Science Library Pad

Celebridée – Ottawa - May 2 to 19, 2008 - Chris Anderson, Salman Rushdie, Kunstler...

As part of the tulip festival, a collection of thinkers and music and stuff.

In 2008, Celebridée will come into full bloom in the Tulip Festival Mirror Tent headlining Sir Salman Rushdie, one of the world's most celebrated and controversial novelists. Other headliners include Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond.

...

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency. Yale University's Amy Chua will present World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, ..., the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics will present The Mystery of Dark Matter, and Richard Florida, author of Who's Your City, will discuss Creative Cities.

Celebridée will also feature several partner events including 1783 – Subject or Citizen? an event on the Treaty of Paris by Library and Archives Canada and musical concerts including two evenings with Angela Hewitt: The Well-Tempered Clavier and Janina Fialkowska & The Chamber Players of Canada, all at St. Andrew's Church.

from http://www.celebridee.com/

Richard Florida's blog is also mirrored at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/creativeclass

UPDATE: I see Ottawa's own Clive Doucet will also be speaking.  I liked his book Urban Meltdown.

UPDATE: Since Colin mentioned he had some trouble finding the actual schedule, it's hidden away at http://www.tulipfestival.ca/en/Celeb_Events/

Trouble with Medical Journals?

Peter Mansbridge, a Canadian newsanchor, interviews Richard Smith, former BMJ editor, author of The Trouble with Medical Journals.

30 minute Windows Media video

http://www.cbc.ca/mrl3/8752/oneonone/20071124.wmv

Book info at

http://www.rsmpress.co.uk/bksmith.htm

Google Book Search API

The Google Book Search Book Viewability API enables developers to:

                   

• Link to Books in Google Book Search using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers
• Know whether Google Book Search has a specific title and what the viewability of that title is
• Generate links to a thumbnail of the cover of a book
• Generate links to an informational page about a book
• Generate links to a preview of a book

http://code.google.com/apis/books/

via LibraryThing blog - Google Books in LibraryThing - March 13, 2008

We need APIs everywhere for everything.

Chapters invites you to their content acquisition community

Chapters-Indigo is the major bookstore chain in Canada.  What do they provide for booklovers online?

Chapters Indigo Community, "Acceptable Use Policy"

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/Legal-Statement/legal-art.html

Emphasis mine.

The User acknowledges that any content, e-mails, postings, offers, software, videos, photos, text, graphics, music, sounds, questions, creative suggestions, messages, feedback, ideas, recipes, notes, drawings, articles, stories or other information, data, materials and opinions (including, without limitation any postings on community forums) ("Submissions") that he or she may provide, e-mail, post, upload or otherwise transmit to the Website shall be deemed and shall remain the property of Indigo, including all copyright, without reservation, and User waives in favour of Indigo any and all moral rights in such Submissions. Except as provided in the Privacy Policy, none of the Submissions shall be subject to any obligation of confidence on Indigo’s part, and We shall not be liable for any use or disclosure of any Submissions. Without limitation of the foregoing, the User acknowledges and agrees that all or any portion of the Submissions may be used, edited, reproduced, published, translated, sublicensed, copied and distributed and/or incorporated into other works in any form, media, or technology now known or hereafter developed for the full term of any copyright that may exist in such Submissions, without compensation of any kind to the User. When You post Submissions to the Website, You authorize and direct Indigo to make such copies thereof as We deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the Submissions on the Website. By posting Submissions to any part of the Website, You automatically grant, and You represent and warrant that You have the right to grant, to Indigo an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such Submissions for any purpose on or in connection with the Website or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such Submissions, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You agree to defend, indemnify and hold Indigo, its subsidiaries and affiliates, and each of their directors, officers, agents, contractors, partners and employees, harmless from and against any loss, liability, threatened or actual claim, demand, damages, costs and expenses, including reasonable legal fees, arising out of or in connection with any of Your Submissions.

Err thanks, but my idea of community doesn't involve transferring my ideas to a private corporation for reproduction in formats yet to be invented, until the end of time.

Way to miss the point of social networking, Chapter-Sin-digo.

They say they have 80,000 members, I don't see how that is even possible, considering that even the older, well-established, and wildly popular LibraryThing only has 368,000 members.

audiobook DRM on the way out

Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anticopying software on digital downloads of audio books.

...

Random House was the first to announce it was backing away from D.R.M., or digital rights management software, the protective wrapping placed around digital files to make them difficult to copy. In a letter sent to its industry partners last month, Random House, the world’s largest publisher, announced it would offer all of its audio books as unprotected MP3 files beginning this month, unless retail partners or authors specified otherwise.

