"“Everyone’s Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide”" in Disruptive Library Technology Jester

This one looks interesting: As the title suggests, it's a guide (in PDF) for nontech users on how to circumvent internet censorship. Will comment once I've read it.

Davey Pattern: Sue the libraries!

I was going to go all serious and earnest and all about IP (that is, intellectual property) with this post, but instead I'll point you to this one from Davey Patter (who just happens to be a dead set genius).

tip: read the cartoon.

2 thangs

Okay.

Two thangs.

Firstly, I want to change the look of the blog: Would anyone mind if I change the font to some nice monospace typeface? Say a nice Courier?

Secondly: I'm thinking of making up a new black rag/jolly roger over the next few days. I'll post it when I've got it.

That is all.

PHM3: The Google Proposition - Challenging our Identity, Furthering Our Mission?

This one puts forward an interesting idea: What if Google (in all their wisdom and with all their millions) were to purchase a publishing house somewhere? And what if they were to provide that publisher's catalogue free of charge (as long as you don't mind a few ads) to anyone on the web? (which unfortunately does not yet mean anyone)

What if authors everywhere were to flock to this new movement in publishing? What if the entire publishing output of the world were to be retrospectively made available for free? Where would this leave libraries?

Well, folk have been running around predicting the end of The Library for years now: A dozen years ago the mass popularisation [is that a word? it is now] of the Internet really put the scare into a lot of folk.

Me, I'm excited. I didn't get into librarianship because of the cardigans and the hair in a bun (though they can be pretty sexy on the right person): What other occupation lets you provide free (or as near as) access to information for anyone that comes along? The concept of The Library is damn near Anarchic in nature (except of course of for corporate libraries, which hoard information for their owners) and suits my socio-politico beliefs quite nicely thank you.

Of course, the "Google as owner of world's publishing output" idea is also very scary: We'd be putting all our biblio-eggs in one basket. Sure, Google seems to have so far been one of the more responsible corporate entities out there, but they are still a corporation: Their main aim is still profit. If at some time in the future they have a change of heart, or if financial circumstances force them to sell their catalogue, or if any of a million things go wrong, what then for the world's bibliographic heritage?

What we would need would be diversity: Of formats, of sources, of repositories. Yes, even quaint old flattened leaves of dead wood. And all this information would not be free, though it might come close.

What we need to tackle is information as property, but I'll leave that for another post. Until then I'll keep the Black Rag flying.

mind maps based on wikipedia articles

This site produces mind maps (that is, structured overview models for a given
information topic) based on Wikipedia articles: I haven't explored it too deeply, but it looks interesting.

PS: It looks as though I'm using this blog as a means to remember interesting sites.

the bible in lolcats: a translation project

. . . I'm not sure about this one . . . but for some reason it just tickles me. Although I'm not sure what it adds to the field of biblical translation . . .

online meditation rooms

This is a new one for me. I'm not even sure I get the concept. Anyway, it's got some cool pseudo-ambient music playing (can ambient music ever be cool? And can you believe there's a Wikipedia article on coolness?)

turing test?

If you've never seen it, head over to xkcd: It's stick-figure geek humour.

on torture

I was going to write a big old post on torture and the end of democracy (as though we can call this tawdry thing being pushed on us "democracy"), but really all I need to do is to point you to these:

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2007/10/another-reason-.html

and

http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2007/10/enough-funny-go-read-this.html

all of a sudden all of those lines don't sound so funny . . .

This one found on Feministe:

Quoting:

Mark Crispin Miller, the author of “The Bush Dyslexicon,” once made a striking observation: all of the famous Bush malapropisms — “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family,” and so on — have involved occasions when Mr. Bush was trying to sound caring and compassionate.

By contrast, Mr. Bush is articulate and even grammatical when he talks about punishing people; that’s when he’s speaking from the heart. The only animation Mr. Bush showed during the flooding of New Orleans was when he declared “zero tolerance of people breaking the law,” even those breaking into abandoned stores in search of the food and water they weren’t getting from his administration.

