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Friday, April 26, 2002 |
I'm enjoying the responses to my question about why you use Google versus contacting your local library. Here's a sampling, although you can read more here and here.
"No disrespect to Librarians, but it's a lot faster than my calling or going to the library, plus I learn more by having to narrow down the search myself (and therefore doing my own search interview). This forces me to think about what it is I really want to know before I start searching." [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog]
"I recently used the Google Answer service. For $15 I got some good pointers to help me determine the number of internet users in Indonesia. Sure, if I was in the US, I could call the local library. However, most of the libraries I've delt with would use printed resources to give me a very stale answer. I'd already spent hours finding information on the net (via google and other search engines) to answer my question and the person who responded to my question on Google Answers was able to give me resources I hadn't found! Very nice. I might have simply lucked out and got someone good. The amazing thing is that his search terms weren't that different than mine and the results were considerable different." [Joe Friend]
"Blogs often include lists of links to other sites the user visits or likes - this is an implicit web of trust. Google uses this information (for all sites, not just blogs) for its PageRank™. However, Google's algorithm is a bit shaky (for this idea) because a link doesn't contain any context as to why you're linking to the site - it could be becuasee you think the site's authors are morons!
So... enter a blog-powered Web Of Trust where not only does one link to sites, but one can annotate that link with concepts or keyword for which the site is considered by the user to be a credible resource. Search engines could factor this information in when crawling sites, leading to more efficient topical information retrieval." [redmonk.net] {To which Jenny says: I've been advocating for librarian PageRank for a while now!}
"I think I would love to do that, if it were available from my desktop. If the public library had, for example, a page that would let me enter a search term or topic, and it would pass it along to a reference librarian, who would then email me back, or chat with me? I'd be all over it." [redmonk.net]
If you have any thoughts of your own, click the comment link and share!
10:18:10 PM Permanent link here
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"The setting is the most impressive search engine ever built: Google. As a test of its new API, two words or phrases will go head-to-head in a terabyte tug-of-war. Which one appears in more pages across the Web?" [onfocus.com, via Daypop Top 40]
Now this is a battlebot! You'll have to try this one early in the day because the 1000 query limit Google imposes on its API gets shot pretty quickly. Tomorrow I plan to try "google answers" versus "librarians" and see what happens. Of course, I can do this manually (258 compared to 841,000), but yelling SMACKDOWN is more fun. ;-)
7:38:15 PM Permanent link here
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The Freshman is on one of the Showtime channels right now. This is one of my favorite movies of all time. "Not this I don't. Remember those words." The komodo dragon scene is coming up, so excuse me while I become utterly engrossed in this movie, even though I've seen it a hundred times.
7:09:04 PM Permanent link here
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"Sony Ericsson president Katsumi Ihara has pledged that the P800, launching later this year, will bring with it a well-coordinated package of content and services, tying in with Sony entertainment properties. It will also come equipped with technology in which Ericsson takes a leading role, such as Bluetooth....
[Anil Raj:] More and more, consumer electronics are becoming Web-enabled. So if you look at Sony's latest video camera, it has a Web browser. The mobile phone handset is the hub at the center of all those devices, providing the link to the network.
At home, the PC is at the center, but if you're mobile, the phone is the hub for all that....
The P800 has a full Web browser, in full color. For a lot of people it's going to be the first time they have that in a mobile device. It has SSL, HTML and everything, so you can get all the applications you have on the Web, your eBay, your Amazon, your shopping, your banking. People know how to use the Web. But it's a new experience in a phone. You can get the Web now, but no one's going to recognize four lines of text on a WAP phone as being the Web. But if you can see a full-color display, with all the icons and graphics, you can recognize that.
You can also use this as a laptop for a short trip. If you have a Bluetooth keyboard, you can enter all the data you want--there will be a whole range of peripherals to connect to this wirelessly. People will realize they can carry out work on this, particularly since you can edit documents like Word and Excel....
The P800 will have color, and fast graphics. Sony understands gamers, the PlayStation2 (news - web sites) is the world's leading console. We've put a lot of that expertise into these phones.
Some of our phones will be able to talk to the console, as well, and interact with the games. For example, if you have a game where the characters need to be trained, you could load the character into your phone, and train it as you're carrying it around with you. It could connect to the PS2 via USB.
