From an interview with Billy Bragg, the Bard of Barking, in the current issue of Mojo:
Vinyl, CD, or MP3? Vinyl. In a hundred years time, vinyl will be the only medium that has survived. CDs will fade, like old pictures that have gone a bit orange, and MP3s, well you can just accidentally wipe 'em any time.
I know. Another quote from a music magazine for the middle-aged. I bought this issue for the story about Portishead. We lived in Bristol for many years and enjoyed the occasional trip to the sea at Portishead, the town whose name they took (also the home of a lido). This was during a remarkable period for Bristol music, with Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead, and others contributing to the Bristol Sound:
The Bristol sound was the name given to a number of bands from Bristol, England, in the 1990s. These bands spawned the musical genre trip-hop, though many of the bands shunned this name when other British and international bands imitated the style and preferred not to distinguish it from hip-hop. [Bristol underground scene - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
Mind you, for us living in Bristol, the early to mid-nineties was the era of the cassette, which is not even mentioned by Bragg.
I am in Dublin (Ireland) for a couple of days and was interested to see Fintan O'Toole writing about archives and genealogy in the Irish Times yesterday (behind a paywall).
He contrasts two views of genealogy, one that it is about tourism, one that it is about culture and the stories we tell ourselves about succession and origin. He associates each view with a state-sponsored initiative, the latter with the National Archives' 1911 Census Online project, the former with the Irish Genealogy Project, coordinated by Irish Genealogy Ltd. I have no personal knowledge of either initiative.
About the Census Online project he says:
It is very important that you can do this without demanding a credit card number. The National Archives project is animated by a connection between public memory and public service, the idea of honouring a community's search for origins.
On the National Archives site I was interested to see this note about James Connolly whom I mentioned the other day.
Read about trade unions and see the return for James Connolly and his family
Which raises interesting questions of continuity across the documents of a diaspora.
This is how the other initiative, the Irish Genealogy Project was described in 2005 in a Senate debate:
The primary goal of the project is to generate economic activity and employment throughout the island of Ireland by boosting roots tourism. The assumption underlying the strategy is that the availability of a world class, country-wide genealogy service, with the potential of pin-pointing the exact point of origin of emigrant families and supplying on-the-ground orientation in Ireland, will represent a powerful attraction for ethnically Irish visitors from America, Argentina, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Britain. The intention is to attract these visitors to the various genealogical centres, which will provide a marketing or sales opportunity. The centres could provide an opportunity for individual genealogical researchers or authors to market their wares. The diaspora is variously estimated at between 50 million and 70 million people; however, the ties between the diaspora and Ireland may well be weakening. [Parliamentary Debates (Official Report - Unrevised) Seanad Éireann Thursday, 20 October 2005 - Page 7]
O'Toole is sceptical about 'roots tourism'.
Here is his concluding paragraph:
The irony of these contrasting projects within the State sphere is that the one that came under a commercial rubric - IGL - looks like very bad value for the taxpayer, while the one that set out to achieve a cultural goal, Census Online, has been a model of the efficient and intelligent use of public resources. But even if this were not the case, there is still an overwhelming argument for genealogical information to be freely available online as a public cultural resource. Genealogy is history made personal - it connects people through their individual genetic past to the past of the communities they inhabit. And, in a society that is struggling with interculturalism, the State should encourage genealogy as an exercise in political hygiene. It has a nasty habit of surprising people and making them realise that they are not quite who the think they are. There are few more civilising experiences.
Incidentally, I noted O'Toole's wonderful remarks about public libraries in these pages a couple of years ago.
I was reading an interview with Elvis Costello yesterday and was pleasantly surprised to come across this question from the interviewer, David Hepworth:
Right. I was interested, you did those reissues, and they're doing them again, and you've got huge numbers of B sides and live recordings and all this kind of stuff, do you have somebody who curates your stuff, do you have somebody who looks after it all? [The Elvis Costello interview | Word Magazine]
Costello (EC) goes on to talk about value and what is worth adding to the 'record' in terms that will be quite familiar to readers here.
