Walt at Random

In previous episodes:

• An old friend reminded me of what I should already have known–that I need to follow my passion (do what I care about) when considering what projects to carry out or whether to carry out any at all.
• I blathered on for more than 2,000 words about The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008, the new projects I almost certainly will complete.
• I ruminated on the general lack of success–and lack of coverage by others–of the two Library Blog books; that’s the major part of the “rejects” side of this series. By the way, if you go back to that post, be sure to read Dorothea Salo’s comment–it’s useful public criticism and helps convince me that those projects were “failures to learn from.”

Now the story continues with:

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Part the Fourth: In which the nature of the apparent failures is detailed on a month-by-month basis.

So just how badly have the two Library Blog books actually done?

Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples

This book came out in August 2007. It got heavy publicity here and in Cites & Insights–and I also sent email to as many of the public libraries in the book as I could find email addresses for.

• It got off to a decent start: Ten copies in August 2007, 13 in September 2007, 15 in October 2007.
• Then it started to slow down: Seven in November 2007, eight in December 2007,  six in January 2008.
• And kept sliding: Four in February 2008,  one in March 2008, three in April 2008.
• Next quarter: Two in May 2008, two in June 2008. Zero in July 2008–and, so far, none in August 2008.

That’s 71 copies to date. For it to be a non-failure by my informal standards, it would need to sell at least 100 copies in the first year–and it’s 29 copies short with about a week to go.

Still…71 copies is better than nothing. For the time spent on it, the net return is not minimum wage, to be sure, but it’s considerably better than what I’d have earned from doing it “the right way” (and I think Dorothea Salo is right in this regard)–that is, putting it up as a website, which would have required significant additional work, might have required more money, and would have yielded $0.

But that’s the middling case…

Academic Library Blogs: 231 Examples

This one came out in January 2008, and you could reasonably say that it’s really too early to call it a failure yet.

Still…

• January 2008: Nine copies. February 2008: Six copies. March 2008: Five copies
• April 2008: Seven copies.
• May 2008: Three copies. June 2008: Three copies.
• Zero in July 2008. So far, zero in August 2008. (Oops: One apparently sold yesterday. So there is hope.)

Sure, there could be a sudden upswing this fall–it could sell another 67 copies between now and January 2009. But I’m not holding my breath.

This post won’t help. I’m aware of that.

And, as I say, I find Dorothea Salo’s comment cogent and convincing.

So what’s going to happen with those books? I can keep them on Lulu indefinitely at no charge. I think CreateSpace now wants a small annual fee (or I can get even lower yields).

Realistically, I don’t think I’ll do that. Unless something surprising happens, I think I’ll take them down, probably in or around January 2009. If I thought it would work at all, I might redo them as a single book that’s mostly analysis and commentary with brief little entries on each blog–but that probably won’t happen. (Actually, if I was going to do that, I’d wait and do a 2007-2009 lateral comparison, as I discussed in Part 3.)

On the other hand…

Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change

This one’s doing OK. I can’t/won’t provide similar month-by-month figures, but it’s still selling (oddly enough, it’s now sold as many copies in August as in July–and more than in May, the low point for this book), and it’s more than two-thirds of the way to being what I’d consider an actual success.

(Oh: The two trade paperback editions of C&I? I wasn’t anticipating any sales at all, so I’m delighted with the four combined sales, other than my own, and I must say the paperback’s both prettier and easier to handle than the Velobound back copies are!)

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So that’s it for Part Four. If there is a Part Five–and there might not be–it will consider some possible changes for Cites & Insights. (And, grumpator, I really was kidding: The September issue won’t be out for at least another 10 days, and more likely two weeks.)

The story up to now

• In Part 1, an old friend reminded me of what I should have known–that I needed to follow my passion, or in less Left Coast wording, do what I care about
• In Part 2, the big secret was revealed at considerable length–the project I’m working on, most likely entitled The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008.

and now, without further ado (and at much less length than yesterday, I hope), we present:

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Part the Third: In which a possibly-useful project is deferred or abandoned for what may or may not be the right reasons.