The P800 could also be tied in to content from one of the Sony Music artists, like Jennifer Lopez or Mariah Carey or whoever. So you could have an album promo on there. Or you could imagine, say, a J-Lo phone loaded with pictures, and her favorite Web sites, sound clips or ring tones, customizations like that." [Yahoo News, via Slashdot]
Mobile phone as remote control and access point for the "Heavenly Jukebox". Will there be interoperabililty, though, or will you lose access to your favorite artist's digital products if you switch carriers?
6:27:00 PM Permanent link here
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Overdue - the Blog
"The funny folks that run the library cartoon Overdue have a weblog. I wonder how I missed this the first time I went to the site. BTW, congrats to Bill and Gene for hitting the 1,000 subscriber mark for the mailing list. I have my top 5 favorite Overdue strips hanging up in my office. Keep up the good work. (Psst - how about an RSS feed for the blog?)" [Library Stuff]
3:50:05 PM Permanent link here
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It's not in a quiz format, so you get to determine for yourself. I'd like to think I'm All-Bran Extra Fiber, but I always think of myself as cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. [Quiz from a klog apart]
 "This comes with air mileage and a long shelf life. Sugar-free, the facts will blow you away. Sometimes you must chew hard, but the rich flavors and confidence in the future outcome make this rewarding experience."
Or maybe I'm just Frosted Flakes.
 "Your cheerful enthusiasm for your subject is corny and boundless. Your naive readers think you're Gr-r-reat! But experienced ones recognize a sugar addict when they see one."
10:59:50 AM Permanent link here
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"One man turns raving about obscure and out-of-print books into a comedic art form. Also check out his Amazon list of 'Bands whose keyboard players slept with my ex-girlfriend.' " [Slate]
9:12:58 AM Permanent link here
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"Division of fiction into genres is like all classification, useful — useful to readers who like fiction of certain kind or about certain subjects and want to know where to find it in a bookstore or library; and useful to critics and students and Common Readers who have realised that not all fictions are written in the same way with the same aesthetic equipment.
Genre has no use at all as a value category and should never be used as such...
But the concept or category of genre is used to evaluate fiction unread. To sort out the real books — that is, realistic fiction — from the "subliterature" — that is, everything else — every other kind of fiction written in this century. Everything but realism, including the very oldest and most widespread forms of story such as fantasy, gets shoved into a ghetto.
I mostly live in ghettos. My fiction-ghettos are kiddilit, YA, regional, historical, sf, fantasy. I write realism too, but that’s not a ghetto, that’s Lit City. Where the real people live. At least it was until a bunch of subversive South Americans came along and made this barrio called Magic Realism, which kind of shook up the vanilla suburbs and in fact may have actually breached some ghetto walls. But magic realism gets shelved with realism. Why?...
Our Multnomah County Library is less detailed and invidious in genrification-by-shelving. It sets apart only four genres from fiction as a whole: mystery, sf , western and YA. In "New Books" there are several genre shelves such as Suspense and Romance, but if thrillers & romances outlive the New Book category they get shelved in Fiction. The science fiction section includes fantasies and horror novels, neither of which belong there; the attitude apparently is "this is irresponsibly imaginative so it’s sf."
Not only is this practice incredibly invidious, randomly including some genres with the Real Books and excluding others, but it’s also shamelessly inconsistent: the librarians admit that they use personal evaluation of the quality of the book in deciding where to shelve it. Tolkien is famous, so Tolkien gets shelved with Realism. But almost no sf gets deghettoised this way, because few librarians read enough sf or fantasy or know enough about it to pick out the books of "genuine literary value" from the commercial schlock....
Segregated shelving helps addicts find their fix. But couldn’t its convenience to readers in libraries be replaced by really good lists for addicts? Lists describe and make accessible without evaluating. Our library has a wonderful Readers Advisory Binder at the desk at Central, listing all the popular genres and others I never would have thought of, such as Baseball novels — Thrillers divided into Spy, Legal, Techno and Apocalyptic — Bestsellers. Romance has 7 subcategories: Family saga, Gothic, Historical, Light, Period, Suspense, and Regency. I looked in vain for Bodice-Rippers. My two favorite subgenres were Novels about Older Women and Younger Men, and Seriously Humorous Mysteries.
If we have to have segregated shelving, then it should be consistent. It should not shelve the "good" authors with "literature" and the "popular" ones in the genre ghetto. Who decided popular was not good and good was not popular? Of course there’s a lot of clearly commercial genre fiction — most long-running series mysteries; most modern fantasy trilogies; a terribly high percentage of romance novels; all Louis Lamour — Junk food at worst, comfort food at best. Little nourishment, much grease. But as soon as you get above the MacBooks level, who makes the call?
