The first method was the easiest: I had two passwords, an easy one and a complicated one. If the site was important I used the complicated one. If the site wasn’t important I used the easy one. Well… that started to seem like less and less of a good idea pretty much as soon as I started online banking and getting work passwords that mattered and stuff. So.

The second method worked for a long time: I had several passwords written down in a fairly secure online place that was itself password protected, and then I had an easy password that I used for all my “I wonder what del.icio.us is” experimentation online. That started seeming less and less good after several of the sites with the easy password got hacked multiple times and the hackers stole their databases of user passwords. Multiple times. And then I’d have to go through these millions of little sites changing a bunch of passwords all day. That got to be a less and less appealing way of spending a few hours. So.

Now I’m using an encrypted password manager. Here’s the setup. KeePassX (the Mac version of KeePass) on each of my computers and KyPass installed on my iPod Touch, each of these is directed to look at the KeePass database that’s stored in Dropbox (and the file made available offline on my iPod Touch).

Hopefully this solution lasts me for a while.

What I find fascinating is that the design changes that keep catching my eyes off guard seem to be more than updates to look and feel. They seem to embody a shifting focus or philosophy on Google’s part.

The new designs seem just enough divorced from any 3D metaphors to leave me feeling unanchored. I no longer look through digital windows or at pages on a digital desk. There aren’t enough edges for those things to exist any more, and what edges there are on the page are flat and insubstantial enough that my eye can’t interpret them as edges. They’re just lines. Even suggestions of the existence of friction (like the bumpy edges of messages that you could “grab” to drag) are gone.

What’s left is a denial of the physical. We’re not in Kansas any more. We’re not even “navigating” the digital world any more. Little by little, Google has stopped shipping information down to our world. Little by little, Google has started asking us to give up on gravity and friction and join it in the ever-shifting, edgeless, 2D existence of the digital cloud.

1. Access NML through your library’s subscription on a desktop/laptop computer
2. Select the playlists tab near the top of the page
3. Select “sign up” near the upper right corner and follow the sign-up directions
4. A confirmation email will be sent, with a link to activate the account.
5. Log in to the desktop interface and create playlists
6. Download the NML for iPhone App and log in using the same account information.
7. Accessed your playlists via the app.

Basically, the music you want to hear on an iThing will have to be put into a playlist first, and the playlist is what’s available via the app.

1. Initial controversial statement (This is usually something that can be interpreted as “You and everything you value? It all sucks.”)
2. Initial “Hey, who do you think you are anyway? And by the way, you suck” response.
3. Mass internet pile on
4. Later, in no particular order
   • Sporadic “That controversial statement wasn’t controversial. It’s been said/done/thought since the beginning of time” interjections
   • Sporadic “That initial statement was spot on” interjections (mostly ignored or decried)
   • Summary blog posts for newcomers to the argument
   • Meta blog posts talking about the experience of the argument (ahem, You Are Here)
5. Argument is named something catchy (usually a catchy acronym or some reference to Watergate)
6. People wax nostalgic about the argument, getting all heated up about it in short bursts
7. Argument becomes point of comparison in the next mass internet argument

On this, your 5th birthday, I’d like to thank you for introducing me to some of the people who are now my best friends in the world, for never backfiring on me too badly when I stuck my toes in the crazy, for never attracting the real crazy that exists out there on the internet, for helping me learn to be a librarian, and for helping me learn to be an adult. I started you on a whim and on another platform. I’ve fallen out of love with you and then realized that it wasn’t you, it was me, and this realization led me back to appreciating you again. And through it all, you’re still here, bursting with drafts that I may never flesh out, but here nonetheless. Happy birthday.

Yours,
Iris

I’ve talked before about how learning goals keep me focused and keep me from burning out on instruction, but it occurred to me in what felt like new says how the framework of learning goals could solve a lot of problems for me in ways that their less actionable cousins (like “best practices” or “standards” or even phrases like “user centered”) couldn’t.

