LISNews: Librarian News

First, for those of you not subscribed to C&I Updates: Cites & Insights 5:1, January 2005, is now available for downloading. Because of the exigencies of this tween-holiday week, I won't submit a "story" until tomorrow, and list postings won't go out until January 3--but it's there. Strong on scholarly access, some stuff on copyright, a whole bunch of self-indulgent retrospective nonsense--and a note about the new sponsorship, from YBP Library Services.

Movies, movies, movies? I've written elsewhere (in C&I) about the Family Classics 50 Movie Megapack I acquired to keep me going on my treadmill, once the 40 free movies I'd gotten from a now-dead DVD magazine were done.

Treeline Films, maker of that Megapack, has apparently developed a production system that allows them to produce boxes with 12 double-sided, double-layer DVDs, each in a cardboard sleeve containing summaries of the four or five movies on the DVD, at a price that means they can sell for $24.95 to $34.99 and be profitable for Treeline and the Internet stores that sell them. (They might turn up in retail stores as well; I got the first one for $19.95 as a RiteAid holiday special, but have never seen any since in local stores.)

The movies are all either public domain or available with no (or nominal) license fees. There are no extras. You get four scenes per movie, that may or may not be logically arranged; basically, movies are split into quarters by time.

Print quality ranges from barely watchable to excellent. On some older movies, frames are missing and some of the soundtrack is garbled, but I have yet to see a movie that was truly unwatchable because of print damage. I just finished watching Danny Kaye's The Inspector General, a gem of a film that was also a nearly-perfect print.

I mention these sets here because Treeline continues to bring them out, and I think they're a remarkable bargain for people interested in older cinema--and maybe for libraries. I see nothing preventing a library from treating each cardboard sleeve/DVD as a separate circulating item. The movies are in at least as good shape as the old public domain $5-$10 videocassettes from oddball companies--and you're getting 50 movies for $25 to $35.

I see 13 boxes so far, including genre boxes for Horror, Mystery, SciFi, War, Comedy, Western, Family, Action, as well as "Hollywood Legends" (all feature films, all with major stars) and "All Stars," a collection of star-heavy TV movies. The final three packs include one with 150 serial episodes (a dozen old serials), one with 100 cartoons, and one with 100 TV episodes.

I would expect more to come. I picked up the SciFi (yes, some of the movies aren't really SciFi, and most of the movies are B to D films), All Stars (a great bunch of TV movies!), and Hollywood Legends (a remarkable set of films for the price) boxes. The mystery (heavy on Sherlock Holmes and others) and some others also look interesting.

You can find them at Overstock for $24.95 plus $1.50 shipping, at Amazon for $34.95, and at DVD MegaPacks and BN.com for $28 to $30. I've found Overstock reliable so far; that's where I've purchased all but the first.

Obviously, I can't vouch for the video quality of those I haven't seen. Some that I have--an early "Scarlet Letter," for example--were badly damaged. Some others have been nearly perfect.

My own calculus: If I see seven movies that I'd be willing to buy as cheapo singles (say for $5), then I'm automatically ahead of the game. I've already seen seven that qualify in the "Family Classics" box, and I'm only on the fifth of twelve DVDs. Your mileage may vary, as always.

By the way, since most or all of these are in the public domain, they should also be usable for public screening.

Say what?

Well, I was doing a bit of focused egosearching (on AllTheWeb, looking for "Cites & Insights", excluding boisestate.edu, and limiting it to "this year," not that date limits do much of anything for websites).

Still too many to look through, but somewhere in the first hundred I hit a publication called Cites & Insights--yes, with the ampersand.

It's a church bulletin from Hines Memorial Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Albany, Georgia.

While I did grow up Methodist (but in what's now the United Methodist Church, not one of the Methodist Episcopal versions), it's fair to say that I have nothing to do with this church publication.

Did they know that C&I existed before they put this on the internet? It wouldn't have been hard to spot, but I won't make such an assumption.

Am I going to ask them to change the name? Of course not.

Just a curiosity.

By the way...the first issue of Cites & Insights volume 5, and the first sponsored by YBP Library Services, is now in the works. I'd guess it will appear on Sunday. Given list outages next week, it may not be publicized quite as widely as usual.

