haven’t read. Anyway, hoping that it will have something useful to say about “information” beyond society’s preoccupation with the “stuff.”
9. Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse I have read a couple of her books and have quite enjoyed them. I am particularly looking forward to rereading Eros the Bittersweet some day.
10. Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights Seven lectures over 7 nights in June and August 1977. Topics are: The Divine Comedy, Nightmares, The Thousand and One Nights, Buddhism, Poetry, The Kabbalah, and Blindness. I have seen these referenced in multiple places and am looking forward to them. I also highly recommend Borge’s This Craft of Verse (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
11. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions Can one really have too much Borges? I think not.
12. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss I adore Middlemarch and Silas Marner and also enjoyed the other shorter things of hers I have read. I have this in 2 different editions, the Penguin Classics referenced here and a nice leather bound one from some set of “great books.” I have been wanting to get to this for a while and a couple of months back I read some idiot commenting on free e-books that “If I had wanted to read The Mill on the Floss I would have done so in college!” Screw the idiots of the world! I’ve read a bunch of e-books and almost every one of them has been free. And many of them have been exceptional!
13. S. R. Ranganathan, Classification and Communication This was recommended to me by fellow student, friend, and all-around-brilliant-guy, Tom Dousa. This, as Tom assured me, will probably run counter to what I believe about the interface of these topics but one must understand one’s betters if one is to critique them.

Whoops! How did I end up with 13 books?

There are scores more books I want to/could read and there are certainly more on my goodreads to-read shelf besides being a couple (or more) score not on the list.

The above are all certainly currently near the top of my TBR list but things changes; i.e., interests, focus, discovery of something previously unknown or just published, ….  Thus, I am going to reserve the right to substitute any book for one on this list.  As I see it I will probably read more than 12 books in the next year anyway so maybe they’ll only be additions. One can hope.

What’s on your list? [Whether or not you intend to participate in this or any other challenge, I am interested.]

[This post title is, for me, multi-meta in that it refers to several things.]

It has been a long time since I’ve been here. Part of me is sad about this fact and part of me thinks that is just fine.

A lot has happened since I last wrote here:

I quit my job as a serials cataloger at the University of Illinois so I could concentrate on (then) upcoming weddings and our move.

Sara and I were married in late May in a small but wonderful ceremony amongst family and friends in a cabin on the banks of the Sangamon River.

At the very beginning of June I started prepping for our move to Sioux City, Iowa.

A couple of weeks later, my daughter got married in Oberlin, Ohio in an even simpler, but absolutely lovely and moving, ceremony to a wonderful young man that I couldn’t be prouder to be related to.

On the evening of 3 July we left Urbana, IL and headed for Sioux City. As of 4 July we are residents of Sioux City. This is a vastly different place  than Urbana-Champaign, in so many ways. We are still getting it sorted out but we will.

We had a good week and a half before Sara had to start her job and we made good use of it. Sara worked for 3 days and then we took a vacation to the Black Hills of South Dakota to spend some time in a couple of cabins with some friends of Sara’s from high school and their respective significant others and children. On the way home we drove through the Badlands. I have a couple of pictures up but I have 100s more to be tagged, labeled, decided upon and uploaded. Suffice it to say that it was beautiful! And being the against much of pop culture fiend that I am, we skipped Wall Drug (unfortunately not the signs though), Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse.

Once back Sara got back to work and is enjoying learning the ropes of this vastly different, and vastly smaller, university. I got back to work on organizing the house, merging two large book collections, much of which was in storage, along with merging two large CD collections, of which all of hers were in storage. There is still a bit to do on all the house organizing fronts but it is definitely getting there.

Shortly after we got here we bought ourselves a 32″ LG HDTV with built-in netflix streaming so we’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and some other things.

We’ve been taking an online class on HTML5 via SitePoint and in a few weeks will take one on CSS3. They were $9.95 each! So the last 2 weeks that is what we’ve been doing in the evenings when Sara gets home from work. (And, yes, I know the CSS3 course says it is $14.95 but by signing up for both at the same time we got a $5 discount!) I think that for the price they are quite good. As with any class it is (mostly) about what you put in to it.

Speaking of courses, Briar Cliff University has a 100% tuition remission policy for spouses so I’ll be taking a 1 credit class this fall called Madwomen Poets. About all I know about it is that it includes Sexton and Plath. But who cares what, if anything, else it might be? Who could ignore a class entitled Madwomen poets?

