Information Research Weblog

I've been posting to both this Weblog and my new location at http://info-research.blogspot.com for some weeks now and, with the New Year coming up, in future I'll be posting only to the new one. So - if you want to continue to read the Weblog, please use the link to 'Subscribe in a reader' at the new Weblog.

I use Google Reader as my RSS reader and I'm happy with it: however, if you are a 'chatter' you might be interest in what Jack Scholfield has to say about a development there.

Whether you sign up or not - have a Happy New Year!

Reading an old issue of the The Guardian Review I came across a piece by Alasdair Gray on the writing of his novel Lanark (started 1953, published 1981 - you can't say he rushed it!) - fortunately still available on the Website. It the piece he remarks:

The notion of Lanark and Thaw's stories being parts of the same book came from The English Epic and its Background by EMW Tillyard, published in 1954, discovered in Denniston public library. It astonishes me to think there was a time when the non-fiction shelves of libraries in working-class Glasgow districts had recently published books of advanced criticism!

Ah, yes - I remember those days. Sadly, the British public library has been in decline since Margaret Thatcher's romantic involvement with the market (continued by T. Blair and G. Brown) and the decline of any feeling in government for responsibility for the 'public sphere'. Once upon a time librarians from the Nordic countries used to visit Britain to see examples of the best in public library systems and services - all the traffic would have to be in the other direction today.

Thanks to Elena Maceviciute for this interesting picture: it shows the headquarters of the Federal Agency of Construction, Housing and Communal Services in Russia. in Russia. One of its responsibilities is the construction work for preservation projects.

I suggested, last week, that academics should resign from editorial boards of journals published by the supporters of PRISM. Clearly, then, I had to do so myself. Below is a copy of my letter to the Editor of the International Journal of Information Management (a journal I founded). I have written in similar terms the editor of Education for Information.
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Dear Philip,

I have felt for some time that there is a conflict of interest in my membership of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Information Management, given my advocacy of open access publishing and, more to the point, the fact that I am publisher and editor of an open access journal.

This feeling was strengthened by the recent announcement of the lobby group PRISM, established, as I understand by the commercial publishers as an attempt to discredit the open access mode of publishing. In particular, their claim that open access threatened the peer review process is nothing less than the 'big lie' - the propaganda technique of Dr. Goebbels - and, clearly, I cannot let my name continue to be associated with a publisher who is prepared to use this kind of tactic.

You and I both know that this claim is nonsense and it is a very great pity that the publishers are prepared to employ the services of a lobbyist who adopts this kind of strategy: it does little to encourage trust in their motives.

I particularly regret that I have to resign from the Board of a journal that I founded and with which I have been associated for so long, but in the present circumstances no other course of action is available to me.

Given that one of the claims of the PRISM Website is that the publishers spend significant amounts of money on supporting the peer review process, and given that, in common with other academic referees, I have never benefited from that spending, I shall in future refuse to undertake unpaid refereeing work for any journal which is not an open access publication.

I shall be copying this message to my colleagues on the Editorial Board and to my Weblog, in support of the open access movement.

With regrets and kind regards to you, personally,

Tom

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I don't know that many of those reading this Weblog will have known, or know of, Professor Wilf Saunders, who died last Friday. Wilf was the founding Director (in 1962) of the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, under the original name of the Postgraduate School of Librarianship.

Wilf was President of the Library Association and Chair of the Committee that recommended the amalgamation of the LA, the Institute of Information Scientists and Aslib - an idea that did not come to fruition at the time, but which subsequently led to the merger of the LA and the IIS into CILIP. He received a CBE for his services to education.

Wilf became known to a wider audience when his "Dunkirk Diary of a Very Young Soldier" formed part of the background for the BBC drama/documentary on the Dunkirk evacuation. Published by Birmingham Public Libraries, where Wilf had begun his career, the "Diary" told his personal story of the preliminaries to the evacuation and his own days on the beach, often wading in water to boats that sank under their loads, before being taken off and transported back to England. He made a brief appearance in an interview associated with the programme. After Dunkirk, Wilf, a Signaller, attended officer training and spent the rest of the war in North Africa and Italy, in charge of a signals unit.

His many friends around the world will miss him - someone described by one of his contemporaries as "a True Gentleman".

