May 07, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, GLAM
, Libraries - systems and technologies
, Libraries - organization and services
, Metadata
, OCLC
Here are links to several unrelated publications .....
Reconfiguring the Library Systems Environment
portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 8, No. 2, April 2008.
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/archive/2008/dempsey-portal.pdf (.pdf: 195K/18 pp.)
[Lorcan Dempsey: Selected publications [OCLC]]
This is a short piece adapted from an earlier blog entry.
Lavoie, Brian, and Günter Waibel. An Art Resource in New York: The Collective Collection of the NYARC Art Museum Libraries. (.pdf: 136K/18 pp.)
[Books and reports [OCLC - Publications]]
The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) includes the Frick Art Reference Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library, and the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. This report describes the results of a study of the aggregate collection of these institutions.
Godby, Carol Jean, Devon Smith, and Eric R. Childress. 2008. "Toward Element-level Interoperability in Bibliographic Metadata." The Code4Lib Journal, 2 (2008-03-24). Available online at: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/54.
[Publications [OCLC - OCLC Research]]
I mentioned this before, but in a message about another topic.
May 05, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
Tom Davenport has created a list of the top 20 management gurus for the Wall Street Journal.
Psychologists, journalists and celebrity chief executives crowd the top of a ranking of influential business thinkers compiled for The Wall Street Journal. The results, based on Google hits, media mentions and academic citations, ranked author and consultant Gary Hamel No. 1. [New Breed of Business Gurus Rises - WSJ.com]
The list itself can be found at the end of another WSJ article. It repeats an exercise carried out in 2003.
As interesting as the articles themselves is Davenport's commentary on them in his Harvard Business Publishing blog. I thought two things were especially interesting.
The first is the growing importance of reputation management in our Internet age. Davenport writes about why Jim Collins is not higher on the list (and judging by airport book stands one would expect him to be!).
Why isn’t he higher if his ideas are so good? Unfortunately, the list is not a ranking of the quality of the ideas. A high-ranking management guru has to be a good promoter as well as a good researcher and sound thinker. Collins—like Michael Porter, who was at the top of the 2003 list but fell a bit (to #14) in the new list—doesn’t do a lot of conference speeches, doesn’t have much of a web presence, and doesn’t write much in the popular press. If you want your ideas to be really influential, you’ve got to be out hawking them all the time. [The New Gurus - Harvard Business Online's Tom Davenport]
The second is the emphasis on ease of reception in an environment which is increasingly resource-rich but attention-scarce:
Interestingly, none of these latter three people are traditional management experts. Friedman and Gladwell are primarily journalists, and Gardner is an educational psychologist. Why have these interlopers prospered to such a degree? I chalk it up to two factors: the increased desire to master people issues in business—we’ve finally realized they’re always the most difficult to address—and the ever-decreasing attention span of businesspeople. Many of them want few academic details and an entertaining story, which these journalists know how to provide. I don’t always agree with the quality of Gladwell’s evidence, but I am certainly impressed by his writing ability. Some of Friedman’s ideas seem quite obvious to me, but he knows how to put together a sentence. That didn’t matter much in the old days of management gurudom, but it seems much more important now. [The New Gurus - Harvard Business Online's Tom Davenport]
Related entry:
May 01, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
There is an interesting short article on book swapping sites in the Guardian, placing them in a 'recycling' context.
For eco-aware readers, the environmental benefits of swapping rather than buying are clear. In 2003, Greenpeace launched its book campaign, producing evidence that the UK publishing industry was inadvertently fuelling the destruction of ancient forests in Finland and Canada. It found that one Canadian spruce produces just 24 books, which means that if you get through one book every two weeks your reading habits destroy almost one large tree every year. (In the same year, Greenpeace persuaded Raincoat Books to produce the Canadian edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on recycled paper, saving an estimated 39,000 trees.) But despite the campaign, only 40% of the UK book industry has introduced paper with a high level of recycled content, largely choosing to use paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council instead.
