Steve Ely

Flag@

Someone recently asserted to me that the short-lived e-mail address flag@whitehouse.gov was a means of collecting information on people, not topics.  I couldn’t find the information quickly enough to address this, so I just want to put some relevant links here for quick and easy access if it should come up again.

This from ABC News.   From Washington Monthly, this post on Aug. 5, and more significantly, I think, this one from Aug. 18.  Also, there’s this from Politico, which unsurprisingly uses a more objective-sounding style than Steve Benen at Washington Monthly but, also unsurprisingly, gives proportionately more attention to John Cornyn than does ABC.

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They each dig their own tunnels.

I enjoyed the clashing conclusions of the reviews for Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self on its Amazon page.  While Library Journal says “Metzinger’s intended audience is the lay reader, and he does a superb job of presenting his theory and introducing philosophical issues related to consciousness,” Publishers Weekly insists that the “prose [is] accessible mainly to those schooled in philosophy and science” and “most readers will have difficulty penetrating Metzinger’s ideas.”

Likewise, Booklist calls it “groundbreaking,” while Publishers Weekly says instead that Metzinger offers “little that is genuinely new.”

It’s as if the reviewers are reading different books altogether.  Apparently the Ego Tunnel is subjective to each person.   Hmmm….did Metzinger rig these reviews to prove a point?

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Surveying the academic library blogs

I mentioned on Friday that I’ve been putting some effort toward the the blog of the Cornette Library of West Texas A&M University, where I work as a reference librarian, and have been hoping to get an idea of 1. how much use and impact other academic libraries are getting out of blogs and 2. whether there are any good ideas I can steal from them about how best to use and promote ours.

Certainly, there is some literature about this, and I’m going to study that and note it here, but there are several reasons for me to seek out and scrutinize all the applicable academic library blogs I can myself.   The key thing, though, is that I won’t have nearly as clear an idea of how these blogs are being used and promoted without examining them myself.  For that reason, I’m looking for blogs at the main web pages for the libraries at all four-year colleges and universities, state by state, either until I get through all of the U.S. states or just enough that I’m satisfied.  We’ll see how it goes.

Since I’m in Texas now, I started with the schools in Texas, and then I moved on to Pennsylvania since I’m from there originally.   I’ll probably go through at least ten states or so.  State selection may be kind of arbitrary, but coverage of schools should be pretty comprehensive.  No community colleges or outright trade schools and generally not medical or law schools or the like, but pretty much anything that grants bachelor degrees.

So far I’ve been taking notes in a Google document, and it’s occurred to me that I’ve only really been noting those libraries that do have blogs, which makes sense because those are the only ones where there’s really anything to observe in answer to the questions here.  But in saying nothing of those libraries that have no blogs, it becomes unclear what proportion of schools don’t.  I should go back and fill a spreadsheet indicating some simple yes/no information on whether they’ve got anything.  The “yes” libraries are already clear from the notes I’ve taken about them, but it’d be good to be clear about who all the “no” schools are.

Obviously, I think that good blogging is an asset, but the simple fact that some library doesn’t have a blog shouldn’t be taken as a criticism by me.   There are obviously more important priorities, with library service generally and with library web sites.   From what I’ve seen of various schools in Texas and Pennsylvania so far, it seems that even most academic libraries that have blogs aren’t doing all that much with them.    I expect that as I go along, I’ll find more impressive examples.  For the time being, here are my notes as they stand now.

After I pull together the spreadsheet mentioned above, I’ll post a link to that here.  And after I get through all of Pennsylvania or maybe a few more states, I’ll put up a new post with some analysis.

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Cornette’s blog

All my blogging for the past couple of weeks has been on the blog of the Cornette Library of West Texas A&M University, where I work as a reference librarian.  All of my productive efforts on the web at home in the evening this week has revolved around trying to get a sense of what other academic libraries are doing with their blogs and how that’s working out for them.  There are certainly a lot of academic librarians with blogs.  But all the instances I know are personal sites of individuals writing about their professional interests (similar to this site, but better).  I know there are blogs being used by academic libraries themselves, but I don’t know the scope of it.   How many libraries are there with blogs, how are those blogs being used, how often are they being updated, how are they being promoted, and how successful are they for any given purpose?

The Cornette blog has mostly been used as a platform for announcing news about new resources, hours changes, outages, exhibts, staff changes, database changes, and that kind of thing.    There’s a little box on the main library page that excerpts the most recent post in the New & Notable category, so everyone visiting the site sees the most recent news and can take a look at the archives on the rest of the blog if they want.  It’s really the only way to guarantee success with an academic library blog, I think: ensure that the gist of whatever must be seen is necessarily seen by anyone visiting the library site at all (not just the blog itself).  As a result, you require no regular, returning readership of the blog for the content to have the intended effect.  If someone needs the information, they can find it.   If no one did, well, it needed to be there just in case.

