American Libraries Magazine: Internet Librarian

Data, Data Everywhere

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:55:44 +0000

By Joseph Janes

As the Big Data beast fattens, will privacy and ethics get gobbled up?

The Michigan Theater is at 603 East Liberty St. in Ann Arbor. Athletes Tom Brady and Cal Ripken have the same body mass index, 27—lower than Dr. Phil’s but higher than Abraham Lincoln’s. Austria’s fertility rate peaked in 1963 and has been falling steadily ever since. Q Lending Inc., of Coral Gables, Florida, received the smallest bailout from the TARP program, at $10,000.

I’m sure you found all of these as fascinating as I did, undoubtedly also wondering where this was going. These facts and a few gazillion others come to you courtesy of Factual, the brainchild of mathematician Gilad Elbaz, who gave us the company that is now Google’s AdSense. In Factual’s 500 terabytes of storage, there’s data from sources governmental and private, on topics broad and narrow, profound and trivial. It’s worth a wander through the website and its featured data sets to see just what it’s been vacuuming up.

A feature article in the March 24 New York Times tells us the company’s plan is “to build the world’s chief reference point for thousands of interconnected supercomputing clouds,” and goes on to describe of Factual’s clientele and and how they use the product. It also names a few competitors, including Infochimps, Gnip, and of course Wolfram Alpha, which partially powers Siri. Factual, by the way, is hiring; its “data specialist” jobs sound more than a little familiar, even if the page describing them lists 2010–2011 internship opportunities. Oops—I guess bad data can creep in everywhere.

This came hard on the heels of the announcement that the Statistical Abstract of the United States had been saved at the last moment by ProQuest. I’m glad of that; it seemed a shame that the government no longer felt it was worth publishing. I should be clear: I’ve never been a fan of the Abstract. (I’m a World Almanac sort of guy.) While its various elements are valuable and come in handy, the way in which it was organized—particularly the index that gave table numbers rather than pages—seemed stubbornly user-hostile to me. And the web version, consisting of large PDF slabs of tables, has gone from understandably simple to gratingly low-tech. Adding Excel versions was nice, though the whole thing still comes off as antediluvian.

Maybe ProQuest will attend to these shortcomings. In any event, these make for a sharp and illustrative counterpoint. One way of thinking about compiling Lots of Data is to organize it, by category—which perhaps yields some context and texture—add some metadata and a search mechanism, all in the service of providing access, so individual people can find a specific fact or set of facts in answer to a question.

Another way, only now feasible, is to mush it all together and see what can be learned. Not by an individual, necessarily, but rather by throwing tons of computing power at it to see what emerges. Both are attempts to somehow wrap our arms and minds around the vertiginous scope and complexity of data being generated and stored every second.

The name “Big Data” gets thrown around a lot, to denote this massive-data-conglomeration phenomenon. We’re told this will be an opportunity for information-focused people to collect, curate, manage, organize. All likely true, and all worth pursuing as extensions of work we’re familiar with.

Go one step further, though. How about professionals who work to humanize this field? Those who think about questions of privacy, authority, quality, authenticity, rationality, and ethicality. Who center these processes in efforts to better the human condition and the lives of individuals. Who build tools to gyre and gimbal in the taffeta of data to find just the right thread for a person in need. Somebody like, I don’t know, a reference librarian … but that’s another story.

JOE JANES is associate professor at the Information School of the University of Washington.

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A Hazy Shade of (Mid)winter

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:00:20 +0000

March/April 2012

By Joseph Janes

A whirlwind of meetings, ideas, and conversations—FTW!

You know that feeling you get when you come home from a conference, and it’s all kind of a blur? That’s been my post-Midwinter experience. Of course, it came right after being housebound for several days during a rare Seattle snowstorm, so I was happy just to be somewhere sunny and warm, no matter how bewildering that was.

