The All-Purpose Guru

Why do we still need libraries?

2010-07-28T08:30:00.001-04:00

People have been asking that question for at least 20 years. I first became aware in the late 1980s that some college administrators regarded the library as obsolete. They thought it a good place to cut the budget. At that time, online databases had only recently become available for public use. There may have been some magazines and scholarly journals available online. "Everything's online" was nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of the ignorant.

Since then, the amount of information available on the Internet has increased exponentially. We could once say that older materials were not available online, but now we have retrospective full-text databases for newspapers and magazines enabling people to read material published more than two hundred years ago from any available computer.

Google Books has been busily scanning out-of-print books, and Project Gutenberg has transcribed a lot of them, too. Ever since Amazon introduced the Kindle, it is no longer necessary to touch print even to read the latest best sellers. Most people today prefer to read books in print form, but how long will that last?

And so the question arises with renewed urgency: why do we still need libraries? But first, let's consider, what is a library?

A collection of information and entertainment materials in a variety of formats, notably books, magazines, and other printed materials, but also microforms, audio recordings, video recordings, and electronic media in various formats.
A building or room that houses the collection.
The technology necessary to play all the different recordings or read the various microforms and current or obsolete electronic media, as well as computers, printers, scanners, etc.
Above all, the staff, who, besides simply warehousing and maintaining all the stuff, understands the collection and helps people identify, locate, and use what they need.

What, then, does the library offer that people cannot find online? Some of the following points might become obsolete in the foreseeable future, but certainly not all of them.

As regards the collection, the library offers proprietary databases. It pays a pretty hefty price for subscriptions, a price far beyond the resources of any individual. These databases are, of course, online, but available only at the library.
In most cases, the collection also includes some unique materials not available anywhere else, such as manuscripts and archives, and rare materials in special collections. One large library might have an exhaustive collection of old railroad timetables where another might have more materials related to dentistry than anyone else. Not many people need the material in these collections, but those who do rely on it heavily. Libraries put some of it online, but certainly not all of it.
Material in special collections and archives is not limited to manuscripts or printed matter. Libraries may own many artifacts such as costumes, arts and crafts, items owned by various local luminaries, and much more.
Many libraries loan out laptop computers to people who cannot afford their own. In other words, libraries extend access to the same online wonders that prompt the question of whether they're still necessary.
As regards the building, the library makes an excellent meeting place. Most libraries have some combination of auditoriums, small group study rooms, large group meeting rooms and classrooms.
Library buildings also have tables and chairs where people can read and take notes. More and more, they reserve some spaces for quiet study and others for conversation.
Library materials require careful attention to climate control, making library buildings ideal cooling centers when it is dangerously hot outside and safe places in the winter for people having any kind of trouble heating their homes.
Since so much of the non-print collection uses obsolete technology, where else besides the library will anyone find a beta player, a computer that can read various sizes of floppy disc, a turntable that can play 78 rpm records, etc. Not all libraries have all of these machines, but most larger libraries have several of them.
Libraries also have the latest machines to be able to handle the newest media in their collections, and have them earlier than most individuals do.
Besides the technology necessary to use the collection, libraries also have multi-featured copiers and scanners, various recording devices, expensive software, etc. that patrons can use for a wide variety of projects.
It is quite possible to have a library without books, but not without librarians and other staff. Some librarians and staff work directly with the public, while others support them by working in back offices, doing too many different essential tasks to enumerate here.
Librarians help patrons identify and locate the materials they need.
Librarians show patrons how to use the catalog, databases, and other discovery tools.
At least some of the librarians are subject specialists and experts. They can consult privately with patrons who need more help than the other librarians can offer.
Software like Finale, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc. have a very steep learning curve. Someone on the library staff knows how to use them and how to show patrons how to understand them well enough to accomplish their tasks.

Librarianship is a profession, just like, say, pharmacy. Anyone can go into a drugstore and buy pills off the shelf. If they don't know how best to use them, only the pharmacist can give the best answers. (People can look on the web, but if the answer is reliable, a pharmacist or other professional wrote it.) Anyone can open Google and perform a search. A librarian can show people how to use Google more effectively or point out that the catalog or proprietary databases will have more pertinent information.

I can't see any time when the work of a librarian will become obsolete. For that reason alone, we will need libraries for the foreseeable future. Libraries will look very different in the future--maybe even the very near future. Who knows what new technology will hit the market next week that will give people a fresh reason to wonder why we still need the library? Whatever it is and whenever it appears, the library will have it and library staff will show everyone how to use it.

All _ are not _: a common statement that's nearly always wrong

2010-07-21T08:30:00.001-04:00

Am I the only person annoyed with this linguistic atrocity? Do a Google search some time on "all ___ are not", filling in the blank with any common plural noun, or a collective noun with "is" instead of "are." You'll find statements like

All women are not a size 2.
All teenagers are not brats.
All paper is not 8 1/2 x 11.
All coffee is not espresso.

These sentences make a statement in the negative about all women, teenagers, paper, or coffee. Since some women are a size 2, some teenagers are brats, lots of paper (in this country, anyway) is 8 1/2 x 11, and some coffee is espresso, the statements are false. Here is what the writers probably meant:

Not all women are a size 2.
Not all teenagers are brats.
Not all paper is 8 1/2 x 11.
Not all coffee is espresso.

Instead of creating an overly broad generalization, this construction negates one. These statements are correct.

It's harder to argue with a statement like "all women are not the same," partly because it's vague enough that the answer "but some women are the same" does not obviously falsify it. Still, careful writers ought to avoid the construction and start the sentence with the negative.

The only time a statement like all ___ are not ___ can be correct is when "all" is somehow modified to make the sentence mean "most," as in, "Two thirds of all newspapers are not recycled." In that case, the statistic may or may not be correct, but the sentence is not automatically wrong, as it would be if it started with "all."

Besides other posts on this blog, I have written other articles about writing and usage:

Confusing vocabulary words: affect and effect
Easy ways to revise and improve your writing
Going on a "which" hunt: choosing between "that" and "which" in relative clauses
Three rules of English usage we're better off without

A modest proposal for a better economic and environmental future

2010-07-14T17:08:00.001-04:00

We love to play the blame game in this country, don't we? In any crisis or disaster, we can count on finger pointing. Various people will blame big business, big labor, immigrants, Republicans, Democrats, the President, Congress, the Supreme Court, liberals, conservatives, and so it goes on forever.

Unfortunately, folks engaged in blaming or trying to duck blame cannot expend that same energy on actually solving the problem. It was for Earth Day 1971 that Walt Kelly introduced perhaps the most famous line in his strip Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us." (See last week's strip for two examples.)

