Miffed Librarian

Recently, well just 2 days ago, something really irritating happened. That’s why I’m calling this post “Miffed Librarian”. Because I’m really annoyed and offended. Mostly indignant. This is mainly just an opportunity for me to rant and get things off my chest without resorting to gossiping behind anybody’s back. So don’t mind me while I go stark raving mad and spit this out of my system.

There’s this colleague who is really full of himself; I shall call him H, for Hubris. I remember on the very first day I met H, he was already going off about the work he’s doing, name dropping the important high-powered personnel he’s caucusing with and the high-profile projects he’s doing outside of his JD in the library. H is not afraid of shameless self-promotion. No subtlety here.

The funny, not in the haha sense, but the strange and pathetic sense, thing is, the way H carries himself, the way he’s boosting about his accomplishment is not in correlation to the outcome of his work. In the few months that I’ve been on this job, I’ve had the chance to work with him or seen him at work, and his work is really shoddy, to say the least. On top of everything else, I find this poor communication skills really a pain. In H’s case, his written skill is as bad as his spoken. I can’t seem to understand what he says because his articulation and pronunciation are pretty bad. As for his writing, what can I say; I’ve noticed that a few of the things he had written are chokablock with blatant plagiarism, even public document and official blog entries. If it’s original, you can be sure the grammar is broken.

But the thing is, some people here think H is doing good stuff. Is it because he’s constantly reminding them that he’s doing this and that, not just here but out there, therefore he’s an asset to the company, etc? But seriously, his work output leaves much to be desired, at least for perfectionistic little me. Maybe it’s because he’s doing something that is relatively new, so people are going ga-ga because they don’t know how to do it themselves.

Frankly, it won’t have bothered me. I mean, I’ve always felt that if I do my job well, even quitely, people will know that a good job has been done. Well, I know God knows, and sometimes, that is good enough as well. I know, I am naive. But I’m not very good at this office politics nonsense and shameless self-promotion. And everything would have been nice and fine, except that H has stepped on my toes once too often and this time, it’s just too much.

For the fact that he thinks he’s better than me (by fact that he’s entered this profession earlier than me), he has chosen to be condescending to me. And I have taken it in my stride. Hubris of a young man, I thought, when I first encountered his condescension and self-promotion. Since I’ve entered this field late, I’d already decided to throw away my pride (and more than a decades’ experience in another field) and try to be approach it with an attitude and desire to learn from others. But I don’t condone the fact that he has decided to talk down to me. When your work is not up to scratch, in my books, you don’t talk to me like that.

More than anything else, I can’t stand the fact that he was patronising. And that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I may not be a highly-wired person, and I may not spend my waking hours hooked onto social media, but that doesn’t mean I am an IT-idiot. And even if I were, it doesn’t give you the right to speak to me in that manner. Which H did. Two days ago. Too much.

I think I have been polite, as polite as I can be, to him all this while. To the point of making excuses for him when other colleagues complain of his actions. But no more. My feathers have been ruffled, my claws are at this point being sharpened. No more Mr Nice Guy. You’ve lost your chance.

The State of Book Publishing

Mother with Baby Using a Laptop
© Somos Images/Corbis

Is book publishing a dying trade? Not so, according to Francine Fialkoff, Editor-in-Chief of Library Journal. In an editorial piece titled The Book Is Not Dead, Fialkoff writes about the BookExpo America (BEA) in New York City and the future of publishing.

I found something written about Scribd interesting:

Although Scribd may be disintermediating the publisher by bringing the reader and writer together, many publishers have begun to work with the company, taking a page from the music industry’s failure to see the future in online content sharing and social media. Scribd taps into a whole reading community of writers, too.

She concludes that “As librarians, you already know that it’s the content, not the container, that counts.”

It is interesting to note that Scribd, often looked upon as the equivalent of Youtube for documents, allows authors or publishers to upload their writing and “set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue“, according to an article in The New York Times. This gives them more control. And just last week, publisher Simon & Schuster agreed to sell digital copies of its books on Scribd at 20% off the list price. Read about it here.

So, what is the future of reading and publishing?

Ann Michael writes an insightful entry on Publishing for the Google Generation, noting that

Our habits and expectations concerning information have changed and continue to change as a result of Google, YouTube, Twitter, and other applications that teach us to interact with information differently than we have in the past.

In Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World, Thompson tackles the question “Can books survive in this Facebooked, ADD, multichannel universe?” His answer is yes, by adapting to the way people are coming to the written word. He highlights 2 new technology, not so much technology but 2.0 type applications? – CommentPress and BookGlutton. Read the fulltext here.

Sokal Affair via Bentham Journal

© Leah Warkentin/Design Pics/Corbis

Philip Davis, Cornell University Librarian, submitted a nonsensical, albeit grammatically correct, paper created with SCIge which was accepted for publication by Bentham Science journals. This reminds one of the Sokal Hoax. Pretty scandalous, if you ask me. What with the recent scandal of a certain major publisher, what is becoming of this publishing trade??

Read about it here and here.

Will Twitter Change the Way We Live?

Image © Twitter.com

Came across an article about Twitter on Time.com by Steven Johnson – How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live.

I find a line he says interesting:

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it’s doing to us. It’s what we’re doing to it.

Besides using it to inform others about real time about “[your] choice of breakfast cereal”, people have found many different uses of the new technology. I remember reading that the hostages in the Oberoi Hotel used Twitter to stay in contact and update family and friends outside.

In his article, Johnson talks about a conference he attended in Manhattan where participants post their commentary on Twitter.

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

Their exchange can be found here.

In schools,  teachers have been using Twitter in the class. Read about it here.

How are libraries using Twitter? Here’s a Library 2.0 example

Bing it on

Search engine war has started. Microsoft has rolled out it’s replacement for Live search – Bing. I’ve used it and it seems quite good. But breaking the Google habit is going to be hard. But I’ll have to, since I’ll have to start a new course on search engines and deep web search soon.

Read ZDNetAsia’s article on this and PC World’s comparison of Bing, Google and Yahoo.

Libraries of the future

Image © Salon.com

It’s not really about the library that I’m working in, although we are going through some renovations at the moment. But that would just be physical and cosmetic changes to the library, not enough to make it a “library of the future”, at least I don’t think so. We don’t have the money for that, unfortunately. But still, I think we are still a lot better than many other libraries out there, so shouldn’t complain. Should instead work on how to roll out information literacy programmes to students to deal with the changes in the way information is produced and digested.

When the future comes, will there even such a thing as a library? Or would it have disappeared from our vocabulary, as suggested by Megan Lane of BBC some years back? We’ll just have to see.

Anyway, back to IL, which I think is really a big issue now with the Google generation, there’s an article written by Peter Godwin on “Information Literacy sans frontieres”. It is an opinion piece that he wrote for JISC. The title really sounds interesting; brings to mind Medecins Sans Frontiers.

The State of Scholarly Publishing

I wonder about the state of scholarly publication, after reading about the Elsevier scandal. It’s not that I don’t know that such things do happen. But to know that it happens for a publisher like Elsevier, it’s just really scary. I’m really wondering the state of scholarly communication.

Anyway, a new book on the state of scholarly publishing:

The State of Scholarly Pubishing

The State of Scholarly Publishing: Challenges and Opportunities

by Albert N. Greco, Editor
ISBN: 978-1-4128-1058-6
Pages: 292
Publication Date: 06/30/09
Binding: Paper / Transaction Publishers.

Summary from publisher:
For decades, university presses and other scholarly and professional publishers in the United States played a pivotal role in the transmission of scholarly knowledge. Their books and journals became the “gold standard” in many academic fi elds for tenure, promotion, and merit pay.

Their basic business model was successful, since this diverse collection of presses had a unique value proposition. They dominated the scholarly publishing field with preeminent sales in three major markets or channels of distribution: libraries and institutions; college and graduate school adoptions; and general readers (i.e., sales to general retailers).

Yet this insulated world changed abruptly in the late 1990s. What happened? This book contains a superb series of articles originally published in The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, by some of the best experts on scholarly communication in the western hemisphere, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Th ese authors analyze in depth the diverse and exciting challenges and opportunities scholars, universities, and publishers face in what is a period of unusual turbulence in scholarly publishing.

The topics given attention include: copyrights, the transformation of scholarly publishing from a print format to a digital one, open access, scholarly publishing in emerging nations, problems confronting journals, and information on how certain academic disciplines are coping with the transformation of scholarly publishing.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in the scholarly publishing industry’s past, its current focus, or future plans and developments.

Albert N. Greco is professor of marketing at the Graduate School of Business Administration, Fordham University. He is the editor of The Changing World of Publishing and The Media and Entertainment Industries.