Not to mention this was my first post-COA conference. I just finished four fascinating years as a member of the Committee on Accreditation, which was hard work, very fulfilling, and extremely informative. They’re always looking for good people to serve on review panels, which is less work but important, so anyone interested in contributing to future education for the profession should apply.

As if the trip itself wasn’t disorienting enough, it came on the heels of the Wikipedia-goes-dark SOPA protest, which seems to have actually made a difference. Lo and behold, on the bus I ran into Phoebe Ayers from the University of California at Davis, a former student and Wikimedia board member, who told me the decision to go dark wasn’t without controversy (as if anything is) but that it seemed an important and necessary step. It’s also a toe in the water in advocacy and in leadership of the noncommercial segment of the internet and, as such, worth watching further.

A quick aside: Of course, there was the predictably snarky aftermarket to the protest, including the inevitable #DayWithoutWikipedia Twitter hashtag meme. My personal favorite? #DayWithoutWikipedia “= Day without copy and paste.” Just how many students found themselves floundering that day—and how many libraries took advantage?

I was so befuddled I actually wound up in a session on cataloging. (I know, shocking.) The discussion of next-generation catalogs was brisk and informative. There’s a lot going on in that world: FRBR and RDA and MARC and SQL and resolving between all those; open-source options (including the great XC project out of the University of Rochester); and emerging ideas from commercial vendors. Takeaways: The ProQuest rep said that lately most libraries are devoting 60% or more of their materials budget to digital formats. OCLC estimates there are 1.2 million libraries in the world; getting attention paid to “libraries” is tricky because unlike Amazon or Facebook, they’re not in one single location; they’re distributed—everywhere. And John Larson of ExLibris talked about the tradeoff between extensibility and semantic richness in any catalog. Hmmm.

There was also the “Trends in Higher Ed” session moderated by the estimable Lynn Connaway: research data curation, long-term preservation of digital materials, the user expectation of seamless access, and the growing importance of the mobile learning environment, among other things.

And how could I resist “UX + VR = FTW”? Courtney Greene from Indiana University led a fascinating hour-plus, late-afternoon session (how often do you hear that?) on how to think about reference from a user’s perspective—for the win! I was equally impressed at the questions and discussions that followed, about a wide range of not only technologies but ideas for improving service. A quick one: How about every time your link resolver fails to find an article, or a catalog search yields zero results, you put up a chat or IM widget for your reference service? Brilliant!

See what I mean? I was so taken with the level of sophistication, depth, passion, creativity, community, collaboration, and downright chutzpah on display throughout, particularly in such a time of profound change and, often, retrenchment. It made me even prouder to be a librarian. Oh, and the steak was incredible, too … but that’s another story.

JOE JANES is associate professor at the Information School of the University of Washington in Seattle.

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What’s in a Name?

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:00:50 +0000

January/February 2012

By Joseph Janes

If you haven’t googled the word “Santorum,” now would be a good time—otherwise most of what follows won’t make a lot of sense. Fair warning: What you find won’t be pretty (i.e., it will be explicit), but it will be instructive.

Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s examine this phenomenon. The neologism that appears first is certainly vivid and imaginative, and as we learn from the Wikipedia entry that shows up second in my search today, it’s been around for several years, the product of one person’s attempt to shame a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania about his opinions. My opinions, such as they are, of the senator’s views—from which he has not backed away—are beside the point. This is character assassination, in an almost purely literal sense of the phrase, depriving the senator of his name for all intents and purposes, since we all know that these days you are what you Google as.

There’s an intriguingly metaphysical aspect to this as well. Among the debates one uncovers is whether this is an old-fashioned Google bomb (ah, those halcyon days of “miserable failure”). If you think this is an attempt to deceive people about the senator, then it is—but not if you think it’s just a new word being coined. And just how many angels did we decide were dancing on that pin, by the way?

I was planning to write about this whole business anyway, originally intending to connect it to Google’s recent revisions of its algorithm, followed by the elimination of the “+” operator and subsequent introduction of the somewhat-more-feeble Verbatim option. Less than half a percent of searches used the “+,” and two thirds of those were incorrect, says Google, so I guess most of us aren’t in the 99% on this score.