Somehow all those gaffes don't seem so amusing any more.

on MARC

this one's from one of the blogs I read: Nicole points to a posting by Chris Schwartz on the future of MARC.

MARC is a sore point amongst cataloguers (or at least in the Anglo-American context): There are armed camps both for MARC and against it.

MARC itself is a data standard, or rather an implementation of a data standard (ISO 2709). It has been used for over 30 years in the library world, initially devised to print catalogue cards from bibliographic data, then used mostly to transmit bibliographic data between systems (for example, between different libraries, or between libraries and their users, through the Z39.50 retrieval protocol; if you've ever used EndNote or similar software to search library catalogues, you've more than likely retrieved MARC records).

I know of no library automation system that uses MARC to store data. MARC data may be imported into an ILS, but the system then parses out that data and stores it within its own database architecture (for example into records within a set of tables in a relational database system).

Now comes point number one. Repeat after me. Systems do not store data as MARC records. Got it? Good.

The problem the anti-MARC factions ignore, is that MARC is also used as an interface language (if you like) for cataloguers: Cataloguers like to think in terms of MARC tags and subtags and indicators. Instead of thinking of additional authors, we thin of "700" tags. Instead of thinking of titles we think of "245"s. Instead of thinking of subjects we think of "650"s. Or "630"s. Or "610"s. Or "600"s.

Of course, cataloguers don't really think in MARC: Cataloguers have become used to a parsed version of the MARC record, where the bibliographic data is neatly arranged in a page-like layout. This is not MARC. This is the bibliographic data, pulled from the database system, and arranged . For example, most cataloguers might look at something like this

000	00878cam a22002771a 450
001	10347858
906	__ |a 7 |b cbc |c oclcrpl |d u |e ncip |f 19 |g y-gencatlg
005	20060316181511.0
008	751210s1965 enk 000 1 eng
035	__ |9 (DLC) 66070332
010	__ |a 66070332
015	__ |a GB66-4853
035	__ |a (OCoLC)1888047
040	__ |a DLC |c FU |d MdU |d Uk |d DLC
041	1_ |a eng |h fre
042	__ |a premarc
050	00 |a PZ3.S2494 |b Nau5
100	1_ |a Sartre, Jean-Paul, |d 1905-1980.
240	10 |a Nausée. |l English
245	10 |a Nausea / |c Jean-Paul Sarte ; translated from the French by Robert Baldick.
260	__ |a Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England : |b Penguin, |c 1965.
300	__ |a 252 p. ; |c 19 cm.
500	__ |a Translation of: La nausée.
700	1_ |a Baldick, Robert.
985	__ |e OCLC REPLACEMENT cdsdistr
991	__ |b c-GenColl |h PZ3.S2494 |i Nau5 |t Copy 1 |w OCLCREP

(taken from the Library of Congress catalogue) and say "That's a MARC record." In fact, the MARC record looks like this:

00876cam 22002771a 450000100090000090600450000900500170005400800410007103500210011201000170013301500140015003500190016404000260018304100130020904200120022205000200023410000350025424000220028924500780031126000570038930000210044650000320046770000210049998500300052099100480055010347858 a7bcbccoclcrplduencipf19gy-gencatlg20060316181511.0751210s1965 enk 000 1 eng  9(DLC) 66070332 a 66070332  aGB66-4853 a(OCoLC)1888047 aDLCcFUdMdUdUkdDLC1 aenghfre apremarc00aPZ3.S2494bNau51 aSartre, Jean-Paul,d1905-1980.10aNausâee.lEnglish10aNausea /cJean-Paul Sarte ; translated from the French by Robert Baldick. aHarmondsworth, Middlesex, England :bPenguin,c1965. a252 p. ;c19 cm. aTranslation of: La nausâee.1 aBaldick, Robert. eOCLC REPLACEMENT cdsdistr bc-GenCollhPZ3.S2494iNau5tCopy 1wOCLCREP

Not exactly human-readable, is it?

