Information Research Weblog

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.

The Royal Society has announced the availability of all of its journals online - including the Philosophical Transactions from 1665.

The journals will be freely available until the end of the year but then only through subscription. Unfortunately, the Royal Society has teamed up with JSTOR in making this offer, and JSTOR is not an open access supporter.

So - this fascinating resource will not be available readily to historians of science, unless their institutions pay the subscription, or to enthusiastic amateurs, or, presumably, to school-children. Surely the archive could have been made partially open access - from 1665 to 1899, perhaps?

Once again, we have an instance of commercial interests closing down access to scholarly, scientific information.

This from Charles Bailey's excellent 'Current Cites'

Sale, Arthur. "The Acquisition of Open Access Research Articles" University of Tasmania EPrints Repository (2006). - In this e-print, Sale examines what happened when the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, the Queensland University of Technology, and the School of Computing at the University of Tasmania mandated the deposit of article e-prints. Based on an analysis of the deposit data at these academic units, Sale concludes: "What can be estimated is that a university-wide mandatory deposit policy takes at least three years to be (say) 80% effective, if it is the authors themselves who provide their documents. If the repository managers adopt a proactive policy of actively uploading missing documents on behalf of the authors, as at CERN http://public.web.cern.ch/ then the apparent transition will be faster, but the rise of self-archiving might be slowed due to lack of direct author incentive and involvement. Repository managerial promotion and assistance, such as that undertaken by the Library in QUT, matters very significantly under a mandatory policy, although under voluntary policies it seems to be largely a waste of money. . ." - CB

It's a highly technical field that requires years of academic training and discipline. Many people develop basic skills using this kind of code, but the number of specialists who excel in it are few and far between. On the Web, those who have advanced coding skills in this specialty can command top salaries in roles as diverse as CIOs, eCommerce managers, information architects, Web designers and usability consultants.

What code are we talking about? The English language. Or any language, for that matter.

Our written language is a code, and it is one of the most challenging codes for Web site developers to master, whether we speak about it as “editorial,” “Webitorial”, “digital text”, or simply “eText” for purposes of this article. We may as well consider eText to be alphanumeric as well, because much of our language and what we consider textual includes alphabetic characters as well as numeric characters and various ascii-type symbols.

The three facets of eText

eText content on the Web is one of the most technically layered forms of content because it is actually several things at once:

* eText is Code – It originates in a formal language; it has substantive meaning, it is used for communication; it is subject to interpretation; and it has affective and symbolic meaning;

* eText is Object – It is visual and spatial, appearing as blocks of text, chunks of text, text documents, text logos and text advertisements (promotional text);

* eText is Design – It is recognizable in many different designs and formats, whether through fonts, spacing, styles, colors and other attributes of design. If a picture paints a thousand words, then a picture of a word must paint a million nuances, meanings and subtexts. Each word has a literal, symbolic, cultural and contextual meaning; and the way it is handled as an object and as a design can affect the way it is communicated and the way it is received.

Is there any wonder that eText is one of the least understood and most poorly engineered forms of content on the Internet? So many people who are charged with authoring, editing, designing or otherwise manipulating eText have never been trained to work with its threefold qualities of Code, Object and Design. Those who are writing experts with a strong command of the subtleties of language often do not understand how to handle text as an object on a Web page or as an aesthetic element in a Web design. Those who understand how to design and layout eText for the Web often lack the skills to understand how language can be shaped for substance and symbolism.

That's not to say that you can't engineer eText content without expertise in all its aspects; process-driven content management allows many specialists to work with content and develop it properly for a Web environment; a writer can author the eText, a designer can design it and a Web publisher or Web information designer can shape it for the site so that it works most effectively. The development process, however, should not obscure the fact that, like all digital content, when you change one aspect, it alters the others. This is one of the reasons Web sites created and managed by perfectly competent and even talented staff can end up confusing, unintelligible and unusable. A writer writes in isolation, and doesn't have any input about how the eText will appear when published online; or a designer is handed a Word document but admonished not to make any changes to it for any reason; or a Web editor is faced with either having to change what the author and designer have done, or leave it as it is with minimal changes.

