Articles by josephsmorgan

That’s right. The young ones are now dubbed the facebook generation. How does one get these bright young souls and what do we do with them to maximize the $$ generating power. Well, here’s the answer..

Among the paradigm shifts from generation F, we get the idea that, are you ready for this,

8. Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it. The Web is also a gift economy. To gain influence and status, you have to give away your expertise and content. [snip] Online, there are a lot of incentives to share, and few incentives to hoard.

Great idea, huh?

Well, spring break is over for me. It was some good times, a nice little vacation with the opportunity to ignore looming deadlines.

Speaking of deadlines. With my week o’ slack at an end, it’s back to the student life. I’ve been reading a backlog of articles on born digital works and the preservation thereof. Libraries are not taking the lead on this as they should. Can’t say I’m too surprised. With budgets tight as always, why waste time on something out there in the nebulous internet world. More specifically, though, I think libraries feel no need to protect this stuff because, well, they don’t own it. Print costs money. And as most economist will point out, people feel more responsibility for things they’ve invested money (and time to earn that money) into.

But just because that is why we do what we do doesn’t mean it’s a right. Instead, as I love to point out, we should be concerned with patron needs. In the not so distant future, it is highly likely that born digital content will be an important aspect of research. This includes obvious things like government publications and e-journals, but it also includes the less obvious such as blogs, social networking sites, etc. Remember how much those historians love their civil war journals or correspondence. Guess what? That’s all here. WIth the exception of the internet archive no one is trying to hold onto any of it. And the archive is not as concerned with blogs and such.

So though we’ve yet to invest $$ into preservation, I’d say the burden of responsibility still lies with us. It is our job to anticipate and fulfill patron needs. This one’s a no brainer.

I’ve been reading two very good books by the Sociologist Richard Sennett. The first is called the The Crafstman the second is The Culture of New Capitalism . Sennett writes a lot about labor, work. How it has changed. How it conflicts with our life, our identity.

In short, I caught myself thinking on a section in The Culture of New Capitalism where he discusses how people find meaning through work. His example involved new immigrants in the UK working menial jobs, cleaning perhaps. Those that worked for a government run hospital took much more pride in their work, more satisfaction. They felt that they were supporting a valuable institution and that made them proud.

Now I’m sure you see where this is going. I know most of us work in libraries because, well, we love the place. I wonder for myself which I enjoy more, the work or the place. I do enjoy a lot of the tasks I perform in a library environment (helping answer questions, create access to information, develop technology to share culture and information) but I do think that in the end, it’s the place that is most important to me. If someone enjoyed a lot of these tasks (as, presumably many computer savvy people might) but don’t love the place, well, I don’t think they could last. It’s nice to be part of something.

I have to say this is great. A bunch of people are trading academic work on bit torrent. And who says the internet is only for entertainment.

Bravo to the Ubiquitous Librarian.

So I now have two different test libraries, and I’m working on a third through wordpress using Scriblio,

The first is built with Drupal and a couple of modules. The backbone module is biblio. However, per a suggestion by another biblio user I’ve added taxonomy access control lite a nice little module that can help control which parts of our collection and which are public.

The biggest problem with Drupal (and all options so far) is the weak search interface. Biblio’s is particularly bad since it only gives ten results no matter how many there are in reality. This just baffles me and I’m wondering if it’s a bug. However, it imports Endnote nicely and seems to be able to handle our large collection. It’s not perfect, but it may actually be the easiest especially if we have to maintain our Endnote records on the side, a possibility I’m sadly beginning to accept.

On the other side I have a nice Joomla set up. The key component here is docman which does an excellent job of allowing indexing and flexible permissions. The downside is, again, metadata. There is no metadata input and thus searchability is next to nothing. It is, however, easier to browse and may thus be more useful for end users. Again, I’d have to maintain it in addition to the EndNote “library” that we have now.

Other than that, I’ve been tinkering with a few faceted search options. That won’t work in Drupal yet because the vocabulary is all over the place and is pretty chaotic at this point. It could be a nice solution to help browsability while maintaining more sophisticated searching and filtering options.

Ok, I’m probably not the first you’ve heard this from, but some members of congress (including democrats no less!) have introduced a bill to stop the NIH open access policy. Personally, I don’t think this will go anywhere. But personally I never thought Californians would approve Prop. 8.

For those of you in Madison (or anywhere) our representative Tammy Baldwin is on the house Judiciary committee. I suggest sending her an email or a letter. Government funded research is supposed to benefit us, not publishers.

Here’s a librarian at heart. When the government puts what should be free information online, he and other like-minded individuals snagged the opportunity and downloaded the information (almost 20 % in one day) to republish in freely available database. That is some good ol’ fashioned take no prisoners librarianship.

And then there are those who would want to keep information hidden. As reported by slash dot, a bill was introduced to stop the NIH open access policy.

Come on people, it’s our tax dollars. Every damn cent spent on research should have the widest possible impact. Hopefully this is a pathetic attempt to, I don’t know, slow the American research process and will fizzle out quickly.

I’ve been reading The Craftsman by Richard Sennett. All around, it’s been a pretty good read. There’s a lot of discussion about the craftsman, how they engage in work, the community, etc. But I believe this line completely summarizes the rise of the DIY spirit and the beauty of open access:

“People invest thought in things they can change.”

Yes. Yes. And more yes. It’s just that simple, people. If we can use it, change it, enhance it, customize it, then it becomes interesting. If we engage it and move on. What is the damn point? Nothing is different or only slightly so.

Well, now I may be adding wordpress to the mix. I ran across a nice plugin called scriblio today. It looks pretty sweet. The worst part is the IT guy who has been nice enough to install all of these to the server suggested WordPress. “Nah” I scoffed “I have a word press blog, I don’t think it can handle the project” *sigh* Well, I may have to praise the prescience of my local computer guy. Secondly, I should do a little more research before I begin.

Because I like to complicate my life, I decided to through Drupal into the digital library mix. Joomla is looking pretty good, but it doesn’t have the flexibility that I’m going to need. There’s no real way to add metadata much less search different categories. Well, we’ll see what happens.

In the meantime I’ve been trying out Drupal as well. It has more flexibility and a way steeper learning curve. Personally, I think someone should put together a content management thesaurus. Something along of the line of Components are to Joomla as Module is to Drupal. Just a thought.

On the plus side, I’ve been much better at documenting as I learn, so now I have a few nice training manuals with beautiful screenshots (thanks Jing). So I won’t have to reinvent the wheel every time I come back to a project.