I've got boxes full of the songs of my own, so I can only imagine other people have got them as well, but whether they're interesting, I mean, I really don't know. I mean, there's a particularly disposition of person who wants to hear every last piece by anybody they really care about and then sometimes there's a reason why they're called outtakes, you know. I remember buying a Billie Holiday set, you know, I got in Japan, that had every take that she had ever done for Columbia, but they were all one after another, so you've got The Man I Love and then you've got the three attempts to make The Man I Love. But they weren't really that much different, you know, there was usually just, like she fluffed a lyric or somebody came in at the wrong point. They weren't like a really different interpretation. Sometimes a demo is interesting because the song is taken off somewhere and maybe, in some cases, ruined. And I've done it myself, you know, I've gone back to the demo of a song and thought, well, I really let that one get away because of whatever I did to it in the process of recording. And there's sometimes that you can sing the song one way and then end up recording it another and both versions are legitimate, they're both valid interpretations of the song, whether or not one is better than the other is just a matter of your taste. And that's the same with a lot of artists I like, the Dylan sets that have come out and Neil Young and people like that who, you know... And that fantastic box they did on Tom Waits, you know, that Anti put out. Stuff like that I find interesting, but the people that you're talking about are interesting artists, so you're going to be intrigued by their attempts to do the song in a different way. But not every last note played by some people, that's just not that brilliant. I mean, I'm much more, you know, everybody's got a couple of, a handful of titles that they can say, you know, I bet you never heard this one, it's a knockout, you know, whether it's an obscure Motown record or some weird garage band record. And there's always somebody somewhere putting a compilation of that together and I think that's what makes, you know, the big archive of music, however it's stored, however it's delivered, something of richness, it makes life interesting. I mean, I went into that record store I told you about, when I was in Los Angeles last week, and you'd think all the records I've got and I still bought $500 worth of records in about 20 minutes. [The Elvis Costello interview | Word Magazine]
Incidentally, Elvis Costello (AKA Declan MacManus) and Diana Krall had twin boys at the end of 2006, one of whom is named Dexter Henry Lorcan. Patrick and Jillian Fink Dempsey also had twin sons in 2007. So, for a while, searches on Lorcan Dempsey would bring back results from stories about celebrities with twins ;-)
[Note: the links in the Wikipedia quotes do not work as I have not changed the relative URLs to absolute ones]
I was looking up James Connolly just now as I prepare some slides for a presentation at the 2008 LIR Annual Seminar. The event is being held in Liberty Hall, which has a historic relationship with Connolly, and I planned to use this as an excuse to show the Worldcat Identities page for him ;-) I noticed that one of the subject headings in the Worldcat Identities cloud for Connolly was for John Maclean. I went to look for John Maclean in Wikipedia (googling his name and Wikipedia which is how I tend to look for things). I clicked through and was surprised to read this:
There is a page listing all the different languages in which there is a Wikipedia with some statistics. I was particularly interested to see how they described their depth indicator.
The "Depth" column ((Edits/Articles) × (Non-Articles/Articles) × (1 − Stub-ratio)) is a rough indicator of a Wikipedia’s quality, showing how frequently its articles are updated. Note that it doesn’t refer to academic quality (which obviously can’t be mathematically computed anyway), but to Wikipedian quality, i.e. the depth of collaborativeness—a descriptor that is highly relevant for a Wikipedia. Depths above 300 for Wikipedias below 100 000 articles are dismissed as irrelevant. [List of Wikipedias - Meta]
The English language Wikipedia is the only one to have more than 1 million articles. A further eighteen have more than one hundred thousand and less than a million.