I joined Facebook recently, just to find out what it was all about, since libraries are now trying to use it (rather unsuccessfully, as far as I can tell) to create 'communities' of their users.

A number of friends and acquaintances seemed to join up at about the same time, so I found a group almost immediately. However, I also found that the amount of use I made of the system was minimal and that it added little more to the experience of communicating than does my ordinary use of e-mail. I also found messages telling me that person X wanted to be my 'friend' - these turned out to be spammers, peddling pornography in general and porongraphic images in particular.

I don't really need any more spam - and am thankful that Gmail's system gets rid of most of it for me, so I have deactivated my account and do not plan to reactivate it at any time.

I suppose these social networking sites are of some use, but I can't really imagine what it might be!

Rather more than 30 years ago I produced what was then called a 'programmed text' on chain indexing - apparently (at least according to a Google search) it still appears on some reading lists. The programmed text, in effect, implemented on paper the notion of hypertext.

I've occasionally thought of updating it, but not seriously until TiddlyWiki appeared on the scene. Now, as a result of a couple of days' work in retyping the text of the book, 'An introduction to chain indexing' is reborn as a true hypertext.

One of the benefits of using TiddlyWiki for this purpose is that the user can simply download a copy to his or her own hard disc (or portable medium of any kind) and use the text whether connected to the Internet or not, since everything needed to manipulate the text is actually built into the Web page.

I'll be interested to hear from anyone who uses the text or teaches the concept.

I imagine that many will have seen notices to the effect that Lynn Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library is making a special plea for support in what is called in the UK 'the public spending round', i.e., the time when all government departments negotiate with the Treasury on what share of the budget they are to have.

At the same time we have the news that preparing London for the 2012 Olympics is likely to cost something in the region of nine billion pounds. Money that will be found one way or another from the public purse.

I guess that one can expect no more from a government led by the fantasist Mr Bliar (the typo is deliberate) - one of the most uncultured prime ministers since the end of the Second World War. It seems that the height of his intellectual interests is in making friends with drunken rock musicians and fading pop stars. Curiously, I've only seen one political commentator calling him a fantasist - but it is pretty obvious from his personal history - after all a child chorister singing directly to God is bound to have the direct line, isn't he? And if the rock band didn't work out and if the legal career was going nowhere, I guess the best place to work out your fantasies is in politics.

Happy New Year, everyone. No doubt the old Earth will continue on its path for at least one more year.

Signs of the times: before going out to buy the newspaper this morning I checked that the Guardian was published today - but, when I got to the newsagent, they'd sold out, the nearby supermarket had no newspapers, another five minutes in the opposite direction the newsagent in the hospital was closed and so was the small newsagent nearby! Can't blame them for being closed on New Year's Day, but why do I buy a newspaper any longer with all the news that's on the Web? So, it will be half an hour with the Guardian online today.

Free Conversant has a feature that enables me to prevent a long message from being posted on the e-mail list. I hope I've managed to implement it - if so, you will not have received a message about the hits on papers in Information Research. If you would like to see the message, go to http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/798

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Like many others I occasionally take advantage of the 'Readers Offers' in the Guardian newspaper. Never again!

On the 18th August I ordered the ION usb turntable for converting my vinyl to CDs via the PC - the promised delivery was 7 to 21 days. 25 days later I called to find out where it was. 'Oh, it was out of stock, and we are just getting them in this week. You'll be a priority delivery.'

'You have my e-mail address and my phone number, why did no one call to tell me this?'

'I'm sorry, someone ought to have let you know.'

Small satisfaction

Today, I called again, to cancel and was told, 'I can't cancel it because it is on the pick list [only on the pick list 5 days after my last call!] and it could go out today.'

The annoying thing about all this is that I could have ordered from three or four other suppliers at the same price and on the same terms on the 18th August and have had the turntable by the 20th August - at the latest!

So - never again!

For some time now I've had a volunteer proof-reader, RaeAnn Hughes from Seattle. However, Rae has been very ill and my last messages were returned by her e-mail service saying, No such user - I fear the worst.

Which leaves me looking for a replacement (or even two to share the load)

I need, as the subject line suggests, a pedantic nit-picker: someone who can work in English rather than American, who has a sense of good writing style, knows the intricacies of APA 5th ed. for citations and references and who can work to deadlines. And - if this wasn't enough, can do it without pay, since all work done for Information Research is voluntary, as the income is zero!