And I'll start publicizing the call for conference/program reporters starting January 3, as widely as I possibly can!

Back a ways, I noted the bizarre total number within my circle in Orkut--more than two million at the time--and that the number did not decrease significantly when I cut my number of "friends" from 21 down to 12.

One who shall go unnamed (why cause him grief?) sent email with an interesting suggestion: The number being reported is roughly the total size of Orkut, and has nothing to do with your own "six degrees of separation."

Just now--with the two million+ having grown to three million+ in the interim--I did a little test of that. I deleted all my "friends" with two exceptions, each of them people with only 20+ direct friends in their own circles.

As I checked periodically, the total number varied, but in no meaningful manner. That is, it started at 3,021,371. After I deleted four of the twelve, it went to 3,018,027. After deleting another four, it went to 2,966,236. And, finally, after deleting all but the two most selective friends in the list, it popped up to 3,023,708--the highest number I've seen.

First, my apologies to anyone who actually uses Orkut, considers me a friend, and wonders where I've gone. Nothing against you: I consider all of the dozen to be friends, and just eliminated 10 of them in a spirit of inquiry.

Second, my opinion is that the number within "my circle" in Orkut is meaningless--that final behavior, jumping up when I deleted a couple more people, can't be explained in any rational manner I can think of.

Third, I've unbookmarked Orkut (since I can't figure out a way to actually delete my "membership"). I do believe social networking software, at least within the business world, may have its uses. I don't believe Orkut has any uses for me, and there are other better ways to waste time. (Like writing journal entries...)

Where's Walt?

On vacation since November 18--and to me, part of being on vacation is ignoring as much technology as possible. We got back Monday; yesterday was entirely consumed in catching up with email and related work issues--I didn't even log on to the Internet except to check one fact.

We visited the Marquesas islands, for those who care: One of the five archipelagos that make up French Polynesia, with islands such as Fatu Hiva and Nuku Hiva. The cruise (14 days) departed from Papeete in Tahiti (departing is always the best thing to do in Papeete!), and visited five spots on four Marquesan islands, along with Rangiroa in the Tuamotu archipelago and some of "the usual suspects" in the Society Islands--Bora Bora, Moorea, Tahaa, and Tahiti, but not Raratea. (Unfortunately, Bora Bora, which may be one of the most beautiful places on earth, was overcast and raining. Otherwise, the weather was generally good.)

I'm not doing a travelogue, at least not here, not yet. Just noting that lack of entries (and lack of comments on postings!) doesn't necessarily indicate lack of interest. I'll catch up little by little, but will be VERY selective about what gets printed and considered as C&I source material--particularly because another time-dependent thing looms on the close horizon.

(No, we didn't visit any libraries in French Polynesia. Sorry about that. For those with a historical bent, the Marquesas represent an extreme example of what Randy Newman calls "the Great Nations of Europe coming through"--probaby more than 100,000 population prior to first European contact, then down to about 4,000 by WWII, now back up to 8,000 or so thanks to antibiotics to help defend against the wonders of European civilization. Things got off to an unusually bad start: The first Western visit at one island resulted in 200 Marquesan deaths right on the spot.) (Oh, and they weren't "noble savages"--neither noble nor savages.)

That's it for now. Just thought I'd let anyone who cares know that I haven't actually disappeared for good.

A few folks might have gasped had they been at the Charleston Conference last week, in a Saturday discussion of OpenURL issues. The discussion got around to some sort of functionality for people to share tips and best practices (e.g., for new targets, new forms of linking, getting around problematic targets...)

Someone suggested a list.

I suggested that a Wiki might suit this particular need better than a list or even a blog.

Now, you gotta understand, I've never run a Wiki nor actually participated in one, and have commented on them much as I've commented on weblogs--that is, "I don't know that everyone really needs to have/do/take part in one, or that they're solutions to all problems."

But, as with weblogs, lists, some kinds of social software, Wikis do look to be low-overhead solutions to some problems--and I think building a "communal knowledgebase" in the fairly specialized area of OpenURL resolver practices may be such a problem.

Who knows? It might even happen. Fortunately, before people started asking me "What's a wiki?", Pat Harris (NISO) noted that the Metasearch Initiative is using a wiki, so setting up another one would be trivial...