I know. I know. I’m supposed to be doing other things, “more important” things. And I am. But it is 50 minutes, 1 day/week. I figure it’ll help keep my mental chops in order. And at this point I still don’t know if I’ll be taking it for a grade or auditing.

As to that more  important stuff … I am ramping back up the work on my CAS thesis via several angles of attack. I am working on the paper proper and I am also working on a journal article, which will be highly related (as in with a little reworking can become a chapter), and I am thinking about trying to come up with a presentation for a conference in early December. The conference is “Semantics for Robots: Utopian and Dystopian Visions in the Age of the ‘Language Machine’. ‘The Language Machine’ is one of Roy Harris’ early books, of course.

As for conferences, I am really sad that I will not be able to attend ASIS&T in Pittsburgh this year. But seeing as we gave up about $40k in income with me not working there is little means of justifying the expense of travel and lodging. And, honestly, the registration cost is plain crazy for an unemployed non-student, non-retiree.

Sara and I decided that the Integrationist conference in Chicago in December, along with being far cheaper, is really more where I need to be right now. I need exposure to more Integrationists and Integrational thinking and I will get far more out of a small conference (as I always do) than a bigger one. Whether or not I can get something submitted (and possibly accepted) I am highly looking forward to it. Nonetheless, this will be the 1st ASIS&T I’ve missed since I started going in 2006.

And if any of my Chicago friends are reading this, I’d adore an invite to stay with you for a couple days in early December (2nd-4th, or so), especially if you are near the Univ. of Chicago.

Tomorrow night we are, thanks to a surprise from Sara, going to see Jackson Browne and David Lindley and the historic Orpheum Theatre here in Sioux City. I have been listening to (early) Jackson Browne for close to 40 years now. I haven’t really kept up with anything since the mid-80s or so but, nonetheless, I am stoked to finally get to see him live for the first time.

We also have a Super Secret Date night scheduled for Sunday night. Sara had that lined up well before we left Urbana. She offered me the chance to find out what it’ll be last night but I passed. I like the surprises! She’s done so well every time in the past. And it also makes me aware that it is past time for me to step up in the Super Secret Date Night scheduling department.

And in case anyone who cares isn’t aware of it yet, my son is in Afghanistan for his 3rd war zone tour. He left just days after we moved. Grrrr.

I guess I best end this for now. It is getting long and the simple shock of seeing a post from me is probably enough already. With any hope I won’t be gone as long before the next time.

29 January is the 5th anniversary of my public blogging. I had a Bloglines private blog for about 9 days before I got fed up with its lack of capabilities. That 1st proto-blog was called In My Secret Life… via Leonard Cohen.

The 1st public-facing blog debuted on 29 January 2005 at bookmark.typepad.com and was called …the thoughts are broken…, which is from Ripple by the Grateful Dead. This would have been the beginning of my 2nd full semester of library school.

On 20 July 2006 I flipped the switch on Off the Mark on my own domain and hosted by LISHost after some tribulations with Typepad over many months. The story of the name is at that post.

On 19 July 2009 I again changed the name of the blog; reasons listed at the post. It is now known as habitually probing generalist.

I will make no promises as to what will or will not happen on this blog in the future. I have not been writing much for quite a while now—some of the reasons are interspersed in posts over the last 18 months or so—and I do not know if or when I will pick up the virtual pen again or how frequently. But I do appreciate having this space as an outlet and knowing that thanks to RSS anyone who truly cares what I might have to say can simply wait on that eventuality to arrive.

Thanks to all who have been here with me any of this time. Hopefully you’ll see me around here some more and I certainly hope to see you (and your feedback/comments/critiques/cries of BS/etc.).

In my recent Books Read in 2009 post I talked a bit about what I read last yea and a few other aspects of reading. In this post I want to touch on a few other issues, some of which are orthogonal ways of looking at what I read last year; so partially an update, partially new.

Public domain

January 1st was Public Domain Day [and when I started on writing some of what became this post].

In honor of the public domain, and Public Domain Day, I intend to read some William Butler Yeats whose stuff enters public domain this year. Look around the Public Domain Day site:“To celebrate the role of the public domain in our societies” and check out the list of authors (probably) entering public domain this year (Sigmund Freud, for instance, and Yeats). All of the listed authors have links to their Wikipedia pages (or the several I checked anyway. All seem to be links. Ergo.)