Also needed, a volunteer html-tidier: although we have a template and pretty good instructions on preparing papers, many authors don't get it exactly right. It takes me between half a day and a day per paper to sort out the code. A volunteer to help with this would be welcome: anyone who enjoys boring, tedious work would be a natural for the job.

All offers (I'm sure I'll be inundated!) to wilsontd@gmail.com

Dr. Wallace Koehler notes:

Interesting...as it confirms observations made in the US. Ironically,
Americans with IQs below the specified values are required to paste
univeristy decals on SUV windows and bumpers. The truly challenged
must fly college penants from their vehicles.

All of the above must yell and yell it frequently "GO BIG [pick a color,
any color]" The prefered color where I come from is ORANGE.

Wally

Information behaviour: an interdisciplinary perspective has been on my site for some years now, but recently a correspondent drew attention to the fact that the diagrams in Chapter 2 were pretty unreadable. So - no sooner the word - it's been redesigned and the figures made legible.

According to Google Scholar (or Scholar Google, or whatever we're supposed to call it) it hasn't had much in the way of citation, but, on the other hand, the paper in Information Processing and Management that was based on the report has had 124 cites, so perhaps people prefer to cite the journal source. Pity, really, since there's more in the report!

A quote from today's Washington Post story on Prime Minister Sharon's illness:

His pullout efforts also angered Israel's religious-nationalist movement, whose members he once encouraged to settle in the territories envisioned by Palestinians as part of their state.

'envisioned by Palestinians' - the occupied territories are not 'envisioned' by Palestinians as part of their state, they ARE part of their state - even though they are prevented from forming one.

When as renowned a newspaper as the Washington Post becomes as meally-mouthed as this, what hope is there?

For another take on 'The death of freedom' see John Pilger's article in today's New Statesman

I was checking on the e-mail address of an old friend in the USA - Dan Carter, at the University of South Carolina, and I followed a link to a lecture he'd given. I recommend the whole of it, but this paragraph struck me as very relevant in the UK, where higher education is becoming more and more a factory system and where the question has to be, To what end?

At the same time, even as we make the argument that higher education can help in raising the standard of living in this state, we should not lose sight of the notion that education is more than simply an avenue to making money and competing economically. We hear much about the value of creating a skilled and technologically proficient pool of workers for the new economy and that is certainly true. In an educational system that works as it should, students will learn how to engage in rigorous analysis, to think logically and sequentially, to speak articulately and to write good prose. Those skills undoubtedly make them good workers. But the inescapable reality is that-in the not too distant technocratic future-we will need only so many people to run the information economy; many of the rest will be marginalized and sidelined in the "service" sector with little need for highly specialized technical education. If we concentrate entirely on the utilitarian value of learning we open the way to creating a society in which there is little purpose to educate this half of the population.

Read the whole piece here

I caught part of Melvin Bragg's 'In our time' programme on Radio 4 this morning. This is an often fascinating series on philosophy, science, history, culture, etc., etc., which is available for download from the BBC site. Today's piece was on American Pragmatism and the work of William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce.

It is interesting for information scientists because of the focus of pragmatism on aligning 'truth' with 'what works' and also for its identification of truth with social interaction and, overall, the general implications for the nature of scientific inquiry and research methods. The contributors on these programmes, chaired by Bragg, are always experts in their field. On this occasion, the discussion involved A C Grayling, Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers' Magazine; and Miranda Fricker, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London

Given the period of the pragmatists, a good deal of material is on the Web: for example, for William James, the site at Emory University has much of his work; for John Dewey, there's a copy of his 'Democracy and education' on the Project Gutenberg site and more at the Brock University site; while for Peirce, the Erratic Impact site is useful.

I was involved in an interesting event on Saturday afternoon, when I received an honorary degree (Filosofie Hedersdoktor) from Gothenburg University. The ceremony, covering a number of other 'hedersdoktorna' (including a roller-coaster designer and a Swedish poet, playwright and actor) and all new doctorates of the University, was held in the convention hall of the Svenska Mässen - the main exhibition hall in Gothenburg and lasted for three hours, with musical interludes of a variety of kinds from Scottish Gaelic 'mouth music' to a jazz trio and Thelonius Monk's 'Blue Monk'. At a rough guess there were close to 100 graduates and about 1,000 people in the audience.

