Weibel Lines

Greatly Relieved

Saturday isn't the end of the world, as some have carelessly bandied about.  It's Judgement Day!  The end of the world isn't for months after... October 21st (which I will be able to remember, as it coincides with my mother's birthday). 

I was having a hard time figuring out what the deal with the specials on pet care for the enraptured... if the end of the world were at hand, wouldn't the pets be similarly SOL?  Now I get it. 

The True Believers go Saturday, and the rest of us party till October.  This is particularly convenient for Seattle SInners, as its been a really awful winter and spring, and I'd really hate to miss sailing season. And the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Show.  And while its sort of a drag that it will be the last one, it sure takes the edge off varnish-guilt.

There are a few questions left unanswered in the chronology below (courtesy of the eBible Fellowship).  WIll it be a rolling rapture?  One time zone at a time?  So, being in Japan, will the saved go first, leaving the rest of us to the Pachinko Parlors?   And if its rolling, could we beat the rap for a while by flying West?  What about the people on the International Space Station?  Someone has to sort this stuff out.

TIMING OF IMPORTANT EVENTS IN HISTORY

11,013 BC—Creation. God created the world and man (Adam and Eve).

4990 BC—The flood of Noah’s day. All perished in a worldwide flood. Only Noah, his wife, and his 3 sons and their wives survived in the ark (6023 years from creation).

7 BC—The year Jesus Christ was born (11,006 years from creation).

33 AD—The year Jesus Christ was crucified and the church age began (11,045 years from creation; 5023 calendar years from the flood).

1988 AD—This year ended the church age and began the great tribulation period of 23 years (13,000 years from creation).

1994 AD—On September 7^th, the first 2300-day period of the great tribulation came to an end and the latter rain began, commencing God’s plan to save a great multitude of people outside of the churches (13,006 years from creation).

2011 AD—On May 21^st, Judgment Day will begin and the rapture (the taking up into heaven of God’s elect people) will occur at the end of the 23-year great tribulation. On October 21^st, the world will be destroyed by fire (7000 years from the flood; 13,023 years from creation).

It's all a load of manure... no just godhead would end the world on my mother's birthday. And She'd probably take the sinners first, anyway... why give the slackers 5 extra months?  This just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

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The monument at the hypocenter of the Nagasaki atomic bomb... now THERE was an end of the world.

And Then There is Twitter

The very name of the service -- Twitter -- brings to my mind the worst performance of a play I was ever involved in... The Importance of Being Earnest.  Callow, inexperienced theater people who didn't know their lines, trying (and failing) to capture some of the subtlety of Oscar Wilde.   Twittering, the Victorian females.  Posturing, the males.

When my graduate student friends at UW introduced me to it, I had a difficult time imagining it as anything more than a fleeting fad.  Now it is the single most important social networking tool I use, and you'd have to be unattentive in the extreme not to have heard of its role in political events and natural disasters at home and (especially) abroad.   Professionally, it is the most effective current awareness service I've ever had, as well as the most frequent communication channel I have to one of our kids (Hi, @theinfodesk!) Twitter long ago replaced a news reader as my tool of choice for 'keeping up'... and not just keeping up, but getting ahead.  Choose your sources well, and you can feel the pulse of breaking developments, whether personal, professional, politcal, and even seismological.

This is old news to most anyone likely to be reading my blog, but the contrast between Twitter and the social networking 'service' I wrote about in my previous post, is so stark I wanted to balance yesterday's negativity.

I'd also like to call out my favorite Twitterer.  My personal MVT award goes to Dan Brickley (@danbri).  Who gets yours?  Tweet it with the hash tag #MVTwitter (miraculously, it is unsullied!)

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More great screens at the Nezu Museum in Tokyo

Spambook

I awoke to a mailbox full of religious dialog from a group on Facebook that someone signed me up to without my permission, and certainly without my interest.  As the world's most successful social network extends its insidious reach into our privacy (mostly with our sheepish acquiesence), I spend more time thinking about why I stay and what the trigger for my departure might be:

The Value of Facebook

Low burden community networking

    I don't have to go looking... its easy to connect to people in my present and past lives without much effort, and connection is mostly good.  Drive-by, one-stop social shopping... a quick view into what friends and colleagues are doing without the demands of engagement.

Easy photo sharing

I have some wonderful camera gear that mostly goes unused, as the crappy camera in my phone is good enough for spur-of-the-moment image-blogging.  Posting pictures is fun, easy to do, and often more eloquent than equivalent spur-of-the-moment-text.  This is the age of the image, after all.

Additional exposure for my twitter feed and blog

As I pipe both into my FB feed, each gains additional exposure, though I suspect FB's recent change in what you see on your feed has probably reduced this benefit substantially.  I can't tell though, because I don't get any stats on who looks at things on FB.