I have never intentionally read any Yeats so I am looking forward to it. For me, one of the big boons of reading ebooks on my Touch [I use Stanza and ePub files] is the number of public domain titles I am reading. Much of it I have been aware of, for assorted reasons, for much of my life but I never got to it. Although I have purchased a very few ebooks I have not made the transition to buying ebooks. Despite the advantages of ebooks—I do believe there are some (and that I’ve said so on this blog)—the limited capabilities of today’s hardware and software, combined with the fact that I am mostly reading stuff from free sources, means that I still buy print books. But the technology and the social/legal situation means that (currently) I get to focus on the stuff now free. I like that.

Based on my Books Read in 2009 post (and feedbooks) I read 28 public domain books last year. That is 35% of my entire reading. Only one (ah, 1.5) of those was in print: Siddhartha and half of Lord Jim. That means that 96% of my public domain reading (a solid 33% of all reading) was done on my Touch. [Only 2 of the total ebooks read were not in the public domain for the US, at least according to feedbooks.]

Fiction vs. Nonfiction

I didn’t even think of this until I saw Jessamyn West’s list a couple days after mine. When I got home I decided to sketch it out, both overall and for ebooks, and finshed vs. not finished.  Jessamyn also looks at ratio of male-to-female authors (amongst a few other looks) and that does not serve any interestof mine. Data’s there, count for yourself if you are.

Overall (print/ebooks)

• Finished: 44 Fiction, 39 Nonfiction.
• Unfinished: 2 Fiction, 5 Nonfiction.

So 53% of total finished was fiction; 47% nonfiction. Pretty even split and appropriate, for now. If you throw in the unfinished books on both sides it comes closer to even (51/49%)

Ebooks

• Finished: 24 Fiction, 4 Nonfiction
• Unfinished: 1 each

86% of the finished ebooks were fiction; 14% nonfiction. Goes to 83/17% if add in one each unfinished, except the fiction gains it back since it is still being read; Emerson’s essays were given up completely.

Goodreads

As of 4 January I have joined Goodreads. Both Jenny and Angel asked me in the comments of the book post why I’m not on Goodreads. I’d never discovered a need, primarily. Thus never had an account and did not know what it is exactly.

Books—most in one of a couple different ways—get tracked in a lot of places by me. Amazon for some things I want; Google doc of acquisitions (chronological); LibraryThing as, primarily, a catalog for me of mostly stuff I own (~99%),  I do little of the social there; Zotero for things I have read, regardless of source; wiki for what read and dates. What else is left?

Well. I haven’t been happy with the amount of engagement I’ve given many of these books (or articles) after I have finished reading them, in a long time. I should write more reviews, even mini-reviews, and other commentary on what I have read. Will this help?

One thing I do not like already is that I cannot find where to find someone I know who uses it so I can add them as a friend. The add friends function seems to really want me to give them my Gmail contacts, my facebook friends, etc. I am not cool with that.

Griped about it on twitter and a friend reached out and friended me. Many of her Goodreads friends are my friends too. But I still do not know how to find and friend Angel. Jenny was found in the previous manner.

I sure wish I could figure out how to simply get a csv file out of a Zotero collection. Might play with putting the last 3 years books read in if I could. I do not want to import my whole LibraryThing database. Wonder can I just export an LT collection? Need to look into that. And. Ebook metadata/editions remains a problem and even adds a new twist. Anyway ….

No promises but I am going to give it a try.

A new year in reading

No idea what 2010 will bring for me in reading. But I am looking forward to whatever it is. Am already reading some Wendell Berry poetry and Kundera on the novel.

Here’s to a great year of reading for everyone!

Not sure what any of this means, or why, it is, or if, of importance. Much can be seen of my book reading habits over the last 3 years at this blog [see links at end of post]. According to previous posts, it looks like another banner year in the Lindner household for book reading. No doubt, article reading was even further reduced; perhaps I need a different ratio; slip a few more articles back in.

Numbers

Numbers, in the real world, are often hard. Overlapping and/or conflicting categories, different reasons for not finishing something, one read 1st half on a Touch and back half in a Penguin paperback (Conrad, Lord Jim), …. Nonetheless, one must try:

90 books total

9 unfinished (all reasons)

81 books read (all formats)

3-4 unfinished are still being read (2 actively: Chan and Mitchell; Gaskell)

Of these totals, the ebooks follow:

31 total

1 given up on (Emerson)

1 ebook/print (Conrad)

1 still reading (Gaskell)

29 ebooks read

So, ebooks made up 29/81 (~36%) of my book reading this year. Some of them being short stories, or short collections, probably helped. Hmmm. I am OK with this.

There is some color-coding and other data exposed, and, in some cases, some commentary. The commentary is down a notch let’s say and, sadly, leave it at that. Dates of reading where known are included.