In case you are wondering :-) - the cited reason for giving me an hon. doc. was that I have been visiting Sweden for the past 25 years, giving lectures on research, running workshops, etc., etc. and for the past few years I've been Visiting Professor at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, which is a joint institution of the Gothenburg University and the Högskolan i Borås

Why can't Microsoft do decent conversion from Word to xhtml? Their conversion programs are rubbish and don't even take note of properly formatted Word documents using different levels of heading - everything is converted into mindless tags with lots of mso (Microsoft specific) tags. Even the so-called 'filtered' version is crap.

For example, I had a paper recently which had used MSoft conversion: one table had 10,542 characters whereas my 'clean' version had 1,545. I know that file storage is supposed not to be an issue these days, but a ten-fold increase in file sizes would quickly cause problems. One shudders to think what MSoft's implementation of xml in its next version of Office is going to do!

It is probably not of much relevance to the wider world, but this week the Guardian newspaper adopted a new, 'Berliner', format. Fine - but in the course of doing so, the editors decided to drop the Doonesbury comic strip, which has shared space with the 'If' strip, drawn and written by Steve Bell. Both are highly political and often complement one another nicely.

As anyone could have predicted, all Hell broke loose - telephone calls, e-mails, letters, all hit the Guardian from Day 1 (including one from me). As a result a shame-faced Ian Katz admits in today's issue that this was a bad idea and the strip will be re-instated on Monday. Victory for good taste! :-)

There are all kinds of games you can play with Google, including the well-known 'Googlewhacking'. I don't know whether I've invented this one, which I discovered accidentally.

It is very simple: just hit a few keys haphazardly, for example, "l;kd" in the search box of Yahoo and see what turns up. The aim is to put in something that returns nothing - which is surprisingly difficult! That combination, for example, turned up more than one and half million hits! Even entered as a phrase, it produced almost 20,000.

The string ";we[kear'k" resulted in 34 hits, largely as a result of the existence of an author called "K. Kear". However, as a phrase, it produced zero - so it can be done. Remember, however, that they entry of symbols should be haphazard, just let your fingers do the choosing.

I have just finished reading a brilliant book - a wonderful work of imagination, 'The piano tuner' by Daniel Mason. Quite apart from its literary quality, the book has an interesting 'sub-text' on the nature of official information. In the following, the speakers are, first, Dr. Carroll, Surgeon-Major in the Shan States of Burma towards the end of the 19th century, the second is the piano tuner, Edgar Drake:

'I know what the reports say.' He lit the cigar. 'If you read closely, you would know that the Indian Opium Act of 1878 prohibited the growing of opium in Burma proper; at the time we did not control the Shan States. This doesn't mean that there isn't pressure to stop. There is much more fuss about it in England than here, which is probably why so many of... us... who write the reports, are selective in what they say.'

'That makes me worry about everything else I have read.'

'I wouldn't. Most of what is written is true, although you will have to get used to the subtleties, to the differences between what you read in England and what you see here, especially anything to do with politics.'

Many years ago I read John Johnson's PhD thesis, 'The social construction of official information', and frequently thereafter recommended it to students as an example of what qualitative research can achieve when it is done well. It is necessary for all of us to remember that no official information, of any kind, is value free, or free from subjectivism, and when we read official reports on such things as the recent flooding of New Orleans, it will be wise to look for what isn't reported, as well as what is.

I had an interesting morning, this morning (apart from traffic problems). I'd been invited to participate at a debate at an internal research conference at Leeds Metropolitan University, so I tooled up the motorway (hence the traffic problems) to participate in a debate on 'knowledge management' with Frank Land (Professor Emeritus, London School of Economics) and Tony Bryant (Professor of Information Management, Leeds M.U.). I was there simply to restate my 'nonsense of km' position, while Frank was more concerned with the ethical issues of km, although proposing that, while km was a somewhat dubious concept, we could think of the historical 'management of knowledge' as something with a greater validity. My objection to that was that this is fine when debating the issues with lay persons and 'knowledge' practitioners, but that the information systems discipline needs firmer definition of its concepts. I think we played a draw, and at least the audience seemed to enjoy it. :-)

