The joy of having print books around you in a library

My academic library has been going through a renovation for over a year, and it continues through March of 2013. During that time, about 98% of the collection had been moved to storage.  (We have a very small reference collection in print.) Patrons can request materials, and they will be delivered within 2 hours.  It really is amazing, but that is besides the point.

During the middle of the renovation, the administration of the university tried to make sure that most (about 80%) of the collection was held off site even after the renovation was done.  They see the library as a cost center instead of as a source of inspiration.  The faculty and students rebelled.  The librarians documented multiple reasons why more of the collection needed to be held on site.  Much of the reasoning was browsability.  But, it was difficult to find articles that documented qualitative research.  (I think we did find some.) These next two blog posts could have been useful at the time, but they were not published when we needed them.  Thanks Barbara and Bohyun.

I recently visited the Brooklyn College Library for the STELLA Unconference, and I was able to simply browse the stacks.  (Yeah, I know, the ebooks are not there...)  I found a book concerning the development of the Hubble Space Telescope simply by browsing the print collection. (The book is also online.) It would have been difficult for me to find this book using the catalog, because the Space Telescope was not named after Edwin Hubble yet.  It was simply known as the Space Telescope in the mid 1970's.  I was able to skim the book looking for a specific author, but he was not there.  I really miss not having a big collection of books around me.  If only the administrators cherished the book collection the same way the students and faculty do.

Open Access books X 2: Crawford & Suber #openaccess

I finished these two Open Access books (One by Peter Suber, and the other by Walt Crawford) a while ago, but I haven't been able to blog about them until now.  I was thinking of comparing and contrasting the two books, but I think it will be easier to just pull out my favorite parts from each book separately.  

Here are the overviews.

Walt Crawford. Open Access: What You Need to Know Now, Chicago: American Library Association. 2011. (Some of the book is also on Google Books.)

This is a pretty quick read.  I usually take forever to read books, and I read this is just two days.  I am sure a fast reader could whip through this in an afternoon.

Walt begins with a section on Who Cares?  He clearly explains why librarians of all stripes and flavors should care about understanding the basic underpinnings of OA.

Here are some quotes and insights that struck me.

Les Carr, repository manager at the University of Southampton, noted that "Repositories are hard work because changing researchers' working practices is hard work and I guess there's no single magic solution that's going to make that efford disappear." (Page 32-33.)  In other words, it takes more work than just setting up a computer with some software on the Internet somewhere.  It takes work to get scholars to change their workflows and practices.

In the section on Why Change?  Walt said that in order to get scholars to change their practices, "They need to prefer OA journals for new papers when that makes sense.  They need to deposit existing papers and assure that they have (and use) the rights to deposit new papers when OA journals don't make sense.  Librarians need to have scholars change, but scholars need reasons to change.  That's an ongoing issue for librarians and libraries, one where you can't do it yourself but need to take part in moving things forward."  (Page 37) Yes, we need some good carrots to lead scholars to change their behavior.

Chapter 4 addressed controversies.  Walt noted in the section concerning "Researchers already have all the access they need" that Alan Adler claimed "there is no crisis in the world of scholarly publishing, or in the dissemination of scientific materials." (Page 49.)  Of course this is wrong.  Even the largest institutions in first world countries (Harvard, for example) do not provide access to all of the materials that are needed by their students and faculty.   Walt also did a good job addressing responses such as "The public can always get access to articles from the public libraries" and that "Scholarly articles are intended for other scholars and world just confuse laymen." (Page 50.)  Many other misunderstandings are addressed.

On pages 60-61, Walt lists some open questions that could be answered with research into scholarly communication practices.  Some of them are:

• How much publishing is there in a particular discipline?  What are the ways to estimate the number of articles or pages publishing in that discipline?
• What percentage of that corpus is available as OA, either green or gold?
• What percentage of papers are CC-By, CC-By-NC or other?
• What are the business models of various journals or publishers who do not have author-side fees?
• How are researchers responding to funder and university policies?  Do these policies change where they submit their work?

In a way, I see Walt's book as the practical book of Open Access for librarians.  The next book covers more of the philosophical underpinnings.

Peter Suber. Open Access. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2012. (The book will be Open Access as of June 2013, and a bunch of the book is available at Google Books.)

If you want see or hear more from the author, here are some good audio and video clips of Peter talking about the book.  Here are some good sections of the book.

Peter noted that scholars "don't do it [publish articles] to earn profits from the results.  They are all nonprofit.  They certainly don't do it to make scholarly writings into gifts to enrich publishers, especially when conventional publishers erect access barriers at the expense of research." (Page 14.)  Yes, scholars should not be working to provides profits to the commercial publishers.

On page 18, it was noted that Tim O'Reilly said that "OA doesn't threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt."

"OA isn't an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers.  OA is an attempt to advance the interests of research, researchers, and research institutions." (Page 24.) My comment to this would be that if conventional commercial publishers are undermined, I would not be heartbroken.

On page 25, Peter noted that the "publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried."

A study from the UK-based Research Information Network reported that "60 percent [of researchers] said that access limitations hindered their research, and 18 percent said the hindrance was significant." (Page 30.)

"Conventional publishers regard easy online sharing as a problem while researchers and libraries regard it as a solution.  The internet is widening the gap between the interests of conventional publishers and the interests of researchers and research institutions." (Page 35.)

"OA is a kind of access, not a kind of editorial policy.  It's not intrinsically tied to any particular business model or method of digital preservation." (Page 103.)  Many scholars know about some of the larger OA journals that have author-side page charges, but they don't know that roughly 70% of all OA journals do not have author-side fees.

"As the late Jim Gray used to say, 'May all your problems be technical.'" (Page 112.)  Yes, the technical problems of publishing open access journals and articles have been solved, but we still have the social problems of getting more and more scholars to understand and support the OA ecosystem.

Also on page 112, Peter noted that OA could include "the whole shebang" of knowledge claims, proposals, hypotheses, conjectures, arguments, analysis, evidence, data, algorithms, methods evaluations, interpretations, discussion, criticism, dissent, summaries and reviews, and more.

On page 115-116, he covered who needs OA?  "It's easy to agree that not everyone needs it.  But in the case of OA, there's no easy way to identify those who do and those who don't. In addition, there's no easy way, and no reason, to deliver it only to those who need it, and deny it to everyone else."  He continued with "OA allows us to provide access to everyone who cares to have access, without patronizing guesswork about who really wants it, who really deserves it, and who would really benefit from it."  The rest of pages 116-117 continues to counter the argument about lay readers not needing access to research.