An interesting announcement from CLIR about a $4.27M competitive program to describe hidden collections has just appeared. The existence of such collections must be more fully disclosed if they are to release more of their value in research and learning:
With generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources is creating a national program to identify and catalog hidden special collections and archives. The records and descriptions obtained through this effort will be accessible through the Internet and the Web, enabling the federation of disparate, local cataloging entries with tools to aggregate this information by topic and theme. [Hidden Collections]
This is a preliminary announcement and it will be interesting to see how the thinking behind the program is elaborated as more materials appear. The call for proposals will be in June. In particular, I will be interested to see some of the observations about organization, formats and federation frameworks expanded. See for example the following statements which relate to each of these topics respectively:
The program's strategy for building a distributed organization of cataloging and collection information assumes local autonomy and responsibility but also requires centralized agreements concerning governing principles that will ensure enterprise-wide coherence. [Hidden Collections]
Because tightly defined fields can impede interoperability, recent reports on hidden collections emphasize the need to make the categories and schemes of record creation and descriptions less rigid than those of the past. Cataloging special collections and archival materials has routinely been defined as a local practice. The shift to understanding hidden collections as a national problem entails an acknowledgment that in the 21st century, collaboration, coordination, and coherence of response to users is fundamental and takes precedence over local practice. [Hidden Collections]
The process will involve adopting a technology platform (or platforms) that will allow accurate descriptive information to be entered quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively. The results of each project will be linked to and interoperable with those of all others to form a federated environment that can be built upon over time. Institutions must acknowledge local ownership of the data generated through the program and agree to its persistence. [Hidden Collections]
It was an interesting week for announcements about network level services.
Amazon announced SimpleDB:
Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers. [Amazon.com: Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Web Services]
Enough to make Nick Carr suggest in his commentary that a 'tipping point' approaches. Tipping, that is, from locally deployed software to processing capacity available on demand in the 'cloud'.
And then, Dan Cohen wrote about the Zotero Commons:
The Zotero-IA alliance will create a “Zotero Commons” into which scholarly materials can be added simply via the Zotero client. Almost every scholar and researcher has documents that they have scanned (some of which are in the public domain), finding aids they have created, or bibliographies on topics of interest. Currently there is no easy way to share these; giving them a central home at the Internet Archive will archive them permanently (before they are lost on personal hard drives) and make them broadly available to others. [Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog]
One of the benefits of network-level services like Flickr or SlideShare is that they allow you to 'add' your materials to the public web and provide you with a URL to facilitate sharing. This is a motivation here also: "one of the great advantages of the Zotero Commons at IA will be the transport of scholarly materials currently residing on personal hard drives to a public space with stable, rather than local, addresses". It will be ineresting to see if the Zotero Commons develops the network effects that characterise various of the successful network level services.
Dennis Massie has a nice post over on HangingTogether. A set of Haiku about collections - they relate to issues discussed at a recent planning event about managing collections in changing times. With difficulty, I limit myself to one here:
On the library as destination:
(End-user POV) Gather my gadgets Destination: library My friends will be there
I am often asked about differences between the library environments in the US and the UK, or Europe more widely.
A major factor is scale of course. The University of California alone has a bigger library system than many countries, for example. Another factor is the major role and influence of nationally coordinated and funded programs such as those described in the articles above.
Those involved with the development of this Strategy believe that if we apply a combination of will, clarity of vision, collaborative effort across sectors and jurisdictions, and investment from both private and public sectors, we can make Canada the most information rich and information literate country in the world. If we are successful in identifying, valuing and preserving our digital information assets, we can use these assets to educate our youth, to foster a common cultural identity and pride in our accomplishments, and to create new knowledge and new products that advance our economy. If we provide ubiquitous and democratic information access for all Canadians, we will support our common goal to live in an inclusive and progressive society. [The Digital Strategy: Part IV: Conclusion - Canadian Digital Information Strategy - Library and Archives Canada]
Here is Grainne Conole, professor of e-learning at the Open University writing about academic papers, conference papers, and blogging:
Coming back to the question of which represents academic discourse – to my mind it’s all three – in different ways writing a paper, giving a presentation and blogging all help me to formulate and take forward my thinking on a particular topic, a means of meaning making and transformation of the raw ‘data’ to new understandings – surely that’s one of the cornerstones of what being an academic means? [e4innovation.com]
And here is how she distinguishes between those modes of academic disclosure:
So the function and nature of the three media seems to be:
Academic paper: reporting of findings against a particular narrative, grounded in the literature and related work; style – formal, academic-speak
Conference presentation: awareness raising of the work, posing questions and issues about the work, style – entertaining, visual, informal
Blogging – snippets of the work, reflecting on particular issues, style – short, informal, reflective
Here is Dani Rodrik, a Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard, commenting on an earlier post of his where he queried whether the high opportunity costs of blogging (think of all those other things that could get done if you did not use the time blogging!) would drive out high quality economics blogs. No, he concludes:
And second, in my trip to Nottingham I was simply stunned by how many people reported reading my blog. Not only that, people actually remembered my posts--some going quite a while back. With this kind of positive feedback, along with others like this, it is hard to imagine closing the operation down.
