Tech Stuff

I haven’t been around much the past few days. There are a few reasons for that. We’re starting to bind journals again for the first time in months.  I’ve taken over a number of knowledge management duties for the library that are forcing all of the librarians here to rethink their work flow models.  I’m putting together a proposal for the 2006 METRO Digitization Grant for delivery in about three weeks.  We’re integrating PubMed into our Article Linker subscription.  And I’m working with my boss on getting our journal subscriptions evaluated and renewed, so there is a lot going on right now.

That said, while I wondered about how to deal with the knowledge management responsibilities, I got to thinking about what I learned from my 20+ years working with computers and how that knowledge helps me plan work both tactically (day to day) and strategically (quarter to quarter, year to year).  I’ve always liked machines, and as I got older and learned to think more abstractly I found that I liked thinking about systems in general. (I was one of those truly nerdy kids –now a nerdy adult–who would  wonder who first created the laser death ray and why  everybody in one sci-fi universe or another seemed to have them.  Did the inventor not patent the thing? Couldn’t he have licensed it to the army? To the Time Corp? What about antimatter bombs? Heck, while we’re at it, who invented the time machine?  Did people pay royalties to H.G. Wells when they built their own? If not, then why not? And how big an economy does a planet really need just to build a single Super Star Destroyer?)

The point is that in my daily interactions with the librarians here it became clear that I know more about these things than most of them do.  And that’s fine–reference librarians don’t need to know every detail about the information systems they use the same way a concert violinist need not know how to build a violin.  But that lack of knowledge works both ways–there are some things our network just can’t do, or at least, can’t do without enormous additional resources (time, money and staff, but mostly time . . . and money).  Even our library’s director–for whom I have enormous respect as both an administrator and a librarian–sometimes thinks of the system as a magic box that works like any ship’s computer on Star Trek.

Well, the world . . .  she don’t work that way. What follows are some extremely basic and blunt thoughts on the things that the planners of Libraryland might wish to take into account if they feel so inclined.   Think of it as a friendly and well-meant rant.

[Read more…] about 10 Things About Electronic Resources That Librarians Need to Know

First, a big WooHOO! to Factcheck.org for receiving domestic and international awards.  If you haven’t subscribed to their e-mail news listserv you’re missing a lot.  I love this site.  If you’re looking for truly professional (i.e., fair and thorough) analysis of political ads and such, this is the place to go (or at least the place to start.)  Click on the previous links and experience the love first hand.

The 2007 MeSH is available now so I went and book marked it.  In truth, this has probably been available for some time and I just noticed it now, which is kind of sad since I use this page nearly every day for catalog work.  At any rate, there it is.

And we have broken the 7,000 visitor barrier (we’re at 7056 as I write this), for which I must thank  a billion or so librarians sporting body art of various types, styles and tastes,  offering  tidbits of information about themselves to satisfy my rampant curiosity.  Most of the traffic this site gets happens through federated search engines (lots of Google, rather less Yahoo, a mix of others) bouncing hits off past metadata entries, and in an average week, it’ll see about sixty or seventy web browsers pass through on their ways to elsewhere.  I’d love to find out how many are repeat visitors–I’d love even more to learn how many folks have linked to the RSS here.  I’ve gone through the Typepad help area and made a few calls to the help desk but I can’t find any support for that sort of statistic gathering.  Am I looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place?  Any and all advice would be appreciated.

In 1990 I found a wacky (and vaguely depressing) manga anthology by Joji Manabe (whose work I love) called "Dora." One of the stories in it (actually the first few pages of one of the stories in it) contained the germ of an idea I eventually turned into a short story called "Norma" (no relation to Dora). A couple of years later I decided that Norma had a lot more to do and so I spent the next five years turning it into a massive first novel with the pretentious title "The Electric Gods." To this day I  haven’t gotten it published, and considering the quality of the writing and the manuscript’s stupendous need for editing, that’s probably just as well.

Anyway, one of the things that Norma learned in her adventures in that (vaguely depressing) universe was that information has a way of osmosing from one place to another regardless of the efforts people and their machines put into restricting it. That’s probably a function of how we utilize the stuff–we tend to organize things into disjointed bits and pieces that we call "trivia", which is a distinctly twentieth century creation. In the nineteenth and earlier centuries, data were organized in rather more coherent forms. Little was truly disjointed, and details coalesced into a particular process. With the advent of assembly line manufacturing, you didn’t need to know the details of the process, just your little portion of it. That little portion, from the point of view of an earlier age, might have been essentially meaningless–trivial–but to the line worker, it was everything.

