There was an online presentation and q&a period on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009, about the proposed redesign of the primary PubMed pages. This was scheduled to be released this summer but is not up at this time yet.

My overall impression is certainly an improvement. It's a much simpler, streamlined and current design, which should ease public use and enjoyment of the product, both of which are rather important. There were the usual questions about functionality, but, as the presenter David Gillikin, Chief of NLM’s Bibliographic Services, repeatedly pointed out, this is an upgrade of design only. Strict functionality will not be touched.

Krafty Librarian points out:

Since most of the "cool" or helpful things like Details, History, Citation Matcher are only available from the Advanced Search, many people may want to have a nice short cut straight to that area.

Labels: aboutHealth, aboutInformation, aboutLibrarianship, aboutOnlineTools, aboutTechnology, aboutWeb2.0, reviews

I like Twitter. It's another easy way to get to know what's happening in other people's heads, what they're reading, what they think is interesting. And I get to share those things with the world too: special events, what I think is important, what I want to share with people. And it certainly doesn't hurt to be in the middle of all those swirling ideas and communications. I may even get a new idea myself one day! lol

But one twitter related phenomenon disturbs me: over-following. I guess all tools get taken into the realm of spam, misuse, commercialization, et cetera, but when supposedly "real" people using Twitter are following literally thousands of feeds... I mean, what do they think the "following" function is for? Well, maybe I've got it wrong. I think it's to read the tweets of those whose opinion you respect or are interested in in some way, those feeds that are going to inform you of something like an institution's upcoming events. You're populating a list of things to theoretically read. You may skip a few but the idea is to read a good portion of them. But when someone's following 2747 Twitter feeds, what good is that? Unless these are all very rare Tweeters, that's a lot of material even to ignore regularly.

The first thing that I think when I see that is that they are playing some sort of game. "I really need a lot of followers so I'm going to follow others so they feel like they should follow me!" I'm following 25 right now and I even consider weeding out a few now and then.

Again, maybe I'm all turned around on this. Maybe there's some Twitter tool (Twool? Gawd, I've gone over to the dark side. lol) that helps weed through the piles of Tweets that must build up. Anyone know anything about this? Hmmm...

Labels: aboutCommunication, aboutEthics, aboutHumanNature, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools, aboutProductivity, aboutReading, aboutReason, aboutSociety, aboutTechnology, aboutWeb2.0

There was a recent article in the Library Journal about the dismissal of the head of the public library system in Lexington, Kentucky. Without much information, which is kind of the point of this article, it's hard to really take sides but there are two points that jump out at me when discussing something like this.

Firstly, the CEO makes some pretty strongly negative claims about the behaviour of the local newspaper and their role in all this. As I've said before, I've never been too impressed with most "professional" journalists. They seem more interested in selling papers than disseminating information. Honestly, if it comes down to a librarian's word versus a journalist's word, all else being held equal, I'd have to pick the side of the librarian, despite my obvious bias.

Also, one of the criticisms of the article and the CEO is that she was fired with no explanation. What on earth is that? What kind of open and transparent government runs things like that (rhetorical question, thank you)? I've always thought that very few, at least in an official sense and regarding important issues, decisions should be made without a specified and sufficient reason. Voting? You should have to write at least a couple paragraphs as to why you think this party or this candidate is better than the other(s). Government decisions? Whole reports could be provided explaining the reasoning and the consideration of other possibilities and options. Ethical beliefs? Well, its certainly got to include something more than, "it seems like the right thing to do." Without some clarification of our actions that will affect others to a meaningful degree, we're just animals (which is exactly what we are but nonetheless), which is not what we WANT to be. We seem to like to consider ourselves somewhat more advanced, somewhat more conscious, somewhat more enlightened. Setting aside any arguments as to whether we are or not, we should at least act like what we want to appear as.

What do you think? Am I being too hard on journalism? And should we really be held to account for our actions in some "literal" way?

[ From Lexington PL CEO Imhoff Fired; Threatens Suit, Criticizes Newspaper Coverage by Norman Oder at Library Journal ]

Labels: aboutEvents, aboutHumanNature, aboutInformation, aboutLibrarianship, aboutReason, aboutWork

The New York Times online has an interesting article about "Animal Farm" and "1984" being deleted from Kindle users after Amazon realized they did not have the right to have sold it in the first place. This is interesting in two ways, IMHO:

1. "Owning" something digital is not always clear cut: This is something that librarians have come to realize with the advent of online content. In the past, we have purchased journals and books comfortably knowing that whatever we bought we would have until it was destroyed beyond repair which, if care was taken, would be quite a long time. With electronic journals and books, ownership of content disappeared, to be replaced with something more like renting the works. We can purchase a whole run of a journal with back files and everything, often for not much less than the print would have cost, but if the distributor decides that something needs to be changed, anything from a typo to our access to it at all, we have very little control and sometimes no knowledge of it even. My suggestion: we should refuse to "buy" anything that we don't have actual control over. If it's digital, we need to factor in the cost of hosting it on our sites if we want to ensure future access at all.
2. Our concept of rights is confused: In this Amazon case, the reason for the deletions was that Amazon had mistakenly sold something they should not have sold. Do we really think we have the right to something just because we spent money on it? What if someone stole your TV, then sold it off the back of their truck to your neighbour? If you COULD get it back, wouldn't you think it was your RIGHT to have it back? Just because we haven't been able to return "stolen" merchandise to its rightful owner in the past, doesn't mean we shouldn't ever do so in the future. And they got their money back. No one lost anything (except the poor shmuck who lost his notes saved in the ebook - remember, keep control of your digital property). There are millions of copies of these books, some you can get for free, say, at your public library for example.

