The Horseless Library

Carol Vreeland, NCSU Librarian for Life Sciences, forwarded me this link about Zotero, a new extension for managing citations through the Mozilla Firefox 2.0 web browser. Zotero is still in beta development and definitely has limited capabilities. Most noticeable and unfortunate is that it does not yet work with NCSU Libraries' Endeca-powered online catalog. But I thought Zotero was still well worth mentioning because it already does some interesting and useful things.

When Zotero is enabled in your browser, it identifies citations on the webpages you visit and signals you with a small icon in the location bar at the end of the url. Clicking this icon opens Zotero in the bottom half of your screen and automatically adds the cite to any Library you create. This feature seems to work very well in Google Scholar, and also inside some of NCSU's general/multi-purpose databases such as Ebsco's Academic Search Premier and JSTOR.

As you're surfing the web, you can also manually add citations to your library with a few clicks and some text entry. You can also add webpage snapshots, full-text documents, and presonalized notes to your entries. All your Library documents are available both online and offline.

Zotero allows you to import records - a workaround for NCSU Endeca users - and it can export in several formats. It also has the ability to generate a bibliography with items that you highlight, formatting them in either APA, MLA, or Chicago style.

Here is an interesting story recounted from a presentation by Bruce Sterling at the PopTech conference:

"Bruce also related a story told to him by an engineering professor friend of his. The prof split his class into two groups. The first group, the John Henrys, had to study and learn exclusively from materials available at the library...no internet allowed. The second group, the Baby Hueys, could use only the internet for research and learning...no primary source lookups at the library. After a few weeks, he had to stop this experiment because the John Henrys were lagging so far behind the Baby Hueys that it is was unfair to continue."

Subsequent Googling indicated the experiment occurred at Harvey Mudd College. It would be nice to read a full write-up of this experiment. If the library print collection fares so poorly in this context one might ask several hard questions about the role of print collections in academic libraries.

(via kottke)

Grazr, http://grazr.com, is a tool that seems both interesting and potential useful. I found it when looking for information on OPML files, which are ways of creating sets of RSS feeds. ResearchBuzz has a review as do many other sites. I started thinking about this after seeing discussions about using RSS for TOCs for researchers. Subscribe to several of these, or in different subject areas, and things could get messy fast in most feedreaders.

I have to admit that the number of blogs I subscribe to can be counted on both hands and the number I actually read on any kind of regular basis on one hand, but for people who subscribe to a lot, this could be useful. I bookmark frequently and fairly indiscriminately because it is so trivial to do so (a keystroke for all intents and purposes). If blogs, social network stuff, YouTube channels, mashups, and podcasts, all of which Grazr handles, were one keystroke things (and if I had oodles more time to actually view, read, participate, listen, etc.), then I think this tool would be pretty useful. Or it might end up like a fancy version of my bookmarks lists: dozens of things of which I have no idea why I actually have them there and only a handful that actually are useful much less used.

I'm just curious - for those reading this, do you subsribe to lots of blogs? Or channels, podcasts, etc? I have no idea what sort of norm, if any, yet, exists for these numbers (and those norms for particular segments of the population too). Are you good about organizing your bookmarks? If so, maybe Grazr is for you. Finally, anyone know of a library doing something with this? Or like this?

Hey, y'all, long time no see. Haven't been by Horseless Library for awhile, because I've been busy teaching.

Just wanted to say that I am really loving using the blogs in my two graduate classes. And I'm sure I wouldn't have used blogs if the library hadn't taken the initiative to set them up; a course on Blogger or Typepad seems almost as unprofessional as one on Facebook or MySpace.

I missed Kim Duckett's session on how to use blogs in teaching, so I had to come up with a way myself, but what I'm doing seems to be working well. I post an assignment every week, and the students submit their work as comments weekly or twice-weekly (depending on the class). I grade these on a pass/fail (1 point or 0 points) basis, and that, I think, is important, because the major limitation of the blog as a technology for managing assignments is that there's no way to use it to give the students grades.

