Monthly Archives: January 2010

Sergio Rivera-Ayala’s Book Strikes (out) Again

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This is the book drama that just won’t die (or keeps on giving, depending on your perspective). Remember back when I got an email purporting to come from a non-existent Carleton student? And then the comments on that post got really interesting really fast? And remember when Steve Lawson shed a little light on the less savory aspects of those comments? And then remember when Steve later got unpleasant emails that were also copied to his boss and dean and college president?

Yesterday I got the following bogus email [see update below]:

—– Original Message —–
From: “Tamesis Books” <tamesisbooks@yahoo.com>
To: tamesisbooks@yahoo.com
Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 1:00:09 PM
Subject: New Title from Tamesis Books

Dear librarian,

Tamesis Books is pleased to announce the release of the book, El discurso colonial en textos novohispanos: espacio, cuerpo y poder by Sergio Rivera-Ayala. This study builds on recent work in discourse analysis and the critique of representation that is developing in such fields as anthropology, history, and transatlantic studies. Engaging with a wide variety of texts, such as Colón’s Diario, Vespucio’s Lettera, Sigüenza y Góngora’s Alboroto y motín, Cervantes de Salazar’s México en 1554, Balbuena’s Grandeza mexicana, and Clavijero’s Historia antigua de México, it traces the origins and uses of geopolitical knowledge from classical times to eighteenth-century colonial Mexico, and provides new perspectives on ethnicity, gender, European subjectivity, and the constructions of colonial geographies. This book goes beyond previous readings of the texts, by suggesting new directions for the analysis and interpretation of spatiality, corporeality and agency in colonial Spanish America.

Sergio Rivera-Ayala is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside. We are attaching a sell sheet to purchase the book for your convenience. We think this book will be a great addition to your Spanish and Latin American collections.

Regards,

Tamesis Books

668 Mt. Hope Ave., Rochester, NY 14620 USA • 585-275-0419 (tel) • 585-271-8778 (fax)

boydell@boydellusa.net • tamesisbooks@yahoo.com • www.boydellandbrewer.com

The “@yahoo.com” part of that publisher’s email address seemed a little weird to me, particularly since the publisher’s web site listed different contact information, so I called Tamesis and received confirmation that this is not their email address. The Commissioning Editor wrote to me today saying that not only is this not their email address, but that they are not the source for selling this book. She apologized that I’m receiving this “propaganda,” and said that they may now have to seek legal advice since their name has been used in this way.

One more string of facts (which may or may not be related), and then I’ll indulge in some minor speculation.

Back in September, when I received the first pseudonymous comment on the original blog post, I emailed Sergio Rivera-Ayala at his UC-Riverside email address to alert him to the fact that odd things were happening in connection with his book. That first comment originated from an IP address in the Waterloo area. Less than four hours later, I received the second comment. This one had the same (vulgar) email address that’s visible only to me as the blog owner, but this one originated from a VPN network of UC-Riverside. By an odd coincidence, Sergio Rivera-Ayala is a visiting assistant professor at UC-Riverside and an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo. (Or rather, he was at that time a professor at UC-Riverside. His staff page at UC-Riverside has 404ed.)

So, the minor speculation? Well, I’ll leave speculation about sock-puppets and their puppeteers to you. Right now, I can only imagine that there’s a hope that if Tamesis gets inundated with requests for this book, that maybe they’ll consider a second printing.

UPDATE: I learned that I can find the originating IP addresses for emails sent to me. Have a look at what WhoIs turned up.

Why Advanced Search?

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I often teach Boolean searching to classes of students.

There, I’ve said it. And I’ve decided not to be ashamed of that practice even though most of the literature I’ve read since library school has steadfastly lambasted the practice as outdated, unnecessary, and self-indulgent.

Of course, I don’t teach it in every class, but sometimes there’s just no substitute for a good advanced search, and students of all class years may end up hearing about how they can use OR to combine conceptual synonyms and how they can use AND to combine those clusters of conceptual synonyms, and just look at how much better ProQuest behaves now that it understands what you mean by “gender” and “higher education” and “achievement,” and that you’d really like articles that address all three concepts, please. Freshmen eat it up like candy, and when I do my mini-surveys at the end of class (name one thing you learned that will be most useful to you — name one thing that still confuses you), the “how to use AND and OR” portion of class is a consistent hit. Sophomores through seniors really can’t function well in the MLA International Bibliography without it. And just yesterday, I learned one reason why they may latch on to Boolean searching as their ticket to research nirvana.

I was talking with a professor while her students were busily putting into practice the things I’d just taught them about searching the MLA International Bibliography, and she mentioned that she hasn’t ever really needed to know this type of advanced searching because she gets pretty good result lists and can scan them quickly to pick out what she needs. “I rely a lot on people’s names, though,” she mused. And that’s when I realized that advanced search techniques are important to students because they provide at least a partial compensation for the students’ lack of disciplinary context.

So, armed with the knowledge that a) my students like it, and b) they need it because they don’t know the names of the major players in their research areas, I’m going to happily continue teaching Boolean searching (when appropriate) until it seems like neither of those criteria apply any more.