Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in The plural of anecdote is not data's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, February 5th, 2006
12:19 pm	Wikimania 2006 -- Call for Participation Call for Participation -- Wikimania 2006 -- Aug. 4 - Aug. 6, Cambridge, MA For more information, see the Wikimania website: http://wikimania.wikimedia.org ----- About Wikimania Wikimania is an annual global event devoted to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. It is both a scientific conference and a community event, open to the public. Wikimania is a place for users and editors of the projects to gather from around the globe, to meet each other, to exchange ideas, and to report on research and projects. This year's conference will be held from 4-6 August, 2006, on the Harvard Law School campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are accepting submissions for papers, posters, presentations, workshops, and discussion groups. We are also accepting nominations for speakers and speaker panels, and suggestions for other activities. Everyone is welcome to submit abstracts and ideas. Be bold in your submissions! ( read more ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 24th, 2006
1:43 pm	two books "Pro ASP.NET 2.0 in C# 2005" and "Pro C# 2005 and the .Net 2.0 platform" Same publisher, same year, same price. Same collection development headache... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, January 23rd, 2006
5:16 pm	arches of waffle "Fortunately, in these times when the amount being published is increasing rapidly, it is rarely necessary to consult everything that has been published on the topic of one's interest. Usually much proves to be irrelevant or repetitive. Some publications (including in that term websites and e-journals) prove to be sadly lacking in important detail and present broad generalizations flimsily bridged with arches of waffle." -- Michael W. Hill, Ia C. McIlwaine, series editors, "Information sources in engineering". 4th ed. Roderick MacLeod and Jim Corlett, eds. Saur: 2005. (Comment on this)
Monday, January 9th, 2006
9:43 am	blaise cronin* has issues with blogs "The biliousness and rebarbativeness that one encounters in the slum dwellings of the blogoshpere are, ultimately, damaging to the social and institutional fabric of this nation, while the faux egalitarianism and flagrant anti-intellectualism of so many exchanges provide a depressing commentary on post-Baby Boomer, anything-goes, American society. I entitled this rejoinder ‘Vox populi.’ It should probably have read ‘Pox populi.’" from: Blaise Cronin, Vox populi: Civility in the blogosphere, International Journal of Information Management, Volume 25, Issue 6, December 2005, Pages 549-550. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VB4-4HFTMWM-2/2/b045aa41b8c5b108e59fd608c78d7bd0) (*former dean of SLIS at Indiana) Gettin' a little hot under the collar there, mr. cronin! (Comment on this)
Monday, January 2nd, 2006
3:09 pm	notable publications in computer science I have been looking for some time now for a "greatest hits" list in computer science of influential publications and notable books. And of course, Wikipedia's started in on an answer This is part of a longer meditation that I've been thinking about a lot -- how do you answer the question of what the core texts of a field, of any field, are? I see this as one of the greatest challenges for learning a new subject, and perhaps one of the biggest challenges for both librarianship and for endeavors like Wikipedia. How do you provide a concise, complete introduction to a subject? How do you determine the truly core texts? Citation analysis is of limited applicability, and there aren't good enough tools to do it, anyway (Web of Science will never be able to measure the influence of something like The Mythical Man-Month or Godel, Escher, Bach). How, as a non-subject expert (a librarian, say) do you determine what the central sources for a field are? Finding more specialized information is in many ways easier; I can get you cutting edge research no problem, but how do I select the very best introductory book for, oh, say, object-oriented programming? Whole forests have been decimated for the subject -- how do I pick the best? In the end, if you're looking for introductory information, people's choices of what to check out will likely be determined more by factors like what's on the shelf and size of the book and interface-friendliness (or perhaps professorial recommendations) than truly by content -- but there are applications where this is an unacceptable approach ... such as writing Wikipedia articles, or making recommendations to undergrads. For Wikipedia in particular, I believe that the difficulty of finding central sources for non-specialists is one of the biggest issues for the site. In recent conversation with a friend who's also in the business, he expressed a criticism of Wikipedia that the articles tended to be not so much inaccurate as incomplete -- a much more insidious and intractable problem. I believe that this is but another expression of what could be termed the introductory-texts problem. (Comment on this)
Monday, December 19th, 2005