Then, like a gift from the gods, came the story about how Facebook had changed Salman Rushdie’s name on his account to his proper given name, Ahmed. He was understandably peeved, turned to Twitter to call out Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook nomenclature hegemonists, and within two hours got to be Salman again. Yay.

Coverage of this story was sympathetic to Rushdie, while also pointing out the understandable difficulties for internet hosts and providers to determine the real from the fake and the increasing trend of using Facebook in particular to sign in to other services, thus raising the stakes and importance of somehow being able to verify identity online. This also leads to the somewhat worrying prospect that, although Americans have consistently spurned the idea of a national identity card, Facebook might be able to achieve much the same objective through the back door.

Apart from Facebook shooting itself in the foot (yet again), I was struck by how differently some people seemed to treat these two phenomena. It’s okay to, um, savage Rick Santorum’s name, but Facebook should let Salman Rushdie be who he wants to say he is. And we thought name authority was difficult.

As of today, more than 35,000 people had liked the “redefining Santorum” web page, and more than 5,000 had +1ed it on Google. Once something like that reaches critical mass, it’s nigh impossible to do much about it, and Google has firmly said it doesn’t mess with organic results absent illegality, which we should support. Our lesson today, then, seems to be you are who everybody thinks you are, or ought to be, which is great if that’s who you think you are too.

There’s a good old English word for what’s been done to the senator, coincidentally connected to the act in question … but that’s another story.

Joe Janes is associate professor at the Information School of the University of Washington.

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Readers Are Fundamental

Beverly Goldberg — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:04:43 +0000

November / December 2011

By Joseph Janes

What else would you call someone who reads?

I was all set to wax rhapsodic here about my iPad, how much I’m enjoying my new toy (and it is a toy, I know), how quickly I got to the point of loving the “app” idea for its convenience and speed, how interesting it is that I’ve started to begrudge using the web at times, and how hard it is to find apps I might like without knowing what I am looking for in the Apple App Store (which is a classic search/recommendation problem).

Events, however, piled on top of one another and subverted my plans. First, I saw the fascinating results of a poll on Stephen’s Lighthouse (Stephen Abram’s must-read blog), where he asked what we should call people who read the e-versions of books. A dramatically split decision, with respondents favoring “digital readers,” “e-readers,” “ebook readers,” “mobile readers,” and several other more exotic options. (“Nonprint readers”? Seriously?) The intriguing aspect for me was not the specific responses so much as their wide variety without a clear consensus, from which I infer we haven’t figured this out yet.

Then came word of the untimely death of Michael Hart, the founder and driving force of Project Gutenberg (and of course, of Steve Jobs, who I wrote about here). For 40 years—yes, 40 years—Michael worked tirelessly to make digital versions of books freely available online, often one keystroke at a time. Michael was many things—fanatically absorbed in his work and his cause, a provocateur, and sometimes, to be honest, a pain in the ass. His passing is a sadness, his voice will be missed, and the ideas he pushed will no doubt live for generations to come.

And then, like a thunderclap, we heard the news of the lawsuit pitting what appears to be every author in the world against the Google libraries and the HathiTrust for copyright violation. I didn’t see this coming; in fact, in preparing for my course this fall in which we discuss the evolution of the book, I had largely put aside the Google Books litigation sideshow because nothing was happening. Oops.

The common thread here is reading, and how we define it. I wouldn’t even say “redefinition” because innovations have come and gone, from the second-century codex to medieval word separation and silent reading, right up to today, and reading follows quite naturally and seamlessly along. Only a generation ago, audiobooks weren’t always regarded as reading, per se, and even today, graphic novels raise a few eyebrows among those who don’t consider the format “serious” reading.

Stephen’s poll, intentionally or not, didn’t include one obvious option: “readers.” His blog’s (ahem) readers stepped right up and plugged it in as a write-in candidate, and several commenters followed suit. For my money, this is the only viable name for the consumption of written words; all the others come across as clumsy and already dated.

