Category: Uncategorized

Clearly there is no perfect survey, as seen in some recent entries, but the design of and use of voter surveys now has a faculty member at Syracuse in the hot seat. Jeff Stonecash of the Maxwell School has conducted a variety of political polls for decades, using students as project staff, offering polls to all-comers, apparently, at cut-price rates. Following complaints from Democrats that the his recent poll was ‘partisan’, he has now been asked (told?) to stop. Clearly there are issues of appropriateness that might need to be addressed but one might also think that practical experience in conducting a poll that will be viewed publicly by a large audience could be an excellent learning opportunity for the students. Curiously, Stonecash is a registered democrat himself, and says he would have done a poll for the democratic candidate too if asked. In a wonderful example of understatement he is quoted as saying “I think it’s a very legitimate issue to ask whether a professor can do polling for candidates using university resources.” Indeed it is, just as legitimate as asking if conducting polls should be limited to profit-driven companies alone rather than allowing academics intent on exploring the process with students to participate. One wonders is the issue about paying for such a service or someone just not liking the results? The role of the university in society is about to be examined, one hopes, and not found wanting.

According to the latest Random House-commissioned survey of more than 8000 adults:

43% of respondents say that they buy most of their books online. Amazon is becoming the bookshop of choice for such people — not only does it outscore Barnes & Noble online site by 10:1, but independent bookstores are the most common choice of only 9%. Of course, the respondents were all online when they provided that response. Coincidence?

60% of adults spend less than $20 per month on books, and 50% of people buy fewer than 10 books a year. This sounds low but if you multiply it up by the millions of adult book buyers, this is a tidy amount. If you are somewhat cynical, you might wonder why nobody ever says ‘I don’t buy or read books’ — surely there are such people out there and you’d think a survey of 8000 random folk should probably find a few. But then, apparently everyone has a library card too and believes in God. No desirability to these responses surely.

The really interesting data is not so much the claimed spending and type of books purchased (hardcover history books bought at the airport seem remarkably popular with these respondents) but while 23% of respondents claim they spent more time reading this year than last, 65% reported increasing their time spent online (completing surveys, perhaps?) The subject of the book and its author account for over 70% of people being drawn to and subsequently purchasing a book; price and bestseller status were deemed irrelevant by most readers. More than half read only one book at a time but a large proportion (40%) report having 2-4 books on the go at once. Now that’s multi-tasking.

The survey contains a section which asks about ‘bad reading habits’ and people seem to view folding over pages or writing on the text to be serious sins. I can’t understand why if the books are your property but this could just be the survey design (again!). Of course, I admit to using corner folding systematically to reflect the quadrant of the open book I am drawing attention to (works a charm in retrieval, at least for me).

Bad news for the e-readers, it would seem – but you might think the following question was just a little leading: “Do you like to curl up with a printed book or would you be comfortable reading books in other format e.g, online, ebook etc.” — now really, is this a straight question? 82% said they like printed books (does this mean 18% have something against them?). I like to curl up with a printed book for sure, and I am also comfortable reading books in other formats. Can’t I have both?

It’s not easy to make sense of the data this survey yields, there are various combinations of results broken down by political affiliation, investment style, and general belief in the American Dream (I kid you not) but if you are the kind of respondent who provides completely off the wall answers to strangers who push surveys at you, you might recognize yourself in here somewhere. The survey was conducted online so there’s a further complication. 80% of such people say they make up answers that create a positive impression of themselves as intelligent, wealthy, well-mannered citizens. [I am making this last bit up]

A series of short articles on the concept of genre in digital environments has been published in the June issue of the ASIST Bulletin. This is the outgrowth of a successful panel session at the 2007 conference.

NPR carried another segment this morning about the oath required of faculty in the Cal State system. They covered it earlier in the month so that story seems to have some legs. Most telling, Wendy Gonaver spoke up immediately when she did not feel comfortable with the oath. Compare this to certain political hacks who seem to swallow their objections until they get whiff of a book deal. Most frightening — can you really believe in this day and age a faculty member will be removed from a classroom by police for failing to take a loyalty oath? Where’s the AAUP on all this? Where’s the AAUP at all?

I am sitting in Austin TX listening to a web feed of a BBC show talking to people in London about a football match in Moscow that we in the US just watched on ESPN. As background, the mighty Red Devils of Manchester United won the European Champions League tonight in penalty shoot-out. That was the result I wanted (though I hate penalties as a basis for separating teams at the end of a game, nay a season). It’s somewhat unnerving to listen to a radio interviewer in London telling the audience she has to move from where she is due to drunk thugs claiming to be Chelsea supporters who are threatening anyone nearby who is not wearing blue. Hooligans aside, it’s a global village, and the wonders of uniting us in real time across the planet to share the moment is something a middle-aged radio fan such as myself loves to experience, words are sometimes more vivid than images. The phone-in to London is coming in from all over Britain and from Moscow, with emails from around the world, uniting a worldwide audience of football fans. Community is connection.