I’m hoping to build on it more, though, and use it as sort of an outreach tool to get people more interested in what we have and how they can use it.  I mean to write about somewhat less urgent and essential matters.   Somewhat less matter-of-fact.  Still factual, certainly, but with more opinion or detailed scrutiny of a given resource, text, technique, or whatever subject.  Things that (I hope) are interesting and useful to any possible readers but things that it would have been perfectly reasonable to never have put up a web page talking about.

So far I’ve written there about the history of the Cornette library, how awesome subject-specific encyclopedias are, using hidden field codes in EBSCOhost, using LC Subject Headings in the OPAC, the nuances of searching across the full text of articles in EBSCOhost, what tools we have for searching for old newspaper articles (pre-1990s, especially), and the odd and interesting things about one particular subject encyclopedia.    I have a lot of ideas for where else this’ll go and in what ways I’ll build on some of these precedents, but projecting what you will write about, I’ve learned, is kind of pointless.   So let’s just see what happens.  Hopefully, though, it’ll be ideas and information interesting and useful to all library users but, of course, particularly Cornette’s.  Therefore particularly WT students.

Anyway, with this kind of approach, success is somewhat more of an open question.  The blog will always remain valuable, for the purposes discussed in the second paragraph above.   But my writing all this other stuff on it is clearly falling short of its principal goal if nobody ever reads it.  I definitely gain a lot of knowledge through the act of researching, thinking through, and writing a lot of the posts.  But I’m not writing just for that purpose.  If that was the main point, I’d do it here.   So while I’m happy to gain a lot of personal benefit from these posts, the focus with it has to be on directing it as much as possible toward Cornette’s patrons, especially the students.  I want to create something of interest and benefit to them and present it in such a way as to draw their attention toward it.

I can better accomplish that with detailed knowledge of what others are doing in this regard elsewhere.  That’s why I’m researching that question, as I mentioned above.  I was going to get into that here, but I need to sleep now, so I’ll return to that at a later time.

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LIS database comparisons and relevant tools

While I was at Pitt, an ARL school, I got a bit spoiled for database access.  One thing I’ve especially missed since is the broad access to all the LIS databases I could want.  As both an ARL member and the home of an MLIS program, Pitt has twice as much reason to have all three of Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) from ProQuest/CSA Illumina, Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) from EBSCO, and Library Literature and Information Science from H.W. Wilson.  LISTA is everywhere–EBSCO actually offers it for free, so not only is it available from all good academic and public libraries, but it’s also on the web at www.libraryresearch.com.

I do miss also having the others, though.  It’s nice to feel when you want to research an LIS question that you’re not missing anything.  Since subscription access to the Wilson and ProQuest products isn’t a realistic option anymore, I’ve been meaning to get a handle on just what it is I’m missing.  I need to compare the details of the journal lists for each of the three.  It would be nice if there were some kind of online tool to automate the process and save me the tediousness.

I didn’t expect there might really be such a tool.  Then on the LIBREF-L listserv this week, someone asked about an online site to compare different databases, and a couple of tools came up in response that are helpful but imperfectly so.

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The difference between children and red tape

Barely a night had passed after I wrote a post criticizing James Taranto’s attack on Judith Flint and librarians in general, which hinged on the role of search warrants and the principle of privacy, before I discovered the next morning a post on Boing Boing pointing toward a panel video and white paper from the ALA on a new privacy initiative.  It seems there’s an ALA Privacy Initiative Concept Paper called “Rallying Americans for the Right to Information Privacy,” as well as a survey on privacy practices.  It appears this all arose before the incident at the Kimball Public Library in Vermont, but it seems very related.  Of course, it doesn’t begin to approach resolving the origins of the principle of patron privacy in libraries, something which I’m going to need to do some real research on, but it is worth considering in conjunction.

Later in the day yesterday, I noticed in the visitor log (which I probably watch far too closely, given this site’s minimal traffic) that someone came to the post via a Technorati search for “James Taranto.”  That visitor’s IP was at Dow Jones Telerate, a subsidiary of Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, home of Taranto’s column.  I’m not sure if there’s necessarily any direct connection between Dow Jones Telerate and Taranto, but I kind of hope that it was he himself who found my post and that I managed to make clear how badly wrong his comments were.

If somehow it was, there’s no indication he’s repented.  When I got home from work in the evening, I found my mother had forwarded me his column again (it’s nice she follows him so I don’t have to), after he published a response from Amy Grasmick, Kimball Public Library’s director.  Grasmick therein adds a lot of information not clear from the AP piece and completely refutes Taranto’s portrayal of Flint as obstinately thwarting the police investigation.  Even though she totally shreds his whole argument from the previous column (and he at least is sensible enough not to try to argue with her, since she’s so clearly in the right), he still seems determined to misrepresents matters.  His only sentence here was his introduction to Grasmick’s letter, in which he referenced “Judith Flint, the Vermont librarian who refused to help policemen trying to track down a missing 12-year-old girl.”   He just can’t stop disparaging her for a minute, can he?   You know who else apparently “refused to help policemen”?  The authors of that pesky Fourth Amendment.