Nothing really new here: I don't own a notebook computer because I don't need one at the moment and prefer to travel light. Ditto a PDA. Doesn't make them useless; just makes them less than universally essential.

And there's my Friday sermonette.

Well, two days is "within the next week or so," so I didn't lie. That is, the document containing the title sheet and indexes for Cites & Insights volume 4 (2004) is now available for downloading.

Eagle-eyed readers may note that the story I just suggested, like the postings to C&I Updates, the Topica list, and a few other lists, is ungrammatical--because I left out "document containing the" for brevity, but certainly didn't use "are" to refer to a single PDF file.

In case anyone ponders the possibility that I spent the last two nights going through the 300+ pages of C&I 4 and preparing the index...well, for Volume 1, I did prepare the entire index as an afterthought. Since then, I've built the dummy Word document used for index preparation after publishing each issue. The final step is whatever cleanup I choose to do (fixing obvious typos, combining subjects, names, etc., that clearly should be combined) and the typographical transforms to finish the index.

So both of you now know a little more about this odd enterprise.

Cites & Insights 4:14--December 2004--is now available for downloading.

This 22-page PDF issue includes:

• Perspective: Wanted: Conference and Program Reporters
• disContent: Turn On the Radio
• Bibs & Blather Experiment Concludes, PublicationContinues
• Interesting & Peculiar Products - Three products
• Perspectives: A Year-End Potpourri
• PC Progress, August-October 2004 - 20 roundups in 10 categories
• The Good Stuff - six items
• Copyright Currents - INDUCE/IICA and HR4077 (the other PDEA)
• Trends & Quick Takes - five items

This is the final textual issue for 2004. The index and title sheet will either appear within the next week or so or in early December.

Note that it's likely to be a while (maybe six or seven weeks) before the first issue of Volume 5 appears--but Cites & Insights isn't fading away.

Special note: A sentence in this issue, suggesting that people use Atom from the C&I Updates blog to keep track of Cites & Insights, apologizes for the apparent loss of markup, at least as viewed in Bloglines.

Apparently the latest version of Bloglines fixes whatever the problem was with Atom feeds; the latest entry shows up just fine.

(As I continue to bite my tongue to avoid a political comment...)

A while back I noted that Orkut said I had two million friends, via the 19 people actually in my friends list and the six-degrees-of-separation stuff.

I thought that was just silly. So, after a while, I decided to do something about it (besides mostly ignoring Orkut, which has worked quite well). I deleted seven "friends" who I've never met and don't really know well enough to consider trusted acquaintances, bringing the set down to 12.

This wasn't easy, given that Orkut lately doesn't work more often than it does.

So I checked today. With twelve "friends," my total network of potential contacts has dropped all the way to...
2,373,822

What? If I cut out half of the remaining 12, I'd wind up with three million contacts? Or do I have a few hotly social contacts and they're reaching some sort of natural asymptote within the Orkut membership, roughly 2.4 million?

Oh well, back to mostly ignoring Orkut.

Because I'm trying to stick with my decision not to post any more political posts (and boy, is that hard--but, you know, I don't think I'd change anyone's mind any more than the scores of other political posts are going to change my mind)...

I discovered something about my plebeian tastes recently. (Well, something more--I already knew that I preferred good/straightfoward food to Haute Cuisine, for example.)

I figured out a long time ago that dark chocolate tasted better to me than milk chocolate. To wit, I really and truly liked Hershey's Special Dark, rationing it out a quarter-bar (that is, half an ounce) a day--when you can find Hershey's Special Dark.

So with the proliferation of serious chocolate from around the world, I thought I'd see what $5 or $6 gets you that $0.60 doesn't, trying some of the best-known and most expensive chocolate bars.

And discovered something: The most expensive ones, with 70% chocolate content (or whatever the key ingredient is), I didn't like at all.--could barely eat them. The middling ones, 40% to 60% chocolate, were OK.

And I actually liked Hershey's Special Dark, which is presumably a degraded mass consumer piece of c**p, better than the expensive spread.
Ah well. We don't all have rarefied tastes, at least not in all things. (Now when it comes to cruise ships, I do have rarefied tastes...another story.)

Those who peruse ChuckB's journal, as you should, may remember this item and my comment.

Turns out that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation underwrote the development of the malaria vaccine as well, according to an editorial in the SF Chronicle.

