Walt at Random

Effective immediately, and for an indefinite period (at least a month, at most until I make the books OP), you can acquire either or both of the liblog books for an insanely low price: $20 for the paperback, $10 for the PDF.

• The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 features 607 blogs by library people, with a wide range of metrics and a final chapter providing brief profiles for each blog in alphabetic order.
• But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 features 521 blogs–with slightly fewer metrics but expanded profiles, including brief subjective comments on nearly all the blogs.

If you’re wondering, my net revenue is essentially the same for print and PDF versions (about $0.03 different in one case, about $0.40 different in the other).

Note: The CreateSpace version of The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 has not changed price.

Once again, it’s a good thing: Few posts because energy spent on other things. To wit:

The first draft of The Project–that is, “Open Access: What You Need to Know,” an ALA Editions Special Report that will appear in 2011–is complete, and starting today/tomorrow I’ll do the Big Changes: Integrating a fair amount of new material (some of it from “a dozen or so” delicious entries that turn out to be, oog, 88 of them), refining organization, clarifying, aiming toward a second draft that’s probably publishable. That won’t be what I submit to the publisher, but the third (and final) draft should be mostly refinement. (Given that blog posts are “not quite first drafts” and most C&I essays are roughly 1.5th drafts, doing three drafts is unusual for me.)

The Other Project–current working title “The Way We Blog: English-Language Liblogs 2007-2010″–gets a little attention when I’m not working on the book, and got a lot during a few days while letting the first draft sit (complete) before revisiting it. Now up to 1,250 liblogs and another 1,262 excluded candidates. A few (anywhere from 5 to 20) more hours of data gathering to do, before setting it aside until it’s time to start the analysis and writing, probably after C&I resumes and the book is complete.

A couple of changes at home (OK, finally getting an HDTV after discussing it for 2-3 years) have taken up quite a bit of time, and that’s not quite done.

I’m learning a lot along the way in The Other Project, as I expanded it from “liblogs that show up in one of the typical places” to “liblogs the existence of which I can discover.” For example:

• There’s a large and extremely vigorous group of liblogs almost none of which show up in the typical places (they have their own typical places), namely kidlit and tween/teen/YA lit blogs (I’m only including ones clearly by library people–not all the others). I mean extremely vigorous. I wonder when some of these people sleep…
• I’d already apologized for an intemperate post a couple of years ago about what program is used by most libloggers. Turns out, I suspect, that the only answer is the usual one: “It depends.” For example, Blogger seems pretty clearly to be the platform of choice for many or most of these book review blogs, even while WordPress is pretty clearly the platform of choice for experienced tech, etc., liblogs. But that’s preliminary.
• A few blog templates (or individual choices) seem to go out of their way to discourage reading more than either the most recent post or the most recent handful of posts–e.g., blogs with neither archives nor “older post” controls, or blogs that show “older posts” one. post. at. a. time, with no monthly or weekly archive functions. Such is life.
• Relatively few bloggers are adopting light-text-on-dark templates (although I was astonished to see a highly-touted new WordPress template that’s exactly that)…but there are some, and one or two that use the even worse black-text-on-dark or purple-text-on-black template, or something other that actively resists reading. I usually take the hint.

So there’s an update, such as it is. Now, off to make sense of those 88 items tagged “OA” in delicious. I would have sworn it was only a dozen or so…

Oh, by the way: Lulu’s summer free delivery sale ends either today or tomorrow.

The good news: I’ve started in on The New Project (a fast-turnaround, relatively brief book for a real library publisher, on a topic I’m quite comfortable with–more later). First of six chapters has a good rough draft in place. Second of six chapters has the first half of a very good rough draft, and I expect to do the second half tomorrow.

The odd news: I haven’t entirely set aside the Liblog Project (here’s the most recent post, which links to the others). It was the kind of thing I could work on after mowing the lawn in 88F weather (which was too tiring to focus on real writing) and in logical pauses during the writing. Here’s what’s happened:

• I decided to change the boundaries for the “deep look” so that it includes blogs with GPR of 3 (of which there were apparently 83, but really 81) and, after looking at them more, blogs with only one post during March-May 2010 (of which there were 67). So I’ve added the comment counts and length totals for 2010 and, where not already there, earlier post counts, comment counts and length totals for March-May 2007, 2008 and 2009 as appropriate.
• While doing that, I started cutting-and-pasting blogrolls that appeared to be library-oriented and consisted only of blog links (there’s a new breed of blogroll that includes the latest headline and date for each blog; WAY too much work to strip down to links, and glancing at most of them says all or nearly all are already in the study).
• So far, 22 of the 148 blogs had usable blogrolls (that weren’t obviously all repeats). The list of unsorted, unchecked candidates is 543 blogs. After Chapter 2 is done (and the Wednesday hike, and other stuff, and maybe Chapter 3), I’ll do the sort/dedupe/check step and, assuming anything’s left, check the remaining candidates. If I get more than, say, 4 or 5 new-to-me liblogs out of that process, I might continue picking up blogrolls. If not, not.