We all, as individual citizens, need to make adjustments in our lifestyle. We need to change our thinking, primarily because that's the only way we can change our behavior. I offer the following points for contemplation:

It is not the government's responsibility to supply all our needs.
But it is the government's responsibility to encourage development of more sustainable technologies. That means it must subsidize small startup companies until they and the industries they are founding become big enough to stand on their own.
Not all tax increases are unreasonable burdens. People must be willing to pay the ones that support new technologies or upgrade our infrastructure.
Bad things always happen, from natural disasters to man-made disasters. There's no point in merely trying to find who to blame for them.
We have some control over some bad things, but none at all over others.
Individuals ought to take prudent steps to insulate themselves from what can't be controlled. For example, your property floods regularly, move your residence or business somewhere else. Don't buy or build anything in such a place.
Individuals and society as a whole must take control where we have the chance. Finger pointing and political name calling do not count.
Maybe there's a better way to do things than the most immediately convenient way.
Sustainable products and practices might be more expensive at first (not necessarily), but will actually cost less in the long run.
Regardless of what anyone thinks about the necessity of oil exploration and drilling right now, we need to explore ways not to use oil for fuel at all. It may be impossible to stop all uses of petroleum products, but the less of it we use, the less we have to buy from unfriendly nations.
It's not that hard to plan the order of errands to minimize how far you drive.
The more we can use our own muscle power instead of some machine, the better it will be both for our health and the national energy consumption.
Conservation and conservative come from the same root, but it is really something that everyone can practice, regardless of politics.
Lately, the party in power has tried to run roughshod over the minority party. When the majority changes hands, the new majority effortlessly takes up where the old one left off. The only reason they get away with it is that voters let them. It's when your party is in the majority that you must push bipartisanship on them.
Both the "left" and the "right" support, and are supported by, special interests. Lobbyist-driven legislation is probably bad for everyone else, so be careful what bandwagons you jump on.
When you finish drinking something out of a can or bottle in your car, put it on the floor. You can put it in a trash can or recycling container when you get to a stopping place. Don't just throw it out the window. In other words, don't be part of the problem.

Are we prepared? Man-made and natural threats in the environment.

2010-07-07T08:30:00.001-04:00

Astronomers predict an increase in solar activity that will at best interrupt our electrical and electronic infrastructure in the coming years. I just read an article that asks if we are ready for it.

Does anyone really need to read the article to know the answer? As a society, and for that matter, the human race as a whole, we are not very good boy scouts. We are hardly prepared for anything.

As I write this, the great BP oil spill continues to gush. BP was not prepared, but all of the other oil drillers had similar plans to deal with a deep-water emergency. They would not have been prepared, either.

The federal government proved unprepared to do much more substantial than to hold BP responsible and declare that they must pay. Not only has it done little to protect the coastline, it has actively interfered with local residents and governments in their attempts to deal with the problem.

Who elected such a government? The same folks who consistently build and rebuild homes and businesses in flood plains, earthquake fault zones, and unstable hillsides. The same folks who want every imaginable government service but don't want to pay taxes for them. The same folks who make their own convenience their very top priority, without questioning its costs.

Are we prepared for earthquakes? California, of necessity, has adopted strict building codes, and yet it's not that long ago that an earthquake collapsed an apartment complex, which caused many deaths. Geologists say that large earthquakes are likely in areas that experience them infrequently. What kinds of building codes do jurisdictions in those areas have?

Are we prepared for floods? We have built over wetlands that would have offered some protection from floods. We have constructed whole communities in flood plains. Property owners expect insurance companies to pay for rebuilding in the same place.

We never seem to have the money to prioritize replacing eroded bridges, redesigning highways with high accident rates, or otherwise keep infrastructure in good shape.

We keep discarding huge quantities of trash, even though some jurisdictions must now haul it many miles to find a landfill for it. Then, of course, the trucks must drive back empty--one way among many that we waste gasoline. Hmm. Might that have something to do with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

How not to do research

2010-06-30T08:30:00.000-04:00

Here are some posts from a thread on an email list I follow. I am deleting anything that could identify the particular libraries where the posters work, although they are clearly all academic libraries.

1.

A scenario reported by one of my colleagues: student sitting at a computer not 5 feet from the reference desk where said colleague is stationed. He's been there for quite a while. As his friends walk by, he asks them how to find something, how to do something. Colleague asks repeatedly if he needs any help and is rejected every time. Then he starts phoning friends IN THE LIBRARY to come over and help him. One of these friends suggests he search the ever-popular JSTOR. Colleague reminds him that JSTOR is an archive and there are no current articles contained therein. The student says, that's ok, I'm researching something that happened in the '70's. [Bang forehead on desk here.]

2.

I was helping somebody on IM who noted he knew nothing about libraries and he needed articles for his topic. After quite a few exchanges with some ground gained, I suggested that if he continued to have problems, he was welcome to telephone me as well and I provided my number. His answer came back shortly, he noted that he was in class.

3.

Unfortuantely, this is not restricted to undergrads

In the past week I have had a master's student and a doctoral
student who both did not know they could look up books in our
library in an [our] online catalog (the master's student, first year,
had a paper due and had not set foot in the library other than
orientation -- the doctoral student is at the writing stage with a
deadline approaching).

Needless to say, a lot of time was spent with them in person and on the
phone for the catalog and databases.

4.

So sadly true. I'm auditing a class in [university name deleted] SILS [= School of Information and Library Science] this semester, and one day a SILS Ph.D. student (3rd year, no less) in the class asked me about how to approach a particular assignment. I suggested going either to the local public library catalog or our library catalog in order to grab the data she would need (a call #). She asked if she did that by searching Google. As I showed her how to use our catalog, it became obvious that she had NEVER used the library's online catalog. Now, this is a very bright woman, who happens to come from a corporate background and is on the IS track. But being on the IS track should not mean one is an LS idiot. I have to wonder what quality of research is being done by Ph.D. students (in lib/info sci!!!) who don't know how to find information! (I also wonder what it says about IS education.)

As I wrote in an earlier post, everyone does research, not just college students. By research, I mean gathering and analyzing information in order to take some action. Writing a paper is but one possible action. Buying a car or a house or any other big expensive item also requires research. So does trying to understand more of a news story than the sound bites on TV.

These four stories exhibit people who should know better making some common research errors. Here are three big ones:

Not paying attention to opportunities to learn about research tools. Surely every college requires some kind of library orientation. Graduate departments typically require courses in how to perform research in their disciplines. Of course, even before starting college, all of these people had to write papers even as early as elementary school that required finding information first. However people start doing research in third grade, they ought to develop more sophisticated competence as their education continues. Many otherwise bright and successful students obviously don't bother. Perhaps they don't pay any more attention elsewhere, either.
Not seeking help early in the process. Internet search engines have made it very easy to find information, but researchers have to know whether they have found the right kind of information or enough information. This is not a new problem in the Internet era. Elementary students used to learn to gather information from encyclopedias. It was a shock to many to get to junior high school and be told not to get everything from the encyclopedia any more. Eventually, with a deadline approaching, people will recognize whether they have found what they need. If they have not found it, the sooner they recognize that fact, the more time they have to get help before desperation sets in.
Not seeking or accepting help from appropriate people. The kid in the first email astounds me, as it astounded at least two librarians at his institution. Not five feet from a person both willing and very well qualified to help him--the librarian stationed at the reference desk--he preferred to stop friends passing by or phone other friends. Did he seriously think he could get better help from them?

