Walt at Random

Assuming I have any readers at all that haven’t already done so:

Go sign the petition to the White House to

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.

You’ll need to create a whitehouse.gov account if you don’t already have one; that takes maybe 2-3 minutes (mostly waiting for verification email).

The petition was mounted Monday. It’s almost halfway to the required 25,000 signatures already. It won’t–by itself-change anything, but it couldn’t hurt.

Oh, and if you’d like to know more about open access itself, you could buy my book (from ALA Editions): Open Access: What You Need to Know Now. It’s a reasonably quick read with lots of good resources.

I believe The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing may be the most important book I’ve ever written–one that can serve every public library (no matter how small) and most academic libraries, making it possible to add a new patron/community service without new equipment or expertise.

And now, you can get the book at a substantial discount: 40% off (not including shipping & handling).

Just use the code LGMP1 (that’s LGMP followed by a one) when you order The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing (follow the link!).

The discount’s good through July 30, 2012.

Quick Background

The new service: supporting micropublishing–that is, using print on demand fulfillment services to publish books that may serve niches from one to 500 copies, by producing books individually as they are needed.

The book shows you how and provides a starting professional-quality book template for Word, the same template used for the book itself. (There’s also a slightly simplified template for LibreOffice.)

Every public library has community members who have family histories and other specialized books in them–probably more than you’d ever guess. With this book, your library can make those books feasible and attractive (it’s enormously more satisfying to publish a family history as a professional 6×9 book than as a stapled or Velobound set of 8.5×11 pages!).

For smaller academic libraries, this may be a service faculty and staff would find useful–there are a lot of people out there who have special-interest books in them. For many academic libraries, there may also be another service, if (or as) you start to publish new open access journals in cooperation with campus departments: Micropublishing offers a no-cost way to make print copies (say of the journal’s annual compilation) available for those who want them.

There’s more detail on the blog post announcing the book.

Remember: Code LGMP1 for 40% off The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing.

In a thread elsewhere, somebody faulted me for suggesting that most Big Business Books, especially those claiming to identify The Secrets to Success through Statistical Analysis of What Works, are largely bogus…especially for not having actually read Jim Collins’ Good to Great, which, I was assured, was The Real Stuff, deeply inspirational and not to be missed.

OK, I’m paraphrasing and probably exaggerating. But…I certainly got the sense that the book would be life-changing and all that.

So I borrowed the book from the library. And read it.

Of course, it got a little odd along the way, frequently being reminded that Circuit City is one of the (only 11!) “good to great” companies assured of everlasting super-success due to its following the set of new cliches offered in the book (there has to be a Snappy Phrase for everything, of course).

Since, y’know, Circuit City is bankrupt.

I wasn’t entirely convinced that Fannie Mae was a sterling example of lasting greatness either. Since, y’know…well, Fannie Mae is a complex story.

And, yes, I’m among those who has trouble regarding a huge peddler of legal poison (lifestyle products that tend to kill their users when used as directed) as being a lasting great company.

But, hey, that’s only three out of eleven. The other eight must be prime examples and prove the theses of the book.

Hmm. One company’s agreed to pay more than $1 billion for illegal marketing. Another no longer exists, having been bought out by another company.  But hey, that still leaves six, more than half of the original group.

But the book only seems to pertain to companies that plan to plod along for 20 or more years, then take on a different path: There’s nothing to indicate that it offers lessons for companies planning to be the next Intel or Microsoft or Apple or… (and at least one of its lessons absolutely, positively rules out Apple or Microsoft!)

And as I was reading and thinking, I started hearing a little voice:

“Correlation does not equal causation.”

Overall? I’m afraid I didn’t find the book life-changing. Nor did I find it a plausible Recipe for Greatness (even if “Greatness” is defined by profitability/stock market success, which bothers me more than a little).

And, well, I think I need to read The Halo Effect.

But I will say this: The book wasn’t quite as padded as a great many Big Business Books are. And Collins is a reasonably good storyteller.

Thanks to all those who commented on my possible public library value ratio project, either on the original post, on the Wednesday, May 9 update when I extended the feedback period or on the third post on Friday, May 11–and to those who sent email rather than commenting on one of the posts.

The comments provided valuable feedback and helped me sharpen the model and concept, as well as pointing me to a range of studies done by state libraries and other agencies. Those studies and some additional thinking also helped me revise the formulas I was planning to use–although in one case that “thinking” resulted in a formula that’s just plain wrong (and has now been corrected). Those who love formulas and details will want to go read all the way through the May 9 post to see what was involved.

The error was too much cleverness on my part–and it would have been glaringly obvious as soon as I started sorting the spreadsheet for some overall comments in Chapter One. Namely, one particular library system showed more than $2 billion in PC-related benefits rather than about $26.1 million. Go read the bottom of the May 9 post: It has to do with large multibranch systems.