Penguin Group, the second-largest publisher in the United States behind Random House, now appears set to follow suit. Dick Heffernan, publisher of Penguin Audio, said the company would make all of its audio book titles available for download in the MP3 format on eMusic, the Web’s second-largest digital music service after iTunes.

...

Mr. Heffernan said the company changed its mind partly after watching the major music labels, like Warner Brothers and Sony BMG, abandon D.R.M. on the digital music they sell on Amazon.com. “I’m looking at this as a test,” he said. “But I do believe the audio book market without D.R.M. is going to be the future.”

New York Times - Publishers Phase Out [AntiCopying] - March 3, 2008

(The actual NYT headline "publishers phase out piracy protection", while alliterative, is stupid.  Copying is not piracy.)

I think it's a shame that more libraries didn't push back harder on publishers about DRM, but it appears that it is dying a well-deserved death anyway.

LibraryThing 1200

The 1200th book in my LibraryThing library is Brunelleschi's Dome.  It's quite interesting so far.

Scholarship in the Digital Age - reviewed for Nature

My review of Christine L. Borgman's Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet has been published in the January 24, 2008 issue of Nature

Nature 451, 401 (24 January 2008) | doi:10.1038/451401a - Published online 23 January 2008 - Full Text - PDF (110K)

UPDATE 2008-01-24:

The article is subscribers-only, although it appears to me that, for the moment at least, the preview extract provided is actually the entire 700-word article.

I have permission from Nature to post my original, unedited author manuscript.

Download borgman_scholarly.pdf

The one clarification I would like to make on the original is that I struggled with a simple way to convey that this is intentionally not a technology-focussed book.  This language: "there is no mention of “wikis”, particular types of websites that provide the ability to collaboratively edit and share text, of which Wikipedia is the best-known example.  This is by intent, not omission." I later reconsidered, since I didn't want to even mildly speculate about author intent.  The wording is considerably clearer in the final version.  Anyway the gist of it is that you shouldn't go to this book looking for technology discussion or recommendations, it's simply not there.  Borgman takes more of a "history of science" approach, looking at a high level at what people do in science, not the technologies they use.  She recommends research directions and policy approaches, not technologies.

ENDUPDATE

There are also (currently just a couple) bookmarks to support the article at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/digitalagereview

For more around the general topic, you can see my blog category E-Science, and my Furl bookmarks on E-Science and Scholarly Communication.

This is a reference book, a textbook, so it was rather challenging to review, it doesn't have a strong narrative that you read.  Instead it provides a comprehensive look at the sociopolitical aspects of scholarly communication in an Internet environment, with copious citations.

Borgman's approach is useful because as technology people we can often lose sight of our users.  As I said in response to a question at IATUL 2007, we need to ensure that technologies we build will work in the real workflows of researchers.  You can build wonderful repositories and lovely tools, but if no one uses them, what was the point?

In case you're wondering about some of the language in the review, I was happy to have an excuse to use "invisible college" and it is a term that shows up in the book (I wonder if I could have gotten "unseen university" past the Nature editors).  Also Borgman places her discussion quite strongly within a framework of Open Science, which she defines on pages 35-36 of the book

The notion of "open science" arises early in Western thought... Open science has been subjected to rigorous economic analysis and found to meet the needs of modern, market-based societies.  As an economic framework, open science is based on the premise that scholarly information is a "public good." ...

The emphasis in e-Research on enhancing scholarship by improving access to information is an implicit endorsement of open science.

While not exactly bedtime reading, this book definitely finds a place on my reference shelf.  Whenever you're writing a proposal or a paper in the areas of scholarly communication, e-science and "scholarly infrastructure", this will be a good book to have at hand.

Borgman used it in her course IS 204 Electronic Publishing (PDF) and via LibraryThing I see it tagged as LIS 2670 (Digital Libraries), I'm guessing for Pitt.

You can access her book site via http://snipurl.com/BorgmanDigitalAge
It includes an extensive list of references, with clickable URLs.

Rainbows End free online - Nippon 2007 Hugo science fiction nominee

There's a lot to like about Vernor Vinge's visionary novel Rainbows End.  I reviewed it in August of 2006 (I could have sworn it wasn't that long ago, time flies).

It's now available in its entirety, free online.

via Boing Boing

A nice year-end present.

As I mentioned in the title, it is a nominee for the Nippon 2007 Hugos.

If you get a taste of it and decide to buy it, here are my Amazon USA and Canada affiliate links:

   

Amazon Kindle: books you can never share

Ah yes, progress.  Now for only $10 you can buy a book and read it.