The titles of books not finished are in red. An “edition statement” is present for all ebooks and says ebook (type) in a sort of pink.

“Professional development” in a comment generally implies that I read it at work on breaks (notice lengthy reading times).

Some previous commentary on a few of the ebook titles read [15, 17-19 & 45], and commentary on my experience reading ebooks on an Apple Touch, can be found in these earlier posts re ebook reading from 2009:

• My personal journey into ebooks [See entries below: 15 and 17-19]
• Update: My personal journey into ebooks [See entry below: 45]

Hopefully there is COinS metadata for all 91 entries; Zotero for the win!

So, without further ado:

Books Read in 2009

1. Steven Black, Serials in Libraries: Issues and Practices (Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited, 2006). Read: 5 Dec 2008-2 Feb 2009. Professional development.
2. Walt Crawford, The Liblog Landscape, 2007-2008 : a Lateral Look (Mountain View, Calif.: Cites & Insights Book, 2009). Read: mid-Dec 2008-6 Jan 2009
3. Wendell Berry, The Long-legged House, 1st ed. (Washington DC ;[Berkeley Calif.]: Shoemaker & Hoard ; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2004). Read: 29 Dec 2008-8 Jan 2009
4. Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha : an Indian tale (New York N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1999). Read: 1 Jan / 10 April-6 May 2009
5. Robert Butler, Intercourse : Stories (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008). Read: 3-4 Jan 2009. See also: Some things seen around the internet lately
6. Jacques. Ellul, A Critique of the New Commonplaces (New York: Knopf, 1968). Read: 3 Jan-15 March 2009. Read about half, all in all. Counting it read. Cited by David Bade in a talk he gave to the UIUC ASIS&T Student Chapter about 2 years ago.
7. Christopher Hutton, Abstraction and Instance: The Type-Token Relation in Linguistic Theory, 1st ed., Language & communication library v. 11 (Oxford [England]: Pergamon Press, 1990). Read: 4 Jan-?? 2009. For my CAS interests. Difficult.
8. Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems. Volume Two (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2005). Read: 9-10 Jan 2009. Wow! Very earthy, natural, attentive. Nice to have read it on the heels of Berry.
9. Mary Oliver, Red Bird : Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008). Read: 10 Jan 2009
10. Paul Woodruff, Reverence : Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Read: 11-23 Jan 2009. I had begun a post on the amazing synchronicity and overlap between, and their effect on me of, Berry, Oliver and Woodruff. Sadly, somewhere along the way, that fell through; like so many other attempted blog posts this past year. Even if it didn’t get posted, I sure wish I had written it for myself.
11. Pablo Neruda, Residence on Earth = Residencia en la tierra, trans. Donald D. Walsh, New Directions paperbook 992 (New York NY: New Directions, 2004). Read: 16 Jan- 2009. Have not yet finished this. Spent several months at it slowly but the last fair bit is about war and destruction. I could only take so much, beautiful as it may be, with my son deployed to Iraq.
12. George Steiner, Grammars of Creation: Originating in the Gifford Lectures for 1990 (New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2001). Read: 26 Jan-1 March 2009. This was an extremely interesting book, although hard to follow sometimes. I had intended to read more Steiner after this but haven’t gotten to it yet.
13. Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmer Poems ([New York]: Counterpoint Press, 2008). Read: 28 Jan 2009. This was a gift from Sara that she brought me from her ALA Midwinter trip.
14. J. H Bowman, Essential Dewey (London: Facet Pub, 2005). Read: 2-16 Feb 2009. Professional development.
15. Rachel Kramer Bussel, ed., The Lust Chronicles Anthology, ebook (pdf). (Beverly, MA: Ravenous Romance), http://www.ravenousromance.com/the-lust-chronicles/the-lust-chronicles-anthology.php. Read: 5-13 Feb 2009
16. Pablo Neruda, Ode to Typography = Oda a la tipografía, trans. Enrique Sacerio-Garí (Torrance, Calif.: Labyrinth Editions, 1977). Read: 9 Feb 2009 in Illinois State University Milner Library Special Collections. [Issued in a portfolio. "One hundred copies printed." No. 26. "This book was printed on Japanese Masa and Ragston papers at Yale University School of Art using a Vandercook proof press. This book was designed & produced by Richard Bigus, Labyrinth Editions ..."--Colophon. "We have translated the ode not only into English but also into the typographical space it celebrates. The "Ode to Typography" is Neruda's song to a world of words as it is created under the ancient fingers of a masterful hand. Typography is also poetry. In this book printer Richard Bigus was the poet."--Translator's note. Letterpress printed. Bound in Japanese side-sewn style using linen thread. Covers created from artist-made marbled paper.]
17. Edgar Allan Poe, Bon-Bon, ebook (epub)., 1832, http://feedbooks.com/book/760. Read: 15 Feb 2009