The Network Effect

Any standard or technology or platform is effective in proportion to the number of people who adopt it. It is hard to argue with 500,000,000 users (and still growing fast).

The Downside of Facebook

The Business Model

The most galling aspect is that spoiled rich kids are getting more spoiled and rich from our participation, and this drives the business decisions.

The Intrusion

As per the introduction to this post.

No Stats

See above.  FB gets all the benefit, the user is left in the dark.

The Potential for Disruption of the network

Yes, I appreciate the irony of whining about something-I-hate being interupted.  The problem is that the community connection IS important to most of us.

What will trigger my departure?

A better alternative. 

The installed base is a huge barrier to overcome, but I'm hopeful that the whispered Google alternative will be good enough to attract a lot of us sour FBers.   I'm ready.

Or maybe I'll just tire of the whole thing and sail away.

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Irises in The Nezu Museum garden in Tokyo

The Filter Bubble and the Ignorance of the Crowd

The Eli Pariser TED talk appeared several times in my Twitter feed recently, and in spite of the fact that the title captures about 95 percent of the value of the talk, I watched it. (Duh... we surround ourselves with the ideas and people we like?).  It is nonetheless a good reminder of the danger of listening to ourselves and our echoes (and the power of the Internet to amplify those echoes).

A far more important (if less glitzy) link that rolled through my Twitter feed (courtesy of Dan Brickly) was a pointer to an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).  The National Academy of Sciences is perhaps the most exclusive scientific meritocracy in the US, and I'm therefore inclined to give it more credence than any other filter on things scientific.

The link in question identifies a research report (How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect) that describes the somewhat paradoxical result that while the so-called wisdom of crowds can distill greater expertise or extract more precision than we can expect from actual experts, when members of the crowd are influenced by other members of the crowd, the result is often a shift of consensus towards the fringes.  A social manifestation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

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Two diners checking their smart phones, captured by another diner with his smart phone, at a restaurant in Fukuoka's Canal City.  Irony, entropy, and recursion rule all.

 

 

 

What would Fred do?

Jonathan Rochkind made several remarks in a comment to my previous post that I largely agree with:

...there are still some regrettable details.

So if someone finds something on a 'to the marketplace' search, how can we make it as easy as possible (one click or less) for the person to figure out how the library can get that thing they found into their hands (licensed electronic copy, ILL, book on the shelves, other)? Cause that definitely is something that's our responsibility, and it's difficult to do without some level of cooperation (or good API's not specifically targetted at us, but just generally good and flexible) with the search provider.

Not sure I can help with the less than one click bit, but WorldCat comes pretty close to what you're asking for, but the user does NOT have to be an OCLC member to take advantage of this.  The library does, of course, but is it so unreasonable, if one wants libraries to act in a global way, to expect them to participate in a global consortium?  Others can answer this better than I, but it was my impression that libraries who are exposed in WorldCat are happy with the results -- more traffic.

Once you find out where the item is, whether you can get it with a click, or have it delivered to you is a matter of the perogatives and wherewithal of the particular library.  I know there have been trials with on-demand-delivery of paper... I don't know whether this has resulted in an economically sustainable service, but again, thats a decision for each local organization to make.  I suspect there is room for a consortial delivery service in this space, but it is probably dependent on geographic considerations.

If you're still reading, you've probably sputtered "But WorldCat isn't Google search, and no one but the saved (librarians) knows about it!"  Perhaps, and thats a huge part of the problem that I don't see an easy fix for.  There are WorldCat links in Google, but you can spend a lot time looking for them (appending "worldcat" to a search works, but not likely anyone is going to do THAT).

Libraries are just too small a part of the information ecosystem to either manage this themselves, or to get enough of Google's attention and effort to make it happen from within the universe of their business model.  Just because something SHOULD work a certain way (from a public perspective) doesn't mean that there is a business model that will support it working that way.  Jonathan's comments, if I interpret them correctly, seem to agree that this is the case (they are worth reading if your concerns are convergent with this issue).

So, what would Karen, Jonathan, and I all agree about?  The dead are poorly represented among us, but in the case of Fred Kilgour, OCLC's visionary founder, we have a documented answer that I've alluded to before.  In his last address to OCLC Staff before his death, in a kind of irascible valedictory, Fred said:

Some of you here have had ideas about how to make information more accessible to people, and many of those ideas have not come to pass.  In some cases this is because you have not done enough to make them happen. [emphasis is mine, though... anyone who knew him can imagine it as his]

Karen is working hard with other technical librarians in the Library Linked Data group, and I expect that effort to be an important signpost to future actions that may help.  Jonathan works in the trenches, actually providing service in one of our more august academic libraries.  I bloviate.  Add your name to the list.  What are you doing, and what should we be doing, collectively, to make our future more effective?  Hints: It isn't railing against OCLC to do more (run for User's Council, or whatever they call it now, if you want to move OCLC... or have your library director do some railing).  It isn't railing against Google (they have stockholders, and as one, I'm sort of upset that their appearance of high-mindedness cost me a lot of unrealized-gain this quarter).