Here are some things to keep in mind in order to perform your research efficiently and productively:

Search engines, online databases (including the library catalog), and various print sources all require a somewhat different method of seeking information from them.
Your search engine results can be no better than the keywords you think of. Perform several different searches in order not to miss some important sites.
Database searching is less intuitive, but yields narrower and more useful results.
Information available through a database might not be available through a search engine at all (and vice versa).
Even with so much information available online, something in print may better for some purposes.
Librarians majored in looking it up. You do not bother them when you ask a question; you give them a chance to do their job by helping you search and find information more efficiently than you can on your own.
The job of a librarian includes helping you refine your question. With a well focused question, you actually have less information to hunt for. A narrow focus divides the necessary from the irrelevant.
Librarians ask other librarians for help all the time.

Our oil addiction: just how serious is it?

2010-06-23T15:41:00.000-04:00

I wrote earlier about our addiction to oil simply from the standpoint of energy usage. I would personally like to see a day when we don't use oil, or any other fossil fuel, for energy at all.

That will at least require massive changes in infrastructure and probably in the tax code. Those changes, in turn, will require a more cooperative, more compromise-prone politics than we have seen for decades.

Of course, we do more with oil than burn it for fuel. We are also heavily dependent on petrochemicals. Some 93% of plastics manufactured in the US start with either oil or natural gas.

And how can we live without plastic? It's in everything. Sometimes plastic is a superior material to whatever it replaced. Sometimes there is not yet any conceivable replacement for plastic.

Kevin Swift of the American Chemistry Council has pointed out that a simple bottle of shampoo demonstrates how pervasive petrochemicals have become:

The shampoo itself contains almost no natural ingredients at all; nearly all of them are petrochemicals.
The bottle is plastic.
The cap is a different kind of plastic.
The seal, the label, the ink on the label, and the glue that holds the label on the bottle all come from oil or gas.

That's just one product. All of these petrochemicals have the same financial and geopolitical costs as the oil we use for fuel. They have their own environmental and health costs (and benefits, I must add).

It will probably never be possible to eliminate the use of petrochemicals entirely, even if we do succeed in completely swearing off using oil as a fuel. What we can and must do is understand the environmental and health consequences of petrochemicals and learn more sustainable ways of producing and using them.

Yeah, you can use my catalog: don't forget the databases

2010-06-16T08:30:00.002-04:00

In this blog I have tried in a number of different ways to explain and promote the uses of online library catalogs and other databases. Students and faculty at the University of Washington iSchool decided to promote their catalog a la Lady Gaga.

Librarians have been sharing the video among themselves. Since The All-Purpose Guru hopes to reach out to library users and potential library users--and since that was the whole point of creating it in the first place--I offer it to my readers, librarians or not! Enjoy.

Water resources and water usage: have we hit peak water?

2010-06-09T08:30:00.020-04:00

In the familiar debate over the future of oil exploration, peak oil means the point at which extraction of oil has reached its maximum. At that point, remaining deposits become increasingly inaccessible, and so extraction rates must decline. Life after peak oil is usually described as some kind of doom and gloom scenario. Now, it seems, the US hit peak water in 1970 and nobody noticed.

Take away the overheated rhetoric, and the concept of peaking is a useful tool in planning for the use of any finite resource. But how does it apply to the earth's water supply? Isn't that a renewable resource? Yes, but it can reach limits on how humans can use it.

A river would seem to be a renewable resource, constantly replenished by rain and snow melt. But so much water gets taken from the Colorado River that there hasn't been enough for any to reach the ocean for about half a century. Underground aquifers would also seem renewable, but several, including the Central Valley Aquifer in California, are being drained faster than nature can recharge them.

Is that more doom and gloom? Not if we reached it this country more than a generation ago and researchers are only now figuring it out. Water use statistics are fragmented and difficult to interpret, but researchers at the Pacific Institute have suggested that water usage and the GDP grew at about the same rate until about 1970. After that, water use declined somewhat and then stabilized even though both the GDP and the population have continued to increase.

It appears, therefore, that economic and population growth do not automatically require growth in the use of resources. It further appears that finding ways to use resources more efficiently can be relatively painless.

There is, of course, a big difference between oil and water. Oil is not renewable in any way. Eventually, we will have to stop using it--and the sooner the better. Multiple technologies exist to derive energy from other, renewable sources.

Before we can stop using oil, we have to find a stable and sustainable way of using what's left. It doesn't have to be painful. I, for one, find an excess of political rhetoric and lobbying much more troubling than any shortage of oil.

Especially for researchers: that means you!

2010-06-02T08:30:00.003-04:00

Research conjures up images of a scientist in his lab or a scholar toiling away in the library working on his or her next tome. That's research, to be sure, but it can also be a college student writing a term paper. For that matter, it can be finding out information about cars before heading to the dealership or checking out the classified ads.

What is research? It's the systematic process of investigation of some subject of interest by gathering and analyzing information about it. Usually research results in some kind of action. Writing a report is one possible outcome. Deciding which cars to look at is another.

The first necessity for any kind of research is a question to investigate. What is the best car I can buy with the money I have? What do we need to tell our stockholders about how our business did over the past year? How did an obscure man like Barack Obama (or Franklin Pierce, or Grover Cleveland, or Abraham Lincoln) become President?

The researcher therefore must first refine the question, at least in part to determine what he or she does not need to know. A student on a tight budget does not need to waste time investigating expensive cars with fancy options.

Certain information must go into an annual report, but plenty of other information is totally irrelevant. So many things matter in the analysis of an election that the researcher must have a clear focus to avoid hunting for useless information.

Probably some time before the focus of more complicated questions becomes apparent, the researcher needs to begin to find information. Most people begin by searching on the Internet.

Always keep two questions in mind: Have I found reliable information? Have I found enough information for now? I say "for now," because for more complicated questions, you will need to seek more information to other aspects of the question. The first batch of information you find might well lead not to answering your question or part of it, but to clarifying your need for different kinds of information.

There are at least two different categories of information you will not be able to find free on the Internet. Much information, from magazine articles to specialized encyclopedias and scholarly journal articles, appears online only through proprietary databases. Still more appears only in print and has never been made available online.

For many purposes, a general interest database like EBSCO Premier or ProQuest may have exactly the right kind of information. Hundreds of other databases serve the needs of people looking for specialized information in biology or entrepreneurship or women's and gender studies.

It's even possible to read old newspapers online as more and more of them become digitized. But you can't find any of these databases with a search engine, and they are too expensive for individuals to subscribe to them. You must visit a library that subscribes.

Libraries will also have some of the many books and periodicals that have never been digitized. Find them using the catalog. If your local library does not own something you want, you can get it through interlibrary loan.

And don't forget to ask a librarian for help to clarify your question, or even to formulate a good strategy for using the search engine.