A Harris poll showed that "an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted OA for publicly funded research.  83 percent wanted it for their doctors and 82 percent wanted it for everyone." (Page 118.)

And finally--"Even if we acknowledge the need for cultural change in the transition to OA--far more critical than technological change--it's easy to underestimate the cultural barriers and the time required to work through them.  OA may be compatible with copyright, peer review, profit, print, prestige, and preservation.  But that doesn't quiet resistance when those facts about it are precisely the ones hidden by confident false assumptions." (Page 167.)

Review of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

I learned about this book (Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by. Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick) from the LSW (of course) and it was a joy to read. Below are some of the best parts.  Note that the quoted parts are from the preprint electronic version of the book. (The copyright notice is way at the bottom of the post.)  Some of the text in the printed book may be slightly different from the online version.  And, there were complete sentences and paragraphs that were in the book, but were not on the website.

Most of her work focuses on the scholarly book publishing industry in the humanities, but in order to explain some of the problems with the scholarly publishing book business, she had to examine how STEM journal budgets have eaten up academic library budgets.  She does a great job of explain much of the scholarly communications crisis as the whole. She would like to save university presses by having their services merged with university library publication services.  In doing this, university administrators will need to rethink the whole scholarly communication ecosystem within universities and with the rest of the world.  She points out that technological change can be quick, but that cultural change can be slow to glacial in the academy.

This bit does a good job of explaining the serials crisis. (page 3.)

Though the notion of a crisis in scholarly publishing was first aired well over a decade ago (one might see Sanford Thatcher’s 1995 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “The Crisis in Scholarly Communication”), things suddenly got much, much worse after the first dot-com bubble burst in 2000. During this dramatic turn in the stock market, when numerous university endowments went into free fall (a moment that, in retrospect, seems like mere foreshadowing), two academic units whose budgets took among the hardest hits were university presses and university libraries. And the cuts in funding for libraries represented a further budget cut for presses, as numerous libraries, already straining under the exponentially rising costs of journals, especially in the sciences, managed the cutbacks by reducing the number of monographs they purchased. The result for library users was perhaps only a slightly longer wait to obtain any book they needed, as libraries increasingly turned to consortial arrangements for collection-sharing, but the result for presses was devastating.

The scholarly communication system is broken (page 7.)

"But the point is, the system’s broken and it’s time we got busy fixing it. What ought to count is peer review and scholarly merit, not the physical form in which the text is ultimately delivered” (Kirschenbaum).

 Administrators should evaluate the work of scholars while being format agnostic (page 8.)

Many of the recommendations put forward by the MLA task force (which were of course later expanded upon in the task force’s final report, published in December 2006) were long in coming, and many stand to change tenure processes for the better; these recommendations include calls for departments:
...
* to acknowledge that scholarship of many different varieties is taking place online, and to evaluate that scholarship without media-related bias.

and

These were extremely important recommendations, but there was a significant degree of “easier said than done” in the responses that these recommendations, and particularly the last one, received, and for no small reason: these recommendations require a substantive rethinking not simply of the processes through which the academy tenures its faculty, but of the ways those faculty do their work, how they communicate that work, and how that work is read both inside and outside the academy. Those changes cannot simply be technological; they must be both social and institutional.

She then discusses the MediaCommons project and the rate of social change within the academy. (pages 8-10.)

No matter how slowly such software development projects move, the rate of change within the academy is positively glacial in comparison.

 and

Those of us who have been privileged enough to succeed within the extant [higher education] system are often reluctant to bite the hand that feeds us. Changing our technologies, changing our ways of doing research, changing our modes of production and distribution of the results of that research, are all crucial to the continued vitality of the academy – and yet none of those changes can possibly come about unless there is first a profound change in the ways of thinking of scholars themselves. Until scholars really believe that publishing on the web is as valuable as publishing in print – and more importantly, until they believe that their institutions believe it, too – few will be willing to risk their careers on a new way of working, with the result that that new way of working will remain marginal and undervalued.

She advocates for a huge change in the peer-review system of scholarship. (page 10.)

In what follows, then, I focus not just on the technological changes that many believe are necessary to allow academic publishing to flourish into the future, but on the social, intellectual, and institutional changes that are necessary to pave the way for such flourishing. In order for new modes of communication to become broadly accepted within the academy, scholars and their institutions must take a new look at the mission of the university, the goals of scholarly publishing, and the processes through which scholars conduct their work....

And it’s the structures of peer review that I argue in chapter 1 we need to begin with, not least because of the persistence of the problem that peer review presents for digital scholarship, and the degree to which our values (not to mention our value) as scholars are determined by it. Peer review is at the heart of everything we do – writing, applying for grants, seeking jobs, obtaining promotions; its presence is arguably that which makes the academy the academy. But I want to suggest that the current system of peer review is in fact part of what’s broken, part of what’s made a vibrant mode of scholarly communication undead.

 We need new ways to cite works. (page 12.)

We may instead need to develop new citational practices that acknowledge the participation of our peers in the development of our work.

 And, we need to figure out ways to encourage administrators to accurately evaluate different modes of scholarly communication. (pages 12-13.)

We must find ways for the new modes of authorship that digital networks will no doubt facilitate – process-focused, collaborative, remix-oriented – to “count” within our systems of valuation and priority.

Publishers will continue to experiment with different business models. (page 13.)

Publishers, for instance, will need to think differently about their business models (which may need to focus more on services and less on objects), about their editorial practices (which may require a greater role in developing and shepherding projects), about the structures of texts, about their ownership of copyright, and about their role in facilitating conversation.

Chapter 1 is all about the peer review system.  She touches on some library things. (page 17.)

As one librarian frames the issue, “Banning a source like Wikipedia (rather than teaching how to use it wisely) simply tells students that the academic world is divorced from real-world practices” (Badke, qtd in Regalado). The production of knowledge is of course the academy’s very reason for being, and if we cling to an outdated system for the establishment and measurement of authority at the very same time that the nature of authority is shifting around us, we run the risk of becoming increasingly irrelevant to the dominant ways of knowing of contemporary culture.

In the course of changing the peer review system, this may entail the loss of "power and prestige" for the academics involved. (page 19.)

She has good overviews of the history and possible future of peer-review.  She also provides touches on the aspects of anonymity, credentialing, the reputation economy of academics, and more.   There is a good quote in the book that is not in the online version. (page 31.)  Junior scholars are advised to

focus not on the important but on the publishable, avoiding risk-taking in the interest of passing the next review.

The scholars who have achieved status in the prior system would like to keep the status quo. (page 31.)