By now, I’ll presume most of you are aware of my twin 2007 projects: Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples and Academic Library Blogs: 231 Examples.

For all the talk about why libraries (every library, or most libraries, or whatever) should be doing blogs and what wonderful benefits they’ll derive, I believe these were and are the first objective looks at what’s actually out there, other than a few handpicked examples.

I believe they were landmark projects, at least deserving of some discussion and criticism.

Two shrubs fall in the forest. No one hears.

They were wholly ignored by the gurus of library blogging. Wholly.

Reacting charitably, I’ll assume that none of those gurus are aware of either Cites & Insights or Crawford at Large, and so were and are wholly unaware of the books.

There are less charitable reactions, to be sure. Kate Davis, one of that remarkable group of Australian libloggers, raised one possibility in a March 14, 2008 post at virtually a librarian.

And, for that matter, a July 12, 2008 post at Marcus’ World seems to argue that social software and other initiatives should not be evaluated–or at least not yet. I’m trying very hard to avoid the phrase “faith-based librarianship,” but when I’m told that we shouldn’t be asking whether new services are effective, I have to wonder. (To my mind, a perfectly legitimate objection would be “You’re not measuring the right things”–which then raises the issue of what those right things would be. To say that we shouldn’t be asking such questions at all–that seems a bit odd.)

Maybe it was a bad idea to begin with

Actually, in details, I’m entirely willing to agree that the books might (should?) have been done differently, with a lot more discussion of analytics and a lot less text from each blog. I thought examples would be useful. Maybe they are, but they made it easy to dismiss the book as “just stuff taken from the blogs.” That’s wildly unfair, I believe, but the I’m biased.

Going forward or not

The public library portion of the project was (is) somewhat interesting on its own merits, but was a lot of work for very little apparent result.

The academic library portion of the project, frankly, got less interesting as time went on. And was even more work for even less apparent result.

So there’s very little in me crying out to take the next step–which would involve longitudinal studies (looking at changes in blogs over time) and a whole lot more up-front discussion.

If there was some form of external sponsorship, or if things suddenly picked up this fall, that could change–in which case, I’d look at the possibility of doing a two-year comparison (2007 & 2009).

Most likely, though, I’ll write this one off as a reject.

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So just how badly (or well) did the books actually do?

That’s Part 4. Stay tuned.

This tale began with this post, in which I note how–with the help of friends–I regained some energy and inspiration. The story continues, at absurd length (sorry!)…

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Part the Second: In which the Big Project is revealed

As will be obvious to some of you (the crazies at LSW Meebo more than most), I’ve been tinkering with this one for quite some time…probably more than a year, actually.

I started keeping notes on the project in a Word document. Here’s most of that document, with some annotations (indented gray paragraphs)–and this may give you a sense of just how long and difficult this gestation has been.

Toward a Global Liblog Survey

Notes toward a stupid project that will take forever and sell maybe 50 copies…

“Forever” is only a slight exaggeration. I’m hoping that 50 copies is conservative.

Inclusions

• All blogs in 2005 “top 60″ study as first baseline; all blogs that meet currency criteria included in 2008.
• All blogs in 2006 “great middle” study as second baseline; all blogs that meet currency criteria included in 2008.
• All other blogs found in IWTBF “Favorite blogs” study, or LISWiki, or LISZen source list, or “tag cloud” source list, or just my own discoveries, as of 3/1/08, that match all criteria below.

“IWTBF”: Information Wants to be Free.

Criteria for preliminary inclusion

• In English
• Not clearly defined as an official library blog.
• Somehow related to library people, at least vaguely.
• Reachable
• Established: At least one post before January 1, 2008
• Not defunct: At least one post after August 31, 2007 (as of March 1, 2008)
• Visible: Sum of Bloglines subscriptions and Technorati “Authority” at least 9 (thus, rounds to 1.0 on Visibility scale) when tested in first two weeks of March 2008

For now, all of those criteria are for additional blogs, those not in one of the early surveys–and I’m still pondering “not defunct.” The “Established” and “Visible” criteria are firm, so that there’s some kind of starting point and so that truly “under the radar” blogs–the ones designed for a small circle of friends–can stay that way.