Eighty years later, we are walking data banks of trivia.

So it’s no surprise to see an article like this one: Don’t Keep Secrets on Cell Phones, from USA Today. People put what can be considered classified secrets (even just to themselves) on cell phones, and then tend to forget that they’re embedded on bits of silicon that can be mined by people who know what they’re doing. Random things: birthdays, addresses, phones numbers for cell, work, and home, as well as those for the spouse, parents, kids, coworkers, etc. Social security numbers. God alone knows how many e-mail addresses and whose. Work and home addresses, meeting schedules, date books. Bank accounts. Credit card numbers. Every one of which has potential value to someone who knows data systems and isn’t too scrupulous about selling that data to someone else.

I have read one economic (slightly off the wall) theory that says that money has a natural tendency to pool where it will do the least good to the fewest number of people. There may be a similar theory of information that says that information tends to pool in places where it will do the greatest harm to the largest number of people (Total Information Awareness, anyone?) Or maybe this is just the result a crapload of trivialities finding critical mass.

Anyway, read the article, and fry your cell phone before giving it away.

I like the Center for American Progress.  I really do, for the sheer level of research they utilize when writing any given bulletin they send out. I am in awe. Having said that, I’m not sure how I feel about their latest posts on what they call the Two-Tiered Internet. The NY Times has a better written account of what it means and why.

Google Alert just dumped a link in my lap that I’m a bit conflicted about: it’s called "Metacrap" and it’s an angry and obnoxious attempt by Cory Doctorow to make what should be an excellent point. Namely, that not all meta-data is reliable and the level to which it is unreliable necessarily degrades its utility for everyone, including (especially?) libraries.

I’ll just say now that I have no idea who Doctorow is or why he’s so unhappy with the idea of meta-data–he seems really annoyed by the fact that the stuff is routinely misused by everybody from porn site designers to slick web marketers and novices who don’t know a thing about HTML getting involved.  But he concludes by saying that meta-data are actually quite useful:

"Certain kinds of implicit meta-data is awfully useful, in
fact. Google exploits meta-data about the structure of the World Wide
Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the
number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics
about the number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important
enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how
reputable the information on that page is.

This sort of observational meta-data is far more reliable
than the stuff that human beings create for the purposes of having
their documents found. It cuts through the marketing bullshit, the
self-delusion, and the vocabulary collisions.

Taken more broadly, this kind of meta-data can be thought of
as a pedigree: who thinks that this document is valuable? How closely
correlated have this person’s value judgments been with mine in times
gone by? This kind of implicit endorsement of information is a far
better candidate for an information-retrieval panacea than all the
world’s schema combined."

To him, I say only: Dude, calm down.

I think he’s making a few errors of his own here: a popular web site may be a better source of disinformation than fact, for example, no matter how many Google links point to it or how many hits have been logged over time–what about a completely factual site that nobody chooses to give credence to, for that matter? (Good info, no coverage. He also ignores Roy Tennant’s analysis of Google’s limitations). He’s right that as more and more pages spring up from more and more sources that nobody has first-hand knowledge of, the general quality of the information disseminated goes down, but that’s just common sense , or it should be.  People have all manner of bias and those biases invariably find their ways into the work they create.  No argument there.

Second, and perhaps more importantly: has anyone actually written anything on how the increasing use of meta-data will somehow solve all  information seekers’ problems? Has anyone actually put that idea forth? Or is "meta-utopia" something Doctrow just came up with because it sounded cool?  (I suspect the latter, but what do I know?)

Yes, meta-data are misused, sometimes badly abused, to the detriment of many. Of course there are problems.  Show me anything created by the human race without the potential for misuse or problems. If you can’t–and we both know you can’t–stop your whining and help those of us who believe in meta-data’s value as an information locating aid to fix the problems that you’ve found.   Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

This concludes the sermon. As I said, his general point has value; he’s just burying it beneath a few tons of cranky hyperbole. I’ve included the link above so you can go read what he says and judge for yourself.