The cost of convenience in trash collection

2010-05-26T15:35:00.000-04:00

I'm dating myself here, but as child growing up in the late 1950s, I remember my mother carefully wrapping the garbage (food wastes) in newspapers every night and putting them in the garbage can by the garage. A company emptied it every week. Boy did it stink!

We put trash (bottles, cans, excess wire coat hangers, broken toys, and the like) in a different can by the garage, and a different company hauled it off. We did not throw out pop bottles; we had to pay a deposit on them, so we returned the empties to the store. As for waste paper, it was my job to empty the waste baskets from time to time into an incinerator and watch over it while it burned.

I suppose that was common all over the country. In 1961, Sam Yorty became mayor of Los Angeles. As part of his campaign, he promised to eliminate the necessity of separating wet and dry garbage. Actually, since the county had banned backyard incineration in 1957, citizens of Los Angeles had to deal with three different collections.

Of course, I have no recollection of Yorty; I grew up in Ohio. Somehow, though, the idea of a single collection of all refuse became the national norm. At some point, my home town also banned backyard incineration. I recall how strange it felt to mingle waste paper, cans, and food waste in the same trash can.

Ironically, the environmental movement began before the end of the decade. After the first Earth Day, in 1970, recycling became a mainstream idea, but not yet a mainstream practice. Perhaps older people recalled recycling and conservation as Depression and wartime necessities and resisted doing it again. Certainly younger people, having recently been freed from the necessity of separating garbage, did not want to have to do it again.

The practice of recycling would probably have caught on faster than it did if everyone were still in the habit of discarding wet and dry garbage into different collection receptacles.

If the practice of separation had continued, it would have been possible to compost the wet garbage. As it is, the commingling of wet and dry garbage limits waste disposal options. In the US, most waste eventually winds up in landfills.

There are two huge problems with landfills. They consume almost 3,500 acres of land per year. As landfills reach capacity, it is increasingly difficult to find land for new ones. Geologically, only certain sites are suitable. And of course, no one wants a new landfill built nearby.

Environmental hazards of landfills vary with their design and management. Problems at older or poorly managed landfills include foul smell, wind-blown litter, vermin, and the generation of a toxic liquid known as leachate.

To prevent those problems, newer designs call for a clay or plastic liner to contain the leachate and keep it from contaminating ground water. Each day's accumulation of new garbage must be covered to keep it in place and to avoid attracting vermin.

As a consequence, the landfill smells better, but the garbage decomposes much more slowly. And so the landfill reaches capacity more quickly. In addition, landfills produce methane and other greenhouse gasses.

I'm a musician and librarian. I do not claim to be an expert on waste management. But I can't help thinking that if Americans had had an uninterrupted practice of separating solid wastes, we would be composting the wet garbage. Recycling would be easier and would remove more from the waste stream than it currently does.

And above all, disposal non-recyclable dry waste would not produce so much gas and leachate byproducts. As a consequence, its disposal would be less environmentally hazardous, less expensive, and less controversial.

Ask your friendly librarian

2010-05-19T14:17:00.000-04:00

In the early 1990s, my then 20-year-old step-son wanted to buy a used car. He found the choices and all of the questions he needed to answer overwhelming. I suggested he could get some good answers at the library, and he asked me to go with him.

We walked into the library and straight back to the reference desk. I asked the librarian what information they had on buying a used car, and she quickly handed me four books. I gave them to my son and showed him to the copier. He looked through them, copied several pages, and gave them back to me to return to the desk.

On the way back to the car, he said, "Thanks, man. I never could have done that by myself." That was probably his first research project since his last high school paper. He had never visited the public library since he was a small child.

I thought it strange that the son of a school teacher who used the library a lot would not think of the library as a resource and would find the prospect of asking a question at the reference desk intimidating. I have since learned that his reluctance is not at all unusual.

Nowadays, of course, much information is online. Why go to the library when it's so easy to get answers at home? But it's not always easy to get answers at home. It's not even easy to be sure what the question really is.

People need librarians just as much today as ever, and for the same reasons. Sometimes it takes a conversation to clarify just what our question is. Sometimes it takes someone with thorough understanding of a wide array of resources to find the best place to look for answers.

Nowadays, you don't have to go to the library to talk with a librarian. Not only can you telephone, you can also chat online, or correspond by email or instant messaging.

If you do go to the library, and no one is talking with the librarian at the moment, he or she might be reading or doing some kind of paper work. Librarians do have other work besides answering patrons' questions, but you are not interrupting if you go up and ask a question. They take work to the desk that can be quickly laid aside. Answering questions is their most important work while they're at the desk.

So don't be afraid. Most librarians are very friendly. They like answering questions. And if you're wondering how to ask a librarian questions, help is just a click away.

Online writing

2010-05-12T14:28:00.000-04:00

Samuel Johnson wrote, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Plenty of bloggers are quite happy being blockheads by that definition. For the rest of us, the keys to success include writing a lot and publishing it in multiple places.

Since I started this blog in August 2009, I have written about 225 posts for three blogs and dozens of articles on other sites. Some content sites pay a flat fee in advance. No matter how successful an article is on those sites, the authors will receive no more money for their work.

Others have some kind of formula for paying according to how many times people read the article. Authors can make money from articles on these sites for months or years after they first appear, but cannot count on much immediate payoff. Other sites offer some combination of up-front and performance pay.

I have no idea how long such content sites have existed, but the average internet business is much newer than the average brick-and-mortar business. New businesses take time to get established, and many fail within a few years. A high percentage of internet content sites are new businesses.

My first inkling that I could make money writing online came last July, when I saw a television news segment about a local housewife who made money from writing on eHow. I signed up for it and eventually published 22 articles there.

Then, apparently bought out by another company, they suspended their writers compensation program. They will continue to pay as before for existing articles, but will accept new submissions only from writers approved by the parent company.

One other site that I wrote for started and collapsed while I was writing for eHow. Therefore I understand the need to write for a variety of sites, some that offer up-front payment and others that share ad revenue or otherwise pay for older articles as people continue to read them.

It's not easy submitting regularly to multiple sites, but if I remember to count what I have put on three blogs along with other content sites, I have produced a lot of work over the past nine months or so. As I learn more and more about the business aspects, I see that I have put myself in a good position to start making good money.

So besides a lot of articles in a lot of places, the other keys to success in online writing include study and patience.

If anyone is interested in trying to make some extra money, or even a living, from online writing, feel free to join me at Associated Content, Factoidz, HubPages, or Xomba.

The cost of convenience at the grocery store

2010-05-06T11:09:00.000-04:00

It used to be that preparing meals for a family took a woman most of the day, especially back when she had to raise and slaughter whatever animals provided meat and grow her own produce.

Nowadays, we can buy, say, lasagna from the freezer section of the grocery store, bread from the deli section, and a bag or two of salad from the produce section. That can provide a complete meal for a family with practically no effort. As a percentage of the family's income, it probably costs less than our great grandparents paid for one of their meals.