After reviewing the comments, looking at the other studies, and thinking about my own time and energy, I’m going ahead with the project–with the proviso that if I find that it’s not going well enough or rapidly enough, it may be abandoned midstream. My goal is to have the preliminary edition available at least a week before ALA Annual, although that’s not a hard-and-fast goal.

Preliminary edition? Yes. This one’s a proof of concept, with the hope of getting feedback on its usefulness. If it’s useful (and reaches an audience), I’ll plan to do a more polished study using the 2010 IMLS database–when that emerges.

Thanks again to all who commented, including those I may have given a bad time. Oh, and if you have a great idea for a title, let me know…right away. Right now, I’m probably going with the best of several suggestions from Library Society of the World members (my informal thinktank!)…

Today through Friday, May 18, 2012, you can save 20% on Cites & Insights Books–or, for that matter, on the hardcover version of The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing.

Add whatever books you want to your shopping cart (and, incidentally, you no longer need to set up a Lulu account to buy books at Lulu); then, when you check out, type TENYEAR (one word, no spaces) into the coupon box.

By the way, if you’re among those interested in micropublishing and were wondering how Lulu’s color options or hardcover options work out: Anna Julia Young – Autobiography, which you’ll also find at Cites & Insights Books, uses the color option for better photo quality and various partial-color or color photographs; it’s available as a $28.50 paperback or $38.50 hardcover. (My wife, a retired librarian/library director, prepared the book, a memoir of a California and Livermore pioneer who’s also a relative.) That book was prepared entirely using Word (except for some photo processing in Corel PaintShopPro, but the photos were then placed in the Word document).

Death Scream (orig. La maison sous les arbres or The Deadly Trap), 1971, color. Rene Clement (dir.), Faye Dunaway, Frank Langella, Barbara Parkins, Karen Blanguernon. 1:36 [1:32]

We have Frank Langella as a mathematical genius, working for a publisher, who’s contacted by someone who really, truly wants him to do something for them…something clearly not on the up and up. He’s in Paris, where he moved two years previously with his wife (Faye Dunaway), their 8-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son. Dunaway seems to be having memory problems, the marriage isn’t as good as it should be, and he bonds with the daughter while she spoils the (slightly rotten) son. The real estate agent who found them the apartment lives downstairs with her husband and spends a lot of time with them. Dunaway’s character is seeing a psychiatrist and seems to be getting more anxious by the day, especially when she buys a party dress and her daughter points out that she already owns the exact same dress.

And then, she’s with the kids at a puppet show, buys a hoop for the son, and as they’re going home, she loses them. After clues suggesting that they might have drowned (or that she might have drowned them), it turns out they’ve been kidnapped. The rest of the film deals with that (and gaslighting, but not by her husband). The title’s a cheat; there are deaths (two of them), but that’s not really the theme. I guess it’s a psychological thriller; I just didn’t find it particularly compelling. Widescreen (but not anamorphic, and zooming this VHS-quality print up to fill a big screen was occasionally unpleasant). Not terrible, not great, $1.25.

Powderkeg, 1971, color (TV: pilot for Bearcats!). Douglas Heyes (dir.), Rod Taylor, Dennis Cole, Fernando Lamas, John McIntire, Michael Ansara, Tisha Sterling. 1:33.

The plot’s all seriousness: A band of Mexican bandits hijack a train and its 73 passengers (shooting the troops that are on the train) in order to free the brother of the head bandit, who’s going to be hanged in New Mexico after the gang had raided the town. If the brother isn’t freed, the head promises to shoot all the passengers—and keeps running the train back and forth on 40 miles of track in the open Mexican country, so he can spot any attempts to rescue them.

Well, sir…the note demanding the exchange (pinned to the body of a railroad official, thrown off at the station the train doesn’t stop at) was written under duress by a young Mexican lawyer, instructed to address it to the president of the railroad and any high-ranking names he can think of. The two names he adds turn out to be a couple of guys who’ve done border-town cleanup in the past. And thus the romp begins.

And romp it is: High adventure with low plausibility, carried off with style by a good cast. After learning that this was actually the movie-length pilot for a one-season TV series starring Rod Taylor and Dennis Cole (Bearcats!)—well, it’s still a good flick. It’s not even worth recounting the rest of the plot. I found it well done, enjoyable, a fairly good print; easily worth $1.50.

Slipsteream, 1989, color. Steven Lisberger (dir.), Bob Peck, Mark Hammill, Kitty Aldridge, Bill Paxton, Susan Leong, Abigail David, Robbie Coltrane. (Brief parts by Ben Kingsley and F. Murray Abraham.) 1:42.