5:04 pm	uk & elsevier journal deal National journal licensing, anyone? http://webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?SESSIONID=&aId=7110 (Comment on this)
11:10 am	the hungarian web for rimrunner: the hungarian web: http://www.webkat.hu/scripts/webkat and thesaurus: http://www.webkat.hu/thesaurus/# "WebKat.hu is the online catalogue of Internet resources related to the Hungarian cultural heritage. The service is operated by the John von Neumann Digital Library. Since 2000, the catalogue was completed with a thesaurus, the development of which was marked by an important milestone in 2003." -- Igneczi L. Tudomanyos Es Muszaki Tajekoztatas. 51(7)OMIKK, 2004, p. 285-8 you can also get to the internet hungarian library: http://www.neumann-haz.hu/index.html and some other nifty-looking but unreadable stuff. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 14th, 2005
9:42 am	cataloging websites: part 1 of N I am a believer in cataloging free websites: they are information resources that patrons use and want to know how to find, and they represent part of what the library can offer access to. As far as I'm concerned, these are all the requirements necessary to justify cataloging. However, there are certainly issues: maintainance and quality control being not the least of them. Maintainance is problematic because the details of websites (size, links, etc) can change so rapidly, with little notice, which means that someone has to check up on the site. Quality control is a problem because sites can become good, bad or indifferent equally rapidly -- lightning-fast in library terms. In the past few days, I've been browsing through catalogs and "e-resource" sites, which have substituted for actual cataloging of websites at many libraries. Taking Wikipedia as a test case, I've found the following, without really trying: * Wikipedia cataloged with The Free Software Foundation as its publisher (I sent an email about this; I shudder to think of the reaction of either organization) * Wikipedia listed as being created "by 6000 volunteers" * Wikipedia listed as "currently working on 166311 articles in the English version." * Wikipedia listed with "anyone can edit this page" copy that I recognize as having been on the main page several iterations ago * Although I can't find a record for the site as a whole (so far) in OCLC, fascinatingly (horrifyingly?) there's a library (*cough* the Kansas State Lib *cough*) that's been cataloging individual wikipedia articles and placing them in WorldCat... and listing them as being published by the FSF. Over 900 of them so far, many of the articles for small towns in that library's state. Anyone who knows more about cleaning up OCLC than me is welcome to comment. --- What's the solution for listing such a dynamic resource? In the meantime, I am going to break out my (extremely limited) cataloging knowledge to create a sample MARC record for 'pedia that libraries could use. Any help with this project would be appreciated. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
9:19 am	cuniform digitization UCLA has a Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. I don't know why I didn't know about this before. Very nifty! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 12th, 2005
11:53 am	out there on the edge, bleeding One of the new buzzwords in information/computer research is apparently "ambient intelligence" (as in this book title: "Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery: Foundations, Theories, and Systems" [Springer, LNCS 2005]). This is related to ubiquitous computing; Phillips, for instance, envisions a (post-apocalyptic? - eds.) world filled with tiny sensors and chips, in everything, documenting our every environmental change. They may be in bed with MIT to achieve such a thing (this site is worth looking at just for the design); however, this research group seems to be playing around with images and all kinds of other things. The aforementioned book, by contrast, talks about making sense out of the huge clouds of scientific data that are created, disseminated, and have somehow to be analyzed: Recent estimates suggest that human knowledge doubles every two to three years – and with the advances in information and communication technologies, this wide body of scientific knowledge is available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. This may also be referred to as ambient intelligence - an environment characterized by plentiful and available knowledge. -- Madhavi Ganapathiraju, Narayanas Balakrishnan, Raj Reddy, Judith Klein-Seetharaman, Computational Biology and Language, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 3345, Jan 2005, Pages 25 - 47. (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 8th, 2005
2:14 pm	e-prints in LIS Today I found E-LIS,, a full-text open access repository of eprints in library and information science. It's a European venture, run out of Italy (though abstracts of papers and site text are in English) and supported by another, similar venture: RCLIS. LIS authors are encouraged to deposit their works here. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 7th, 2005