ONLY you can read it and ONLY on Amazon's $400 Kindle e-book reader.

Want to give it to a friend?  Sell it?  Pass it on to your children?  Donate it to a library?  Sorry, too bad, it's "licensed digital content", don't you know.

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

Restrictions. You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

(Some emphasis above mine.)  I find it interesting that in all the Engadget hoopla, and on the entire snazzy Kindle page, this is never mentioned.  You have to go to Kindle Support, and find the last item on the page (Amazon Kindle Terms of Use and Policies), and then you get another list of pages where you have to select "License Agreement and Terms of Use", and then find the Digital Content section within that item.

How many people do you think are going to do that?

I also like this language "you may not, and you will not".  Um, ok I can see how you can forbid it, but "you will not"?  What is this, like a contractual limitation on reality?

tag cloud on book cover

I was kind of amused to notice this tag cloud on the cover of the Lonely Planet Lyon travel guide

I assume it's a pseudo-cloud, rather than being based on the actual book text, but it has all elements of a typical cloud: terms vary both in size and brightness.  It would be interesting to compare it with a real tag cloud for the book, but I'm the only one on LibraryThing with it (most people don't put travel guides in their LT, let alone travel guides en français).

27th Ottawa Antiquarian Book Fair - Oct 27-28, 2007

They don't seem to have a website, but the Ottawa Congress Centre events site says

The Twenty Seventh Ottawa Antiquarian Book Fair has become an exciting fall event for book lovers from across Canada. A display and sale, recognized as one of the finest book fairs in the country, features rare, unusual and collectible books. The fair will include over 40,000 items, dating from the 15th century to the present day, displayed by over 65 booksellers from across Canada.

Alvin Toffler interviewed by Allen Gregg

ALVIN TOFFLER
Future Shock. The Third Wave. Two classics that revolutionized the way we think about our rapidly changing world. They established Alvin Toffler as one of the world's most influential futurists. In his new book, Toffler once again takes us back to the future. It's called Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be Created and How it will Change our Lives.

Web Exclusive Preview: Allan Gregg in Conversation with Alvin Toffler

Allen Gregg in Conversation (on TVO) - August 31, 2007

Note: a lot of the links on the TVO site won't work if you have cookies turned off.

Previously:
October 1, 2006  Alvin Toffler on Big Ideas

Google Earth Book Search Layer - geobooking is here

Google pushed out a new "Featured Content" layer today called "Google Book Search". This layer, when you turn it on, shows little book icon placemarks when you zoom into different places around the world. You don't have to enter a place into the search, just browse places and the placemarks will appear. These placemarks are results from search of places found mentioned in books indexed by Google's search engine. For famous places like "Rome", you will see a huge array of icons in a series of concentric circles. Each icons shows the results of that city mentioned in a particular book. There may be dozens of such references, but you you can click on a summary link that will take you straight to the book search results on a web page.

Google Earth Blog - New Google Earth Book Search Layer

This is very cool, but there are still loads of problems.
Click the book in the centre of the Ottawa ring

and you get The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, which is all very grand.  The hits are for Nepean, which is indeed an Ottawa suburb.  A suburb named for Sir Evan Nepean.  Unfortunately, Nelson is writing TO him, in his early days as Evan Nepean, Esq.  Nelson isn't writing about the town of Nepean at all.

Scanning the table of contents for the book points out another issue, which is that Google's digitisation is far from perfect, e.g. page xi where the left-hand side is cut off, losing about 10 characters.

Problems aside, it does turn up gems like Hudson's Bay: Or, Every-Day Life In the Wilds of North America by Robert Michael Ballantyne (1859)

On Sunday the 19th of October we commenced descending the magnificent river Ottawa, and began to feel that we were at last approaching the civilised nations of the earth.

Previously:
January 29, 2007  Google geobooking
January 12, 2006  libraries as warehouses of dead paper: set your books electronically free

Are Americans still Afraid of Dragons?

In 1973, the science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin gave a talk at the Pacific Northwest Library Association conference, which turned into an article "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" in PNLA Quarterly 38, Winter 1974 (unfortunately not online).  The essay is collected in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Since we're in Harry Potter season, it seems appropriate to revisit the topic.

As you may know, the topic of "witchcraft" seems to have a thread running in American society from the days of Salem, including the strange idea (perhaps unique to a particular strand of American religion?) that books like Harry Potter are a bad influence.  A thread strong enough for The Onion to satirise in the classic "Harry Potter Books Spark Rise In Satanism Among Children", which had enough of an impact to merit an entry in Snopes Urban Legends.

