Bleaaaaaahh...

It really sucks to be sick and have a backache at the same time. I wanted to spend all day in bed, sleeping off the worst of the illness, but I couldn't get comfortable there because my back hurt too much, so I figured I might as well get up.

Also, I did need more Tylenol.

I know: whine, whine, whine.

In other news, I didn't accomplish anything productive because I was too busy whining. I was kind of disoriented--I walked several blocks the wrong way down the street when I got out of the pharmacy--so my concentration was probably doomed anyway.


I did read this interesting post on Butterflies and Wheels that mentions the ways in which the work of journalism is changing.

In a conversation I had with a journalist recently, we discussed what he deemed the two temptations of our post-print era. One is getting mixed up in what he called the“information jungle.” The other is sitting complacently in a “filter bubble.” He suggested that the task of good journalism in the coming years will be to serve as a curator for the public, exposing citizens to, without overfeeding them on, information and ideas that challenge or deepen their firmly held beliefs. All right, but what shall we call it? How about “out-of-the-jungle, beyond-the-bubble Black Swan journalism?”

This idea that journalism may be more about a kind of curation that simply reporting facts reminds me of the idea that librarianism of the future (or of the present, really) can also be seen as more about curation than collection.

If everything (or a significant portion of the 'everything' that most people are likely to look at) is fairly readily available, which parts of it do we want to highlight and recommend to our users?

Except for historical or highly specific collections, it might eventually be less about collecting physical items and keeping them in a single spot, and more about linking to items in various locations online. And paying for them, of course. How many times do librarians roll their eyes when someone says they found a journal article 'free' online and turns out they got access because the library pays for a subscription?

Maybe journalism is looking at a similar problem, in that people find all their news 'free' online and don't really think about how someone--perhaps a professional journalist who might enjoy getting paid--may have been involved in writing and submitting the initial report.

Maybe promoting journalism as more 'curation' will make it seem more worth paying for, to at least enough people to keep news sites going?

Or maybe I'm too disoriented (and recently shivering, but now sweating!--it's the ague, I tell you!*) to actually think about any ideas.


*Incidentally, MeSH doesn't have a term for ague, but maps it to Chills, previously indexed as Shivering, which is much less interesting than the dictionary definition of ague.

Back, and Bewildered

So I've been gone, and the whole world started jumping around with news.

Like, half of Alabama was pulled to pieces by tornados, including Tuscaloosa, home of the University of Alabama SLIS, provider of my library school education. Facebook is proving itself useful with a group dedicated to checking up on people, and it seems that everyone associated with SLIS is OK, but there was a lot of damage to homes. Hang in there, everyone.

Then, some people no one I know knows got married, and there was much rejoicing. I guess. Anyway, people on the news couldn't stop talking about it.

And then John Paul II was beatified. And there was possibly much rejoicing, I don't know, I'm not a Catholic, but anyway, people on the news did talk about it.

And then we heard that Osama bin Laden had been killed, and people on the news definitely did not stop talking about that.

I'm working on a conspiracy theory about it, since there are already all these people wondering about the details.

It's like this: bin Laden isn't really dead, obviously. They just faked his death, and it all has to do with the terrible secret he knows about President Obama's birth certificate.

My theory is, both bin Laden and Obama were actually born in Kenya (obviously, right?), probably in the same hospital. I think bin Laden delivered Obama (he was about 7 years old at the time, easily capable of both catching a baby and pretending to be in Hawaii) when the local doctors were called away to take care of some aliens in a crashed space ship. One of those aliens was Obama's father, on his way back to his home planet.

Hence, Obama owes bin Laden a major debt for not dropping him on the floor, and could never have him killed! Still, bin Laden had to be removed from the picture, so he's been spirited away to a mysterious island in the Bermuda Triangle ('burial at sea'? sure, whatever), like in the TV show The Prisoner, where he's currently hanging out with Elvis.

Who, I believe, also knows a terrible secret about Obama's birth certificate. If you'll recall, people used to report Elvis sightings all the time, long after his supposed 'death,' but not lately! It's because he was trying to reveal the truth, and had to be stopped.

He couldn't be killed due to his magical Elvis DNA, but he could be kept quiet by being trapped on an island, or, as we like to say, 'buried at sea.'

It all makes so much sense if you just put the pieces together! Spread the word! The internet has to know the truth!

Now I'm going to bed.

And really, my thoughts are much more with the people in the towns hit by tornados.

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News

Some takes on the latest in the Google Books Affair.

From Rough Type, Slate, and the ACLU.

Basically, we like books online, but we're leery of letting Google have sole control over them.


Another thing we're leery about--what the hell, they're cutting the Statistical Abstract of the United States? That's like the US classic vital statistics resource! We love it!

I want my tax dollars to be used to fund it!

You cannot turn around these days without some horrible news about something being defunded.

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Keeping Up

Someone I know was working hard (and successfully) over the holiday break to finish reading 50 books for the year.

Fifty seems like a good, round number, doesn't it? Inspired to look back, I find that I myself read 53 books in 2010, or just barely more than one per week. I must give credit to goodreads for encouraging me to keep track of them all, since otherwise I would certainly have no idea of the number.

I must also give credit to a kindly co-worker, who frequently lends me books to read (especially YA fiction), and, of course, to the South End branch of the Boston Public Library, where I checked out many of the others.

It's been a group effort. Hooray for all of us!

I also watched I don't know how many movies (at least one a week) and TV shows (ditto), read probably 25 or so issues of various magazines, played four video games, and read many thousands of blog posts (to hazard a guess based on my subscribed feeds and a tentative average for number of times each posts weekly, maybe 25,000?). Also there were the online news stories, the daily free paper on the train, and the backs of some cereal boxes.