The result, conventionally, has been the dismissal by many faculty and administrators of all electronically published texts as inferior to those that appear in print, or, where those authority figures are sufficiently forward-looking as to argue for the potential value of electronic publishing, the insistence that the new forms adhere to older models of authorization — and thus the reinforcement of “the way things have always been done” at the expense of experimental modes that might produce new possibilities. Such conservatism shouldn’t come as much surprise, of course; those faculty and administrators who are in the position of performing assessments of the careers of other, usually younger, faculty are of necessity those who have sufficiently benefitted (sic)  from the current credentialing system as to rise to that position.

She touches on the scarcity of information vs abundance. (page 37.)

Print-based publishing operates within an economics of scarcity, with its systems determined in large part by the fact that there are a limited number of pages, a limited number of journals, a limited number of books that can be produced; the competition among scholars for those limited resources requires pre-publication review, to make sure that the material being published is of sufficient quality as to be worthy of the resources it consumes. Electronic publishing faces no such material scarcity; there is no upper limit on the number of pages a manuscript can contain or the number of manuscripts that can be published, or at least none determined by available resources, as the internet operates within an economics of abundance.

She also cites Clay Shirky (page 38) on the scholars' ability to "publish-then-filter," instead of filtering (peer-review and rejection) before publication. 

She introduces a concept called peer-to-peer review, which she describes as a "review of the reviewers." (page 43.)

Chapter 2 covers authorship.

In what follows, I argue that we all need — myself not least among us – to rethink our authorship practices and our relationships to ourselves and our colleagues as authors, not only because the new digital technologies becoming dominant within the academy are rapidly facilitating new ways of working and new ways of imagining ourselves as we work, but also because such reconsidered writing practices might help many of us find more pleasure, and less anxiety, in the act of writing itself. This is of course not to suggest that digital publishing networks will miraculously solve all of the difficulties that we face as writers; rather, it is to say that network technologies might help us feel less alone and less lost in the writing process.

Concerning the remixing of content... (page 79.)

We might, for instance, find our values shifting away from a sole focus on the production of unique, original new arguments and texts to consider instead curation as a valid form of scholarly activity, in which the work of authorship lies in the imaginative bringing together of multiple threads of discourse that originate elsewhere, a potentially energizing form of argument via juxtaposition. Such a practice of scholarly remixing might look a bit like blogging, in its original sense: finding the best of what has been published in the digital network and bringing it together, with commentary, for one’s readership. But it might also resemble a post-hoc mode of journal or volume editing, creating playlists, of sorts, that bring together texts available on the web in ways that produce new kinds of interrelationships and analyses among them.

Chapter 3 covers texts and CommentPress.

Chapter 4 is about digital preservation including bits about standards, metadata, LOCKSS and CLOCKSS, and the economics of preservation.

Chapter 5 covers the University.  She envisions great changes for the future of university presses.

Page 159 has a quote that is not in the online version.  The university press system exerts "a conservative influence over scholarship, as genuinely new ideas would present concrete financial risks" when they consider publishing the first work of a junior faculty member.

Here is another big blockquote on the serials crisis. (page 159.)

In fact, the degree to which the largest commercial scholarly publishers have put the bite on universities (by obtaining the products of scholarship, most of which were produced through university, foundation, and government funding, without compensation to authors or their institutions — indeed, at times even demanding payment from them — and then selling those products back to universities via obscenely expensive journal subscriptions) might encourage us to rethink the profit-model of scholarly publishing altogether, to consider whether there’s another option through which universities can reclaim the core of the publishing endeavor from the commercial presses. The commercial presses can’t be beaten at their own game, as the large commercial publishing conglomerates will always be able to conduct such business more efficiently, and more ruthlessly, than the university should want to do. But nor can we simply abandon the business of scholarly publishing to them; as Thompson notes, in times of economic slowdown “commercial logic would tend to override any obligation they might feel to the scholarly community” (98), leaving nothing to stop them from eliminating monograph publishing entirely. We can’t beat them, and we can’t join them; what we can do is change the game entirely.

 Ahhhh, here is where she goes into the benefits of Open Access. (page 160.)

One clear way of changing the game, dramatically and unequivocally, is a move toward the full embrace of open-access modes of digital publishing. While the notion of open access has generated a great deal of controversy among presses, who given current financial realities declare its proponents naive and its ideals untenable, we need to understand, as John Willinsky has argued, that “open access is not free access… the open access movement is not operating in denial of economic realities. Rather, it is concerned with increasing access to more of the research literature for more people, with that increase measured over what is currently available in print and electronic formats” (Willinsky xii).

But, the roots for open-access publishing models lie not in the "subversion of market forces in the distribution of scholarship" but it is

the ethical desire to break down the barrier between the information “haves” and “have-nots” of the twentieth-century university structure, enabling institutions without substantive endowments, institutions in less-wealthy states, institutions in developing nations, to have access to the most important new developments in scholarly research.

On page 165, she recommends that universities consider locally produced publications and journals (eg. university presses) be

considered to be fully part of the core research mission of the Institute... in the same way that an experimental laboratory is considered part of the core research mission in the sciences, employing both graduate students and technical professionals working on an ongoing program of research — would it be funded differently? Would we begin to understand publishing ventures not as revenue centers nor as idiosyncratic one-off experiments, but rather as part of the infrastructure of the institution, as key an element in its research mission as is, for instance, the library?

She argues for greater collaboration between the university press and the university library system. (page 166.)

If such publishing ventures are understood as part of the core mission of the university, and thus become funded as part of the university’s infrastructure, however, there are some potentially fruitful avenues through which we can think about streamlining the labor that must take place, about finding ways to avoid the reduplication of efforts, and ways to bring together work already being done in disparate administrative units in order to expand their potential. For instance, new scholarly publishing initiatives will require significant new resources for programming, design, and distribution, but will presses or libraries need their own teams of programmers, or can a fruitful partnership be developed with the programmers located elsewhere in the institution? Do presses need metadata specialists, when this is one of the key aspects of contemporary library and information science programs? While the library, the press, and the information technology center all currently serve different aspects of the university’s communication needs, and while all are often stretched to their limits in meeting the full range of those needs, joint experimentation amongst these three units might enable fruitful reimaginations of the university as a center of communication, with a reduced need for perpetual reinvention of the wheel.

But, this would be an interesting challenge. University presses and libraries have different thoughts on experimentation. (page 169.)

Such new partnerships, however, present challenges for institutions, and even many of the institutions that are working to build such strategic relationships encounter difficulties in the process. These difficulties are less due to any dearth of administrative imagination than to the real, material differences between these various academic units. As Brown et al point out, for instance, libraries (as well as, I’d argue, information technology centers) often have resources for experimentation available, but their positions within the institution do not serve to provide them with a broad sense of the fields in which such experiments might operate (what audiences, for instance, the experiments might address, and how they might fold into ongoing projects within the disciplines).  Presses, on the other hand, have a clear sense of their markets, but often lack the resources with which to experiment, as well as the mandate for that experimentation.