I tried to use Vista for my undergraduate class, which can be configured so that the students can see each others' work, and which allows students to track their grades, but frankly I found it to be a nightmare. Everything took SO LONG to set up! There were a million different toggles for creating an assignment, and it wouldn't allow me to copy assignments, and even just the molasses load speed drove me NUTS. I kicked it to the curb and began using a majordomo e-mail list instead so that my undergrads could submit a weekly response that I actually grade (though only on a 0, 1, or 2 point scale).

Even the majordomo list has its problems, but it has two features that I liked: it is distributed to the whole class, and I can submit grades that go to the students individually. Still, I really really really wish that I had set up a blog with pass/fail weekly assignments for the undergrads, too. They'd be reading each other's work more, I'm certain, which I think is enormously valuable -- they don't usually bother to open the attached essays their classmates send, they've said -- and they'd have that sense of writing in public that writing for the web provides.

One last little cute-ish story about using the blogs that I think Emily Lynema already knows about. We were reading Tennyson's "Locksley Hall," which features a marriage between first cousins. One student asked about this, and another attempted to answer, but her comment was flagged as porn spam because it contained the word "incest"! She posted her answer on her own blog, and Emily very kindly commented on that post and explained what had happened.

So what I'm trying to say is this: Thanks! Thanks to the Libraries for adopting the blogs, and thanks to all of you (especially Emily) for supporting them so well. I'm convinced they've seriously enhanced my teaching and the students' learning, which I would not say for Vista. (Though I hear that Vista is a blessing for enormous lecture courses.)

My course blogs can be seen here:

Two competitions designed to encourage innovative use of library data have recently announced winners.

The Talis "Mashing up the Library" Competition first prize went to a Google gadget suite for integrating library content in the Google personalized homepage. You can see a full list of winners and entries on the Talis website.

The OCLC Software Research Contest prize went to an OpenURL link resolver tool called The Umlaut.

Unfortunately, the OCLC contest entry submitted by Emily Lynema and myself did not win, but you can learn more about it here: Catalog Availability Service.

Library competitions are fun and encourage new thinking around library services. I hope to see more competition opportunities in the future.

Recently I stumbled on some really great examples of software that visualize change over time.

Gapminder presentation

First, I would like to draw your attention to this highly entertaining presentation by Hans Rosling as he demonstrates the use of his Gapminder software to bring decades of world health data to life. This is a full presentation so you may want to advance two minutes into it to get to the good part. What you will see are scatterplot charts that animate by using time as a third dimension.

Tag history

Second, here is a very clever tool for seeing of how a community created tagcloud changes over time. Move the slider to the left to see how the tagcloud looked at different periods in the last year. I find this interface particularly effective because of the bottom-up nature of tagging. The tag distribution matures over time as certain tags become more popular within the community.

I would image that a similar approach could be being used to visualize shifting focus in scholarly research over time. For example within a given research area specialized topics become more or less represented in the scholarly literature over time. Anyone know of an application that does anything like this?

Three recent posts on other blogs dealt with digital librarianship and issues that have been written about by several of us here over the summer including networked books, Google's digitization program, and digital presses in the academy. All three are better written than the average blog post, are not rants (imho) and make for decent reading.

At If: Book a rare post was put up that actually deals with physical books. It challenges academic libraries to stop handing over the keys to the store, so to speak, in making deals with Google's book digitization program. http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/08/librarians_hold_google_accountable.html

Here's an excerpt:

That's because no sane librarian would outsource their profession to an
unaccountable private entity that refuses to disclose the workings of
its system ? in other words, how does Google's book algorithm work, how
are the search results ranked? And yet so many librarians are behind
this plan. Am I to conclude that they've all gone insane? Or are they
just so anxious about the pace of technological change, driven to
distraction by fears of obsolescence and diminishing reach, that they
are willing to throw their support uncritically behind the company,
who, like a frontier huckster, promises miracle cures and grand visions
of universal knowledge?

OCLC's WorldCat.org search service in now live. The search response is super fast, the interface is very clean, and they even have faceted search refinement functionality across five dimensions (Author, Content, Format, Language, Year). For an initial release this is impressive.