So here comes my point number two. Again, repeat after me. Cataloguers do not really use MARC. Got it? Well okay.

There are alternatives to MARC, some even built from MARC (MARC-XML come to mind). But what many cataloguers imagine when they look at MARC-XML (and the anti-Marc lobby haven't exactly disabused them of this), is that they'd have to work on records at the XML level. Why? We do not work directly on MARC now, why would we have to work directly with XML in the future? that's what interface designers do; they design applications that allow us to work on the records without ever seeing what they really look like!

[carlos sleepy]

. . . and here's one that's very relevant for those of us who keep reading until 3 in the morning and then have to get up again for work 4 hours later:

Cheat on the Need to Sleep

It seems that a 15 minute powernap at lunchtime is all we really need! Of course, we've been hearing that for yars from various sources. However this is the first time I've heard anyone mention caffeine within this context! I may, at some stage, try this out.

a bit more on statistics and their misuse

A couple of weeks ago there was a piece published on the New York Times about the "happiness gap" between men and women. A lot of idio . . . people posted comments on the NYT site (and also on Digg and other sites I'm sure).

Anyway, once you've read that article, have a look at this and this; they're both responses by Mark Liberman (a linguist, no less) at Language log. Interesting stuff.



-----------------------------
[5 minutes later]

. . . and there's this one too (also from Language log)

surveys and statistics and politics

A final Age article for tonight:

First, let me just say that I don't like statistics. Or rather, I don't trust people who try to convince me of something by quoting figures. In order to trust statistics I need to know about sample sizes, about questions asked, about demographics . . . I need to know about the methodology behind the figures. So do 7 out of 10 dentists. Or chiropractors. Or window cleaners.

So anyway, what we have here is a situation where two opposing opinions are being justified by different sets of figures. Dig it:

In 2005 the Australian Government introduced WorkChoices; an amendment to the Workplace Relations Act 1996. You can read all about that here.

So anyway, there was a study on the effect of WorkChoices on the Australian working population: The study was titled Australia@Work: the Benchmark Report (click here if you want to read the report (.PDF)) and it was authored by the Workplace Research Centre at the University of Sydney. The report was funded by both the Australian Government and Unions NSW.

Now, it seems that the Government was not happy with the report's findings:

The Age reported yesterday that the survey of 8343 people had found employees on individual contracts introduced under the Government's WorkChoices scheme worked longer hours for $100 less weekly pay than those on collectively negotiated agreements.

Why would the Government be unhappy about that? On the eve (we expect) of a federal election?

The story prompted a political storm, with Mr Hockey [Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations] attacking the authors, from the Workplace Research Centre in Sydney.

He said centre director John Buchanan and report author Brigid Van Wanrooy were "former trade union officials who are parading as academics" and that "I'm not sure that this institution is known for academic rigour".

Well, he is a politician. If you don't like the message, you can probably get political mileage from attacking the messenger.

Mr Hockey said that ABS data showed that workers on Australian Workplace Agreements "earn nearly twice as much as people on awards". Prime Minister John Howard also said that the ABS "tell us that people are better off under AWAs".

Hmm. Well, if the Australian Bureau of Statistics says you're right, you must be right! Or are you?

But the ABS's assistant director of labour employee surveys, Valerie Pearson, said the survey Mr Hockey had referred to "was conducted only six weeks post WorkChoices".

"The only thing that would have been picked up in the survey was any AWAs negotiated in that six weeks," Ms Pearson said.

Oops! So much for using figures! Anyway, one good thing to come out of all this:

Dr Buchanan

[director of the Workplace Research Centre]

said yesterday that he would consult a defamation lawyer over the comments to "explore legal options".

"Saying we've concocted stuff is very serious for academics … I'd prefer a retraction, but I'm sick and tired of the way they're bagging academics," he said.

Good on him. And who knows? Maybe he'll end up owning Joe Hockey's website!