More and more scholars are getting recognition for the work that is online and at the leading edge. (page 170.)  She noted that "at this point very few scholars have been hired, granted tenure, or promoted primarily based on this kind of open online work, there are a few, and there will be more in the years ahead.  More and more scholars are rejecting publication venues that don't provide open access."

Concerning the publication of knowledge, she cited David Perry--"Knowledge which is not public is not knowledge."  She goes on to say that if faculty research is not public, then the "university has not completed its job." (page 173)

This seems to be the basic thesis for the book, that universities should merge the functions of the university press with the university library. (page 180.)

What if the press were reimagined, in parallel with the library, as another point of pivot between the institution and the broader scholarly community — if, as the library brings the world to the university, the press brought the university to the world? What if, rather than serving particular scholarly fields through the current list-based model, the press instead focused its attention on the need to publish the work produced within the university, making it available for dissemination around the world?

However, she recommends that the university press publish the works of the faculty at the university instead of publishing the works of those outside of the university. (page 181.)

The changes I’m proposing here thus have broad implications for every academic institution, and not just for those relatively few institutions that currently house university presses, as shifting the focus of the press’s publishing efforts from the list model to publishing the work of its own faculty will require every institution to take on this publishing mission, to invest in bringing the work of its own faculty into public discourse.

This requires university administrators to think of university presses in a different way.  The proposal "requires a radical reexamination of the funding model under which scholarly publishing operates, moving the press from being a revenue center within the university toward being a part of a broader service unit within the institution." (page 186.)

In the conclusion of the book, she notes that this is an "extraordinary challenge that change presents for the academy--the degree to which 'We Have Never Done It That Way Before' has become our motto--we might do well to ask how much of what I propose in this volume is really feasible....  I do believe, however, that change is coming, and coming more quickly than we imagine." (page 194.)

Lastly, she said that "Change is coming to scholarly publishing, one way or another--but what form that change will take, ans whether it will work for or against us, remains to be seen." (page 195.)

---------------------

Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, published by NYU Press. Copyright (c) 2009 New York University. This text may be distributed in part or in whole on condition that (1) distributed text is not sold, whether or not such sale is "for profit" and (2) distributed text bears this notice in full. Except as permitted by law, all other uses are prohibited without written permission of the publisher.

A review of the book Too Big to Know

I know that there are already tons of reviews and information out there about David Weinberger's newish book, Too Big to Know, but I like writing these reviews so that I can remember what it was that struck me about the 231 page book, and the implications for academic libraries and librarians.

In the past, to reduce the flood of information, there was "an elaborate system of editorial filters that have prevented most of what's written from being published." He also noted that "Knowledge has been about reducing what we need to know." (page 4)  Today, rather than limiting knowledge "to what fits in a library or a scientific journal, we are now knowing-by-including every draft of every idea in a vast, loosely connected webs" of information. (page 5)  Thus, we are beginning to filter our feeds of information post-publication instead of pre-publication.  "Filters no longer filter out.  They filter forward, bringing their results to the front." (page 11) 

"We now know that there's too much for us to know."  This has consequences for old institutions because "the task is just too large." (page 11)  We need to create new technologies that can handle the filtering and text mining of huge amounts of data and information.

Some of the book talks about the work of Jack Hidary.  He left a career as a scientist at NIH because he felt that "putting scientific papers through the traditional peer-review process had begun to seem frustratingly outdated." (page 15)

In the past, one could trust the validity of data that was "professionally published and stocked in your library" because it was published by a reputable publisher [however one makes that definition.] For example, if you didn't trust the population figure of Pittsburgh in an almanac, you could go out and hire your own census takers to make your own count of the population, but that is not feasible.  Thus, the almanac was a stopping point, and we trust that the data is accurate enough for our needs. (page 21)  But, if you are looking for medical data, or scientific data or business data that has serious consequences if a source is wrong, one might check multiple sources or duplicate the research process to create a new data point that may or may not agree with the original published facts. He discusses the work of Jean-Claude Bradley and his UsefulChem project on pages 139-141.

On page 95, he brings up Robert Darnton, and how he would like to see books that allow readers to look at other books in their totality, and not just single lines or passages.  This could "open up new ways of making sense of the [historical] evidence."

In the past, the shape of knowledge was a triangle, with authorities at the top, and knowledge passed down to lower levels as needed.  Now, "knowledge on the Net has no shape because the Net has no outer edge."  "The shapelessness of knowledge reflects its reinvigoration, but at the cost of removing the central points of authority around which business, culture, science, and government used to pivot." (page 110) Authorities can be anywhere and come from anywhere.  The authorities of knowledge today do not have to live within the old publication and journal article system.

We are not going to resolve the question over whether the internet is good or bad for knowledge.  "That is too intertwingly." (page 117)  "We can learn how to use the Net to help us know and understand our world better" and we should teach our children how to search and learn from the Net.  That is a great job for librarians and parents.

"If books taught us that knowledge is a long walk from A to Z, the networking of knowledge may be teaching us that the world itself is more like a shapeless, intertwingled, unmasterable web" of information. (page 119)

Chapter 7 is "Too Much Science."  Here, he covers the huge amounts of data that are being faced by today's scientists.  Some of the projects mentioned are:

• GBIF.org
• ProteomeCommons.org
• Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• data.gov
• Creative Commons
• Galaxy Zoo
• Patients Like Me
• Mendeley

"The impact factor today reflects what was important two to three years ago." (page 137)

"Mendeley is being felt outside of the population of Mendeley users because it can give a much faster view of what papers are mattering to scientists than can the impact factor." (page 138)

Peter Binfield (formerly of PLoS ONE) noted that "Scientific journals rarely publish research with negative results." And, this is a problem because it would be useful to scientists to know what other people have tried and failed at doing. (page 139)  He then goes on to discuss Jean-Claude Bradley's work from pages 139-141.  More of the policies of PLoS ONE and Peter Suber and Open Access are discussed on pages 141-143.

After a good discussion of some past projects of John Wilbanks, he noted that it is more important "that we be able to share data than that we agree on exactly how that data should be categorized, organized and named.  We have given up on the idea that there is a single, knowable organization of the universe." (page 148)

"If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting," but that is not the case. (page 150, from another source by Richard Smith) Science is taking advantage of electronic media to work smarter, better and faster.

