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.

Book fetishism

December 26th, 2008

I’ve written here before that I have CueCat lust. Well, I finally caved and asked Y to get me one as a stocking-stuffer for the holidays, which she obligingly did. So I spent far too much time last night playing with it and adding books to our LibraryThing library, mostly from what we refer to as our Pretentious Bookshelf, which is to say the bookshelf in the living room where we have most of our books from college, plus most of our more highbrow reading. (And before you ask, yes, we have actually read all of them, or at least between the two of us we have.)

Anyway, I’ve come to the following realization: lust was the correct term for what I had for the CueCat. Because LibraryThing turns books into fetish objects. The OED (which, I would just like to point out, I have in my LT library) has a variety of definitions of fetish including: “Something irrationally reverenced.”

Not to be crude, but I actually do mean this literally. What is a book for? For reading, for storage of ideas. Maybe for other uses, but those are certainly the primary two. I’m going to ignore the latter since that happens prior to my coming in contact with the book; a book performs that function for the author, not for the reader. The function that a book performs for a reader is to be read. (Books are for use, Every reader his book, Every book its reader?) Though what I suppose I’m saying is that the function a book is intended to perform for a reader is to be read. Not to be, as my colleague Helen puts it, fondled. LibraryThing is essentially book fetishism. (I would almost go so far as to say book frottage, but I am going to stop just short of being that offensive.) Instead of actually reading my books, I’m stroking them, performing arcane rituals over them involving bar codes and lasers and ISBN numerology. (There is real irony in the fact that now I’m going even a step further and writing about my book fetishism, rather than actually engaging in it.)

(I would also like to mention how chagrined I have been to discover how many books we own that do not have bar codes. Also chagrining is the fact that so far, LT’s queries to Amazon are returning book info at a considerably higher rate than queries to the Library of Congress, even for books printed in the US.)

All that said, I have to admit that adding my books to my LibraryThing library is quite gratifying… but then, you’d expect it to be, if it pushes the same psychological buttons as other ritualized behaviors. I’m not giving up on my CueCat: I plan to finish the Pretentious Bookshelf and then move on to my science fiction collection. But after a point, it becomes not about the books at all anymore, the ritual takes on its own importance.

Librarianship First Principles

December 17th, 2008

The more I prep for my Library 2.0 course, the more I find myself thinking about what Library 2.0 really is all about. And the more I think about what Library 2.0 means, the more I return to what I think of as the First Principles of librarianship. I don’t mean Ranganathan’s Five Laws, though certainly those are true enough, and useful as a way of framing the philosophical underpinning of the profession. No, what I mean is this…

Most of the writing I’ve seen about Library 2.0 is in one or the other of two veins. Let me quote myself from another paper on another topic:

Literature on new technologies often appears in distinct phases. The first phase contains “gee whiz” types of presentations of the new technology and discussions of its potential. Literature in this phase is written primarily to introduce the technology to a new audience, and is often written by early adopters who have a vision of how the new technology may serve existing requirements, or how the new technology may be implemented in a new environment. … The second phase contains case studies: discussions of specific implementations of the new technology in specific environments.

Since writing that, I see these two early stages everywhere. It seems they’re universal. But I don’t mean to be disparaging; these are natural and useful stages in the evolution of the literature about new technologies. But I think these types of pieces miss the point of what Library 2.0 promises.

Because what Library 2.0 promises is nothing more than the opportunity to rethink what librarianship is and does. Miksa draws a distinction between the social organization of the library (the modern library as building, collection, management structures, etc.) and the social institution of the library (the idea that access to information is a social right). Miksa also argues that the modern social organization of the library is (merely?) an artifact of a particular period of history and technology, albeit a really radical solution for its time. He also argues that this social organization is changing again as times and technology changes. While Miksa does not ever mention Anything 2.0, I think his argument maps perfectly here: the promise of Library 2.0 is the opportunity to radically change the social organization of the library (again) while retaining the social institution, which is (I believe, and I think it’s clear that Miksa believes) the more important thing anyway.

So here we have an opportunity. Given the desire / need to preserve the social institution of the library, how can we change the social organization? How must it / will it inevitably change? And when I think about this, I keep coming back to the question that Shera poses of what it is that libraries do for the individual and for society.

So, what do libraries do?

  1. Libraries are curators of materials that they manage. The classic case of this is of course books. Though increasingly this includes electronic materials, as with data librarianship. I say “manage” rather than “own” because often the library does not own these materials — the researcher owns the datasets, for example — but the library manages it on the owner’s behalf. Digital libraries often fall into this category, because DLs often contain digital representations of materials in the library’s other collections. Though DLs compound the management problem, because once an object has a digital representation made of it, the library now has to manage two objects.
  2. Libraries are portals, or gateways, or whatever term you choose, to materials that they do not manage. The classic case of this is of subscription databases. Increasingly this includes ebooks and online periodicals. This may also, though as of yet it rarely does, include digital libraries maintained by other libraries.
  3. Libraries provide (and sometimes develop — Scriblio, etc.) mechanisms (by which I mean both tools and processes) to enable users to access materials: e.g., OPACs, etc.
  4. Libraries provide education and training in the use of materials and mechanisms. Sometimes this goes as far as using materials and mechanisms for the user, as in Reference work where the librarian provides an answer rather than sources.