"I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased."

Labels: aboutBooks, aboutEthics, aboutEvents, aboutInformation, aboutMoney, aboutTechnology

Any librarian having spent more than a month or so at a reference desk in a public library (or any library really) has had to deal with questions with too little information to really answer. Seattlepi.com published a short piece with an excellent real example of such a transaction. Here's a taste:

Librarian: ...Would you have any idea the name of the author?
Caller: No. Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. The lady's name is... oh, I can't read her writing. It's impossible. Um... My wife said the cover of the book is a really neat picture.

Labels: aboutBooks, aboutCommunication, aboutInformation, aboutProfessionalService, aboutReferenceService

Library Journal has reported on a new deal between the University of Michigan and Amazon where hundreds of thousands of digitized public domain books will be made available through their print on demand business.

Sounds good. Hopefully UMich is getting tons of moolah for the deal. And it's good to see efforts made to support the interests of the long tail, those people looking for works otherwise out of print and therefore much more difficult to obtain. I only have two problems with this. One, I see nowhere in this article any mention of any efforts to make this huge pile of etexts available to or through other academic or public libraries. They said that a lot of them are already available through UMich's catalog and Google Book Search but that limits the potential discoverers to those at UMich (and maybe a bit of the outlying area) and those who actually know that Google Book Search exists (I'm always amazed that people don't even try there). Make it easy to link through or host the content elsewhere and make those works supposedly owned by the public available for use by the public.

My other problem is in regards to Roy Tennant's comment that this is a sign that print is not dead. Well, no it's not but this doesn't suggest that it's going to live any longer than we thought before. Print's got it's place but speaking for myself, if it's a choice between paying for something in print and getting it for free online, I'm taking the latter. Even if the fee is nominal. But I'm a geek, so... All this will do it delay print's demise for certain otherwise doomed genres because the majority of those searching for books will pay Amazon not knowing that it could be free somewhere else.

[ From Michigan Deal A New Twist on Access to Scanned Book Content at Library Journal 7/23/2009 ]

Labels: aboutBooks, aboutEvents, aboutInformation, aboutMoney, aboutReading

A major U.S. government agency utilizing Web 2.0 methods and tools. It warms the heart.

The CDC is hoping that the next Surgeon-General's 2009 report on tobacco will "go viral" through using such tools as "Facebook, Twitter and MySpace" and RSS and devices like "iPhones, BlackBerrys and other personal digital assistants", and are going to try to make it possible for the public to share the information easily. It's certainly a good sign, but I have to say, not really a surprising one. We've all seen the effects of such simple technological tweeks enabling smoother communication, sharing and mixing, and how quickly a good portion of the public has taken to absorbing it into their lives and enriching the global society. It seems quite obvious by now that to not utilize this phenomenon would be to bury yourself and whatever information you are trying to get out to the world.

Now if only Canada would follow suit. lol

Anyone hear of any other group doing something similar? Do you think that efforts like this will succeed?

[From "Surgeon General's next tobacco report to get Web 2.0 push" by Doug Beizer at FederalComputerWeek found via Google News]

Labels: aboutCommunication, aboutHealth, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools, aboutSociety, aboutWeb2.0

I have been playing World of Warcraft for a while now. Just as with everything in my life, I try to tie it somehow to librarianship. I've thought about ways that I could look into and write about the information seeking behaviours of WoW players, what a service providing information in-game would or could be like, or the imagery and perceptions of books, libraries and librarians that exists within the game.

There are others connecting World of Warcraft (and other games or virtual environments) to something academic. Wow.com had an interesting interview last month with a professor of anthropology at the Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota who has created and offered a class entitled: "Warcraft: Culture, Gender and Identity". Beyond teaching students about some important cultural concepts in an environment they all know and enjoy already, this course also provided a chance to show how a gaming world like WoW can be used in teaching, which seems to be a slowly but surely growing trend.

What do you think? Is this an appropriate connection? Do games and software like these provide enough complexity or an appropriate venue to learn from?

(For those of you who may not have "got" my poor attempt at humour in the title, watch this.)

Labels: aboutEducation, aboutGaming, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools

So as some of you may have noticed, I've been using Twitter for a while now. Everytime I mention it in conversation to a person not twit-lightened (lol), they shake their head violently and laugh about reading about whenever people go to the bathroom (and it's not because I used the word "twit-lightened"... I swear, this is the first time!).

