Science Library Pad

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

Chasing Crusoe

An online multimedia exploration of the real Selkirk and the fictional Crusoe.

http://www.rcrusoe.org/

imagined Canada is Costa book prize winner

Winner of the 2006 Costa Book of the Year award: Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves, a book set in 1867 Canada.

On leaving university, Stef became agoraphobic and could barely travel.  She has never been to Canada and researched The Tenderness of Wolves at The British Library.  Now recovered, Stef is 37 and lives in East London.

Canadian Living interviewed Stef Penney as it made the book its January Book Club pick.

I live near the British Library in London, and so I read everything I could find on the Canada of the period -- a lot of it written by Hudson Bay employees. In fact, the more I read, the more I became convinced that the Company had to be a part of the story.

Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1905204816

Paperback ISBN13: 978-1847240675

(Why don't ISBN13 searches work through WorldCat and Google?  Are the ISBN13s not indexed yet?  If I go directly to WorldCat.org it works.)

The imagined landscape angle is interesting, but on the other hand, it's not like you can visit 1867 anyway - and aren't even the places we have actually been to some extent imagined?  How much of a trip to London ends up being real, and how much "London of the mind"?  In fact you will find a number of books for both "imagining london" and "imagined london", including Anna Quindlen's Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City.

report on Library Future Roles webcast

I liked the EDUCAUSE Webcast Architectures for Collaboration—Roles and Expectations for Digital Libraries.  Peter Brantley (currently of CDL, soon to be Director of the Digital Library Federation) gave a very clear-eyed assessment of the current state of library IT engagement, and proposed many areas in which the library can do better.

I have to admire the boldness of a presentation whose 4th slide is "Libraries have failed in critical ways".

He said that a key role that libraries have to embrace is to enable discovering books, and searching inside of them.

He had many well-constructed phrases, I particularly liked "technology wipes out our current understanding of how libraries engage the world".

He then moved on to explore the many roles that libraries can still play, both in the physical and digital worlds (including Second Life).

I asked a rather long question about the DLF Architectures group, their DLF Service Framework, library SOA and relationships to the JISC e-Framework.

In his response (and several other times in the presentation) he highlighted the DLF Aquifer project.

If I understand it correctly, it's about building frameworks for discovery and use of distributed digital resources.

We support scholarly discovery and access by:

    * Developing schemas, protocols and communities of practice to make digital content available to scholars and students where they do their work
    * Developing the best possible systems for finding, identifying and using digital resources in context

When asked about new DLF initiatives he has planned, he indicated a few key areas:

• mass digitization
• policy issues (e.g. rights, privacy)
• new virtual communities
• new media and discourse

He had a lot of ideas about engaging with faculty and students, as well as making better connections between the library and IT, and between libraries and publishing.

In particular, he said that libraries should explore the community aspect of dealing with faculty and students - libraries as enablers of community.

In terms of IT engagement he said libraries need to move together with IT to enable deep information discovery.

He also talked about ensuring that we take full advantage of the potential of virtual worlds, and not artificially constrain ourselves to old ways of operating in them - new libraries in new worlds, or to paraphase: No OPAC IN SECOND LIFE!

He said we need to rethink social learning, recognizing that virtual spaces are social spaces with the added aspect that they are freed from normal physical constraints.

He also talked about investigating new social media, having the library as a richer and more imaginative participant in the digital publishing process.  Again a paraphrase: "imagine what the book looks like in an interactive, networked future."

He said libraries need to re-engineer scholarly communication with faculty and with the public.

He mentioned a critical task, which is that we as libraries need to learn how to get our content harvested and ranked appropriately by search engines, perhaps by working more closely with the companies making such engines.

He identified "Collaborative problems, collaborative solutions":

• massively distributed information
• rich data
• new indexing architectures
• mining and mapping our data to build interactive linkages
• challenge of providing ubiquitous access

Successful digital libraries bridge communities, build new services, and help others discover new services to build.

Digital Libraries are the architects of collaboration.

Publishing should be increasingly online and interactive, there should be digital workflows.

Challenge of "open access" to our applications - challenge for IT and libraries.
He talked a lot about how to permit remix, mashups, and combinations/

Of course my solution to that challenge is to ensure that libraries are building on a good service-oriented framework.  I very much hope that the DLF will further pursue SOA initiatives under his guidance.

