This has been so effective, says a representative of Oxford University Press, that “321,000 times in the last two years, people have clicked on an Oxford book saying ‘I want to buy this.’ We spent nothing to do that. That’s why we’re a big fan of this program.”

This is an interesting (one presumes) unintended consequence of Google Book Search, that by directing traffic to university presses, it’s actually increasing the sales of scholarly monographs. Frankly, anything that can increase the sales of scholarly monographs is going to be a good thing for university presses, most of which are on major life support these days.

To be fair, and in the interest of full disclosure, Tefko is on the Advisory Board for the DL Curriculum project, and we’ve also started collaborating with Tatjana. So it’s not like my reputation precedes me and they asked me to do this because I’m so famous. But still, I do consider it to be quite a complement that they asked. Even if it is because they know I’m staring down the barrel of tenure review and hungry. Though to be fair to myself, the DL Curriculum project has been getting some attention. Mostly because we’ve been publishing and presenting at conferences like mad. (Indeed, Barbara presented at this year’s LIDA, earlier this very week.) Dare I say it? It’s amazing how one’s acceptance rate goes up when collaborating with Big Names In The Field.

Anyway, I asked some of my senior colleagues if they thought this would be a good way to spend my time, as a junior faculty member. After all, conference planning is service, if anything, and as we all know, service is a distant third in the academic triumvirate. One of my colleagues suggested that I can frame (read: spin?) this as leadership. I like that. Another colleague was especially pithy, and made the comment that to get tenure you have to be good, and to get promoted to full professor you have to be good and famous. So hopefully this can be a start on the fame part.

As an afterthought, I suppose the title of this post should be ja sam stolica. But this is one of those cases where humor (if you care to be generous and call it that) just doesn’t translate.

Look at numbers 6 & 7 in the Pimp Your Cube 2017 slideshow, from PopSci. Cordless power? RFID tags in staples so your lost papers can find themselves? Totally want.

Then I made a cloud of the entire text of my recent article in RUSQ, minus the title, abstract, and references. Why that article? Because I’m very pleased with it. Again, no big surprises, except perhaps that I use “however” too often.

More interesting is the cloud from the titles of the work that cites me. Apparently I’ve been cited by a number of works in French and Spanish. And I have implications for the future.

So, if searching for yourself in search engines is ego surfing, what is this called? Would these be ego clouds?

Lally, A. M., & Dunford, C. E. (2007). Using Wikipedia to Extend Digital Collections. D-Lib Magazine, 13(5/6).

In May 2006, the University of Washington Libraries Digital Initiatives unit began a project to integrate the UW Libraries Digital Collections into the information workflow of our students by inserting links into the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The idea for this project grew out of our reading of OCLC’s 2005 report Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources [1] which states that only 2% of college and university students begin searching for information at a library web site. It is, therefore, incumbent upon Librarians to look for new ways to reach out to our users where they begin their information search.

The explosive growth of Wikipedia made it a prime candidate for our efforts at pushing information about the Libraries out to where users conduct their research.

Thank you! Damn straight!

My rant has always been that librarians need to edit Wikipedia to make it more reliable. But the good people at the University of Washington Libraries took a different tack: directing Wikipedia users to resources that were known to be reliable, since they were under the control of the library. Very creative! Excellent thinking!

And the results?

Analysis of server statistics indicates that Wikipedia is indeed driving more traffic to our site. … What is significant, then, is the steady increase in usage we have seen from Wikipedia. … Web 2.0 technologies offer librarians a great opportunity to enhance the authority of resources that students use on a daily basis, and to push their knowledge and expertise beyond the traditional boundaries of the library. We now consider Wikipedia an essential tool for getting our digital collections out to our users at the point of their information need. We view this as a very low cost way to enhance access to our collections…

Yes! I say, well done, University of Washington Libraries!

The Authors@Google program brings authors of all stripes to Google for informal talks centering on their recently published books.

Interestingly, the full set of videos is on YouTube and not Google Video. Though I suppose now that Google owns YouTube, it’s six of one half dozen of the other. Makes me wonder why Google Video still exists, actually; why Google is maintaining two video sites.

And here’s where this story becomes a comedy of errors. What did the IMLS send me? The same report I already had. Oops. The two reports have similar titles, & they were both written in 2003 by the same consulting group, so I can see how this error could get made. But I mean really. So I tried again & submitted a new FOIA request, this time containing more detail.

Now, about a month later, my request was denied. The reason given for this was:

The IMLS FOIA Officer has determined that in accordance with FOIA guidelines, the report that you have requested is being withheld pursuant to FOIA Exemption 5, 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(5), which protects agency information which is predecisional or part of a deliberative process.

This annoys me. I’m sure this report was written for IMLS use only. And given the content, it may have 5,000 pages of appendices, & so would be some trouble to copy & send. But it’s also 5 years old, so even if it was “predecisional or part of a deliberative process,” those decisions surely have already been made. But of course we’ll never know, since apparently the FOIA does not require providing any information on what the decision actually is.

You tax dollars at work.

I’ve been using Amazon for over a decade now, and this is literally the first time I’ve seen an error like this.

Incidentally, Volcanoes in History, in Theory, in Eruption is by Fred Mason Bullard, not that that name means anything to me. But then, I’m not a volcanologist.

Do you blog? If yes, then please consider participating in an online survey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. The study, Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation, is being conducted under the guidance of The Real Paul Jones. The study team is interested in hearing from all bloggers on their perceptions on digital preservation in relation to their own blogging activities, as well as the blogosphere in general. To hear more about this survey, please visit the study’s fact sheet at http://www.ils.unc.edu/~hcarolyn/blogsurvey/. From there, you can link out to the web-based survey. The survey will be available from April 25 through May 23, 2007. We believe blogs are valuable records of the human experience. Help to contribute to continued access to these important records by participating in our study. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Carolyn Hank, the study Principle Investigator, at hcarolyn@email.unc.edu. Thanks!

And I’m feeling a bit of peer pressure here: Paul and Terrell both wrote about their topics ahead of time, and I didn’t. So I’ll write about it now. Also I’m amused by the recursiveness of blogging about this panel, and the fact that it was videorecorded. I’ll add a link to the video when it’s put online, thus completing the loop.

I won’t bother writing about what I said on the panel, since you can watch the video to find that out. But will you? I wouldn’t; there’s almost nothing more boring than watching a video of a panel or a speaker, even a good one. Something is lost in the medium switch, I think, though I can’t say precisely what it is. These sorts of events are truly experience goods; you really just need to be there. All of which makes one of my points for me. Deborah mentioned not being able to imagine wanting to ever relive an entire year of her life that was captured on some media, but that she could imagine reliving a few choice moments. Which I absolutely agree with. Are you really that interesting? Why would anyone want to relive big chunks of their life, in realtime? Most or at least a lot of what all of us do all day is boring: checking our email, walking to our cars, etc. Of course a panel like this is one of the few choice moments (or at least we panelists hope so). But even that loses something in the translation. I submit that this is why editing was invented: to convert raw footage into something worth watching. I commented on the panel that blogging is inherently exhibitionistic. Umberto Eco points out that pornography is one of the few genres where action is presented in real time. I most definitely do not want to get into a discussion of the merits, or lack thereof, of pornography. But really, why would anyone watch unedited footage of another person’s life? That seems to me about the most boring and gratuitous thing imaginable. Of course, I think I just said that pornography is boring and gratuitous… maybe I need to rethink my metaphors here. Anyway… Can anyone explain to me why anyone would watch justin.tv? Because I seriously don’t get it.