I'm trying to consume my fair share of media here.

Although I do notice I'm not keeping up with podcasts. I just haven't gotten into them, despite regularly intending to.

My consumption of web video, while not non-existent, is also rather puny. Usually I just can't be bothered to wait 10 seconds for a clip to load.

I demand that my media be instantly available!--or I'm off to grab a book.

My attention span is a harsh environment.


Edited 1/1/11 to add that Jessamyn at librarian.net has a much more detailed list of books read last year, including such interesting information as the percentage of books by male/female authors, the percentage of fiction/non-fiction, and the percentage she liked/disliked/was ambivalent about.

Now that's informative!

Inspired once again, I went back to count my own books, and find that I read almost equally male and female authors (25 and 28 titles, respectively), and slightly more fiction than non-fiction (31 and 22, respectively).

In case anyone wants to plot this on a nice four-way table, of the 22 non-fiction titles, 14 were by women and 8 by men, while of the 31 fiction titles, 14 were by women and 17 by men. Given this distribution, I can only conclude that I prefer to have facts presented to me by female writers, and to enjoy tall tales by male writers.

I mean, I have to conclude something, right?

Another year's worth of data may shed new light on this question.

I did not feel up to quantifying the degree to which I liked or did not like each of these books (there are so many levels of enthusiasm to consider!), so I'm leaving that number out.
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Ooh, Subject Headings!

David Bigwood at Catalogablog passes on the news that the New York Times has added "approximately 5,000 new subject headings to data.nytimes.com."

These headings "include organizations, publicly traded companies and geographic identifiers" and join roughly 5,000 personal name headings previously made available. This will allow super-awesome subject-based searching of NYT articles.

Since I'm all for subject search capability, this makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

My fuzzy sweater helps, too.

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You Can Do This

For those of us who are not scientists, I recommend this referral from Bad Science to a helpful post by Dr. Alicia White on How to read articles about health and healthcare (PDF).

It's got good tips on evaluating the stories one reads, which tend to be full of exciting claims that grant license to drink beer until we're silly (I'm sticking to my theory that it's all about people wanting license for extremes of behavior).

It turns out that if you read carefully, the research usually does not support sweeping generalizations. (See how I nimbly avoided making a sweeping generalization about how research never supports such things? That's accuracy for you.)

But it's OK: I give you license to eat cake until you're silly. Go ahead! Have at it!

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In the News Weeks Ago

Some things I never got around to mentioning lately...

If anyone is interested in a nice charitable endeavor, my friends Erika and Petra are collecting donations to renovate a school library in Thailand.

The Distant Librarian notes that Dartmouth is now beta testing a new federated search service called Summon. You can test it yourself on the Dartmouth Libraries page! I gave it a shot, looking for 'edible wild mushrooms,' and retrieved thousands of results including--on the first page--a book, a lot of journal articles and some newspaper articles.

I really don't have any smart review notes, though...the whole reason I meant to post about this was to make some sort of goofy joke about how much I wanted to use something called Summon because it would make me feel like a wizard casting a Summon Information spell ('cause you know, usually you Summon Monster, right?)...yeah, it needs work.

Dangerous Intersection has an interesting piece about how impartial focus groups could be useful to help settle all kinds of questions. Sadly, it would probably be pretty expensive to make this kind of service widely available.

And there was a really interesting Blowfish Blog piece called "Special Rights, Not Equal Rights" (linked from Greta Christina's Blog) about how weird it is to be in a same-sex marriage in California right now. Since it's no longer legal to get married, but if you already were married before Proposition 8 passed, you still are, there are a lot of people who do have 'special rights' denied to others.

What Fresh Horror--No, Classic Horror--Is This?

I've enjoyed a little series of entertaining posts at Dangerous Intersection, listed here blog-style from most recent to earliest:

• Mexican judge’s execution called a hoax!


• Bush Administration destroyed cancer research center and scattered the researchers


• Principal drowns hundreds of grade school students in school basement


• Father of two charged in child poisoning case

Each presents a sad, sometimes horrific tale of abuse, arrogance, misguided determination, and other human failings. Go read before I continue if you don't want to be spoiled.

[Pause in case anyone wishes to do so.]

All right, the not-so-shocking twist here is that each of these posts presents, as if it were a news item from contemporary sources, and with modern names and places, a biblical story.

It's very interesting to see these familiar (to many people who grew up more or less in the common popular culture in the United States, I should say) stories presented as if they referred to human beings.

Now the whole point of a god is that it is not a human being, and thus may easily be conceived to do things that seem hideously wrong from our point of view, but that nevertheless serve a higher purpose that still equals 'good,' so I can understand that one could argue this means nothing.

Nevertheless, an interesting mental exercise.

News Item Frenzy

So everyone in the world is on Amazon for apparently censoring titles in its sales rankings. This is clearly not cool. Information! Free! Etc.

There's some speculation that it might be an external hack as opposed to an internal policy. I use Amazon all the time, so I anxiously await further info and hope it doesn't turn out that I have to despise them. Search #amazonfail on Twitter for lots of info.

[Edited to add this NPR story, noted by LISNews]

Also, it's National Library Week. Shelf Check has more.

The New York Times' Well blog posts about a story of a dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacterium. What have we been saying about overuse of antibacterials? Cut it out!--that's what we've been saying. But no one listens to us.

Bad Science has posted a chapter that was left out of the author's recent book (on bad science) due to legal action at the time. Now available at no charge! It's about AIDS treatments, scientific and non-, and how they combine with politics, history, ideology and horrific HIV infection numbers in African countries.

Somber and worth reading. I must read the whole book one of these days.