That shouldn't be surprising. Big Pharma is not known for investing huge sums into developing cures for "third-world diseases" or "diseases of the poor." But a big $nudge$ from the Gates people makes all the difference in the world.

Probably quite literally all the difference of the world for millions of third-world people in the future.

Trivia, and really answered by this post: A couple of friends have expressed the hope that a set-to in the comments space won't frighten me away from LISNews or from the journal.

No worry. Big gaps in the journal are because I don't have anything to say that I think suits this particular format, or because I just don't have time. Don't expect a lot of posts in the near future: I'm in the middle of a special writing project, there are still C&I and EContent pieces to write, we're getting ready for a big vacation (hurray), there are new extended-family medical problems to worry about...and, oh yes, the full-time job has been heating up.

Doesn't mean I've been scared away. Just means I'm not a natural-born blogger and I'm busy.

You won't see comments turned off here either, any more than you'll see earlier posts removed. Not my character.

Now I think I get it.

Some people see things as black and white. Other people see most of life as shades of gray.
For now, I won't characterize either in terms of politics, religion, or whatever--partly because it isn't that pat.

Those mindsets are so fundamentally different that they're pretty much irreconcilable--and it becomes exceedingly difficult for a "shades of gray" person to converse with or sometimes make sense of a "black and white" person.

Mostly it isn't worth the trouble. I really should learn that lesson once, instead of having to relearn it two or three times a year.

Before anyone at LISNews gets all upset: The lesson doesn't have anything to do with interactions at this site. Yet.

And credit goes to Randy Travis, or the songwriters for that particular song, to be sure.

Another silly Orkut posting.

I accepted an invitation to join Orkut, partly to find out what "social software" was all about.

I continued to accept "friendships"--by and large--to give it a fair chance. And, I think, proposed "friendship" in one or two cases (both actual friends).

So far, there have been some strange invitations to join middle eastern communities, a couple of political mass-mailings, and that's it.

Today, a landmark of sorts was reached: I now have a supposed circle of 2,005,387 "friends" via the 19 "friends" in my social circle.

I'm now pondering whether to pare that set down to people who might fit more plausible definitions for useful social software--that is, people who I know enough to place some trust in (beyond the level of trust that I, as a notorious Pollyanna, place in almost everyone). That's mostly people I've actually met, and maybe one or two who I've learned to trust. I think it comes to 8 out of the 19. Nothing against the other 11; I just don't really know them to any significant degree.

I'd guess there are 300-500 people, maybe more, who I would put on a "trusted acquaintance"/friends list...People I'd go at least a little out of my way to respond to or help, and who I think would do the same for me. I suppose 8 on Orkut isn't bad.

But, based on that absurd two million number, I can only assume that "friends" of "friends" are as loosely defined as the current 19--that is, there's no real reason to believe that a "friend" of a "friend" of a "friend" of a...has anything more than possible name recognition with the link in the chain.

I haven't done anything yet. I'm not convinced that social software is worthless, but I'm pretty much reaching that conclusion for Orkut's implementation, at least as far as I'm concerned.

---------------
Postscript: Orkut now consistently yields a "Page has no data" error when I log in, so I think Rochelle and I are pretty much in the same boat.

Such is life: Even Google-owned websites go bad.

1. Arrggh. I'm not going to add yet another refinement on my comment on the "Librarian strikes it rich" story. I read the story too fast. Depending on how you interpret it, the librarian in question winds up with either $251K or $274K (and odd dollars in either case). My point stands: Not only do many (most?) multimillion-dollar lotto winners keep working, neither $251,000 nor $274,000 is enough to retire on unless you plan an exceedingly modest standard of living.

2. Here's a real question, for those of you who know such things:

We recently purchased a front-loading washer. Now that we've used it for a while:

• I see why it only uses 1/3 as much water.
• I see why it gets clothes drier.
• I see why it uses a lot less electricity.
• I see why it's gentler on clothes.

What I don't understand is how/why it gets clothes cleaner than a top-loader.

It does; there's no question there. I've stopped using pretreatment for clothes that formerly needed it; we're getting consistently better results.

But how? Why?

I also see why this form of front-load washing was basically impractical before cheap sensors and computer circuitry, but that's another story.