I was interested to see if this had also been the case over 30 years ago, but actually Le Guin's essay turns out to be a scathing critique of general American cultural conservatism - no mention is made of religion whatsoever.  Well, she does connect to the Puritan work ethic, but not to the sort of fundamentalism behind some of the anti-Harry rhetoric in the US these days.

In wondering why Americans are afraid of dragons, I began to realize that a great many Americans are not only antifantasy, but altogether antifiction.  We tend, as a people, to look upon all works of the imagination either as suspect, or as contemptible.

...

"Fairy stories are for kids.  I live in the real world."

Who speaks so?  ... It is, I fear, the man in the street--the hardworking, over-thirty American male--the men who run this country.

Such a rejection of the entire art of fiction is related to several American characteristics: our Puritanism, our work ethic, our profit-mindedness, and even our sexual mores.

To read War and Peace or The Lord of the Rings plainly is not "work"--you do it for pleasure.  And if it cannot be justified as "educational" or "self-improvement," then, in the Puritan value system, it can only be self-indulgence or escapism.  For pleasure is not a value, to the Puritan; on the contrary, it is a sin.

Equally, in the businessman's value system, if an act does not bring in an immediate, tangible profit, it has no justification at all.

Have these elements of American culture changed in the past thirty years?  Or is it that capitalism, which must bring endless growth and at least the appearance of novelty, must eventually expand to encompass everything, every subculture?  Or maybe it was Star Wars that gave it a push?  Pulling in millions of dollars for a space opera in 1977 certainly would have gotten the attention of even the dullest businessman.  But I think at most it became the case that it was more acceptable to use SF and fantasy to market to kids, not to adults.  When did the real adult crossover start?  When the Star Wars generation became adults?

It's clear that Harry Potter has been a major crossover success, to the point of having separate covers for adults.  And the Lord of the Rings movies brought some wonderfully executed adult fantasy to the screen.  Could the Lord of the Rings movies have had the same success in the 1970s?  I know there was a phase of popularity coming out of the "hippie" days - was it the hippies that turned us all on to fantasy?

Did the return of Star Trek with the Next Generation in 1987 bring a ubiquitous presence to television science fiction?  I know I can't switch a channel these days without coming across Trek or some other flavour of sci fi.  Was it a cultural shift or was it just Paramount finding it can make piles of money?

With shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Heroes, with complex plots aimed directly at adults, are we in a new era?  Or is it just that the market has fragmented into so many pieces that what would have been niche programming now has an acceptable fraction of the audience?

And has this acceptance of fantasy penetrated to the ruling class that Le Guin describes?  I don't have any impression that it has.

I think that a great many American men have been taught... to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful.

Now I doubt that imagination can be suppressed.  ... If it is rejected and despised, it will grow into wild and weedy shapes; it will be deformed.  At its best, it will be mere ego-centered daydreaming; at its worst, it will be wishful thinking, which is a very dangerous occupation when it is taken seriously.  ... Nowadays, with our secular Puritanism, the man who refuses to read novels because it's unmanly to do so, or because they aren't true, will most likely end up watching bloody detective thrillers on television, or reading hack westerns or sports stories, or going in for pornography...  It is his starved imagination, craving nourishment, that forces him to do so.  But he can rationalize such entertainment by saying that it is realistic--after all, sex exists, and there are criminals...and also by saying that it is virile, by which he means that it doesn't interest most women.

Hmm, ego-centered wishful thinking taken seriously?  Does that sound like any of the country-runners these days?  CSI and porn seem to be going strong too.  Has the culture just grown to encompass more options?  Or is there a mainstream culture that is much more diverse, and a "serious old men" culture that is still clinging to a distaste for dragons?  When was the last time a politician said they were reading a science fiction or fantasy book?  But they have no problem saying they faithfully watch 24.

Have the geeks gone mainstream, or is the mainstream just so big and ill-defined now that everything is mainstream?

UPDATE 2007-07-16: I ran across this Washington Post article

Harry Potter and the Death of Reading

More than half the adults in [the United States] won't pick up a novel this year, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Not one. And the rate of decline has almost tripled in the past decade.

That statistic startles me, even though I hear it again and again. Whenever I confess to people who work for a living that I'm a book critic, I inevitably get the same response: "Imagine being able to sit around all day just reading novels!" Then they turn to each other and shake their heads, amazed that anything so effete should pass for a profession. (I can see it in their eyes: the little tufted pillow, the box of bonbons nearby.) "I don't read fiction," they say, suddenly serious. "I have so little time nowadays that when I read, I like to learn something." But before I can suggest what one might learn from reading a good novel, they pop the question about The Boy Who Lived: "How do you like 'Harry Potter'?"