Are we making content re-cyclable — or disposable?

One of the most practical yet ultimately counter-productive trends is toward the re-use of content, which usually means structuring eText content so that each chunk of data in it and each aspect of it can be extracted from its original form and redeployed in another context using dynamic publishing. This reductionist approach essentially treats the code of language as simply a quantifiable mass of data that can be carved up without losing any intrinsic value, i.e. the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. While this may work at a practical level for organizations attempting to 1) improve quicker and easier access to content for different users in different contexts, and 2) extract the maximum value from existing content rather than having to constantly reinvent the wheel with new content, recycling content actually makes it more disposable. It mechanizes human communication and it mutes or eliminates its human complexities and shadings. It's the equivalent of the “voice to speech” software: you can make your PC speak words with a human-sounding voice, but the effect is in human and lacking in originality, nuance, emotion or spontaneity.

What makes eText different than other codes is the human element. eText engineering is not about the automation of language or about turning it into soulless digital output, as practical as that may seem when content managers are trying to find efficiencies for their sites. eText specialists are, by necessity, professionals who have a more sophisticated understanding of how eText moves, motivates, engages, impels and even challenges other human beings.

(Garth A. Buchholz, B.A., C.U.A. is a Canadian author, Web content strategist and Certified Usability Analyst.)

Computer Weekly for 31st January carried a double-spread article on the digitisation plans of the British Library. Doesn't say anything to surprise readers of Information Research, but it's a nice overview.

I've just taken a look at the counter's table that shows the browsers used by readers. Here it is:

1.	Internet Explorer 6.x	63.3 %
2.	Mozilla Firefox 1.x	27.1 %
3.	Netscape 3.x	4.1 %
4.	Internet Explorer 5.x	2.8 %
5.	Safari 1.x	1.8 %
6.	Opera 8.x	0.5 %
7.	Opera 7.x	0.5 %

That's a big jump for Firefox!

My attention was drawn by the LITA-L discussion list to an interesting article in Nature on a test of Britannica and Wikipedia. Nature sent out a total of 50 articles from the two encyclopedias for peer review and concluded that there was not much to choose between the two.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

As a result of the recent fuss over misleading articles in Wikipedia, some changes are being made. Specifically, 'stable' articles will be identified and will not be editable - only a separate version will be editable and that will replace the currently 'stable' version when it is deemed appropriate.

Wikipedia has been in the news recently, most seriously as the result of a claim that an anonymous 'editor' had presented false information about one John Seigenthaler - a former aide to Edward Kennedy. The suggestion was made that Seigenthaler had some role in the assassination of Kennedy. Wikipedia has edited out that material and now carries a brief account of the issue. Seigenthaler has written about the problem, suggesting that Wikipedia's lack of any control over the submission of text means that it cannot be a trusted information source. For a source such as Wikipedia, which has several hundred thousand entries and is visited by millions daily, this is a serious issue. The fact that the false information was discovered is, perhaps, justification of the view that 'open' editing works, but the article was available for months and had been repeated in two other sources, so how long is it before false or erroneous information on less notable persons or issues is discovered? In some case perhaps never.

In another case, one of the leading figures in the development of 'podcasting' edited the article on the subject to remove information about another person who was instrumental in developing the concept, thereby giving himself a bigger role than might have been justified.

I guess that Wikipedia is going to have to introduce better control over the submission of information—it is not for nothing that scholarly journals have peer review.

A couple of magazines of general interest to Information Research readers have come to my attention today.

First, the Free Software Magazine, now in its eighth issue and, appropriately, free. The current issue includes a review of a free anti-virus program. Many interesting articles in the previous issues - all of which are available.

The other freebie is O3: the open source enterprise data networking magazine—quite a mouthful, and I'm sure there should be a comma in there somewhere, but where? "open source enterprise, data networking magazine" or "open source, enterprise data, networking magazine"—who can tell? Still, the first issue has some interesting items, including one on the perils of letting Google's spider into your servers.