"Call the decision not to track down the hardcopy in a library laziness if you want--and there are times when it will have bad consequences--but it feels like efficiency." (page 175) Yup, if it isn't online and easily downloadable, most people will not jump through hoops, nor pay $35 to download the article.  They will take the shortest path to get to the information they think they need.

This is good advice to publishers--"don't try to reduce the network's inherent abundance by introducing artificial scarcities, such as imposing on digital libraries all the limitations on access inherent in physical libraries." (page 183) Yet, so many ebook services try to limit access or have a DRM that limits the functionality of an ebook in library settings.  But, these publishers are just making it frustrating for readers of their content.  Then, from pages 183-185, he covers the advantages of opening up access to journals, and creative commons licenses, again.

"Libraries not only have content in books and articles, they have the expertise of librarians, they have metadata about usage patterns that can be used to guide researchers, and they are at the center of communities of scholars who are the most learned people in their fields."  (page 191)

"If we want the Net to move knowledge forward, then we need to educate our children from the earliest possible age about how to use the Net, how to evaluate knowledge claims, and how to love difference....  But, knowing how to click buttons is the least of our concerns." (page 192)  Trying to teach undergraduates about how to evaluate information is really tough. Unfortunately, I probably spend too much time showing students how to use our database and how to click around the interface, and not as much time on figuring out how good one article is compared to another, or comparing one journal with another.  He noted that "learning how to evaluate knowledge claims--is never ending." (page 192)

Overall, I loved the book.  Run out and buy a copy, or check it out from your library.

Yet another great review of Reinventing Discovery

The book, Reinventing Discovery, is amazing!  Go out and buy yourself a copy RIGHT NOW!  Really, it is that good.

Considering how much this book covers the issues and problems of the modern scholarly communication industry, I was surprised to see that the term libraries only shows up once in the index of the book.  Even then, libraries are only mentioned in the notes section of the book.  He notes that academic libraries and publishers are not institutions that will be developing the new tools for the construction of knowledge in the future.  He says that "the right place for such tools to originate is with scientists themselves." He also noted that "libraries and scientific publishers are not, for the most part, set up to work on such risky and radical innovations."  For the most part, I agree with the statement that many librarians and library systems are risk averse, but there are many librarians (and some publishers) who have great ideas, insights and will provide innovative solutions for the long term advancement of scientific communication.

I know that Michael received a lot of advice and communication from members of the library and open science community, so I am a little surprised that libraries were not mentioned more often in the book.

The best chapter for me was Chapter 9: The Open Science Imperative.  Much of the book and much of the chapter is available online at Google Books, so go read some of it there.

I wish Michael would have talked a little more about some of the cultural issues that are holding scientists back from doing more open science. There are some positive financial and social incentives to encourage more scientists to do open science, but academic department administrators and deans still tell junior faculty that they have to publish in the closed access Journal of X, the limited access Journal of Y and/or the Transactions of Z in order to get tenure.  The academic bean counters may find it easier to evaluate a researcher based on the supposed quality of journal title containers, than it is to evaluate the quality of specific articles within those journals.  Mike Taylor noted that:

Because of the stupid way researchers are usually evaluated (and this is another whole issue), the intrinsic quality of our work matters less than the brand name of the journal it’s published in. So we have strong selfish reasons for wanting to get our work into the “best” journals, even if it is at the cost of effective communication.

and

Happily, there are signs of movement in this direction: for example, The Wellcome Trust says “it is the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author’s work is published, that should be considered in making funding decisions.” We need more funding and hiring bodies to make such declarations. Only then will researchers will be free of the need (real or apparent) to prop up parasitic publishers by sending their best work to big-name, barrier-based journals.

More change needs to take place within the hundreds of academic departments.  But, if the major funders such as the NIH and the Wellcome Trust (and many other funding organizations) can continue to provide money as the carrot for positive open science innovation, then we have a bright future ahead.  This is why I support the Federal Research Public Access Act. When this passes, this will encourage more scientists to do science in the open.

A week after #scio12, #rwa and reinventing discovery

This week has seen a convergence of three topics.  First, I got back from the Science Online 2012 unconference a little over a week ago (1/22).  I had been meaning to write a post to wrap up the sessions I attended, but then I started to see a lot of news concerning the Research Works Act.  I have also been reading Michael Nielsen's Reinventing Discovery, and there has been a good deal of discussion about that book on the net as well, including from the famous #scio12 @BoraZ.  So, with all this open access and open science discussion swirling in my head, I figured it was a good time to put the electrons down on the blog.

1. Science Online 2012.  I tweeted a bunch of the sessions already (and blogged about one), and most of the sessions have some form of online abstract, so I don't need to go into the details.  What struck me most about the conference was the discussion between the science journalists and the scientists themselves.  Scientists are stuck in a hard place because many academic departments and/or institutions frown on bloggers/tweets and people who try communicate their research to a general audience.  Journalists have a hard time working with scientists who do not understand their craft.  These two sessions particularly caught my attention.
2. Research Works Act (RWA). While I had known about the RWA since well before the unconference (January 5th), the topic didn't catch fire with scientists until a post from Fields Medalist, Dr. Gowers wrote "Elsevier — my part in its downfall".  That sparked a huge amount of discussion and other blog posts from a variety of scientists.  Many of those posts are cataloged at Michael Nielsen's Polymath Wiki page on journal publishing reform. (I see some posts that are missing on the wiki, so I will add those later.)
3. This brings me to Michael Nielsen's book Reinventing Discovery.  I have been slowly reading the book (a library copy), and I was reading it on the way to and from the Science Online Conference.  Two copies were being given away at the conference, but alas, I didn't win a copy.  In any case, here are some good reviews of the book by Bora, John Dupuis and Martin Fenner.  Michael also talked about his book on Science Friday.  Here is the podcast last Friday, January 27th, bit.ly/wFibOk.

Library thoughts derived from the book, Where good Ideas Come From

A couple of years ago, I was able to go to a presentation by Steven Berlin Johnson. (I remember the Berlin part of his middle name, because there are A LOT of Steve Johnsons out there.)  Anyway, he was at DU talking about his 2006 book, Everything Bad is good for You. That was way back on March 31, 2009 for a Bridges to the Future (video) event.  (He was also selling his 2009 book, The Invention of Air.) Just this year, he wrote Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.  This book also looked interesting, so I checked it out from Penrose.  In short, I was able to glean lots of great perspectives and insights that could be applicable to the library world.  Here are some:

Concerning open systems - "When one looks at innovation in nature and culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments. Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders." Page 22.

"Innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts--mechanical or conceptual--and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those combinations--by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges--will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration." Page 41.