There’s a deep mystery to this picture. We’ll get to that in a minute.

Oh, the mystery’s not the nature of the killer who’s central to the plot. He (Bob Peck) starts out being captured by two cops, one of whom (Mark Hammill) delights in blowing people away at the slightest provocation; is taken from them by a no-account bounty hunter (Bill Paxton) who wants to turn him in for the reward; and winds up the most heroic character in the film. If you haven’t figured out what he is long before it’s revealed—about halfway through the film—you’re not trying.

It’s not even the erratic nature of the slipstream—the supposed worldwide band of constant howling winds that’s the chief result of “the Convergence,” a near-future environmental disaster that’s resulted in the death of most people and ruination of most others. The slipstream is terribly ferocious when it suits the plot; nonexistent when it doesn’t.

It’s not even just how long in the future this could be set, given that one semi-decadent “downstream” group, living in an old museum/library setting with a variety of artifacts seems to have an unlimited supply of Dom Perignon.

Variable acting (Mark Hammill makes a great villain), pretty good print, loads of scenery, good stereo sound (unusual for these pictures) with an Elmer Bernstein score. Not a great scifi flick, but not a bad one.

The mystery is this: How on earth does a British 1989 color science fiction flick with good production values and scenery (if not great special effects), produced by Gary Kurtz, filmed in Turkey with a quality score and a good cast wind up in a Mill Creek Entertainment megapack? In any case, I’ll give it $1.50.

Somewhere, Tomorrow, 1983, color. Robert Wiemer (dir. & screenplay), Sarah Jessica Parker, Nancy Addison, Tom Shea, Rick Weber, Paul Bates. 1:31.

At first blush, this appears to be a movie told as flashbacks, starting with a teenager (an 18-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker) in ICU after a minor concussion—because, the doctor says, she seems to want to die. And, in the end, she doesn’t—but there’s also a little twist on the twist.

Basic plot: The girl’s father was killed in a plane crash—it’s never said how much earlier. She mourns him. She and her mother live on a horse ranch, but really can’t afford to keep it up. Her mother’s dating a local cop, and the girl’s not too wild about that.

And then…and then. Lots of plot. Cut to a teenage boy and his friend, taking off in a single-engine Cessna (I guess the kid’s old enough for a pilot’s license) to go visit the kid’s horse, who is on a stud appointment at the girl’s ranch. There’s some sputtering just before they take off (as the kid’s teaching his friend to fly), but they ignore it. Which, of course, eventually leads to them crashing in the firebreak near the ranch, just as she’s taking the kid’s horse out for some exercise.

We wind up with the boy showing up as an all-too-physical ghost only she can see (and, oh look, she was watching Topper just before going out for the exercise ride), a lot of blather about the need for her mother to move on, her mother marrying the police officer…and back we go to the hospital. It all ends happily and truly peculiarly.

The good parts: Very good print (full VHS quality). Some good scenery. The bad parts: The very young Parker (in her first movie, although she’d done earlier TV) isn’t all that great, and neither are the other actors—but maybe that’s the script. Oh, and Parker sings two songs, which turns out not be a win either. I found the whole thing sort of dreary; there may have been a Deep Religious Message that I missed, and there’s definitely a “life must go on!” message*, but mostly it was not very good. Generously, $1.

I’ve received great feedback–both in comments and in email–based on the second post on my possible public library value ratios book project.

Michael Golrick pointed me to a Wisconsin page with a much larger list of state, local and regional library ROI studies than I’d encountered previously. I’ve now read (or at least skimmed) all of those and checked a couple of other sources.

As a result, I’ve added a new section to the May 9th post explaining the actual model I’ll use for the Value Ratio–if I do this project at all. I think it’s a defensible model that’s also wildly incomplete (it’s a baseline, representing a countable portion of a library’s value, but nowhere near the totality), and could possibly be a valuable complement to some excellent state and local studies. But I’m still not sure.

I invite you to take another look–the new information is at the bottom of the post, under the line–and offer additional comments from now through Sunday, May 13, 2012. That’s when I’ll make a decision on whether or not to proceed. (You may also want to read the original post.)

Two days ago (Monday, May 7, 2012), I asked for instant feedback on a possible quick-book project providing a detailed set of charts and percentiles related to a “value ratio” for public libraries–that is, the ratio between library expense per capita and library value to its users and community (per capita).

A number of states have done studies of this ratio (usually defined as ROI, return on investment), some of them using fairly sophisticated models and surveys. Consistently, however, such studies yield a single number.