Beyond using the country's dwindling network of libraries, until recently the opportunities for exchanging paperbacks have been limited to friends, community schemes and book groups. But in the past two years, a spate of online book-swapping sites have emerged. Inspired by the goodwill schemes operated by hostels around the world, whereby travellers can leave behind books they have read and pick up something new, these sites generate little profit for their founders. The books are swapped directly between users, who pay the postage; the sites simply facilitate the meeting and identifying of potential exchanges. [Charlotte Northedge on book-swapping websites | Environment | The Guardian]
I was surprised to read the following:
Of course, those churches and charity shops that made money from second-hand book sales stand to lose out, as do the publishing industry and authors. "In the music industry, this kind of thing would be called 'file sharing', and technically illegal," the author Jeanette Winterson wrote of book-swapping sites recently. [Charlotte Northedge on book-swapping websites | Environment | The Guardian]
One of the more interesting things to me about the mass digitization initiatives is that they have highlighted that libraries do not 'own' many of the books in their collections, if by 'own' we mean the ability to repurpose at will. Of course, they do own the cost of processing and making them available, and of storing them over time, but for the larger part of their collection, there are limits on what they can do with the content.
April 30, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, GLAM
We got a present of a couple of children's books from Australia and were intrigued to discover their relationship to the collections of the National Museum of Australia.
Making Tracks takes young readers on a fictional journey through some fascinating Australian stories, inspired by objects from the National Museum of Australia's collection. The series is written and illustrated by leading Australian children's authors and artists. [National Museum of Australia - Making Tracks]
While looking at the NMA site ("Nice bright colors, K....") I was interested to discover reCollections, their journal. From the current issue, an article by Paul Arthur:
This paper surveys the digital history field — a broad field that is increasingly relevant to museum practice as museums experiment with digital modes of presentation and communication, including virtual exhibitions and other online extensions of the physical visitor experience. [reCollections - Papers]
In recent presentations, I have been suggesting that libraries will need to adopt more archival skills as they manage digital collections and think about provenance, evidential integrity, and context, and that they will also need to adopt more museum perspectives as they think about how their digital collections work as educational resources, and consider exhibitions and interpretive environments. I have used a capture of the home page of the Library at Oregon State University in this context, which showcases several digital collections. These currently include a resource about Linus Pauling and the peace movement which puts digitized materials in a broader context:
The three sections of Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement combine to provide an unusually rich source of information on Linus and Ava Helen Pauling's remarkable body of peace work. Navigate between the sections by using the links on the site's home page or by using the links at the top of any page within the site. [Introduction - Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement - Special Collections - Oregon State University]
April 28, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, General - distributed environments
I am writing a short piece on mobile communications at the moment and have been interested to see that the whole world is writing about the impact of mobile.
The Economist has a very nice special section with articles on a range of topics (see the display panel on the right of this opening section for a list of articles). There is almost no focus on the technology per se, rather it looks at how our working and social lives, our buildings and our jobs, and our attitudes and expectations are being reconfigured. The emphasis is not on 'mobility' but on permanent connectivity in an environment where computational and communication capacity is increasingly pervasive. What is our world like when the network is not something that is 'out there' but when potentially all that we do is network aware.
There are several sections; here is a note from the piece on space:
The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles. [The new oases | Economist.com]
I particularly liked this section; it filled out the context for my suggestion a while ago that Starbucks has become 'on-demand space'.
And I was interested to see this little snippet the other day:
Who is the largest camera maker in the world? Nokia. Who is the largest manufacturer of music devices in the world? Nokia. Who is buying the company that provides the map data behind Mapquest? Nokia. [Our Cells, Ourselves - washingtonpost.com]
Related entries:
April 25, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
I have noticed that any self-respecting blog has to have the occasional science fiction reference. So here is an off-topic post for Friday.
A remake of Blake's Seven is being discussed.
LONDON -- Hoping to cash in on the success of classic sci-fi revamps such as the BBC's "Doctor Who" and "Battlestar Galactica," Sky One is planning to remake cult '80s space series "Blake's Seven." ...
... Memorable for its cardboard sets and leather-clad arch villainess Servalan, the show was the creation of sci-fi legend Terry Nation, himself responsible for Doctor Who's arch-nemesis the Daleks.[Sky One to revive 'Blake's Seven']
Here is Wikipedia on the original:
Although many of the tropes of space opera such as spaceships, robots, galactic empires and aliens are present, the series is primarily noted for its strong character interaction, ambiguous morality and its dark, pessimistic tone.[3] [Blake's 7 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
I preferred Blake's 7 to Doctor Who, perhaps because it came along when I was older, or maybe because it lasted for a much shorter time.
Avon was a pretty memorable character. And you could never forget that eye-patch!
April 23, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Social networking
Lovereading is a site for readers ...
Lovereading was founded for book lovers by book lovers in 2005.
These days, it is harder than ever to find the book you want to read next - particularly because of the sheer volume and choice of books you can find on the net. So at Lovereading, we only feature books we have read and believe are great reads in their category.