Can we all just spare one another the endless discussion and get on with the important stuff? Authors and publishers already get it: The ways in which stories are displayed come and go; what matters is the story and the storytelling. (And the royalties and rights management, apparently.)

I believe that what many saw as Michael’s lack of tolerance of people who didn’t share his ideas or points of view was actually a display of his impatience with delays in what he saw so clearly as the necessary work to be done. Everyone involved can agree that while the parade of technologies never ends and in fact accelerates, the power of the stories and the ideas behind them will never ebb … but that’s yet another story.

JOSEPH JANES is associate professor at the Information School of the University of Washington.

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Steve Jobs, 1955–∞

Beverly Goldberg — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 20:20:24 +0000

By Joseph Janes

May there always be one more thing

Here I sit, minding my own business (OK, working a crossword puzzle and catching my breath after an exhilarating class session with our new graduate students about the future of the book and how libraries will respond to whatever is happening) when an email pings with a request to write an “extra” column for American Libraries—an online-only reflection about Steve Jobs and his legacy to the library world.

Happy to. And I need go no further than a 3-foot radius around my work space to see his influence: I’m writing this on a shiny new MacBook after firing up my special writing-music playlist on my iPod (which isn’t even an iPod since it’s really just an app on my iPad2). Beyond the technologies, two words in the previous sentence testify further to Steve Jobs’s reach into everyday life; he may not have invented or even pioneered the terms “playlists” or “apps,” but without him, would they be familiar to millions upon millions of people?

I’ve been a Mac guy for a long time, even through the dark years when I was forced to live under the Windows hegemony. I had a Mac Plus back in the day, which I lo-o-o-o-ved, and got an iPod in 2003 (see my March 2005 column), even though I knew I wanted one 30 years earlier (without knowing exactly what it was I craved), as I sat in my bedroom, finger poised over the record button of my tape recorder, waiting for my favorite songs to come on the radio so I could create what was yet to be called a mixtape.

Those of us of a certain age also remember the days when Apple used to exhibit at ALA conferences; the Apple Library of Tomorrow was a beacon for those of us trying to figure out how increasingly available technology could enhance and further librarianship. Steve Cisler and Monica Ertel, bless them, carried that torch and lit the way. They also made a huge difference to me, giving early visibility to the Internet Public Library project, for which I will always be grateful.

Steve Jobs was a fascinating and multifaceted personality: design guru, lifestyle icon, movie mogul (his Disney stock, earned when he sold Pixar, is worth about twice his Apple holdings), technological soothsayer. I have to admit that the depth and emotion that have characterized the response to his death surprised me; people are leaving flowers, notes, and in a charmingly wistful vein, apples minus single bites at Apple stores. He would have appreciated the simple, even stark memorial front page on the Apple website; for that matter, he might well have approved it.

Even though, as we all know, technology is just a means to an end—not unlike the information it processes—Jobs made that technology sexy, compelling, worthy of notice in its own right and for its own sake, and maybe most importantly, cool. The designers and conceivers of the IBM PC had a significant role in the explosion of “personal computing” and of course that platform has had greater commercial success over the years. But do you know their names?

As heroes go, though, Jobs was a bit chilly, distant, even detached. So the emotional reaction to his death, at least in part, isn’t really about him—though on some level it is, of course—it’s more about what he represented to people. We remember him, but mainly we remember moments associated with the stuff he decided we wanted. He was a taste-maker, one of an increasingly rare breed who really understood, deeply and authentically, what people would respond to. The quote from his obituary that has stayed with me epitomizes this: “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.”

There’s a reason that many of these paragraphs are about me and my experiences with and uses of Apple technology (full disclosure: the crossword puzzle and obituary were both accessed on my iPad). Background egomania notwithstanding, that’s because we live in a world shaped to no small extent by Jobs’s personal vision of how technology could and should be used—in personal ways. Only Steve Jobs could say “computers are like bicycles for our minds” and not sound like an idiot—and then make it crystal clear through his product line.