Currency: additional criteria for final inclusion, if done at all – omitted.

Whazzat? The single bullet point said “Current and semi-active: At least one post in two of the three months March, April, May 2008.” That’s comparable to the “active” rule for library blogs (at least one post in two of the three months March, April, May 2007). For several reasons, I concluded that it wasn’t a reasonable criterion this time around.

Blogs added to 2005/2006 lists and blogs not added

Note that some new blogs appear in more than one source. Favorites came first. “Others” came last. I believe LISZen came second and don’t remember the order of the other two.

• Favorites: 48 added.
• LISZen: 81 added
• LISWiki: 37 added
• Cloud: 9 added
• Others (wcc’s picks): 29 added.
• Total added: 204
• Not added because too new: Five (plus some “others”).
• Not added because invisible: 92 (plus some “others”).
• Not added because available but defunct: 97.
• Not added because not reachable: 57.

Adding clearly defunct and not reachable yields more than 150 defunct of about 450 candidates–about a 33% mortality rate. (Note: Mortality for the 2005-2006 group handled separately.)

At some point, the numbers don’t quite add up. That shouldn’t be surprising…

Baseline and bizarre attempt

There are now 542 blogs in the spreadsheet.

Except for a few that lack feeds, wcc’s Bloglines list includes all of them (and a few others), for 551 feeds in the Library folder.

For at least a week, I’ll track how many new posts (and updated blogs) appear in twice-a-day checks. (Note partway through: I’ll give it two weeks.)

If the number of posts seems very high, I may delete a small number of frequently-updated blogs and note them here.

Completion of stupid experiment on 540 blogs: Over two weeks, there were, on average, 221 posts per day, or 0.41 posts per blog. By comparison, the 213 blogs in the 2006 survey had an average of 104 posts per day or 0.49 posts per blog-not a convincing difference. (By comparison, the 60 blogs in the 2005 survey had an average of 55 posts per day or 0.92 posts per blog, but that was a special handpicked set of blogs.)

First assumption-that, on average, libloggers are posting less often: Not proved, and the evidence is extremely weak at best.

Next steps

Doing March-May 2007 scans for some portion of the 2005/2006 blogs, both as background for TxLA…and to get some sense for whether I want to continue this nonsense.

Issues include: Should I be tracking illustrations? Should I be tracking # of posts in which links appear? To what extent do blogs allow easy tracking of length, etc? (Have a column noting exceptions?) Is this just going to be more work than can possibly be justified?

For now: Yes on illustrations. No on links. If blogs hide posts, I’m noting that and not tracking length.

Blogs deleted during 2007 scan

• Society for librarians who say m…. Reason: Just not going to do that one.
• dulemba.com: Reason: No indication of any library focus or interest; a book writer & illustrator.
• Five weeks to a social library. Reason: Hidden posts in archive, and this was a “termed” blog-active during the course, mostly for course participants.

Second Run: Blogrolls

Process: Looked at blogrolls for blogs already in list, based on:

• Front-page blogrolls (no blogrolls from links)
• Plausible length of blogroll
• Some evidence of library focus for blogroll

Scan and results

Roughly 100 blogrolls checked in early May 2008. Results:

• Added: 46 blogs (new total: 585)
• Invisible: 21+
• Defunct (no posts in 2008, or no posts in March-April, thus not included): 42+
• Official library (not obvious from name): 4+
• Too new (no 2007 posts): 4
• Not library-related at all: 15+
• General good taste-excessive obscenities or automatic soundtrack: 2

Decisions Along the Way

For now, I’m leaving in blogs with no posts in March-May 2008 if they had posts in March-May 2007 or were in one of the two earlier surveys.

I’m deleting blogs that had no posts in March-May 208 and no posts in March-May 2008 and weren’t in one of the two surveys-unless they’ve (a) been around for a long time or (b) have posts in June 2008 or later. I may need to rethink that (and some other decisions).