What is the real cost of this convenience? Let me count the ways:

1. The energy costs of manufacturing, packaging, and distributing the food, not to mention hauling the used packaging away from the house, contribute to each person's carbon footprint. We have not yet devised any method of manufacturing, transportation, or waste management that does not result in some kind of pollution. We import too much of our energy, most from nations that are not our friends.

2. The manufacturer of the lasagna has spent a great deal of money to determine how to make the tastiest product it can with the lowest cost. There's nothing wrong with trying to provide good value and get repeat business. Unfortunately, the lasagna, along with all other prepared meals, gives its pleasure through layers of fat, sugar, and salt. The human body easily becomes addicted to the accumulation of these ingredients, resulting in our current obesity epidemic, with all its consequences for people's health.

3. The whole meal probably came from miles away. In addition to the transportation costs, the distance has an accountability cost. Remember when packaged spinach was recalled? Carelessness at one farm resulted in contaminated spinach. That spinach was mixed together with spinach from other farms and distributed all over the country. Some of the packages contained toxins from the contamination. Most probably did not. And yet all of it had to be recalled. There was no economical way to determine which few packages were not fit to sell.

More could be said, but this is enough for one post. Do I mean we have to give up all our conveniences? No. I'd rather cook my own lasagna than buy it from the freezer section, but I certainly like having packaged mixed greens available. I wouldn't eat multiple kinds of lettuce fast enough to keep from throwing most of it out.

Meanwhile, I do believe that if more people cooked their own lasagna and/or clamored for real food, the kind you actually have to chew, restaurants and manufacturers would be happy to supply more wholesome and less addictive products. After all, if people stop buying addictive food that makes them unfit and unhealthy, manufacturers will have no choice but to start making what customers will want.

It would be nice if more things could be grown, packaged, and distributed locally. A bad batch of something would not require destruction of the good with the bad over half the country.

Does convenience have to cost so much? Can we find a way to get the costs under control? Are "efficiencies of scale" really all that efficient?

Information literacy: the work of librarians past and present

2010-04-29T19:39:00.000-04:00

As long as there have been public libraries, librarians have been involved in education. They have helped people choose what to read for leisure and helped with their information needs. The recent emphasis on information literacy is more of a new term than a new concept, but as technology has transformed everything in society, information literacy needs to be done differently.

For most of the twentieth century, the best way for most people to identify books on a particular subject was the card catalog in the library. Specialists could use various published bibliographies or the Cumulative Book Index among other tools .

Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, which began publication in 1905, helped the general public find information in magazines, etc. As the century progressed, publishers brought out more, and more specialized, indexes to periodical literature, including some of the major newspapers.

Encyclopedias have been around since the late eighteenth century. In the twentieth century, encyclopedia publishers aggressively marketed door to door. Many families owned a set, but the library always had up-to-date editions of several different encyclopedias.

The foregoing describes the kinds of tools available up until the Internet went public. In every case (except for the family encyclopedia), people who wanted to use them had to go to the library, and could easily ask librarians for help when they needed it.

Librarians also excelled at helping people clarify just what kind of information they needed. And since not everything ever published is well written or reliable, librarians helped people learn how to distinguish good information from bad.

Now, of course, people can look up all kinds of things online. What has changed for the librarian and information literacy now that we have computers? Lots. And not much.

The online library catalog has replaced the card catalog. That gives library patrons the same advantages as any other online searching, but it operates on different principles from search engines. Librarians love to explain how to get the best use of both,

New online databases have replaced the Reader's Guide. Several serve the same kind of general purpose it used to. Many are much more specialized. They all work a little differently. Patrons who find them confusing can still ask a librarian for help.

It is no longer necessary to visit the library personally in order to use them, but as they are prohibitively expensive for individuals, people can only access them through subscribing libraries.

All of this new technology has changed people's information-seeking habits. Not everyone today is even aware that the flood of print publications continues. Fewer people know about the databases or any other online information sources that are not free to the public except at libraries.

Generally speaking, finding information is now much easier than ever before. Finding particular information and knowing how to evaluate its reliability is as difficult as ever. People still need the help of trained experts--librarians--for that.

So in a sense, information literacy means doing the same things libraries have done for generations, but the public no longer has to visit the library to find information. Therefore, librarians can no longer foster information literacy by passively waiting for patrons to come in the door. Librarians have recognized the need to adopt a more entrepreneurial approach--like blogging!

April is the cruelest month

2010-04-19T22:05:00.000-04:00

I've never been quite sure just what that saying means, but this year I agree with it. One thing I do understand is what might be called Lennon's Law: Life is what happens while you're making other plans.

Here were my most important plans for April: 1) Maintain the pace of updating blogs that I started in December. 2) Devote time to studying some articles on improving traffic to blogs and articles and follow through on the suggestions. 3) Devote time to studying an article on coordination social networking and social marketing sites. 4) Rewrite the articles I wrote for the HubPages challenge and publish the revisions elsewhere.

When I made those plans, I knew taxes were due in April. (That's pretty cruel right there, isn't it?) I also knew that April is prime yard work time here in North Carolina. Not a big problem, because I have a handyman I can call.

What I didn't know was that my publisher would send proofs for my upcoming book and request both the corrected proof and the index in three weeks. I'm not sure I could make that deadline working full time on it. Taxes, as always, were a royal pain to prepare--even with TurboTax. It would take just as much work to compile all the papers and receipts to take to an accountant.

I have had to keep up with my online writing, but at a slower pace. I have done virtually nothing to promote anything I've written, let alone learning any of those new techniques. That will have to wait until next month.

But when I hold my new book in my hands for the first time (some time in June, they say), it will all be worth it!

The cost of convenience: drive-throughs

2010-04-07T21:08:00.000-04:00

For as long as I recall, and probably generations earlier than that, advertisers have promised that their products will save time. We all know how that turned out. Gas or electric stoves and ovens, refrigerators, washing machines and driers, other major appliances, and a host of other smaller gadgets saved housewives so much time that they can get jobs outside the home. And they have to in order to pay for all the stuff.

Once, everyone had their own garden, and most people kept chickens and other animals for their food. They had to chop wood to cook it. Then we got grocery stores to supply basic ingredients and utilities to provide cleaner and easier fuel.

Eventually, we got fast food companies, because folks have become too busy to cook even in their modern, convenient kitchens. Next came drive-through windows so no one even has to get out of the car to get the food.

What does all this convenience cost? In no particular order, we have fuel costs, land use costs, and health costs. There are pollution costs, too, but I will need to mention them in more than one place within these three.

Fuel costs

Firewood cost energy: energy to chop down trees, to cut them into logs , to transport the logs, to chop them into firewood, to carry the firewood to the kitchen, and to dispose of the ashes. The muscles of humans or working animals accomplished all of these tasks. Like the trees themselves, the energy was renewable.

I wouldn't want to have to go back to those days, and hardly anyone else does, either. Public utilities have proved a boon to everyone, but they are expensive. Besides what everyone has to pay in their monthly bills, there are environmental costs. Electricity generation depends largely on coal, a dirty fuel that in various ways pollutes air, water, and land.

