bangersandmash

Interesting piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education detailing some of the ways that Google’s book search falls flat. I particularly liked this part:

Start with publication dates. To take Google’s word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler’s Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André Malraux’s La Condition Humaine, Stephen King’s Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society 1780-1950, and Robert Shelton’s biography of Bob Dylan, to name just a few. And while there may be particular reasons why 1899 comes up so often, such misdatings are spread out across the centuries. A book on Peter F. Drucker is dated 1905, four years before the management consultant was even born; a book of Virginia Woolf’s letters is dated 1900, when she would have been 8 years old. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities is dated 1888, and an edition of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew is dated 1848.

Though this takes the cake:

More mysterious is the entry for a book called The Mosaic Navigator: The Essential Guide to the Internet Interface, which is dated 1939 and attributed to Sigmund Freud and Katherine Jones.

This piece turned up just before a rather lengthy discussion on the NGC4Lib mailing list on Google’s use and mis-use of library-created metadata (via OCLC). Karen Coyle sums it up quite nicely in her blog post “Google Metadata and Library Functions.”

Since upgrading to Snow Leopard I have been completely unable to send invitations to events through iCal. Everytime I tried to send an invite I received the following error message:

XXXXXXXXXX currently can’t be modified. To discard 
your changes and continue using the version of your calendars  
that’s on the server, click Revert to Server. To save your 
changes on your computeruntil the problem is resolved, 
click Go Offline.

I finally got around to researching the problem this morning and cam across a helpful discussion on the apple support boards. It turns out that the problem was that my timezone wasn’t set properly in iCal. Here’s the solution that worked:

If you go to preferences within iCal, you can select “Turn on Timezone Support” ( in advanced tab)

then, on the iCal window, top right you’ll see “Eastern time” with a dropdown. Select the dropdown, and “Other”. highlight our geographic region on the map and select “City” as the closest city.

THEN, be sure your system timezone is set appropriately as well.

My invitations are now going out as they should. Hooray! My Entourage-free life has finally arrived.

Getting it wrong

The APA and MLA have both released new style guides this year. The purpose behind both updates is (partly) to update how electronic resources are handled in reference lists and bibliographies. The APA, tragically, has gotten it completely wrong — especially for journal articles.

The APA has chosen to include the doi as the preferred way of locating an electronic article. The journal’s homepage is the fallback position for articles that do not have a doi.

For example:

Bar-Ilan, J., Keenoy, K., Levene, M., & Yaari, E. (2009).       
    Presentation bias is significant in determining user 
    preference for search results-A user study.  *Journal 
    of the American Society for Information  Science and 
    Technology*, 60(1), 135–149. doi:0.1002/asi.20941

This, in itself is fine. The reader is directed to a specific version of the article. The fallback, however, is to direct a reader to the homepage of the journal. For example:

Bar-Ilan, J., Keenoy, K., Levene, M., & Yaari, E. (2009).       
    Presentation bias is significant in determining user 
    preference for search results-A user study.  *Journal 
    of the American Society for Information  Science and 
    Technology*, 60(1), Retrieved from
     http://www.asis.org/jasist.html

This points the reader back to the homepage of the journal, but not necessarily to

1. a point where the article can be retrieved from
2. a point where the author actually retrieved the articles from
3. a copy of the article in the same format as the author accessed. For example, the author could have used a re-keyed HTML version.

The APA style, on the one hand demands specificity by using the doi, but quickly abandons this specificity by recommending that the journal’s website be used even if the journal’s website was not the source of the article.

I am being pedantic here. I am aware of that. But consider how elegantly the MLA handles the same issue:

Bar-Ilan, Judit, Keenoy, Kevin, Levene, Mark, and Yaari, Eti. 
    "Presentation bias is significant in determining user 
    preference for search results-A user study."     *Journal
    of the American Society for Information Science and 
    Technology*, 60 (2009): 135—149. Wiley InterScience. 
    Web 09 September 2009.

Notice the differences? The MLA:

1. allows you to focus on where the article was downloaded from. Not a cryptic number. Not a website that may or may not actually link to the article.
2. makes an author explicitly state the medium of publication: print, web, film, email, etc. All documentary forms are equal
3. moves away from URLs (which can change) to simply acknowledging the medium of publication.