Has reading Harry simply become a typical American mega-event, where participation in to some extent semi-mystical, the idea being that somehow being associated with a big success may cause some of success to rub off on you?

Are we moving into a Long Tail world, or is Harry a tail-less dragon that's eaten up all the casual readers?

Do the library patron trends support the assertion of the decline in fiction reading?  (I work in a science library, so it's hard to know what the fiction trends are.)

Casey Bisson on Scriblio and OpenLibrary

In the BIGWIG library social software showcase, Casey Bisson writes about his proposal to further enhance Scriblio.  Scriblio is a vision of a modern library web presence that is about finding books, not being a book inventory.

With its partners, the Internet Archive will build an open, structured website that includes tools to provide public and institutional access to library resources around the world. OpenLibrary.org will offer a system of integrated tools that can be used individually or together to meet a library or patron’s needs, that is free to the user and the library. The overall goal of the project is to shorten the distance between initial query and document.

Assault on Reason: a review

A disappointing book.  Starts out strongly with quite an erudite examination of American history, but then descends into a long, long list of factual yet useless critiques of the policies and actions of the 2000-2008 US federal executive branch, and concludes with a call for Internet Net Neutrality.

Network neutrality has many merits, but I don't think singlehandedly saving the United States of America from unreason is one of them.

I'm afraid I am quite the literalist.  I expect a book to be about the topic stated in its title.  For example, I expected Laura Penny's Your call is important to us : the truth about bullshit to be about businesses and the false language they use.  The phrase "to serve you better," for example, deserves an entire chapter, since it almost always translates into "we are inconveniencing you, our bothersome customers, in order to make more money for our shareholders".  But instead, Penny's book is a long, long rant about how the B-C administration sucks, and the American right sucks, and big corporations suck.  Which, as I've said, even when true, is not illuminating.  A much better book is Death Sentences, which actually is about the assault upon our capacity to reason with language that is "business speak".

I therefore expected Gore's book to be about the systematic undermining of reasoned thinking in the United States, and its deliberate replacement with appeals to emotion and faith.  Similar books in this genre are Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, Schneier's Beyond Fear, or Glassner's The Culture of Fear.

And indeed, Gore's first chapter, "The Politics of Fear," (available free online from ABC News) explores this terrain quite well.  But as he progresses through the next seven chapters, I'm afraid Mr. Gore's passions gradually over-ride his reasoned discourse, so that we go from the misuse of religion (and the current executive and his party), through the misuse of wealth (and the executive), to chapters that, well, are all anti-current-administration, all the time.

In Al Franken's book Lies and the lying liars who tell them, he had two chapters amusingly titled "Ann Coulter: Nutcase" and "You Know Who I Don't Like? Ann Coulter".  Gore's book has rather more reasonable-sounding chapters, but in the middle section, they could be fairly accurately retitled "Worst. President. Ever.", "You Know Who I Don't Like? President #43" and so on.

This is unfortunate for two reasons.  One is that this meaty diatribe in the midst of a book about reason is going to be the main section that many partisans seize upon.  The second, and more important, as I stated in my opening paragraph, is that it is factual yet irrelevant.  The entire section could have been replaced with a reference saying "See factually documented issues with current executive in (selected list of books, articles, and websites)" with Gore's formidable intellectual energies then going into analysis.

Because reason is not about listing facts, it is about analyzing them to come to useful conclusions.  Yes, all these things happened.  The war.  The Kyoto situation.  But WHY.  Why aren't the American people reacting?  Why aren't the American people informed?  Why do they fear the wrong things and draw the wrong conclusions?  Why are the people in power making certain choices?  Unless we can understand why people are doing things, we can't start to develop a strategy to address the situation.  This book needs to be less case for impeachment, more What's the Matter with Kansas? writ large.

And I find it odd that Gore does not take a global view.  This is a man who as I've said is very intelligent, with a particularly incisive understanding of how to separate local, regional, and international concerns (demonstrated by his environmental analyses in Earth in the Balance).  Yet not once does he step outside America to ask why, if other Western nations also have television and corporate power, two of the key threats to reasoned discourse he identifies, yet those other nations still have populations that participate in their political processes and that demonstrate a reasonable understanding of science and current affairs.

I'm also a concerned that, rather than being a reasoned argument starting with facts and using analysis to draw conclusions, Gore has decided on his conclusions in the same way that he accuses his opponents of doing, and then chosen his examples to support his conclusions.