18. D. H. Lawrence, Amores : Poems, ebook (epub)., http://www.munseys.com/book/24967/Amores. Read: 16-17 Feb 2009. Enjoyed quite a few of these.
19. Christina Rosetti, Poems [New Poems by Christina Rosetti: Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected], ebook (epub)., http://www.munseys.com/book/22140/Poems. Read: 18 Feb-7 March 2009. A bit much sometimes, especially when she’s on about religion, but I enjoyed quite a few.
20. Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (Cheshire, Conn: Graphics Press LLC, 2006). Read: 1 March-. Gave up fairly quickly as did not feel prepared for it in some way. Hope to get back to it someday.
21. P. K. Page, Cry Ararat! Poems New and Selected (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967). Read: 2-5 March 2009. Quite enjoyed these.
22. Leonard Smith, Chaos : a Very Short Introduction, Very short introductions 159 (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 6 March-27 April 2009. I really appreciated how it kept hammering away on the differences between models and reality; numbers in our mathematical models, the numbers we observe when taking measurements in the world, & the numbers inside a digital computer; and models, computer implementations of our models, and the real world.
23. H. G. Wells, Tales of Space and Time, ebook (epub)., 1900, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3469. Read: 11-20 March 2009. I quite enjoyed these stories. Makes an excellent read on a mobile device.
24. P. K. Page, Evening Dance of the Grey Flies (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981). Read: 14-15 March 2009. Enjoyed these also. Have a couple more books of Page’s poetry to read.
25. Alex Rose, The Musical Illusionist : and Other Tales (Brooklyn N.Y.: Hotel St. George Press, 2007). Read: 18 March-3 April 2009. Read this at Sara’s. Was pretty good, all in all, but I seriously longed for some sort of pointers (citations/references) to that which was based on fact. I guess there is just too much admixture of reality and make believe in this for me.
26. Lisa Lane, The Darkness and the Night : Blood and Coffee, ebook (epub)., A Ravenous Romance™ Fantastica™ Original Publication (Beverly, MA: Ravenous Romance, 2009), http://www.ravenousromance.com. Read: 20-25 March 2009
27. Barrett Watten, Conduit (San Francisco: GAZ, 1988). Read: 22-24 March 2009. Cited by Ron Day, “The “Conduit Metaphor” and the Nature and Politics of Information Studies” JASIST 51(9) p. 808. Although I was really looking forward to this, I didn’t quite get it. Mostly a series of disconnected thoughts, statements, etc. Maybe I’m just not bright or hip enough to get it.
28. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, ebook (epub)., 1895, http://feedbooks.com/book/32. Read: 25-28 March 2009. Enjoyed it but also noticed a few issues that with a bit of probing around academically I discovered have been commented on by Wells scholars. Tad bit pleased with myself for that.
29. Umberto Eco, Serendipities : Language & Lunacy, trans. William Weaver, Italian Academy lectures (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Read: 27-29 March 2009. Enjoyed this much better than the longer book for which it is the leftover bits (see Eco below).
30. Roy Harris, Mindboggling : Preliminaries to a Science of the Mind (Luton: The Pantaneto Press, 2008). Read: 29 March-1 April 2009
31. Charles Wagner, The Simple Life, trans. Mary Louise Hendee, ebook (epub). (New York: Groseet & Dunlap, 1901), http://www.munseys.com/book/25493/Simple_Life,_The. Read: 30 March-9 April 2009. Quite excellent; highly recommended.
32. Per Linell, The Written Language Bias in Linguistics: Its Nature, Origins and Transformations, Routledge advances in communication and linguistic theory 5 (London: Routledge, 2005). Read: 2-15 April 2009. A most excellent book that I hope to revisit someday; preferably with my own copy.
33. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-reliance and Other Essays, ed. Edna H. L. Turpin, ebook (epub)., Merrill’s English texts (New York: Charles E. Merrill, 1907), http://www.munseys.com/book/17951/Essays. Read: 9-21 April 2009. Only read Intro and four essays (through Friendship) before giving up. I found Emerson practically incoherent and self-contradictory. I wanted to like and respect these essays more but simply could not. May give them another chance in another decade or so.
34. Ronald Gross, Peak Learning : How to Create Your Own Lifelong Education Program for Personal Enlightenment and Professional Success, Rev. ed. (New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999). Read: 12 April-. Am supposedly still reading this but haven’t been back to it in a while unfortunately.
35. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress, The making of Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997). Read: 15 April-19 May 2009. Of some value but highly disappointing. The outtakes, which comprise Serendipities, make for a better read.