We have developed some unique online tools to help you choose your next read, including free 10-15 page Opening Extracts of every one of our Featured Books. And our readers particularly appreciate the regular magazines we send them recommending books they like might love to read in their categories of choice these are completely free and come with no commitment to buy.
Since we started Lovereading, we have added more and more books, ( we now have over 5,000 Opening Extracts) more and more unique features (you will love Author Like for Like) and more and more readers all of whom we would like to thank for their ongoing help and support. [lovereading - make the most of lovereading]
It is interesting to see the focus on the human touch here when so much is made of ranking, relating and recommending based on the aggregate trace of the crowd.
I have just returned from a trip. The emphasis of Lovereading seems to be on fiction, so I thought I would check for the three novels that accompanied me on the trip:
- I took C.J.Box's Savage Run, based on a recommendation from somebody who had seen my previous note about Wyoming mysteries. OK, but I might not read another one, I thought.
- I bought Borderlands in Dublin airport, curious to read a contemporary crime novel set on both sides of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. I didn't like the story but might read another one given the setting.
- I bought Open doors and three novellas by Leonardo Sciascia in the very fine London Review Bookshop in, er, London. I like the author and hadn't seen this particular collection before.
So, armed with this test collection I approached lovereading.co.uk.
Savage Run was not listed, although there were two other books by Box. There were no 'like for like' recommendations for C J Box.
Borderlands was listed, and in a 'like for like' search on Brian McGilloway, Declan Hughes was returned. I have seen Declan Huges in bookshops but have not read anything by him, so I do not know how good the recommendation is. There is also a useful link to a Google search for reviews.
There were several books by Sciascia but not this one. There was no 'like for like' recommendation for Sciascia.
I wonder will they open the site up to reader input at some stage? And let the crowds in?
April 20, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
A late Friday afternoon note .....
I was watching an old episode of 8 simple rules this morning. Rory had to do a book report on To Kill a Mocking Bird. His father got the Gregory Peck movie, but his mother suggested he actually read the book, or read the book and watch the movie. I was amused to hear Rory say something along the lines of ...
Forget it. I am not going to read a book and watch a black and white movie too.
Luckily, he later came across notes on the book which mean that he could give up reading it ;-)
I was reminded of my own note about 'black and white' movies a while ago ....
I was surprised to discover a while ago that the children had never actually seen a western! We agreed we would look out for one on TV and watch it. The first we saw was in black and white. No way would they watch a movie in black and white ;-) It was soooo old. We never did manage to watch a full one ... [Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Westerns]
April 20, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, General - systems and technologies
Having moved from London to the Mid-west we are very aware of the impact of location on life-style, the switch from public transport to the car being a major example. In this context, I was interested to read this paragraph by Castells et al in Mobile communication and society: a global perspective which I am reading quickly to help me address a writing obligation in which I am currently delinquent ;-)
Another critical difference between national systems is related to the predominant transportation method: in the States, for example, where most people drive their own cars, certain types of mobile communication activities (such as SMS) are less viable. In contrast, where public transport is the main means of movement (as in parts of Asia and Europe) people have a greater ability to use wireless technologies on-the-go and consequently develop expertise faster. [Mobile communication and society: a global perspective, p.37]
I sometimes wonder about reading in this regard, but have not done the work to see if there has been any research about the correlation between 'predominant transportation method' and reading levels. For example, I would read a newspaper on my way to work when I traveled by train or bus; I spend less time reading newspapers now that I drive.
April 18, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Libraries - distributed environments
, OCLC
I recently came across xignite, a financial web services company. Here is their blurb ....
Financial events around the world impact not only finance professionals but every business. This is why successful businesses integrate key financial information into the processes and applications their employees or clients use every day. Until now, this integration has been a challenge. Xignite answers that challenge by letting you access the latest financial and industry data on-demand, and easily integrate it straight into your company's mission-critical applications using through web services. With Xignite, you can make your business financial-aware in minutes. [Global Financial Data, News & Information Web Services - Xignite]
I liked the expression 'making your business financial-aware' through web services.
Worldcat.org is a bibliographic 'destination' and is used heavily in that way. For example, it is an important scholarly tool given its topical reach and historic depth. I recently came across an interesting niche use, when I was told by a used book seller that he uses it to discover how widely distributed an item is, or to identify libraries who might be interested in buying an item.
However, very importantly, it is also a switch into the library network. It connects discovery to actual locations, and depending on your institutional affiliation it offers you various services against those locations. In this way, Worldcat.org discloses library collections and services on the web.