I was asked to write about Steve Jobs’s legacy for the library world. Let me instead suggest what we might take from his informed intuition going forward. The world he helped to make grows ever more complex and fraught, and it can seem as though perils lurk behind every decision we face. When in search of guidance for those decisions, remember the personal; even the most seemingly trivial of interactions with information or a librarian can be profound, and a focus on the human aspects might pay dividends.

It’s also appropriate, perhaps, that this will be my first column that’s not intended for the printed page. As with so many things, it’s not clear what that might foretell … but that’s another story.

JOE JANES is associate professor at the Information School of the University of Washington.

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What’s Gone Is Gone

Beverly Goldberg — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 22:05:28 +0000

September/October 2011

Joseph Janes

Haunted by losses that we can’t document

I wasn’t intending to write a “9/11” column, really. The 10th-anniversary rumblings have already begun as I write this, and I’ve started to ponder what I’ll do on the actual day (apart from pulling the covers over my head and muting the inevitable pregame and halftime goings-on during NFL opening-week games).

Then, over coffee and a scone one morning, I read an Associated Press story (“Mystery Surrounds Loss of Records, Art on 9/11’) about records and documents that were lost that day. Like everybody else, I vividly remember the blizzard of papers that cascaded down from the towers, some of which made it all the way to Brooklyn (AL, Oct. 2001, p. 20–21; Nov. 2001, p. 12–17), so the article didn’t come as a complete surprise.

Until, that is, I got to the sentence that starts “Twenty-one libraries were destroyed… .”

Really? I never knew that. The article lists a number of businesses and government agencies (including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the CIA) that had offices in the area, so it makes sense that libraries would have been among the casualties. The litany of what’s gone—collections of documents on the history of trade, a trove of photo negatives of JFK stored for safekeeping, documents from the Helen Keller Institute, art from the site—reinforces not only the breadth and scale of what was there but of the diversity of collections in general, often precious and in some cases irreplaceable.

More perniciously, in many cases not only is material gone, but so are the inventories—so it’s not even possible to know precisely what is lost. And sadder still is the tale told in the article about the decade of “litigation, politics, and overall distrust surrounding the 9/11 attacks,” which has meant little progress or cooperation among organizations involved.

The cautionary, back-up-your-stuff-now aspect of this is obvious. I found myself dwelling on the notion of not fully knowing what was gone. Losing all those resources is bad enough; never being able to identify what it all was has a certain Library at Alexandria vibe to it.

Ultimately, this is a story about continuity. One of the reasons we have libraries, and particularly archives, is that they enable us to get on with it, to keep and maintain the records of what has gone before so they can be consulted when needed. The EEOC had to redo witness interviews and the original document creating the Port Authority is, presumably forever, gone. Yes, both these and other organizations have endured, but it can’t have been easy or fun.

It’s easy to blithely say that this is all much less troublesome in a networked environment. Physical records, often unique, are more susceptible to destruction, degradation, or just plain misplacement, that line goes, but on a distributed network they can be duplicated and searched easily. The put-it-all-on-the-cloud argument has some merit—assuming the cloud is reliable and well protected.

Sure, there are technological preventatives and remedies here, though not without peril. (Tried searching an intranet lately?) Add in some tried-and-true values like stewardship and conservatorship, a service orientation, and the importance of understanding and using the best and most viable technology for the situation and clientele, stir well, and there are lessons to be learned for us all.

Coincidentally—I assume—my work email was out for a little while this morning, so it was with a combination of relief and anxiety that I sat down to peck this out. It came back after a while, though not before I had a fever dream or two about, um, how somebody would tell me why the email was out and how I’d get stuff done without it … but that’s another story.

JOSEPH JANES is associate professor at the Information School of the University of Washington in Seattle.