I also realized that I really have four groups of liblogs and that some portions of the analysis and narrative ought to treat them as four separate groups, not just two groups. As things stand, the four groups–which don’t include the 720 “not liblogs” that will be treated summarily–look like this:

• Group 1: Fairly active and fairly visible blogs. Liblogs with a Google Page Rank of 4 or higher that have at least three posts between March 1 and May 31, 2010. So far, there are 394 of those.
• Group 2: Less active or less visible blogs. Liblogs with Google Page Rank 3 or that had only one or two posts during the quarter. So far, there are 156 of those. The combination of Groups 1 and 2 constitutes the Deep Look pool, 550 liblogs in total. (So the comment somebody made that “there seem to be around 500 active liblogs” seems to be right enough for jazz…)
• Group 3: Probably alive but relatively inactive or invisible. Basically, these are all the liblogs that don’t qualify for the Deep Look but that seem to still be around. That includes active blogs with Google Page Rank lower than 3, blogs with no posts during the quarter but at least one post since December 1, 2009, and blogs with no posts during the half-year between December 1 and May 31, but with at least one post since May 31, 2010. There are 210 of these.
• Group 4: Canceled or deeply moribund. (Canceled blogs only appear here if they didn’t qualify for Group 1 or Group 2: A liblog that’s explicitly canceled during or after March 1-May 31 is considered active for that quarter. There are a small handful of those.) These are blogs with either explicit cancellations prior to March 1, 2010 or no sign of activity for at least seven or eight months (that is, nothing since November 2009, given that testing was done in late July and early August 2010). There are 310 of these–and that doesn’t include, to be sure, a few hundred blogs that have disappeared entirely or gone behind firewalls.

I may be almost done with the data gathering. Data analysis and writing up an interesting narrative–and I think there will be lots of interesting things out of this very broad look–will come, well, when it comes.

Now, back to the book project…

As for Cites & Insights, where I’m still apparently on a writing break: There will certainly be a September 2010 issue. Whether it will appear in late August or early September: Still unknown. Whether it will be new material or a large chunk of But Still They Blog: Still unknown.

[Whether even the tiny trip we were planning this month will happen: Still unknown. That's a whole different can of worms. Meanwhile, I think we're now safely above 95% electric generation for the year, since the total from PG&E is now down below 150kWh and the photovoltaic system has generated considerably more than 3,000 kWh...even though, thanks partly to a neighboring palm tree that keeps feeding lots of pollen to our cars and to the panels, we never did reach 18kWh per day.]

Another “not really a book review”–I can’t resist this time, because I liked the subject matter so much during its brief existence.

To wit, The Industry Standard–a weekly magazine devoted to “the internet economy” that lasted about three years, from April 1998 through August 2001. It was well-written, much more skeptical than most magazines and trade papers related to dotcoms…and it went under rapidly and dramatically.

In my semi-random library borrowing, I sometimes turn to the 330-340 section to read about interesting or alarming business stories. Thus it was that I encountered Starving to Death on $200 Million: The Short, Absurd Life of The Industry Standard by James Ledbetter. Checked it out. Finished reading it last night.

It’s an odd and sad story. At its peak, the magazine was selling more ad pages than any other magazine and producing some thick, remarkably content-filled issues. Between September 2000 and February 2001, it even included an extra monthly issue, Grok (yes, a stupid name), devoted to a single theme each issue.

Maybe the magazine’s fate was sealed by the dotcom crash of 2001. Maybe it was corporate shenanigans. Maybe it was foolish long-term leases (including one lease for a substantial quantity of pricey New York office space that the magazine never used). Maybe it was all those things and more.