A busy day, today. My attention has just been drawn to another Google iniative - Google Base. As usual, it is in a beta phase at the moment, but the question is, what exactly is it intended to be? The stated principle is that you can deposit material in the base and Google will host it

Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content that we'll host and make searchable online. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle, Google Base and Google Local.

However, when one carries out a search on Google Base, it is difficult to determine what is hosted by Google and what is normal Web content. For example, I bought a nice fresh sea bass this morning and so went looking for a recipe and up popped a site for one Michael Thompson with, at the head, a recipe for 'Barbecued Squid with Hot Dipping Sauce (Squid Sate)' - sea bass was an alternative to the squid. When I searched on the Web, instead, the same site appeared - although lower down the listing. So, is this a Google-Base-hosted site or does Thompson have his own site?

A further interesting question relates to originality in the recipe field - I put the full recipe name into Google and came up with 370 identically named recipes - down to the parenthetically embraced 'Squid Sate'. Could someone claim to have been plagiarised? :-)

Another search brought up a quotation site - again, not evidently hosted by Google - which had a quotation from J.K. Galbraith that I rather enjoyed:

Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong. - Galbraith, John Kenneth

Given Cheney's characterisation of Democratic politicians who have been speaking out against the war in Iraq as peddling 'cynical and pernicious falsehoods', that bit about the mendacity evident in the higher levels of public administration is highly relevant. There's an old saying about the pot calling the kettle black that springs to mind.

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 find air travel a complete pain—sitting for hours doing nothing, but winding up feeling dog-tired! However, occasionally one finds something in a flight magazine or a newspaper and, on a recent trip to Porto (Manchester/Frankfurt/Porto and back - almost a full day of travelling each time because there are no direct flights!) I came across a couple of items of interest.

First, in USA Today (not one I read regularly), I found an article, Needless fight threatens Google's online library in which the paper argued, rightly in my opinion, that the publishers are shooting themselves in the foot by trying to prevent Google from making bits of books available online (as I've said before). More interesting perhaps was the response from one Pat Schroeder, described as 'Former Democrat congresswoman', who is now president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers. Sadly, this was a predictably blinkered response which could have been written by one of her aides and reflected an ignorance of the law relating to copying that is astonishing. (Incidentally, the piece appeared on 7th November, but I found it in what I assume is the European edition on the 9th.)

On the same flight, I picked up The Wall Street Journal - a newspaper that is so right-wing it ought to carry a health warning. However, the European edition for 9th November had an article comparing mapping sites and discovering that MapQuest did a better job of providing directions that either Google or Yahoo. But doesn't everyone use satnav these days? :-) (I couldn't find the article on the Website, even though the Journal is free this week. Free for a week, eh? Bid deal WSJ, one of these days you'll notice that a subscription news site generates no stories when there's so much free stuff around. Why don't you free up most of the site and make the key business stuff and the archive only accessible to subscribers?)

Here's an interesting little item on Google.

TechWeb Today points to a new TechEncyclopedia, with 20,000 terms. Curiously, this doesn't display correctly in FireFox, although when I download the page to look at the code, the downloaded version displays perfectly well. Something strange going on here!

A good portal to resources in psychology can be found at the Psychology World Wide Web Virtual Library.

The excellent Current Cites has drawn my attention to Science.gov, which provides a search capability for 30 federal government databases.

It doesn't provide direct access to all documents, but is quite valuable because the databases go back beyond many of the online databases, to the early 1970s. There's a good chance, therefore, that you'll come across something relevant to your work that you might have missed.

Usability is a pretty hot topic and all times and I've referred from time to time to Jakob Nielsen's "Alertbox" pages. Now here's an interesting site on the subject, drawn to my attention by the developer. More than you ever need to know about the subject.

Everyone is interested to some degree in food, so discovery (via The Scout Report) of the Epicurious (sic) site interested me, especially as it is suggested that this is the world's biggest source of recipes - 16,000 pages. Being in Oporto at present and, on Monday night having sampled a very nice dish of 'cabrito no forno' with a red Vinho Verde Espumante (which I didn't even know existed), I thought I would check on recipes. However, 'cabrito' as a search term returns nothing, 'kid' returns nothing, and 'goat' only returns recipes using goat cheese. Now some may have an aversion to eating goat, but the young animal is as popular as lamb in some parts of Europe - especially Southern Europe and I'm a little surprised that the publishers of Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines have no recipes on file. Incidentally, the goat was delicious!