Not so incidentally, one of the unexpected scholarly benefits of having a blog is that it is like keeping an intellectual journal. You get an idea, you jot it down in your blog. Some months later, you vaguely remember having had the idea and you google your own blog to recover it. I am not kidding: I google my own blog all the time...
And here is the evidence: the first third of my talk at Nottingham was based on a couple of blog posts from a few weeks back (this and this). So maybe that someone also over-stated the bit about opportunity costs...[Dani Rodrik's weblog]
It is interesting to see them both discuss blogging as an integral part of their academic lives. And their blogging is an important record of thinking about the academic problems they address. And an indication of their academic networks.
I regularly look at the blogs of several folks from the Open University: Tony Hirst's, John Naughton's, and now Grainne's (with whom I used to interact years ago when she was director of ILRT and I of UKOLN). I will occasionally land on Martin Weller's and am peripherally aware of Marc Eisenstadt's.
Ever since my (economist) colleague Brian Lavoie introduced me to Greg Mankiw's blog, I have intermittently followed it, as well as Rodrik's. They occasionally refer to their colleague George Borjas's blog, another Harvard economics professor. Of course there are some pretty high profile economics blogs, including blogs from the Freakonomics authors and, recently, Paul Krugman, both hosted by the New York Times. And there is the prolific Gary Becker, Nobel prize winning economist, at the Becker-Posner blog. I have found Mankiw and Rodrik interesting because of the general mix of light material, commentary on theirs' and their colleagues' work, and their high-level and engaged policy perspectives. The general nature of the blog discourse, to borrow Grainne's word, in that community is absorbing to watch.
Rodrik notes that his blog material appears to have enduring appeal for colleagues. Indeed, the intrinsic interest of the blog output of both the Open University and the Harvard bloggers, and its relation to their academic work, and their broader communities of interest, means that this is probably more generally true.
The blogging platforms used by these people vary. Sometimes they may be institutionally based, more often they will be on one of the main blog hosting sites. While they may be of enduring interest, little thought has probably been given to thinking about their longer term persistence.
Which brings me to my question. Universities and university libraries are recognizing that they have some responsibility to the curation of the intellectual outputs of their academics and students. So far, this has not generally extended to thinking about blogs. What, if anything, should the Open University or Harvard be doing to make sure that this valuable discourse is available to future readers as part of the scholarly record?
I find it convenient to think about current library systems activities in terms of support for three materials workflows: bought/print materials, licensed/electronic materials, and digital/digitized materials. This is being pragmatic rather than pure, and is open to challenge on many grounds. I have discussed these at more length here, and suggested some ways in which they are developing. Development is in two directions: each of the areas continues to develop itself, while at the same time there is a growing desire to find better ways of working across them (e.g. at the discovery layer, or in terms of a more unified approach to metadata creation/management).
Now, we have an agreed and well-understood set of processes around the first category. These are encapsulated in the integrated library system, and still quite strongly influence library organization. These include things like selection, acquisition, cataloging, circulation, catalog, and so on.
We have a less well agreed set of processes around the second area, and an emerging apparatus of systems support. This includes resolvers, ERM systems, A to Z lists, metasearch, and so on. A level of agreement is apparent in that substitutable systems are now available to support this activity. However, differences in organizational structure to support the area and low takeup of ERM systems suggest that we are in early days. One place where there is likely to be further evolution relates to the creation, management and sharing of the data used to drive these systems.
