Are Library Degrees Becoming Computer Science 'Light'?

I'd like to thank Professor Lankes for introducing the term 'computer science light'. He brought up the term when a student in our class last year asked him basically, "We keep hearing about all these encoding languages, programming languages, schemes, systems, etc... should I be learning all of these?" His response argued that, no, we shouldn't treat the field of study like "Computer Science light", especially because: why wouldn't you just then take Computer Science? You would basically be setting yourself up to be not as good as a Computer Science major, let alone a C.S. graduate student. He then went on to explain how, yes, it is valuable to learn and get some degree of expertise in these technologies, but at the end of the day, this shouldn't be our primary focus.

After a year removed from that lecture, which I fully agreed with at the time, I'm not sure that holds true anymore. Sure, his argument is sound and that's what the ideal situtation would be, but I'm finding it doesn't really hold true in the library professional world. Budgets are tight. Libraries cannot afford a fully-staffed IT Services department anymore to handle the 'heavy-lifting'. Learning these technologies not only increases your worth to potential employers, but it immediately makes you qualified for job postings that ask for 3-5 years experience, because, guess what? In 3 to 5 years of digital librarianship, you can't help but learn many of these technologies. To be a digital librarian these days, you are expected to know an alphabet soup of metadata languages, XML, TEI, Web design, databases, and programming. That's the stark reality of the profession right now.

This goes back to the fundamental friction between librarianship as a professional practice, and librarianship as a scholarly pursuit. We still can't really figure out if the degree should work almost like a trade school; after all, librarianship, although varied, ultimately is a fairly homogeneous profession, and Professor Lankes himself argues that we shouldn't be splintering ourselves into over-specialized groups (unfortunately, though, positions such as 'Web services librarian', 'reference librarian' and 'metadata librarian' are the norm). SU's approach of having a 'core' program that you can then adapt to a certain specialization (which I think is a good approach) is turning out to not properly reflect the marketplace. These specializations, like Digital Libraries, School Media, and eScience, are all under attack, and in danger of being abandoned. They're at a crossroads where they either return to a broad umbrella of a program, or splinter even further into highly specialized sub-degrees.

The response may be to make Digital Libraries and eScience programs even more involved, with more mandatory technology courses in order to produce qualified grads. But then we truly are making a computer science light profession.I'm not sure what the solution is.

Video Games are Hard to Archive

Today I read an interesting article that took a critical look at the Smithsonian, who have an exhibit entitled "The Art of Video Games". The article argues that many 'classic' games have been omitted, because the poll conducted for what items to include resulted in only hugely popular, home console games.

I've dealt with how to go about archiving video games before. It's a fairly rich history, and from a certain viewpoint it seems simple, since it is so recent and many of the 'originals' are still in existence. But as I found out, it is very hard to get the history straight, organize the items, and above all else describe them. I attempted to do as much in my metadata schema that I adapted from Dublin Core and EAD (here), but I frequently ran into decisions that had to be made. Would I include arcade games? Ultimately I decided to, just because arcade games are vital in video game history, despite their insignificance today. I also included PC games, despite their relative obscurity.

Underlying all this is the issue of whether video games are art in the first place. I've argued they are in the past, but not in the same way others do. That is, many people want to compare video games to existing forms of art in order to find some legitimacy. I am of the opinion that people will only fail with this comparison. I think the way to do it is to recognize video games as a new form of art, instead of trying to awkwardly compare it to completely different media. Was it important to describe how a photograph was similar to a painting? Or was the real breakthrough to develop the photograph as a wholly different art medium? I would argue the latter, because initially all comparisons between a photograph and a painting resulted in the photograph coming up short.

I'm still skeptical that video games will see legitimacy in the world of archives and the arts, but there is hope, simply because of the popular growth of video games, with some grossing more in their first days than some movies make in an entire year. However, as the article points out, the legitimacy starts to evaporate if we judge the artistic merits of a game based on sales. There is significant overlap, of course, because the NES Super Mario Bros. is both an artistic high water mark and a commercial blockbuster. But much in the same way as independent and foreign films, whose commercial success is very small and yet receive critical acclaim, we must document the video games that had something to say, or presented something significant, despite being commercially insignificant.