Neither of these systems is guaranteed to lead a reader back to a copy of the article. Links may have changed, the article may be behind a paywall or a server might be down but the MLA doesn’t pretend. It removes the confusion for the author because the author can cite based on how they obtained and used the article rather than on some provenance that is removed from their research process.

It has been a long time since I’ve written using the MLA style. For years I have preferred the APA style because I found it more logical and easier to use. Now I’m left trying to decide whether I want to stick with what I’ve been doing for years or if I want to begin using a system that seems to recognize the realities of online publishing and provide sensible solutions to documenting online sources.

So, Outlook is coming to the Mac. I’m sure this has nothing to do with Apple integrating exchange services into Snow Leopard’s mail and calendar client.

Mac users have been begging for something better than Entourage for years so I’m glad to see Outlook finally making an appearance. It is a shame, however, that Microsoft only felt the need to answer our cries when it saw that it was going to lose the status of “only product in category” for those of us who need exchange. 90% of my work is conducted via email, so I think about email applications in a way that others think about cars or shoes. Any improvement in an email client’s functionality is likely an improvement in my ability to perform my duties.

Several months ago I was forced out of Mail and into Entourage. I miss Mail. I miss the data detectors — especially the calendar detectors, I miss add-ons like Mail Act-On and I miss the general experience of using Mail and Calendar. I can say without hesitation that I will be dumping Entourage within seconds of installing Snow Leopard, however I will give Outlook a try at some point. Credit to Microsoft for writing Outlook in cocoa. I’m hoping that they build something that replicates the PC version feature-for-feature rather than simply tossing out a rebranded Entourage.

The only thing this announcement was missing was some screenshots. I’m very curious about what the UI will look like!

Just cracked upon iMovie on the new macbook pro. Lovely app! I put together a quick little video on exporting references from RefWorks into Zotero, iMovie09 and Mousepose 3. I’m pretty happy with the results, especially considering that the whole production took less than twenty minutes from idea to upload.

RefWorks to Zotero from Jeff Newman on Vimeo.

I’ve managed to get Outlook 2007 working on my 1st generation macbook. I used CrossOver — which I snagged for free back on October 28, 2008. The built in installer doesn’t include Outlook 2007, but it installs pretty much flawlessly if you use the Microsoft Office 2007 installer. The only nightmare was configuring Outlook to work with my employer’s Stalin-esque security policies. So long Entourage, you flaming pile of garbage!

That’s not perfect, but it’s clearly better than the actual tab bar design in the Safari 4 public beta. Consider: with the previous tab design, if you wanted to move a window you dragged the window, and if you wanted to move a tab, you dragged the tab. Now in Safari 4, if you want to move the window you drag a tab, and if you want to move a tab you drag the small grippy strip at the far right edge of a tab. This is more abstract, indirect, and worse. Chrome’s tab design suffers none of these problems. from: Daring Fireball

I suspect that the “problem being solved” is that there was nothing about the old tabs that indicated you could move (or do anything with) them. Though the old title bar is gone, the behaviour is the same as before — click anywhere on the top of the window (except the grippy bit) and the window moves. Click the grippy bit and voilà, suddenly the masses know they can move their tabs about at will.

Here’s my time vampire of the day:

Flashbake

I’ve been using SVN until now, but git has intrigued. Flashbake’s ability to track context as well as product seems really interesting. More to follow.

Update: 2009-03-05 Fail. Just couldn’t get it to work. Oh well. I blame my lack of terminal-fu. Interesting project, though.

One of the things that I’ve been working on over the past year is ways to help disciplinary novices create better search terms and search strategies. Research has shown that domain novices are particularly poor at identifying appropriate search terms — largely because they are not yet familiar with the terminology and relationships used within the discipline (Hsieh-Yee, 1993; Vakkari, 2001). As a result I’ve been very interested in different ways of analyzing strengths and weaknesses of search strategies in order to better advise and support students at the beginning of their research. Max L. Wilson and Daniel Tunkelang had an interesting little back-and-forth about ambiguity of terms and clarification vs. refinement. Hopefully they’ll continue this discussion as it is yielding many interesting ideas.

