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Month: October 2010

Emerging thoughts about emerging formats

Published by Iris on Saturday, October 9th, 2010

It’s probably not coincidence that my library is beginning a serious study of the eBook landscape just as there’s been a burst of discussion on that topic in the circles I inhabit. Seems like everywhere I turn someone’s linking to interesting articles on eBooks and other emerging publication formats.

James Bridle just posted a fascinating piece on the topic called Walter Benjamin’s Aura: Open Bookmarks and the future eBook. For libraries, eBooks are complicated for a bunch of reasons he doesn’t get into (access, ownership, DRM, lending rights, preservation, and Interlibrary Loan, just to name the biggies), but Bridle talks about a piece of the puzzle that I hadn’t really thought about before: what a book actually means to people, and whether those things can be either replicated or meaningfully replaced in digital formats. Here’s the crux:

“I believe that the copy is no longer important, that we can all get the book, the text itself, if we need it. What is valuable and what is core and what we can lend to our friends and pass onto our children is not copies of books but originals of our own experiences, associated with those singular works of art.”

I’m still trying to figure out what I think about that. I find it a compelling and provocative statement for reasons I can’t really put into words just yet (maybe you can help me!). I also think that we all have that book that we hide behind the front row of books on our bookshelves, and that the concept of marking the souvenir would have to be flexible enough to accommodate that.  And I think that “we all” probably can’t get at the book if we want it, but I think that a whole bunch of “we all” probably can. And I know that I buy and keep relatively few books but find the buying and keeping of them very compelling. And I also wonder if we’ll need two entirely separate publishing models to accommodate the person who buys books and the library that buys books. And I really love the photography he has in that post. And clearly I’m just rambling at this point.

Kind of related pieces on my radar this week include:

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The Age of Big Access

Published by Iris on Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

This week I had a post published over at ACRLog called The Age of Big Access. It starts:

While we were all busy wondering what it means to be a librarian in the Age of Google, we got flanked. This is not the Age of Google after all. That was just a distraction — a clever and dazzling light show. Meanwhile, behind the curtain, a totally different age was gathering itself: The Age of Big Access.

And even though I’ve had a couple of months to ponder this stuff since drafting it, my last two sentences still stand: “I was pretty comfortable with my role as an instruction librarian in the Age of Google. I’m totally at sea trying to figure out my role as an instruction librarian in the Age of Big Access.” I want access like an addict wants a hit, but maybe it’s killing me.

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Investments in the Term Economy

Published by Iris on Monday, October 4th, 2010

Search is all about term matching, and several times in the last couple of weeks I’ve had students think there was nothing on their topics simply because we hadn’t found the right terms yet. Once we’d dug enough to find some useful search terms, we uncovered previously hidden worlds of scholarship which could in turn point us toward related works as we ruthlessly mined them for even more terms, their bibliographies, and their “cited by” works.

Finding the right terms is hard. It takes empathy with the author, it takes some knowledge of the field, it takes some knowledge of related fields (particularly if you’re in an interdisciplinary database and can’t figure out why you’re getting chemistry results in your humanities search), and it usually just plain takes reading. Reading carefully and with an eye toward learning vocabulary. Reading lots. And there are very few shortcuts.

And then comes full text searching of historical documents (something I’m going to be teaching tomorrow). That’s another whole layer of complexity, and I really love what Timothy Burke had to say about that recently. He makes it clear that you really have to read, and read a lot, before you can start searching through historical texts, and he makes it clear that developing a familiarity with other rhetorics is vital to scholarship.

Searching sometimes feels like the modern way and browsing like the legacy way of doing research. But in some sense, search is impossible without a hefty dose of browsing.

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Sunday:

Published by Iris on Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes people tick. Sometimes it’s so that I understand my friends better. Sometimes it’s so that I understand myself better. Sometimes it’s so that I can teach better. Sometimes it functions for all three purposes simultaneously.

Like, lately I’ve been thinking about how human interaction works online and off, and particularly what kinds of information people need about each other in order to interact easily together.

At the conference I went to last week we heard about an assignment that failed and talked a lot about why that might be. The assignment was for Russian language students to participate in a Russian language forum on a fan site for a Russian pop star. For those of us who spend a lot of time online, it was kind of unsurprising to hear that the students didn’t get much in the way of participation from the forum denizens (and that the teacher had to reassure the forum owner that they weren’t some sort of spam bot). If 15-30 students suddenly showed up in my online space asking seemingly random questions, I’d be taken aback, too. So that’s one piece of the still-disconnected thread in my head. It takes time and participation (in a genuine way) before people in a forum will interact with you. First you have to interact with them and give them enough of your personality that they remember you.

Speaking of which, remembering each other is kind of complicated. There are no faces to remember, or clothing styles. Avatars, sometimes, but it seems like the people I remember best online have some kind of hook. My friend Jason is the Zotero guy. He’s more than that, obviously, but that’s his hook, particularly for people who don’t know him as well. My other friend Jason is the Apple/tech-predictions guy. Again, he’s way more than that, but that’s his hook. These hooks are kind of like stand-ins for faces — not complete representations of the person, but something to recognize from across the room.

I also got to hang out in person with a friend I normally can only hang out with via IM, and we realized how much online conversation narrates what we’re doing in real life, and how little that’s necessary when we can actually see the other person. I didn’t have to say I was cooking dinner. The cooking of dinner was pretty obvious. Online, though, these mundane things provide valuable context for what we might be thinking or how interrupted a conversation is likely to be. And more than that, they help me know how my friends are doing and help me read between the lines a little, more like with face-to-face friends.

And then there’s a habit a few non-local friends and I have of starting off a “conversation” simply with the name of the day and a semicolon. “Sunday:” (After all, coming up with a subject line is the worst part of subjectless online communication, so a day of the week works just fine. I wish email didn’t scream at me for skipping the subject line.) I rather love this habit we’ve formed even though there’s almost never anything earth shattering in the follow-up pieces to those conversations. For example, today I wrote, “Furnace guy, resting, now getting ready to spend the rest of the day on the reference desk, with a break for dinner at a friend’s house.” That’s barely even interesting if you’re my mother. But these conversations keep me feeling connected to these friends and help me to predict the kinds of interactions we’re likely to have, and when, and about what. They also give us things to talk about when “furnace guy” has come and gone. (In related news, my house will no longer be in danger of blowing up when the furnace kicks in.)

It’s about the little stuff, for me. If I have to wait for big stuff I’ll usually have nothing to say. And if you wait until you’ve got big stuff to tell me, I no longer know how to read between the lines. There’s just so much to compensate for when you can’t actually see the person you’re talking to.

And now I should get back to prepping for these classes I have coming up this week. *sigh*

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