Tablet Popularity and Libraries

The explosion of tablet devices is proving to be a bit more disruptive than I had inititally anticipated. A new article has an interesting infographic that focuses in this case on the tablet's impact on journalism. An unsurprising result is that while use of online news sites on tablet devices is incredibly strong, users tend to stick to the big news sites and they aren't willing to spend money for online news services.

It'd be beneficical for librarians to start thinking about how this will apply to libraries, given the unavoidable shiift from desktop/laptop computing to mobile devices. As many as 79% of tablet users (who now are a staggering 11% of the population) used to use their desktop or laptop in getting news. And they are much more satisfied with the tablet experience. Libraries need to take heed of the trend and use it to their advantage. The good news is that libraries can play on the popularity of online journalism and eBooks while delivering a "value-added" experience on a tablet, especially as eBook lending practices and open access resources become more common.

Libraries' main problem, however, is that many of the materials online cannot be reached via Google. It is imperative that initiatives like OAI-MH start to move their systems closer to public visability. Imagine the satisfaction an iPad user could have looking through digital collections on their device that they couldn't have found via Google. Perhaps they were fed the collection through RSS. Maybe this could all be done through an app that houses basically the OAIster union catalog (see OAIster. The potential here is great.

Realistically, though, the hurdles loom large. It's simply hard to break out of the Google mindset these days. Even so, optimizing collections and services for use on tablets and mobile devices will be a major first step. Users of tablets, referencing the infographic, are not young, tend to be well-educated, and thus they might have a demand for the kind of information online collections/catalogs can offer. The key will be persuading them to come to it versus just Googling it and finding, on average, fairly low-quality results.

Abstraction is a Powerful Method

By "abstraction," I am referring to it in the Internets world. The beauty of abstraction on the Internet is that, when executed properly, people don't even know they're being shielded from complexity. The classic example is when you are shopping online for let's say shoes. You see on the sidebar you can select a link to filter shoes to show only those that cost under $50. What you don't know is you're actually executing a query to a database and pulling data from it. This abstraction means that millions of people who have no idea what in God's name a database is or does don't have to. And that is a very good thing.

But with great power comes great responsibility. A central tenet learned early on in design or working with some technology is to not obscure meaning in the design. Not only will you confuse the end-user, but they will not even be able to see what they did wrong, since the actual back-end is not accessible for them. And even if they could see the back-end, that would eliminate the entire point of abstracting the complexity from them. In other words, abstracting complexity is incredibly difficult to do, and has to be nigh perfect.

A good example of a great program falling victim to the difficulties of abstraction is Google Sites. I actually enjoy Google Sites, but when it first launched, it was kind of a nightmare. I know some basic XHTML, so I thought it'd be fun to play around with. Understandably, Google Sites made the decision to not allow HTML on the user-end being input. This makes sense as a first principle. But, it introduces some interesting problems. Google Sites, while it has improved over time, started out with an almost incomprehensible user interface. Knowing HTML was a disadvantage, because certain terms were borrowed from HTML design but were used to do completely different things. And while it was feasible, I doubt many people with zero knowledge of HTML were able to spit out a web page in a half hour. This narrows the target audience considerably. I still like Google Sites in the way I like Google Docs, and that is, it is extremely convenient to get something accomplished in a day or so. It's quick and dirty, but sometimes you don't have a choice due to time constraints. But I am almost certain this was not the initial intention of Google Sites; I'm pretty sure it was intended to be a stepping stone from almost zero HTML knowledge to being able to work with stuff like Wordpress.

On Convergence

A common theme I've run into the past week is that of convergence. Not just in my personal life (because everything seems to be colliding together in positive and negative ways), but also in my academic and professional work. I have interviewed for an internship which would have me as a part of a Digital Humanities working group. The team is comprised of members who each have interrelated yet focused fields (I won't haul out the dreaded Venn diagram). Digital librarians form one "wing" of the group, and would be the members I would work closest with. As I have before, I will deal with concepts of metadata, schemata, classification, and data management/curation. But that sounds a bit more complicated than what the main task will boil down to, and that is: metadata quality control. Looking back, I will actually apply some of what I learned as a quality assurance employee (read: video game tester/monkey)!

On the other side are the other members, both technical and administrative, which is where the convergence comes into play. We have the Unix administrator, dealing with the physical expression of the project, and the web services specialist. Finally there are the head and co-head, who collabrate with researchers and the college's administration(s), as well as the all-important role of securing funding.