Here’s what I mean in three examples:

• In my own teaching, there are usually 15 or 20 Very Important things that I wish I could teach my students in any given session. Using learning goals helps me prioritize from among the very important things, feel less guilty about letting some very important things fall by the wayside, remember to think about what they’re learning rather than what I’m teaching, and feel connected to the broader, more interesting issues of information literacy.
• In selecting a discovery tool, there are long, long lists of features and functions that user-centered design relies on. No interface has each specific feature, so how do we choose? How do we prioritize the list of very important features? What if we developed learning goals for our discovery system? What if these goals were something like being able to learn the differences between kinds of sources, be able to pick out important terms for the topic and field, and see where to go from here (different searches, different databases, different people). Maybe one system doesn’t have faceting but does have something else that reveals terms and directions. Maybe our usability tests could be more a long the lines of assessment of what the students learned by interacting with the system. Maybe this would all help us prioritize from the long list of important things to choose a system that functions in service of the mission of our library.
• In first year seminars (the context in which the original phrase came up), focusing on programmatic learning goals could help prioritize from the long list of things it’d be nice if all first year students knew. Maybe it would help guard against creating impossibly long check lists of things students should be exposed to, and therefore guard against treating first year seminars as massive inoculations that transform high school students into college students. Maybe it would also grant the teaching faculty the freedom to explore interesting topics in interesting ways while having similar learning outcomes.

Or maybe I’m just creating my own buzz phrase. Or maybe everyone else already knew this.

But for me, at my institution, expanding this framework beyond my direct teaching or my department’s strategic planning is helping me make those hard decisions that crop up all over the place and to make them with more confidence.

What we didn’t realize is that we’re not players in the discovery game — we’re pawns. The players strategizing and moving the chess pieces are the EBSCOs and ProQuests of the world, and sometimes sacrificing a pawn or three is the only way to win that game. It’s not personal.

Here’s how the game, the real game, is played.

A couple of weeks ago a ripple of outrage spread around the library community when Ex Libris sent out a letter explaining that EBSCO had removed its content from Primo’s central database.² Did EBSCO realize that they’d be hurting their click-through rates with this move, we asked. How could they be so selfish, we wondered. Don’t they realize they need us, we raged.

These were the questions of people who thought they were players in the game. In reality, though, EBSCO needs us like a chess master needs pawns. Which is to say, they need us quite a bit, but not that much and not as full partners. What they really need is to act on opportunities to profit and to ward off their opponent’s attempts to profit more.

Matt Andros, Vice President of Field Sales at EBSCO, was kind enough to help me understand things from EBSCO’s point of view, first through an email³ and then through a phone conversation (1/19/2011). The email was helpful; the phone conversation was enlightening. Apparently, participating in 3rd party discovery tools is not an opportunity for them to gain market share, and since the other big players aren’t participating either it could even open EBSCO up to loss. He told me in our phone conversation that 90% of academic libraries already have the major aggregator databases (like Academic Search Premier), so their goal is not primarily to increase the number of subscriptions there. And the metadata associated with their more specialized databases, the databases holding those exclusively licensed journals, isn’t itself exclusively licensed, so it could land in the discovery tool from any other company without harming EBSCO’s market. After all, what we’re after is the full text, and we can get to that easily via a link resolver. It’s just not in their interest to share metadata unless they’ll be getting something in return.

On the other hand, they do have to play the discovery game. “Discovery is hot,” Matt said to me yesterday. All the big players are playing it, so it’s not very strategic to fall behind in this market while ProQuest cashes the discovery checks. It is much more strategic to beat the competition at its own game by doing the same thing, only with (hopefully) better content.

As strange as it may sound, the future is not in unified databases powering discovery tools, Matt told me yesterday. He can’t foresee a time when the major database vendors will find it profitable to combine their metadata for our benefit. Instead, the future is in hybrid systems that combine discovery and federation. As I see it, libraries will have to decide if they care whether their EBSCO products or their ProQuest products are seamlessly integrated, choose the discovery layer that matches the company of their choice, and then federate in the content from the other database providers. Federated search is dead; long live federated search. And I’m sure the thinking at EBSCO is that we’ll be paying someone for a discovery tool, and that someone should be them.