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As They Like It

Beverly Goldberg — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:00:06 +0000

July/August 2011

Joseph Janes

Make friends, influence search results

One of the best parts of my job, especially this time of year, is marveling at great achievements; how splendid it was to witness an old friend and erstwhile student, Eric Meyers, defend his dissertation last month.

Eric’s dissertation covered a lot of territory; he studied the relationship between group information-seeking processes and the products of that activity in middle-school students, and found, among many fascinating things, that while youngsters liked working in groups, it often impeded rather than enhanced their performance on information problem-solving tasks. His model of group problem solving, suggesting beneficial places for professional intervention and assistance, will also be of great interest to many.

A minor note in his work caught my eye. In many cases, it seemed students were relying on the search results page, rather than clicking through to a website to find answers or information. That’s not difficult to believe for middle-school students working on a class assignment, nor, now that I think about it, for anybody else. Truth be told, I’ve done this before, if all I was looking for was available in the title, URL, or brief excerpt on the results page.

This results-page-as-destination was on my mind when I saw a commercial a few days later highlighting a new feature from Bing. It’s one of the early forays into an area we all know is coming: social search. That’s been in the wind for a while, and now Microsoft is rolling this out. They say that research shows 90% of people consult family or friends when making a decision and that 80% will delay a decision until making that consultation.

Now you don’t have to, because Bing will do it for you! As Microsoft encourages, “see which stories, content, and sites your Facebook friends have ‘liked,’ from news stories, celebrities, movies, bands, brands, and more. With the ‘thumbs up’ from your friends you can jump right to the stuff that matters the most to you.” Integration with Facebook will also allow it to prefer sites and “stuff” that friends have liked, as well as things that have been liked by others, an addition to the popularity metrics that search engines have used for years.

There’s more, including a suggestion to ask friends to “like” more things, so that there’s more data to use (and more traffic on Facebook, imagine that), and so on. Undoubtedly, this is only the beginning of this sort of trend—there’s a whole lotta data out there in status updates and likes, tweets, geolocation check-ins, and so on. (No automatic biometric attitudinal data yet, but no doubt that will be coming soon from mood sensors on phones and tablets? Ick.) And if we’ve learned nothing else over the last decade, it’s that data will get used by somebody who sees a way to make money off it.

All of this seems to me a simultaneous broadening and narrowing of the concept of search: encompassing even more information to improve a process notoriously difficult to crack, while diminishing the depth and complexity of the evaluation, understanding, and use of the results. Assuming this works, we’ll see more examples of socially- aided or driven search, which will no doubt affect how search works, and thus how people think about search, and on and on, becoming a process increasingly personal and popular, in both senses of the word.

Mayhap Keats had it right nearly 200 years ago: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” … but that’s another story.

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A Numbers Game: The Life of an E-book

Sean Fitzpatrick — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 13:15:34 +0000

May/June 2011

By Joseph Janes

26 is a peculiar number. Mathematically speaking, it’s not that interesting; the Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers tells us it’s the sum of the digits of its cube (26^3 = 17576). Yawn. Wikipedia offers the atomic number of iron, the number of Swiss cantons or Oscars won by Walt Disney, or, alarmingly, the “number of space-time dimensions in bosonic string theory.”

Unless you’ve been living in a cave on Mars with your fingers in your ears, you know why the number 26 is of sudden concern to us. HarperCollins has announced it will magnanimously allow that many loans of its e-books before they go poof into the ether. The publisher must have calculated that that was the point at which its marginal profit per “copy” dropped beyond an acceptable limit, or was the rough equivalent of the number of loans a physical copy of a book could sustain. Or, HC made it up.

I’ll leave it to others to opine and speculate on the mercantile vs. ethical aspects of this PR gem; instead let’s think about why this has riled people up so much. Sure, it’s a shocker; the only other time I can remember publishers wanting to come to the library to pull stuff back was that government-document-reclassification foofah in 2006. Typically, publishers want their stuff read, or maybe that’s a hopelessly old-fashioned perspective.