Comments? Explanations?

I was going to alert you to what should be a neat new paperback: Grape

This appeared as a 47-part (I think) series in the San Francisco Chronicle and was thoroughly enjoyable. I assume the book version is slightly expanded, although it wouldn't need to be.

Unfortunately, a check of Amazon doesn't turn it up yet, and the RLG Union Catalog doesn't show a CIP record for it.

Why did I think it was out? Because today's Chronicle has an ad offering an autographed copy of the book with a new subscription (or something along those lines).

Anyway: When it comes out, it should be good--and, if you're impatient (and can deal with all those downloads), you can read the original pieces at SFGate, starting here.

Trivia: SFGate is the Chronicle's website; it got the name when it represented both the Chron and the SF Examiner, when both were published in a joint operating agreement. Since then, the family that owned the Chronicle and some TV stations and other stuff sold the paper to Hearst, which "sold" the Examiner to a local publisher with a multiyear subsidy to keep it from disappearing altogether...but that's all history.

And if you're wondering, Chronicle Books is still owned by a member of the family that owned Chronicle Publishing--and no longer has any relationship to the paper.

[Note: A different version of this grump could plausibly turn up as a Bibs & Blather piece in the next Cites & Insights. Or not.]

A recent post in this journal concerned a stupid mistake I made--attempting to comment on something in a blog I should never have even been visiting. (I checked on that site again; the discussion has proceeded nicely enough, sometimes about me, but without my participation. I'll leave it that way. I managed to wipe my shoes clean and don't wish to step in that again.)

Comments--from one person--on that journal post seemed to take me to task for not being simplistic enough (I'm paraphrasing, and if this isn't what the poster really meant, that's OK: I'm not naming the person anyway.) A later point was that you can be nuanced in intellectual discussion, but if you want change, you have to be an advocate, and to advocate, you have to [MY WORDS] "dumb it down."

While I disagree with that assertion--I'm trying to talk to reasonably intelligent adults, and I really hate it when people dumb things down for my consumption (since it always means, directly or indirectly, talking down to me), so I'm sure not about to insult other people by assuming they can't handle nuanced treatments (or semi-Proustian sentences like this one either)--I just realized that it involves a conclusion that is not in evidence.

Namely, that I'm particularly interested in advocacy. I don't think I am. To the extent that I wind up advocating certain positions, it's because I find them more coherent and more in line with my overall worldview than alternatives; to the extent that I argue against other positions, it's because I find them incoherent, inhumane, or sharply at odds with my underlying beliefs.

My columns at various magazines have generally been intended to describe, educate, and sometimes synthesize. I don't believe I've been trying to persuade, except to the extent that "If you believe in X, then maybe you ought to consider Y" could be considered persuasion.

Cites & Insights started out primarily as a way to note articles worth reading and developments in technology worth paying attention to. It's become much more than that (and in some ways less, as I don't cover PC-related stuff all that much) through a process of natural growth and continued analysis and synthesis.

Maybe my failure to act as an advocate is a problem--but I'm not sure it's my problem.

I am sure that the thought of hardening my positions on library-related issues and simplifying my arguments so that I can be more convincing does not appeal to me. If that means I'm less effective as a change agent, so be it: That was never my career goal. Even my first book was not an effort to get people to use MARC; it was an effort to make MARC understandable and explain its background.

Next posting (barring surprises): Something completely different!

Here's one that has nothing at all to do with librarianship or any of the big issues of the day.

Last week, we saw two "for sale" signs go up across the street, from two different realtors. We knew one house was going on the market (divorce issues), and expected the one next to it to go on the market eventually (estate issues), but didn't really expect both to go on the market simultaneously. (We've had a few sales on our block this year--typically the one-open-house, multiple-bid, sale at above asking price variety that's common to Mountain View.)

We also found it odd that the right-hand sign was so far to the left of the house--it almost seemed to be on the same property as the left-hand sign.

When we saw the usual "open Saturday & Sunday, 1:30-4:30" placards, we did the usual: went over to look through the houses. (We're always looking for possible remodel ideas and to see how houses compare--and realtors expect that.) The one on the left was interesting in some ways, uninteresting in others, and based on the steady traffic both days they'll probably get more than the $858K asking price (this is Mountain View, and the part of Mountain View with Los Altos schools, some of the state's best, so $858K for a 50-year-old 1,300-square-foot rancher isn't as outrageous as you'd think).

