ASIST 2009 Wordle

November 2nd, 2009

Inspired by KT’s excellent wordle image of her Pharmacy Librarian blog, I decided to create a wordle of — don’t ask me why — the session titles at the upcoming ASIST conference. Note that this is just session titles, not abstracts, and does not include the titles of pre-conference seminars, social events, governance, or the plenary sessions.

Wordle: ASIST 2009 Session Titles

I don’t know, do you think this conference might have something to do with information? Come on people, demonstrate a little more creativity in naming your presentations, please.

The Not-so-Perpetual Beta

November 2nd, 2009

One of the tenets of Web 2.0, according to Tim O’Reilly’s seminal article, is “the perpetual beta.” That is, “the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.”

Well, Web 2.0-ish applications seem to be shedding beta-ness fast and furious lately: first Gmail, now Remember The Milk.

I know, I know: two datapoints does not a trend make. Also, I’m not really sure you could reasonably call Gmail a Web 2.0-ish application… I mean, email is about as Web 1.0 as it gets. But it’s Google… so gets some 2.0-ish cred somehow.

Also, just because Gmail and RTM have dropped the “beta” label, doesn’t mean they’ve stopped rolling out functionality rapidly. Or that they’re developed any less in the open.

But I just wonder what it means for the whole concept of 2.0-ishness that two of the best established web-native applications have abandoned the beta label. I suspect they won’t be the last, either. Does this mean that the label “beta” isn’t as cool anymore as it was once upon a time? (”Once upon a time” being a phrase which here means, two short years ago.) That calling something beta won’t give you cred any more? Or is this just the natural progression of the End of the Software Release Cycle that O’Reilly predicted? That calling something “beta” isn’t even necessary any more; it’s just assumed?

Genealogy

July 14th, 2009

I recently installed PhpGedView, an open source genealogy application, and am learning to use it, with some help from Terrell. Yvonne and I got heavily into genealogy research back when we were living in Syracuse, probably 7 or 8 years ago now. But then we got sidetracked by, you know, finishing our graduate programs, and put it aside & haven’t picked it up again until just recently.

In the last few days, though, we’ve been making spectacular progress on our genealogical research… largely, I think, due to the fact that Ancestry.com has increased its holdings dramatically in the past 8 years. It also helps that we have some relatives who have done some genealogical research of their own — in Yvonne’s case, one relative has done a huge amount of work.

Anyway, Yvonne has found that one of her ancestors — her great great aunt, I think — wrote a book, A Steele Tribe of Virginia. And moreover, the author, Eva Belle Steele, worked at Duke. And moreover, the book is in the Duke library’s collection. Small world. And I’ve put in an ILL request for another book about a different branch of Yvonne’s family. That book was in the Syracuse library’s main branch, and come to find out it’s one of only 7 copies in existence. We had no idea how good we had it back then!

Anyway, as cool as this is, it kind of bums me out that none of my ancestors ever wrote a history of their families. In my family, we get a lot of “We left the old country to get away from all that, why would we ever want to talk about it” from my grandparents’ generation. So I’m able to track my ancestors back to their immigration to the US, between the 1880s and 1920s, and then all trails go cold.

Ifrane Itinerary

June 19th, 2009

As I’ve mentioned on Twitter, I’m going to Morocco tomorrow, to Ifrane. Actually it’s me and Javed, and we’re going to have initia meetings to establish a distance librarian-training program at Al Akhawayn University. We just received our itinerary for the first 2 days of our trip. And since I have nothing else to say at this point, I thought I’d feed your envy by posting that. I’ve deleted the names of the people who we’re meeting with and will be giving us tours.

Stay tuned for photos, and hopefully video. We’ll see what the connectivity situation is like. Ifrane is a university town, obviously, so I’m hopeful.

