Tag Archives: author

Notes on another presentation about tagging

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I’ve pointed several times to the You’re It! blog because there is a lot of useful information to be found there about tagging in a context that is much broader than the library world.  (In fact, I have yet to see or recall any mention of libraries so far in what has been written there.)

Today there is another interesting post, this time, containing notes on a presentation given by Rashmi Sinha entitled "Sorting, Tagging and Social Information Architecture or The Missing Chapter in the Polar Bear Book."  I highly recommend that library folks who might be interested in tagging vis-à-vis cataloging take a look and digest some of the points contained in this report.  Sinha compares tagging to taxonomy (akin to library cataloging).

Just one of the many interesting things mentioned was the following table comparing the two:

Sorting Tagging
higher cognitive cost lower
richer data less rich data
harder to aggregate socially easy to aggregate socially

The author also describes the ways in which Sinha describes tagging as useful, and includes a statement — made by himself or by Sinha, I’m not sure — to the effect that "Categorization is going to make a comeback."

Elsevier’s response to depositing articles in E-LIS

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Recently I decided to explore E-LIS, an independent, international, open access repository of information (articles, papers, presentations, syllabi, etc.) relating to library and information science, with the goal of depositing some of my material there. One of the first things I wished to deposit was articles I had written for the journal, Serials Review, published by Elsevier. My sense was that Elsevier’s recent policy change for author copyrights allowed this but upon reviewing the terms again, I began to have doubts. Below is an email I sent to the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, who forwarded it on to Elsevier for comment and a response:

“Recently I thought about the possibility of self-archiving articles I’ve published in SR in an OA repository such as E-LIS. I thought that this was specifically permissible under terms of copyright agreed to by Elsevier sometime back in 2004. However when I went over the conditions and terms it seems to me that this permission is institution-specific. In other words, if I worked at [XYZ University] and [XYZ University] had an IR then I could deposit any articles I’ve written for SR there with no problem. Can you tell me specifically if depositing them in a third party repository such as E-LIS is in violation of Elsevier’s terms?”

Today I received Elsevier’s formal reply:

“…Elsevier policy permits authors to post a personal version of the final paper on a personal site or their institute’s website. You are correct in assuming that we do not permit posting of the papers in a third party repository.”

I am not a happy camper. This is an arbitrary distinction, in my view, particularly since I no longer have a direct institutional affiliation. (An email conversation on this issue with Peter Suber, author of the Open Access News blog as well as the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, confirmed this.) At the very least such contractual language as exists should be enhanced to make this distinction clear. It certainly isn’t clear now. Just fyi, below is the specific language from Elsevier regarding an author’s right to deposit a personal copy of his or her article in an institutional repository (taken directly from Elsevier’s Author Gateway website > Getting Published > Copyright Information section) with the relevant passage highlighted:

“As an author, you retain rights for large number of author uses, including use by your employing institute or company. These rights are retained and permitted without the need to obtain specific permission from Elsevier.
the right to make copies of the article for their own personal use, including for their own classroom teaching use;
the right to make copies and distribute copies (including through e-mail) of the article to research colleagues, for the personal use by such colleagues (but not commercially or systematically, e.g. via an e-mail list or list serve);
the right to post a pre-print version of the article on Internet web sites including electronic pre-print servers, and to retain indefinitely such version on such servers or sites – see also our information on electronic preprints for a more detailed discussion on these points.
the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final article (to reflect changes made in the peer review and editing process) on the author’s personal or institutional web site or server, with a link to the journal home page (on elsevier.com);
the right to present the article at a meeting or conference and to distribute copies of such paper or article to the delegates attending the meeting;
for the author’s employer, if the article is a ‘work for hire’, made within the scope of the author’s employment, the right to use all or part of the information in (any version of) the article for other intra-company use (e.g. training);
patent and trademark rights and rights to any process or procedure described in the article;
the right to include the article in full or in part in a thesis or dissertation (provided that this is not to be published commercially);
the right to use the article or any part thereof in a printed compilation of works of the author, such as collected writings or lecture notes (subsequent to publication of the article in the journal); and
the right to prepare other derivative works, to extend the article into book-length form, or to otherwise re-use portions or excerpts in other works, with full acknowledgement of its original publication in the journal.
Other uses by authors should be authorized by Elsevier through the Global Rights Department, and authors are encouraged to let Elsevier know of any particular needs or requirements.”

