I know most of you never see this site anymore and if/when you do see my posts you are probably seeing them in a feed reader. That’s OK. I probably read about 50% of the blogs I follow in Google Reader and 50% at the blog itself (by clicking through). To get a feel for a new blog or to read one I know is well-designed (say, Walt at Random or via negativa), I’ll click through for the better aesthetic experience.

All that said, I am redesigning my blog. I have scrapped the old Cutline theme that I have used since November 2006. Wow! Really‽

I am using the Twenty Eleven theme from WordPress but along with the Twenty Eleven with Sidebar in Posts child theme. I have been doing some tweaking to it—kind of the point of a child theme—but still want to do more.

I have made some headers, which rotate, from some of my photos and plan on doing more. I am hoping to use a Google Web Font (still need to choose which one) for my blog title. If that works, I may consider finding one for the main text of the blog but I am concerned with loading overhead. I am currently using Georgia for body text, which I like a lot better than the sans serif font the theme uses by default, but Georgia really isn’t that great of a serif font.

I still need to restyle some H3 elements I have used as heading within posts previously as they are kind of small and light, add post counts to the Archives page, take the “!” off the Contact Me! page, do a bit more adjusting of the header area, along with changing the font to something nicer up there, and a few other things. I have added the citation for the inspiration of the title to the tagline area but I’d prefer it to be part of the title properly. We’ll see.

If you are so inclined, please feel free to actually visit the blog and provide any thoughts on aesthetics, location of elements/widgets, etc., missing/preferred elements/widgets, etc. Keep in mind, though, that this is a fairly responsive design and will look different depending on screen resolution, size, etc. For instance, the sidebar items all shift to the bottom on our iPads to leave plenty of room for the body.

When clearing out my aggregator a couple weeks back I came across this article in ResourceShelf (29 August 2010). It is a short, 4-page article which I printed and read on casual-leisure searching.

It appears to be a preprint from an ACM journal but the real info is lacking. I did some Google Scholar and Google searching and determined it to have been a presentation from HCIR 2010 last month. Daniel Tunkelang’s blog was most helpful, even including having the presentation embedded and linking to the mentioned Technology Review article, “Searching for Fun.”

Fourth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval 22 August 2010

Update: The entire proceedings are available as a (big) pdf from the HCIR 2010 site: Proceedings [pdf: 18.2 MB]  Hmmm, Zotero linked to the entire proceedings; when/how did that happen? The individual article pdf is linked in the 1st paragraph (the one after the citation).

I also found a copy of the preprint at the first author’s uni site.

Casual-Leisure Searching

It turns out that, in fact, it is not only librarians who like to search. Some folks do it just to do it. The authors work in the realm of “exploratory search” and based on two different studies they have done have noticed that information retrieval (IR,) information seeking (IS), exploratory search (ES), and Sensemaking models are all incomplete.

“ES is defined as trying to resolve an information need when the searcher has limited knowledge of their goal, domain, or search system [13], normally involving some kind of learning or investigating behaviour [9]” (28).

They provide a very quick overview of these models and how they assume an information need, and that searching occurs to find information. They then discuss personal tasks versus the work-based focus of most of the research in these areas. Stebbins work on non-work and leisure activities in brought in, situating these activities as hedonistic. The area of the least research on information behavior, especially information seeking, is in this arena of casual-leisure. Some of this is now occurring and they do point to the work of Jenna Hartel and others.

All of these previous models are information-focused but in their work they are beginning to see searching for its own sake.

They did a study on TV-based casual information behaviors and one on harvesting real search tasks from Twitter. This is preliminary work but it is exciting. In the TV-based study they were able to look at both behavior and motivation. One might, if a hard-headed enough nit-picker, describe the behavior as still “wanting to find” but it is the motivation that shows the behavior is tending towards search without finding. These folks still, to me, wanted to find something. But their criteria was so loose that, perhaps, many different things could satisfy what they were looking for.

To me, it is the 2nd study, of Twitter, that shows the most promise in expanding our views, and theories, of search. One could get in a huff and say this is only browsing, except that under the previous models browsing is still assumed to be goal-directed and that it is browsing for something.

Have you ever found yourself endlessly browsing etsy.com, or ted.com, or just sort of leisurely following hyperlink after hyperlink to suddenly notice that 2 hours have elapsed? That sort of browsing or searching has no real goal except to pass the time and, as they note, this can be either a good thing or a not so good thing. But often we do just do this for the experience of it. And I must say that this is one of the few current uses of “experience” that I can get behind. People do, in fact, sometimes search for the experience of it. There is no goal except to pass the time, hopefully in a reasonably enjoyable and non-frustrating manner. But other than that, what is found is of no consequence.