The idea of the debate arose out of an invitation to me from Frank to participate in a session at the HICSS Conference in Hawaii - unfortunately, much as I would like to revisit the Big Island, I lack the institutional support necessary to get me there. (LSE is rather more generous to its Emeriti than the U of Sheffield!) So, as a substitute, the debate was video-filmed and will be shown before the relevant session at HICSS - those of you who are attending can watch out for me :-)

I'm very pleased to announce that we have a new member of the Editorial Board of Information Research, Professor Shunsaku Tamura of the School of Library and Information Science at Keio University. He is member of the Board of Trustees of the Japan Society of Library and Information Science and former member of the Board of Trustees of Japan Library Association. He has research interests in information behaviour of ordinary citizen; literacy and reading research; and management and evaluation of information and reference services, especially in public libraries. His publications include Information seeking and information use (2001, editor, text in Japanese) and various articles. He is currently working on a funded research project on the effects of information service to business in public libraries.

The trip to Japan ended some time ago - 4th April, to be precise - but my time has been occupied with getting the latest issue of the journal out (see http://InformationR.net/ir/10-3/infres103.html if you haven't seen it yet) and various other things that built up.

I was amused by a very gung-ho article on technology in Japan that appeared while I was there. It gave the impression that technology was king, that everyone was using mobiles for all kinds of purposes, etc., etc.

In fact, I saw fewer people on the street in Tokyo using mobile phones than I do in Sheffield. I was travelling around with a group of four or five Japanese colleagues and I think that only once did I see anyone using a mobile. On a couple of 'bullet train' trips, only one person in the same compartment left to use his mobile on receipt of a call.

As for Internet connection; only one of the four hotels I was in had Internet connection to the rooms - the other three didn't have it at all. I was told of only three Internet cafes in the Ginza area of Tokyo and their paucity was explained to me as being the result of the high telecomms costs.

However, I wasn't there for the technology, and found the visit fascinating, partly because of discovering more about the nature of LIS education and research in the country, partly for the nature of society itself, and partly because of the mixture of ancient and modern in the cities.

If you get an opportunity to go - take it!

The Weblog will be more than usually dormant for a little while, as I am off to Japan in the morning, returning on 3rd April, and I don't know how much Internet access I'll manage to get. I'm giving lectures in Tokyo and Kyoto and hope to have a little time for bird-watching, as well as a little technology-watching :-)

I'll tell you all about it when I get back.

I see that the Financial Times, yesterday, was reporting a 20% rise in online shopping over the Christmas period in the UK, so I thought I'd report on my contribution and experience.

First, of course, one has to survey all of the price comparison sites, since most of them only include the stores that pay them. I discovered this a couple of months ago when I was looking for an iRiver mp3 player - it turned out the ShopGenie was the only one that included the high street store, Richer Sounds - and, as the local store is just five minutes walk away, it was actually more convenient to buy the device there. Actually, 'high street' is a bit of a misnomer - the company generally leases properties in cheaper parts of town, presumably this helps to keep its costs down.

However, I was also looking for a new scanner and online reviews persuaded me that instead of going for a Canon (my cameras and my printer are all Canon products) I should replace my old Epson scanner with a new one - the Epson Perfection 4870 Photo. This one draws plaudits for delivering near professional quality output at retail prices, and my reason for switching was to have a scanner that would help me reduce the decades of slides to digital storage. It turned out that Amazon.co.uk had the best price and immediate delivery - so I set it up yesterday and, although I have got to the slides yet, I am very pleased with its performance on, for example, OCR and copying prints. So - stars to Amazon for fast (and free!) delivery, and to Epson for a good product.

Of course, with more CDs to convert to mp3 (or, rather the .ogg standard in my case) and slides to convert, I'm obviously going to need more storage space, so the next thing on the list was a Maxtor OneTouch II 300GB 7200rpm external hard drive. According to one or other of the shopping sites Dabs.co.uk had the best offer, but was out of stock. So, I had an e-mail conversation - or, rather, I tried to have an e-mail conversation, only to end up being told that the only information the company had about possible delivery dates was on their Website - the only problem was that, for this particular product, there was no information. Sorry, Dabs, but your customer relations policy is crap - you're off my list for ever. I then moved on the the next best deal at Technoworld and got all the way through to the point of ordering, when some database glitch sent me an error message - a totally unintelligible error message, of course. Again, an e-mail conversation ensued - this time they really were trying to be helpful, but the error message happened again, so I said goodbye to Technoworld - it you are going to sell online, get some software that works.