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That’s the end of the Word memo–for now, at least. That’s also, doubtless, way too much information. Here’s what I believe is happening at this point:

2008 Metrics and Initial Text

I’m currently going through blogs, noting:

• Brief factual information for each one (the name, using the orthography in the page title if there’s a discrepancy, tagline/motto if any, who it’s by if that’s clear or if it’s a group, when it started, the crude visibility measure, up to three of the most popular categories or tags or labels if that’s easy to determine, the software used if that’s obvious, whether it’s sans or serif and noting if it’s fully justified text and if it’s an odd text/background combination, and the URL)
• Number of posts during March-May 2008 (if it’s possible to determine that)
• Total length of posts (if it’s not too difficult to determine that)
• Number of comments and number of figures (if it’s plausible to determine either or both)
• The same information for March-May 2007 if I didn’t pick it up before: I’m using a second method to get at full text of posts for some WordPress blogs with “hidden-post” archives (using page numbers).
• The general affiliation of the blogger, if that’s evident (e.g. “Academic librarian,” not “College of William and Mary”).
• In some but not all cases, a sentence about the nature of the blog. I’ll have more of an explanation for “but not all” when the project’s done–but it’s fair to say that the typical grandmother’s advice enters into it, as do various conflicts of interest.
• In a few (very few, actually) cases, a fragment of a post that I found particularly intriguing.

The raw numbers go into a spreadsheet. The text goes into a Word chapter, alphabetically by sortable blog name (which is how I’m doing the checking)–but only as the first pass of a multipass textual process.

This is not a fast process–but having a two-display setup (the cheap way, because my new “desktop PC” is actually a notebook, so there’s an automatic second-display support for my retained LCD display) helps a lot! When I’m doing this, there are four active windows, and three of them (two Word, one Firefox) need to be nearly full-screen size. (The Excel window is wide but only five rows tall.)

How fast is not fast? It can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 1.5 hours to go through five blogs, and I try to do five at a time. There’s a two-minute (or so) setup process, but I find that doing more than ten at a time rarely works well. Some days I do five, some ten, some (rarely) fifteen…and some none at all, because I’m entirely focused on other things.

As of this writing, I’ve done 295 of 583 (there was a duplicate in that “584″ count)–but that turns out to be 289 of 577, because I’ve deleted seven blogs along the way, typically because they’ve disappeared entirely and weren’t in an earlier study or because they’re defunct and were alive for too short a period to be included (e.g., your typical “create a blog for class” blog).

So I’m just barely halfway through. If I average five blogs a day from here on out, I should be done with this phase around the end of September. If I average ten blogs a day, I’d be done in early September. My current target–taking into account Cites & Insights, columns, mental health, maybe a short vacation–is 50 blogs a week, which should get me through the whole list right around the time I turn 63…

But wait! There’s more!

At that point, depending on various factors (phase of the moon, feedback, offers of support, health, what have you), I could do another “additions” pass–picking up more English-language liblogs that seem to fit the general criteria, probably by working from blogrolls again. In saner moments, I say this won’t happen. If it does, of course, then there’s the metrics process for each of those blogs…and, since 2007 metrics would also be needed, I figure 1.5 to two hours for each fivesome.

I might also do a “subtractions” pass. Maybe the non-English blogs in the 2006 survey should be deleted. Maybe there are other categories that should be deleted… But at some point I’ll have a “complete” spreadsheet matched with a set of chapters.

After all the metrics gathering is done, comes the analysis. Lots of analysis.

How much and what kind of analysis? I’m not quite sure.

I am sure I’ll look at averages, medians, standard deviations, outliers and quintiles for each significant metric–and that “significant metrics” will include the changes from 2007 to 2008, for those blogs with posts in both quarters.

I suspect I’ll do some correlations–and I’m sure I won’t do the “toss everything into SASS and see what significant correlations emerge” style of correlation. (I don’t have access to SASS, for one thing, and I’m acutely aware that statistical correlation does not imply causation or, in fact, significant correlation.)

