Wikipedia Readings

Anonymous: History of Wikipedia
Anonymous: Criticism of Wikipedia
Miller, Helicher, & Berry: I Want My Wikipedia

I've been following Wikipedia for a couple of years now, and I continue to have mixed feelings about it. Probably my favorite quote in these readings came from the Criticisms article, when Roy Rosenzweig called Wikipedia "surprisingly accurate", damning it with faint praise.

That's a great attitude to have about Wikipedia. I visit the site multiple times on a typical week, and I find it extremely valuable. At the same time, I know enough not to completely trust what I find there. While a number of points in the Criticism article resonated with me, on the whole it felt strained. If Wikipedia were presenting itself as an authoritative, peer-reviewed publication, I'd be lining up to wag my finger too. It isn't, though. The number of times I've found exactly what I was looking for, and the frequency with which I come back, tell me that there's good stuff to be had there.

I was surprised in the History article to learn that it started as an outgrowth of Nupedia, a much more heavily moderated and peer-reviewed reference work. I assumed Wikipedia had grown out of constrained anarchy from the start.

Fundamentally, using a wiki as an authoritative source requires an optimistic view of human nature which I don't share. There are too many losers in the world who like to wreck things, and there are too many people with dangerously over-positive views of their own expertise. But accepting those caveats, a wiki can be a great place for the actually-helpful, actually-knowledgeable people in the world to help others.

Censorship Readings

Boyer: Boston Book Censorship in the Twenties
LaRue: Buddha at the Gate, Running
Nunberg: The Internet Filter Farce

What struck me in Boyer’s work was the fickle nature of mob mentality. In this article, mob mentality plays a role in the rise of censorship in Boston, as in the first two decades of the twentieth century a wide variety of people praise and support the censorship movement as a noble cause, for example, praising the Watch and Ward Society as a sort of “moral board of health”. But just as the 1920s was a period of social and moral flux, the mob turns in the middle of the decade and proceeds to eat its own, savaging its former heroes.

In retrospect it’s remarkable to think that self-appointed moral police could have such a strong extralegal influence as to shut down the distribution of certain publications: telling the reviewers which books they shouldn’t review, and the booksellers which books they shouldn’t sell, with the understanding that those people would be vilified as purveyors of filth if they broke ranks.

LaRue and Nunberg represent movements by groups that hardly deserve to be called mobs since they’re motivated by concern over their children's well-being. Nunberg’s article itself reminded me of the Boston backlash, complete with an angry accusation in the title. Internet filters are ineffective, and their developers have over-sold their abilities, but we should also see them as the industry’s flailing first attempts to address a real problem for parents. As with Double Fold, I’m sure that not everyone behind the situation is evil incarnate.

Arms: Digital Libraries

Besides the useful list of terms and issues, a couple of things caught my attention in this article.

One was the idea of archiving and preservation in a digital library. Given the concerns over the transient nature of digital information, and the increasing proportion of all information that never sees anything other than a digital form, this seems like a critical area for research and discussion.

Second was the apparent sense that interoperability between digital libraries is a daunting problem. That may be true, but I wonder. In terms of computer adoption, healthcare has to be one of the most technologically sluggish fields around, but even so it's managed to develop a reasonably civilized interoperability standard (HL/7). Healthcare data is mind-bogglingly complex and irregular, so it's hard for me to imagine that interoperability between digital libraries can be more challenging. Funding is a confounding factor though. There are generally more dollars available in healthcare since it accounts for as much of 20% of the country's GDP, so even a small fraction of that can amount to a lot of people focusing on standards.

Rubin: Information Technologies in the Twentieth Century

Disintermediation is the removal of, for lack of a better term, a "middleman" (or "middleperson", or even "middleinstitution"). People often use computers to disintermediate. Often it's a good thing, for example, when I can order a book from Amazon at 2am without having to visit a store, or when I can schedule an appointment with my doctor without calling anyone. Sometimes, though, it's a bad thing.

Although he didn't use the term, the theme of disintermediation runs through Rubin's brief history of technology in 20th century libraries. Whether we use computers to reduce the need for professional catalogers (p. 83), or to reduce the need for librarian assistance by providing an OPAC (p. 87), or to let users bypass librarians altogether in the most extreme forms of digital library (p. 94), I worry that we're sometimes removing not only the opportunity for an information expert to help people find things better, but also a human connection. I certainly wouldn't want to see the reintroduction of every intermediary, but I wonder how we can find ways for information professionals to become subtle, accessible, possibly even on-demand intermediaries.