The book’s a good read, and Ledbetter’s fairly up front about his insider status (and possible lack of objectivity). He gets one simple fact surprisingly wrong for someone who moved to England and was in charge of the magazine’s foolish attempt at a “European edition” based in England–namely, he says that A4-size paper is taller in Europe than in the U.S., where it’s 8.5×11. Well, no: The standard “letter paper” in the U.S. is just that–letter paper, 8.5×11. It’s not called A4. A4 is a standard metric size paper used in most other countries; it’s taller and narrower than letter paper. What Ledbetter says is like saying that the liter is larger in Europe than in the U.S., where it’s 32oz… (yes, a liter is a little larger than a quart; no, nobody in the U.S. calls a quart a liter–and they don’t call 8.5×11″ paper “A4″ either).

That’s trivial, although a good copy editor should have caught it. I wish there was another book on the subject with a different perspective, but I don’t find one, and that’s not surprising.

Oh, one point in passing: This book is seven years old and only held by 240+ libraries on Worldcat.org. I could see some libraries weeding it because, you know, it’s old news. For larger libraries, I think that’s a shame–and I was saddened by the Awful Library Books blog naming Megatrends as a book that should be weeded. In that case, at least for larger libraries, weeding old futurist books full of bad projections by Gurus is a great way to help assure that Gurus will never be called to task: Their old bad projections simply disappear. I love reading the old projections; it helps provide insight into the quality of current work. I’d hate it if the public libraries I use made a practice of weeding such books simply because they’re old. (Yes, I know weeding has to happen in most public libraries. I just hate to see it being at the expense of being able to follow contemporary history.)

Back in April, I talked about a production problem with two books (family history) my wife was publishing through Lulu. Namely, the two 8.5×11″ books had warped covers–warped enough, in the first shipment, that she wasn’t ready to use them.

What I mean by “warped”: If you lay the books flat on a table or desk and look at the short side, you’d see two curves up from the edge of the table–one curve on the 6″ side of a 6×9 book, but most of those curves were so small as to be unnoticeable.

At the time, as recounted in that post, several things became clear:

• Lulu pays attention to customer concerns. It took a few days, but they not only sent us replacement copies at no cost (also with a little warp, but not enough to be terrible–and that small warp goes away after a week or two), they ordered copies (at their cost) from two different U.S. printers and a UK printer to investigate the situation further. (They sent us these copies after they investigated.)
• In the end, Lulu concluded that some warp was unavoidable–and that the paper stock for the books themselves was within normal parameters.
• The one shipment may have been an anomaly–possibly the printer shrinkwrapped the six copies too soon after they were bound and shrinkwrapped them too tightly. In that one case, the warps–while lessened–are still there.

But a natural question came to mind:

Is it just Lulu?

And I had the perfect opportunity to explore that question–with ALA Annual on the horizon.

So, in DC, while going through the exhibits, I made a point of looking for trade paperbacks produced with that kind of cover (10pt./85lb. coated gloss full-color) and, if feasible, laying them down and seeing if there was warpage. Better yet, I might spot some stacks of identical books.

And I got my answer.

No. It’s a characteristic of the cover stock and process

The “aha” moment came when I saw a small stack of 8.5×11 trade paperbacks at a major publisher’s booth…with exactly the same double-warp pattern, made more obvious by the stack of books.

Trying out both 6×9 and 8.5×11 trade paperbacks (mass-market paperbacks are smaller and typically use a different cover stock) with that kind of coated, glossy, 10pt./85lb-90lb. stock, I saw the warp (single for 6×9, double for 8.5×11) repeatedly. Rarely so bad as to be noticeable unless you were looking for it, but in a couple of cases it was as bad as the shipment we rejected.

Conclusion

Lulu’s one-off production process works as well as most trade paperback printing processes. The body paper is better than a lot of trade paperbacks and as good as any I’ve seen, the printing (high-speed laser) is what it is (as good as offset for text, maybe not quite as good for photos), the cover color reproduction is excellent–and the cover stock is what it is.

I’m reassured. As to the warped books, well, you let them lie flat for a while. Weighting them down doesn’t seem to make much difference.

There’s the other cover problem that shows up with this kind of cover stock once in a while, and I’ve seen that much more often in “bookstore books” than in PoD books: The flyaway covers, where the top right cover warps out from the book itself. But then, I’ve seen that with almost any cover stock.

Oh, there is one way to absolutely avoid the warpage problem. My wife decided she needed a couple of hardbound copies of each book (to give to local history museums, who indicated they wanted them). Lulu can do that–for 8.5×11, by shrinking the body PDF just slightly (since the body paper is 8×10.5, with the covers 8.5×11). The original cover is reproduced in full cover on the case binding. The results were first-rate. Of course, that does add about $10 production cost and a week to production time, but the results are quite nice. (It’s not a sewn binding, to be sure; it’s perfect-bound to a cloth strip attached to the case.)