Grasmick’s letter is certainly worth reading in its entirety for anyone intereted at all in the issue.  Further showing Grasmick’s healthy perspective on the whole thing is a comment I was delighted to see appear on the post at the end of the day from Jessamyn West, noting that “the library’s head [presumably Grasmick] said in an email to the Vermont Library Association this week [that librarians should] get ready for the deluge of hate mail that comes when you do ANYTHING that’s controversial” and that “had [Flint] turned over the computers, others would have been howling just as loud.”  I probably would have agreed with the howlers in the latter hypothetical case, though.

I particularly enjoyed the bit where Jessamyn, who seems to know the principals personally, responded to Taranto’s inane characterization of Flint as a bureaucrat: “no bureacrat she, it’s a three person library.”  Heh.  It’s actually an epithet that continues to amuse me.  After all, the AP story begins with “Children’s librarian Judith Flint was getting ready for the monthly book discussion group for 8- and 9-year-olds on ‘Love That Dog’ when police showed up.”  Apparently, either James Taranto can’t tell the difference between children and red tape, or he hopes we can’t.

Update: The comment from Jessamyn West seems to have since disappeared, which confuses and disappoints me.  Alas.

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Patron privacy, professional principles, and Taranto’s tripe

A few days ago, my mother sent me an article about a librarian in Vermont who drew some attention when police sought to seize the computers from the public library where she works and she required a court order first.  This seemed pretty basic to me.  As a commenter of Jessamyn West’s notes, police need the library’s computers to solve a crime, they get a search warrant, they get the computers.  Done.  “Seems pretty simple.”  I guess it should be obvious by now, though, that many in America today view warrants as just a contemptible and offensive nuisance.  Today, my mom sent me a James Taranto column that illustrates this.

Taranto is disgusted that anyone would require a court order before handing over whatever library records or computers police might ask for.  He asserts that actual patrons don’t hold any expectation or concern for privacy in their library usage.  He claims further that librarians are only motivated to protect patron privacy because of pretensions to professional prestige equal to doctors and lawyers.  He characterizes Juidth Flint, the librarian in the story, as “a bureaucrat,” perhaps because of her demand for a warrant.   He claims that because state law in Vermont didn’t yet require her to demand it, she was therefore “acting on her own discretion” and “on her own authority.”

I was at first struck by Taranto’s view that patrons don’t actually care about privacy and that librarians who treat patron activity as protected have an overinflated sense of their own importance.  I’d argue that Taranto has contempt here not just for librarians but for libraries and ultimately their users.  He can brush aside the idea that librarians claim a concern for patron privacy rights for any reason other than “status envy” because he dismisses out of hand the concept that individuals might prefer for their specific information pursuits not to become public knowledge.  That library users have no interest in keeping private the details of their usage is simply an assumption Taranto makes because it’s convenient to him in his attack on a profession that’s annoyed him.  (Not that he allows us to think for a moment he regards librarians as professional.)

He insults Judith Flint even more than librarians in general, of course, but, more to the point, when he says “Flint was acting on her own discretion in demanding a warrant,” he’s lying.  The AP article he links says specifically “The library’s policy was to require [a court order].”  Perhaps he’d like to criticize the library’s policy, or even criticize the librarian for adhering to it.  (And why not criticize her for adhering to policy, Mr. Taranto?  After all, if people are going to obey existing policies requiring warrants, next they’ll expect the president to obey existing laws requiring warrants, such as the pre-2007 FISA, and only a crazed leftist would want that.)  But he could make that criticism (which I still wouldn’t agree with but would respect more) without distorting or lying about the situation for the sake of his cheap shot.

I’m OK with letting certain policies slide.  If the policy is “no food in the library,” and you bring some food in, I may let it slide if it doesn’t seem like a big deal.  If the policy is no cell-phone use in the library and you answer your phone, I may let it slide for a couple of minutes if you’re being quiet, trying to keep it short, and not really bothering anyone.  But a degree of flexibility on some things doesn’t suggest library policies ought mean nothing.  If the library enacts a policy of “no disclosure of data about patron library usage without a court order,” and a librarian respects that policy in just the sort of circumstance it was enacted specifically for, she’s not “acting on her own authority,” and it doesn’t make her a jerk.

I’d actually be very intrigued if there’s an instance in which Taranto ever defends any privacy rights rather than attacking those who do.