36. John Clarke, Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance periods. The Rede lecture delivered June 13, 1894., ebook (epub). (Cambridge [Eng.]: Macmillan and Bowes), http://www.bookglutton.com/detail/Clark/Libraries+in+the+Medieval+and+Renaissance+Periods/352.html. Read: 22-24 April 2009. This was an excellent lecture. The only drawback of the ebook version was that all but one image was missing.
37. Catherine Belsey, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, Very short introductions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Read: 28-30 April 2009
38. John Miedema, Slow Reading (Duluth Minn.: Litwin Books, 2009). Read: 29 April-3 May 2009. Worth reading. Short with an easy style. [The LibraryThing reviewers who called this overly academic in their reviews are nuts.] I started on a review of this but didn’t get far due to assorted interruptions. Another one that I wish I had at least gotten down for myself.
39. Tom McArthur, Worlds of Reference: Lexicography, Learning, and Language from the Clay Tablet to the Computer (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Read: 2 May-30 June 2009. Ordered my own copy from amazon on the 2nd day of reading. This is an excellent book, especially appropriate for all LIS folks. Should be required reading for all LIS & book history folks.
40. Irving Singer, Sex: A Philosophical Primer ; with New Material on Same-Sex Marriage, Expanded ed. (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). Read: 4-7 May 2009
41. Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information, and Wonder: What is Knowledge For? / (London: Routledge, 1991). Read: 9 May / 30 June-4 Aug 2009. Restarted 30 Jun with my own copy. A most excellent book which I hope to revisit on occasion. Recommended by David Bade.
42. Sheila S Intner and Peggy Johnson, Fundamentals of Technical Services Management, ALA fundamentals series (Chicago: American Library Association, 2008). Read: ?? May-11 Sep 2009. Professional development.
43. Toni Weller, Information History : an Introduction : Exploring an Emergent Field (Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2008). Read: 11-16 May 2009. OK but I was hoping for something more.
44. Nick Baylis, The Rough Guide to Happiness: Practical Steps for All-round Well-being, Rough guides (New York: Rough Guides, 2009). Read: 18 May-. Finished most of this. Free from LibraryThing via their monthly publisher review copy program.
45. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, ebook (epub). (Project Gutenberg, 1997), http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/844. Read: 29-30 June 2009. My 1st Wilde and I enjoyed it immensely.
46. Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (ebook (epub), 1894), http://www.feedbooks.com/book/162. Read: 1-6 July 2009. Quite enjoyed this and makes a fine ebook read.
47. Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood, ebook (epub)., 1922, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2158. Read: 6-11 July 2009. Awesome swashbuckling goodness!
48. Aristophanes, Clouds, trans. William James Hickie, ebook (epub)., 2001, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2562. Read: ?12-16 July 2009. Seriously underwhelmed. Need a good print edition with lots of foot/endnotes fleshing out the huge amount of missing context.
49. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, ebook (epub)., http://www.bookglutton.com/detail/John+Dewey/Democracy+and+Education+an+Introduction+to+the+Philosophy+of+Education/400.html. Read: 18 July-22 Sep. My 1st long nonfiction work read on the Touch. It went OK but this, for me, would have been better in print.
50. Wendell Berry, Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World (Berkeley, Calif: Counterpoint Press, 2009). Read: 1-2 Aug 2009. Excellent for all ages! Gift from Sara that she brought me from ALA.
51. Anne Carson and Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, D.C.), Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1986). Read: 5-11 Aug. Most excellent! Acquired my own print copy shortly after finishing it. Will definitely be revisiting this.
52. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Beacon paperbacks 330 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). Read: 12-16 Aug. Quit at pg. 16 because I just could not get into it. Maybe someday. The main text looked like it was better than the introduction but that was where the author was setting out what he had tried to do and placing the work in the context of his subsequent work [English translation came years after the original].
53. Susie Bright, Susie Bright’s Sexwise: America’s Favorite X-Rated Intellectual Does Dan Quayle, Catharine MacKinnon, Stephen King, Camille Paglia, Nicholson Baker, Madonna, the Black Panthers, and the GOP–, 1st ed. (Pittsburg, Pa: Cleis Press, 1995). Read: 16-19 Aug 2009. Saw this on the quick sort shelf waiting to be reshelved. What can I say? A large font Sexwise down the spine caught my eye.
54. Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, eds., Language Myths (New York N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1998). Read: 20-28 Aug 2009. Short overviews of lots of issues in linguistics and language studies. Generally good quality throughout that makes for a good introduction.
55. Birger Hjørland, Information Seeking and Subject Representation: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Information Science, New directions in information management 34 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1997). Read: 28 Aug-11 Oct 2009. This time got through the whole thing.
56. Robert Fiengo and Robert May, De Lingua Belief (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006). Read: 29 May-. Supposedly still reading this but I think I’ve given up on it. While they are challenging the received norm in philosophy of language they are doing so on a very fine point. I agree that theirs is a valid critique but I also feel that it is spurious and does not begin to go far enough; that is, to question the whole of the received norm of philosophy of language.
57. Marina Orlova, Hot for Words: Answers to All Your Burning Questions About Words and Their Meanings, 1st ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Read: 31 Aug-1 Sep 2009. What can I say? This little tramp caught my eye on the new book shelf at Urbana Free (my public). Really not worth the effort; which isn’t much, mind you. Etymology of the worst kind. And by a[n intentionally] tarted up blond.
58. Alan Moore, Lost Girls (Atlanta: Top Shelf Productions, 2006). Read: Vol. 1 sometime in Aug. perhaps; vol. 2 7-8 Sep; vol. 3 8 Sep 2009
59. Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, 1st ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Read: 9- 24 Sep 2009. Another poet tried. Another that didn’t particularly speak to me.
60. Owen Barfield, Speaker’s Meaning, 1st ed. (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1967). Read: 13-15 Sep 2009. Enjoyed.
61. Owen Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays, 1st ed. (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1977). 15 Sep-15 Nov 2009. Enjoyed most of these essays. Would like to revisit this with my own copy someday.
62. Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, 1st ed. (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009). Read 20-24 Sep 2009. A popularization of some of the types of invented languages discussed by Eco, amongst others, but far more readable and interesting.
63. Karel Čapek, R.U.R., ebook (epub)., 1921, http://feedbooks.com/book/4199. Read 23-25 Sep 2009. I have been filling in the name of this story in crosswords for decades so I figured it was time to read it. I was not disappointed. Another great ebook read.
64. David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age, 1st ed. (New York: Arcade, 2001). Read 25 Sep-24 Nov 2009. Pretty good but read at work during breaks so the author’s point was kind of too spread out for me. Instead, I recommend Avatars of the Word [See below].
65. Arthur Conan Doyle, Through the Magic Door, ebook (epub)., 1907, http://feedbooks.com/book/356. Read 28 Sep-5 Oct 2009. Doyle on other books; excellent. Would be easier to (re)consult if printed.
66. Melissa Kwasny, Reading Novalis in Montana, 1st ed. (Minneapolis, Minn: Milkweed Editions, 2009). Read 2-31 Oct 2009. Mentioned positively on a good friend’s blog so I wanted to check it out but these poems just didn’t speak to me. But in a bit of sychronicity, the epigram at the start of Lord Jim is by Novalis.
67. Rafael Sabatini, Casanova’s Alibi, ebook (epub)., 1914, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3952. Read 5?-10 Oct 2009. Interesting read.
68. Paulo Coelho, The Way of the Bow, ebook (epub)., 2008, http://feedbooks.com/book/3873. Read 10 Oct 2009
69. Kurt Vonnegut, 2 B R 0 2 B, ebook (epub)., 1962, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/912. Read 12 Oct 2009. Quick, fun read.
70. Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, ebook (epub)., 1887, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/7. Read 12-13? Oct 2009. Hilarious!
71. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ebook (epub)., 1868, http://feedbooks.com/book/3311. Read 12?-19 Oct 2009. Quite good; I highly recommend it. “Widely regarded as the precursor of the modern mystery and suspense novels, ….”
72. Kimberly Zant, Surrender (Lake Park, GA: New Concepts, 2007). Read 20-22 Oct 2009
73. George Eliot, The Lifted Veil, ebook (epub)., 1859, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4316. Read: 23-24 Oct 2009. Decent enough short story but not classic Eliot.
74. Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow, ebook (epub). (1921), http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4146. 25-26 Oct 2009
75. Jane Austen, Lady Susan, ebook (epub)., 1794, http://feedbooks.com/book/3922. 22?-30 Oct 2009. Yes, I did read Huxley in the midst of this. It got off to a slow start for me but I went back to it after Huxley. All in all, I’d say it is decent enough. Epistolary novel.