The terminally overcommitted

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Only recently have I begun to read the T. Scott blog. It’s well worth the time. A recent posting describes the author’s experience attending his first meeting of the board of the Medical Library Association. In particular I just about cracked up over the following statement he made:

“Volunteer organizations are strange creatures. They run off the drive and energy of the terminally overcommitted, so there are never really enough resources to bring to bear.”

This tickled my funny bone because I’ve been there, done that. The time I spent on the board of NASIG was incredibly worthwhile and I will be forever grateful for that experience. Yet I can say that T. Scott’s observations are spot on. I remember attending my first NASIG board meeting as a visitor (newly elected vice-president/president-elect) at the NASIG annual conference at the University of Michigan. Like T. Scott at the MLA board meeting, this was an illuminating experience.

I don’t care what anyone tells you, being president of NASIG is no less work than a full time job (or in some leadership capacity in whatever volunteer organization). It was incredibly stressful and required that a lot of time be devoted to the organization. As an aside, it’s interesting to note the similarities between NASIG and the Medical Library Association given the huge disparity in membership dues between the two volunteer organizations. NASIG charges $75 (and there are variations on dues depending on your status, e.g. students get a lower rate, and location, e.g. those who live in Canada or Mexico pay less in US dollars) whereas the Medical Library Association charges $165 for regular members. And NASIG used to charge $20-25 from its inception in 1985 ’til last year, when the dues were raised significantly for the first time.
Anyway, getting back to the workload issue for volunteer organizations… Given the fact that we all have “real” jobs, T. Scott writes:

“Frankly, it’s a wonder we get anything done at all.”

Still, it is worth it. My NASIG involvement has been incredibly important to my growth as a librarian. Friends I made 15 years ago remain friends to this day, and many new ones have been made along the way. I particularly agree with T. Scott’s closing statement in his post, and it holds true for most volunteer organizations that I know of:

“It is, after all, an association. A gathering of people committed to working together to achieve some things they can’t achieve on their own. Sometimes we’re successful, sometimes we fail. Always our reach exceeds our grasp. I like it that way.”

I like it that way, too.

Swimming with sharks

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I’ve noted before that I have a “thing” about sharks. This story from the Chicago Tribune a week ago was quite interesting. In a way I’d love to do what this author wrote about, to go diving with great white sharks, but in another sense, I’d be so terrified that I wouldn’t be able to move a muscle, let alone jump overboard into the shark cage.

The closest I’ve been to swimming with sharks was about 14 years ago during a stay in Fiji. A friend and I stayed in a bure (Fijian for “hut”) on the Coral Coast of the main island, Viti Levu. I went snorkelling every chance I could and I can still remember the experience as if it were an exotic dream. The colors, the variety, the dazzling beauty of the coral reef, are all things I will never forget. ‘Course I also remember getting the worst ever sunburn of my life ;-) Those who know me know that I never tan, only burn. Imagine me snorkelling for hours with my back and legs exposed to the tropical sun. Sharks weren’t able to get through the reef where we spent the most time, except for one place where there was a sort of break or passage in the reef and the water was much deeper there. I decided to be really brave and go snorkelling there. The water was darker and more menacing and at any minute I expected to see some huge, shadowy form loom up and scare the bejeebers out of me. I think if something had shown up I would have literally walked on water!

LibraryThing and cataloging nirvana, er, FRBR

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I’ve mentioned LibraryThing several times already, but I have to write about it again, this time, because of its groundbreaking and chaotic foray into cataloging nirvana, er, FRBR. Basically Tim Spalding has set LibraryThingers (LibraryThingamabobbers?) loose on figuring out what a “work” is and combining multiple versions of a work together into a “work” view in a way similar to what FRBR describes. David Bigwood of Catalogablog has already discussed this here as have Sarah Houghton of The Librarian in Black and William Denton of The FRBR Blog (see list of links here).

After working with this capability for a while, I think it is definitely a huge, big deal. As Tim writes, the intent of providing this capability in LibraryThing is social and socio-statistical (see the link to the comment from him for more explanation). And it is user controlled. Those aspects may seem like no big deal but in reality, they represent something completely different from what catalogers have attempted to do for decades in a largely self-contained, controlled environment. Just take a look at the discussions among LibraryThingers via the LibraryThing blog or the Google Group devoted to discussing LibraryThing to get some idea of how this capability is playing out. Like I stated earlier, it is not just cool and useful, it is chaotic by its very nature.