And we have a much less well agreed set of processes around the third area. Libraries are exploring repositories for digitized collections, they are creating institutional repositories, and building workflows for content preparation and ingest, metadata creation, and so on. In fact, there is no agreed level of service in this area: you do not naturally expect to find particular services here in the way, for example, that you expect to find a circulation system. Of course, this lack of agreement makes this a potentially expensive area. There is a lot of figuring out what to do, and routine off-the-shelf tools or services may not necessarily exist across the range of what you want to do.
This is an overly complex systems landscape, and it will have to be rationalized in coming years so that libraries can spend more time putting their systems to work in support of their users and less time actually getting their systems to work together at all.
Anyway, this is by way of prelude to an observation about repositories. A couple of repository launches have come over my horizon in recent weeks.
The first is the Digital Conservancy at the University of Minnesota, which I mentioned the other day. This aims to provide services in relation to two classes of material: faculty research outputs and university administrative materials that traditionally would have gone to the University Archives. As I suggest in my post this makes a lot of sense: the repository aims to support the full range of institutionally produced intellectual outputs.
The second was the Open University's Open Research Online, "a repository of our research publications and other research outputs." In this case, the service aims to provide support for all the research outputs of OU academics. So, what you will find are deposited open access materials. However, you will also find citations to books, journal articles, and so on, which are not actually available in the repository: you may be referred to a publisher site. The repository aims to provide a full record to research activity, not only the open access materials.
What we have here, then, are well-worked through services which offer overlapping but different views onto their University's intellectual outputs. This is not a major issue as universities work towards a view of what should be offered and what their constituencies value.
However, in the longer term, lack of agreement about services and supporting processes may be a barrier, on the management side where different systems support is needed, or on the user side where different services from different universities may lead to confusion, reducing the gravitational pull that familiarity supports.
Aside: Of course, in the longer run also, there are interesting questions about the relationship between these institutional services and network level services but that is a discussion for another day.
Major 'memory organizations' face significant challenges as the volume and variety of what is within their potential remit to collect grows. The digital turn has presented major challenges in developing routine ways of capturing and curating digital materials in many contexts. An Australian colleague pointed me to a joint statement and request for additional funding by the National Film and Sound Archive, National Archives of Australia, and National Library of Australia.
Digital has become the preferred medium for Australian government agencies, authors, researchers, film makers, musicians and creators. Increasingly, the primary evidence of public administration is created in digital form. The vast majority of film and television works, and virtually all music and recorded sound created in Australia are now released in digital form.
Australia ’s ability to maintain a permanent and accessible record of these activities is therefore linked to our preparedness to cope with this digital tidal wave of images and sounds. As the Collections Council of Australia noted in its background papers for the 2006 Summit on Digital Collections: “ The growth of digital information and the need to store, manage and preserve access is an issue of truly global proportions.” [Australia’s Cultural Heritage – A Digital Future]
As the scope of what such organizations have to do grows, as digital curation needs to become mainstream, and as they have already cut back where they can, the situation becomes more grave.
We’ve already lost many of our important moments and many of our creative ideas and cultural expressions. There is a danger that in ten years time Australians will look back at today as a digital dark-age. [Australia’s Cultural Heritage – A Digital Future]
I might humbly suggest that digital libraries must adopt a theoretical stance. As I noted above, library science is devoid of theoretical foundations and of a knowledge-base that is relevant to the budding digital world. Archival science with its principles of uniqueness, provenance, arrangement and description, authenticity, appraisal, and its tool sets such as diplomatics, may offer us a framework for a theoretical foundation for digital libraries. [Digital preservation, archival science and methodological foundations for digital libraries. ECDL 2007 [PDF]]
We use the following collections grid from time to time to help focus attention on particular collecting patterns in libraries. The bottom right hand corner represents materials that have not been highly stewarded and which are usually unique to a particular institution. The types of material which go in here are research and learning outputs (e.g. preprints, data sets, learning objects) and institutional administrative records (annual reports, and so on).