Two other interesting questions raised here are 1. To what extent have library patrons voiced a concern for privacy and to what extent has a principle about that arisen for any other reason, including Taranto’s explanation of “status envy” and 2. To what extent do librarians generally suffer from status envy and seek the same respect society accords doctors and lawyers.  This may have a kernel of truth to it.  I think I may have seen some instances, but it’s not automatically true as a consequence of the word “profession,” and the flat of assertion of it without evidence is shabby at best.  Judith Flint, certainly, is no such evidence.

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Tag this item? Not so much.

A few months ago I had occasion to compare the way different libraries catalog the same book and so was opening from WorldCat some records in catalogs I’d probably never otherwise mess with.  One of those catalogs was that of Kansas State University.  Examining the holdings record for the book, I was intrigued to see a link for Del.icio.us there.  I was, moreover, simultaneously delighted and annoyed to see their effort to integrate Web 2.0 functionality with the OPAC.

Following the MARC fields, there are a couple of interesting lines. “Tag this item,” it says, with the Del.icio.us icon and a colon followed by the word del.icio.us, linking to a page to directly post the item to the user’s bookmarks.  And this is what annoys me.  I presume by “this item,” they mean the holding record we’re currently viewing when we read that.  The link they give us doesn’t (nor does Del.icio.us itself ever) give us any way to tag the actual holdings record.  What it does give us is simply an easy way to create a bookmark for the web page of the holdings record. All that we can then tag is the Del.icio.us bookmark record we create.

This is closely tied to the line that follows it, reading “Link to this item: permalink, right click to copy.”  A lot of catalogs might not have convenient permalinks for their holdings records, so that’s worth something right there.  (In fact, I took advantage and linked to it in the first paragraph above.)  But once they’ve given us that, the ability to create a bookmark in Del.icio.us is pretty unremarkable.  I can bookmark any web page with a static URL.

I’m not typing all this to complain that their innovation is insufficiently innovative, though.  I’m complaining that their presentation of it is misleading.  They’re probably confused themselves about the concepts.  If it simply said “Bookmark this item,” I’d have no complaints at all here.  I’d be rather pleased, if not all that impressed.  But if by “this item” they do indeed mean the holdings record (as their use of “this item” with the permalink implies), they’re very much implying we can tag that holdings records.

This false suggestion only has the effect of pointing out what you can’t do with that record because the capability does exist elsewhere.  In the OPAC of the Ann Arbor District Library in Michigan, users can indeed tag the records.  Not just bookmark them and tag those bookmarks but actually put tags on the holdings records themselves.  It’s one of the few catalogs I know of that’s actually implemented this functionality.

Now, it’s not as if I think social tagging is necessary in OPACs generally, let alone in academic libraries’ OPACs.  I do think it’s a great feature and adds value, but the lack of it is totally normal.   My point here is partly this:   It’s no good promoting features you don’t really have.  It just makes you look bad when you don’t need to.

Mostly, my point is this:  Let’s be clear about the difference between tagging and bookmarking.  Because bookmarking something effectively in Del.icio.us tends to entail tagging, it’s easy to get mixed up and think of the bookmarking as tagging.   But the terms are not synonymous, and when you mix them up, you just end up making promises you can’t keep.   Creating a record in Del.icio.us that points to a web page (such as the page for a library catalog holdings record) is bookmarking that page.   Tagging, whether on a Del.icio.us bookmark or on an OPAC holdings record, such as at the AADL, is adding metadata to that record.  This is a difference we ought to be able to keep straight, as librarians and as users of social bookmarking.

At least they’re trying.

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More print biography resources

I noted earlier that I was getting better acquainted with some print biographical resources on the shelves at Cornette.  There I only took the time and space for Who Was Who and the Dictionary of American Biography.  Here I want to take a look at a couple of comparable works, the American National Biography and the National Cyclopedia of American Biography.

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Print Biography Resources

I had some familiarity with print biographical resources while at Pitt but perhaps not intimately or in profound depth.  Even what I did know has grown a little rusty as time has passed while my attention was elsewhere.  So I’m glad for the recent occasion to work with them a bit more here after my curiosity was provoked about a particular historical figure.

A book I read recently mentioned the American Colonization Society as founding Liberia and Bushrod Washington, nephew of George Washington, founding the American Colonization Society.   My reaction went something like this: George Washington’s nephew founded the group that founded Liberia?  George Washington had a nephew?  George Washington’s nephew was named “Bushrod”?  Anyone’s ever had the first name “Bushrod”?

So I plugged his name into the Biography and Genealogy Master Index and found he’s included in about 31 sources.   We haven’t got all of them at Cornette, but we do have a number of them.  I’m happy for the chance to figure them out a bit more.  Scrutiny of a couple of them follows below in the full entry.

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