An old Star Trek episode stays on my mind...

I record old Star Treks for my mom and me to watch together on Sunday evenings (they come on at 11:00 Saturday nites). One episode that I keep thinking about found the whole crew drawn to a life on a planet that seemed ideal, but it was a mirage of course. A flowering plant would blow pollen or something in a person's face and from then on, the person was just happy, happy, happy. It took a lot for Captain Kirk to convince everyone that happiness that appeared and felt real was in fact empty and wasteful of the very lives they all were trying to enrich by opting for the feel-good. It turned out that the inhabitants of this utopia had accomplished absolutely nothing in decades of living in bliss.

Seek -- 21st century: It's fallen to Captain Google to prod the oh, so contented libraries to do something with our planet, our assets, our energy, stop mistaking satisfaction with the bliss of, well, of whatever it is we might be blissful about, for real accomplishment. Our satisfaction is an illusion and it's causing us to abandon our ship and ultimately, to give up on our mission.

Google announced a number of things recently that take the form of this prodding, though in the 21st century, this is just how the competitive market system works in this country -- you innovate because if you don't you die. So, it's not like Captain Google really cares about us and our planet, planet library, he's just doing his job, playing his part. He's reminding us that standing still is no accomplishment, even if you are intensely happy standing there.

Let's see, there are new Library Partners in Japan and the US (Cornell); new enhancements to Google Book Search (My Library and User Reviews and Ratings, Popular passages added to book reference pages, Sharing passages from public domain works, Google Books in Google Earth, and Google Book Search video testimonials); and of course, the news that Google will begin selling access to books on line, that is, ebooks. Wow. And everyone is talking about how this might affect publishers. And how might it affect libraries? And what will Google introduce next week? And how many weeks are there in a year?

Ok, I'm getting a bit overwrought here, I know. It's just that it really does look like life in the satisfied, happy library planet is getting a good swift kick. It took a knock-down drag-out to get Spock to come to his senses. Maybe it will take the business-competitive equivalent of that for us as well.

Google custom search

Just noticed an O'Reilly Radar post by Peter Brantley, in which he interviews Google's Ramanathan V. Guha about Google Custom Search. Brantley thinks this is a powerful tool that holds a lot of promise, if certain issues can be addressed (the predictable privacy, of course). I had heard about this tool awhile back, and had thought about playing with it a bit, but it seemed way too big a project for me at the time -- it's sort of, at its base, like creating a big list of all the sites that you think are the best on a particular subject, no small task -- but now I'm rethinking my dismissing it so quickly.

I looked at the example Brantley included of the Cornell Law Library's Legal Research Search Engine, and was pretty impressed. It seems to get at the complaint that some in library studies have that there needs to be some curation of Web content for instructional purposes (ie, using Wikipedia for everything and only Wikipedia, I mean, is just not ok), and it also would make a very good assignment for grad students to create such a Custom Search Engine in a subject area. The idea of how you would go about casting your net, winnowing out what you get, thinking very carefully about the decision to bring something in, put something out, all of that would make for a very interesting experience and one the discussion of which would be interesting in its own right. You could put a regular Google Search box right next to your Custom Search Box and people could see for themselves what you had done in pointing to things you think are of the highest quality. We do this with Blogs already (our blogrolls are recommendations) and the selection of other sites we link to. We do it with "resource" pages like mine for Open Access Resources for Authors. In fact, I think it would make a great addition to any resource page to add a "search these resources" custom search box. There are people who like to browse a set of sites; there are people who know what they are looking for and want to search. You can speak to both. Cool.

Shifting the focus for my interactivity research class project

I’ve been planning an interactive research report over the summer that would use the video I made in France in May, along with images of objects I collected, images from the Web and text I will write about the research project. I have the entire fall semester to execute this plan for the College of Communication Interactivity Research class. But it occurred to me this morning that I could shift the focus, making the Effect of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Law and Policy the centerpiece of the site, try out CommentPress as the main interactive feature, and use the French video of library interviews and images as a sidebar (the view from France), among possible other sidebars. This makes more sense, puts the French point of view in the broader context, and is more like the pattern that I’d like to develop for my dissertation. There I could focus on the effect of ubiquitous network access and the development of institutional cyberinfrastructure on the use by scholars of alternative forms of scholarly communication (and ultimately, on the future of research libraries). Sounds like a plan, and none too soon, as the class starts in a week. The August issue of CTWatch Quarterly was devoted entirely to this subject and I'll have to squeeze reading it into the framework of all the other readings I've got to do.

Intro to Doctoral Research and Theory got rolling yesterday. Lots to read and think about. I've chosen a journal to review over the semester (and write four short papers about) that seemed an unlikely choice for me (that's why I chose it): Library Quarterly. Sounds so mainstream; published by U of Chicago Press, its contents studied by others over decades to show why library science in this country sort of stagnated on the technology front until after WWII. So why would I choose it? Of the choices, it was the most over-arching in its focus. It seemed to at least touch on big-picture policy, theory and "where are we going" kinds of questions. So many of the others are tightly focused on the nitty gritty of one thing or another. Can't do that right now. So, I read two articles yesterday, both in the January issue. What a span. One was about storytime in public libraries, the other about reassessing the influence of Michel Foucault on the theory of library science. So what is the audience for this journal? I'll get to talk more about that as I develop my first paper on the subject. Coincidentally, I did a short presentation on Foucault in my philosophers' bootcamp class this summer. Foucault and Baudrillard. Both fascinating.

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