Thanks to Glen for pointing out this webcast.

In case it's not clear, you can hear the audio of the presentation (which is essential, as the slides are just very high-level talking points) by following the instructions on how to log in to the "HorizonWimba archive" on the presentation page.  Once you're in the interface, switch to the Archives tab and scroll way way down to the bottom.  (Unfortunately, I currently get 503: Service Unavailable from their QuickTime server.)

UPDATE 2007-01-31: I was able to play the QuickTime audio on both my home Mac and home Windows box, with Firefox.  On the Mac the slides didn't display though.  It would be nice if EDUCAUSE offered just the audio as an MP3 / podcast.

free download of SOA book

On the shareware model: try and if you like it, buy it.

Enterprise SOA Adoption Strategies by Steve Jones

It's a free PDF download, you have to register (also free) with InfoQ first.  (Note: Adobe Reader won't let you print the book.)

What I really like about Mr. Jones is that he insists SOA is a methodology, not a specific technology.

I like this a lot since I have been evangelizing the exact same approach.

Google geobooking

Google Book Search is now linking to Google Maps.  I think this is another step in a revolution of mobilizing the data that books contain.

why not visualize places mentioned in books on a map? Now you can. Our team has begun to animate the static information found in books by organizing a sample of locations from them on an interactive Google Map

Inside Google Book Search - Books: Mapped - January 25, 2007

via Lorcan Dempsey

Previously:
July 17, 2006  geobooking - books to locations and back

books on a map

We took strings from our MARC 650 $z and plotted the corresponding titles using CommunityWalk.com, a Google Maps-based API.

Some major coolness from Botanicus Blog

The main site is http://www.botanicus.org/

Botanicus is a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library.

reports of the death of the book are premature

In 1993, Canadian futurist Frank Ogden ("Dr. Tomorrow") wrote a book entitled The Last Book You'll Ever Read.

This was not the first and certainly not the last prediction of the imminent demise of the printed page.

There is only one problem with these predictions, which is that they are consistently wrong.

Long-format is better as a printed book.  It's portable and powered only by your brain.  It is readable under a variety of lighting conditions.  Maybe tablets and/or e-ink are going to reduce our use of printed pages, but if you look at almost anyone's office, the use of paper does not appear to be declining.

The only context in which e-books ever made sense to me was for university textbooks.  These have the following characteristics:

• big
• heavy
• expensive
• always changing
• dense information explanations for people new to the field
• often never used after the course or the degree is completed

In that specific context, it makes sense to dematerialize the books so that they can be carried around easily, and also, ideally, so that they can feature enhanced materials (demonstrations, live graphs, animated problem solving etc.)

Somehow digitization of books has gotten all jumbled together with e-books and the demise of books.
I think this is incorrect.  Digitization is about SEARCH, not about reading.  Quick, find me that one brilliant description of London in that book you read.  What dates was Darwin on the Falkland Islands?  All of this information is buried in books.  All kinds of relationships and connections between books are similarly buried.  I think the prospect of surfacing these is tremendously exciting.  It will enable much better discovery of books, to be followed by delivery at the local library or bookstore.  This is a huge opportunity.

Slashdot points me to an article in yesterday's Sunday Times: Could this be the final chapter in the life of the book.

David Worlock of Electronic Publishing Services said, “Ultimately it’s not up to Google or the publishers to decide how books will be read.

It’s the readers who will have the final say.”

No, it is the teachers who will have the final say. They will determine whether people will read for information, knowledge or, ultimately, wisdom. If they fail and their pupils read only for information, then we are in deep trouble. For the net doesn’t educate and the mind must be primed to deal with its informational deluge. On that priming depends the future of civilisation. How we handle the digitising of the libraries will determine who we are to become.

I don't buy this "more information with more full-text search will lead to less civilisation" argument.  I'm pretty sure Gutenberg helped civilisation along quite a lot.  Is there any evidence anywhere in history that more information was harmful?  If having too much access to information is detrimental, maybe we should all go back to the days of an illiterate audience being harangued in Latin by the expert authorities of the day.

The event that the Times article mentions was Un-Bound: Advanced Book Publishing in a Digital World.