So, how do libraries need to change, IMHO?

  1. Libraries do this better than any other social organization, largely because libraries are one of the few social organizations in existence for which this is a primary function. (Libraries aren’t the best at what they do; they are the only ones that do what they do.) There has been a lot of discussion in the past few years about the fact that libraries, museums, and archives — cultural heritage institutions, memory institutions, call them what you will — all perform this function. And that’s true. So what does that mean? We should combine these institutions? At least join forces to tackle common problems, like management of digital representations. But whatever joining of forces or mergers may happen, I think it’s clear that this is one function of libraries that will persist, regardless of technology change.
  2. I have one word for you: Google. Ok, I have many words for you: Google, LibraryThing, Delicious, Zotero, Connotea. I find library-based efforts like the OLE Project very encouraging: OLE is essentially trying to reinvent the OPAC from blank slate, as if OPACs were being invented now for the first time. I think this is a good approach, at least as a mental exercise: shed all your preconceptions and try to solve the actual problem, not try to build a better tool based on decades of assumptions about what the problem was throughout all that time. But let’s face it: when Google hit the streets, everyone else lost the battle to be the portal to the web. Libraries lost this battle worse than some. I know I’m not the first to say this, but… maybe libraries should just give up on OPACs and whatever else and accept that tools made by non-library vendors for non-library purposes are better at solving library problems than the tools we’ve been using all this time. We already have Google Scholar searching embedded in our websites… so it would be a gentle slide. Learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.
  3. We need to do more of this in libraries. I almost just want to leave it at that, full stop. But I can’t just leave a thing hanging out there. I think this falls out as a natural consequence of point 2, above. If we adopt tools developed for other (that is, non-library-specific) purposes, then we’ll have to tweak them. Or there won’t be tools to do what we want, so we’ll have to build them (a la libraryh3lp). What this means, of course, is that libraries need to hire more people who can program, or have professional development to that end. Plus spend less money on vendors and more money on internal technical expertise. This is beginning to happen anyway. Again, it would be a gentle slide.
  4. Libraries used to be about the only game in town here, but no longer: commercial help desks and social Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers have cut into that market. The edge that libraries have here is (1) that libraries have access to source materials (see points 1 & 2, above), and (2) that librarians care a lot about providing quality information and helping the user. Edge #1 is important, but less critical than it used to be, since see point 2 above. Edge #2 is critical, but librarians often trip over that one: as a profession we’re not very good at acknowledging that good enough is good enough.

I feel that I’m far from done here, but I’m going to just stop now and post this. I’ve been working on this post for either a week, or since 5:30 this morning, depending on how you count. Also, I realize now that I haven’t even addressed 2.0-esque technology in my list of how libraries need to change. I’ll leave that for a future post.

Wikipedia as shared worldview

December 10th, 2008

I’m still reading Here Comes Everybody. On p. 279, Shirky writes:

Wikipedia, which looks like a reference work to the average viewer, is in fact a bureaucracy given over mainly to arguing. The articles are the residue of the argument, being the last thing anyone declined to disagree about.

This made me think: in other words, Wikipedia is a massive experiment in shared understanding of the world. Shirky discusses “shared awareness” a lot in HCE, but this is not really that… this is more shared world-view. Wikipedia represents the lowest common denominator of what the entire “community” surrounding Wikipedia (and Shirky discusses the problems with calling Wikipedia a community on p. 278) agrees is an accurate representation of the world. Obviously, constrained by the limitations of a wiki as a tool, and the attention of the contributors: in other words, some things will always not represent that shared understanding because of the rapidity of change of some pages and the infrequency of edits to others. But to an approximation, anyway.

So, that said… the following thought occurred to me. There are several different language versions of Wikipedia. There is likely to be at least some overlap in topics across language versions, particularly for popular topics, topics in the news, etc. So here we have a natural experiment in comparative shared world-views, across different language communities.

Calling all speakers of a language a community is even more problematic than calling all Wikipedia contributors a community (and forget about all language-specific Wikipedia contributors). Though the linguistic pride that French speakers display about the French language, and the quote attributed to George Bernard Shaw that Americans and English are two peoples separated by a common language, is I think evidence that one can reasonably generalize about language communities.

Has anyone ever done a study like this, comparing worldviews across linguistic communities? This is essentially the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I suppose, so there must be some empirical work on this. But as I’ve always understood it, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis concerns the individual, not communities or societies. Anyway, as a massive collaborative production, Wikipedia seems to me to be a field just crying out for some interesting sociology.