Fundamentally, his conclusion is that active two-way Internet participation will re-invigorate American democracy.  I will have lots more to say about that, but to start with, in order to draw this conclusion, he then has to construct two eras: the print era, in which there was reasoned bidirectional discourse, and the radio/television era, in which there is not.  In the print era, he argues, barriers to entry were low, so that differing ideas could circulate and be debated.  I will state clearly I am no expert, but I don't believe such a golden era existed.  There was, to be sure, a time of vigorous pamphleteering, but surely never more than a tiny percentage of the population was ever involved in actually writing and circulating pamphlets.  Surely the more defining characteristic of that time period was that people who engaged in democratic discourse were often deeply educated (whether formally or self-taught) in the world's classics of literature and thought, and expected to engage in the Enlightenment ideal of active, informed debate.  They knew much, they were richly adept with the English language, and they both cared and acted.

Certainly it's true that television is a one-way visually-driven reactive medium, versus the imaginative, reflective medium of print.  But as I said above, since pretty much everyone in the  Western world has a television, there has to be more to the change in American discourse than just a change in communications technology.

What exactly, I can't say, since it's a topic that needs someone to study deeply and write a book about, a book that sadly this is not.

After his long listing of the current administration's sins, Gore devotes just a single chapter, chapter 9, to his proposed solutions.  Outrageously, he discounts somewhat the value of education in addressing the failures of reason

Education alone, however, is necessary but insufficient.

Hmm.  If one may venture, as Ghandi Gandhi said when asked what he thought about Western civilization, that "it would be a good idea", similarly perhaps before dismissing the possibilities of American education, it would be a good idea to, well, actually have some.  Some education that at least leaves students upon graduation clearly understanding how America's constitutional democracy works (which Gore demonstrates with various poll statistics that they currently don't) and also able to read and write well enough to understand the power and limitations of language and, as a bonus, maybe know some science and basic techniques of logical reasoning as well?

Alas, Gore's prescription for debate amongst an informed citizenry consists instead of:
- broadband Internet ideally able to stream television-quality video continuously
- advocacy web sites
- blogs
- wikis and particularly Wikipedia
- "Web 2.0 social networks"
- most important of all, Network Neutrality

Err, yeah, good luck with that.

Don't get me wrong, I think the Internet has a role to play in reasoned discourse.
A small role.  A useful tool for pointing attention to falsehoods and referencing inconvenient truths.
But electronic communications have a fatal allure of virtual action.

Concerned about the environment?
No need to go outside and walk in the woods,
or clean up a polluted lot in your neighbourhood,
or knock on your representative's door and explain the urgency of your position.

No, instead you can just fire off an email, write a blog posting, and then turn up the air conditioning and the lights and stretch out on the couch and read a good book.

You want to make things happen?

GO OUTSIDE, DO SOMETHING AND TALK TO PEOPLE IN PERSON

Amaznode related book visualization

Amaznode uses Flash and the Amazon API to extract and visualize related books for a search.

See e.g.

paris

and

gps

Note: it will continue pulling in results for a while (about a minute).

Via BlogSchmog.

Everything is Miscellaneous: a review

Everything is Miscellaneous could be, at a very crude level, described as "Folksonomy explained for librarians".

This is to me the core of the first 100 pages, and a topic of substantial value.  Although I don't think Weinberger ever states this explicitly, our schooling and our concepts of the world help to shape our understanding of what is possible.  I am not a librarian, but I have to assume, at least until recently, that library school is a great deal about the physicality of books, their need to be classified so that they can be shelved in their one-and-only-one location.  The lessons one learns from that kind of thinking, the implicit understanding of "information" and how it can be used, can lead one to have a set of assumptions that are so fundamental they are probably almost invisible, difficult to expose to self-examination.

Weinberger explores the reasons for the classification systems used by libraries, helping to make explicit the choices and trade-offs involved.  Then he leads one into the possibilities opened up by the unconstrained world of electronic information.

After this strong start, I found the book drifted a bit, touching on, well, various miscellaneous topics.  There is a useful section on the importance of standardized, universal, unique identifiers, a fair bit of The Usual Discussion of The Usual Suspects (WikipediaFlickrDelicious etc.), a brief pondering of the popular topic "will we filter ourselves into a reflective bubble of self-reinforcing beliefs",  then quite a bit of philosophizing about the nature of knowledge.

The last element left me a bit wary, as it edges into relativism, knowledge as an individual construct.  Yes, it is true that there are many areas where things are "fuzzy".  What is this book about?  Well, it's to some extent "about" whatever the percentages in the tag clouds associated with it say

It's "information organization internet folksonomy tagging classification".  But it is nevertheless a book, a physical object, published in 2007 and located in my house.  I think there is a lot of danger in overstating the flexible nature of understanding; nature itself is not so understanding.  All the belief in the world will not get a rocket into space, only a very precise agreement of your design with the real physical constraints of the universe will do so.