The ability to search across the collections of 18,000 libraries is impressive. The Find in a Library feature allows you to check to see if your local library has a copy of the item. I am interested in the evolution of WorldCat localization services. For users with a known library affiliation (e.g. undergrads), can WorldCat do more than Find in a Library?

Two interesting articles about the Chris Anderson's Long Tail phenomenon showed up in the last week. In the Wall Street Journal, Lee Gomes critiqued Andererson's methodologies:

Indeed, so far, the winners in the long tail scenario aren?t
publishers but the online booksellers and the databases that aggregate their
titles, making books stranded on the dusty shelves of local used-book stores
readily available to buyers around the world. Online used-book sales rose 33
percent between 2003 and 2004, to $609 million, in a $2.2 billion used-book
market, according to the Book Industry Study Group. But publishers don?t profit
from used books. Even Anderson acknowledges this. Online retailers may have unlocked the fuller potential of
the used-book market, but ?that doesn?t benefit the authors or the publishers,
because the revenues don?t go to them,? he said in a recent telephone
interview. ?But it does benefit us as consumers.?

Meanwhile, in a great example of irony, Mr. Anderson's book, The Long Tail, sits at #10 on the NYTs nonfiction best seller list, enjoying all the perks that come from blockbuster publishing, bookstore placements, and extended media coverage. It makes me wonder if the best thing to do to help Chris Anderson out might be to not buy his book , but rather find and buy something way down the long tail list, say #100,000 or lower on Amazon. Surely he'd rather be correct in his economic analysis than rich off a blockbuster, right? Right?

But a real question, more pertinent to me, is where are libraries in all this?

From French-language Wikimedia comes this picture of a sculpture titled "Modern Book Printing" on Berlin's "Walk of Ideas." Evidently the sculpture is in honor of Gutenberg. Oh, and the 2006 World Cup.

Just saw this mashup mentioned as a Macromedia Flex Developer contest winner last month. The site is created by Amit Supta and is called E41ST, http://www.amitgupta.info/E41ST/. It integrates book content from Amazon.com with the catalog holdings of the NYPL. A really neat, enhanced way to browse this info.

Viewing requires the new Flash 9 Player, and I had to restart my browser after that installation in order to access the site. Visitors can view without registering.

Okay, I'm completely excited about this. A piece in today's Inside Higher Ed reports that Houston's Rice University has revived its scholarly press.

But this time, it's digital.

I've wanted to see an all-digital university press for a long time. Rice's press is going to maintain high standards of peer review, and it'll easily be able to publish art history books with high-quality images and musicology books with built-in sound files.

As for the economics of it, I bet it'll be cheaper in the long run for universities and more profitable for scholars, too, both in terms of royalties and reputation (which is the real currency in academe). The articles I've published are posted online on my website, and I get a lot more "action" from having them there in terms of queries from scholars than I do from having them in the print journals. No one ever emails me (much less snail-mails me) and says, Hey, I read your article in the Yeats Eliot Review, but I get emails from people every once in awhile who say, Hey, I read your article online. And we then have interesting conversations, productive of learning. What's not to love?

I'm trying to get my dissertation published now, and I've gotten rejection letters that give my work unqualified praise, but cite the "difficult economic considerations that face university presses" as their sole reason for rejecting my proposal. I'm a little hampered by the fact that I really do sympathize. Why should they publish my dissertation as a book when any half-serious scholar can read it through DAI and any yahoo can find it on the internet? Granted, I'm making some major revisions to it, but still. If the economic burden to presses and libraries is decreased enough, it will mean that scholars like me can get the higher level of credentialization that publication (really, peer review) affords based more on the merit of the work than on the financial difficulties of the scholarly publishing biz.

bepress, which is the major (first?) digital publisher of academic journals, makes for an instructive comparison. There's an interesting table there that shows that the per-page subscription costs for bepress journals have decreased from 83 cents per page in 2001 to 36 cents per page in 2005. That's a 56% decrease in four years. I'd bet that the new Rice press will see something similar; at first their operating costs and the concomitant cost of their books will be pretty high, but they'll decrease dramatically very quickly.