This is another area of daily, mundane, life that as usual until recently has been neglected in science—social or otherwise. Info seeking research began by studying scientists and then corporate work life. Eventually studies of nurses, children, janitors, etc. came along but they were still generally work task related. Only recently has the personal, casual, leisure angle begun to be explored. Now that it is the lack of coverage of our models is beginning to show. Even the more recent exploratory search aspect of information seeking is limited in the same way.

Those who claim that “it is only librarians who like to search, everyone likes to find” are, and always were, wrong.

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.

Sunday, 1 Apr 2007

Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read:

William Blake, “The Chimney Sweeper”
William Blake, “London”
William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much With Us”

Babik, Wieslaw. “Terminology as a level for the compatibility of indexing languages. Some remarks.” Compatibility and Integration of Order Systems: Research Seminar Proceedings of the TIP/ISKO Meeting, Warsaw, 13-15 September 1995. Warsaw: Indeks-Verlag, 1996. 157-162.

Aitchison, Jean. “A Classification as a source for a thesaurus: The Bibliographic Classification of H. E. Bliss as a source of thesaurus terms and structure.” Journal of Documentation 42 (3), Sep. 1986: 160-181.

This was a good article that looks at using BC2 to generate thesauri. It seems as if it could be a very useful tool; but what is the status of BC2 today? Was it completed? Has it been kept up-to-date? Need to look into that at some point….

Doerr, Martin and Patrick LeBoeuf. “Modelling intellectual processes: The FRBR-CRM Harmonization.” The CIDOC Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2006 [pdf]

For Ontologies.

Monday, 2 Apr 2007

Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read:

William Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge”

Broughton, Vanda. “Structural, linguistic and mathematical elements in indexing languages and search engines: Implications for the use of index languages in electronic and non-LIS environments.” Advances in Knowledge Organization, Vol. 7 (2000): Dynamism and stability in knowledge organization. Proceedings of the Sixth International ISKO Conference 10-13 July 2000, Toronto, Canada. Ergon Verlag: 206-212.

Farradane, J. “Relational indexing.” The Indexer: Journal of the Society of Indexers 2 (4)Autumn 1961

Wow! Über-classic article.

Monday – Tuesday, 2 – 3 Mar 2007

Doerr, Martin and Patrick Le Bouef. FRBR object-oriented definition (version 6.7) August 2006.

This is the version Allen linked to for Ontologies, but he and several others had the newest which is 7.1. That made me a little grumpy, to say the least. This is an attempt to harmonize FRBR with the CIDOC CRM.

These guys really are brilliant people, but this thing is a mess. If you had any squishy thoughts about FRBR at all, but particularly “works” or “manifestations,” be ready to have your brain pulled out through your rear end, kneaded until soft(er), pureed in a blender and put back in with a turkey baster up your nostrils. Seriously. A small part of that was trying to keep straight the newer model used in discussion from the one I had read, but mostly it was the several types of “manifestations” and, oh perhaps, a dozen kinds of “works.” Seriously guys, logic is not always your friend. I understand the logical purpose for the reification of multiple kinds of works, but is it useful?

I guess I truly need to see a bare-bones catalog and cataloging module that’s been designed with this model, play with it a bit, and then have a look at the innards. But I seriously cannot see anybody building something that will be used based on this. Maybe I’m just not the proper middle man here, but since that’s the role I see myself in in my professional life I consider that an issue. I really want to know how anyone will get from this model to a workable system that practitioners will buy in to.

Tuesday, 3 Apr 2007

Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read:

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”

Wednesday, 4 Apr 2007

Dousa, Thomas A. “Towards a clarification of the superwork in Svenonius’s set-theoretical model of the bibliographic universe.” Seminar paper for LIS590OH Spring 2007.

Good jeebus! Tom is a freaking genius! I need to re-read this—very closely—at least one more time. I’m not sure I see the same problem in Svenonius that Tom saw and solved. But, for now, I am assuming that he is right about the problem being there. Because as I said, Tom is a freaking genius! And if the problem is there. He solved it. And he used a few words that I’m going to have to look up, so that’s a bonus.

I’m just really sad that I’ll miss him presenting it next week. The week after I get to present my little paper on clarifying P88 and P89 in CIDOC CRM. I was so excited to find out Allen liked my paper! But now, after reading Tom’s, I feel so inadequate. Oh well, I’ve already warned several fellow students not to compare themselves to Tom. I best take my own advice for once.