I'm not sure what the answer is.  But it isn't writing blog posts like this, either.  Visionary with action plan wanted.

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Another exquisite screen in the Nezu Museum in Tokyo. 

Its too late

Karen Coyle, someone we recognize as one of librarianship's clear-thinking thought leaders, said recently:

Really, if we don't do this, the future of libraries and research will be decided by Google. There, I said it.

See the post for the referrents of 'this'.  Her post is on the general topic of dystopias in the modern information age, and heaven knows there is plenty to feel dystopic about.  But, if we want libraries (as she also says) to be of the Web, then why paint Google as the bugbear that threatens our future?  Indeed, I would argue there is no single organization in the Age of the Web that has done more to improve access to information in general, and research specifically, than has Google.  Google Books is something we didn't have the wherewithal to accomplish, even if we had had the vision.  Google Scholar on the other hand, we have no excuse for not having done within our own community.  It was doable.  A failure of imagination.  In a sense I suppose Karen and I are converging on the same position from different sides.  Google abhors a vaccuum. Some parts of that vaccuum should have been backfilled by libraries.  Other parts are simply beyond the resources, the imagination, and the organizational coherence that librarianship can muster.

Karen is frustrated by this.  Lots of us are.  But I find it in no way dystopic that Google has rushed in where librarians are too impoverished or too limited in vision to tread.  Google (and Amazon, and Yahoo, and maybe even Bing) have already decided the future of libraries and research by putting information products and services in place that we couldn't, or didn't, imagine.  But I belabor the obvious.  The indirect benefit is also fairly obvious -- by invading territory we once imagined as 'ours', they have forced upon us a re-examination of our profession and what it means to be charged with looking after both the legacy paper and our slippery digital assets.

Karen rightly argues that there is danger in the mismatch between Amazoogle business models and the long term management of cultural heritage assets, and i strongly agree with this point.  But I can't even imagine the overstretched resources of our community providing a tractable alternative with a prayer of gaining more than a small fraction of the search market (another failure of imagination?).  I used to worry about this.  I don't any more. Search platforms come and go (remember Altavista?), and if Google seems invincible now, we know that it isn't really.  Libraries need to make damned sure that our digital assets are safely cared for, and that they are accessible according to standard web protocols that will survive corporate upheavals.  Leave search to the marketplace.  Its as changeable as last year's microprocessor platforms, and we don't feel compelled to be part of the engineering of those platforms, even though we use them to manage our stuff.

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Image: These screens, at the Nezu Museum in Tokyo, are designated national treasures, and the signature pieces of this wonderful museum.  Built by a railroad baron, and still maintained privately in the Nezu family, this museum has a small, select collection of Asian statuary, ancient Chinese bronzes, a smattering of furniture and ceramics, some spectacular screens, and even a couple of 'sparkle plenty!' clocks.  It is situated in a beautiful building that is at once traditional and ever-so-modern.  But best of all, it has an extensive stone-lantern-studded-garden that features a pond with, yes, actual irises that were in explosive bloom on the occasion of my visit. The Nezu is my new favorite place in Tokyo.  Eight bucks for a latte in the cafe-with-a-view, and darned well worth it.  Thanks to Jan Askhoej for the tip. More pictures in the Nezu Museum set on my Flickr account [Warning note: Please be apart from the statues, when the earthquake occurs]

Notes from Japan

I posted this picture on fb from my iPhone (from the Harajuku train station platform in Tokyo), and it attracted a number of comments.  It's direct simplicity and charm grabbed my attention immediately -- a very effective esthetic for a warning sign.  No slashed-red-circle, or postured olympic stick figures.  A delicate, evocative siloutte, instead.  I love the balance of it -- the train-master's kindly lean, the counterbalance of the retrieval device. The classic style of the ribboned hat, and the girl's pigtails - very Japanese and universal at once.  And her posture... bent knees and arms that capture her distress perfectly.  I can't think of a more charming piece of signage.

I had another quintessential cultural moment (entirely unrelated) at the Coffee Factory in Tsukuba last weekend.  This is the place where they hand-sort their coffee beans to assure the quality they offer their customers. The level of latte art is also the highest in my personal experience.  They occasionally do the cutesy stuff (more girls in pigtails, or kitties), but what I like is the elegant swirled-tree figures that are poured, not drawn. 

The previous weekend I had made my pilgrimage and, while paying, had dropped a coin that rolled under a counter.  Of course, they apologized for my clumsiness, but I waved it away and bowed and left smiling.  This week, 8 days later, paying for my latte, there was a plastic bag waiting for me with a note written on it, with a 100 yen coin in it.  I laughed and smiled and bowed my way out.  The honesty is gratifying, but the care is what knocks me out.