In recent years, we have seen many bibliographic destinations emerge. They are variously positioned in terms of value creation. Amazon, AbeBooks, Goodreads, Google Book Search, LibraryThing, Live Search Books, OpenLibrary, the Library of Congress catalog, many national and regional library union catalogs (for example Libraries Australia, COPAC, OhioLink, Bibsys, ....), and so on. This variety seem healthy to me, and Worldcat sits alongside this range as one more destination with its own characteristics and uses. An increasingly valuable destination, we trust!
However, we also hope that Worldcat is also used by the other sites - and it is - as a switch. It is a way for other sites to add value by providing access to library resources. And it creates value for libraries by making them present in other environments where people look for, work with, share information about, books and other resources. It allows libraries to disclose collections and services in other environments.
As we move forward with the Worldcat API, this allows Worldcat functionality to be made available to other applications. So, adapting the xignite phrasing above, the Worldcat API will make applications 'bibliographic-aware'; however, thinking of the switch functionality, it will also help make applications 'library-network aware'. It will allow applications to incorporate access to a network of library assets, and to focus in on particular ones of interest. We can do this because of the collective investment by the library community and OCLC in Worldcat and registry data.
I was prompted to do this post by another interesting post from Mark Dahl where he talks about (my words) how OCLC can make the library network available at the network level, to other applications as well as to user interfaces.
OCLC has this valuable data, and great potential to develop things with it, as well as a general current towards network-level computing moving in its favor. When an libraries compare OCLC's products with that of a traditional ILS vendor, they need to see that the OCLC product is more than technology. Rather, it is an extension of a community, a network. [synthesize-specialize-mobilize: OCLC's competitive advantage]
April 07, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Libraries - systems and technologies
, Libraries - organization and services
, OCLC
Jeremy Frumkin of Oregon State University talks to Merrilee Proffitt about library services and moving to the network level in the second Parcast [file is here]. This is in response to the question "what keeps you awake at night?".
What is a Parcast?
Welcome to the OCLC Programs and Research PARcast page. Here you'll find links to our podcasts—the latest recorded interviews with industry thought leaders and up-and-comers—as well as recorded webinars, or online presentations, from Programs and Research staff. [PARcasts [OCLC - Programs and Research]]
Mark Dimunation of the Library of Congress spoke to Merrilee in the first Parcast. His topic:
Special collections need to keep collecting and building collections of real things, but also need to be smart and be part of the digital conversation. How do libraries create a digital environment where researchers can derive the evidence they need to do their work? [PARcasts [OCLC - Programs and Research]]
March 24, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, OCLC
, Search
Well, another very fine issue of the Code4Lib Journal has appeared.
Jody L DeRidder has an interesting piece describing how they used browsable link pages (by subject, name, ..) and sitemaps to improve the visibility of a particular resource to search engines. The discussion gets into some of the issues of trying to get crawled, indexed, and then ranked: decision criteria may be applied by the search engines at each of these steps. Tony Boston, then with the National Library of Australia, published an article a while ago on experiences at the National Library of Australia in exposing materials to search engines and includes some pointers based on lessons learned. I hope that we see more of these types of articles as SSEO (social/search engine optimization) is a topic of growing importance for libraries. Here is sentence from Jody's conclusion:
Within three months of completion of this project, over 4 times as many hits and over 5 times as many users were recorded in a month as had ever been previously measured. [The Code4Lib Journal - Googlizing a Digital Library]
Update: See also the following article in the current issue of Dlib Magazine. Clearly articles on digital library search engine optimization are like buses. None comes for ages, and then several come together.
Site Design Impact on Robots: An Examination of Search Engine Crawler Behavior at Deep and Wide Websites
Joan A. Smith and Michael L. Nelson, Old Dominion University
doi:10.1045/march2008-smith
[D-Lib Magazine (March/April 2008)]
And I should mention that my colleagues have an article on metadata crosswalking in this issue of Code4Lib also:
This paper discusses an approach and set of tools for translating bibliographic metadata from one format to another. A computational model is proposed to formalize the notion of a ‘crosswalk’. The translation process separates semantics from syntax, and specifies a crosswalk as machine executable translation files which are focused on assertions of element equivalence and are closely associated with the underlying intellectual analysis of metadata translation. A data model developed by the authors called Morfrom serves as an internal generic metadata format. Translation logic is written in an XML scripting language designed by the authors called the Semantic Equivalence Expression Language (Seel). These techniques have been built into an OCLC software toolkit to manage large and diverse collections of metadata records, called the Crosswalk Web Service. [The Code4Lib Journal]
March 16, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Learning and research - distributed environments
, Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
And speaking of Elsevier, several colleagues and I received an email invitation from "the Scopus team" to look at our h-index [Wikipedia entry] on our very own Scopus profile page. Here is some of the text from the invitation:
The h-index * can help you evaluate and benchmark your research output and that of your peers. It provides an indication of the quality and the consistency of the researcher's work by looking at the number of articles published and the number of citations received over time. In Scopus the h-index presents a metric that takes all of an author's articles published between 1996 to present into account and thus provides a transparent mean to evaluate the impact of an author in the most recent 12 years. You will also find quick links to your publications, citation counts and co-authors.