Thursday, 5 Apr 2007

Albertsen, Ketil and Carol van Nuys. “Paradigma: FRBR and digital documents.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 39 (3/4), 2005: 125-149.

This is from the special issue of CCQ edited by Patrick Le Boeuf, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR): Hype or Cure-all? Well worth checking out if you are new to FRBR.

This paper is about some FRBR Group 1 extensions implemented by the National Library of Norway for handling composite entities at all abstraction levels. I may have read it before as I read most of this issue, but it was cited by Tom in his paper.

Perreault, Jean. (1965) “Categories and relators: a new schema.” Reprinted in: Knowledge Organization 21 (4), 1994: 189-197.

Another Über-classic article.

Friday, 6 Apr 2007

Efthimiadis, Efthimis N. (1996) “Query expansion.” ARIST 31

Read to get some idea about the topic of query expansion and so I can say something about the role of relationships in this portion of search for my Representation and Organization project.

Buckland, Michael K., et. al. Advances in Knowledge Organization, Vol. 7 (2000): Dynamism and stability in knowledge organization. Proceedings of the Sixth International ISKO Conference 10-13 July 2000, Toronto, Canada. Ergon Verlag: 48-53.

Interesting report of some preliminary work I need to look into. Functional relationships may well be more important, or at least as important, as semantic relationships in providing access to organized knowledge/information.

Saturday, 7 Apr 2007

Vickery, Brian C. “Knowledge representation: A brief review.” The Journal of Documentation 42 (3), Sep. 1986: 145-149.

A decent early overview of ways of representing knowledge, particularly for use in computer systems.

Sunday, 11 Mar

Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read:

Shakespeare, The Ghost’s Speech (from Hamlet)

John Donne, “The Flea”

Green, Rebecca. “Relationships in the organization of knowledge: An overview.” In Bean & Green, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. 3-18. Re-read for Representation & Organization.

“Mereology.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Read because Allen Renear suggested I do so in relation to my trying to elucidate the difference between P88 and P89 in the CIDOC CRM. I made a rather lengthy class forum post trying to elucidate this difference, and will probably write my first paper on it.

And, yes, portions of it were beyond my current abilities. And other portions were beyond the work I was willing to put into it. But he also said, “You don’t need to read all to get the basic introduction to standard axioms for mereology.” So I was going “above and beyond” again. Glutton. Punishment.

Monday, 12 Mar

Thomas Gruber. (2005) Ontology of folksonomy: A mash-up of apples and oranges. For Representation and Organization, with nice overlap for Ontologies.

Good, but simple [not simplistic] article about the development of an ontology for tagging. I’ve had thoughts along this line myself on occasion, so I was happy to read this. I found myself wishing for a bit more in way of technical details, though; perhaps a little XML or RDF, say. But I imagine that is to be found at http://tagcommons.org/. Oh well, another blog added to my aggregator. Then again, I promised myself I’d look into more projects and actual practical things and remove some of the biblioblogosphere echo chamber.

Tagging for me, though, is at best secondary and perhaps even tertiary. But since I can actually get my mind around an ontology for tagging it may be a good project to use to learn more about ontologies, XML, RDF, and whatever else they are using to implement.

Smith, Barry and Achille C. Varzi. (2000) “Fiat and bona fide boundaries.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LX (2), March 2000: 401-420. [pdf]

Same as my entry on “Mereology,” except Barry Smith recommended, in general, for his work on bona fide and fiat boundaries.

Smith, Barry and David M. Mark. (2001) “Geographical categories: an ontological investigation.” International Journal of Geographical Information Science 15 (7): 591-612.

See above entry. Excellent article that happened to be an awesome congruence of ontologies, categorization, Lakoff and CIDOC CRM. I’m not sure how much of this mereology stuff I’ll actually use in my paper on P88 vs. P89, because I honestly don’t think some of the ultra-analytic philosophy issues need to be gone into to clear up the CIDOC CRM issues, but there is some useful material in this paper. The issues can be easily cleared up with some reference to basic thesaural principles and other KOS work, and experiential work in categorization, without anything useful being contributed by “deep” philosophical analysis of mereology. Even the bona fide vs. fiat boundary issue—while immensely interesting and useful (in some sense)—is not directly applicable. This paper, though, brings the best of all those areas to bear and, while not necessary to the defense of my pulling P88 and P89 apart, it can add something to the discussion.