And, to repeat, it takes them a few days, but Lulu does respond to customer/creator problems.

“Making the case” for what, exactly? Well, really, for “semi-” still being part of my self-description as semi-retired. Oh, and for going to ALA conferences (or any library conferences) after this year, as part of staying involved in the field–which, for reasons of real economics and household harmony, needs to involve some appropriate earned income.

To recap:

• Making the Case 1 notes the solution I’d find most desirable–finding ongoing sponsorship for Cites & Insights or (and) Walt at Random.
• Making the Case 2 starts with a surprise (the shutdown of the Library Leadership Network) and considers the possibility of a new site providing diverse essays that can inform library leaders (and managers) and possibly generate conversations on relevant topics.
• Making the Case 2.5 explains some fine points (that 1 and 2 aren’t either/or, that finding a home for much of the LLN content is relatively easy but also less interesting, etc.)

I think this is the last of this post series, both because it’s getting close to ALA Annual (the ideal spot to discuss these possibilities) and because I’d rather get back to other topics.

Research

I’d love to be involved with some group involved in real-world library research, and I believe I’ve demonstrated my ability to carry out focused, transparent projects.

I did some of those projects on speculation, hoping that they would result in some modest amount of income either from book sales or, potentially, from speaking or other invitations. The results–not only monetary, but even having the research noticed–have ranged from mediocre to abysmal. It’s hard to justify doing any more projects except out of pure personal fascination, unless there’s some up-front sponsorship.

At this point, I don’t see how this is likely to happen. I’d love to be proved wrong.

Other improbabilities

When I was first looking for a new gig, three years ago, I did get a couple of offers–one to teach a library school course (after designing the course), one to do seminars. It’s also been suggested that I should become a consultant (hmm: suggest that someone out of work become a consultant–what a novel idea!)

Why haven’t I followed up on these possibilities? Turns out John Scalzi has a post today at Whatever that speaks to this situation: “The Self-Awareness of Incompetence (or Lack Thereof).” An excerpt:

I think there’s a critical intersection between being willing to try things you’re not good at (or good at yet) to learn and experience them — and thus accepting that there’s an interim period of incompetence in the area while one gets up to speed — and the self knowledge (or lack thereof) that no matter how much effort you put into something, you won’t ever reach a sufficient level of competence. Or in shorter words, there’s a cross street between “try something new” and “give it up, already,” and I think it’s interesting to find out, when people get to that particular curb, if they actually know where they’re standing.

I’ve done loads of the former–starting with computer programming and going on from there–with, usually, reasonably good results. I’m willing to continue.

But…

• I really don’t believe I’d be more than mediocre as an adjunct faculty member at a library school, and I do believe that if LIS students are to be taught by non-MLIS holders, those non-MLIS holders should be a whole lot better than mediocre.
• I know I’m not enough of a self-promoter to be a successful consultant, and the question “Consult about what, exactly?” keeps coming back to haunt me. I’m not closing this off entirely, but it’s clearly not My Future.
• As for webinars, quite apart from the ungainly name…well, not impossible, but it appears that I’m no longer in demand as a speaker (possibly for good reasons), and I think I’d be even less spectacular as a webinar presenter.

So, well, I haven’t followed up on these. Maybe that’s wrong.

Otherwise, there are always columns, articles and books. I have one book proposal (yes, with somebody else publishing it) in the works now. I suspect I’ll have one or two others along the way, although the sheer multitude of books in the field (ten at a time?) gives me pause. (One topic that’s been near & dear for many, many years might be ripe for book treatment…) Always possible–columns and articles. But with all of those, maybe books more than others, the issues of compensation and value add come into play. That is: I don’t want to write books that I don’t believe add substantial value…and most books and articles don’t really yield much of a revenue stream. They’ll be part of it, I think, but not a major part. (Psst: Thanks to the two people or institutions who’ve purchased But Still They Blog this month!)

And I think that’s it for the cluster.

Availability during ALA: Most any time Friday from noon to 6 or so, any time Saturday (period, so far), and Sunday from, say, 2 p.m. through dinner time. But contact me beforehand, ‘cuz I still travel without a netbook or notebook or iPad or iTouch or…  waltcrawford at gmail dot com.