Wrapping it all up

Then I’ll write the manuscript–several chapters of analysis (how many I don’t yet know), followed by the alphabetic chapters, each of which will require a rewrite (for example, filling in pieces that emerge from overall analysis).

And then I’ll produce it–probably as a book, possibly with a few overall comments here or in C&I.

When? I honestly have no idea. If I manage to get it out before ALA Midwinter Meeting 2009, I’ll be fairly happy.

Now, if someone was to come forward with some form of adequate sponsorship, I’d be delighted to make a PDF version free, or to run major amounts of the analysis in Cites & Insights. Otherwise, not so likely.

Thus endeth Part the Second. Now, off to do today’s five or ten blogs. Where am I? Well, there’s one letter that begins the names of one out of every five libblogs, and it’s right in the middle of the alphabet. So, “where the L am I?” answers itself.

Heather Morrison has a post about the “gratis v. libre” distinction that Peter Suber is suggesting as being more neutral than “weak vs. strong” when discussing the difference between open access as a way to read material and open access as a way to reuse material.

It’s a useful distinction. No, more than that, it’s a necessary distinction. And it allows people to start discussing whether “the goals” should be libre (which seems to be required by some of the OA declarations) or gratis (which opens readership–what a lot of us thought was the goal).

That’s why I featured it in Open access basics, the starting point for the PALINET Leadership Network’s cluster of articles on open access. (I believe I was one of the first to pick up on Suber’s usage–and note, with a little disappointment, that pretty much nobody but Suber has mentioned the PLN open access cluster. Too bad; I believe it’s a significant contribution and could use wider readership and discussion.)

Here’s the thing, though: Morrison includes this paragraph:

Since IJPE is not a peer-reviewed journal, the focus of the open access movement, it is not quite accurate to call IJPE OA – even though it is gratis, libre, and scholarly in nature.

Huh? Because the primary focus of the OA movement has been peer-reviewed articles, then anything else can’t be called OA? When did that happen?

The paragraph and those that follow do bring up another issue: Does “libre” mean anything at this point?

IJPE operates under a Creative Commons Attribution (BY), Noncommercial (NC), Sharealike (SA) license. That’s not the most restrictive CC license, but it certainly doesn’t remove the permission barriers that some people feel need to be removed: You can’t reuse IJPE material in commercial settings without permission, and the SA portion makes datamining and derivation a little tricky.

If I were to call Cites & Insights OA, I’d call it gratis, not libre, because I use a BY-NC license (but explicitly allow derivative works without requiring sharealike).

I would have left a shorter version of this as a comment at Morrison’s blog–but it doesn’t support comments.

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Update: It may be useful to quote Peter Suber, from his longer Open access overview:

• Royalty-free literature is the low-hanging fruit of OA, but OA needn’t be limited to royalty-free literature. OA to royalty-producing literature, like monographs and novels, is possible as soon as the authors consent. But because these authors will fear losing revenue, their consent is more difficult to obtain. They have to be persuaded either (1) that the benefits of OA exceed the value of their royalties, or (2) that OA will trigger a net increase in sales. However, there is growing evidence that both conditions are met for most research monographs. Nevertheless, this is still a minor front in the larger campaign for OA to royalty-free literature.
• Nor need OA even be limited to literature. It can apply to any digital content, from raw and semi-raw data to learning objects, music, images, multi-media presentations, and software. It can apply to works that are born digital or to older works, like public-domain literature and cultural-heritage objects, digitized later in life.
• I refer to “peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints” in my subtitle because it’s the focus of most OA activity and the focus of this overview, not because it sets the boundaries of OA.

There are plenty of issues and controversies around open access. This needn’t be one of them.

Back on April 30, 2008, I did something I almost never do: Made a prediction.

And, more to the point, did something a good futurist would never do: Made a falsifiable short-term prediction that would clearly be testable while short-term memory still works.

I was wrong, as I noted here.

This morning, I was checking secondary Gmail accounts (actually ones that have no live uses), which is the only time I’d see Gmail’s free-space allocation so vividly…and it looks as though I was just about a month off. Gmail’s space allocation either hit seven gigabytes early this morning or, possibly, sometime last night.