. . . see, the Yanks should elect THIS dude as their next prez

another one from the Age:

It seems that Barack Obama has proposed banning nuclear weapons. Period. Not banning nuclear weapons in Iran. Not searching for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Liechtenstein.

PRESIDENTIAL hopeful Barack Obama overnight proposed eliminating all nuclear weapons, saying the US should greatly reduce its stockpiles to lower the threat of nuclear terrorism.

Best idea I've heard in a long time.

more on the Australian government and immigration

got a couple of articles here from the Melbourne Age

first one's about the Immigration Minister's decision to not accept African refugee applicants until July 2008:

"We have detected that there have been additional challenges in relation to some of the people that have come from Africa over the last few years," he told reporters in Melbourne.

"We know that there is a large number of people who are young.

"We know that they have on average low levels of education, lower levels of education than almost any other group of refugees that have come to Australia. We know that many of them, if not most of them, have spent up to a decade in refugee camps and they've spent much of their lives in very much a war-torn, conflicted situation.

Gee, do you think that might be why they're refugees?

"And on top of that they have the challenges of resettling in a culture which is vastly different from the one which they came from," he said.

And that is different to what other (non anglo-celtic) immigrant groups face . . . how?

The other article is an opinion piece by Ray Cassin on the Australian Citizenship Test: It seems I'm not the only one that thinks its main (and possibly only) purpose is to keep out . . . foreigners!

He says that the "Becoming an Australian Citizen" booklet

includes the information that might be expected in an elementary civics course: the basic structures of Australian government, the rights and freedoms that sustain liberal democracy, an outline history of the nation, and so on. But there is much more, such as the facts about Bradman and the laureates, and Phar Lap and Evonne Goolagong, too. We are not just asking new citizens to demonstrate their capacity for participation in a democratic process, we're asking them to soak up all of the wider culture. The message is not "this is how you become one of us", but "to become one of us, you must become just like us".

How is knowing about a dead horse going to make someone a better citizen? Why not ask them to list the ten last winners of the Melbourne Cup?

Maybe the whole strategy is to give people like me (who are [WARNING! UNDERSTATEMENT ALERT!] not likely to vote Liberal/National) some kind of a brain embolism from hearing about rubbish like this. Infuriated to death. Nice way to go.

my response to "The Semantic Web as a large, searchable catalogue: a librarian’s perspective"

I think I'd be better off not responding: I'm sure the authors put a lot of time and effort into the article, but I really don't see how it adds anything to the semantic web discussion. It's the same old thing Berners-Lee and company have been saying for the last 10 years or so. The web is broken and the semantic web is the way to fix it. Librarians (read "people who work with metadata"; though to many cataloguers the term "metadata community" is seen as something alien) have the skills, so they will sort it out.

And to be fair, some of the progress towards the semantic web has been done by librarians: OCLC developed the DCMI. Of course, that was years ago; what's been done recently?

It seems to me that most of the talk about the semantic web had pretty much dried up by a couple years ago. Then we had the Web 2.0 business spring up out of the woodwork: Social bookmarking; social networking; RSS (though rally it was around before the whole 2.0 hoopla); CSS (ditto); wikis; blogs; tags and folksonomies; AJAX and rich internet applications; and so on. These distracted us for a while (okay; I'm still distracted; and libraries have and could further benefit from many useful apllicatons of 2.0 technology), but it seems that people are going back to the old question: How do we impose order on the internet?

This, I think, is why the semantic web will remain a pipe-dream for a long time yet: In order to impose order on the internet, one must first ask "whose order?"

The Semantic Web as a large, searchable catalogue: a librarian’s perspective

I haven't read this one yet, but it looks as though it may be interesting. I'll post a response when I read it.

THE BEST post I've seen in a LONG time

Head on over to Bitch Ph.D. and have a look at this post. Brilliant.

The Australian Citizenship Test

On the 1st of October 2007, it will become necessary for most people who apply for Australian citizenship to pass the Government's new citizenship test.