What I have in mind is both cruder (far less sophisticated and relying entirely on public information) and more detailed–namely, yielding a variety of percentile ranges that break down the overall picture into more detailed forms. To quote a little of the other post:

The four axes or, if you will, chapters, following an overall look:

• Clumps of libraries by LSA size (using the 10 HAPLR divisions)
• Clumps of libraries by expense/budget ranges
• Clumps of libraries by per capita expense ranges
• State-by-state analyses (one clump for states with few libraries, probably three by broad size categories for states with many libraries)

For each clump, as for the overall figures, I’d provide correlations as appropriate, plus mean, median, and percentile levels in two ways–the 90th, 80th, 70th, etc. percentiles, but also the percentage of libraries exceeding certain value ratio set points.

I wanted feedback on whether this might be useful, useless or even a bad idea. I wanted that feedback by the end of today (May 9, 2012), since my plan was to have the book available by ALA Annual.

Early feedback

I’ve received half a dozen responses. While most of them are mildly positive, by far the most detailed response–and the only one clearly coming from a state library employee–was less so. I’ll quote that feedback,, from Steve Mattthews, here:

For what it’s worth, it seems it would only by useful IF the Value Ratio to which you refer is an empirical statistically useful number. Simply calling some number “value” doesn’t make it valid. Are you using contingent valuation (CV) either willingness-to-pay (WTP) or willingness-to-accept (WTA)? Or are you using some arbitrarily assigned “value”?

It also seems like a no-brainer premise to say that “libraries that are better funded provide better service.” One of the pitfalls of using data collected for one purpose to apply to a different purpose is that it requires numerous questionable assumptions to make the numbers meaningful. How would this data be more valid or more valuable than the results from several states that conducted their own ROI study within the past few years? The 21st Century Library is More:

I replied, probably defensively, after looking at all of the ROI studies available from that link and from links within those links. My plan is to do something entirely different, possibly more valuable only because it’s something more than One Big Number for an entire state–but certainly less valid based on that commentary.

Extending the feedback request

If Steve Matthews’ response is typical of what well-informed librarians would say, or typical of how state libraries would feel about what I have planned, then I should abandon the idea: Way too much work for what may be perceived as valueless or even harmful.

I’m not quite ready to do that. Instead, I’ll ask for more feedback, through the weekend (that is, through Sunday, May 13, 2012). Apologies in advance if I respond in what seems a defensive manner; maybe I’ll try to avoid responding at all. Except, of course, to come to a decision on Monday.

So, either by mail to waltcrawford at gmail.com or in a comment here (noting that comments with multiple links sometimes get trapped as spam, and I get WAY too much spam to check each one):

Good idea? Lousy idea? Pointless idea?

[If you think my investigation into public library closings was actually a bad thing, you will most assuredly think this project is a bad idea as well--but you can think the first was good and that the second is pointless.]

Additional information (added 5/11/12)

I’ve now read or at least skimmed all of the studies linked to from the page Michael Golrick identifies (in one of the comments below), re-read some other sources, and modified (or clarified) the numbers I’ll use if (and it’s still if) I do this instabook–which, it should be clear, is intended to be complementary to the state ROI studies, the HAPLR ratings, the LJ Star ratings, and all those other things, not a competitor to any of them.

Here’s what I would be using to establish the Value Ratio and the two subratios (Explicit Value and Implicit Value):

Explicit Value

• $8.30 times the sum of Circulation, ILLTo, and ILLFrom. (This is one of the two Big Numbers–although ILLTo and ILLFrom are a small part of it. After looking at a wild diversity of arguably sound amounts for average circulation worth, I used the average price of mass market paperbacks in 2008.)
• $15 per reference question. (Assumes that, these days, there are relatively fewer but relatively more important/difficult reference questions.)
• $10 per program attendance. (Given the relatively small number of reported program attendances, changing this number wouldn’t have much effect on anything.)
• The larger of: $8 times the number of counted PC uses or $2.66 times (the number of Internet-connected computers available for users times the number of open hours the average number of open hours per outlet). This is the other Big Number. However calculated, it’s also a partial standin for uncounted items–database use, wifi use, etc. [If you’re wondering: That $2.66 figure is based directly on one of the carefully-done ROI studies, and assumes $4/hour value and that 2/3 of computers, on average, are in use. The $8 figure assumes an average of 2 hours per use, also at $4/hour.)

Implicit Value

• $60 per open hour (partly a standin for in-house use and the many uses of library as place–arguably, this figure should be much higher).
• $5 per visit (also partly a standin for the above).

Right now, it looks as though the median is a little more less than 5 and the mean is very close to the median (which is a good thing)–and EV is anywhere from two to three times as much as IV overall (about 2 for median, more than 3 for mean).

This information may or may not help late comments.