Basically, we don’t like to be told what to do, or how to manage our stuff. There’s the rub, though; it’s not really our stuff any longer. It’s theirs, and they’re just letting us use it access it pay for it, for a while.

In November 2005 (“From the Other Side of the Rubicon,”) I wrote: “To be honest, as we all know, it’s not like we really have a choice any more,” making the point that librarianship necessarily involved the internet and that there was no going back. One could now say much the same about licensed access to databases, journals, and, apparently, e-books. It’s clear what we have gained: broader accessibility, greater reach, more use. We also can cast a wan glance over our professional shoulder with nostalgia, wistfulness, and a tinge of regret for what we had when we bought stuff, owned it, kept it safe, and doled it out.

The HarperCollins announcement (and Amazon’s booting of Lendle) is at once a banal business decision and a profound marker in our ongoing relationship with works of creation. The Merry Wives of Windsor that sits on my shelf is the same one that the first Queen Elizabeth saw around 1601 and her namesake has no doubt read, along with Dickens and Swift and the Brontës and Orwell.

Now, without the apparatus of the Ministry of Truth, we can no longer be so sure. Books aren’t necessarily what are sold, they are what they are as of today. The bowdlerization of Huckleberry Finn is a mere hint—what if that had been published as an authoritative version and nobody even knew it? Or noticed? Or cared?

So yes, it’s about the money—as it’s been since Gutenberg—though this time it’s also about the works themselves and who gets to be in charge of what they are, when, for whom, and how much. Uncharted territory, this side of the river.

We all know that 26 is also the number of letters in the alphabet, miles in a marathon, and half a deck of cards. Must…resist…temptation…to end with half-baked “running a marathon/playing with half a deck” reference…. Now if the number in question was 42, it’d make some literary sense…but that’s another story.

Joe Janes is associate professor at the Information School of the University of Washington in Seattle.

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Lost and Found

Sean Fitzpatrick — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 22:04:54 +0000

March/April 2011

By Joseph Janes

Vignettes from the frontiers of modern life

At dinner the other night with friends, we learned that their eldest daughter, a college sophomore, had had her boyfriend visit for a few days over the holidays. The visit went fine, or so it seemed, and then the relationship ended, abruptly and unexpectedly.

A sad, if not uncommon story; the punch line was how my friend found out this had happened—by the fact that the boyfriend’s Facebook relationship status had been switched to “single.” A phone call confirmed the breakup, and since her daughter didn’t change her status for quite a while, it didn’t take much deduction to figure out who broke up with who. (Apparently, this happened at the airport as he was leaving; at least he had the good grace to do it in person and not dump her by a text from the tarmac, so he’s not a complete heel.)

For some reason, this put me in mind of the search I did for another friend and colleague whom I lost touch with a couple of years ago. I found myself thinking about her and wondering what she was up to, so I turned, naturally, to the internet. I started with Google (yes, I know, very 2008) and all I could find were older results; filtering for recent pages came up dry, as did a search in the last place I knew she had worked. Bing was no better, leading me to an outdated entry in Zoominfo; nor was Intelius or LinkedIn or even Facebook, since hers is not an uncommon name.

Admittedly, I didn’t do an exhaustive search; it was more of the I-wonder-where-and-what variety. And I didn’t reach out to mutual friends and connections, which would be a natural next step. (I did, though, do a quick obituary search, for my own peace of mind, which happily also yielded nothing.)

Of course, I have no idea why my search failed. I guess the surprising part to me wasn’t that I couldn’t find the particular person I was looking for, so much as that there was any way not to find somebody you were looking for. We’ve become so much of a culture of self-broadcasting by tweets and status updates and blogs and Foursquare badges and smartphones with GPS functionality that it’s difficult to imagine being invisible, unfindable, off the radar, gone.