These share some characteristics. And in some ways, we can see them becoming the 'special collections' of the future when they move into more stewarded environments.
In this context I was interested to see the University of Minnesota's Digital Conservancy. Effectively, it is looking at stewarding the material in that quadrant: institutional research materials and administrative records.
The University Digital Conservancy is a program of the University of Minnesota Libraries that provides long-term open access to a wide range of University works in digital formats. It does so by gathering, describing, organizing, storing, and preserving that content.
Works produced or sponsored by the University of Minnesota faculty, researchers, staff, and students are appropriate for deposit in the UDC. Works might include pre- and post-prints, working papers, technical reports, conference papers and theses.
I am writing this in the very fine new public library building in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I was speaking to the Wyoming Library Association conference this morning. I have been travelling this week, hence no posts. In the few minutes before the library closes ....
When I told the children I was coming to Cheyenne I realized that it did not have the same associations for them as it does for me. If I had an American schooling my associations would no doubt be different. But when I was sitting in Denver airport early this morning looking at flights to Cheyenne, Amarillo, or Dodge City my thoughts ran straight to the Westerns I saw when growing up.
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 ...
It is funny to think that these names do not have the same associations for them. It is also a reminder - if one was needed - of how different their cultural frame of reference is to mine at their age.
Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics: .... [Publish or perish]
Among the statistics it generates are: Total number of papers; Total number of citations; Average number of citations per paper; Average number of citations per author; Average number of papers per author; Hirsch's h-index and related indexes.
One interesting feature is that a search on a journal title returns a list of papers ranked by citation.
Now, of course, this is as good as the data in Google Scholar. I expect we will see some analysis comparing results here with comparable results from ISI.
Update: my comments about the published literature below are about the library literature, a very specific set of journals and organizations. I am not trying to make any statement about the general value of the 'published literature' relative to blogs or other media.
We have lots of places to 'publish' positions, views, findings, .... Consider some options ...
One. A little while ago, I wrote a couple of hundred words or so in a post to the discussion board on a Facebook group. Not a very active or large group. It took a while to prepare as I had to think about it, and the topic had been bubbling away under the surface for a while. A colleague read it and asked why I had not put it on my blog. I responded that it was probably a little more provocative than I would normally be here and also that it was specific to the experiences of various folks within that particular Facebook group. However, it does have a limited readership, and it does underline one of the widely discussed issues with Facebook: that it is a one-sided platform: what happens in Facebook stays in Facebook. However, I felt about it like I felt about posts to mailing lists or about blog posts in early days of the blog: it is for the moment.
Two. I write quite a bit on this blog. It has been an interesting experience. From a writing point of view I find it quite liberating. Over the years I have written quite a lot for the professional literature. However, I write slowly. For me, the main procedural difference here is twofold. The first is that entries never get long enough to
worry about structure. And the second is a continuing sense that that this is still a fugitive medium. This means that an entry can be dispatched relatively quickly. I did it for a year internally at OCLC before we decided to externalize it. So it has a strong focus on work topics, although latterly I notice that I have to resist using it to talk about a wider set of topics. It is good to have a place to 'publish' short pieces, to comment on what is going on, and to have stuff commented on. And I also find it a useful place to work through things, which makes me better prepared in (some ;-) discussions. The downside is that I have become something of a blog bore: increasingly I want to refer people to blog entries in conversation as it is somewhere to which a range of thoughts have been 'externalized'.
It is also nice to see posts or concepts discussed here get into wider circulation. It is interesting to see blog entries being cited in the 'literature'. Although it is very difficult to get a real sense of readership. That said, I do sometimes wonder about the opportunity cost of writing here in the context of a broader set of writing opportunities (or reading time, or whatever, ...).
