American Libraries Magazine: Internet Librarian

Making Friends with Research

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:26:15 +0000

March/April 2013

By Joseph Janes

Did you know that about 95% of incarcerated people eventually reenter the general population? Neither did I. Nor did I know that a high proportion of them are high school dropouts, though I suppose that’s not all that surprising. Given those circumstances, the importance of, say, health literacy training for inmates seems pretty obvious. Obvious, but not easy, especially when you consider that, um, they’re not allowed to use the internet.

Solving that conundrum is the aim of a project led by Gail Kouame of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM). She and her team built a sort of internet-in-a-box to simulate the experience of web browsing. The regional NN/LM is housed at our university’s health science library, which is how I got to hear about this.

My point isn’t just to show off the work of our library’s great people—like Emily Keller and Deb Raftus, who are writing books for new academic libraries that are suddenly faced with new subject specialties, or John Vallier, whose project involves figuring out what to do about those horrible DRM terms of service on music downloads that nobody reads (though institutions should really pay attention to terms of service lest they run afoul of them.

Nope, not just showing off. I’m writing about this because, for as long as I’ve been in this field, I’ve heard the continual “They don’t get it” from both academics and practitioners when it comes to research. “Academics are pointy-headed theorists who wouldn’t know what to do with a real patron and whose research is abstruse at best and frivolous at worst.” “Practitioners are small-minded drudges who care not a whit about anything that doesn’t speak to their momentary and comparatively petty work concerns.”

Sound familiar?

And for the record, it’s not hard to find cringe-inducing research that sends me scrambling for the door at conferences and to find library staffers who believe all research is pointless. Moreover, there are colleges and universities with libraries and LIS programs that barely tolerate or even acknowledge one another, or worse.

This all seems so … pointless. Yes, we see the world from different perspectives, but c’mon. Numerous recent examples of great research that’s useful in and motivated by practice (and vice versa) have arisen from OCLC, Pew, Project Information Literacy, and a bunch of libraries. I’ve also been very impressed with the kinds of in-house investigations done by folks at universities like Illinois and Rochester, helping us to understand the nature of their users and how they do their work.

The point here is that “research” can take many forms and be for many purposes, and when our professional and scholarly communities come together and understand each other and each other’s perspectives, the results of that research can be even more powerful in both venues. That same research that is seen as today’s esoterica could become tomorrow’s can’t-live-without-it. (Google? Probabilistic information retrieval?)

If you want a great example of research that can do both, I give you our PhD student Jill Woelfer. She’s spent much of the past several years working with homeless young people and researching their information lives and their use of mobile devices. She asked them how they use and experience public libraries. In her study, she found that almost 80% use them, mostly to get online (for employment information, classes, social networks), to find books, and—get this—to talk to librarians. For help.

It’s possible that engaging with librarians and libraries might help homeless kids move past the bad experiences many of them have had with social institutions. Knowing how they relearn how to interact could be an important part of facilitating that process. A goal we can all agree on … but that’s another story.

JOSEPH JANES is associate professor and MLIS program chair at the Information School of the University of Washington in Seattle.

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Why Do Publishers Hate Us?

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:02:52 +0000

January/February 2013

By Joseph Janes

Fear of uncertainty is driving—or deterring—dialogue

Okay, now I’ve got this bright, shiny new column to play with. What will I do with it? Be provocative? Reassuring? Speak the uncomfortable truth? Turn to history for lessons? Look to the future for inspiration?

More than likely. For now, let me ponder this month’s title question. It doesn’t take much to find numerous examples in recent months to indicate that the publishing world, broadly construed, has a library problem. (Or, more aptly, the library world has a publishing problem.)

The Georgia State e-reserves lawsuit. The American Chemical Society reacting very badly indeed to SUNY Potsdam’s decision to dump its online journal subscription package. The seemingly endless series of instances of ever-more insidious models of pricing, licenses, policies, and so on for ebooks. Who would have thought that the HarperCollins 26-loan model would look so quaint or desirable so soon?