But the house on the right didn't seem to be open Saturday. So we looked again Sunday. It still didn't seem to be open. At which point I picked up one of the brochures available on the for-sale post...

And found something I've never seen before, and still find hard to understand: The post seemed to be on the left-house property because it was for that house.

Two different realtors, from two different companies, were offering the same house for sale! (When we asked, the message was that the ex-husband and ex-wife couldn't even agree on listing agents, so one agent is the ex-husband's agent, one is the ex-wife's agent. At least they managed to agree on a price!)

I can't see how this can work out--which office handles the likely multiple simultaneous bids (almost all house sales around here have a date/time at which they'll accept bids, usually a day or two after the open house)? Which office handles the negotiation? Do they split the commission?

Strange days. Again, nothing to do with LISNews, but this is a journal, right?

Anyone else ever hear of a house sale like this?

Whoops. I went somewhere I shouldn't have gone on the Web yesterday. (No, not what you're thinking, this was perfectly SFW, just not safe for mental composure.)

Going there wasn't the problem. Getting involved was the problem.

Won't happen again. Well, at least not this week. I can get in enough trouble with comments and posts hereabout, and with my "too nuanced for either side" stances in Cites & Insights. This extra trouble I didn't need. My own stupid fault: As noted, I was somewhere I shouldn't have been...

The subject: Other old farts may remember Big John & Sparky [NOT the newer religious-indoctrination show], which got me up on Saturday mornings back when radio was, well, radio. Its theme was "Teddy Bears' Picnic," from whence this line comes. Man, it's amazing I can learn anything new at all, with almost six decades of c**p stuck in my brain!

---------------------------

Update, October 7:

I belatedly realized that the subject of this post may give a misleading impression--that is, that I might return to a weblog and comment "in disguise."

I don't maintain pseudonyms. I don't use pseudonyms. The only time I ever comment "anonymously" is with Blogger logs that require you to establish an account before posting with name, but let you post anonymously--and then, I always include my name.

(I did go back to the scene of this foofaraw, and see loads of comments that refer to me. None of them came from me, and none will. Some day I'll learn to look through some examples of how comments are treated on a log before stepping into the fray. Of course, I may be dead five days before I learn that, but there's always hope.)

If you just love "Internet memes," or even if you don't, you may find this list interesting (or annoying, I suppose)--200 things you might have done in your life.
I found it here but didn't manage to find the original, unbolded version. It's an odd list, but an interesting one.

My response? I could bold 55 of the 200 (a boring life, I suppose), with two more questionable. Which ones? Other than being on a cruise ship and touching a glacier (well, and being truly happy at least once, getting married, falling in love and not being heartbroken...), I'm not saying. Nothing terribly exotic or suggestive of being addiction-prone, to be sure.

And looking at the dates of postings on this "weblog lite," I'm reminded once more of why I don't have a weblog. Not enough to say that works well in this form...

Wow. I made Library Link of the Day (for 9/16, if you read this any other day).

Or, rather, the Copyright Currents section of the current Cites & Insights made Library Link of the Day.

Close enough.

Firefox 1.0 (Preview Release) is just out.

Stodgy as I am, I've been using Firefox 0.91 as my preferred browser at work for months now. It may be a little slower to load than IE, but it seems to render pages faster and is presumably (?) less subject to IE's various security problems.

It's worth a try. It's a relatively small download (1.0 is just under 5MB, a little smaller than 0.91), it has a nice set of features, and it does an excellent job of importing your IE bookmarks. I haven't explored the full range of features (for example, there's an "RSS" logo in the lower right hand corner of my screen as I write this, which invites me to "Add Live Bookmark for this page's feed"!), but it's powerful and a good alternative to IE. It's far more compatible than Opera, and doesn't have ads.

So why haven't I gone to Firefox completely--and why do I say "at work"?

Simple: the iNotes Web email client from IBM Lotus, which is how I get to Notes mail from home, won't run under anything but IE--and at work, Onyx (commercial software that we use for a variety of internal functions) won't work under anything but IE.

Such is life. (Eureka runs just fine on Firefox, if you're wondering...)