And no, I still haven’t made up my mind. The three or four additional hours spent yesterday in checking sources I hadn’t previously encountered, and the half-hour redoing overall numbers, don’t matter much in the overall scheme of things–they’re sunk costs. If this wouldn’t be valuable to libraries and the library community, I won’t do it.

Strikeouts and changes, Monday, May 14, 2012

As I was going over the various comments, asking for help with a good title for this study (from the Library Society of the World, and I’ve received some excellent ideas), and checking one item for interest (namely: how often is “actual PC use” a larger figure than “potential PC use”), I realized that there was one fundamental error in my ratios–it became fairly obvious when one multibranch library had more than $2 billion in PC use.

Namely, the original formula only works for central libraries with no branches. For multibranch libraries, it overstates the availability of PCs by a factor equal to the number of branches. That is: If a three-outlet library (central and two branches) has 200 PCs in central library (open 70 hours per week) and 100 each in the two branches (each open 50 hours per week), the original formula yields $2.66 * 400 * 170, or $180,880–and assumes that there are 400 PCs available 170 hours per week. (I would have discovered this error as soon as I started playing with the spreadsheet for the first chapter: It would be really obvious that something was wrong.)

The new formula is the best I can do, and it somewhat understates availability for libraries in which Central has many more PCs and is open many more hours than branches. To wit, it divides hours per week by the number of outlets–so, in the three-outlet case, the formula is $2.666 * 400 * 56.7, or $60,293.

If that seems like a big difference, consider a library with 89 outlets, open a total of 242,424 hours and with a total of 3,609 PCs: The original formula overstates the availability of PCs by close to 88 times. (Yes, there is such a library. As it happens, once the correct formula is applied, the two possible PC use benefit numbers–that is, $8 times reported PC uses and $2.66 times PCs times average hours–are very similar for that library.)

This change reduces the median ratio to 5.00 for 9,102 libraries or 4.88 for the 8,535 libraries included in most of the analysis (excluding 415 “libraries” with less than one quarter of a librarian, 152 libraries with less than $5 per capita funding, and 27 libraries with more than $300 per capita funding). Notably, the correlation between per capita expenditures and per capita benefits is now 0.63, which is a very strong correlation–stronger than it was with the erroneous calculation. It also means that circulation is The Big Number, representing 71% of direct benefits.

Does all this sound as though I’m almost certainly going ahead? That’s true, based on the whole set of comments received here and directly via email. And my thanks to all who commented. Look for an announcement, significantly before ALA Annual if all goes well–and probably in the next Cites & Insights.

I need instant feedback on this one–by Wednesday, May 9, if at all possible. A quick comment here or email to waltcrawford at gmail.com will do.

The idea

When I was finishing the Public Library Closures study, I remembered back to many years ago when I was doing state library conference keynotes with some regularity. For several of them, I did snapshots of the public libraries in the state (at the time, using state databases), looking at per-capita expenditures and circulation. I found that, with very few exceptions, “libraries that do a lot do a lot”–well-funded libraries had higher circulation per capita than poorly-funded libraries, to the point that they were at least as good bargains.

I wondered whether a slightly more sophisticated calculation would be useful to libraries and library groups in telling the positive story I believe public libraries should be telling: That is, it’s not about forestalling closure, it’s about providing the resources so libraries can enrich and enhance communities. And, with very few exceptions, public libraries are demonstrably good stewards of additional resources.

The status

I’ve taken the 2009 IMLS figures (the most recent available) and done two versions of a master spreadsheet–both using eight reported factors to determine direct value (countable events that are clearly valuable to community members) and indirect value (countables that provide a less clearly direct value to the community), calculating total operating expenses per capita, and preparing a Value Ratio: value per capita divided by expense per capita (with two sub-ratios for direct and indirect value).

One spreadsheet includes 8,936 libraries–excluding those that didn’t directly report expenses, hours, or circulation. It does include imputed figures for items other than expenses, hours and circulation. (There are some 300 libraries–mostly very small, quite a few not in the 51 states + DC, that just don’t report enough information for inclusion.)

The other begins with the 8,936, but moves 524 of them to a separate Outlier page based on one or more of these conditions:

• Less than one-quarter FTE librarian or total staff, or imputed staff levels rather than reported staff levels (350 libraries)
• Less than $5 per capita expenses (147 libraries)
• $300 or more per capita expenses (27 libraries))

That leaves 8,412 libraries. (Most of the 524 are small: While that’s 6% of the libraries, it includes only 1.8% of the population served–the remaining 8,412 include 293.7 million people in service areas, as compared to 5.3 million served by outliers.)

Also, these tables were cleaned up to zero out all numbers not directly reported by libraries–all imputed numbers became zeros.