"The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table." Page 42.

Concerning the supposed wisdom of the crowd vs. herd mentality - "This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they are connected to the network." Page 58.

Concerning browsing and serendipity - "But serendipity is not just about embracing random encounters for the sheer exhilaration of it. Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure, but what makes them happy is the fact that the discovery you've made is meaningful to you. It completes a hunch, or opens up a door in the adjacent possible that you had overlooked." Page 108-109.

Bill Gates from Microsoft used to take annual reading vacations.  He (and his successor Ray Ozzie) would "cultivate a stack of reading material--much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft--and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they've stockpiled." Page 112-113.

More on browsing and serendipity - "But it [browsing on the web] is much more of a mainstream pursuit than randomly exploring the library stacks, pulling down books because you like the binding, ever was.  This is the irony of the serendipity debate: the thing that is being mourned has actually gone from a fringe experience to the mainstream of the culture." Page 118.  I am not sure that I agree with this.  There is a bit of research that shows that browsing and serendipity was important in the print world of the library, too.  Here is one good article, final version is behind a paywall...

Concerning the market of ideas and intellectual property - "All of the patterns of innovation we have observed in the previous chapters--liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity, noise exaptation, emergent platforms--do best in open environments where ideas flow in unregulated channels.  In more controlled environments, where the natural movement of ideas is tightly restrained, they suffocate." Page 232. Yes, yes, yes.  Let's get scholarly research out from behind paywalls.

"Most academic research today is fourth-quadrant in its approach: new ideas are published with the deliberate goal of allowing other participants rerefine and build upon them, with no restrictions on their circulation beyond proper acknowledgement of their origin." Page 233.

Concerning walled information gardens - "Participants in the fourth-quadrant don't have those costs; they can concentrate on coming up with new ideas, not building fortresses around the old ones." Page 235.

"Whatever its politics, the fourth quadrant has been an extraordinary space of human creativity and insight.  Even without the economic rewards of artificial scarcity, fourth-quadrant environments have played an immensely important role in the nurturing and circulation of good ideas--now more than ever." Page 239.

Thomas Jefferson noted: "That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition...."  Johnson noted: "Ideas, Jefferson argues, have an almost gravitational attraction toward the fourth quadrant.  The natural state of ideas is flow and spillover and connection.  It is society that keeps them in chains." page 241.

Another good line concerning the Internet - "There are good ideas, and then there are good ideas that make it easier to have other good ideas." Page 243.

Overall, I liked the book.  I highly recommend it.

"We are people of the screen."

This is from "TOC 2011: Kevin Kelly, 'Better than Free: How Value Is Generated in a Free Copy World'".  Found this via Patricia Anderson and this blog post.

More on the book, Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

Here are some interesting passages...

Chris Anderson, "The Rediscovery of Fire."
"Before Gutenberg, we had a different technology for communicating ideas and information. It was called talking."  And then, "Read a Martin Luther King Jr. speech and you may nod in agreement.  But then track down a video of the man in action, delivering those same words in from of an energized crowd.  It's a wholly different experience."  I think this is part of the reason that YouTube is so popular.  Seeing a presentation or a demonstration is much more powerful than just trying to read about how to do something.

Eric Drexler, "The Web Helps Us See What Isn't There."
This deals with absence detection.  This "could help societies blunder toward somewhat better decisions about those questions."  Identifying what is absent by observation is much more difficult than identifying what is there.  Reference librarians get these kinds of questions every once in a while.  A student wants to see if anyone has done research on a niche topic.  One could search and search and search and search and not find anything.  This is what the person wants, because he or she wants to identify a unique area where the person can perform novel research.

Martin Rees, "A Level Playing Field."
He discusses the arXiv.org as the preferred mechanism for reading research in physics.  He notes that "far fewer people today read traditional journals.  These have so far survived as guarantors of quality."  He sees that other less formal methods of publication will survive, such as blogs, and that quality control will be controlled by mechanisms of restaurant-like grading or Amazon style reviews.

Seth Lloyd, "Move Aside, Sex."
Why trek over to the library, when Wikipedia is 99.44% correct?  The 0.56% can burn you.  In mathematics, "an approximate theorem is typically an untrue theorem."  What is the sex part?  He goes on to explain that sex is a good way to share DNA information with others, and yadda, yadda, yadda.

John Tooby, "RIvaling Gutenberg."
He talks about the huge impact that Gutenberg had on the transmission of information and knowledge.  Not really new news here.  But, I like his note about William Tyndale who dared to translate the Bible into English, because that is what, you know, everybody read in England. He wanted lowly farmers to be able to read the scriptures and the supposed word of God. He was executed for doing such a foolish thing.

More to come.

Thoughts on Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

I am a very slow reader.  I got this book (HarperCollins, Ha) several weeks ago, but I haven't read much of it.  In the past, I would do whole book reviews on here, but in this case, I think I will chunk it out, and do reviews of sections of the book.  It is derived from an edge.org project.  They have about 150 2-4 page essays from prominent scientists and artists.  The book is an edited version of the essays on the edge.org site.  For example, Clay Shirky talks about the invisible college. 

Concerning the old publishing and mass media system:

The beneficiaries of the system in which making things public was a privileged activity--academics, politicians, reporters, doctors--will compain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake: The change they are protesting is already in the past.  The real action is elsewhere. [Preprint of the essay is here.]

I hear some things like this from my faculty.  I need them to wake up and see that the old publishing system is dying, and that they need to support new methods of publishing and peer-review. The Administrators need to figure out new ways to award tenure based on the different publishing systems. The architecture of access to scientific knowledge is just plain messed up.  We can't go back to the good ol' days.


Hopefully, I will be able to blog about many more sections of this book.

Sort of a review of Cognitive Surplus

Finally finished Cognitive Surplus the other day. Took me a little while to read it. I had to renew it twice... I guess I was using my cognitive surplus on other things besides reading that book.

The word library shows up once I think. I can't find it again. Anyway, there are a number of things that Clay Shirky talks about in the book that is pretty relevant to libraries. Such as:

Clay said on page 17:

People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to. Access to cheap, flexible tools removes many of the barriers to trying new things. You don't need fancy computers to harness cognitive surplus; simple phones are enough.... Once you have figured out how to tap the surplus in a way that people care about, others can replicate your technique, over and over, around the world.

This is what hit me with the Library Camp and Unconference model for meetings and conferences. That is why I helped to organize the STELLA Unconference. We don't always need big organizations like the ALA or SLA or State Library Associations to hold meetings of like-minded (or unlike-minded) librarians anymore. [Note: I am the Chair-Elect of the Sci-Tech Division of SLA, and I still find the SLA conference to be worthwhile.] If anything, a lot of work and discussion can get done over discussion lists and other social networking sites. The difficulty is figuring out how to tap that surplus in a way that people care about. I hope others will continue to replicate the unconference model (very low cost aspects) for other meetings and gatherings.