In this context, I was interested to read Andy Powell's comments about Jakob Nielsen's Write Articles, Not Blog Postings piece. Nielsen is talking about the effort/impact ratio. If you are going to spend effort, make sure it has impact. Andy's response is that the blog works just fine. He goes on to compare the blog with the professional/scholarly literature.
Now, impact means different things to different people, but for me, as a non-researcher (i.e. as someone that doesn't have to worry about impact factors and the RAE), writing something for a peer-reviewed journal that won't see the light of day for another year or so doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm happy with the impact of this blog thank you very much. There are times when it does seem to make sense, to me, to write for something with a quicker turn-around - Ariadne for example - but I must admit that it isn't 100% clear to me exactly when that makes sense and when it is sufficient to simply put something in the blog. [eFoundations: Write blog postings, not articles :-)]
And thinking about impact, or influence, Dan Cohen urged his fellow professors to take up blogging some time ago: "A large blog audience is as good as a book or a seminal article. A good blog provides a platform to frame discussions on a topic and point to resources of value."
I sometimes wonder about curation and about record, especially given the volume of material now 'published' here. It has gone beyond 'just for the moment'. Much of what is in blogs is not worth holding onto, some is, as is shown by citation patterns. We don't have good models here. There is a tension between the now (where the library literature and associated apparatus is difficult to access, to the extent, I suggest, that it is the new 'gray' literature, while the network literature is readily available) and the record (where we don't have professional practices and services to ensure continued access for the 'blog' literature, while we do for the classical literature). And yes - we are seeing some closing of this gap. But slowly.
Three. However, I think we have a very dreary 'published' literature. We have a set of niche publications, many of little sustained interest. The literature is a citation farm for those involved in formal research activity, and in the US, a necessary career convenience for those librarians who work within the tenure system. I remember once sending an email to a university colleague asking had she a copy of an article. This was on the basis of a related article which I thought was very good. She responded bemusedly that I shouldn't be reading this article, that it was just something churned out towards an application for tenure. There are certainly many interesting articles published, but I wonder about the system as a whole.
The state of the library literature is a big topic, one which I don't propose to address here. A major issue is that much of it is cut off from the web, which reduces its impact inside and outside the library community. My own incentives to publish in the existing print literature are much reduced in recent years: why hide away something that has taken a lot of effort to produce in a journal with limited readership? And no traction outside the library community.
Since being at OCLC, I have encouraged my colleagues to publish more in the professional and scholarly literature. However, I have recently been involved in several discussions about where to offer something for publication without any really satisfactory outcome. D-Lib and Ariadne suffice for some types of material but not for all.
Now something like College & Research Libraries does land on a lot of desks; it would be nice if I could pass around URLs for articles published there. It seems to me that I see more references to Educause publications or to First Monday than I do to C&RL? How often do you see mentions of LRTS articles in discussions of metadata or knowledge organization outside the library community?
So, I am left with two thoughts:
There is a growing gap between the positions that the library profession takes with respect to the literature more generally and the state of its own literature.
What responsibility should libraries take, if any, to the curation of the 'blog literature'. This is another area where the balance between institutional and network level response is interesting to think about.
Reading Walt's latest Cites and Insights this jumped out at me:
I believe that gray literature—blogs, this ejournal, a few similar publications and some lists—represents the most compelling and worthwhile literature in the library field today. [Cites & Insights 7:9 - On the Literatyre]
Gray? Gray! Blogs, reports published on the web, web journals: these are brightly colored and shining. They are connected to the life of the web - link and search - and are visible, referencable and available.
In contrast most of the formal library literature is a very dreary affair. Dull publications, hidden for the most part from the web. Determined not to have any influence outside their niche. Gray, Gray, Gray ....
I think we need to revise our terms ;-)
The web has shone a light on the formerly gray; the formally published seems to want to stay in the shadows and become the new gray.