I really like it actually. I find I'm thinking up a kinds of new types of tweets to put up. I've started listing the children's books I'm reading to my son every night (as well as the books and stories I'm reading), linking to them and (since I'm at finding the link at Amazon anyway) writing a little Amazon review about them (example). I'm always complaining about the dearth of book reviews out there to inform librarians in their collection development efforts so I figured I could do my small part to help out.

I've enjoyed Twittering so much, and see it as so potentially useful as an information dissemination tool, as well as a networking and archiving tool (I actually back-up my tweets myself, not being confident in Twitter's own willingness to store my inane statements throughout the years), that I've put in on my daily to-do list. Crazy, I know. Anyone else been using Twitter lately? Or something similar?

Labels: aboutCommunication, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools, aboutReading, aboutWeb2.0

I already commented on the potential problems of adding Wikipedia articles to a library's catalog in the Distant Librarian blog entry that brought up the subject for me here, so I won't go over them again. What I want to do here is consider the benefits of doing so and doing it in the best way possible.

One benefit is that since an assumed good number of users see them as valuable and worthy of usage already, we can somewhat "ride the wave" of Wikipedia's success. Having their content linked to in our collection might say to a good portion of our patrons that, "Yes, we are hip and we can help you get to the resources we know you want." That may not sound like the best reason, but survival of an institution that most of us believe is worth saving may also be worth pandering a little to ensure continued appreciation. I'm not sure what the long term results of such pandering might be so this is probably not a sufficient reason but it does have a certain amount of short-term appeal at least.

Another benefit is that actually, many Wikipedia articles are valuable and include content not included in other resources to a sufficiently similar extent if at all. A venue where anyone anytime can add topics and start filling them up with content will always include more same-level topics than one that must pay authors to develop content. This is saying nothing about the quality of such content but if we assume some bare minimum level of quality that is sufficiently higher than neutral, or worse yet, outright falsehoods, then something is better than nothing. There will be somewhat informative articles in Wikipedia on topics that a for-fee or author-restricted resource will be able to provide. The benefit to a library catalog is that it can be filled with some content not available elsewhere.

A third benefit is that it is free, at least in terms of direct cost. Libraries do not typically have infinite budgets for collections and anytime a minimally worthy resource can be added to the collection for not outlay of money, it must be considered. Of course, the disadvantage of online resources such as Wikipedia articles is that they don't come with handy pre-made MARC records, requiring a certain amount of expertise and effort on the part of those who want them added.

Given these three benefits, how can the addition of at least some Wikipedia articles (and perhaps other similar online resources) be made easier particularly for those libraries with little time or smaller staff complements. First of all, they need to be linked to at the specific version level. This solves the issue of quality control that we tend to pride ourselves on in our collection (as mentioned in the comment mentioned above). Also, when a library/librarian has decided that a specific article version is worthy of addition, the metadata created needs to be shared, made available to other libraries considering it in the future. As a profession we tend to share well so let's use our large numbers to solve our general lack-of-local-resources problem. Finally, if we go down this path, we should go all the way down the path: if we're adding Wikipedia articles to the collection, advertise that we're doing so. One of the big problems with the library catalog as a tool is that users don't know what's in there. We need to tell them. It needs to be made clear all the kinds of resources are included in the collection and why. Not all at once though. One at a time.

Still not sure it's a good idea... May get too messy. But it seems to have a few useful positive side effects and is doable at least on a small scale. What do you think?

Labels: aboutClassification, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools, aboutWork

I taught a few sessions of a "keeping current" workshop that I put together for work a while ago which was mostly/usually about what RSS is and how you can use it in your current awareness strategy instead of subscribing to and NOT reading dozens of print journals. But while I was teaching these sessions, a recurring theme arose.

Finding information's not the problem. We all know that "If I only knew/read/skimmed everything in this book/journal/website/etc that would really help my job/research/homework/relationship/parenting/etc." There is enough information out there -- factual or not, professional or not, valuable or not -- to satisfy every individual need for knowing more about whatever they want to know about. The key is in choosing what "stream" to follow, or float down rather. You have to be pretty selective about what you're going to be tracking regularly. There's a lot of content out there but there's also a lot of overlap. What one Corvette expert has to say on a regular basis will repeat much of what another has to say. You can't listen to them all.

Well, actually, you can almost. If you narrow down your focus enough, you can still keep pretty good tabs on all the "experts" in a field. But then you can't do anything else. You can be yet another expert on the topic of marsh hens but when someone asks you about guineafowl you'll be stumped. Of course, if you don't focus at all, you'll be reading about a million and one topics and not get enough depth to be of value in any of them.

The best path is right down the middle. Make a list of your primary interests and primary specialties and focus on them. Read some books, read some blogs, search for some current articles on each of your main topics and do so with some regularity.

And remember to shut it off once in a while. Dive into something completely new once in a while. Or turn it all off and have a break. You'll be amazed at what bubbles to the surface when the turbines are turned off or pointed in another direction.

So what do you folks do to "keep up"?

Labels: aboutEducation, aboutInformation, aboutReading