This project meshes well with this semester and the direction of my studies this year. I am taking database administration to supplement and strengthen my metadata knowledge. Digital Libraries is giving me a good "macro" vision of what a digital library is and what it should be in the future. And my Policy class is yet another cog in the whole machine. It's unfortunate I'm not also taking Copyright, since it is also a crucial aspect tying everything (i.e. digital libraries!) together.

When reading in my Policy class about how advocacy groups struggle(d) to unite against international bodies to accomplish their agenda, it made me think about the larger library world. And at the end of the day, if you want to get something monumental done; if you really want to break new ground, convergence is the only path. Not doing so will result in limited, local, or uneven accomplishments. It's incredibly difficult (ew, politics), requires everyone to have an open mind and a strong commitment, and is necessitated on connections. I hope I can infuse these sorts of concepts into the Digital Humanities project.

It Starts Again

It's the start of a new semester. My workload looks pretty hefty so far, and some of my classes aren't so "library-y," but I still am taking some very helpful classes. Especially Database Management, since that is a large part of the Metadata librarian world. Digital Libraries will surely be intriguing, and I'm glad I'm taking it with Metadata and a lot of the introduction classes under my belt.

Looks like I didn't get the library job I wanted. Oh well. I'll be on the lookout for some kind of academic job where I can do something a bit more challenging... I don't want to settle for volunteering my time if it's not very helpful to myself or the public. There's a lot of internships and part-time jobs out there that just seem pretty trivial.

So that's it for now. I was thinking of making another portfolio for my Metadata work, but on the other hand, my final project sort of encapsulates all the work I did. You can find it at: Final Metadata Project: Video Game Core

I'm back!

So, after a lengthy hiatus, I am once again returning to library blogger land. A lot has happened since I last posted. My eScience Data Management course ended, and our presentation went well enough that the researchers we worked for are interested in us implementing our proposals. So, work was done on the database, and I will later work on the finalization of our schema and making it XML-friendly. Very exciting, and I'll post (what I can) results in the future.

I also completed my internship at Cornell's CISER. There I got to experience first-hand the interaction between librarians and researchers in a non-library environment. I did my best to increase the amount and quality of metadata in their data archive. If you follow the link, you can see that the current amount of abstracts is ~70%, where it was only ~40% when I started. Also, I implemented and customized a new subject index for their archive, and I am pleased with the results.

On the school front, I have been in a Metadata class, which has really been a challenging course. I have gained a huge amount of experience with XML, taking me from a "functional" XML editor to being able to create schemata and application profiles by myself. I got experience in all kinds of metadata standards, such as DC, EAD, CDWA Lite, and others. This class has made me want to keep striving to become a metadata librarian, but I'm still keeping my options open.

Which brings me to today, when I'm interviewing for Fayetteville Free Library. It's a bit out of my comfort zone and metadata track, but I think it's always good to go outside your comfort zone when it comes to opportunities and challenges. Hopefully I get it!

So that's all for now. I'm working on my final Metadata course project, so hopefully I can share that sometime next week. My project is designing a metadata scheme specifically for video games, their consoles/platforms, and related documentation. I call it Video Game Core, or vgc. It borrows from Dublin Core, EAD, and other schemata, with a healthy amount of unique elements. Then it'll be time for the new school year! Take care.

Is It OK to Not Be a Reader?

First off, I freely admit to my bias. I am what you could call a reader, although not as avid as I'd like to be. In fact, I'm rather conservative regarding language in general, as I'd like to return to a curriculum that encourages learning either Greek or Latin in addition to a selection from modern languages like Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, etc. This kind of immersion, in addition to reading a great deal, makes one understand English or language in general at a much deeper level, and I believe this facility seeps out into other areas of study. But I'll try to not let that cloud this topic. I'm honestly asking the question: is it OK these days to not be a reader?

To be clear, a person not being a "reader" is not meant to imply that the person is illiterate or doesn't read at all: it simply means that what the person reads is essential, tied to their personal education needs (e.g. only reads textbooks and articles for class), or the person in general doesn't spend time reading for pleasure.