Hmm. Let’s see. I predicted July 4 in a post dated April 30–so it was a prediction with just over a three-month timeline. I was off by a month. That’s…well, that’s pretty bad, actually. And it suggests that Gmail’s algorithm doesn’t add space at a constant rate. That, or my calculations were just wildly off.

So, here’s my new fearless prediction: When will GMail’s space allocation hit eight gigabytes?

Some time in the future–or not. Vague enough?

It’s been more than a month since I said, in this post, “Anaheim did have the desired positive affect, I think.” Which relates back to this post, where I noted that–despite a first-rate two-week vacation–I was short of energy for writing and, more important, inspiration to do anything major. “I’m hoping ALA Annual 2008 will mark a turning point, that I’ll emerge with more inspiration and recovered energy.

It did–as I also noted in this post. Since that post, I’ve turned out the August 2008 Cites & Insights–a good solid issue if I do say so myself–and gotten off to a good start on the project I plan to pursue. There’s a hint of that project in this post.

So…I thought I should expand on matters a little. (This group of posts will probably appear in somewhat different form in the September C&I. Or not.)

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Part the First: In which an old friend reminds me of what I should have known.

Yes, Anaheim helped–not the city, to be sure, but ALA Annual itself. I listened to enough people and talked to enough people to gain back some inspiration and energy.

One particular conversation helped a lot–and, unfortunately, I don’t remember who the conversation was with. It might have been Fred Gertler before ALA. It might have been Tom Wilson during ALA. It might have been someone else entirely… and, come to think of it, it could very well have been Joan Frye Williams.

After a brief discussion of the situation–several possible projects, very little inspiration, and really discouraging sales and lack of feedback on the library blogs books–this old friend made a key comment, which I’ll paraphrase as

What do you really care about? Do that.

Good advice–along with the counterpart:

What are you still doing that you no longer care about? Stop doing that.

I’d been trying to do a somewhat impersonal calculus, which could be summarized as:

Where do I provide real added value, in areas that librarians should care about, and where there’s a reasonable chance what I do will be read (and, if in book form, paid for)?

That turns out to be too complicated. The simpler formulation–which a good Left Coaster like me might translate as “Follow your bliss”–is a whole bunch simpler.

I’m using two informal analyses based on this proposition, one for projects too big for Cites & Insights, one for Cites & Insights itself.

1. Am I interested enough in the results of a big project to make it more worthwhile than, say, working on music or reading, even if book sales might never amount to minimum-wage compensation for the time spent?
2. Should I be writing about this–even if I’ve written about it in the past?

In the first case, the answer turns out to be Yes for one project, which I’ll tentatively describe in Projects and rejects 2, and No for another project unless something changes fairly drastically in the next few months–and I’ll discuss that issue in Projects and rejects 3.

In the second case, I should be doing this at least once a year: Looking at the areas I’ve been covering and saying, for each one,

Do I still care enough–and add enough value–to bother with this?

For Cites & Insights as a whole, the answer is clearly Yes–particularly if I slough off the areas for which the answer is now No.

That discussion is, if all goes well, the basis for the final post in this series…assuming I get that far. In the meantime, I’ll admit that I’m probably dropping one area entirely (where I’d slowed down anyway). Last weekend, I reviewed the contents of the Censorware folder…and, after thinking about it, recycled all the paper, stripped the folder label, and returned the folder to my stock of blank folders. (Yes, I do use real third-cut folders–even if I’ve reduced printouts to the first page, that level of print organization and retention is still essential for my working methods.)

Why? I could provide several reasons, and maybe I will in that final post (“final” only in this cluster), but it boils down to just not caring enough about the value I can add.

Wrapping up this post, it all probably boils down to conserving energy to retain inspiration. By reducing the overall set of possibilities, I believe I can do a better job on the ones that remain–and avoid bogging down in overall disenchantment and the resulting ennui.

That’s Part 1. Part 2? Maybe tomorrow, maybe Wednesday. For now, I’m off to work on The Project, currently somewhere in that vast array of “liblogs beginning with L.”