There was a good, albeit brief section where he discusses the challenges of the Semantic Web, I would summarize his conclusions as "too big and ambitious to ever work, but whatever they come up with will be a useful addition to the web of knowledge".

The book has a few minor errors when it touches on technology, for example it says you can enter a book into LibraryThing by uploading a photo of the barcode, perhaps this is some confusion with Delicious Library or with the operation of the CueCat scanners.  It also says you can look up libraries at LibraryLookup dot com, the actual URL for Jon Udell's tool is http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/LibraryLookup/

Librarians, library bloggers, and cataloging concepts are all well-represented here, I learned some interesting things about Dewey (he was obsessed with the Metric system, and had originally specified metric dimensions for the ubiquitous "3x5" card). 

If you're already familiar with the concept of folksonomy, or quite willing to accept that a book might be reached through many different paths of full-text search, blog entries, tags and catalogue metadata, this book may not add a lot for you.  But I know that there are still those out there who don't quite get it, rejecting full-text search and yearning for some nostalgic yesteryear of controlled OPAC Glory Days.  So if you're a librarian who is open to, but doesn't quite get this whole folksonomy thing, or if you're a cataloger who thinks full-text search is the devil's work, this would be a good book for you.

The one area I would have liked to have seen addressed - if only in the form of a pointer to other references, is an explanation of the fundamentals of how web pages and web servers work.  This fundament is what all the other linkages are built upon, and a lack of understanding of this technology leads, in my experience, to many fundamental misconceptions about link resolvers and the web in general.

I find myself wishing I could give two ratings on LibraryThing, with different semantic context.  For people who already know about folksonomy, or who have read similar books, I would say three stars.  For librarians, catalogers, businesspeople and others who want to understand how the digital world of unlimited categories and tags differs from the physical world of one object, one location, I would say four stars.

For me, I am waiting for the next generation of tools that exploit even more information about and within books.  As an example, I'm guessing that very few tools would be able to tell you that both in this book

It was Jean-Baptise Lamarck--unjustly remembered primarily for being wrong about how giraffes got long necks--who not only sorted out Linnaeus's worms but changed the basic shape of Linnaeus's tree.  As Gould recounts the story, Lamarck loved invertebrates so much that when he was almost fifty, he was appointed professor of insects and worms at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle.

and in Paris to the Moon

The entrance to the paleontology museum at the Jardin des Plantes is graced by a statue of Lamarck, with the engraving "The Father of Evolution," in giant letters, on its pedestal.  Darwin, on the other hand, is nowhere in sight.

two books which could not have more different topics, we yet converge on a location in Paris, a location where I happened to be just weeks ago.  When we start to develop tools that help us make these kinds of unexpected connections, I will know that we are finally starting to mobilize the information in the containers our libraries have so carefully catalogued.

UPDATE 2007-05-27: There is a good video of Weinberger presenting about his book at Google.  Via Thingology.  ENDUPDATE

Misc: I read this book because it was mentioned in the LibraryThing blog.  The dedication of this book is "To the librarians".  There is a review in the ALA Techsource blog.  The book has a blog at http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/

ISBN-13: 978-0805080438

the French National Library and more

You may have the impression that I'm a technophile, but I'm actually an appropriate-technology-phile.  People, paper and pens can be appropriate for some activities, for example, voting.

Here's a passage about the Bibliothèque nationale de France that I enjoyed from Adam Gopnik's essay "Lessons from Things, Christmas Journal 3", in his book Paris to the Moon.

Then you search, among consoles set off near the walls, for an empty, operating computer terminal on which to make your book requests.  Most of the terminals are out of order, and when you insert your identity card, they sigh and say that they are initializing.  After fifteen minutes you give up and walk up and down the great hall, looking for a terminal that works.  When you find one, you can penetrate the catalog fairly quickly; then you claim the page and demand the book; the computer registers that you have made the demand and tells you to go sit back down.  The entire library is, in principle, served by, or subject to, the same vast, single computer system, which knows who you are, where you are, what you're doing, and what you want, can track you from visit to visit, and anticipate your interests, etc.  This of course means in practice that any tiny bug in one part of the system destroys the entire operation of the library.  The latest bugs are posted on photocopied sheets Scotch-taped to the terminals: Please, don't ask to "resee" your list, they say, just ask to "revise" it, etc.

...

