Articles for 22 April

Wright
One of the most striking points brought up in Wright’s chapter was the idea of a third dimension within documents and knowledge sharing. The third dimension he defines through Paul Otlet as “their relationship to place, time, language as well as other readers, writers, and topics.” Referencing the practical importance of search and retrieval performance, Otlet practically predicts the basic idea of Google, though under his prediction trained staff would need to perform the search. Still, while the predicted systems differed in many ways, the problems they present (or potentially could have presented) remain similar. But, the relationships between documents today through applications like Google lose their third dimension – they discover the relationships between documents but they remain largely unexposed to the end user who never knows these complicated algorithms defining such relationships. Instead, the documents stand alone in a two-dimensional world without its third dimension. Although the rhetoric of this can get a bit heavy and philosophical for something like technology, such rhetoric exists today and is present in next week’s reading as well. Either way, it gets the point across. And today, technology complaints indicate that users WANT the third dimension – they do not want to be kept in the dark.

Just like Bush’s memex, the third dimension could help externalize a reader’s thought process just like the associative trails. This is, after all, the first step to establishing the third dimension of document relationships to its readers. Still, this technology brings up an important point. Bush suggests the possibility of “smarter machines that could anticipate our needs and adapt themselves… like good servants.” But, as many fiction pieces about technology’s future warn, something like that could get out of control and end up for the worse. Moreover, the changing nature of authorship today with all of the Web’s possibilities has found us in a legal jam not quite knowing what to do. The very definition of intellectual property has been called into question with programs like Napster and YouTube. Still, ordinary citizens outside this technological hierarchy are taking the Web back. The explosion of blogging, photo sharing, and other forms of personal expression have taken out the professional element in the Web and made it more accessible to the average user. Users of blogs can create their own associative trails by creating tags to their entries. Users can share music and see who has downloaded the same songs. Postmodern theory states that there is no such thing as “original” – that everything is plagiarized because in one form or another all works borrow from elements of other works. The concept of universal authorship and the postmodern definition are becoming today’s reality.

D’Elia et. al
This article was admittedly difficult to read due to its statistical nature, especially coming after a 40-page article, but it was interesting nonetheless. While some aspects seemed to be obvious results, the questions need to be asked anyway to establish it officially. For example, the fact that those with higher income were more likely to use the Internet and the library does not seem overly surprising. Based on many of the readings we have read for this class, the library’s mission of serving “all people” and being the “poor man’s university” were obviously in rhetoric only and did not really carry over to reality.

Still, statistical analyses should be read with caution. John Zaller, political scientist, argues in a classic piece that survey responses do not necessarily reflect true attitude statements, but most of the time are more likely short-term opinion statements. The model Zaller produces to defend this statement involves taking thoughts or bits of information at the top of the respondent’s head. The response that comes out, therefore, is an averaging of all immediately accessible thoughts at the top of one’s head. So, if a respondent were to say they use the internet to make purchases, perhaps they just recently made a purchase but do not usually do so via the Internet. In this case, the purchase would be at the top of the respondent’s head and used in the response, but may not reflect a true long-term attitude. Zaller goes on to discuss the wording and rhetoric of surveys. It is good that the authors of this library survey include the question and answer wording, since they can have large impacts on the readers response. By using certain words, it will cause activation of certain thoughts at the top of the respondent’s head related to the word, and therefore may bring up responses that again do not reflect long-term attitudes. The survey is insightful, but perhaps jumps to conclusions too quickly. The authors in their discussion seem to accept the technology integration into the library as all too encompassing. Another interesting point relating back to the other week’s readings is that the consumer market for Internet and library are increasing. This survey should invalidate to some degree previous article’s claim of the detrimental effect of commercializing the library. While it may not be the most rosy option, the need for it is brought to the forefront in this article.