I don't believe my original question is trivial. Much has been made in recent years about the appalling state of young boys' literacy and educational involvement. However, If it's OK to not be a reader, shouldn't we just sit on our hands, keep them at an average reading level, and encourage our young boys to study hard in math and science? Because apparently that's all that matters these days regarding America's education crisis, given the voluminous attention math and science receive when compared to the paltry mention of the humanities.

It's not just a problem with "kids these days." My generation is also dealing with these problems, especially concerning the gender divide in education and other aspects of the American experience. Men are trending down in college attendance, jobs, and other areas. One could argue such systemic problems have nothing to do with them being non-readers, and I agree, the two are not necessarily causally linked. But I do believe that being a young non-reader and the compromised status of males today stem from a common cause: the state of our education system.

Since coming to Syracuse, I have come across fellow would-be librarians—typically thought of as a rather bookish profession—who openly admit to not being readers. I can totally understand where they are coming from. Life these days consists of information bombardments for all of your waking hours. Isn't it a waste of time to add non-essential reading to the thousands of lines of text? Who has time for that? Isn't reading text throughout the day on the internet a perfect substitute?

In a word: no. I am loath to critique the modern conception of the 21st century digital being, but you cannot multi-task. I know you think you can, but you can't. You do not require the same level of reading comprehension when reading normal internet fare when compared to literature. In other words, not all text is created equal.

I think it's a worthy mission to try to turn young boys into readers. I was surprised to learn this is a somewhat controversial stance within the library community. I fully enjoy and have no quarrels with video games, graphic novels/comics, movies, multimedia, etc. I just think these could be harnessed as tools to show people the power of the written word. Some boys are quite frankly averse to reading because they haven't been shown books that might appeal to them. They don't make the association between the movie and the novel it was based on. They might not realize that graphic novels and comics borrow themes heavily from modern and classical literature. Instead, all they see is the boring Moby Dick that the English teacher is making them read, and it makes them associate books with monotony.

To wrap up this somewhat snobbish rant, yes, I think it is perfectly fine to be an adult and not be a reader. But I want that to be the case after years of self-weaning, not a result of artificially low expectations and unimaginative education.

SDM A4

This week, we had Exercise 4 in our course for Science Data Management. This time, we had to come up with a hypothetical data use scenario. I envisioned a researcher looking at economic data with regard to food subsidies in Africa. This helped us get thinking about what elements would be used to locate the data, and what problems we couldn't realize from the previous assignments.

johnson-ex4

Earthquakes and the Semantic Web

The World Earthquake Interactive Map, which can be found here, is a great example of linked data and the power of the Semantic Web. Once it was made, it became effectively a dynamic, self-updating page with rich data. You can filter by magnitude or location, which comes in handy if you want to keep track of the aftershocks in Japan, for example. Credit goes to Google Maps, NASA, US Geological Survey, Li Ding, MIT, and any other sources I have neglected to mention.

A Question of Utilization

Today we had the pleasure of hosting Mr. Indra Sarkar in our Science Data Management class. It's perhaps rude of me to use the title Mr., since he holds a PhD in Bioinformatics along with an MLIS, but he could be younger than I am! During his talk—and I'm sure I'm not the only audience member who had these thoughts—I couldn't help but think that we need more "big picture" people like Indra that have a Library Science background. Otherwise, I fear that the talents and skills we are gaining will see little use, especially if only applied within the limited environment of traditional libraries.

I was pleasantly surprised that someone of Indra's expertise emphasized the importance of the macroscope. That is, taking the largest perspective possible, and as he puts it, creating a "global brain" that takes all the inter-related entities into consideration. It's an ingenious way of putting into a simple word what I have been trying to articulate for a while; that this is an interdisciplinary world, and one of the ways forward in this information storm is to bring lots of knowledge systems together to solve problems. As Indra pointed out, the ideal is to reach a point where knowledge systems work so seamlessly together that new perspectives on old problems are spawned, and truly new knowledge is created and shared. A great example regarded hantavirus, where through visually displaying the locus of research being done, Indra was able to point out a gaping hole in what researchers were doing because they weren't looking at the larger picture. All the research and sequencing was being done in the Eastern U.S., and mistakenly applied to the Southwestern U.S., which is not a great idea since the rats responsible for Southwestern hantavirus outbreaks are a different sub-species of rat than the ones found in the East. In just one visual representation, so many concepts and mistakes become strikingly clear.