76. Stephen Dunn, Local Visitations: Poems, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003). Read 1-3 Nov 2009. Another poet that really didn’t speak to me.
77. Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche, ebook (epub)., 1921, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2168. Read: 2-13 Nov 2009. Good Sabatini; the one he is most known for but I prefer the previous 2 I read more.
78. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World, ebook (epub)., 1912, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/67. Read 13-14 Nov 2009. Excellent!
79. Max Black, The Importance of Language, Cornell paperbacks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969). Read: 6/14 Nov 2009. Read on the way to/from ASIST 2009 Annual Meeting; 1st half on planes there, back half on a train home.
80. David Yanor, ed., Lust: Quills Annual Erotic Magazine, vol. 1 (Vancouver: Quill’s Canadian Poetry Magazine, 2004). Read: 14 Nov 2009. I read this on the City of New Orleans train from Chicago to Champaign on the way home from ASIST 2009. I got this from Little Sister’s in Vancouver.
81. George Eliot, Brother Jacob, ebook (epub)., 1860, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4370. Read: 17-18 Nov 2009. Again, not the best Eliot, but fun and short.
82. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ebook (epub)., 1900, http://feedbooks.com/book/719. Read: 18 Nov-11 Dec 2009. See also entry below. Read just about half on my Touch and then while at the Illini Union bookstore during a 30% off sale I noticed a new Penguin Classics paperback for $7. On sale it was $4.90 so I grabbed it and finished the novel in print and then went back and read the introductory essay by Alan H. Simmons. Print also provided me the glossaries and all the editorial notes. This was an excellent novel. The Novalis epigram, mentioned in the Kwasny entry above, that opens the novel is: “It is certain my conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it.”
83. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim : a tale, [New ed.] /. (London: Penguin, 1900).
84. James Joseph O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998). Read: 18 Nov-14 Dec 2009. Noticed Dorothea Salo thanking Steve Lawson for recommending this in friendfeed so picked it up. Quite good; recommended.
85. R. L. Trask and Bill Mayblin, Introducing Linguistics, Introducing … (Cambridge [Eng.]: Icon Books / Totem Books, 2000). Read: 29 Nov 2009
86. Duncan Emrich, The Folklore of Weddings and Marriage; the Traditional Beliefs, Customs, Superstitions, Charms, and Omens of Marriage and Marriage Ceremonies (New York: American Heritage Press, 1970). Read: 10 Dec 2009. This was grabbed on a lark when looking for books on alternative wedding vows because it was illustrated by Tomi de Paola.
87. Mary Oliver, American Primitive : Poems, 1st ed. (Boston: Little Brown, 1983). Read: 13 Dec 2009. One of my favorite poets so far.
88. Saki, The Chronicles of Clovis, ebook (epub)., 1911, http://feedbooks.com/book/3401. Read 14-?? Dec 2009. Decidedly wicked and wickedly funny.
89. Wood, James. How Fiction Works. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Read 17-30 Dec. Quite enjoyed this.
90. Chan, Lois Mai, and Joan S Mitchell. Dewey Decimal Classification: Principles and Application. 3rd ed. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC, 2003. Read 21 Dec-. Professional development for the new year.
91. Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. Curious, If True: Strange Tales, ebook (epub)., 1859. http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3335. Read 21 Dec-. Enjoying this so far; 2 out of 5 stories read.

Well, that’s it for 2009. #90 and 91 are still being actively read. A few others will hopefully be continued soon. As to what’s next? I got lots of Mary Oliver, Erotic Poems, Crowley, and a Harris book for Christmas. I also have plenty on the ‘to be read’ shelf among many more. And seeing as I have yet another ‘to be read’ shelf at work, too, … *le sigh*

Metadata issues and the issues of (non)reference for ebooks still sucks. I have begun doing my best to get my ebooks via the Web on the MacBook and then syncing them. When I grab the file from feedbooks, gutenberg, …, I bookmark the page in my delicious account and tag it with ebook. Then I can at least see what the source is claiming for what I believe I got. Has been somewhat helpful but a real pain. Most of the metadata in the CoinS in this post for ebooks comes from my entering a good deal of data from those pages. Very little good structured data in free things often; it is a difficulty.

Oh well. Here’s to reading in 2010!

2007/2008 Books read and earlier 2009 posts re Reading

• Books Read in 2007
• Books read in the 1st half of 2008 (and some)
• Book read in the 2nd half of 2008
• My personal journey into ebooks
• Update: My personal journey into ebooks

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.

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.

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.

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.