Previously:
September 20, 2006  ECDL 2006 - Session 10 - Next Generation Million Book Digital Libraries
January 12, 2006  libraries as warehouses of dead paper: set your books electronically free

my review of Slack

I had purchased Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency (by Tom DeMarco) with the vague notion that it was book on the topic of improving one's individual effectiveness, using Getting Things Done (GTD) principles.

It turns out instead to be a great little book about understanding how to manage knowledge workers.  DeMarco's expertise is in understanding how to manage software developers (he has a well-regarded book specifically on that topic, Peopleware).

This book targets most specifically the myth of 100% efficiency, the Taylorism notion that individual workers can be viewed as machines that can be configured to perform optimally.  The other myth it tackles is the idea of goal-first planning, where you decide your outcome first, and then attempt to force reality to conform to your schedule, however impossible.

The book also introduced me to the First Law of Bad Management, a phrase I immediately treasured:

The First Law of Bad Management

If something isn't working, do more of it.

DeMarco proposes a core solution to move your organization from a burnout-producing factory to an effective enterprise: slack.  Knowledge workers need some free time to be creative.  Google's "20% time" is a great example of a recognition of this need at the highest levels of an organization.

You can't make employees think faster.  If you try to "increase productivity" by loading them down with task after task, you actually make things worse.  There are a number of reasons for this, but a main one is the high cost of context switching.  It's a popular notion that we are all becoming great multi-taskers, but it's simply false.

Humans are not capable of maintaining multiple task states simultaneously (indeed, neither are computers, although their speed makes it appear so).  Every time a person has to switch from one complex mental task to another, they have to spend time, perhaps considerable time, to "unload" the mental state of one task and "reload" the state for the new task.  The more task switching, the less time available for actual work.

When you look at the multi-project, interrupt-driven workplace we have created, you can see we've engineered ourselves into a recipe for frustration and limited achievement.

DeMarco's book is a quick read, at 220 paperback pages split across 33 short chapters.  Highly recommended for anyone engaged in knowledge work, or managing knowledge workers.

Knowledge workers of the world unite: Give us some slack!

# Publisher: Broadway; Reprint edition (April 9, 2002)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0767907698
# ISBN-13: 978-0767907699

my review of Wikinomics

Summary

Wikinomics is a good book for managers who want to understand the latest trends in technology and society.  Toffler's The Third Wave (1980, ISBN-13: 978-0553246988) and Friedman's The World is Flat (2005, ISBN-13: 978-0374292799) are better books, with deeper insights and more thoughtful analysis, but they are also a bit more theoretical and much longer.

Details

I was initially quite sceptical about this book, the articles in the Globe were interesting but a bit short on caveats.  The tone of the book is extremely positive, to the point of sometimes excessive technology evangelism hyperbole.  However, I found that as you get farther along in the book, they do provide more balance and perspective.  If you separate out some of their marketingspeak, there is content of value.

I am a bit concerned about the approach of using a small number of "business case" exemplars, as I don't believe in the business case idea - I think most businesses successes are a result of a unique confluence of events, that wouldn't work if you tried to duplicate them.

For me, the most interesting chapters were #4, about marketplaces for ideas and innovation ("ideagoras"), #6, about shared and collaborative science, and #7, about creating technology platforms that enable innovation and expansion.

The first three chapters are ok, a basic overview of the current technology and social environment.  This will be nothing new for those of you who have been tracking these changes in your RSS feed readers, but may provide a useful capsule of information for managers and others wishing to understand these new ideas and activities.

I myself am always interested most in information that is new to me, and the chapter on idea marketplaces was an eye-opener.  As in all chapters, they pick a few specific business examples, with InnoCentive being singled out for particularly lengthy discussion.  InnoCentive describes itself as a

web-based community matching top scientists to relevant R&D challenges facing leading companies from around the globe

I think that's an interesting idea - just as eBay has been able to match buyers with sellers, InnoCentive aims to match problems with solutions.  Can you make the world your R&D department?  I think it is profoundly challenging to outsource anything, but nevertheless, it's worth experimenting with.

Chapter 5 is about Prosumers, which is Toffler's idea, The Third Wave does at least get a citation at the back of the book, although I would have liked to have seen more prominent exposure in the actual text (for that matter, why not interview Toffler, if possible).  Prosumer is basically the idea of anyone being able to both produce (with potentially global distribution) and consume media and information.  They have some good examples, but are a bit behind the times in criticizing the mainstream media, "Why is this happening on digg and not CNN..."?  Err, actually, it is happening at CNN, they call it CNN i-Reports.