But of course, constructing and curating (or something as seemingly simple as providing crosswalks among existing knowledge networks) these vast knowledge systems means that the skills of the librarian and data manager are crucial. My worry is that the people who are in these research fields will have no clue that librarians are being trained for these tasks. I had a discussion with my brother, who is in the meteorological field, and he shared my skepticism. In a private firm such as the one where he works, we doubted that someone would actually hire an eScience librarian/consultant, or even be aware that they existed. Of course, this is understandable considering the novelty of the field, but it stresses the need for greater awareness not just in what eScience librarians can do, but also digital and embedded librarians. As Prof. Lankes used to explain, part of the problem is the perception of the term "librarian," which unfortunately means that in the minds of most people we are forever consigned to and associated with brick-and-mortar libraries.

Anyway, Dr. Sarkar's lecture was fascinating, and got me to thinking about how his innovative ideas in eScience could be applied to the fields I'm interested in.

Economics Is Not a Liberal Art

As someone who possesses the rare and unfortunate dual backgrounds of Humanities and Business Economics, I find myself uniquely qualified to dismiss a canard I've tried my best to ignore this semester. It is the claim by Drucker that management (which is de facto an extension of economics) is a liberal art. Now, I can see why he wants management to be a liberal art. He doesn't want it to be quantitative. He wants to dissociate it from its unmistakably horrible past. Scientific management, en vogue during the Gilded Age (which we seem to be quickly returning to), despite its claim to fix "social loafers" in the workplace, was the impetus for the labor movement of this country. Once a manager knew that a good worker could make a gadget every 50 seconds, guess what? You were fired if you took longer than that. Any complaining or organized resistance was met with lock-ins (meaning the management locked their employees in, which resulted in some cases of fires killing numerous workers) or outright violence and murder.

Like I said, it makes sense to try to dissociate management from its ugly past. But this is just apologetics. It dishonors the tradition that organized labor went through in this country, much as we'd like to believe that unions are just barriers to financial solvency. Management still tries to fix the social loafer, albeit with more humane methods. But the legacy of unethical management is still with us. Sweatshops, illegal and under-the-table jobs, or a certain governor (with several others waiting in the wings) trying to show his managerial cred. by busting an entire state's public union. Taylor and the robber barons would be proud.

My point is, own up to your history and let's move on. Don't pretend you're a liberal art, when we know damn well that what Drucker is telling us is not in his mind subjective (he states as fact such things that union movements damaged this country, which one might expect from a person who fled social democracy in Germany), subject to taste, or open to interpretation. Management is a highly specialized subset of economics, and both are social sciences. This means they are not hard sciences, since it involves the complicated and ever variable thing we call society.

Science Data Management

As part of my IST 600 Science Data Management class, I will be posting my work for the semester on this site. I will be working with eScience fellows and collaborating on some interesting data projects. I hope to organize it in a sane and convenient manner. So keep your eye out for some data flying at you!

Spring Renewal

The semester finally started today, so hopefully this will kick start the blog going forward. I have a nice new volunteer/internship at Bird Library uploading digital documents into the open-access repository SUrface, a cause I am really dedicated to. I have some really challenging classes dealing with scientific data and management as well, but I usually have more activity the more I am challenged intellectually.

One thing I am thinking about now that I have drilled down a bit more and gained more experience is just how bad the data deluge is (or tsunami if you prefer). Which I always knew about, really, but once you throw metadata needs in there, too... yikes. Hopefully my job and classes will give me some ideas on how to get self-described data into repositories that last long into the future.

Prehistory Changes More Than You'd Think

As a Classics nerd, I am amazed at the genesis of the Greek civilization. The hardest part is sometimes determining when it all started (defining civilization is always tricky). Harder still is trying to determine if there is anything really shared by certain steps (Cycladic->Minoan->Mycenean. Are they even related to each other?).

But this new find of 130,000+ year old tools on Crete is incomprehensible if true. The edge of prehistory is obliterated by the shear length of time, and even suggests pre-modern human sea travel. Could any of this really be possible? It's so long ago, we have to start thinking about if there was an ice age at the time, if this could possibly be Neanderthals, etc. This find could show us just how little we know about prehistory.