Sunday, June 21th

8:45 Arrival to Casa airport and pick up by a University driver

14:00 Arrival to AUI campus – Ifrane

14:10 Lunch – AUI Restaurant

15:00 Campus tour (by a Library Assistant)

Free afternoon

Monday, June 22th

8:30 Breakfast with our host

12:30 Lunch

Location: AUI restaurant

15:00 Meeting with our host and another academic officer

16:00 Visit of Fez City with a Library Assistant

Markets, Research, and Ethics

June 10th, 2009

More musings induced by my Econ course…

My textbook states that “market transactions are characterized by voluntary exchange coordinated by prices.” Except that there’s a big difference between “voluntary” and “well-informed.” One can do something voluntarily that is extremely poorly informed (examples abound), or one can be actively misled and misinformed.

One of the arguments that my text makes for why advertising exists, and works, is that it increases the information available to consumers. Which maybe it does, and maybe that was the original intent of advertising, but I would really debate that that is it’s primary function nowadays. But that’s not the point. The point is, market transactions are engaged in — purchases are made — voluntarily, by people who are more or less well-informed about goods, substitutes for them, their costs and value, etc. But I’m used to operating in an environment — that is, getting IRB clearance for research studies — in which participants must be fully informed.

But what if research were subject to the same criteria as markets? Anything you could convince your subjects to do would be fine, because it’s “voluntary.” Tuskegee-like studies could abound. Enough said, I think.

And what about the other way around, if markets were subject to the same regulation as research? Before you buy this pack of cigarettes, read this informed consent form and sign here. Do you have any questions? Do you need a translator to help you understand? If you’re under 18, a parent will need to sign for you. You can return your half-smoked pack at any time and we’ll give you your full money back. That would be a hell of a regulatory burden, but honestly I’m not sure if markets wouldn’t be more efficient for it, at least in the sense of having better information flows. They’d certainly be more ethical. Businesses would really have to identify all costs, including the costs to their customers and even to society at large, including non-customers.

Economics questions

June 9th, 2009

I’m currently taking an Economics course, EC 205: Fundamentals of Economics, a self-paced correspondence course through the Friday Center. Why? Because over the past few years economics has become an increasingly major part of my evaluation-related research: return on investment, cost analysis, etc. And for most of the time I’ve been working in that arena I’ve relied heavily on Lori’s Econ chops. But now that she’s moving onward and upward to a dissertation proposal, I figured that if I want to continue this line of research (and I do), I’d really better know something about Economics myself, beyond what I’ve absorbed by osmosis.

While I’ve been reading the textbook, I’ve been making notes about questions and ideas that occur to me. I’ve been making these just for myself, in a Word file, for a while now. But it occurred to me that this blog is a better place for these. Partly because I’m trying to contribute to the blog more. And partly in the hope that I may get answers, or at least comments, in reply to some of these questions, which will help me understand these issues better. That said, dear reader, please bear in mind that this is an introductory Econ course that I’m taking, so these questions may be incredibly stupid or naïve. Give me credit for being brave enough to potentially look foolish in public.

First, demand curves. The textbook discusses the hypothetical of a perfectly inelastic demand curve: where demand is constant regardless of price. But what about (the hypothetical?) of a perfectly elastic demand curve: where price is constant regardless of demand? Actually, since I first jotted this note down, I’ve since read about price taker firms, which have a perfectly elastic demand curve at the firm level (the firm must take the market price for its good), though the demand curve at the market level is subject to more normal price elasticity. So I suppose I’m asking about perfectly elastic demand in a market. Wouldn’t this basically be the model of filesharing? Wouldn’t price necessarily be driven to 0, & we’d be in the environment of Chris Anderson’s Free? A perfectly inelastic demand curve would converge on price = infinity, a perfectly elastic demand curve would converge on price = 0.

On a related note: demand elasticity. Under what conditions would demand be less elastic, or even equally elastic, in the long term than in the short term? Only, it seems to me, when substitutes for a good disappear over the long term. Which seems pretty unlikely.

Next, equilibrium. Buyers can go out & purchase stuff more or less in an instant. But it takes some time for producers to acquire or build new stuff, longer for more complex stuff. So supply always lags when demand increases. But this is only the case when the market is for physical goods or services. When the market is for information “goods,” producers can duplicate as many copies as demand calls for. Take, for example, the iTunes store: if suddenly a song becomes popular, 80 jillion users can download it as easily as one. So I would hypothesize that markets for information should reach equilibrium faster than markets for other types of things, in fact instantly. In fact, markets for information should never be out of equilibrium.