We also have automobiles and trucks that mostly run on petroleum products. Unlike coal, the United States cannot produce all of the petroleum it uses. So besides the pollution costs of burning gasoline or diesel fuel we have the economic costs of importing petroleum and the geopolitical costs of having to buy it from our ideological adversaries.

Now imagine a line at a drive-through. The one at a Biscuitville near my house sometimes extends out into the street, causing traffic problems. Think of how much gas each car uses in inching all the way around the building until they receive and pay for their order!

Land use costs

One big problem with the old reliance on firewood has been solved: the accumulated ash is no longer the most bulky waste taken to the dump (or later, landfill). Fast food places alone account for a lot of paper, plastic, and food wastes that have to go somewhere--too much of it strewn along highways or in peoples' yards.

The fast food restaurants themselves require land both for the stores and parking lots. While they are often welcome additions to the communities in which they are built, they not infrequently touch off controversies over zoning. The large chains that own many of them regularly update individual stores, sometimes demolishing them to rebuild larger buildings or move to another lot.

All that construction rubble has to go to the landfill. The English idiom to throw something away disguises the fact that there is no such place as "away." We are running out of suitable sites for new landfills. No one exactly clamors to have one built near their homes.

That became particularly necessary when drive-through lanes first became popular. They put constraints on the design of the store's interior. They also require more land. After all, the store cannot sacrifice too many parking places for the drive-through.

Health costs

What is the current obesity epidemic besides a cost of convenience? We don't expend physical effort on food preparation when we eat at a fast food place. The food is designed to be easy to eat. It tastes good and doesn't require nearly as much chewing as "slow" food.

It is also loaded sale, fat, and sugar. A single fast-food meal may have half a day's allotment of calories and salt. That doesn't mean it satisfies our hunger. If it fills us up initially (not guaranteed), it does not keep us full for long. Most of us eat too much and exercise too little.

Even parking the car, going inside, and standing in line requires more of our own energy than sitting in it and burning up gasoline instead. Some people can walk to a fast-food place from their homes or hotel rooms. Do they? But many stores sit on pedestrian-unfriendly land.

Now that our culture has begun to take a fresh look at health, food, exercise, and sustainability, it is time to take a careful look at the conveniences in our lives. Have they become too expensive? And shouldn't we at least give up the drive-through window and walk into the store for our take-out food?

"85 reasons to be thankful for librarians," and counting

2010-03-24T21:22:00.000-04:00

I found a fun page I'd like to pass along. It's a semi-serious list of reasons not only to be thankful for librarians, but to use the library. It also lists reasons to be grateful for all the print materials in the library, as well as the wealth of electronic information it offers.

I say semi-serious because of the tongue-in-cheek writing style and because while most of the reasons relate to the real services librarians offer, some don't. No. 7, for example, is "'Sexy Librarian' is still a popular costume at Halloween."

The list appears on a site devoted to college information, but most of the more serious points apply just as well to school libraries, public libraries, and probably at least some special libraries. As I write this post, the article has attracted 340 tweets and 32 comments. Some of the comments add more reasons, continuing the original numbering up to 101.

Perhaps one of the best things about the list is that whoever compiled it is clearly not a librarian. Some librarians expressed regret over entries mentioning spinsters or learning the Dewey Decimal system, but I think a vast majority of librarians appreciate the love more than they wince at some of the comments.

All in all, it's great to see evidence that someone who is not a librarian loves libraries and librarians enough to take the effort to compile a list like this.

Saving the planet and our health at the same time

2010-03-19T19:43:00.000-04:00

In a previous post, I pointed out similarities between the obesity epidemic and our addiction to oil. As we burn more oil, our air becomes less healthy. We cannot produce enough ourselves and have to buy it from countries that are not our friends. That, in turn, leads to uncomfortable consequences in foreign policy. The situation has lately become worse worldwide as developing nations try to catch up with our standard of living.

In this post, I want to concentrate more on the personal health side of the analogy. People become overweight by consuming more energy (calories) than they use for their daily activities. This weight puts stress on their joints and other body systems. It becomes more difficult to keep active. Less physical activity means burning even fewer calories and so gaining more weight. It's a vicious cycle.

If I drive where I used to walk, I not only use fewer calories but more oil. Likewise if I take an elevator or escalator where I used to take the stairs. As I expend less of my own body's energy, it gets heavier if I don't reduce what I eat.

But if I get to the place where it takes too much effort to go much of anywhere or do much of anything--if I spend more time just sitting because it hurts to do much more--I'm more likely to eat just to stave off boredom.

What kind of food can I eat without preparing a meal? I can toss something in the microwave. I don't know how to compare how much energy it takes to use the freezer and microwave for it with using the stove or oven to fix something comparable from scratch, but I suspect there's a net increase based on what it takes to get that prepared meal to your freezer.

First of all, the factory that manufactures the meal surely does not have people with knives and cutting boards preparing the ingredients. Making, say, stir fry on an industrial scale calls for fairly large machines to do any of the steps people would do in their own houses: cutting the ingredients, adding them to the wok, stir frying them, putting rice and water in a separate pot, and then serving up portions of an appropriate size.

Not only must machines do the work of people in a factory, but other machines must prepare various aspects of the packaging. Finished and packaged meals must be stored in a freezer at the factory. The factory then ships them to a warehouse, and the warehouse to the factory.

Freezers at the warehouse, at least two trucks, and the back room at the grocery store keep the meals frozen until they are ready to be placed on the sales floor. All those machines, trucks, and freezers use a tremendous amount of energy. I haven't even begun to describe the energy costs of manufacturing and shipping all of that packaging from raw materials to the landfill.

Obese people did not become obese over night. Our nation did not get into its dangerous addiction to oil over night, either. As I have tried to show, these two problems are not separate from each other.

Fortunately, whatever we do for our personal health will probably help the nation's energy imbalance. Take a look at other articles I have written, following the links to the left of this post.

We may think that one person can't do very much about large problems. But in fact, one individual making healthier choices, multiplied by tens of millions of other individuals making similar choices, can have a profound impact. That, after all, is how we got to where we are in the first place.

On stimulating innovation in green energy

2010-03-10T13:49:00.000-05:00

The quest for green energy seems strongly bound to the politics of global warming and climate change. I find that unfortunate.

The earth's climate has gotten warmer over the past two centuries. Abundant evidence exists, from scientific measurements to the visual impact of melting polar ice and receding glaciers. Where people can honestly disagree is to what extent human activity has caused it and whether a catastrophe awaits the entire human race if we don't fix it.

My reading indicates that the present climate change follows a long-established natural rhythm, that industrial activity has contributed only marginally to it, that suddenly going back to pre-industrial energy use would not stop it, and that it does not threaten a global catastrophe. We need green energy for other reasons. Those who think otherwise generally follow two basic strategies for dealing with it.