Tuesday, 13 Mar

Budd, John M. (2006) “Toward a practical and normative ethics for librarianship.” Library Quarterly 76 (3), July 2006: 251-269.

Stumbled over browsing the current issues of print journals in the LIS Library. Pretty good, all in all.

Noy, Natalya F. and Deborah L. McGuinness. Ontology development 101: A guide to creating your first ontology.

Re-read for Ontologies. Read 30 Nov 06 for Information Modeling.

Lakoff, Chap. 14.

Paglia, Camille. Break, blow, burn. 2005. Read:

John Donne, Holy Sonnet I

John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV

Wednesday – Thursday, 14 – 15 Mar

Green, Rebecca. (2000) “Locating sources in humanities scholarship: The efficacy of following bibliographic references.” Library Quarterly 70 (2): 201-229.

Re-read. Originally read 22 Jan 2007. Maybe I’ll get it blogged this time.

Just went back looking for the link to my previous mention of this article. I had forgotten that this was the article that led to my “Intellectual crushes and more mature relationships” post. It’s amazing what a good article, a quiet bar on a Monday evening, and $2 pints of fresh Guinness will lead a boy to say.

Foucault, Michel. The Discourse on language.

Made a lot more sense than the book it comes in, The Archaeology of knowledge.

Friday, 16 Mar 2007

Kemp, Rebecca. (2007) “Catalog/cataloging changes and Web 2.0 functionality: New directions for serials.” The Serials Librarian 53 (4): 33 pages. Preprint found via post at NGC4LIB list 14-15 March 2007.

Worth the read; is actually much shorter as it is a double-spaced Word doc converted to pdf.

Asheim, Lester. (1983) “Selection and censorship: A reappraisal.” Wilson Library Bulletin November 1983: 180-184.

I was quite excited when I found out last night that Asheim wrote a follow-up to his famous article 30 years later. One of my earliest posts was on an Asheim article. I probably should’ve gone back and read the original, but didn’t. The follow-up deserves a read, though.

Beall, Jeffrey. (2007) “Search fatigue: Finding a cure for the database blues.” American Libraries March 2007: 46-50.

Not a bad article all-in-all. The shame is that it even needs to be written in this day and age, and at such a basic level. But it does, and I find that truly sad. Honestly, any degreed librarian ought to be able to write that article in its essence! The sad truth that they cannot is attested to by the Calhoun Report, numerous blog posts and posts on assorted list servs.

Other than the general sad state of affairs just mentioned, I have 2 small complaints with this article.

First, there is really nothing “natural” about alphabetic order. It is simply a historically contingent arrangement of symbols, which admittedly seems natural since most literate folks are used to it, but it is in no way natural. And relevance ranking (Oh, please don’t get me started on that!) is not the only alternative.

Second, while I fully agree that quality metadata can compensate for the weaknesses of keyword searching, it is not the case that “every document” is assigned the correct indexing terms, nor that “no relevant information is excluded from the results” (49). There is the issue of interindexer consistency, failure to provide retrospective indexing when new or changed terms are introduced, and other issues which affect the quality of metadata enabled searching. The professionals within our field who seem to think that keyword indexing is all that is required are (usually) well aware of this, and ignoring the issue entirely only provides them with (perceived) ammunition. Please, do not do this! We have rock-solid ground to stand on, but we cannot ignore the sometimes rock strewn ground that makes the footing a bit unstable at times.

Shapiro, Lawrence A. “Can psychology be a unified science?” Philosophy of Science 72 (5): Dec 2005 Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Part I Contributed Papers, ed. by Miriam Solomon: 953-963.

I got this issue the mail yesterday and, yes, I am a member of the Philosophy of Science Association despite the fact that much of what these folks are after just baffles me. And while some of it is beyond me (one sense of baffle), it is mostly the fact that they actually pursue these things which baffles me. Much of it is so vastly disconnected from the world and what goes on it that it is hard to believe that it is, in fact, the world that they are trying to describe and reason about.

This is a mighty big issue, of which I’ll only read some of. Just over 800 pages big. There are 3-4 papers (generally) on all of the following topics: Topics in philosophy of biology; Topics in philosophy of physics; Quantum mechanics; History of philosophy of science; Observation and experiment; Causality, confirmation and inference; Philosophy of social science; Gender and science; Topics in evolutionary theory; Realism and underdetermination; Natural selection and evolution; Decision theory; Race and science; Science models; General relativity; and Structural realism.

