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.

Membership has its privileges

December 8th, 2008

I’ve been doing some weird things to prepare for teaching the Library 2.0 course in the Spring: I recently finished reading Teaching As a Subversive Activity, I’ve become a disciple of Howard Rheingold’s pedagogical stylings, I upgraded our free LibraryThing account to Lifetime membership. I’ve also finally caved in to my CueCat lust: I asked Y to get me one as a stocking-stuffer for the holidays. (I mean, it’s only $15, big deal.) For some reason I feel like, if I’m going to teach a Lib2.0 course, I should start using LibraryThing more actively… I have a whopping 11 books in my LT library, which are the same ones I added a year-plus ago when I was just testing LT out to see what it’s all about. And while I admit to having the compulsion to catalog my own books, I know that I won’t spend the time to enter all that data manually… the only way I’ll do this is if I can enter books automatically. So that’s another silly thing I’ll be doing, ostensibly to prepare for teaching Lib2.0.

Expertise swell in Wikipedia?

November 28th, 2008

At the 2002 VRD conference, my now-colleague Phil Edwards (at the time we were both still mere doctoral students) presented a paper titled: Characterization of Volunteer Expertise Within the Internet Public Library Reference Service. In that study he found what he called “expertise swell.” In other words, novice IPL volunteers answer questions on a limited range of subjects (users submitting questions via the IPL’s Ask A Librarian webform can self-categorize their question into a set of 25 or so subject categories); Phil hypothesized that novice answerers answer questions on subjects they know well. The longer an answerer was volunteering for the IPL, however, the wider the range of subjects in which they would answer questions; Phil hypothesized that as answerers gain experience, they “develop an infosphere ‘map’ such that they no longer have to rely solely upon previous knowledge in order to answer wider varieties of questions.”

I wonder if such a phenomenon happens with Wikipedia editors as well? Do people who edit Wikipedia start out editing articles on a fairly narrow range of topics, and do the topics expand over time? Of course, whether the narrow range of topics in which Wikipedia editors / IPL answerers start out are those topics they know well is itself an empirical question.

Seems to me that this would be a fairly easy bit of data analysis to do. First, you’d need to get the complete set of edits ever made to Wikipedia, and the usernames associated with those edits. This could probably be done with a crawler, though I’m not sure how a crawler would handle page history. Alternatively, maybe one could convince Virgil Griffith to share his WikiScanner data. Second, eliminate all anonymous edits, and all users who have only made one edit ever. That should significantly reduce the dataset to be analyzed. Third, figure out how to cluster articles by subject. The IPL has created its own subject categories, but how to do this in Wikipedia? Could this be done with WordNet? Do sets of words cluster in WordNet, that could be used for this? What is the shape of the English language, according to WordNet?

Who cares? I don’t know. This was just an idea that occurred to me over Thanksgiving, as I was reading Here Comes Everybody, something that I thought was an interesting question; I wasn’t thinking about practical applications. But it seems to me that one of the issues surrounding Wikipedia has always been how to foster involvement in collaborative projects. This seems to have never been a problem for Wikipedia itself, which has plenty of involvement, but was a problem for Nupedia, and as best as I can tell still is for Citizendium. If someone could develop a model for how “expertise swell” happens — how people decide how to expand their range of subjects in collaborative information production — then maybe we could do a better job (indeed, any job at all) at encouraging people to contribute and directing contributions. Maybe.

Nitpicking the Google Book Search agreement

October 28th, 2008

Today’s big news: Google and the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers have come to an agreement on the lawsuit that was brought against Google in 2005 about the Google Book Search project.

As usual, Jessamyn West has collected and posted an excellent set of links about this.

Two sentences in particular from the Google blog post about this caught my attention:

The agreement gives public and university libraries across the U.S. free, full-text viewing of books at a designated computer in each of their facilities. That means local libraries across the U.S. will be able to offer their patrons access to the incredible collections of our library partners — a huge benefit to the public.

Yes, that means local libraries will be able to offer their patrons access, but will they? I want someone to follow this up in a year or so, to see where in the library those designated computers are. Are they clearly marked as being the “Google Books computer”? Are they centrally located or in some out-of-the way corner of the computer cluster? Are they in the computer cluster at all, or on a staff member’s desk?

Maybe I’m just being overly cynical. But anything that requires libraries to expend extra effort in maintaining their computers, in my experience, has the potential to go awry.

Empathy, 2 year olds, and the free rider problem

September 9th, 2008

I heard this story on NPR recently, and then when I saw this tweet by @hrheingold, I remembered that I’d wanted to look up the article in Nature, which I did:

Fehr, E., Bernhard, H., & Rockenbach, B. (2008). Egalitarianism in young children. Nature, 454(7208), 1079-1083.

As the parent of a child who is deep in the throes of the Terrible Twos, I’m extremely interested in this research that shows that egalitarianism and empathy develops between ages 7-8. Because a 2 year-old sure hasn’t got any.

In searching for this article, I stumbled across an older paper by one of the same authors, Ernst Fehr:

Fehr, E., & Gachter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature, 415(6868), 137-140.

This is yet another article that I take to be on the topic of my obsession, what motivates people to participate in open projects. Though actually, the more I live with this particular obsession, the more I realize what it’s really about is the Free Rider problem, or more accurately, why in certain contexts the Free Rider problem appears not to exist, or at least is not a problem.

For my money, the interesting thing about this 2001 article is that it makes the case that there’s an evolutionary basis for cooperation. Which means that free ridership is the anomaly, not the other way around. Which means that my failure to understand the motivation to not free-ride means that I’m a sociopath, or a Neanderthal, or something.