I am sure that this has gone to many readers of this blog also.
A very superficial examination shows that Scopus provides some useful approaches for merging and demerging result sets based on knowledge provided by the searcher. It pulls together a lot of contextual data in its profiles, based on mining of article details. I found it useful. I have not looked at Web of Knowledge recently so I do not know how it compares.
Four overlapping things struck me about this invitation and the service:
- Reputation management. The direct appeal in the invitation is to the author's interest in his or her research impact or reputation. Reputation management is of growing interest, for individuals and for institutions. I think that this creates an interesting intersection between research support/administration services and library/information services around such things as the relationship between institutional repositories and the recording of faculty publications, consistent naming of authors and institutions so as not to fragment impact through incorrect pulling together of publications, faculty expertise databases, citation management, and so on. The interaction between personal disclosure (what I put on my website, or social networking sites, or ...), institutional management, and third party data aggregation/manipulation will also be interesting to watch.
- Making data work harder. The SCOPUS profiles are based on extensive mining and manipulation of data to create the context on their pages (affiliations, citations, cited by, h-index, etc). Increasingly, in many cases, we will expect to see such further analysis to create context and depth. Think of what we see in a Google Book Search page, an Amazon results page, a Worldcat Identities page.
- Socialising Knowledge networks. The academic literature and the tools we have created to organize it reveal networks of knowledge. Citations, subject indexing, cross-reference structures, and so on, create connections between people, documents, ideas, institutions. Increasingly, we can mobilize these connections in digital environments, and make other connections. Alongside these 'classical' networks, we are seeing newer social networks emerge. One of the more interesting developments we will see will be the integration of our classically created networks and these new social networks. I was interested to see for example discussions around user-driven name disambiguation at Crossref. SCOPUS offers you the opportunity to submit feedback on a profile: presumably this will develop over time to allow greater interaction between those doing the profiling, based on available data, and those profiled, based on their knowledge.
- We know where you live. Related to the last point, I was interested, and quite impressed, that they could send me an email pointing me to my profile page and that it all worked out. I do not have a very common name; I wonder what criteria they had in place before they would send you an email, and how many of them went astray. It is also interesting to see a publisher of a bibliographic tool reach out to users/authors in this way, with an incentive for them to get interested in a particular product. It potentially creates an interesting dynamic for the library.
Related entries:
March 13, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, General - distributed environments
Raymond Yee is the originator of the useful triple "gather, create, share", and is known for his work on the Scholar's Box. He lectures at the UC Berkeley School of Information.
I have just got a copy of his book:
Yee, Raymond. Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services. Berkeley, CA: Apress, 2008.
There is an accompanying blog, Mashup Guide which also has some material from the book, including a table of contents. The table of contents shows the wide range of approaches and services he looks at.
Here is a scope note from the introduction:
The overall flow of the book is: What can be done with no programming -> programming of one system (through its API) -> figuring out how to combine 2 or several systems -> creating "service composition frameworks" for combining arbitrary systems.
It would be easy to veer off into heavy-duty theory in this book. Instead, we will keep grounded in "practical interoperability" (a grab-what-we-can-from-wherever approach) while dipping into the deeper pools of grand unification efforts (such as the full semantic web vision) that have so far not come to full fruition.
It is nice to see LibraryLookup used as an introductory example in a mainstream text like this. And to see some discussion of LCSH, FAST and Dewey in the chapter on tagging.
Yee claims that the book is useful for the experienced developer as well as for more novice users (with some knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript).
I have passed the book over to my colleague, Ralph Levan, for a more technical review. I will point to his review when it is done.
March 12, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, OCLC
Here are some blogs of potential interest, two from OCLC and one from JISC.
From OCLC:
The Developers' Network blog
This provide updates about services which allow applications integrate OCLC services and data.