I read the Shapiro article because he was taking on Jaegwon Kim’s argument that there cannot be a unified science of psychology due to multiple realizability of mental states. I used to read a lot of Kim on consciousness, multiple realizability, supervenience, and so forth.

This is actually a pretty good article and, despite my rustiness in these areas, it seems well argued. Even better, it may actually have some impact in the world even though many of these arguments do not.

One good reason to continue reading philosophy is that “these kids” know how to argue and call each other names in a highly civilized and humorous manner. Many of us could learn a lot from them. I absolutely loved this put down by Shapiro:

I hate to rest on reductio arguments, because there is a disturbing trend among philosophers not always to agree with me about what is absurd, but this will have to do for now (958).

Masterly and snarky, all at the same time.

Well, I can’t swear that I won’t read anything else this week, but I should be writing and perhaps re-looking some of the mereology stuff so I can write. But writing is my mission at the moment.

See you next week.

I had high hopes of doing some serious rewriting tonight based on the input of some very special people. But despite realizing yesterday that I was starting to feel physically better, tonight when I got home it was back to feeling very poorly. Oh well.

I am sure I will get over it in time, but I really do not like search engines today. For one thing, commentary should not rank higher than the the actual work—especially if a current work—in my opinion. ‘Nuff said for now.

I did update the theme I use (Cutline) for my blog this morning. The guy who wrote it—Chris Pearson—is simply awesome. He is more than helpful to the inexperienced; it is only the super geek that wants too much and maybe ought to do it for “himself” that he gently brushes off. I fall somewhere in the middle—lower middle perhaps—so am safe for now.

He rewrote the theme from the ground up and made it really easy to put all our custom css in one place so that future upgrades go seamlessly. He is extremely responsive when it comes to questions. In fact, he is the opposite of what Karen Schneider is discussing here.

I’m particularly thrilled about the tagline now showing up under the header at the top of the page! Now I just have to style it a bit. I was not looking forward to trying to figure out how to make that show up myself in all of WordPress’ php weirdness.

Anyway, I got a few minor css tweaks working this morning, but then realized I broke the random headers. Turns out I did need the updated random header file. But worse, I overwrote the earlier, modified one without thinking about it. Anyway, this evening I got the random header file updated and random headers are back.

I noticed a comment on his blog post about the random header generator about the new header file not calling the custom css. Well, yes, that’s true. My css mods are gone. I tried what the previous commenter suggested and that restored my css mods and broke most everything else. So I’ve commented and I’ll bet Chris is working on it right now.

My mods are pretty simple, although I do want them back. And I’m definitely looking forward to being able to style other things on my own, all in one place.

So despite feeling a bit under the weather again, I am pretty stoked about being able to easily do the above. Now if only the above above was easy. And search engines be damned! Even if they are only doing what they are supposed to do.

Update: I see I broke my Contact form, too. Dangit! And I “knew” something was missing but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Not a problem; as in I should be able to fix it when I get a few minutes. Just means I overwrote something else yesterday morn. I am trying to do a better job of recording these little mods all in one place so I can avoid that in the future.

I would shut my eyes but I’ve got promises to keep
I can’t go crazy and I can’t get sane
And I don’t want to leave—I’d just have to come back again
I’ve got nowhere to go but to sleep….

Jolie Holland. “Nothing to do but Dream.” Springtime Can Kill You

The pain is pretty much under control between the Vicodin and large doses of ibuprofen. But the tiredness. And lack of concentration, and subsequent lack of progress and productivity. Not good.

I had come up with a fall back plan for getting my academic act together. Doesn’t seem like I’ll be able to pull that off either. I really am not happy with what I need to do to reach the fall back, and now I don’t even seem capable of doing the small things I need to do to be ready for tomorrow’s class. I guess I’ll see how I sleep tonight and try and do something before my class which is at noon.

I also spoke way too early about the ants. Not as many yet, but I found a few this morning and another upon coming home this evening. I need to get something else specifically for them, but have had neither time nor money. I now have a little money, but no time to go to the store. Of course, I’m out of many food necessities, too.

I attended a presentation by Endeca today. I took a few notes, but I have no idea what I’m free to report. Nor am I in the mood anyway.

I guess I best get busy and finish my ASIST 2006 posts as I see I made This Week in LibraryBlogLand for my conference coverage, as did Washtub and Christina.

I also see I made it in for my Words. post. I sure hope I get to feeling better in case it generates any conversation.