I will say that I don't think that a digital revolution in scholarly book publishing will do much to make it easier for junior scholars to get tenure. Digital university press publishing will make it easier to get a book published, yes, and that's a good thing even though there's more and more being published every year, and less and less of it being read, probably. But I think it's a good thing for that scholarship to enter the permanent record, credentialized by publication if it deserves it, because the "long tail" will ensure that if someone needs it sometime, it'll be there. But there are other gi-normous economic considerations driving the overpopulation of graduate schools and the adjunctification of the academic profession, and it's those factors, really, that make it tough to get a tenure-track job and subsequently to get tenure.

One final comment. Note that it's University Librarian and Vice Provost Charles Henry who will be in charge of the new press at Rice. Lots of librarians think that it's not appropriate for libraries to get into the publishing biz, and lots of university publishers think that it's not appropriate for their work to be done by the librarians. I can see that point, but on the whole I think it's a good idea for university libraries and presses to merge, especially when you're talking about digital publishing. Somehow the gap between the task of producing the book and the task of preserving the book narrows in the digital realm. Maybe it's that you need about the same resources (e.g., servers, programmers) to deal with the digital book no matter which one you're doing?

More importantly, I think that university presses and university libraries have more in common with each other (or should) than do university presses and commercial presses. Call me an idealist, but I think that it is part of the research university's overall mission to provide knowledge to the world for its own good, not for a profit. University libraries and presses can cooperate on that mission.

Here is a case where networked digital books likely would have been of great assistance to an individual. My friend and colleague Keith Morgan sent me an article a few days ago called The Poet of Dielectics that analyzed Marx's Das Kapital as a work of literature rather than as a piece of economic theory as is usually the case. See http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1814909,00.html

The article claims that

At university, Marx "adopted the habit of making extracts from all the
books I read" - a habit he never lost. A reading list from this period
shows the precocious scope of his intellectual explorations. While
writing a paper on the philosophy of law he made a detailed study of
Winckelmann's History of Art, started to teach himself English and
Italian, translated Tacitus's Germania and Aristotle's Rhetoric, read
Francis Bacon and "spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book
on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight".
This is the same eclectic, omnivorous and often tangential style of
research which gave Das Kapital its extraordinary breadth of reference.

..."They are my slaves," he [Marx] would sometimes say, gesturing at the books on
his shelves, "and they must serve me as I will." The task of this
unpaid workforce was to provide raw materials which could be shaped for
his own purposes. "His conversation does not run in one groove, but is
as varied as are the volumes upon his library shelves," wrote an
interviewer from the Chicago Tribune who visited Marx in 1878. In 1976
SS Prawer wrote a 450-page book devoted to Marx's literary references.
The first volume of Das Kapital yielded quotations from the Bible,
Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Voltaire, Homer, Balzac, Dante, Schiller,
Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Defoe, Cervantes, Dryden,
Heine, Virgil, Juvenal, Horace, Thomas More, Samuel Butler - as well as
allusions to horror tales, English romantic novels, popular ballads,
songs and jingles, melodrama and farce, myths and proverbs.

...Like Frenhofer, Marx was a modernist avant la lettre. His famous
account of dislocation in the Communist Manifesto - "all that is solid
melts into air" - prefigures the hollow men and the unreal city
depicted by TS Eliot, or Yeats's "Things fall apart; the centre cannot
hold". By the time he wrote Das Kapital, he was pushing out beyond
conventional prose into radical literary collage - juxtaposing voices
and quotations from mythology and literature, from factory inspectors'
reports and fairy tales, in the manner of Ezra Pound's Cantos or
Eliot's The Waste Land. Das Kapital is as discordant as Schoenberg, as
nightmarish as Kafka.

...To prove that money is a radical leveller, Marx quotes a speech from
Timon of Athens on money as the "common whore of mankind", followed by
another from Sophocles's Antigone ("Money! Money's the curse of man,
none greater! / That's what wrecks cities, banishes men from home, /
Tempts and deludes the most well-meaning soul, / Pointing out the way
to infamy and shame . . ."). Economists with anachronistic models and
categories are likened to Don Quixote, who "paid the penalty for
wrongly imagining that knight-errantry was equally compatible with all
economic forms of society".