Hafner
I loved reading this article, because I have heard so many utterances of the Google Book Project but finally got to read something concrete. I was surprised to read that the project was partnered with a librarian, since besides publishers much talk has been of how the project might diminish librarian work as well. If anything, this gives credibility to the project and its purpose. Still, the fight of access vs. ownership comes up in this controversy. The library feels they should provide access to whatever information for all patrons, which goes along with the Google Book Project’s goal, but the intellectual property ownership and copyright laws say otherwise. Verba makes an interesting point, though, that the project’s showing small excerpts could lead more readers to an author’s book. This point stuck with me, because a lot of times when I am doing research, I just want something specific – like a quotation – out of a book, but I have no idea what books might contain what I’m looking for. The project would bring me to many more books I wouldn’t have otherwise known about. Besides, when people want books for researching purposes, they usually will not go out and buy it. Especially when books are old/rare or academic, they can cost hundreds of dollars and I have no such interest in spending that on a simple quotation – or anything for that matter. I wonder if this really would be detrimental to authors and publishers, and I almost think it wouldn’t. Most people probably wouldn’t replace going to the bookstore with the Google Book Project, but rather a trip to the library. If they check something out from the library, the author is not making money anyway. So the effect would probably be negligent.

Grafton
In discussing digitization and its contents, the end of the article (or the second article? Not really sure) looks to different archives that exist already. With a subscription to a few databases, almost every article becomes available to the subscriber. However, Grafton points out how few books are in libraries especially in countries like India or Argentina, and how Google’s book Project would increase access to books in poor countries that might otherwise be without it. The issue of access comes to mind as an historic issue in the library profession. The hindrance of the project questions whether the poor should have access to books and resources that the wealthy can easily afford? Money should not block information access, and it doesn’t have to. One can simply go to the library and get whatever they need. If this option exists, what is the difference if the Google Book Project and ones like it exist? At the same time, though, outside the United States this might not be as possible. The problem is similar to the controversy facing the One Laptop per Child campaign (OLPC), which hopes to send cheap laptops to poor African countries to help them fight poverty and come in to the modern world. However, critics argue that people are donating $200 to send a child a laptop when much graver problems exist that should be solved first – like hunger. So, the argument may not hold so well for third-world countries, but for the United States it holds strong. The archiving of records and documents has been around since before the common era, so archiving books in the digital world should not seem like such a shocking controversy. The National Archives of the U.S. have uploaded many documents to the digital world, and Thomas Jefferson isn’t complaining from the grave. Perhaps contemporary authors should take a hint. Either way, it is clear that the law cannot keep up with the technological world, as lawsuits become more and more common over copyright and intellectual property.

Frischer
When I started reading this article I had to go back in the reader to check the date of publication – 2002! This sounded more like something that would come out of a 1970’s future prediction or some kind of science fiction novel. Frischer’s idea of a digital theater in the research library seemed a little bit extreme for 2002 and I am surprised that he thought this could be feasible within just ten years. At the beginning of the article I was glad to hear someone advocating the permanence of libraries and research libraries in the digital age, but the article just got somewhat bizarre as I read on. I do not understand why this digital theater was so important to his library future vision, but it just seems unpractical. Going back to the Public Library Inquiry, libraries in modern history (and before that, really) are in need of increased funding constantly which they cannot quite seem to procure. The state of Wisconsin, for example, only provides 8% of the library’s needs with petition and legislation needed each year to INCREASE funding just to maintain that 8%. When library funding is so problematic to begin with, Frisher’s digital theater just seems unreasonable. Even within the university libraries, universities face so many budgeting issues to start with, that implementing a program like that which wouldn’t really produce profit might be out of the question.

Plus it brings up some questions in the education realm. If they are recreating this virtual scene for the purposes of accurate historical study, who will review it? Will there be standards for such theaters and will they be enforced? Who will check the accuracy of it? In order to build it, architects would have to use the same information that would be found in a research library today (books!) and researchers still would not be able to see the background information that went into this construction, necessitating again the need for a regular, print research library. It has been six years since Frischer wrote this article, and while we are no closer to developing such a virtual reality theater, the print research library is still going strong and probably will continue to do so in 2012.