Taxes. My textbook (as I imagine most textbooks do) discusses taxes as if they’re a sum of money. Which I suppose is how people usually think of taxes. But it seems to me that a tax can be any force that is a disincentive to trade, “friction” as it was called in a study I was involved in as a PhD student. I’m thinking specifically of the difficulty for the buyer of reaching the seller: distance, time to close the sale, aversion to smarmy salesman, etc. So anything that increased friction would have the effect of a tax, while anything that decreased friction would have the effect of reducing the burden of taxation. The internet, by making both buying and selling easier, should reduce the burden of “taxation”, even if online sales were monetarily taxed. And the fact that many online sales are not taxed should reduce it even more. Are there any studies on this?

I have more, but that’s enough for now. Back to actually reading my Econ text.

Thoughts on the DuraSpace Press Release

May 15th, 2009

I’m sure everyone who pays even a small amount of attention to digital libraries has already seen this press release: Fedora Commons and DSpace Foundation Join Together to Create DuraSpace™ Organization

I have to admit that when I first saw this announcement I thought it was a late April Fool’s joke, you know, like those “announcements” that Microsoft and Yahoo are merging and will change their name to Microhoo, or something. I mean, DuraSpace? Doesn’t that sound like a joke?

(On reflection though, DuraSpace is more than a bad portmanteau of DSpace and Fedora; the use of the root “dura” is a nice touch where digital libraries are concerned. Though obviously too subtle for me.)

That said, this is a very interesting development, and one that I plan to follow very closely. I wonder if it’s a statement about the difficulty of sustaining open source projects, even large & well-established ones. I’d love to know what was said in the conversations that led up to this merger.

And here’s where I start to pontificate. While the press release says that “DuraSpace will continue to support its existing software platforms, DSpace and Fedora,” I predict that they will merge the two platforms eventually. I give it 2 years, max.

I’m also looking forward to seeing how the DuraCloud service pans out. As far as I know, Greenstone is the only DL platform for which there is a hosting service available. If DSpace & Fedora were hosted, that could be huge; it would open up digital library development to tons of cultural heritage institutions that can’t afford CONTENTdm and/or don’t have the skillset on staff to install and maintain an open source DL app now.

Post from the iPoderantz

April 16th, 2009

Thanks to the good people at ibiblio, specifically Ken, I now have the WordPress app for the iPhone set up. Behold, the matzah… or, in this case, my first post from my iTouch. Which, yes, I call the iPoderantz. (It was just too easy a shot… when I had a Palm, I called that Palmerantz. I mean, come on, with a name like Pomerantz, you have to take it where you can get it.)

Breathing new life into the old blog?

April 8th, 2009

Now that tenure is a done deal — on March 10 I submitted a signed copy of my tenure letter to the Provost’s office… see my celebratory tweet — I keep telling myself that I’ll put some effort into this blog again. Not that I don’t have about a dozen other things that I should be writing instead. But for reasons passing understanding I am not willing to just completely abandon this blog, so I figure I’d better actually contribute to it.

To this end, a couple of days ago I installed the WordPress for iPhone app, thinking that maybe that will lower the bar for blogging for me. Maybe my blog posts will become more tweety. Who knows. Well, I’m getting an XML-RPC error. I submitted a help ticket to the good folks at ibiblio, so we’ll see how this turns out.

I can haz tenure

February 24th, 2009

And now, for your viewing pleasure, my tenure letter. This is, I would just like to point out, the culmination of thirteen, fourteen years of my life, since I started my Masters program in 1995… though it wasn’t until 1996 that I decided that I wanted the job of a faculty member and that I was going to go on to do the Ph.D.

And I would just like to point out this passage in the letter:

I look forward to your acceptance of this promotion and ask that you sign the enclosed copy of this letter and return it to me within three weeks for our records.

As if I’m going to say no? I suppose this is my opening to negotiate salary, though this is a pretty sucky economy for that kind of thing.