And Andrew Pace reappears in a new location:
Hectic Pace
JISC now has a blog from the Information Environment Team, which, if they keep going ;-), will be a good place to look for developments in repositories, preservation and resource discovery. There will be a UK emphasis, but it should also be of general interest. No doubt, it will also be marked by 'high acronymic density'.
Information environment team
Roy alerted me to Andrew's reappearance (and he also writes for The Developers' Network blog). Thanks to eFoundations for the note about the Information Environment Team blog.
Incidentally, I reckon that eFoundations is currently one of the most consistently interesting blogs in our space. I say 'currently' because I find that preferences shift with changing interests. Fickle me or what ... ;-)
March 10, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Social networking
Today's Observer has a list of the world's 50 most powerful blogs. There is no indication of how it was put together.
I wasn't familiar with all of the 50. No great surprises in the top few (Huffington, Boing Boing, Techcrunch, Kottke). I was surprised to see Crooked Timber on the list at number 33.
Papers are full of lists now; they are sometimes fun to read and, in some cases, probably fun to compile. They are also cheap, and ideally suited to attract some network discussion.
I saw this article just after I had read John Lanchester's review of Nick Davies' Flat Earth News, a description of how papers now do less original reporting and fact checking as they have to fill more space with fewer journalists (think of the supplements, website, ...). It makes for depressing reading.
Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry. Davies’s book explains something easy to notice and complain about but hard to understand: the sense of the increasing thinness and attenuation of the British press. It’s not literal thinness: the papers, physically, are bigger than ever. There just seems to be less in them than there once was: less news, less thought (as opposed to opinion), less density of engagement, less time spent finding things out. Davies looks into all those questions, confirms that the impression of thinness is correct, explains how this came about, and offers no hope that things will improve. [LRB · John Lanchester: Riots, Terrorism etc]
Coincidentally, I was flicking through an old Economist later and found another review.
Citing research done by Cardiff University, Mr Davies argues that the number of journalists in Britain is roughly the same today as it was 20 years ago. But the rise of supplements, websites and 24-hour services means that the same number of reporters must now fill three times as much space. The result he dubs “churnalism”: more demand for copy means more time spent in airless offices and less spent out and about gathering stories. That, he says, makes reporters vulnerable to the “hidden persuaders”—PR firms, press offices and advertisers—who now seem to have more power and influence than the journalists they ostensibly serve. The same research claims that 60% of stories in Britain's quality papers are either recycled press-agency copy or rehashes of PR releases. [British journalism | Hacks at work | Economist.com]
"Churnalism" - a good name for some of these lists.
Something to return to in future posts ....
Related entry:
February 19, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
I did an interview about blogging a while ago for Information World Review.
One of the things that got left out of the final version was a list of blogs from outside the library world which I read from a work point of view. Here are the blogs I listed. I limited it to four, as there is only so much reconfiguring going on ....
- Edge perspectives with John Hagel. A blog about how networks reconfigure organizations.
- Bubblegeneration. A blog by Umair Haque about how networks reconfigure strategy.
- Software as services. A blog by Phil Wainewright about how networks reconfigure applications.
- Rough type. A blog by Nicholas Carr about how networks reconfigure computing.
Now, Nick Carr covers lots of things, but his big message is about the 'big switch' to 'utility' computing. Just as we no longer have individual power generators, he suggests, so will we cease to rely on local computing capacity. We will begin to rely on computing capacity in the cloud. Phil Wainewright covers developments among companies providing 'applications on demand' or 'software as services'. We have seen less discussion of this trend in libraries in recent years than we have of that other game changer in software, open source. It is inevitable however that libraries will also follow the general trend here and source more of what they do from shared services on the network. Bubblegeneration is elliptical, dogmatic and provocative. Hagel posts occasionally, and is reflective and suggestive when he does.
Now Carr is an ex-editor of the Harvard Business Review and Umair Haque pointed the other day to his new blog within the Harvard Business Blogs, styled a collection of 'discussion leaders'. These include well-known names such as Gary Hamel and knowledge management writer Tom Davenport.
It is an interesting investment by the publishers of the Harvard Business Review, and another interesting example of how organizations who want to 'lead the discussion' are developing network venues.
February 14, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
I was playing with Rock Band at home the other day - well, moving my fingers anyway. I was struck by the way in which it gave renewed life to old songs. Who would have imagined, for example, that the youth of today would strum, drum and hum along to Should I stay or should I go? by The Clash?