5:17 pm	So there is an OUP "Very Short Introduction" for quantum theory: http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-280252-6 One for cryptography: http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-280315-8 One for math: http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-285361-9 (I will very likely get this; I'm math-illiterate, and I match the readership almost exactly: "people who would like to talk about mathematics in an informed way without having to learn technical details.") there's an introduction for molecules: http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-285430-5 (ah, molecules) And one for particle physics: http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-280434-0 But while future titles include "Chaos" (not to mention "The End of the World"), there is nothing at all on: computational physics complex networks applied dynamical systems self-organization in complex systems nonlinear dynamics grid computing biological computing and simulation computational cosmology ecological simulations and modelling data mining Monte Carlo simulations topographic imaging particle theory And so on. Anyone who understands physics and would like to take pity on me and explain some things would be most welcome :) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 5th, 2005
6:00 pm	cs resources The UT Austin Library's guide to CS resources rocks; see particularly the links to # Programming Language Theory Texts Online and # "So you just want to grab a Java programming book off the shelf and don't want to go to the trouble of looking one up in the online catalog. So where are the shelves with all the Java books? This outline will help." Thank you, Austin, for that last link, which at least attempts to explain the insanity of LC classing in the computer science field (it's even worse than usual in the QAs, trust me). eta: link all fixed now, sorry! (Comment on this)
10:22 am	fascinating Look what google ads gave me, on a thread of emails re: wikipedia -- http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/12/02_sims.shtml [snip] BERKELEY – The appointment of two renowned researchers to the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information Management & Systems (SIMS) has been announced by SIMS Dean AnnaLee Saxenian. Geoffrey Nunberg is a leading researcher in information and linguistics and a well-known print and broadcast commentator on language, and Paul Duguid is internationally known for his research in organizational knowledge. They have been co-teaching a course on "Information Quality" this semester. Saxenian said the two came to SIMS because they share common interests in information technology as well as backgrounds in the social sciences and humanities, and they want to raise funds for a major SIMS research project exploring critical issues relating to online information quality. "This is a huge issue for everybody," Saxenian said, noting that over the centuries, since the introduction of the printing press, society has developed mechanisms such as peer review and other standards to help readers determine the quality of print material. "But online, we're kind of in the dark," she said. Duguid and Nunberg will teach undergraduate and graduate classes on "The History of Information" in the fall of 2006, exploring historical episodes in the creation, storage, manipulation and use of information, with a focus on the interplay between technology and society. [snip] methinks I need to make some friends at Berkeley. (Comment on this)
Sunday, December 4th, 2005
10:39 am	Wikipedia thoughts As part of my other life, I posted thoughts about the Wikipedia/John Seigenthaler controversy here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/brassratgirl/286343.html here http://www.livejournal.com/users/brassratgirl/287207.html and here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/brassratgirl/287277.html I also posted my idea for writing a wikipedia evaluation guide: http://www.livejournal.com/users/brassratgirl/286557.html as follows: One idea I've been batting around is writing a guide to evaluating wikipedia, esp. from a librarian perspective. I've actually been requested to do so by a couple collegues [who want it for instructional purposes, especially in pop culture classes] and I think it could over well. Thoughts? Suggestions? I know I'm not the only person to think of such a thing, or possibly to even do it, and I need to find out what other people have actually done, and look at their work before going forward. There's an introduction to Wikipedia *for* librarians that's been started here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Librarians/Introduction but that's not quite the same thing. I'm thinking more for students. There's also a big debate going on right now over referencing, and how references should be used, collected and managed within WP. There's this proposal, among others: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicite and this one: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Textrose It's all very interesting and complicated. We have a two-fold problem of a) getting cites in the first place and b) verifying them, and we have to do it on a *massive* scale -- 750,000 articles to be fact-checked in English, is my conservative