There’s a strong correlation between expenses per capita and value per capita (>.6) for the 8,412 libraries. Libraries that are funded better generally provide more services, and–up to a point–it doesn’t seem to involve diminishing returns.

The plan

Here’s where I need immediate feedback: Is it a waste of time to break this down into a detailed set of charts and percentiles, using four different axes to look at subsets, yielding a reasonably compact book that I’d probably sell for $60/copy (and probably issue in a new version, with refinements, a few weeks after 2010 IMLS databases emerge)?

That is: Would a fair number of state libraries and possibly libraries find this analysis worthwhile (and possibly library schools), or would it be ignored or, worse, resented (as some folks seem to resent my finding that public libraries aren’t actually shutting down all over the place)?

The four axes or, if you will, chapters, following an overall look:

• Clumps of libraries by LSA size (using the 10 HAPLR divisions)
• Clumps of libraries by expense/budget ranges
• Clumps of libraries by per capita expense ranges
• State-by-state analyses (one clump for states with few libraries, probably three by broad size categories for states with many libraries)

For each clump, as for the overall figures, I’d provide correlations as appropriate, plus mean, median, and percentile levels in two ways–the 90th, 80th, 70th, etc. percentiles, but also the percentage of libraries exceeding certain value ratio set points.

(The overall value ratio for all 8,412 libraries is 4.59–that is, $4.59 in value for each $1 in expenses, including zeroing out all imputed numbers. Including the imputed numbers and the outlying libraries changes this to 4.62, a fairly trivial change. As it happens, the 4.59 is almost equally split between direct and indirect value.)

If you’re thinking either HAPLR or the LJ Star Libraries, there are similarities and differences.

Similarities: As with both of those, it’s based on nothing more than the IMLS database and a set of calculations.

Differences: It’s looking only at patterns, not “stars” or “top X.” In fact, I’ve removed library names from the primary spreadsheet, so I’m not even tempted to consider the library names themselves. (Yes, I can get back to the library name, but it’s a two-step process.) And it’s looking at more factors than LJ, although fewer than HAPLR.

Mostly, though, it’s not about naming names. It’s about showing value in general and providing appropriate benchmarks/comparisons.

Prepare or abandon?

I have the spreadsheet. Do I just say “that’s interesting” and drop it, or does it make sense to prepare the results in a manner that libraries/library groups might find useful?

Your feedback, please–and soon! (If I do this, the 2009 version will probably be ready by ALA Annual, which I won’t be attending.)

On April 27, I posted a mystery graph with four data points: “a real-world graph, representing honest information about a current situation.” I asked some questions based on the graph.

I got one guess, from Michael Golrick, and it was an excellent set of estimates based only on the information available in the graph.

I said I’d provide more information later, and so I shall. But not, just yet, a lot more information–although what I provide here just might be enough to give away the mystery.

More data points

Here’s the same real-world graph–but with nine additional data points added preceding the four in the previous graph. For consistency, I’ve numbered the new points 0 through -8.

At this point, asking for guesses as to data points 5, 6, 7, and 8 may seem absurd…as may asking when it will hit 100.

But I’ll take whatever comments you have, for about another week. Although this may be enough to note that even legitimate subsets of data may be wildly misleading…

I should update one item in the new Cites & Insights.

On page one, I say:

That’s a simple story: Contributions for 2012 total $0.

No longer true. I’ve received a $25 contribution for which I’m grateful.

Also, one print copy of Library 2.0: A Cites & Insights Reader was ordered in the past week, and two PDF copies were ordered earlier in April. I suppose I should count $4 of each order (the amount I get) as contributions toward C&I. Grateful to see somebody found it worth ordering, at least.

Thanks!

Here’s a real-world graph, representing honest information about a current situation.

And here’s the fun part:

• What would you expect value #5 to be?
• What about #6 or #7 or #8?
• At what point will the value pass 100?

The real-world answers and probability in another week or two, I think.

Cites & Insights 12:4 (May 2012) is now available for downloading at http://citesandinsights.info/civ12i4.pdf

The issue is 44 pages long. It is also available in a 6×9″ single-column version, optimized for viewing on edevices (and idevices bigger than phones) and available at http://citesandinsights.info/civ12i4on.pdf. That version (exactly the same text, but somewhat cruder appearance) is 82 pages long; if you plan to print, please download the regular version!

The issue includes the following (each essay also available as an HTML separate, noting that the single graph in the second section may not appear properly):

The Front  (pp. 1-2)

Breaking down The Middle: why there won’ be a long series of wholly miscellaneous sections with that heading. Also some notes on the reality since I took action based on reader polls (including the truth about people’s willingness, so far, to pay the lower suggested donations).