Now I have a number of of problems with this (I'm not going to go into this in any length (because of how infuriating I find it)):

• Firstly, there is an inherent unfairness here: Why do new applicant have to pass this test? What about people who were granted citizenship a month, six months, six years ago? Why don't they need to pass the test? What about people who, through being born here, were granted citizenship at birth? Why don't they need to pass this test? If it is needful for prospective citizens to pass this test, shouldn't it be needful for all Australian citizens? If I thought a citizenship test might make people better citizens I might suggest a certain group of people that could benefit
  
• Which brings me to the next issue: Why is it necessary to introduce this test now? Is it because Australia is receiving less Northern European migration and more from the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and East Asia? People who are seen as other, who are seen as being less likely to understand our way of life? If that's the case, who benefits from the test? Is it the people who have to undergo it? Is it the nation? Or is it really the ruling parties? In the 1998 federal election the Howard government was startled to find that, despite years of multiculturism pushed by successive (mostly Labor) governments, there was a significant sector of the population that was not happy with multiculturalism, not happy with people seen as different. The One Nation party gained appoximately 9% of the vote in 1998, mostly at the expense of the governing Liberal/National parties. So what did the government parties do? They co-opted this newly-rediscovered racist vote. And so for the 2001 elections we had Tampa and the Children Overboard. Then we had the confusion over SIEVX. Then the Pacific Solution. The government parties benefited from all this at the polls and comfortably retained government. Is this new citizenship test a way for the government parties to reactivate the racist vote?
• And just on this electioneering topic. if this test is so important for the wellbeing of the nation, why was it not introduced earlier? Why is is that this new test (and its accompanying ad campaign, and its accompanying glossy booklet) comes just weeks before a Federal election is due?
• And as to the information provided for prospective examinees . . .
  

Agh, I'm too angry to continue this post. But at least I'm not the only one that feels strongly about it.

. . . and while we're talking about ebooks . . .

i often hear complaints that ebooks are not user-friendly; that it's difficult/uncomfortable to read books off a screen; that the feeling of a book (holding it in your hand, turning the pages, etc) is as important as reading the thing.

About 3 years ago I bought a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA. I don't use it as a PDA, but rather as an ebook reader: I find it is very comfortable to use. It has a nice large screen, and it runs Linux!

It's dead simple to get books for it (the Opie Reader application can read all sorts of file formats, but i normally only use ASCII text files or hypertext files) from sites like Project Gutenberg or any of the dozens of online text archives, newsgroups, blogs, online versions of newspapers, and so on, and so forth.

the Zaurus is now getting a little beat up and scratched, and some of the buttons don't work properly any more (evidence of heavy use, in this case), so i've been thinking of getting a replacement of some sort. Unfortunately, ebook readers are hideously expensive (I'm thinking especially of the electronic paper readers such as the Sony Reader), and PDAs are overkill (and hugely expensive) for what i need (especially the ones with screens big enough to read a book comfortably).

on the death of books

A friend and colleague (hi Therese!) has posted a page on the future of books, including links to various digitisation and ePublishing projects.

She also mentions a book I'm shamed to admit I hadn't heard of: The book is dead (long live the book) by Sherman Young from Macquarie University. It sounds interesting.

The blog about the book about the . . . about books is here.

Anyway, Therese's page also has a link to this video (I seem to recall seeing a mention of this on various blogs several months ago, but I never saw it at the time). It runs for 9 min. 20 sec., and it might be a good idea to play it with no sound in a background window first (otherwise you'll get a lot of stops and starts while the video segments download; people on dialup, I suggest you don't even bother).

Karen Schneider article on Wikipedia

CIO have posted an article by Karen Schneider on the culture (she calls it "corporate culture", I think "organisational culture" might be a better fit) of Wikipedia. Please read. It's interesting.

It's good to see that we have (at last!) moved away from the Wikipedia vs Britannica debate.