On the desks there is a single red light that is supposed to illuminate when your books arrive, but these lights have never been known to work.  Or, rather, they have been occasionally known to work.  So you have to get up regularly and check your computer terminal again, to see what's up.  The light may be off because the books haven't arrived yet, and it may be off because it's not working.  ...

It's quite a long essay, covering diverse topics, and I recommend it.  I was interested to read in it about the exhibits in the Jardin des Plantes, since I have recently been there (I photographed some of the buildings, but I didn't go in, I just had time to walk in the garden).  I suppose I have progressed, considering that when I was there in 2004, I didn't even know there was a natural history museum at all.

More about this book

Chapter One, courtesy of the New York Times

Excerpt chapter "A Tale of Two Cafés", courtesy Random House

ISBN-13: 978-0375758232

Photos from the Jardin des Plantes

2007:

2004:

cool geobooking and pat on the head from Google

Via Google Earth Blog I find Google Lit Trips.

This site is an experiment in teaching great literature in a very different way. Using Google Earth, students discover where in the world the greatest ... stories of all time took place

Very cool, although I suspect it's done manually, which is not so efficient.

I was a bit surprised to see a "Google Certified Teacher" logo.

If you've been reading my blog, you know my opinion on certifications of any kind, if not, here it is:

Certifications are bullshit.

On top of that, I find the idea of Google certifying teachers incredibly condescending.  Sure, you have a Bachelor's and a Master's in Education, and years of skills in getting a bunch of jittery kids to actually learn something, but hey, what use is that?  No, now you can spend some time (mostly on your own dime, it looks like) learning how to create placemarks in Google Earth and finally You've Come A Long Way Baby, you're Google Certified™®.

the Amazon embeddable search widget

It's interesting that, at the same time as libraries are worrying about losing traffic to external websites, Amazon is building search widgets that embed the search results in the local page

http://typepadwidgets.amazon.com/

If you type a search into the widget below, it will return the results within the widget, rather than forcing you to go to Amazon.  To me, this is a visible demonstration of the possibilities provided by Web Services and SOA.  The only way you can have your data show up on a remote site is by making those data visible through a well-defined external interface.  Exposed services enable external embedding and visibility.  We have seen this previously with the Amazon aStore, and now with this TypePad widget.

I have not chosen the book list below; I think Amazon is reading either post- or site-specific information (perhaps parsing the entire posting for contextual clues) in order to determine what books to display it looks like Amazon is using its Omakase technology, which recommends books based on your Amazon purchase and browsing patterns (as linked by an Amazon cookie).

Note: The widget may take a moment to appear, and it probably won't show up in a feed reader at all, due to the JavaScript libraries it needs from the web page.

   

Amazon.ca slight delivery delay

I had meticulously accumulated E.E. Doc Smith's Lensmen books at used bookstores and book sales, waiting until I had all of them before reading the series.  My parents, as parents are wont to do with comics, books and any other stuff that's in their way, cheerfully threw them all out.  They are basically impossible to buy new from Amazon.  How impossible?  The current ship date for First Lensman is January 5.  January 5, 2031.

more geobooking from Google

I love these book data visualizations.

Inside Google Book Search - Earth viewed from books

As I've said before, I can imagine such a tremendous discovery power coming from unlocking the data in books and visualising and linking it all.

via Darren Barefoot

Previously:
January 29, 2007  Google geobooking

15 libraries may close in Oregon

April 7 [2007]... Jackson County in southern Oregon shuts down its entire public library system.

The 15 libraries serving this rural forest community lost $7 million in federal funding this year -- nearly 80 percent of the system's budget.

...

Now, not long after all 15 branches were rebuilt or remodeled, every one will be shuttered in what's being called the largest library shutdown in the United States. The crisis in southern Oregon can be traced not only to changing funding priorities on Capitol Hill, but also to crooked railroad deals in the Wild West, a spotted owl and a shrinking timber harvest.

San Francisco Chronicle - Largest library closure in U.S. looms - March 4, 2007

Heard this on CBC Radio this morning.

I think this is a tragedy.  You may think I'm all about the electronic gizmos, but while I think electronic is fine for article delivery (I usually immediately print out the resulting files), I love paper books and I loved going to the library as a kid.

LibraryThing 1100

The 1100th book I've entered into my LibraryThing library is Paris Inside Out: The Insiders Handbook to Life in Paris, 7th Edition.  It just arrived from Amazon today, in advance of a trip later this year.

In case you're wondering how I got from 864 to 1100, I indexed a bunch of my books that are in storage.

Previously:
July 23, 2006  my LibraryThing 864 update