Well, that’s enough griping, although the last two paragraphs aren’t gripes at all; they seem to be the highlight of my week so far. I should add all the love and concern I’m getting from my friends via various means. And my daughter sent me a friends request in facebook. Those are both pretty highlighty.

Night all. Please cross your fingers, pray, whatever turns you on. I really need to sleep to at least 5 AM or so.

I am trying to be busier and productive now that I’m a little rested from last week. I am trying to prioritize, and trying not to feel guilty about “owing” various folks here something or other.

I’ve been busy and want to mention some of these things here in more detail:

The Wailin’ Jennys on Wed.

Siva on Thursday

Friday the 13th (I love them!)

Chicago

Ani DiFranco

Ace

Two days of “rest”

Refocused busy time, again

I’ve already started on Ani post. I have some notes from Siva’s talk for a post. I have photos on flickr; not of Siva or Ani though….

But I also have other things to do and other priorities. I end one class on Tuesday afternoon. And as much as I love it and would like to continue it in other directions, I need a freakin’ break and I need to start attending my other class.

For Pauline’s last class, I need to finish my Common Ex. C write-up and turn it in. I also need to prep for leading discussion on the Calhoun Report. That is the easy one of the two, even if the common exercise is technically further along. It has been a few weeks since I looked at the exercise. As for Calhoun, I have written and spoke about this at least 3 times each now and have read lots of commentary covering the spectrum on it. My views have, in fact, moderated much since I first read and wrote about it. I still think that despite the good that is in it, it is an abomination and went a long way to effectively shutting down productive discussion on its and related topics of concern in the cataloging and classification worlds of libraries. [Steve, our discussion from summer LEEP oncampus would be vastly different now. I see some good now, a lot even. But....]

The Wailin’ Jennys were excellent. I got no good photos though. I did get all 3 to sign the liner notes of my 40 days cd.

Siva was good, but I was exhausted [there will be more on Siva]. Besides the exhaustion building up to Thursday, I also woke up at 4 AM Thurs. morning. Yippee! I followed Siva with 2 classes. I gave my “Free the Authorities!” presentation in the last of the two. It started out quite well despite the situation. I did start flagging after a bit, particularly after a few questions and discussions. But I held up reasonably OK. I was proud of it (my performance?) at the beginning….

After class Pauline said something very positive to me. Daunting in a way, but very nice. On Tuesday she had asked me if I was applying for a possible job, because she said if I wasn’t then she was going to twist my arm until I did (paraphrased). I sure wish I could believe in myself like she does.

I’m not sure how driving to Chicago and back in a day and a half is “rest.” But I had a good time and it was as relaxing as it could be. So I am somewhat refreshed.

3rd load of clothes is in the dryer. I may have to go in to GSLIS to look at my thesaurus for Common Ex C. I found all my stuff, but printouts do not a thesaurus make.

OK. Off to do other things. I’ll be working on more details as I can.

Oh, BTW. I’m going to a meeting about that job tomorrow. More in the future, but it is one I hope to do beginning next semester, while hopefully staying in serials cataloging also. So, I’m also studying a 32-page LSTA grant application and finding myself wishing I had the figures and the attachments. I’m asking for a complete copy tomorrow at our meeting.

Where do you go little bird
When it snows, when it snows
When the world turns to sleep
Do you know, do you know
Is there something in the wind
Breathes a chill in your heart and life in your wings
Does it whisper ‘start again’
Start again

The Wailin’ Jennys. “Arlington.” 40 Days.

Peace.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, of Sivacracy.net, author of several books, and NYU professor, will be at GSLIS on Thursday to deliver this year’s Windsor Lecture.

This talk will explore the ways that large-scale digitization projects such as Google Book Search affect those who research and write books. It will examine the ways full-text searches might affect research, how widespread access to digitized books will alter market demands for authors, and how technological changes could alter the modes of composition and distribution of books in the near future. Critical of Google for its lack of quality control, this talk will argue that the public debate (such as that between John Updike and Kevin Kelly) has been misguided and misplaced. The real questions for authors will be how we will gather and represent the raw materials for our work.

Thursday, October 12th, 11:30 AM – 1 PM, GSLIS Room 126.

Be there, or don’t. Me, I’ll be there. My noon time professor is encouraging us to go, and I probably would anyway. While I don’t agree with everything Siva writes, I do agree with much of what he says. He also pays more attention to the intersection of pop culture, the academy and the corporate world than I am able to. I, for one, am glad he’s looking into some of the things that overlap with, and have a major impact on, my world.