Page 50:

When publication--the act of making something public--goes from being hard to being virtually effortless, people used to the old system often regard publishing by amateurs as frivolous, as if publishing was an inherently serious activity.... An activity that once seemed inherently valuable turned out to be only accidentally valuable, as a change in the economics revealed.

Open Access publishing is continuing to gain steam. People are starting to realize that it does not take a behemoth to publish high quality articles. I hope that the journal I am involved with, Collaborative Librarianship, fits this description.

Page 98:

No one wants e-mail for itself, any more than anyone wants electricity for itself; rather, we want the things that e-mail enables--news from home, pictures of the kids, discussion, arguments, flirtation, gossip, and all the mess of the human condition.

As a librarian, I need to remember to focus on how the technology can enhance the human condition (and how our students can use the technology to learn stuff and gain knowledge and pass their classes and get good jobs after they graduate, etc.), and not on the technology itself. I have a tendency to do that, I know...

Page 162:

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, compared bloggers to monkeys. These complaints, self-interested though they were, echoed more broadly held beliefs. Shared, unmanaged effort might be fine for picnics and bowling leagues, but serious work is done for money, by people who work in proper organizations, with managers directing their work.

Librarians from lots of various organizations can work together just fine without having managerial overhead. The Library Society of the World is a good example. While the LSW may experience some growing pains every once in a while, it is a working example of a group of people that can be organized without the organization.

Page 189:

The communications tools we now have, which a mere decade ago seemed to offer an improvement to the 20th century media landscape, are now seen to be rapidly eroding it instead. A society where everyone has some kind of access to the public sphere is a different kind of society than one where citizens approach media as mere consumers.

I am not quite sure I agree with his "everyone has some kind of access to the public sphere" bit. There is still quite a big problem with the information haves and have nots here in the US, and lots of people in China or Nigeria or Romania have information access problems. But, we are heading towards greater information access for all. In any case, our society is going to see great changes in the way our patrons view the media and publishing in general. The upheaval has just begun.

Page 192:

Users never behave exactly as the designers of the system expect or want them to.

As librarians, we know that this is sooooo true. Patrons never use the databases the way that the computer programmers expected. The patrons try to extract information in ways that are not expected. The patron wants to sort by the first name instead of last? The patron wants to search by the city of publication, and not just the publisher name? The patron wants to get a list of sales by longitude instead of by zipcode or some other geographic data?

Page 194:

It is far better to start with a system that is small and good and work on making it bigger than to start with a system that is large and mediocre and working on making it better.

Another truism in library systems and databases. I'd rather have patrons use a smaller clean database with good indexing and good links than a huge database that has lots of errors, comes back with strange results and leads the patron to dead ends.

Page 196:

If you want different behavior, you have to provide different opportunities.

In other words, the patrons will respond to how the database and the interface is designed. If your catalog is set up so that patrons can tag items, but only after they jump through some hoops to login to the system, then they are not going to use that feature. If a patron has to click three or four times to get to an advanced search screen, they are not going to use that, even if that is what they need to find the kinds of articles they are looking for.

Page 203:

Twitter was created for use on mobile phones, then retooled itself for more web use..... Instead, the imperative is to learn from failure, adapt, and learn again.

This section deals with adaptation. Of course libraries and librarians need to adapt, but I think we could learn from our mistakes faster and adapt a bit quicker. I work in an academic library, and some of the decisions can be made verrrrrrryyyyyyyyyy sloooooooowwwwlllllllyyyyyyyyy. Lots of decisions are made by committee, and if you don't have a consensus on something, it can be death by committee. Sometimes it can be easier to just do something based on your gut feeling and knowledge of something, and if it was the wrong decision, own up to the mistake and admit it. Sometimes, it is easier to ask for forgiveness after the fact, than it is to ask for approval from a group of people to do something before the fact. If you want some examples, let me know.

Page 205:

As a general rule, it is more important to try something new, and work on the problems as they arise, than to figure out a way to do something new without having any problems.

Some librarians can be quite risk averse. They don't want to start a new service or program without figuring out how to solve all of the possible problems ahead of time. How should we respond if someone asks a question like this? What if we get a line of people at the service point? What if the patrons want to use the equipment under water? What if patron doesn't recharge the battery? Well, I say we should just start the service and see how they use it. There is no way we are going to know how people are going to use the service or the equipment until we make it available.

Page 209:

Biases in favor of existing systems is good, as least in periods of technological stability. When someone runs a bookstore, or a newspaper, or a tv station, it's advantageous to have those people think of their work as being critical for society.

This is a section of the book where Clay is arguing that we should have as much chaos as we can stand during this media transition. We are going to see massive change in the culture of information use. Of course, librarians want libraries to exist [and thrive and prosper] because we are critical to the underpinnings of an educated populace, and to a well-oiled and smoothly running society. (Well, relatively smooth running society...) But, journalists see themselves in a similar role, and so do people who work in the telecommunications industry. When people can get news from non-journalists, or communicate with friends on Twitter or Skype or IM, then those industries are going to contract with some of the professionals in those industries crying about the lack of services that the non-professionals provide.

Libraries are going to continue to see contraction because some of the funders and decision makers do not see the value of services and information we provide. We have to do a better job of marketing what we do to more of the higher ups.

Page 210:

People committed to solving a particular problem also commit themselves to maintaining that problem in order to keep their solution viable.

This has huge implications for libraries. The good news is that as the information universe continues to get more complex, we are going to continue to have patrons who need our help in navigating that universe. As new information gets published, we will have to continue to purchase or lease or subscribe to it. We need to keep track of the electronic resources and books we have, and we also have to let our patrons know about all of that stuff and all of the services we provide to our patrons.

But, do we have to worry about doing too good of a job? Can we ever teach them so well, that they will no longer need to ask us how to use information products? Could a search engine do such a good job that it can do a true reference interview? I think computer software will get better, particularly with the semantic web, but I don't think it will be able to have a conversation with the patron. If someone knows what they are looking for, they might be able to get a good answer. What about the patron that needs advice on how to narrow it down? Can a computer respond with--have you tried looking at this problem in a completely different way? The computer might be able to recommend other search terms, but it won't be able to see the facial expression of the students when they are confused or happy, and know how to ask that next question.

---

Well, that is it for me. Did you read the book?