This could prove to be useful in a teaching context. Even though the article that Wilson cites shows that only 16% of search terms were ‘ambiguous,’ one has to wonder if these terms would have been ambiguous had the searcher used a discipline-specific search engine or database rather than a general search engine. Also one has to wonder if there is a difference between the percentage of ambiguous terms found in queries resulting from problems with low complexity (ie. when was “Rubber Soul” released) to queries with high complexity (ie. what was the impact of the trans-atlantic shipping on youth culture in 1950s Liverpool?). Could directing students towards discipline specific sources help with the ambiguity problem? Possibly. Discipline specific sources have the advantage of rewarding correct term selection with high-relevance material (if “relevance” is defined as “from the right disciplinary context”) however they are also very punishing — zero results, for example — for those who do not have the right search terms yet. Developing strategies for the latter group has been the biggest challenge when teaching information seeking skills.

Obviously I need to spend more time thinking about this.

I’m a couple of chapters into Christine Bruce’s Informed Learning and I already feel the need to talk about it. The focus on information seeking and use being a disciplinary act is wonderful. This quote pretty much sums up what makes this book so wonderful:

We need to emphasize both discipline and information-use outcomes in our learning design and implementation; discipline mastery is achieved through the processes of creative and reflective information use. Once we recognize what information is and how we are using it, we can be more in charge of the information environment and how we encounter, source, control, engage with, and use information. We cannot assume that learners are aware of these processes or that they are able to implement them. The learning experience that prepares today’s students for tomorrow’s professional practice brings such practices into the curriculum and encourages reflection upon them … The idea of informed learning comes from recognizing that information use and learning are close companions; in formal learning environments, discipline content and effective information use need to be learned together as interrelated phenomena. (p. 3-4)

I’ve been struggling to articulate what she communicates with such ease. I’m going to reserve further comment until I’m finished the book but I wanted to get something up here as it looks like much of my work over the coming year is going to focus on the relationship between discipline, information seeking, writing and information literacy. It is exciting to know that the little nagging idea that has been rolling around the back of my head has some basis in reality.

No posts lately because I’ve been stuck in a rathole while trying to work through a possibly insane idea that I’ve been toying with. Hopefully it will lead to a fuller post, but in short I’m messing around with ways to use citation information to help people clarify their dreaded “I’m looking for information on the impact of x on y” (where x usually equals globalization and y equals either a non-Enlgish speaking, non G-7 country or women.)

Who knows how it will work out. Results have been limited so far, but I have had some success in taking topical keywords and terms from statistical agencies and producing a list of articles that identify and analyze trends by working with hard data. Unfortunately, at the moment the number of databases that this works with is exactly one (Scopus) and the list of terms from statistical agencies required to get reasonable results is approaching 20. This may be more useful in theory than in practice.

Having said that, it really would be nice if there were more databases and search engines out there where one could specify that the search terms should be found in the references list. Also it would be nice if Scopus wasn’t so stingy in their application of proximity searching. Why, for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (yay! two year old meme!) can’t I search for:

(census OR statistics) w/10 Canada

The answer is because Scopus doesn’t allow the use of OR when proximity searching. Which makes kittens cry.

This one needs a lot more thought, but is there a way to quantify the difference in technique/cognitive approaches between effective searching of structured databases and unstructured databases.

I have a bucketload of strategies that I use for navigating through structured relational databases. I’m also aware of the fact that I approach searches in a search engine like Google very differently than I approach something like the MLA international Bibliography or PSYCinfo. Part of the difference could be that I’m searching with the expectation of finding different kinds of information, another could be that I adjust my strategy in Google knowing that I will be matching against at least 100K of full text rather than abstracts and bibliographic data.

I imagine that people consciously or subconsciously structure their searchers to avoid unwanted material (even if they don’t use ‘not’ or ‘-’). I’d be very curious to know how people take a massive set of potential information like Google structure their searches to compensate for the monumental amount of off-topic material that could possibly interfere with the quality of their search results.

Spent last night reading a few articles on the relationship between searching and serendipity. This morning’s indexed seems to fit the bill perfectly

Core Competencies for Librarians — with all the stapling-jello-to-the-wall goodness of the Information Literacy Competency Standards (which are identified as a core competency, no less)! Get yours today! (Consult your physician before ingesting). According to Library Journal these were approved yesterday.

It has been over a year since this report came out, but it is worth mentioning again: ‘Google Generation’ is a myth, says new research. In other news, not all men good with socket wrenches and some white men can jump (see under: Bird). Can we stop informing policy and curriculum decisions with intergenerational stereotypes now?