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.