I write this as I fly to California. I have a bad head cold and realized that I would not be able to sustain my usual practice of intense, continuous work on the plane. I thought I would settle for a less intense form of work and decided to try watching a movie on my iPod Nano, something I had not done before. I had limited time to get something, so after I could not find my first few choices on the iTunes Store I cut the search short and went with the first John Cusack movie I had not seen before.
So, I ended up on the plane watching Grosse Pointe Blank. I was interested that it was a pretty reasonable experience on the small screen. Anyway, I settle in and what do I see (just about) in the opening credits? Score by Joe Strummer (of The Clash)! And a retro-evocative 80's soundtrack.
I then turned to the Atlantic and was interested to read an article about the future of TV in a changing media environment of online availability of content:
And here's the final twist. As TV and the Internet converge into something generically known as broadband, the distinctions between the two will soon become nugatory from a consumer point of view. But will this resulting hybrid be more like TV, plus interactivity; or more like the Internet, plus TV? The distinction will be worth billions to whoever gets there first and organizes this mess in a fashion that's satisfying for consumers. The networks and cable companies, therefore, will need to move quickly to find a way to package the different streams - professional and user-made, broadcast and Internet - into a huge, interactive library, all easily and pleasingly accessible on demand and portable to whatever device people are overpaying for at the moment. [Michael Hirschorn. The revolution will be televised. The Atlantic, March 2008]
There was a limited range of films on iTunes. There is an interesting selection of books available for the Kindle, but not enough to satisfy the majority of my reading needs.
I wonder how long it will be before when we read or see something, we can reach out and retrieve it. It increasingly seems like it will happen, even as we recognize the amount of work required to give large quantities of material an afterlife in our new digital environment.
Incidentally, I notice that I have a Clash album on the iPod: the songs don't seem to come up very often in the shuffle. It turns out that the film did seem familiar: I must have half-watched it on a plane on some other trip.
February 08, 2008
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Books, movies and reading ...
Steven Johnson, author of Everything bad is good for you: how today's popular culture is making you smarter, writes about a couple of recent discussions of reading, including the much discussed NEA report. :
The problem with both arguments is that they're fundamentally rehashing the technological opposition of the television age, the kind of opposition that McLuhan wrote about so powerfully back in the 1960s: word versus image, text versus screen. But that long-term decline towards a pure society of image has been reversed by the rise of digital media. What separates the Google generation from postwar generations is the shift from largely image-based passive media to largely text-based interactive media. We don't know exactly how that will play out in the long run, but thus far, when you look at the demographic patterns of the Google generation, there is not only no cause for alarm: in fact, there's genuine cause for celebration. The twentysomethings in the US - the ones who spent their childhood years engaged with computers and not zoning out in front of the TV - are the least violent, the most politically engaged and the most entrepreneurial since the dawn of the television era. [Dawn of the digital natives - is reading declining? | Technology | The Guardian]
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February 01, 2008
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Books, movies and reading ...
, Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
I mentioned the other day that the Times had nominated Philip Larkin, poet and librarian ("the toad work") as the greatest British writer since 1945.
Through the wonders of resource sharing I have got hold of a copy of his history of the library at the University of Hull, updated by Maeve Brennan (from Western Michigan University, if you are interested ;-).
Larkin, Philip, and Maeve Brennan. A Lifted Study-Storehouse The Brynmor Jones Library, 1929-1979. Philip Larkin memorial series, no.1. Hull: Hull University Press, 1987.
There, I was interested to read:
.... independent history implies independence of operation, and since a library is always first and foremost a service it should be reluctant to arrogate to itself any qualities suggesting an identity separate from the community it serves.
Which is a nice reminder that libraries are not ends in themselves. Something that is very well said by Eleanor Jo Rodger in one of the more interesting things I have read in the last few years (in the September 2007 American Libraries). Interesting enough to bear repeating. She places the library in the context of its host environment, and closes with this paragraph:
Creating value for our host systems always involves three things: Librarians must understand their host systems; they must understand the source of their claim to being a legitimate part of their system; and they must do their work well so the system is better because they are there. It's usually far more a matter of asking and listening than it is of telling and pleading.
Incidentally, 'study-storehouse' pulls together - a little clumsily? - the dual role of the library as a place for people and as a store for materials discussed by Larkin in the text.
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January 27, 2008
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Books, movies and reading ...
On page 3 of Helen Vendler's Our secret discipline: Yeats and lyric form I read:
And since there is no better motive for writing on a subject than a gap on library shelves, I began in earnest, some years ago, to study Yeats's lyric style.
I wonder is there a potential service here somewhere ;-) Proactive research recommendations based on patterns of publication!
January 18, 2008
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Books, movies and reading ...