So where’s our leverage in all of this? Competition in the free market is the force looking out for library interests, Matt said, and laughed with me as I pointed out that this was hollow comfort given the shrinking number of competitors out there.

After we hung up, I wondered if this whole game was short-sighted or the best long-range plan I’d ever heard. What happens when they drain us dry and their beautifully cultivated market withers on the vine? If we were their only revenue source, this might be a point of leverage, but we aren’t. They also own companies that deal in office supplies and companies that manufacture outdoor goods like fishing lures and hunting decoys.⁴ EBSCO is “one of the largest private companies in the US” according to Datamonitor’s company profile, so even if they are a little worried about library budget cuts, they can also move with confidence through the strategies that matter to them — the strategies that focus on their true competition.⁵

And that, my friends, is how the real game is played. Focus clearly on your opponent’s king and position yourself so that you don’t have to worry too much about your pawns, however useful and important those pawns may be to your strategy.

(Many thanks to Steve Lawson for helping me think through these and many related issues as I prepared this post. And many thanks to Matt Andros for his generosity in helping me rethink my assumptions.)

This would probably be true if the unique content and value of subscription databases were housed solely in the citation, abstract, and potential for full text access, but in fact it misses the point for many researchers. And it misses the point particularly for undergraduates.

Search is all about term matching, and terms are often the hardest thing for undergraduates to harness. So one key value of a database or search engine is the way that it introduces students to helpful information such as terms that might be important to their topics, genres of publication that are relevant to the scholars in the field that study the topic, and ways of judging the source’s relative weight by providing clues about other things the author has written or about how often the source is cited by other sources. These are not things that undergraduates are able to do just by looking at a citation and abstract.

Google Scholar is very forgiving of bad searching. It will nearly always give you something, even if you enter “impact of cell phones on globalization” into the search box. (Two of my big goals for this last term were to get students to stop searching for “impact on” and “globalization.” I was only minimally successful.) Because it’s so forgiving, it can be a great place to start. However, it’s pretty bad at leading you to new search strategies once you’ve found the one article where the author uses your phrase in her abstract.

Disciplinary databases are not nearly as forgiving of bad searching, so they may be pretty intimidating places to start. Where they excel, however, is in foregrounding those elusive, mysterious, and powerful terms that students need so badly if they’re going to revise their searches and gather more disciplinarily relevant material. The vocabulary, controlled and otherwise, is one of the two key advantages of disciplinary databases. These databases also help students make decisions about the relative worth of a source by (usually) giving links to other things by that author, other things published in that journal, citation counts, bibliographies, indications about peer review, and so on. And sure, these aren’t things that students are used to looking at when they enter college. But in my experience, these are tools that students very quickly come to rely on.

For the totally at-sea undergraduate, the most powerful research process will probably look something like this: take a citation found using a messy search in Google Scholar, plunk that citation into a library database, mine the resulting record for terms and other useful information, read a couple of articles “instrumentally,” and then repeat the process as needed with better and better terms each time.

So is Google Scholar a database killer? Like Steve, I think not. I think it’s a great tool that complements our other tools. And hey! It’s free!

I updated the theme yesterday morning and noticed that doing so got rid of the “Home” tab up there next to “About Me.” Poking around on the theme’s website I was reminded that all I need to do is go into the functions.php file and un-comment a few lines of code that the developers put there for those of us that want the Home tab. So I did. And my blog went blank.

Now, some other wonky stuff happened (my browser seemed to hang when I pressed “save” so I didn’t think that had worked at all, and I was in the middle of feeding my cat and eating breakfast and going to work and stuff) so I’m still not 100% sure that that commented-out portion of code is the culpret, but that’s the order of events. Anyway, I had a post set to auto-publish and it didn’t show up in FriendFeed, so I clicked over to the blog only to discover that it was completely blank.

I emailed Blake at LIShost (who is awesome, by the way), and he said there was a bad line of code that he fixed, and wonder of wonders, my blog came back.

Then I got home from work, fired up my computer, which reloaded all my tabs (one of which was the hung functions.php “save” page), and my blog went blank again. All I can think is that the tab reloaded and saved the morning’s actions again, overwriting Blake’s fix. Though who knows, maybe I’m attributing cause where there is none. Anyway, the wonderful Blake fixed it again.