For good measure, there’s also the Authors Guild lawsuit against the HathiTrust business model, which hinges in part on the orphan works issue. I hereby propose that we refuse to listen to any lectures about this until publishers get their own house in order, or at least work with us in figuring out how to proceed. The pervasive school of thought seems to be that it’s preferable to lock stuff up—in perpetuity, or as close to that as can be legislatively or judicially achieved—rather than run the tiny risk that some long-tail novel or journal might get copied and read a second time. Please.

Not to mention the ne plus ultra—and who thought you’d ever read this in a library publication?—publishers simply refusing to sell books to libraries (ebooks, that is). Bennett Cerf is undoubtedly rolling in his grave. There aren’t a whole lot of reasons that a profit-making corporation just won’t sell something to you. Despite our longstanding commitment to building readership, publishers now want no part of us and our market power when it comes to digital titles.

It is, still, hard to believe that an entire sector—one that still courts us at ALA and BookExpo America with tote bags and Hershey’s Kisses, and with which we have worked so successfully for generations—has turned so quickly and comprehensively against us. Perhaps, in a spirit of generosity, we could give them the benefit of the doubt and consider what else might be going on. Do you suppose they so fully misunderstand or misconstrue our work, thinking that we are in fact trying to buy one copy of The Casual Vacancy and then lend it to every public library patron in the country? It can’t be envy. Disrespect?

You know what I think it is? None of those. Secretly, privately, doors closed in the dark of night, publishing houses believe the jig is up. The end of a century-old comfy business model is nigh, and thus they’ll leave us out in the cold while they make deals with Amazon or Apple or whoever is in power and slit their own throats in the process in order to eke out the last few dimes before the clock strikes midnight. Or merge. (Random Penguin House, anyone?)

Do I think the future is that dire for publishers, or for libraries? No, but I do think that many people do, which is what really matters. Everybody knows that massive change with an uncertain outcome is afoot; so what’s driving the bus here isn’t vengeance, or confusion, or realignment. It’s fear.

We’re collateral damage. It’s not us; it’s them, as they struggle to envision their place in a landscape frightening and unfamiliar. In that respect, at least, we’re on common ground, as that’s an issue we’ve been dealing with for quite some time. Who knows? Maybe if they just asked us nicely, we could give them some advice (actually, we already have) … but that’s another story.

JOSEPH JANES is associate professor and chair of the MLIS program at the Information School of the University of Washington in Seattle.

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The Wheel Turns Again

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 23:20:24 +0000

November / December 2012

By Joseph Janes

Another milestone, measured in quarter turns

And here we are, at my 100th column.

Readers with long memories (or nothing better to do) may recall that for my 50th (Feb. 2007, p. 27) and 75th (Aug. 2009, p. 36) columns, I pioneered the groundbreaking idea of letting the internet do my work by, respectively, googling the numbers “50” and “75” and seeing what happened. Good times.

Well, of course, I felt obligated to give it one more try, so I googled “100.” The first entry, naturally, was Wikipedia. It was followed closely by the Z100 radio station in New York and a search engine bafflingly called 100.com (which seems rather pointless), and then in 10th position—seriously—a listing for the MARC 21 format for the 100 field. If Google retrieved that because it “knows” I’m a librarian, even though over the decades I have had nothing more than a passing relationship with cataloging, then it’s doing a much better job than I believed.

Interspersed through the results were also numerous lists: 100 top this, 100 best that, 100 most, and so on. It’s a nice round number, and there’s a sense of completion, of circularity, associated with it.

Double circle

This 100th column comes smack on top of my 10-year anniversary writing it; this double circle has given me an opportunity to reflect on what has been, what is, and what could be, and I’ve arrived at the conclusion that a column called Internet Librarian is no longer necessary. Not yet outdated or an anachronism, fingers crossed, but certainly not groundbreaking territory either. I was comfortable saying seven years ago (Nov. 2005, p. 62) that we’d crossed the Rubicon and you can’t really be a librarian anymore without the internet. And, we know now, there’s no way back.

