Journalism is Burning Or How Breaking News is Broken

I wonder if the Journalism grad students are thinking about things like Dale Dougherty is musing about at Journalism is Burning Or How Breaking News is Broken. He starts with simple observations, then begins to imagine new ways that news could be reported and gathered by readers. Very imaginative. Where is it that scholars are studying these phenomena? I want to study them, because it's instrumental in the telling of the story about what's going on with cultural institutions that have acted as intermediaries when we seem to be able to do more and more for ourselves. Of course, I know there's always the information frontier, but still, libraries can't be unaffected by all that's going on.

So I wonder if the College of Communication is where all this research is happening. I'm taking a class there this semester on Research in Interactivity, Web 2.0, so I'll get to meet some of the Communication grad students. I could see looking at a survey of new forms of scholarly communication that emerge over a 3 year period or something like that (for example, MediaCommons and CommentPress, both if:book platforms). Watching the world change right under your nose. Looking at uptake in a specific community. Counting the numbers of alternative publications. Right now you can actually count experiments in alternative and interactive publishing in single digits. I doubt that will be true for much longer. It would be good to get on it right from the ground floor.

I would love to revisit things like this post in 10 years and see how it looks from 2017. It's curiously satisfying to look back at what you were theorizing, what you thought about where things were going. I guess that's one of the bonuses of writing down what you think. No way I'd remember it otherwise.

Time passes slowly when you're watching a full lunar eclipse

WOW. There are just no words that better describe this morning's lunar eclipse. But of course, I'll go on anyway. A reddish ball floating low in the Western sky. Majestic. Warm. Aglow. It doesn't so much look like our moon. It looks like a planet. It could be Venus or Mars. It's a big, big ball of the same stuff that earth is made of, floating in space, but not very far away. Not far away at all. I started watching it at 4:30 Austin time. It was a totally clear night. I have a balcony door off the bedroom facing West. I watched it for about 45 minutes. What amazed me was that when I came back to see it again about half an hour later, it was even better. It was lower, redder, and more distinctly spherical. My best view of it was at 6:15 this morning, in a clearing amongst the junipers behind my deck. As it got lower on the horizon, the three-dimensional aspect became intense. Our moon is not a flat disk. It is a softly glowing ball in the night sky. What a treat.

And it's too low now for me to see it anymore. It is obscured by some kind of misty cloudy thing just above the level of the hills to the West. Ah, life.

Fall semester's classes

Fall semester starts next Wednesday, actually, Thursday for me because I don't have a Wednesday class, but I'm already reading articles for the first day's meeting. Phil assigned 6 articles about research in the field of information studies. That and his 74 page syllabus round out a full weekend's concentrated effort. Nevertheless, I took off a full 4 hours this morning to work diligently in the garden. It was a beautiful morning, everything needed pruning, fertilizing and in some cases, transplanting, to prepare it for the 3 month-long fall growing season here in Austin (we expect first frost around Thanksgiving each year).

Now I'm reading, reviewing my fellow Ph.D. students' blogs and websites to find out what each one is studying, well, not every one, but the ones I know already, and others if they are into anything similar to what interests me, at the moment. So, I'm getting some ideas for how to tweak this blog to make it a little more useful as a collection of important information related to my work at the iSchool. I need to add some static pages, but I'm not sure Blogger does that. In fact, I don't recall anything about that. I'll check when I'm finished with this post.

For now, it's enough to get back into the habit of organizing readings, writing papers, and beginning the process of thinking about where my interests fit into the grand scheme of things within info studies. Some of the articles I read made me feel that I don't fit in at all. I seem to come at it from a different perspective than the articles indicate most people who are attracted to this field come from. I don't really think about representing information. I just think about supporting research and scholarship, and how that will change as the forms of scholarly communication change. I guess I'm not thinking about the mechanics of helping people actually, but whether that will be done in any way remotely like it's done today, say in 10 years or 20 years.