So the moral of the story is that if you use Thematic, don’t try to get the Home tab back unless you know more about this stuff than I do. Admittedly, knowing more than I do wouldn’t take a whole lot of knowledge, but at the very least you’ll want to edit this stuff NOT in the WordPress interface because as soon as you mess it up, you can’t do anything to fix it because your site goes blank (including the back end). Me? I’m waiting for the next update to the theme before trying any funny business.

The idea is that reading for comprehension is good and important and all that, but that the point of the article is only one of many things you can learn by engaging with it. Just reading the first few paragraphs of a work slowly and carefully, you can glean a whole host of names and terms that you can then use when crafting further searches or deciding where to search next. For example, you can note down concept names, other vocabulary, researcher’s names,  relevant institutions that might produce or publish information for the topic, or types of evidence used in this kind of argument. After reading the first few paragraphs of a few likely articles, you can go back and start using these new concepts and terms and research/institution names to craft more focused searches. At this point, you’re more likely to be using vocabulary that a more expert person would have used in the first place.

Here’s one concrete example.

Cooks, Bridget. “Fixing Race: Visual Representations of African Americans at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893.” Patterns of Prejudice, 41.5 (2007): 435-565.
ABSTRACT Cooks examines the Johnson family cartoon series published in Harper’s Weekly during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Her analysis addresses the series’ caricatures of African-American fairgoers in the context of the landmark exposition, a national celebration of America’s cultural leadership and accomplishment since its ‘discovery’ by Christopher Columbus in 1492. The Johnson family cartoons are remarkable because they are the only racist images in the issues of Harper’s Weekly in which they appear, highlighting the importance of their message that African Americans were an unwanted presence at an event that served to solidify America’s national identity. The series provides insight into some of the social anxieties of white Americans regarding the presence of African Americans at the exposition. It also explores white American discomfort with racial and economic diversity through the antics of the imaginary yet symbolically representative Johnson family. Cooks’s discussion includes a visual analysis of the cartoons and comparisons of the Johnson family images with photographs and illustrations of African-American labourers at the fair and with depictions of proper behaviour by white American fairgoers. This examination of the cartoon series questions the roles of race, class and social hierarchy in turn-of-the-century America, and illustrates that acceptable mainstream attitudes clung to ideas of racial prejudice.

Just from this I get a whole bunch of clues about how and where to look for evidence that might reveal attitudes about race in the late 19th century. I might not have thought to page through Harper’s and other magazines at the time. How would I find out which other magazines to look at? I could look at caricatures in general, cartoons (oh, and I bet there were caricatures and cartoons in newspapers at the time, too, so I could look there), advertisements, and anything else that exaggerates normality or abnormality. I could do more research into the World’s Exposition, since it’s positioned as being a representation of America. Terms like “national identity” and “social anxiety” might be useful. The abstract also makes it clear that one great way to build an argument about difference is to make an argument about what the ideal sameness might be. It also compares caricatures to photographs, which is kind of a similar rhetorical move — making arguments about exaggeration by comparing it to its opposite: realism.

If I read a few paragraphs of the article itself, I’m sure there will be useful citations to follow, possibly some argument about why Harper’s is a good source (which might hopefully mention some similar periodicals as part of this argument), certainly other historians who are interested in race in America, possibly some theorists (which would be a jackpot, particularly if this were a literary article, since searching for theorists is one of the hardest things to do), possibly some other types of scholars who might have an interest in this kind of topic, and hopefully some clues about where to go looking for photographs, either from citations for the photographs used or from other context.

Once I realized that this is how I approach most of the searching I do (since I’m almost never searching for topics in fields in which I’m an expert), I decided to back up and start teaching this as a way to read result lists and abstracts, too (part of my exploding the article idea). So now I often have students help me pick relevant terms out of both controlled vocabulary and abstracts, or point out clues hidden in article records that might point us to related genres or topics or avenues into the literature. Then we search again, and then again, usually (hopefully) finding whole pockets of literature that we’d never have stumbled on otherwise.