Thus, with profound fondness and gratitude, I hereby retire that field. As I do, it’s only fitting to acknowledge and thank my friend and predecessor, Karen Schneider, who originated this column and did a characteristically splendid job over many years when the internet was young, the web was a novelty, and we had untrodden ground to explore. Heartfelt thanks, Karen—drinks are on me at Midwinter.

Going forward

So, am I done here? No such luck. The editors at American Libraries have agreed to allow me the privilege of launching a new column, a chance for me to have a broader territory in which to play.

This won’t necessarily mean I write nothing further about the internet; there are, however, lots of other things to say, think, and ask about. I feel as though I’ve spent more time here asking questions and providing another way of thinking about things than providing specific ideas or techniques (though there have been a few of those along the way). An occupational hazard for an educator, I guess.

I have truly loved writing these columns, even the ones I struggled with, and people have generally been very kind in their comments about them—all of which will continue, I hope, going forward. This column, and American Libraries, has been very good for me and to me, and I can’t wait to embark on the next round of this adventure.

As for that new title: I completely fell into the “but that’s another story” tag line with which I’ve signed off every column. The first time it just sort of fit, and then the second one did too. Soon it became a thing. I also say it all the time; ask my students. So now, happy me, I get to tell some of those other stories … 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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The March of Time

Beverly Goldberg — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 17:04:35 +0000

September/October 2012

By Joe Janes

Technologies change, but innovation rolls along

Can it really be 10 years since I began writing this column? It doesn’t seem possible, yet there I am, horrible picture and all, chirpily nattering away on page 74 of the September 2002 American Libraries. A lot of water has gone under many bridges since then, which puts me in a nostalgic frame of mind. I could revisit those past 10 years, but it seems more interesting to go back 10 more to get a broader perspective.

So set your way-back machines to the year of The Crying Game, Murphy Brown, Maus, and the pre-Monica-era Clintons, and let’s have a look at what was going on 20 years ago. The AL cover was graced by Kristi Yamaguchi, in full glam sparkle for her READ poster, up on her toe picks and brandishing Danielle Steel’s Heartbeat for all she’s worth. That brought back some memories, as did the ads—ProQuest trumpeting full-text availability online and on tape, full images on CD-ROM, and the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia on CD. Those were the days.

This was September 1992, so there were a number of things that presaged what was on the horizon, besides a terrible economy and draconian budget cuts. There’s a report on an open hearing in D.C. about libraries’ role in the planned high-capacity NREN (National Research and Education Network, the precursor of Internet2) and the importance of funding, access, and library representation in planning (p. 617). We further learn that LC had begun to use the internet for cooperative cataloging and that more than 12,000 people had so far viewed its online exhibit of Soviet documents.

Another report describes a “virtual library” program at ALA Annual with Howard Rheingold that discussed the “cyberlibrary” as a sort of electronic agora (p. 636). Very early 1990s, though I was struck by the comment envisioning the public library as an electronic tool with which people can express themselves—echoes of the now-increasing interest in incorporating creation and the maker culture into the library domain.

Sometimes the simplest ideas, no matter how goofily we name them, are worthwhile. I couldn’t help but smile at the item describing the “Dewey Dialer” developed in Fort Worth to automatically call people about their overdues (p. 618). (It was even smart enough to leave a message on an answering machine!) The discussion about “document delivery in an age of electronic technology” is somewhat less inspirational, though few of us would have appreciated just how completely “document delivery” would be transformed in less than a generation.

One sentence, though, jumped off the page at me and stared me in the eye. At a panel at the Annual Conference, a provost asks the assembled crowd this stunner: “How are you going to define yourselves to me?” (p. 630–631).