Only somebody who really reads in that field, really knows that field, can do it. An expert. The reputation of the publisher means little any more: all big publishers are intensely commercial, most are subsidiaries of corporations that have no interest whatever in literature; their lists are controlled by Barnes and Noble and Borders; their books are principally chosen not by editors but by the accounting department. What blurbs mean depends on the integrity of the blurber. How useful are critics and reviewers as a guide to quality in genre fiction? Almost useless, unless you read critics who know the field. Almost all literary and academic reviewers are appallingly ignorant of genre fiction, don’t know how to read it, and pride themselves on their ignorance. Kirkus and the other review-factories tend to be fairly knowledgeable about mysteries and thrillers, totally erratic about science fiction, and blankly ignorant of most other genres, unless a Patrick O’Brian comes along and they have to admit he exists....
And libraries, by perpetuating shelving by genre, will perpetuate the bizarre and arbitrary limitation of literary fiction to one modern genre." [More Like This WebLog]
It's interesting to hear about this issue from an author and Le Guin certainly does make some valid points. However, I question some of her assumptions. First of alll, I think her beef is with publishers, more than bookstores or libraries. Having worked in both, I can say that the easiest way to categorize a book is by looking on the spine. For most mass market fiction, there is a designation of fiction, mystery, romance, science fiction, western, or young adult. In other words, someone involved in the publishing of the work decided what to call it long before I was put in a position of having to decide which stack to shelve it in.
This is true for booksellers more than libraries, because libraries have a whole cataloging process we go through in order to identify the book. That's why these days, many libraries use additional subject headings besides just the genre. For example, you can search many catalogs for Irish historical fiction, science fiction about Mars, and young adult novels about death and dying. (If, of course, you know the correct jargon - we still need to work on that.)
But probably the biggest reason libraries shelve their collections into a half-dozen genres is the lack of resources. Staff would need extra time to categorize the books appropriately, we'd need more room for extra shelves (because you need defined areas), then we'd need money for the extra shelves, and then we'd spend more time showing patrons where these collections are and helping them find titles they thought would be in SF. We purchase one copy of the majority of titles, and we have to pick its closest genre match.
But I suppose the biggest difference of opinion between myself and Le Guin is that I don't think of different genres as ghettos. In fact, I think the opposite - at the bookstore where I worked, fiction was the big catch-all category. If you didn't know where to put it, you threw it in fiction. Have you every tried to browse through the general fiction section? It's difficult because there's just so damn much of it. Being shelved in the fiction section isn't necessarily a good thing. And considering the caliber of 80% of the novels that are put there, I don't think it's viewed as "better" than anywhere else. That 80% also isn't considered "popular" if you look at sales figures.
In fact, librarians are the most creative at grouping like items in different ways. The readings lists Le Guin mentions are a perfect example. You won't see those at the bookstore. The very nature of shelving - physical collections - forces genre collections, but computers illustrate what it would be like if we had all of the resources in the world. If you tried to group books based on the categories they're assigned in their online records, you'd see a hundred more "ghettos." Except that in the online world, they're not ghettos - they're focused collections, collaborative filtering, whatever you want to call it. There it's a good thing because it helps you find what you want.
Luckily, we can marry the physical and online world using our catalogs.
7:45:45 AM Permanent link here
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"We librarians (or, if you prefer, information professionals/knowledge workers/research specialists) are supposed to be the experts at organizing, finding and disseminating useful information. We pride ourselves on our ability to help our clients find just the nugget of accurate information they need as fast as possible....
Our very nature is to provide access to as much information to as many people as we possibly can. We want to open all the gateways to all the information in the universe to our clients. But we also have an in-bred need to make sure that our clients use the information that we make available to them responsibly. And here is the dilemma. There is way too much garbage on the Internet that is way too easily confused with factual, vetted, researched, footnoted information....
This is a long way of saying that we're still out here -- we librarians. We're still interested in helping you to find that nugget of information that you may or may not be able to find on your own after an exhausting and time-consuming search. We understand that the thrill of the hunt is invigorating: It's why we chose our profession in the first place. But we have years of training and education behind our research skills. We want you to experience the thrill of the hunt, but we're more than willing to lead the safari.
That said, here are some secrets to the Internet that we librarians are happy to share to avoid information malpractice...." [Providence Journal, thanks to Gary]
12:02:16 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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