I’ve spent several hours lately, trying to pull together disparate bibliographic entries in LibraryThing using this new capability. I’ve only done some authors and left others alone. I’ve made a few mistakes but by and large, I think I’ve managed to contribute some useful work. Authors I’ve worked on include Herge (author of the Tintin series), P.D. James, and Frank Peretti.

It is a bit strange, as a former cataloging manager and serials cataloger in a large academic library, to be doing this. But it’s gratifying, too, and in many ways, that’s the point.
I think we are only just beginning to understand the ramifications of this kind of user-level, user-controlled interaction with bibliographic data (and data that is not necessarily or purely MARC-based). Some of the issues that have already arisen include whether or not to combine all language editions of a work together, authority control, how to handle editors vs. authors, and so on. All of these things have solutions or at least have been discussed for forever among professional catalogers and it is quite interesting to see how the discussion is going among a group that is largely made up of “self-proclaimed” catalogers. As Tim calls it, “Everyone’s a librarian.” Interesting stuff.

Two gadgets away from nirvana

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“…Two gadgets away from nirvana.” I had a good chuckle over that line, which is part of a much longer post about the possibilities for e-books from SimonWaldman.net. The author outlines some good points about the way that certain pieces seem to be aligning in a positive way for the e-book market (both for the publisher, and for the reader). Honestly, I am not (yet) a fan of e-books at all, from the angle of one who has managed or provided access to a fairly large (several thousand) collection of e-books in a library, as well as from the patron angle. One of the best implementations of e-books that I’ve seen in the past few years is Safari Tech Books Online (available for libraries through ProQuest). Other e-book collections and services, however, are not particularly user friendly as of yet, including those provided by netLibrary, eBrary, and Overdrive. The last vendor in particular bugs me because it does not support or allow e-books to be downloaded onto an iPod. I’m sure my local public library and its consortial members have put lots of money into providing access to these e-books from Overdrive but this glaring omission in functionality renders the service useless to me.

Mixing work and blogging

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This article in the Chicago Tribune today was interesting to read, although it didn’t cover any new ground in the debate about employee blogging. Now that I work for a commercial entity again, this is an issue that I am more aware of. As far as I know there is no official blogging policy at my company, although a broader policy about Internet use could be construed to cover it. It is related to my previous post in that the author mentions the accessibility via Google and other search engines of whatever people choose to write in their blogs, and how easy it is to get into trouble if something negative is written about an employer. It also mentions that concerns by employers about their employees blogging are very similar to concerns employers had back when universal access to email and the World Wide Web for employees was a new thing.

I have had firsthand experience with this concern on the part of an employer. When I was at the University of Chicago I was asked to chair a task force in their library’s technical services division that was charged with articulating a set of guidelines for acceptable use of the Internet on the part of librarians and staff. The formulation of this task force was largely prompted by concern by some supervisors in technical services about abuse of Internet and email on the part of their staff. The task force duly arrived at a set of guidelines but frankly, they were not taken seriously and, at least for the duration of my time there, were not enforced that I know of. My personal view of the situation as a manager of several staff was (and still is) to rely upon principles of common sense and good supervision rather than an artificial set of rules or guidelines. I remember likening the potential for abuse of email to abuse of using the telephone. There is nothing new in this, really. And blogging is similar. If I as a supervisor have concrete, well understood expectations for performance by my employees, along with concrete ways of measuring that performance, the issue of email/blogging/telephone/Internet abuse can be easily dealt with. For instance, I made clear to my staff that I really didn’t care if they used the Internet for personal things IF (and that is an important point) their performance was good. That is, if they were getting their assigned work done in a superior fashion then using the Internet for surfing or writing emails or whatever was just fine with me. However, I also made it clear that if performance was subpar then personal use of the Internet would be one of the key areas I would focus on for that staff member, and I would restrict or curtail that activity if it was shown to be a contributing factor to their negative job performance. Unfortunately, my experience has shown that there are many supervisors in libraries (and maybe elsewhere) who lack common sense and/or people leadership skills and who turn to artificial rules and regulations to do their work for them.