There have always been resources to help us learn more about people—from Who’s Who and Burke’s Peerage through Current Biography, Find a Grave and ancestry.com. In the constellation of reference tools, they belonged up there with resources about books, journals, places, words, facts as among the primary categories. A moment’s contemplation of the title of Who’s Who tells you one of the main traditional reasons for that: an implication that certain people are more important than others—that their lives are worth memorializing, remembering, remarking on, emulating (or avoiding).

Today, it’s not only easier to get famous (Snooki, anyone?), it’s easier to be known or at least known about, and by extension less easy not to be known. Has it been at least a week since a long-lost classmate friended you? (Or since Facebook developed a new tool that gave away more of your private info by default?)

The traditional biographical sources helped to satisfy our curiosity about people we would likely never meet. Now it’s easy to get “friends” who we may never meet and know intimate things about people we’ll never know. As an old (real) friend of mine used to say: “People. They’re everywhere” … but that’s another story.

JOE JANES is associate professor at the Information School of the University of Washington in Seattle.

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No Relax: Sophisticated Search Operator Is a Metaphor of Modern Life

Sean Fitzpatrick — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 15:08:25 +0000

January/February 2011

Joseph Janes

I had a splendid time at the Internet Librarian conference last fall (and not just because I made it into a birthday-celebration weekend in Monterey, though that and the yummy meals didn’t hurt matters any). It’s a crisply conducted conference and draws a varied and eager crowd.

This year, I was particularly attracted to an entire day of sessions on search. Several connoisseurs were on the menu, so with appropriate thanks to Chris Sherman, Mary Ellen Bates, and Gary Price, from whom I lifted these tidbits, I thought I’d share some of what I found most appealing and striking from the day.

First of all, Bing. Not yet a verb, but an increasingly interesting and viable search tool. A full range of services (bing.com/explore), of course, with an emphasis on things like travel, shopping, and so on as you know from the commercials. Did you also know they had licensed a number of music and TV shows for free streaming? Neither did I. Nor did I know that they tried to balance points of view on controversial issues (try a search on <should we bail out the banks> and look to the upper left).

I got my first good look at Blekko, which is an atrocious name for a search engine—unless it was developed by the guys at Mad magazine. It’s not yet in public release, one of those ask-us-and-we’ll-let-you-look deals, and apparently it allows for customization of the database or results (a search like <global warming/green> would be different from <global warming/tech>, for example). Worth watching when it gets released.

Some Google tricks were on offer as well. We’ve all discovered Instant Search by now, I assume. (Yawn.) Apparently, as only Google can do, they’ve calculated that not having to hit return or click the little box will save the average searcher two to five seconds per search, or a total of 350 million hours per year. How nice.

On a more worthwhile note, Google’s Image Swirl has real potential to make image searching more effective. It tries to group images into related categories and allows browsing among them. Real-time search results (such as from Twitter and Facebook) can be organized on a timeline to bring a little order to the chaos: Go to Updates in the left-hand sidebar. I also hadn’t realized they were leveraging YouTube assets to provide episode-level access to TV shows (search the show under Videos, if they’ve got them, the episode guides will appear on the left).

Back to Bing and the most impressive thing I heard about: advanced operators. Really advanced. Trust Microsoft to hide these and write documentation for them that looks like a 1975 IBM manual … but they’re there; search <bing advanced operator reference>. Several versions of familiar Google tools such as intitle:, url:, site:, OR, and the like, as well as some very keen ideas. Like imagesize:, which is pretty obvious. Or near:, a proximity operator which made me mist up a bit, thinking of the good old days of search tools one could actually control. Or inanchor:, which is very interesting, allowing search in the anchor text on a page … almost a little bit sorta maybe like a subject search?

The operator with the best name, though, has got to be the one that forces Bing to search all the words in a long string with equal weight (typically, beyond five words, the later words don’t necessarily have to appear in results). It’s called norelax:, which is not only descriptive of the operator, it’s also provocatively metaphorical for our times … but that’s another story.

JOE JANES is associate professor at the Information School of the University of Washington.