That’s really the question, isn’t it, then and now? These are the very beginnings of a profession exploring its boundaries, trying to understand a set of phenomena yet to be ubiquitous and nonetheless on the doorstep and impossible to ignore, no matter how much many of us try. No doubt 20 years on, our first steps to cope with ebooks, the mobile/app culture, social networking, and so on will seem equally crude to our successors, and yet new challenges will face them to demonstrate our worth to our communities.

That conference was held in beautiful San Francisco, where the Gay Pride Parade took place the same weekend as ALA Annual. The July/August issue of AL triggered several months of correspondence and commentary about the cover image, which featured members of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force (which has since evolved into a round table) joyfully marching in the Pride Parade. Reader reaction included high-minded discourse such as “I wanted to puke!” from a colleague in Kansas (AL, Sept. 1992, p. 625).

Nobody ever said progress was going to be easy … 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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Amped-Up Ebook Apps

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 22:22:21 +0000

July/August 2012

By Joseph Janes

In today’s volatile and unpredictable world of publishing, the way we write and present stories will continue to evolve

I wrote here a few months ago about reading—its power and ubiquity and transcendence of format: “The authors and publishers get it; the ways in which the stories are displayed come and go, and what matters are the story and the storytelling.”

Events in the ensuing months—the Department of Justice settlement with publishers, which may or may not have handed over the entire ebook market to Amazon at the expense of Apple; the ongoing legal tug-of-war between the Authors Guild and HathiTrust; the myriad maneuvers in the library world about who gets books from whom—while dramatic and illustrative, have done nothing to disabuse me of this belief.

We’re just starting to get our feet underneath us about what an ebook is, can be, could be, can’t be, and so on. And then a new wrinkle emerges: the book as app. Not an app like iBook or OverDrive’s, which allows you to download an ebook, but a standalone downloadable app that is a book unto itself. Penguin (pause for hissing) is in this game, and one of its offerings is an “amplified” version of Atlas Shrugged, the paean to Objectivism so much in vogue these days.

It has several features of note: In addition to the text and navigational aids, the reader gets screenshots of manuscript pages, video and audio excerpts of author Ayn Rand’s lectures, articles, photos, a timeline of her life, etc. Even more fascinating, though, are the “reader enrichment materials,” such as the discussion guide for book groups, a trailer for an upcoming documentary, “testimonials from celebrities and business leaders” on how keen it is, and—no kidding—a “collection of shareable quotes and passages from the novel (via Facebook, Twitter, and email)” and a “fun ‘Who Said That?’ quiz to challenge readers to recall some of the most memorable lines from the novel.”

That’s quite a lot for $14.99, especially since it won the Publishing Innovation Award for fiction apps this year, beating out Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. So yes, the world of publishing and reading is going to continue to be volatile and unpredictable for a long while.

As we used to say in my long-ago days as a math student, “That’s an unbalanced equation.” Publishing and reading don’t happen without the words to begin with, so let’s pause to think for just a moment about the future of writing. We all know the importance (not to mention the difficulty) of putting the right words together in the right order to convey the right message. We also all know that the form and genre matter. You write an article differently than you would a book, email, or business letter; one of the challenges I encountered when I took on this column was writing to the correct number of words, which is harder than it sounds, at least at first.

Say what you will about the murky and disputed history of the novel, but before the widespread distribution of printing throughout Europe, there really weren’t that many long-form fictional narratives around, or at least not ones that survived.

And don’t forget: “Novel” comes to English from the Latin for “new.” It’s one thing to take a 50-year-old novel, add some bells and whistles, and make a hybrid of the familiar and the new; it will be quite another to see how people write specifically for digital, mobile, downloadable media. What stories will they tell? What rhetorical devices will they develop? What navigational and structural aids will they engender?

Speaking of novel approaches, my next column will mark 10 years of writing for American Libraries, and I’ll be using the milestone to explore new ways to continue covering issues of interest to our profession. Bells and whistles not included … but that’s another story.

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

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Data, Data Everywhere

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

May/June 2012

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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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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