Many want to deal with the problem through collective, global action to reduce carbon emissions and give billions of dollars worth of clean technologies to developing countries. Others want to work on the national and local level to stimulate the market place to develop new and more efficient energy sources and of products and processes that require less of it.

Those of us who are skeptical about the prospect of a climate-induced disaster ought to make common cause with the second group, because, in fact, it doesn't matter who is right about climate. Our current energy usage cannot be sustained, especially as India and China struggle to catch up as industrial powers.

Global initiatives do not offer much hope. World leaders can agree on all kinds of high sounding theories, but not on actual mechanisms for working together. Then, when they leave the big, splashy conferences, like the recent one in Copenhagen, they cannot find a politically viable way of meeting their own targets.

Still, entrepreneurs and industry cannot by itself devise self-sustaining ways of green energy generation and usage. The federal government must be involved in the creation of a new energy model, with or without the cooperation of other countries. Making most efficient use of any foreseeable kind of green electricity, for example, will require massive investment in an upgraded power grid.

At some point, the government must regulate carbon emissions. It will have to find some way of calculating the cost of carbon emissions both in terms of their impact on pollution and the implications for energy independence. The kind of extensive infrastructure upgrades that we need require funding from some kind of carbon tax.

Development of renewable, minimally polluting, efficient energy sources that do not depend on imports is certainly worth the creation of a new tax. Green energy legislation will open the door to innovation, therefore startups of entirely new companies, and therefore the creation of jobs that cannot exist under current conditions.

How to find titles in an online library catalog

2010-03-03T15:56:00.001-05:00

Some online library catalogs, trying to imitate Google, show only a single search box, which works as a general keyword search. If you want to look up a title, you need to switch to "advanced search," which is actually less frustrating to use.

Google is a search engine, and the online library catalog is a database with multiple indexes. You need a screen that will let you choose which index to search. The better-designed catalogs offer a choice between "title" and "title keyword" search boxes.

For "title," type the beginning of the title, omitting the initial article if any. In English, articles are "the," "a," and "an." If any of these are the first word, leave it out. Omit initial articles from all other languages, too.

If the item you want has a long title, you do not need to type it all so long as you put in enough to get to distinctive words. For example, if you want to locate The trumpet & trombone in graphic arts, 1500-1800, you need go no farther than the "gr" in "graphic." Simply searching "trumpet and trombone" will turn up more titles, but the one about graphic arts will still probably be on the first screen of results.

Don't worry about whether the title has "and" or "&." You can safely type "and" (or the equivalent in another language); a cataloger has (or should have) put the title in the record both ways. And don't bother with capitalization. Nothing but the first word, proper names, or German nouns will be capitalized in the catalog. Search boxes, whether in Google or in an online library catalog, are not case sensitive.

"Title keyword" comes in handy for long titles where all the distinctive words are at the end or for when you don't remember the title exactly but remember several important words. Enter only keywords from the title and separate them with "and." For the title in the last paragraph, the search "trumpet and graphic" should suffice to get the record you want.

In my previous posts about finding names and subjects, I have had to explain the concept of controlled vocabulary. Generally speaking, titles are not controlled. If, for example, a book has one title on the title page, a different one on the cover, and something else again on the spine, the cataloger simply enters all of them in the record. Type in whatever you know, and if the library has the item, your search will turn it up.

But what if you want something that is available in more than one language? For example, English translations of Dostoyevsky's novels may be available with different English titles. In that case, librarians regard the original language as the preferred title, subject to vocabulary control so everyone always uses the same one . You will recognize a preferred title in a cataloging record because it is a hot link.

Suppose for example, you find his A raw youth. The record also shows the preferred title Podrostok. English. It has been translated into English at least three times; the other titles are The adolescent and An accidental family. If your library owns all three titles, you can choose which you want to read. If someone else has its only copy of A raw youth and you have no need of a particular translation, you know that the other titles translate the same book.

Record snow fall and climate change

2010-02-25T10:28:00.000-05:00

Climate change? February 2010 has been one for the record books. Washington D. C. and the Mid-Atlantic states suffered monster blizzards on consecutive weekends that dumped five feet of snow. For a while, 49 of 50 states had snow on the ground. While no one has kept records, that certainly seems most unusual. Lot's of people say they would love to know where all that "global warming" is.

Jokes aside, and politics aside, climate and weather are not the same thing. The weather changes from day to day. Over a period of decades, any given day has its normal temperature, but the actual temperature may be twenty degrees higher or lower than normal. Climate does not vary from day to day. Climate change occurs more slowly and over a much longer time than weather.

In recent years, we have seen glaciers retreating. We have seen a lessening of ice at both poles. We have seen plant and animal life disappear from where we have been used to seeing it and appear somewhere else where it has never been before. The Northwest Passage, which Henry Hudson sought in vain in the frozen Arctic Ocean four hundred years ago, has become a reality, at least part of the year.

No one who bothers to differentiate between climate and weather can deny that the earth is becoming warmer. As we look back at climate changes over the last few thousand years, we can see that it has always fluctuated. Whatever legitimate controversy there is centers on whether today's climate change represents a continuation of age-old patterns or whether modern industrial technology has caused or contributed to it.

Those who, for scientific or political reasons, believe that climate change is at least partly man-made advocate making some wrenching changes in our industry. Others, for scientific or political reasons, hotly deny that human activity contributes to climate change.

In fact, it doesn't really matter who's right about that argument.

You read right. It doesn't matter whether human activity has caused climate change or not. We simply cannot sustain our current energy sources, energy usage, agriculture, transportation, solid waste, and much more--regardless of whether it's changing the climate or not.

Economic and geopolitical considerations--not to mention simple self interest--will eventually either dictate making changes or cause some kind of social collapse. Generally speaking, whatever changes man-made climate change may dictate need to happen for other reasons as well. Let's stop confusing climate with weather and figure out how to deal with the challenges that confront us

Writing for eHow

2010-02-17T11:58:00.000-05:00

Of the content sites that I write for, eHow imposes the strictest format limitations. All of the titles begin with "How to." The article itself must consist of an introduction, a list of items needed, an indication of how easy or challenging the project is, numbered steps, tips, warnings, and key words.

The template offers a chance to link to other, related eHow articles, as well as off-site resources. eHow has a system of categorization that enables writers to select a broad subject area and two levels of sub-headings.

Whatever you choose to write about, other people have probably written something similar. You must devise a unique title, which may be tricky for popular topics. The number of different perspectives on the same topic certainly benefits the readers.

Like other content sites, eHow functions as a community of writers. Writers seek out each other as friends, comment on each others' articles, recommend each other, and participate in various discussion groups and forums.

Like Factoidz, eHow pays authors (via PayPal) a portion of the money it earns from Google's AdSense. The dashboard makes it easy to see the number of times each article has been read, both recently and in total, and the cumulative amount of money each has earned.

Its formula is proprietary, so authors cannot know how their pay is computed. eHow credits authors' PayPal accounts only if they have accrued at least $10; lesser earnings are carried over from one month to the next.