Back to the shopping sites and I discover that Komplett actually has a better deal than Technoworld - the order goes through without a hitch and now I'm sitting waiting - not for long, I hope. Interestingly, Komplett is a European company, based in Norway, operating in Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK with a turnover in 2003 of 1,732,000,000 Norwegian Kroner (that's £148,207,359 at today's rate, or $277,310,790 - no doubt 2004 showed an improvement on that.

Finally, blank DVDs - back to Amazon, which turned out to have best price, instead of a number of other places recommended on various discussion groups - delivery is promised for Monday or Tuesday.

From a buyer's point of view is that Amazon has the best interface once one gets to the point of ordering and I have no doubt that its software must have been pretty pricey to develop. Other places I suspect of relying upon off-the-shelf packages of one kind of another and they may be letting the company down. If that interface is not easy to use and glitch-free, the consumer experiences a big turn-off.

I thought a little non-serious questionnaire analysis might amuse you - I'm in the process of a rough and ready analysis of the questionnaires returned by readers of Information Research and three of the questions generated some interesting responses. Well, actually, they are all interesting, otherwise I wouldn't have asked them, would I?

However, the three I have in mind tonight are those that asked for the 'most interesting paper', the paper that had been 'most useful recently', and which paper would get 'the best paper award'.

Naturally, there is just about as much variety as there are responses, and the first thing to note is that, in general, people didn't respond to these questions: 39 non-respondents to the first, 45 to the second, and 60 to the third—out of about 90 analysed to date.

Of those selected as 'the most interesting', the following attracted more than two votes:

• Brooks-Web search: how the Web has changed information-paper 154
• Heinstrom-Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour-paper 165
• Wilson-The Nonsense of Knowledge Management-paper 144

Of those selected as 'the most useful', the following attracted more than two votes:

• Dervin-Human studies and user studies-paper166
• Franklin and Plum-Library usage patterns in the electronic information environment-paper 187
• Heinstrom-Five personality dimensions-paper165
• Jarvelin and Ingwersen-Information seeking research needs extension-paper 212

Of those selected for the 'best paper award', the following attracted more than two votes:

• Miller-I=0-paper140
• Wilson-The Nonsense of Knowledge Management-paper144

What does it all mean? Well, I guess there's some correlation between the number of hits a paper gets and the probability of it being selected, and that choice will be dictated by current concerns and interests. But, looking at the list, I think that they are all pretty good papers :-)

IDC reports that for the first time in four years, Sweden has slipped from top position in its ranking of countries on an Information Society Index for 2003.

	Country	ISI Score
1.	Denmark	963
2.	Sweden	958
3.	United States	938
4.	Switzerland	929
5.	Canada	925
6.	Netherlands	919
7.	Finland	911
8.	Korea	904
9.	Norway	899
10.	United Kingdom	870
Source: IDC Information Society Index, 2004

So Tony Thatcher's (oops, Freudian slip, I meant, of course, Blair's) much vaunted drive for Britain to be the leading state seems to be going nowhere very fast.

And with the dismal news of a probable Bush victory in the US election (how can more than 50% of the American electorate not realise what a disaster this is?), I assume that the monkey will be intent on dragging the US back to some stone age condition. After all, the Information Society isn't in the Old Testament, is it?

This, apparently, is what eBay considers to be good customer relations.

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Dear valued customer [Really? After what follows you want me to believe this?]

We regret to inform you that your eBay account could be suspended if you don't re-update your account information. To resolve this problems please click here and re-enter your account information. If your problems could not be resolved your account will be suspended for a period of 3-4 days, after this period your account will be terminated.

For the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us.

Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are prohibited from using eBay in any way. This includes the registering of a new account. Please note that this suspension does not relieve you of your agreed-upon obligation to pay any fees you may owe to eBay.

Regards, [!!!???] Safeharbor Department eBay, Inc

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Actually, I have never bought anything through eBay, and, after this lovely morsel, I never shall!