Libraries: Public Library Closures 2 (pp. 2-14)

Investigating 1998-2009. Another original research piece, this one involving a lot more research, reducing the number of apparently-closed (based on IMLS changes) public libraries over the last 12 years from 785 to…well, read the story. Includes a proud admission of error, a case where I’m delighted my original guess was way off base.

The Middle: Futurism (pp. 14-33)

A roundup of trends and other bits of futurism–but really the first half of a two-part roundup (the second half, Forecasts, probably in the next issue, deals with short-term assertions, the kind that can be checked readily).

Social Networks: The Social Network Scene, part 3 (pp. 33-44)

Completing the catch-up effort on social networking items that don’t fit into a subgroup. Some fun stuff.

The context isn’t that important, but that was recently noted as the RAM and hard disk basis for a particular database.

For some reason, it struck me two ways:

Today, that isn’t all that much

Checking Fry’s for PC-level prices, for name-brand equipment, I see that you could get 314GB of high-speed name-brand RAM (actually 320GB, since it’s  8GB cards) for $1,600 (40 cards, each $40)…and 20TB of internal 7200RPM hard disks for $1,090. If you wanted solid-state storage, it would cost a lot more (not surprisingly): $27,300 (at $350 each for 256GB SSD modules).

So figure $2,700 for 314GB RAM and 20TB storage. Oh, plus a modest amount for the computers to hold the RAM, the RAID enclosures (and extra drives–let’s add another $500 for 50% redundancy)…maybe, what, $10K altogether? Of course, that’s PC-level equipment, but still…

And it wouldn’t take up that much space.

Just 24 years ago, that would have been essentially impossible

Looking back at 1988 prices, I find $63/megabyte for RAM (but on three megabyte cards, so you’d need a bunch of cards, so figure $5.12 million for the RAM (to say nothing of what you’d need to mount 100,000 cards).

Hard disks? A 2008 PC World story claims that a good price for PC-level hard disks in 1988 was $8,755 (in 2008 dollars: figure $4,990 in 1988 dollars) for a 150MB drive. That might be true, but that’s because 150MB was a huge disk for 1988 PCs. More realistically, the Seagate 251 offered 40MB for $400.

You’d need a mere half million of those Seagate drives (which sure didn’t spin at any 7200RPM!) for 20TB total capacity–and you’d spend $200 million to get there.

Let’s say $206 million total.

Consider the ratios

RAM prices pretty much follow Moore’s Law, since they’re integrated circuits. So the price for 314GB in 1988 was 3200 times what it is in 2012. (Ignoring inflation…let’s just do that for now.)

3200:1–a pretty impressive ratio!

Except that hard disk development has consistently been faster than Moore’s Law. Even with today’s shortage of hard disks (those 2012 prices are higher than they should be, thanks to weather-related issues), the price for 20TB in 1988 was 183,486 times what it is in 2012–or, including 50% more storage in 2012 for RAID reliability, call it 125,000.

125,000:1–now that’s an impressive ratio!

[Want solid-state storage instead? Figure about $27,300 in 2012--a lot more than $1,090 or $1,600 with 50% overage. Which suggests that the real Moore's Law change should be about 7300:1, not 3200:1.]

Still, 125,000 is impressively more than 7,300.

Ignoring…

Ignoring the much faster performance of those 2012 hard disks, each of which has a RAM cache almost as large as the Seagate 1988 disk (32MB).

Ignoring the much faster performance of that 2012 RAM.

Ignoring the reality: The system mentioned is certainly not running on PC-level equipment, although my understanding is that Google, at least, does use vast arrays of PC-level hard disks (my understanding could be wrong). It’s not realistic to have that much RAM on a PC for physical reasons, for example…

Ignoring the limits: Well, actually, the only limit even in PC terms is that Windows 7 [Ultimate, 64-bit version] can “only” address 192GB of RAM. (The limit for hard disks is apparently 256TB, so that’s not an issue…)

Background

I was finishing up the draft of one (long) essay for the next Cites & Insights, looking at posts about the future (but not one/two-year forecasts: that’s the second half), and got to a commentary by Jason Scott at ASCII, his weblog: Dated November 10, 2010, entitled “Your Roger Corman Future.”

You may want to read the whole thing. It’s 2,500 words, plus 38 comments of varying length. Scott writes well and forcefully, even if he has one of the most unpleasant to read blog designs I’ve encountered: White text on a black background and, if you let the site specify the typeface, you get a bizarre monospaced (like Courier!) sans serif. His writing makes up for it, I think.

Scott does documentaries related to the history of computing (one on bulletin board systems, one on text adventures), along with a bunch of other things (he’s really good at saving tech-related stuff that would otherwise disappear entirely, and now works at the Internet Archive).