The process has been slow but e-book numbers show continued healthy growth according to the latest publishing data. Against a backdrop of typical 2.5% annual growth in book sales over the last decade (more than $25 billion of revenue in 2007 according to AAP), the e-book proportion is miniscule (less than $100 million) but growing much faster. This January alone, e-book sales showed record numbers again suggesting a further spurt in 2008 is likely. It’s not easy to get accurate data on these issues but the International Digital Publishing Forum provides wholesale estimates and intriguing data nuggets: did you realize Japanese readers were buying over 300% more books to read on their phones than the previous year or that sales for e-books doubled in Korea in 2007? And you can’t just dismiss this by saying that selling 3 books instead of 1 is a 300% growth — the $ amounts for Korea alone top $140m. Not sure how much of this is due to nifty new readers or the increasing pressure to condense your entire life into your cell phone but all these data provide an interesting counterpoint to the negative assessments of people’s reading habits. I don’t dispute the NEA (well, perhaps a little) but my view is that we are all spending more time reading now than ever before, if by reading you include more than curling up with a book.

I can hardly bear to write that Roy Mersky, perhaps the best known legal librarian in the country, is at this moment close to the end of his life. Roy, the Tarlton Law Librarian here at UT has been an incredible force in the education and career advancement of many influential legal scholars and a staunch supporter of our school’s development over the last five years. Roy, the Law West of Townes Hall, was a pioneer in the area of legal information access, a human rights activist, a bon-vivant, a storyteller, an outspoken critic of mediocrity, a demanding leader but a passionate defender of his staff and just about the best fun at a party you could ever hope to meet. There are hundreds of stories one could tell of his sharp wit (and sharper tongue) but I will never forget his telling me that if we wanted to create a leading national program in legal information, all we had to do was start one! To help me do this, he invited to UT dozens of the leading law librarians and legal informatics researchers (at their own expense) for a workshop where they provided me with input, curricular ideas and advice. That everyone he asked responded positively to his invitation spoke volumes of the man’s impact on others’ lives. I have no direct way of communicating to Roy, in his final hours tonight, the sadness felt by many at our school but Roy Mersky was cut from very special cloth and we’ll not see the likes of him again. Farewell Roy, and thank you — what a life!

The quote above is from an interesting story in the LA Times of a potential faculty member for Cal State who was fired for not signing a loyalty oath initially developed to weed out commies from the university system in those enlightened 1950s. Before making your own mind up, here’s the text:

From the California Constitution:

“I, ______, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.”

The faculty member wanted to add an addendum to the effect that as a Quaker, she was a pacifist, and the interpretation of defending needed clarification. Unlike some other universities in CA, employees are not given this option. Wendy Gonaver, the faculty member concerned, was due to teach a course on protecting the constitution ( you could not make this stuff up, right?)

The reader reaction is quite intense on the paper’s site, but I just can’t quite figure out how the Al Qaeda member gets through, unless one assumes such a person would not care. Indeed, the most telling line in the report is a quote from Gonaver that the only people that fail to get hired as a result of this oath are those who ‘take it seriously’.

We hosted a lively talk this week from William (Bill) Anderson, formerly a researcher at Xerox, now chief of Praxis 101, on the potential of the ‘Net to advance scientific discourse and data sharing through peer production and commentary. He raised fascinating questions about the potential for ‘citizen scientists’ to engage in the process of research, the roadblocks to participation, and the general reaction of scientific communities to open access and engagement. His talk sparked one of the liveliest discussions among the audience that we’ve seen this year at our iForum series and it’s clear that many of us have very strong views on the problems and prospects. The local Daily Texan covered the talk in advance and this attracted a diverse group of attendees, many of them surely first-timers at a School of Information talk. We encourage this, as the issues we deal with are impacting everyone.

A couple of issues that dominated discussion revolved around the apparent elitism of science which is seen as discouraging participation from ‘amateurs’. I am less convinced of this. I believe most scientists and scholars encourage discussion and are quick to engage, but lack the time to deal with people who themselves lack sufficient knowledge to talk appropriately about certain topics. Discussion forums that treat opinion as equivalent to data push intelligent discourse aside quickly, resulting in the setting up of more controlled groups where membership is limited to those who can discriminate. This is necessary, not elitist, in most cases for reasons of effort and sanity.

A further issue related to the ability, given big science’s reliance of massive technological investment, of citizens to engage in any process. That is true enough if we anticipate a return to Victorian-era innovators working out the secrets of medicine in their studies, but there are examples of shared computing resources being put to targeted use or the ability of large numbers of people to play with huge data sets generated by some of these technologically-driven experiments. I would add that the process of discovery should not be limited to the individual level so literally, and that distributed discourse on research might enable a culture or society to play with ideas in a manner that yields insights which would not emerge were a scientific team working in relative isolation in their labs.

All told, a lively session and lots of food for thought. Bill blogs through his company site.

If you ever watched the Killing Fields, you know about Dith Pran, even if you forgot his name. He died this weekend and his story is being retold by most major western newspapers. The Independent in England ran a great article that outlines his role as an infomediary, a fixer who enabled journalists from the west to function in the hostile world of 1970s Cambodia. There are many others playing that role now around the world and they are perhaps even more overlooked now by a news media intent on presenting stories through photogenic, white-toothed, personalities impersonating journalists. What Dith Pran provided was literally a life or death service and we would all do well to remember the power of information and the reliance of this power on a series of human links who rarely, if ever, get the attention their role deserves.