If you are a bird-watcher ('birder', if in the USA) or, more seriously, of an ornithological bent, you'll find the Ornithological Worldwide Literature (OWL) site of interest. It's a collaborative affair:

OWL is a joint effort between the American Ornithological Union and the British Ornithological Union and Birds Australia. The database is hosted by the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology, based in the Zoology Department of Oxford University, UK

Moreover:

Eventually, the online database will go back 50 or more years to acquire citations to the serial literature. OWL will proceed well into this century with a database of the current worldwide literature that would be of interest to ornithologists.

The database is reported to have 19,000 entries at the moment - but that should increase substantially, given the plans.

Be sure to take a look at 'Help with syntax' before you search - otherwise, like me, you are likely to get nothing but an error message. There's no automatic 'AND'ing.

Curious that a site with the acronym OWL, should have a picture of what appears to be a plasticene humming bird!

That acronym is really too common. A quick search reveals:

• Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL)
• OWL - the discovery magazine for kids
• OWL.org (Our Web Location for education)
• OWL Composite Protein Sequence Database
• OWL Web Ontology Language
• OWL - Older Women's League
• Career OWL
• The ESO 100-m OWL Telescope concept
• OWL-online.de
• Openwall GNU/*/Linux
• [A site for women's organizations in Russia]

I thought I'd give the links, just in case someone isn't interested in birds!

I still get requests for offprints of my 1981 paper, 'On user studies and information needs', so I've finally got round to digitising it. The diagrams have been re-drawn and there are one or two other small changes and corrections, and I may even get round to adding a commentary one of these days.

On re-reading the paper, while I worked on it, I was struck by the fact that pretty well everyone who has referred to it has missed the significance of Figure 2.

Tom

I've just taken the time to check Web of Science and it seems that all items in Information Research from Volume 8 no. 1 have now been indexed there. I look forward to every increasing hits :-) Speaking of which... the current hits on the top page now exceed last year's total by more than 10,000

A couple of items come to my notice today. The first is an item from the excellent Current Cites, on the use of RSS feeds by the Library of the National Cancer Institute to augment their catalogue and to provide services to members of the staff. It's published in the Library Journal, which is worth keeping an eye on. Here's a quotation to whet your appetite:

At the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, we have used RSS both to integrate Internet content into the NCI library system and to make content from the library system available on our intranet in the form of RSS news feeds. This new content makes our library system a more useful and timely resource, allowing us to better 'feed' the information appetites of our clients, whose jobs require that they keep up with cancer and healthcare news, events, research, and politics. After the initial investment of time and technology, the information flows without requiring hands-on staff effort.

The other is from the Internet Scout Report (which has been going for years), which directs us to the Peter Drucker archive. I think that Drucker was the first to talk about the 'knowledge society', in his book 'The age of discontinuity', back in 1968. I imagine that today's 'knowledge society' enthusiasts will be astonished by the date - 'You mean we've been living in the knowledge society for almost 45 years?' And they think they invented it a couple of years ago :-) Actually, Drucker believed that we'd already been in the 'knowledge society' for some years, even in 1969.

The site has quite a wealth of information on it but not much in the way of electronic documents - properly speaking it is a guide to the archives. However, can anyone tell me why a Web designer would choose to use a very small point-size, sans-serif fount on a grey background? It is desperate to read, so I recommend Opera's zoom feature, which allows me to blow it up to 150% to make it readable. Even then it is necessary to discover the source address of the pop-up articles so that you can load them separately into a new browser page - messy. In fact it was only in this way that I discovered that one of the buttons at the bottom of the page is a fount-enlargement button!

Does no one pay attention to the usability gurus? Here's one of Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002

Style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40.

Respect the user's preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms -- not as an absolute number of pixels.