Recently, eHow deleted a number of old articles. Since it had so many poorly written, even spammy articles, it needed to get rid of them in order to enhance its credibility. Unfortunately, it offered no warning to authors or any clear guidelines.

Many authors lost articles that were earning them money and that they could have rewritten given the chance. The sweeps of old articles caused a great deal of controversy. Many long-term writers have lost trust in eHow's management.

Perhaps because the eHow template has so many steps and pulldown menus (four pages in all), it often does not work properly. Generally speaking, authors for any site should compose their articles on a word processor rather than directly with the site's authoring tools.

It is especially important for eHow, considering how frequently its buggy software frustrates attempts to publish anything. I suggest writing and saving a template of your own, with the various parts of the eHow format listed in order. It should also begin with the warning not to include any HTML in your prose; eHow does not permit even italics or bold face.

When you want to write something, open your template, save it as the subject of your article, write your article, and then copy and paste from there to the site.

Once you finish writing your article and successfully fill out the template, you submit it for publication. It does not appear on the site until after an editorial review. That's usually by the next day, but longer delays have occurred. No one likes having an article rejected or having to rewrite one in order to satisfy the editors, but in the end, the quality control helps everyone.

Compared to Factoidz, eHow seems to have less traffic, but pays a little more. The key to earning a payout every month is both submitting a high volume of traffic and being a member for a long time. It will likely take months (or a high rate of publication). The first articles you write should continue to earn money months or even years later.

Oil: an unsustainable addiction

2010-02-11T09:53:00.000-05:00

"America is addicted to oil," said George W. Bush. That was a startling admission from a President who used to be in the oil business. Another oil man, T. Boone Pickens, launched a plan for energy independence that involves substituting wind power for natural gas to generate electricity and using natural gas instead of oil to run our cars.

We are indeed in the midst of an oil crisis on many fronts. In fact, Bush understated the problem. The entire world suffers from the same addiction. India and China, trying to catch up with the United States and Europe as industrial powers, are driving up the world-wide price of oil. As long as oil is the fuel of choice, it puts economic development, or even self-sufficiency, out of reach of poorer countries.

Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, has more money than it knows how to spend wisely, so it diligently exports the anti-technology, anti-modern Wahabi sect of Islam to other countries.

The influence of that sect directly discourages education (especially for girls and women) and economic development. Indirectly, it discourages jobs and the people who need them. Whether on the Arab street or among the starving masses all over Africa or anywhere else, discouragement and discontent lead to violence.

I have nothing to say about global warming or climate change. Polar ice caps are melting, and the Northwest Passage that Henry Hudson couldn't find is becoming a reality. As to the argument over how much modern industry contributes to it, it really doesn't matter.

We--not just Americans or Europeans, but everyone else as well--have ample other reasons to find less expensive and more equitable sources of energy. Most of the ones under discussion now also seem to be cleaner and less damaging to the air and groundwater.

Both economically, environmentally, and geopolitically, the world cannot sustain its current energy usage. I, for one, would welcome development of enough viable alternatives to oil that we could stop using it entirely, or at least use less than we can produce ourselves.

Beyond information seeking: ways the library meets some other needs.

2010-02-05T14:53:00.000-05:00

In earlier posts to this blog, and other places around the Internet, I have written about how to ask reference librarians questions, how to use a library catalog, and some of the differences between libraries and other ways of finding information. All of these articles have assumed some kind of information-seeking, or at least literature seeking. That is, if you want something in particular, I have given pointers for how to find it. Today, I will look at a random sample of a few other good reasons to visit the library.

1. Libraries are cool in the summer (in case your air-conditioning is not working), a warm place in the winter, a dry place in the rain, a quiet place away from the noise of traffic or the hustle and bustle of working or shopping. There are lots of things you can do in this peaceful and comfortable refuge.

2. Libraries are a great place to browse. They subscribe to more newspapers and magazines than you'll find anywhere else--and not just current or recent issues, either. Only libraries offer the relaxing pleasure of leafing through fifty-year-old issues of Life or some other magazine. Think of the library as a vast StumbleUpon, where you can choose exactly what you want to browse.

3. With a library card, you can see an unlimited number of movies with no rental fee--and very likely find things that the video store, or the Red Box, or Netflix doesn't have. (Plus, if you still have a VCR and no DVD player, the library probably still has cassettes!)

4. Even though libraries offer peace and quiet, the days of, "Shhhhh" are long over. The library is a good place to meet with friends. More and more libraries (academic libraries, at least) hold game nights from time to time. Just think, you can socialize without having to make arrangements for anyone else.

5. Libraries offer other public programming, too: concerts, lectures, public discussions, rooms for meetings, all kinds of things. And while the web is no particular place--basically the same sites are available to users anywhere in the world--the library caters to its own community. Programs reflect the interests of local people. You're local in your own home town, aren't you?

Writing for Factoidz

2010-01-29T11:19:00.000-05:00

As Samuel Johnson said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Even when writing free for academic journals, I have always expected some kind of payoff in terms of getting a good job, getting merit raises, or generating book sales. Now, in addition to my blogs, I write for five article sites, including Factoidz. It's a lot of work keeping up with all of that, but over time, I should be preparing some good passive income.

No one should expect to get rich, or even make a living entirely from writing on the Internet, although I understand some people, by sheer volume of writing, very careful selection of hot topics, and relentless marketing, come pretty close to the latter.

Factoidz accepts three kinds of article (called a factoid): how to do something, facts about something, or lists of something. It does not accept opinion pieces or promotional links to sell products or services. Basically, though, "something" can be virtually anything. Factoidz has 32 broad categories from beauty tips to job searching to hobbies to science. Each of them is further subdivided.

Factoids should be at least 400 words. For each one, you will need to select a category and subcategory, provide a title rich in key words, write a short summary good for search engine optimization (SEO), and list 10-15 key words. Don't worry if you don't know as much as you'd like about SEO; Factoidz authors have already provided plenty of information about it for you to study.

Like every similar site I have ever seen, Factoidz works as a community of writers. The best way to gain readership is to read and comment on other articles on the site. Members can also vote up each other's articles and nominate other authors as experts in various categories. Each member's profile includes the number of votes their articles have received, how many followers they have, and their expertise scores and rankings.

Factoidz has a user forum, and a list of suggested topics. Your dashboard as a member includes statistics on "your most recently published Factoids;" your most viewed Factoids today;" the number of views today, yesterday, and all time; and, of course, your earnings for the month.

Some sites will not actually pay earnings until they reach some minimum threshold. Factoidz pays (via PayPal) even as little as a dollar or two after every month. Significant earnings build slowly and require quality of writing, quantity of writing, and time elapsed since publishing your first article.

That first article, after all, will continue to pay something months or even years later. No one article will pay much in a given month, so you will need lots of articles that people want to read, each earning a little bit every month, to add up to a significant payout. In addition, the time spent reading and commenting on others' articles really increases readership, as well as providing advice and ideas for future articles.

If you are interested in writing for Factoidz, create an account here.