Opening yourself up to the world

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There is still a lot of debate about the usefulness and longevity of blogs. I can see both sides, i.e. that blogs can be dangerous, erroneous, harmful; and that blogs can be very beneficial, informative, and useful. One aspect to blogging that has also been discussed is its effect on one’s job or future job prospects. There was a good article about this in The Chronicle of Higher Education some months ago that resonated with me. Basically, the author advised against blogging, period, viewing it as detrimental in the job search process.

The reason it resonated with me is that I had recently been involved in a job interview (this was early last summer) in which the existence of this, my personal blog, played a significant role. This was a big surprise to me at the time, although it shouldn’t have been, I guess. Throughout the two day interview process at a private liberal arts university here in Illinois, my blog was mentioned several times. It even came up during the first meeting I had with members of the search process, when I met with two people from the library for an introductory meal the evening before the formal interview began. The next day during a part of the interview in which I met with other university (non-library) faculty, the topic of my blog came up again. I remember one faculty member brightly declaring to me, “I learned so much about you from your blog, including answers to questions that I could not have legally asked you in this interview! Oh, and by the way, you have wonderful children!” This, from a complete stranger, was rather weird and somewhat unsettling for me. Somehow I just didn’t think much about the possibility of someone Googling me and finding (and reading) my blog. The next day I was scheduled to give a formal presentation on a topic of my choice. I had had a topic in mind but after the comments about my blog, I decided to switch topics at the last minute to focus on blogs and blogging: what is a blog, how to create your own blog, uses of and implications of blogs and blogging for libraries. This was, in a way, an attempt to turn the tables on my interviewers. My audience consisted of students, staff, and librarians, about 10 or 12 people, including the library director. By the end of the session, each person there had created her or his own blog using Blogger. I thought it went well.

However, the upshot is that I was not offered the job. I have no idea what, if any, role my blog had in this library making that decision. But I do think that in some way, my blog did play a role, for good or ill, in how I was evaluated.

My point in telling this story is that I learned in that experience that you never know who might read your blog or when. I think I can confidently state that a personal blog can and does play a significant role in how people evaluate you, especially in job interviews. There is nothing I am ashamed of in what I’ve written here, but I do know that I have views and beliefs that many disagree with and might even feel threatened by. Does that mean I shouldn’t blog? No. But it does mean that I am far more aware of and careful about what I write in this blog. Like it or not, maintaining your personal blog is like opening yourself up to the world in ways that were not as easy to do in the past.

One final note: It is not easy to gauge the readership of one’s blog. Sure, you can get a vague idea from, say, how many are subscribed to your blog in Bloglines. Or you can use Google Analytics (a service which I really like) to obtain some idea of who, what, where, and when people are accessing your blog. But there is no single way to really know for sure, what the readership is. It’s a guessing game at best.

Procrastination

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I derived a lot of enjoyment from reading an article (available to subscribers only) in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the topic of procrastination. Misery loves company, I guess, because I felt comforted by the author’s description of his life of always being late with some project or another. My thoughts as I read about his techniques for not getting done what he should have already completed were something like: “Wow, he could be describing me.” I have failed, over and over and over again, to make writing deadlines. And yet I am tempted to say Yes again and again when asked to do this or that writing project. There is some weird psychological explanation here that fails me at the moment. Getting back to the article in The Chronicle, I thought the author summed things up nicely when he wrote:

“The best advice I ever heard is that life is what we do when we are avoiding something else. There are already too many books chasing too few readers, and, perhaps, the best thing for most us to do is take some time to play with our kids, talk to our students and colleagues, cultivate our gardens, and live well.”

Amen.

When you don’t fit in

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When You Don’t Fit In

This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education caught my eye today. Although the details are somewhat different, the reality is the same. Michele and I definitely do not fit in here in rural, east central Indiana. I wonder sometimes if we ever will. Or if I even want to fit in here. Like the author of the article, I am up for tenure next year. I’m not at all a fan of tenure. It’s not that I mind the requirements. I’ve been there, done that, not because I had to, but because I wanted to. I’ve published, presented, become deeply involved in professional organizations, taught a graduate level LIS course (and will do that again in a few months). I’ve done more, professionally, than many people I know who have tenure. The only piece I am missing at this point is another advanced degree, and again, I am planning to pursue that anyway because I want to, not just because it’s a tenure requirement.

I have seen tenure (or its equivalent) abused too often, in all of the places I’ve worked, to think highly of it.

To quote from the article:

If it doesn’t feel like home by now, when will it?