Baker: Double Fold

First, this was a wonderful and thought-provoking book. Shortly into it I decided that, even though I couldn't really afford the time, I'd take a cue from Scrolling Forward and read it for the experience, rather than just for the information. I'll recommend it to others.

The subject was of course deeply distressing. It had never occurred to me that microfilming or scanning materials might be a destructive process. When I've told others about it they've been shocked, too. I agree with Nicholson when he says that a book is a historical artifact in itself, not just a "bowl of words".

Even though I enjoyed reading his deadpan incisiveness, though, Baker seemed almost gleefully critical at times, seeing conspiracy and malicious complicity when in many cases it's clear that well-intentioned peoples' real crime was only credulity and unquestioning conformity. I loved Baker's pithy closing with "Four Recommendations", but I wished he'd also made a call for more education. Toward the end of the book it seemed that the library world was waking from a bad dream, and I feel that the dream could have been shortened by more rigorous education in certain topics within LIS.

Willinsky: The Access Principle

I was surprised to learn how far the Open Access movement has come - I'd assumed that it was a good idea, but one that hadn't picked up much momentum. I thought such a thing would be very hard to pull off in our profit-motivated society. Even though there's some incentive for the authors ("the right to be known"), on a whole I'd chalk one up for idealism.

It was amusing to read one publisher's dire warning that giving people access to all this information would lead to chaos - that patients might even come to their doctors "asking things". Patients have been increasingly pestering their doctors since the dawn of the Internet, and the best doctors turn that to their advantage. I imagine most would be delighted if their patients pestered them with academic journal citations rather than the normal junk that's to be found on the Web.

I'm skeptical about whether author's Cooperative model would work. If members do all the work, and non-members get free access, it would take an act of idealism (or institutional guilt) to remain a member. But I've already been proven wrong once about idealism, so I'm willing to accept that it's possible.

Leckie, Pettigrew, Sylvain: Modeling Information Seeking

For me, the most interesting thing in this paper was the just idea of modeling information seeking behavior. I've never been exposed to abstract modeling of the information seeking process, and I can see the value when it's applied to a specific professional group. I also found it valuable to read about the wide array of the factors that can influence a professional's information seeking behavior: work environment, cost-benefit, ease of use, accessibility, etc.

I was less persuaded of the value of an abstract/universal information seeking model, since a model drawn so broadly is so general that it's difficult to apply usefully in specific situations. However, I can see that it could be valuable for broader purposes, such as establishing a common vocabulary and a common direction for people who are researching the information-seeking of specific professions.

It was interesting to read that most of the professionals made little or no use of libraries. I've wondered about the future value of the corporate library as a physical destination. It seems important for special libraries to find ways to bring information to professionals where they work - to be "the library in the life of the user".

Mann: The Differences Between Real and Virtual Libraries

I enjoyed this chapter; I found a lot to agree and disagree with. It's almost uncharitable for me to disagree, though, since the arguments were made eight years ago, and some of them have been undercut in the intervening years.

• Quality control via publishers and editors is generally a good thing, but it also perpetuates orthodoxy: a virtual library's quality of ideas is far less consistent than a print library's, but it's more diverse.
• Cataloging is a good thing in some ways, but as we've read it's also a restrictive act.
• And as we've read, copyright really has become a problem.

Even so, I agree that paper's a much better medium for deep reading, and I appreciated the idea of who, what, and where limitations. And eight years later the Internet is still an unimaginably broad and generally shallow information lake, a lake with a horrific amount of junk floating around in it. The content is deepening in places thanks to broader net-based publication and projects like Google Books, though. While the virtual library will never approach the Library of Congress in scope, it provides an wonderful supplement to the typical community's library.

Public Agenda: Long Overdue

I want to believe everything in this report. I'm struggling, though, because it reads like a paid advertising supplement.

At first I felt shallow for thinking that: it's unfair, I thought, to discount a study's content just because of its form - because Public Agenda decided to fill it with stock photos, slick graphics, and high-level summaries in eye-catching print. In fact, I appreciate it when people make things inviting to read. But then the science behind the survey started distracting me. I've never done formal coursework in survey design, but the questions in this one seemed biased to elicit pro-library responses. Since I'm in an LIS program maybe I should appreciate the support, but I feel that a more frank and less friendly analysis would be much more valuable.

Even so, there were some reasonable learning points for libraries. People want libraries to remain "free" services, to focus on the needs of the young and disadvantaged, and to provide access to computers and government information.