This doesn't seem to fit in with what I'm reading about research in the field. But then Lance Hayden's critical discourse analysis around red light surveillance doesn't seem to fit in either and he was accepted to candidacy on Thursday. I'm pretty sure there's room for people whose interests seem a bit tangential perhaps, but with the changes in the definition of what information studies is, should come changes in what kinds of people the field attracts. And these articles are all pretty old, at least by my standards (from the 90's). But that's another issue. Enough for now.

The last days of summer

The month of August is always so bittersweet. It's hot, often humid, making me wish for fall, but it's also the last of summer and I always feel that once it's over, we hurtle at breakneck speed towards the end of another year. Another year. This summer in Austin has been one of the most unusual I've experienced in the almost 40 years I've lived here. It was so rainy and cool for June and July that it was hard to believe it was Austin at all. Everything was so green and lush. If summers here were like that all the time, we'd be the size of LA. August brought a bit more normal heat and humidity, but even that only lasted about 2 weeks before the hurricanes and tropical storms in the Gulf of Mexico lowered temperatures and brought the rain back.

So, I'm about to begin my second year in the graduate program in information studies. I feel a bit more calm about it, not so "kid in a candy store" about it. I have great classes lined up: a research class focusing on interactive Web stuff, where I'll get to work on my presentation from the trip I took to France in May; an intro to doctoral research and theory with my buddy Phil Doty (we've taught copyright and information policy together several times at the iSchool before I became a student); and a management class with MaryLynn, whom I adore. I guess I am still a bit like a kid in a candy store...

And work really hasn't taken any kind of break. In fact, while I've not had classes, I've put in extra time on the digital distribution (eres and Blackboard), UT Press (collaborative publishing), School of Nursing (open access) projects and picked up a new project creating a process for clearing our scanned books for posting as public domain works. This is exciting as it involves collaboration with other Google library partners, first off, University of Michigan.

So, very busy, very happy, but also a bit sad to see summer come to an end. And another year to fly by.

"And they tell him, take your time, it won't be long now, 'til you drag your feet to slow the circles down." -- Joni Mitchell, Circle Game

Rethinking the catalog, scholarly publishing, digital delivery ...

We got our scholarly communications blog launched this week. The Scholar's Space -- focused on academics and the processes we use for our research, and to collaborate, share our results and start it all over again. And of course, the big thing is the pace of change. Actually, it's glacial compared to the pace of change at a place like Google. I just returned from my second Library Partner's summit. I love hearing about what all Google is up to, new products and services. Their approach to everything is so very different from academe. How on earth do we survive like we do?

So, it's summer, only 1 month left before school starts. I can't quite believe that I will be totally geared back up in a month. I am enjoying the relaxed summer pace so much. So un-Google like. The last time I had a summer off was right before law school, 19 years ago.

But enough of that. Things are perking right along. The blog launched, as mentioned. I had been agonizing every day over the news items in the blog scope that I couldn't say much about because the blog was not launched yet. But I knew that it wouldn't really matter. No matter when it launched there would be a flood of things to talk about because that's the way it's going in scholarly communication right now -- news floods the blogosphere. Just since launch there have been major pieces of news. It's wonderful to have a blog specifically devoted to this subject where I can sort of collect my thoughts and pointers and then refer back to the entries later for ideas for the papers I'll need to write for school.

I have a Google project now that will involve my job and working with a graduate research assistant from the iSchool, and probably evolve into a paper for a class. Our Benson collection has many works in the public domain, but Google's conservative algorithmic estimate of which books they are leaves room for us to apply brute force manpower to make finer determinations if we want to. So, we'll probably join other Library Partners in contributing more precise data to a collection of public domain facts about our books. It's great to be collaborating with the other libraries this way. There's not nearly enough of that.

I'm rewriting the Crash Course in prep for moving it to the UT Austin Libraries website, and also to tailor it more to fit with the scholarly communications set of issues.

The UT Press project is progressing. So is the School of Nursing project, where we're working with the department to increase deposits to PubMed Central. And then there's digital distribution of course materials where we're trying to streamline and integrate 3 different systems for providing access to course materials to students, with permissions taken care of in the background. This will likely take a year or more just to design it. All of these have kept me quite busy this summer, but somehow, with no classes, I feel like I'm "off" for the summer. How is that? I think it's because I love what I'm doing and I'm still having way too much fun to think of it as work.