I was particularly interested to read about "Sharing for Science and the Science of Sharing" in chapter 6.  There is lots of good information about how the web is an enabler for science collaboration, and many ideas for how your organization can take advantage of open science.  They do, in my opinion, rather oversimplify the issues of peer review, implying that you could replace it with the Wisdom of Crowds, an idea I have already disagreed with at length.

The next chapter covers "platforms for participation", and this is a set of ideas that I already praised when they had an article in the Globe.  This chapter should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the huge advantages of building networks of APIs (perhaps implemented as Web Services).  They talk about the activities of Google, Amazon and the like, and explain how they benefit from providing their services for use at this machine-to-machine level.  They also provide some much-welcomed caveats about business models built around platforms.

Chapter 8 is about the "Global Plant Floor", which I don't really care about since I'm not much interested in manufacturing (or similar very complex collaborative design efforts).  In fact I think that this idea of globally sourcing designs and parts is in for a big challenge if the full carbon pollution costs of vast distribution networks start to be accounted for.

Chapter 8 does end with some guidance on "harnessing the global plant floor" which I think is applicable to any type of "harnessing the new web".  Here are the subheadings:

• Focus on the critical value drivers
• Add value through orchestration
• Instill rapid, iterative design processes
• Harness modular architectures
• Create a transparent and egalitarian ecosystem
• Share the costs and risks
• Keep a keen futures watch

If reading this book leads to people and organizations embracing even a few of the above activities, it will be of great benefit.

The final two chapters deal with how your can try to bring collaborative, dynamic work patterns into your organization, and harness the power of open collaboration.  Some good guidance is provided about when these patterns may and may not be useful.

Overall I thought it was a useful book.  I learned some new things and I also got some ideas about how to present some of the complex technology topics I deal with, including numerous concrete business examples.

In the spirit of open collaboration, their book's final chapter 11 is a blank wiki online, for the readers to create.

Product details from Amazon.com

# Hardcover: 320 pages
# Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover (December 28, 2006)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1591841380
# ISBN-13: 978-1591841388

Previously:
November 24, 2006  the Wikinomic Generation

a library quest

Pretty much just like doing a regular ILL, except for the part where I had to kill monsters to get special ore to grind into ink to copy the only existing edition of a book.
Actually on second thought, given what I know about our library systems, not much different from ILL after all.

above: Milton Sheaf, Head Librarian of the Royal Library in Stormwind Keep, directs me to another library

above: Brother Paxton, Northshire Abbey librarian

above: Northshire Abbey, Library Wing

carbon neutral is OUP 2006 phrase of the year

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2006 is (drum roll please) Carbon Neutral.

Being carbon neutral involves calculating your total climate-damaging carbon emissions, reducing them where possible, and then balancing your remaining emissions, often by purchasing a carbon offset: paying to plant new trees or investing in “green” technologies such as solar and wind power.

Oxford University Press USA blog - Carbon Neutral: Oxford Word of the Year

via DeSmogBlog

This is also a favourite of mine:

elbow bump (a greeting in which two people touch elbows, recommended by the World Health Organization as an alternative to the handshake in order to reduce the spread of germs.)

the Blooker Prize

Yes, you read that right.

The Lulu Blooker Prize is the world's first literary prize devoted to "blooks"—books based on websites such as blogs and webcomics.

Awarded in three categories:

    * Fiction
    * Non-Fiction
    * Comics

$10,000 First Prize
$15,000 Total Prize Fund
$2,500 Category Prizes

In case you're not aware, Lulu is a big name in self-publishing.

via TypePad Featured Blogs

OED / BBC word hunt

The compilers of the definitive English dictionary want the public's help to find the roots of words such as stiletto and loo, British media reported yesterday.

Those behind The Oxford English Dictionary are appealing for assistance with 40 definitions

Globe and Mail - Dictionary seeks help in etymological sleuthing - January 4, 2007

The OED site is: Balderdash & Piffle Wordhunt.

Slashdot review of Wikinomics

Slashdot Books - Wikinomics - January 3, 2007 /.