Mini book review -- Love is the Killer App

I just finished reading most of Love is the Killer App. I thought about writing a good long review of the book, but then I figured, there are already 144+ reviews out there on it, why bother. The book came out in 2002, and it seems like it was way ahead of its time. This was written before social networking services came into vogue, and he (the author, Tim Sanders) advocated radical sharing of business ideas and thoughts -- gasp, even with competitors.

I liked his idea of jotting many notes about a book within the book. I don't know if I will do that, but I might jot more notes down in different spots to jog my memory of the gist of the books I read. It seemed strange that he doesn't like magazines or newspaper articles on business topics. Perhaps he is just reading the wrong magazines, journals and newspapers... He likes to hand out lots of hardback books to colleagues as gifts. But, I would guess that more and more people today would prefer gift certificates so they can get an ebook version. It is the thought and the love that counts.

As a librarian, I think I could always share my love and compassion with my coworkers and my patrons a little bit more. Maybe I will make that an unofficial new years resolution.

What is the future of the book? LRS wants to know your opinion

This survey just came out from the Library Research Service.

Recently, news outlets and blogs have been busy deriding and celebrating the recent ascension of e-readers. The growing popularity of this new format has come with murmurs about the death of paper books and some even surmise that as technology advances libraries will cease to exist!

Taking notice of the chatter, Library Research Service has decided to survey librarians on the matter. This new 60-Second Survey asks your opinions on e-readers and how you think they will transform reading.

• Will e-readers be the demise of the paper book?
• What will libraries circulate?
• What is the future of the book?

Please let them know...

The 95 theses from the Cluetrain Manifesto have stood the test of time

It is odd for me to write a blog post announcing that I will be writing another blog post (on April 28th), but this is the case today.

The 95 theses (not 96) from the Cluetrain Manifesto have now been around for about 10 years. For the most part, the theses form the heart of the Web2.0 revolution. The book turns 10 years old on April 28th, and in celebration, the author has asked for 95 bloggers to write blog entries that expand upon how the world has changed in 95 ways over the last 10 years. In short, I've signed up to expand upon thesis #72, which is "We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it." I have an idea in my head about how I would like to expand upon this (talking about OA, blogs, wikis, new media, etc.), but maybe you would have some other ideas on how I could talk about how we are creating our own new media outlets.

I know some other library bloggers who are covering other thesis statements. Thanks goes to Connie Crosby for noting the celebration.

The Pedagogy of Innovation

This was the title of the "Symposium for Colorado Teachers and Faculty" that took place right before the Bridges to the Future event.

I learned a lot of stuff about:

• Scalable Game Design from the University of Colorado, Boulder
• Humane game development for students and teachers
• Scratch -- A programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art.
• Greenfoot -- Game development platform that is more appropriate for teenagers.
• David Thomson wrote the book, Law School 2.0: Legal Education for a Digital Age. This books is focused on how students are using social networking services. I really like how he used wordle at the beginning of each chapter.

I hope I can use some of these resources to help my son make his own video/computer games.

My short review of the Age of Spiritual Machines

I came across this book (The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence) written in 1999 concerning the future of computing. Dr. Kurzweil has an interesting take on the future of computing and the human race. He sees things in a very positive light, and he is a very strong "strong AI" proponent. He had many specific predictions about the future of computing in 10 year increments. There are predictions for 2009, 2019, 2029 and 2099. Since it is now 2009, I thought I would look at his predictions for 2009 to see how accurate they are. The synopsis of his predictions come from pages 277-278, but chapter nine (pages 189-201) covers the year 2009 in more detail.

"A $1,000 personal computer can perform about a trillion calculations per second." This would be 1,000 Gigahertz computer. In looking at some Dell and Gateway desktop models that cost around $1,000, I see that they have processors such as a Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor up to 3.33GHz or an Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q8200 at 2.33GHz. This isn't exactly 1,000 GHz, but with the dual and quad processors, they may be effectively operating at much greater than a 3.33 or a 2.33 GHz single Intel processor. Processing power isn't as important as it used to be. Memory is also very important, and that is not addressed at all in his book. Also, the speed of the computer can depend on the operating system that is used.

"Personal Computers with high-resolution visual displays come in a range of sizes, from those small enough to be embedded in clothing and jewelry up to the size of a thin book." He kind of called this one, but wearable computers are not exactly in fashion these days, unless you consider an iPhone a wearable computer.

"Cables are disappearing. Communications between components use short-distance wireless technology. High-speed wireless communication provides access to the Web." Plenty of cables are still around, but WIFI and G3 is taking care of the Web access.

"The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition. Also ubiquitous are language user interfaces." Ummmmmmmmmmm, no.

"Most routine business transactions (purchases, travel reservations) take place between a human and a virtual personality. Often, the virtual personality includes an animated visual presence that looks like a human face." Well, we do make purchases and reservations online, but it is not with an animated virtual presence.

"Although traditional classroom organization is still common, intelligent courseware has emerged as a common means of learning." We are not even close to being there. I think Dr. Kurzweil doesn't understand the political and social inertia that is in the public education system and in the college educational system. High quality educational software is pretty difficult to devise.

"Translating telephones (speech-to-speech language translation) are commonly used for many language pairs." Another no.

"Accelerating returns from the advance of computer technology have resulted in continued economic expansion. Price deflation, which had been a reality in the computer field during the 20th century, is now occurring outside the computer field. The reason for this is that virtually all economic sectors are deeply effective by the accelerating improvement in the price performance of computing." Well, no. However, how could he possibly have predicted the 9/11 bombings. The Tech bubble bursting in the early 2000's, and the economic and housing market collapse of the fall of 2008. We are in a stage of abundant over consumption, and humans need to learn not to consume so much and to save more.

"Human musicians routinely jam with cybernetic musicians." Again no. But, I do find the word 'cybernetic' interesting. Haven't used that word in some time.

"Bioengineered treatments for cancer and heart disease have greatly reduced the mortality from these diseases." I wish. As humans have gotten heavier, our heart problems have gotten worse. The war on cancer is still being waged.

"The neo-Luddite movement is growing." Another no. I see more and more people sharing their thoughts, ideas, images and videos using Web2.0 technology. We are seeing solutions to our problems being solved with crowd-sourced open-access software platforms.

Some other good reviews are at:

Fogel, David B., A true visionary's truly fantastic vision. IEEE Spectrum, (July 1999), Vol. 36 Issue 7, p9-10.

Casti, John L., Exit Homo sapiens, stage left. Nature (2/25/1999), Vol. 397 Issue 6721, p663-664.

Proudfoot, Diane, How Human Can They Get? Science (04/30/1999), Vol. 284 Issue 5415, p745.