Patronizing

Trees the data structures that is. We’re covering them right now in SI 503, the search and retrieval foundation course at SI. Throughout the semester, we’ve heard grumblings from the library and archive folk about how this isn’t really relevant to their fields. I’m sure I’ll hear more in discussion today. The funny thing is, having taken a few data structures and algorithms courses with computer science students, many of them complain about the same thing: “I’m never going to use this in my real job.”

One the surface, they’re right. For the most part, many of them will be using already existing classification systems and existing programming libraries so they don’t have to think about that stuff.

But underneath the surface, recursion is a fundamental principle of nature. Chomsky got that when he developed his theory of syntax. And it extends beyond language to the entire human mind (for a great introduction to recursion and cognitive science, check out Godel, Escher, Bach: An Internal Golden Braid). And even on the surface we see signs of recursion, from ferns and trees to nautilus shells, they all show recursive patterns. This isn’t just some abstract mathematical mumbo-jumbo. Understanding trees and recursion will better help you model information about the real world.

As a librarian, if you’re designing a new classification scheme, chances are you’re designing a tree, or a series of trees (also called a forest.) Understanding trees and search on trees is going to help you help your users find information faster.

To be sure, recursion isn’t an easy concept to grasp. Everyone suffering through 503 should keep in mind that many computer science students are also having trouble with the idea of recursion. I’d be willing to bet that a good majority of computer science graduates don’t actually “get” recursion. Sure, they all had to write a fibonacci sequence generator for their introductory programming course, but after that it was kind of forgotten (which might explain why so many have problems with their compilers and interpreters course work).

And of course, all of this work shows another important core principle from 503, the idea of “divide-and-conquer” algorithms and logarithms. They’re all related.

Boing Boing has links to screenshots of Sugar, the desktop interface for the One Laptop Per Child project. It uses wireless ad-hoc networking to build several “views” that allow users to interact with other users on the network. It’s a very innovative and fresh approach to interface design, really integrating social actions into the core of the desktop.

Part of the reason I applied to the School of Information was an interest in mobile ad-hoc networks (commonly called mesh networks) and social issues on those networks. It’ll be interesting to see how the OLPC project deals with issues such as free-riders and free-loaders on the mesh.

C-SPAN has changed their copyright for most of their videos to a creative commons type license. You can read about the change in the C-SPAN press release. At the bottom of their main page, there is a link to their copyright policy.

C-SPAN’s RSS feeds and audio/video files are made available free of charge for use by individuals for personal, non-commercial uses, but they are still fully protected by copyright.

Except as specifically permitted by this policy, C-SPAN’s RSS feeds and audio/video files may not be used for any political, commercial or otherwise unauthorized purpose. Any posting, retransmission, sale, public performance or other unauthorized duplication of the audio/video files is strictly prohibited.

One thing I noticed is that they don’t allow you to use the content for “political” purposes. That’s a rather strange restriction. Why else would I want to use political videos if not for political purposes. I assume this doesn’t include parody, but it is an unnecessary restriction that could ensnare bloggers and artists. In fact, it seems to go against the very reason they proclaim in their press release:

“As technology advances, we want to continue to be a leader in providing citizens with the tools to be active participants in the democratic process.

Wouldn’t letting people use your content for political purposes help them become active participants, and not just viewers and consumers?

I often find myself trudging through thomas.loc.gov trying to keep up on civil liberties related legislation. It’s a great resource, but not the most friendly. The people behind Democracy the Internet media player have created OpenCongress, which is somewhat similar to TheyWorkForYou. It allows you to keep up-to-date on legislation moving through Congress. Nifty features include the ability to subscribe to feeds on bills and members of congress.

I don’t usually write about elearning environments, but there’s something fishy happening right now in the elearning world.

Blackboard was recently awarded a broad patent covering a lot of elearning tech., most of it with prior art. Tim O’Reilly has a great writeup on the story.

Well, it turns out there’s more. Pamela Jones of Groklaw has an article in LWN talking about Microsoft investing in Blackboard. Considering their SCO connection, this strongly hints at a Microsoft attack on open source by proxy.

A recent post on distributed file systems got me thinking about their use in academic environments. Found via Slashdot, the article was about Cleversafe, a distributed file system licensed under the GPL.

Libraries would be a perfect environment for distributed storage. Obviously, we always need space. We’ve got hundreds of computers which are usually under low load. And most have several gigabytes free.

All that’s needed is a server running on the public PCs that doesn’t interfere with normal use.

Wikipedia has some additional links on Distributed parallel fault tolerant file systems. Another free distributed fault tolerant filesystem is Hadoop, which seems to be vaguely based on GoogleFS.

David Walker created a SRU Interface for III servers called Shrew. I first read about it in Ryan Eby’s post SRU Interface for the III XML Server.

It didn’t take much to modify my Microsoft Office interface for OAI servers to support this too. So now you can query the library catalogs that Shrew supports in Office.

Here are some screenshots.

It’s open to the public, but still in the testing phase. If you want to use it, open up Word or another Office program, in the sidebar choose Research from the top dropdown. Down near the bottom choose Research Options. Then choose Add Services. The URL is: http://lib0059.lib.msu.edu:6891/axis/services/OAIResearch

Here’s the code: oairesearch-0.1.tar.gz. It’s a horrid mess, but I figured I’d make it available.

Related to Ryan Eby’s recent post about PLoS One, last month’s Wired had an excellent article about open-access publishing and Harold Varmus. Also in that issue is an article on harnessing the power of crowds for distributed computation. It mentions things like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

What’s missing is tying the two together. With open-access publishing and the proper distributed framework we could have a new model of democratic publishing. Nature is discussing some of this in their Peer Review Debate.

Opening up the peer-review process doesn’t necessarily dilute the quality of science published. With a proper reputation or trust system we could still meets scholary standards.  A reputation system could even give papers a rating depending on who reviewed them.  If the article was reviewed by experts in a field, it could have a high rating.  If it was reviewed by web nobodies, it could have a low rating.  Browsing systems could be setup to browse by this trust metric.

I know a lot of the content on this site is critical of librarians, especially when it comes online issues. But I have to say almost all librarians have it right on when it comes to privacy.

Slashdot just posted an article titled Library Chief Criticized for Requiring Subpoena talking about a librarian who protected the privacy of library patrons, and who has received public criticism from the mayor and borough officials.

The North Jersey Media Group article Library chief draws cops’ ire has some great quotes from the director about the importance of privacy. From the article: Borough labor lawyer Ellen Horn felt that the library director, Michele Reutty, was more interested in “protecting the library” than helping police.

No, she was protecting the privacy of citizens who use the library. For that matter, protecting privacy in general. As she Horn states: “The main issue here is privacy of information, and all of this could have been handled by education.”

Earlier this week Ryan Eby mentioned Google’s new co-op service and possibly using it for reference services.

We’re replacing our existing electronic resources system with libdata. Since I helped with the project, I knew enough about the system to have it spit out a subscribed links file.

You can test out the MSU Libraries Getting Started Guides subscribed links by subscribing to it in my Co-op profile.

If you run libdata and know Python, you can also try using the libdata co-op export script.

This is just the start of what’s possible. Labeling specific sites will allow reference librarians to tag authoritative and scholarly sites. No more building lists of URLs in libdata or another custom software platform. We can then have users subscribe to our expert’s sources.  Instead of telling students that Google is bad, we can work to improve it.