[PS: why am I using 'fount'? Because it has been that way in English since 1683. "fount A complete set or assortment of type of a particular face and size. Also fully, fount of letter or type. (OED)]

New of the online Dictionary of Canadian Biography from Research Buzz.

More than you ever wanted to know about any Canadian you've ever heard of. Who knows, you might find an ancestor here.

Reflecting on Terry Brookes's Web services column:

Amazon tools will let Office users access Amazon information from within an Office document, using the research pane included in most applications. A writer typing a bibliography in a Word document, for example, could click on the name of a book to get catalogue information or cover art from Amazon.

Microsoft is making a major effort to encourage partners to build online services that exploit the new Office's XML capabilities, with service providers looking at Office as a familiar interface that will encourage greater consumption of Web services. Early backers include Factiva, a Dow Jones-owned online research service, and online payment services from eBay's PayPal.

Another major digital resource - The Lancet - is going digital (with its entire archive) but:

People will still have to pay to access the electronic version, and it is likely to be available in major reference libraries at universities and in cities rather than affordable by private individuals.

Here's a clever site, courtesy of The Shifted Librarian. It is the University of Minnesota Assignment Calculator, which is much more than a 'calculator'. Its basic aim is to enable a student to complete an assignment in time, and to that end, it breaks down the work into a series of tasks, with dates by which they should be completed, and supports learning about those tasks with links to other sites at Minnesota and on the wider Web.

It is the work of the University of Minnesota Libraries, in association with other campus organizations, such as the Writing Center and is an excellent piece of organization. Even if you don't want to use it for its established purpose, a student could gain a lot by following the links.

For those interested in maps, there's a new(ish) site covering Scottish towns, mainly in the 19th century. To quote:

Over 1,900 sheets covering 62 towns - the most detailed maps ever surveyed by Ordnance Survey.

Ideal for local historians and family historians.

A little while ago I had an item on the 1986 Domesday Project, operated by the BBC and using now defunct technology. There's a useful article on this in the current issue of Ariadne.

Volume 8 No. 4 of Information Research is now available.

This issue is devoted mainly to research being carried out at the Department of Information and Communications, Manchester Metropolitan University - there are six papers covering topics from 'synchronised object retrieval' to 'information literacy', indicating the wide span of research going on.

There is also another 'Luso/Hispanic' paper - this time in English, from Brazil on "Observing documentary reading by verbal protocol"

Tom Wilson Editor-in-Chief

For anyone interested in language the Ethnologue site will be of interest - it is produced by SIL International, an interesting organization that collects information about and encourages the development of unwritten languages. Did you know, for example, that Spain has eleven languages, five of which are official, as well as two extinct languages? Next time you're on holiday and wander into a little village where you don't understand a single word, you'll know why! I came across this, more or less accidentally, on a Weblog I hadn't seen before, MRSO

Readers of the Guardian newspaper's online resources are going to be required to pay for access to some parts according to a BBC News item.

"The realities of web publishing mean that we also have to seek opportunities to maximise our revenues," said Emily Bell, the editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited.

I assume that newspapers regard their Web sites as part of the marketing budget and I imagine that the costs are a closely kept secret. Given available technologies I imagine that, once the site is designed, a great deal of the content is automatically generated from the news service feeds and the newspaper's own databases. However, I don't recall papers on this subject coming to my attention. Does anyone know?

This from the LIS-BAILER list:

A selection of anti-apartheid periodicals published during the period 1960 to 1994 have been digitised by DISA (Digital Imaging of South Africa Project funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation). The digitised journals have been indexed and are available on the web for research purposes. As most of these journals are not readily available in South African Libraries and complete collections are rare, information managers are encouraged to create links from their Library OPAC to the digitised version on the Disa website by inserting the relevant URL in the SAMARC 856 field. This will greatly enhance user access and availability. The full list of digitised periodicals and the required URLs for the links are available from

http://disa.nu.ac.za/Bulletin/JournalURL.pdf

Information resources come in all types and a new site at the Library of Congress will be of interest to those involved in oral history. It's a site recording the experiences of people in war - from World War 1 to the Gulf War.

It should provide budding novelists with a lot of ideas :-)