Make Way for Obsessives

August 29th, 2008

Now that I’ve fessed up to being bothered by the mystery bunny in Peter Rabbit, I feel a great weight lifted off my shoulders. So now it can be told… something has been bothering me for months about Make Way for Ducklings.

First rabbits, now ducks? What’s your problem with cute fluffy animals, Pomerantz? This is my problem…

I actually made the mistake one day of thinking about Mr. and Mrs. Mallard’s flight path from the Public Gardens to their nest site. And here’s what I realized: they start in the Gardens, then “they flew over Beacon Hill and round the State House,” then they fly over Louisburg Square, and finally they arrive at the Charles River. So what? Well, those of you familiar with the geography of Boston, think about it: this requires a hairpin turn over the State House. Not efficient, for one thing, and not the kind of flying one generally expects of ducks, who tend to stick to straight-line flight plans.

Because I’m a complete geek, I’ve mapped this on Google Maps:


View Larger Map

And then, once I had Mr. and Mrs. Mallard’s Public Gardens-to-nest site flight mapped, I was compelled to map out Mrs. Mallard and the ducklings’ return waddle.

But wait… my compulsiveness isn’t over yet. Mr. & Mrs. Mallard fly over Louisburg Square in the wrong direction. From the State House to the Charles is west, and downhill. But it’s clear from the picture that they’re flying east, uphill.

Also, look at the pictures of the Mallard’s nest site. It’s on an island in the Charles that looks like it’s practically right underneath the Longfellow Bridge. There are three candidate islands that this could be: one and two, the “seawall” islands off the Community Boating building, which are closer to the bridge, and three, the pedestrian island by the Hatch Shell, farther from the bridge. I conclude that the nest site is on the seawall island nearer to the Longfellow. Why? First, there is no island right underneath the Longfellow, but this one is closest. Second, in the picture, the nest site is on an end of what looks like a pretty tiny island, and you can see the Longfellow in the background, so obviously you’re looking north / northeast. If the nest site was on the second seawall island, you’d be able to see the first in the background.

When Mrs. Mallard and the ducklings leave the nest site to walk back to the Public Gardens, the picture clearly shows them walking perpendicular to the axis of the esplanade to “the highway” (that is, Storrow Drive). So from the nest site, Mrs. Mallard and the ducklings must have swum ashore, then turned right and walked down the path to the Hatch Shell, the turned left to walk on the path to Mount Vernon Street. This makes sense though, since this is the closest path across the Esplanade to Storrow from the water. There’s the footbridge to Mugar Way and the Charles T station, but that’s to the northeast of the nest site and in the wrong direction if you’re trying to get to the Gardens. Still, there’s really no need to stay on the path if you’re a duck.

And there’s still more. On their walk back to the Gardens, Mrs. Mallard and the ducklings pass by the Corner Book Shop, on the corner of Mount Vernon and Charles Streets. But there’s no Corner Book Shop at that location, and I’m not able to determine that there ever was. (Though I admit to not researching this as rigorously as I might have.) The used to be an Old Corner Bookstore at the corner of Washington and School Streets, until the 1950s. Note that Make Way for Ducklings was published in 1941, so it would still have been there when McCloskey was writing. But the problem is: the corner of Washington and School Streets is nowhere near the rest of Mrs. Mallard and the ducklings’ route, easily a 15-minute walk even for a human.

And a final detail. Where do Mr. and Mrs. Mallard meet Michael the policeman? It’s in front of a building that says Police on it, though it’s not clear if it’s a police station or just a police box. In one picture you can clearly see Mount Vernon Street in the background, down which Mrs. Mallard and the ducklings are walking. In another picture, the station/box looks like it’s a few steps from the Charles. So I conclude it must be on the green in front of where the Hatch Shell is now, at the front water-side (stage right) corner of the Shell. Did there used to be a police station or box there? The Hatch Shell was built in 1941, so there might have been when McCloskey was writing. Maybe on the construction site?

Have you seen this rabbit?

August 23rd, 2008

Note: This is a re-post from Charlotte’s blog.

You know that you’ve read a book too many times when… things like this start to bother you.

Charlotte has recently rediscovered The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and now we’ve been reading it several times a day for the past week or so. So I’ve been staring at the book a lot lately. Which is my only excuse here.

On page 2, old Mrs. Rabbit declares that she’s going out, and sends Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter off into the fields or down the lane, with a warning not to go into Mr. McGregor’s garden. So far, so good. But look again: as Mrs. Rabbit preps her children for their day, there’s someone spying on the Rabbit family.

Peter Rabbit

Who is this rabbit? There are only two other rabbit characters even mentioned in the book: Mr. Rabbit, who was apparently was put into a pie by Mr. McGregor at some undetermined past date, and Peter’s cousin Benjamin Bunny, who seems to have had some kind of a bad run-in with a cat but lived to tell the tale.

So who is this? Benjamin Bunny? We have no reason to think that he even lives nearby. Mr. Rabbit? Why would he fake his own empiement? More ominously, some unknown third party? It’s a mystery wrapped in fur.

Follow-up: My colleague S suggests that the mystery rabbit is Mrs. Rabbit’s lover, and that her trip to the baker’s is just a ruse. They are, after all, rabbits. S is far more cynical than I had previously given her credit for.

JASIST Going Green

July 21st, 2008

From the latest issue of JASIST:

As of January 2008, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) will follow the green road open-access model, whereby authors publishing in the Journal are granted self-archival rights for preprints, with linking to the final article and to the online journal, as detailed next.

Full text here.