OK, I am cheating a little. The Times has produced a list of the greatest British writers since 1945, and Philip Larkin heads the list. Larkin was of course Librarian at the University of Hull for many years. "My job as University Librarian is a full-time one, five days a week, forty-five weeks a year. When I came to Hull, I had eleven staff; now there are over a hundred of one sort and another. We built one new library in 1960 and another in 1970, so that my first fifteen years were busy" (Paris Review interview, 1982). [Homage to Philip Larkin - The New York Review of Books]
Here are the subject headings for Larkin pulled out in Worldcat Identities:
Of course, the list is meant to invite discussion. I was interested in the children's authors listed, and was surprised to see Alan Garner come in at number 28 and Rosemary Sutcliff at 49. Each of these was a favorite of my young reading life and maybe this says something about the profile of the Times staff who made the assessment... I recently tried introducing our nine year old to Garner and Sutcliff. Sutcliff was perhaps too 'antique' in style. Garner was more engaging: he would have been even more engaging if there was a movie. Now that we have had Tolkein, Lewis and Pullman movies (all these authors are on the list), maybe Garner will be considered ;-)
I looked up timelines in Identities:
The Larkin literature will grow as his reputation continues to grow.
New editions of Garner and Sutcliff continue to appear.
And here are the FAST subject headings associated with Larkin. Some library ones in there!
Sad confession: I bought Andrew Motion's biography of Larkin years ago. I fear I have never read it all the way through. I have looked through the index though and noted the discussions about the ILS and about his professional library colleagues.
January 06, 2008
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Books, movies and reading ...
, Featured
The much-discussed, and somewhat contested, NEA report on reading came out at around the same time as The Uncommon Reader, a fictional account by Alan Bennett of the late discovery of reading by the Queen (of England). The conjunction was discussed in the New York Times:
PERHAPS the most fantastical story of the year was not “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” but “The Uncommon Reader,” a novella by Alan Bennett that imagines the queen of England suddenly becoming a voracious reader late in life. [A Good Mystery: Why We Read - New York Times]
'Fantastical', the author, Motoko Rich suggests because: 'At a time when books appear to be waging a Sisyphean battle against the forces of MySpace, YouTube and “American Idol,” the notion that someone could move so quickly from literary indifference to devouring passion seems, sadly, far-fetched.'
“The Uncommon Reader” posits the theory that the right book at the right time can ignite a lifelong habit. (For the fictional queen, it’s Nancy Mitford’s “Pursuit of Love.”) This is a romantic ideal that persists among many a bibliophile. [A Good Mystery: Why We Read - New York Times]
This same tone is evident in the Financial Times review:
His storytelling, though, is rather less magical. By taking us into the workings of minds other than our own, Bennett argues, reading makes better people of us. This is a quaintly old-fashioned view of literature that one might find comforting had history not so comprehensively rubbished it. [FT.com / Books / Fiction - The Uncommon Reader]
I read the book when it came out and was a little puzzled by some of the emphasis of these and other reviewers. While the book does indeed celebrate the power of reading to transform the Queen's life, its main message for me was somewhat different. It is a discussion of how little of this 'literary' reading there actually is. So, I reread it over the holiday. It is a quick read ...
The Queen discovers a City of Westminster mobile library outside the kitchen doors of the palace and borrows a book. This triggers a sustained late-life reading wave. She reads quickly, passionately and in ever-increasing circles (her initial choices are guided by Hutchings, who worked in the kitchen and was in the mobile library when she came across it; he suggests books by gay authors). She soon comes to regret the many wasted years where she did not read; she is mortified when she thinks of all the authors she has met without any insight into what they wrote. And yes, the author connects her progressively more discriminating reading tastes with a general refinement of sensibilities. She becomes concerned, for example, with the bad impression she makes on a maid, something that before she would not have noticed. She wonders why, and the narrative voice suggests that she is yet to connect this "access of consideration" with her reading. She talks of books opening up "other lives" and "igniting the imagination". She rebukes her Private Secretary who wondered had she not been briefed about the authors she met: "Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up".
But what comes across more strongly than this personal refinement is that her new interest does not extend the range of her personal connections with others. She does not find the world hospitable to readers. Indeed, her reading becomes a barrier to engagement, not a bridge built on new shared reading interests. Sir Kevin is concerned that while not quite "elitist", reading tends to "exclude" and sends out a bad message. Not many people actually read, he suggests. He further suggests that reading is selfish, a "withdrawal", that it makes "oneself less available", and is "solipsistic". She makes people she |
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