When he released GET LAMP, his package on text adventures (actually three documentaries “combined with a coin,” he priced it at $45, which isn’t bad for quality independent productions. And he’s grossed (not netted) six figures on it, which–as he says–makes him hot stuff where true indie filmmaking is concerned. (He’s also a whiz at Kickstarter, to be sure.)

But he got pushback…some of which resonated with what I’ve encountered, but Scott gets it in much more abhorrent ways.

All of which leads to this post.

The Premise: You’re Not Willing to Pay the Price for Some Creative Work That You Might Want to Read/See/Whatever

Here’s what all levels discussed below have in common. Somebody has created something (available in multiple copies). They, or their publisher or distributor, has set a price for copies, possibly one price for physical copies, another for digital copies.

You’re interested in that something, but you’re not willing to pay the price set by the publisher or creator.

The levels come in what you do about it.

Level 0: You don’t pay. If it’s available at the library, you borrow.

This is “level 0″ because you’re not being a jerk at all. You’re exercising your entirely valid and reasonable option of not buying something because the price is higher than you’re willing to pay.

Nothing wrong here. Nothing at all.

Oh, and if a library you have access to is willing to pay the price and you choose to borrow it from the library? Good for you.

There’s a related level, where you’re also not being a jerk in any way, but it’s a level that only affects some creators and some would-be readers/viewers:

Level 0b: The creator asks for feedback on the price and you say it’s too high

Nothing wrong there either–at least if you’re not abusive in your response and don’t make a point of suggesting a “digital price” that essentially says to the creator “your time, energy and creativity aren’t worth squat.”

So: If I say “I have a new book prepared on Topic X. It’s 200 pages long or a 1MB PDF. I think $45 for a paperback, $55 for a hardcover, and $30 for a download is about right. What do you think?”

You’re being perfectly reasonable to respond “I wouldn’t pay more than $10 for the download or $15 for the paperback” or some variant on that.

If you say “You must offer the download for free” or “A 200-page paperback costs $8.50 to produce through Lulu, so $9 is the most you should charge” -well, now you’re starting to be a jerk. You’re explicitly saying that my (or Scott’s) work is not worth anything.

But let’s move on:

Level 1: You post public messages asserting that my price is outrageous and that only a price directly related to the cost of producing a single copy is reasonable (e.g., $0 or so for downloads)…or, for works involving a publisher, you blame the author for the price set by the publisher.

This assumes that I didn’t say “How much should I charge for this?” It’s not the same as saying “This might be interesting, but I’m not willing to pay $X.” it’s saying “It’s wrong for the creator to charge enough to yield any net revenue for his or her work”–perhaps not in those words, but in effect.

You’re being somewhat of a jerk. You’re telling the creator that creativity is worthless.

I’ve had that happen. You learn to live with it pretty quickly.

[Perhaps at this same level: You're asked how much you would pay for something. You (several of you) say "I'd pay X." The creator sets the (suggested) price at X. Nobody pays that amount. Not that that would ever happen...]

Level 2: You post negative reviews about the work, even though you haven’t read or seen it, based entirely on the price (or on assumptions about the work that you haven’t checked).

Now you’re being a major jerk: You’re trying to discourage other people from paying for creative work, since you know (or should know) that people look at star averages sometimes without actually reading the reviews. “Geez, the only review is one-star: It must be crap.”

I was looking up replacement string reels for my electric edger, to make sure I had the right part and approximate price–after two years’ use, it finally ran out of “string.” One site had three reviews, all of them highly negative. Why? In two cases, because the person purchased the wrong thing, and therefore it was a bad, bad thing. The third one was just mysterious.

Need I say Open Access: What You Need to Know Now–where a science blogger assailed the book because he/she assumed ALA had commissioned the report and, therefore, should release it for free (you know, since every scientific organization releases all the work appearing under the organization’s imprimatur absolutely for free, like the American Chemical Society), and a “reviewer” (possibly the same person) wrote a one-star “review” at Amazon that was based on a price I had no control over and an assumption that this was a “white paper” (presumably paid for in advance). (I normally wouldn’t link to Amazon, but since that’s where the review is…

This is the kind of thing that gets discouraging. And it’s the worst I’ve encountered. But not Scott: He’s been subjected to…

Level 3: You inform the creator (publicly or otherwise) that the asking price is outrageous and, therefore, you are wholly justified in looking for a pirated version, which you intend to do.

Now you’ve gone from jerk to troll (probably not the right word, but I still don’t like “pirate” for copyright infringement, even in this most blatant of cases): You’re saying “I want what you’ve done; I don’t think you deserve payment; therefore it’s ethical for me to break the law in order to acquire your work without paying you for it.”

Go read the post and comments. Scott says this sort of thing a whole lot more eloquently than I ever will.