There is a passage in a letter from Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno where he suggests removing a reference to Georges Bataille from a document. Bataille, in addition to his other accomplishments, was a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Benjamin writes:
And in this way my own relationship with Georges Bataille will not be adversely affected either, something I would like to maintain, both because of his assistance at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and because of my plans for naturalization. - The fragment would not escape his attention since the Institute journal is openly displayed in the reading room where he often works; and he is hardly the type of person to react serenely to its contents. [Theodor W Adorno and Walter Benjamin. The complete correspondence, 1928-1940. p. 276]
I was reminded of this passage as I read Jeremy Harding's discussion in the current London Review of Books of Walter Benjamin's 'last day' before his death in 1940 while trying to flee to the US.
Benjamin had left various papers, including the manuscript of his Arcades Project, with Bataille for safe-keeping. Bataille hid them in the library. The Arcades Project is a massive unfinished work, a weaving of quotations and Benjamin's own text.
So the library comes in at three levels. At one, it is important for the scholar to keep in with the librarian ;-) At a second, the librarian receives a manuscript on the eve of flight and keeps it safely in the library from where it is retrieved and published. At a third, is it possible to imagine a book which rests so much on quotations without the libraries which preserve the scholarly and cultural record the quotations point to and make it available to readers?
Alma Swan has an interesting post discussing the value added by the publisher in copy editing and concludes that it is ... variable. She notes a publisher study:
Wates and Campbell looked at copy editing changes carried out on a set of science, humanities and social science articles at Blackwell Publishing (as was) and reported that the biggest category of corrections by the publisher was concerned with the references (42.7% of all copy editing changes), the next biggest category (34.5%) was concerned with minor syntactical or grammatical changes and a small proportion (5.5%) of changes corrected author ‘errors that might otherwise have led to misunderstanding or misinterpretation’. [OptimalScholarship]
I was interested in the attention to references. And I wondered whether the variety of tools introduced in recent years to help with the capture and management of such citation data (RefWorks, Zotero, etc) had reduced the number of errors spotted in a paper's references. It would be interesting to know how the corrections break down, as between errors in bibliographic sources, transcription errors, stylistic or completeness errors, and so on.
In the longer term, it will be interesting to see whether such data flows more easily with the potential introduction of citation microformats (I don't know what the status of this work is), or, say, if it were to happen, the introduction of support in something like Microsoft Word to allow structured data of this sort to be imported or exported. I still believe that we will see greater use made of a new 'bibliographic tissue' which connects the user environment and database resources through resources like citation managers, reading lists, social bookmarking, microformats and RSS feeds.
Incidentally, the discussion of copy-editing is by way of introducing a JISC-funded project looking at differences between versions of articles (different author versions, publisher version):
VALREC will ask stakeholders what levels of validation they would like to see, and what broad categories of differences would be helpful, such as ‘editorial differences’ and ‘content differences’. The project will then develop the technology to measure differences and generate a digital certificate for any article detailing the differences. An example of such a certificate is on the VALREC website. Not only will there then be a means to itemise the exact differences between the author-final and published version, but between other, earlier, versions of an article too, perhaps those first exposed on blogs or wikis. This will permit better formalisation and monitoring of the scholarly record, especially as authors move to early-use of repositories and informal web tools as part of the communications process. [OptimalScholarship]
The project is a joint one between Alma's company, Key Perspectives, which has done a lot of empirical work on open access and researcher behaviors, and the University of Southampton, which has been a major producer of tools, systems and data analysis in support of open access directions (see, for example, the eprints.org site).
I found David Crystal's remarks about the 'language' of texting in Words, Words, Words refreshing, having been in a couple of conversations recently where folks were complaining about it. "Texting language is totally appropriate for its setting" he says. And goes on to note "New genres add to the expressive potential of a language". To illustrate he quotes the winners of The Guardian Text Message Poetry Competition, including:
I left my picture on th ground wher u walk
so that somday if th sun was jst right
& the rain didnt wash me awa
u might c me out of th corner of yr i & pic me up
(Emma Passmore)
Now, I hope that some libraries somewhere are collecting examples of texting as it seems to me that it is an important part of current cultural expression.
Indeed, I suggested in my remarks [ppt] at the LIBER Think Tank on the future
View comments (2)
Post a comment
Bookmark:
There is a passage in a letter from