Well, finally, what I started out to say, as evidenced by the title of this entry: I've read so many articles lately that announce major rethinking of this or that or the other. This one is about Rethinking the Catalog; this one is about rethinking Scholarly Publishing in a Digital Age. All this thinking. But I want to move things along at my library, so I will just concentrate on my projects, report out results when I can, and encourage others to use tools like the ones the ACRL's Institute on Scholarly Communications gave us to shepherd projects along. Life in the slow lane...

So you have a perfect match in some book somewhere...

Hmmm. I haven't read this book, but according to Blue Pyramid, it's my perfect match. I can't say that the description is "off the mark" (Off the Mark being the blog where I learned about this little I'net quiz), but I'm not sure it really captures me either. Maybe my friends could validate it, or not --

You're A People's History of the United States!

by Howard Zinn

After years of listening to other peoples' lies, you decided you've
had enough. Now you're out to tell it like it is, with all the gory details and nothing
left out. Instead of respecting leaders, you want to know what the common people have to
offer. But this revolution still has a long way to go, and you're not against making a
little profit while you wait. Honesty is your best policy.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Musings on Library Education - Life as I Know It

A reference to fellow grad students' "Musings on Library Education" at Life as I Know It got me to thinking about what I'm learning from my iSchool experience. Granted, I'm only 1 year into it, and I've only taken 8 classes. One of those was in the French department and another in the College of Education, so I've only taken 6 in the iSchool. So, what is it like? How useful is it?

Unlike Jennifer, I don't need the degree, so I wouldn't feel compelled to stay with the experience if it truly were a waste of my time. But I do agree with her that it's ok to blow things off: worrying about grades or how well you do in a class is absolutely not a priority. I think, however, that she is coming at that conclusion from a very practical perspective -- she just can't always give it 100% and that's got to be ok because that's life. For me it's more a matter of conscious choice not to waste my time. It's the most valuable thing I possess. If I am going to spend a considerable part of it in a class, I'll do my utmost to get as much as I can out of the class, but if I find that some assignments do not further my goals and are not worth (to me) the time that they will take to complete, or to complete well, I am quite willing and able to draw the line at how much energy I put into them. I am there to learn and I pretty much know what I want to learn about.

I like choice. I love choice. I make choices all the time, very consciously. Today I'm choosing very carefully where to put my energy, my time and my attention. Here on this blog, for example. I am spending time this morning *instead* of doing other things that I could do, because I think that reflection is important and the blog facilitates that. Later today I'll go to the Library and listen to a presentation about a software product that the Library is considering buying, a product that I think has very important implications for the Library's ability to serve its clients/customers/patrons. And I'll pay a visit to my mom's doctor's office to secure some meds for her. And I'll work on a draft of a paper for the Center for Intellectual Property (effect of mass digitization projects on copyright law and policy). Among other things. But those are my priorities for today.

School fits into this quite well. I have learned valuable things from every one of my classes. The structure works well for me. I love the reading and writing. The thing I'm disappointed in is the lack of opportunities to discuss. Not the focused discussion of a classroom, but the wide-ranging discussion that informed individuals can have when they share a common core of information and values and places to be in and just pass the time talking. This is no doubt partly my own fault. I don't spend a lot of extra time at school. It is just one part of what I do and so I'm in and out of the building. I need to hang out more. But I think it might also be due to a lack of the place element. There's no place really *to* hang out at the iSchool. The IT lab is the only place that comes to mind, but that's because Carlos works next door and is likely to be there and so I know I can usually find him there, and other people too (people who are into technology, which, incidentally, was sort of the lead-in to Jennifer's post on Musings), but really, we need a lounge, a nearby Central Perk, or some place where we know we can show up and others of us will be there and we can talk. I think I'll work on this.

Now it immediately occurs to me that maybe this could be accomplished virtually. I think it could, but not exactly in the same way. Online conversations have this linear quality that inhibits seeing the big picture, for me anyway. While it might be nice to set up a virtual place too, I really want a real place. Yes, I'm going to work on this.