Another Elsevier Scandal

Red beads on wooden abacus © Tetra Images/Corbis

Found another Elsevier scandal. From a year ago.

Basically, it is to do with a scientific journal, published by Elsevier, which has one of the highest impact factor amongst mathematics research journals. Problem is, one of the most prolific writers of the journal is also the editor in chief  who has a cult following. This would explain the inflated citation count.

To be honest, it is an acknowledged fact that many editors and writers/researchers play this game, so I’m not really surprised. I’m just surprised that Elsevier is involved in this when they are the ones behind Scopus.

More reading:

Elsevier Math Editor Controversy in The Scholarly Kitchen

The power of self-citation and self-publishing – the case of el Naschie in Re Research

Crackpot Scandal In Mathematics in Slashdot

You’re a mean one, Mr. El Naschie in Scientific blogging

More on Elsevier Journal Scandal

Capsules and Pills © Bilderbuch/Design Pics/Corbis

As previously reported, publishing giant Elsevier has admitted to publishing six fake medical journals between 2000 and 2005, all of which were sponsored by pharmaceutical companies and released in Australia.

According to a report in Library Journal, 5/14/2009, byJosh Hadro, the Elsevier Journal Scandal is provoking response from librarians who are calling for some action from ALA and MLA.

The problem now is that libraries have always promoted themselves as being a place where genuine, credible, timely and authentic information is available for the patrons. Now, this scandal has challenged libraries and librarians as facilitators or gatekeepers of that genuine information.

In his article, Hadro quotes Jonathan Rochkind, Digital Services and Software Engineer at Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries:

What responsibility do librarians have to detect such things on behalf of our patrons? Is it feasible to expect us to be able to do that, or is the increasingly giant body of mostly electronically read literature way out of our ability to be expected to ever catch anything like this? And if even professional experts in publishing conventions can’t reasonably be expected to catch it… what does this say about scholarly output in general?

In response to this, the Progressive Librarians Guild has issued a call for Elsevier to End Corrupt Publishing Practices and for Library Associations to Take Advocacy Role on Behalf of Scientific Integrity. Details available here.

Elsevier’s  statement by CEO of Health Sciences Division Michael Hansen is available here.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

John Keilman, writing for the the Chicago Tribune re-asks Technology author Nicholas Carr’s question, “Is Google making Us Stupid?”

Some choice quotes from Keilman’s article:

Too much surfing, scanning and tweeting has given me the attention span of a gnat on Red Bull.

…

And it’s not just my relationship with the printed page that has suffered. I can’t make it through half of a TV drama or three innings of a baseball game before I grow restless. I’ll whip out the BlackBerry or wander to my desktop computer and blaze through a few news and entertainment sites until my click-starved mind is satisfied.

…

But how long can that last? Some research suggests that the brain itself changes with the media it absorbs — becoming, in the case of the Internet, more amenable to distraction, less capable of deep, sustained thought.

Post it notes on computer screen © Phil Boorman/Cultura/Corbis

I’m not sure about Google making me stupid. Actually, I think it is great and I use it all the time to make “quick-and-dirty” searches when I have a trivial (as in trivial pursuit) to recall (okay, technically, I’m not supposed to be encouraging the use of Google as a librarian, but that I think is another post). And I think that’s the problem. Using Google for my”quick-and-dirty” searches – it’s making me forgetful. Since it is so easy and convenient to Google something, there seem to be less incentive to commit that thing to memory. I can’t even remember my phone number since that can also be Googled! Well, actually, I’ve never been able to remember my own phone number, with or without Google, since I don’t normally dial that number.

So, if not being able to recall things is considered a kind of stupidity, then I’m STUPID as charged. My stupidity is not so much because I’m easily distracted and cannot have a sustained “relationship with the printed page” (I still have a viracious appetite for books and although I do a lot of reading online nowadays, I also frequent the bookstore and library for my dose of reading material as I prefer the tactile and olfactory satisfaction of a book), as Keilman suggests, but rather I’ve become too lazy to use my brain to store information. Now, I seem to only index certain terms in my brain, or parts of information, and when I need to embellish more details, I would just Google for it. Like my phone number… Perhaps it’s also due to the Information Obesity factor. Too much information produced at too fast a speed to be processed. So, I’ll just index or bookmark that for later use.