estimate. How to do this? How to manage references, bearing in mind that WP is multilingual and international and references often refer to in-country publications? The textcite proposal is essentially for a wikified, distributed, openly commentable bibliographic system. Textrose is a citation analysis tool, essentially putting Wilson's theoretical guidelines of trusting text into actual practice. (It would also show what bits of a text haven't been cited yet). I need to study these more, look into them in depth before I form a real opinion. What I am more fascinated by is the question of how to get contributors to cite their sources -- a basic problem that, as I wrote in my Seigenthaler commentary, is not always well-practiced in academia and academic journals, let alone the internet (sj reports he's been having similar conversations in other venues). A lot -- (many? most? some? no one knows) of WP contributors are quite young -- younger than college age, for instance. These folks, (many? most? all?) of whom are undoubtedly smart, many of whom are brilliant, still may have never been exposed to "why and how we cite" type information (especially since this is poorly taught in college, let alone high school, let alone to non-humanities students). How to make this a wp priority? Finally, on the subject of collecting wiki literature, Nichtich and PatrickD, a couple of Germany librarian(students?) that I had the pleasure of meeting this summer, are working on this: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~voj/bibliography/index.php?action=readOnly which mirrors, precisely, my own thoughts on the subject. Good for them! (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 30th, 2005
10:01 am	Romanian libraries In light of my visit to the Romanian National Library in Bucharest last summer, I was fascinated when I ran across an article on the history and development of Romanian libraries, and whether the state of Romanian libraries is an indication of Romania's readiness to join the EU. The basic conclusion of the article: they're in sad shape. An excerpt: "The vast majority of large Romanian libraries are closed stacks. Only a very limited number of libraries have an online catalog (more on this issue in the section “Infrastructure”). Reference services as they are known in the northern European countries and on the North American continent are almost nonexistent. A very limited number of county libraries have Internet connections. They allow user access to the Internet for a fee or free of charge. Very few of these libraries offer mediated searches to their clients. One of the reasons is that the librarians are not trained on how to search the Internet efficiently and how to evaluate effectively the information available on the World Wide Web." Anghelescu, Hermina G.B. "European Integration: Are Romanian Libraries Ready?" Libraries & Culture, Vol. 40, No. 3, Summer 2005. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
9:14 am	computer research at UCD Groves of Academe UCSD Scientist Computing a Theory of Theories This graphic shows the results of a circular “computational automaton” computer model after 100 cycles. Image Credit: James Crutchfield, University of California, Davis A University of California, Davis researcher received one of the most powerful computers of its type as a gift from Sun Microsystems Inc., and he's using it to construct simulations called cellular automata and investigate how theories are developed. The computer that Sun donated to professor James Crutchfield is known as Colony. It has 14 motherboards that have 64 chips each, and each chip contains 64 32-bit processors, for a total of 57,344 processors. But what makes Colony special is the speed of the connections between its processors - it can run simulations thousands of times faster than conventional machines. A simple cellular automaton would be a lattice of cells, each of which can be in a set number of states, such as black or white, one or zero. Colony can run very large lattices and also run models in three or four dimensions, making for more powerful and realistic models, says Crutchfield. He has developed a new theory of how cellular automata can spontaneously organize into miniature universes with their own unique structures. The ultimate goal is to understand how structure can appear at different levels of the universe, how the levels are related and how scientists (and computers) can automatically construct theories from data. from here: http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,106356,00.html?source=NLT_HW2&nid=106356 n.b.: 'ucsd' actually means 'uc san diego', but crutchfield does work at davis. he's pretty awesome. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005
3:42 pm	I love you, LCSH What is cataloged under the subject heading: "Human-computer interaction -- Drama"? 2001: A Space Odyssey, of course. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, November 18th, 2005
10:08 am	ASIST chapter in the PNW, ASIST chapter in LA... but no ASIST chapter in the SF Bay area? It looks like there's a "student" chapter but no main chapter. hrm. (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 17th, 2005
11:33 pm	ha! (Comment on this)