I enjoy reading old (10yrs or more) futurism books, but business books can be just as much fun, in an odd sort of way.

Take, for instance, the big fat book (584 pages with relatively small margins–the text block is 28 picas wide and 47 picas high, as compared to the 26×42 pica block I typically use for a 6×9 book) I just finished reading… Infinite Loop by Michael S. Malone. Published March 1999. For those who don’t know the subject from the title, here’s the subtitle: “How Apple, the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane.”

It appears to be a near-postmortem for Apple, as Malone seems convinced that Apple would never have any significance as a company after 1999, if it survived at all. Indeed, he psychoanalyzes the company in a manner that leads him to conclude…well, here’s the quote:

Before and after everything, companies are about character… Good companies have strong characters. Great companies have heroic characters.

Of all the great companies of recent memory, there is only one that seemed to have no character, but only an attitude, a style, a collection of mannerisms…

This was Apple Computer Inc…

Malone, a long-time Silicon Valley reporter, seems convinced that Apple’s downfall was fated from the start.

Downfall? What downfall?

That’s a reasonable question, particularly from a 2010 perspective. In fiscal 1999, Apple was roughly a $6 billion company. In fiscal 2009, it was a $36 billion company–and the last decade had relatively low inflation: If Apple had just kept up with inflation (tough to do, since PC prices deflate), it would have been a $7.65 billion company in 2009. In other words, accounting for inflation, Apple had more than 4.5 times the sales in 2009 that it did in 1999.

Note: The first half of FY2010 is even better–$29 billion in sales–but since that includes the holiday season, I’m unwilling to project those figures for a year. In any case, Apple doesn’t seem to be falling apart this year either.

In other words, in some pretty fundamental ways, Malone got it wrong–perhaps because he tried to hard to get inside people’s minds.

It’s a fascinating read, all the more so when you know the ending is seriously flawed. There are no footnotes, but he cites a lot of sources. I’m inclined to suggest there were no editors, either, but that may be unfair.

On the other hand…

You could say, with some legitimacy, that Apple as a computer company isn’t all that important any more, although I can almost hear the howls of outrage from fanboys and other dedicated users. Malone makes much of the declining market share for Apple, how being at 5% or less (and being incompatible with the rest of the market) makes it hard to take them seriously.

In 2009, Apple sold about 10.4 million computers (including 3.2 million desktops). That’s about 4% of the worldwide market for 2009. If the increased sales for the first half of FY2010 continue, Apple would sell about 12.6 million computers–of about 300 million projected to be sold worldwide. Again, somewhere between 4% and 5%.

Apple is mostly not a computer company any more. It’s a telephone and home entertainment/consumer electronics company that also makes computers. Unfair? For FY2009, computer sales represented a little over a third of Apple’s total sales. For the first half of FY2010, computer sales are a little over a quarter of Apple’s total sales. iPhone revenues exceed total Mac revenues. By quite a bit.

If you wanted to defend Malone, you could say that he just missed this future transformation, that Pixar’s Jobs could turn Apple into an enormously successful entertainment and phone company, with a decent sideline of computers.

But I don’t know that I much want to defend Malone… I think he just got it wrong.

An equal generosity of spirit toward all

I’ve seen a few reviews that say Malone is biased against Apple, or more particularly, against Jobs.

I don’t see that.

Oh, sure, Malone speaks badly of Jobs (and Amelio, and Sculley, and Spindler, and for that matter Wozniak–albeit in very different ways). But he also speaks very badly of Ellison, Gates, and most everybody else (except for Hewlett, Packard and Moore). He clearly loved Apple products for many years–if anything, his attitude seems that of a disappointed fan more than anything else. He pretty much despises IBM, Microsoft and the rest…

I can’t find the quote again, but there’s an interesting point at which Malone says Jobs wanted to save the world if he could rule it–where Gates just wanted to own the world. It’s interesting to see who is actually setting about to save the world…

In the end, I count this as an interesting (if seriously flawed) book that shouldn’t be taken too seriously. At least it lacks the idolatry of some Apple-related books–but I’m not sure replacing idolatry with mean-spirited corporate psychoanalysis is a big improvement.

And is it really plausible that all these Apple higher-ups (and others) were doing so much sobbing all the time? Really? I was working in Silicon Valley through most of the period covered here (1979 and on), although not really within the PC field, and I don’t remember it as an unusually teary place. But from this account, people were bursting into tears all over the place. I must have missed something.

Three items not really worth full posts–two book-related, one DVD-related:

La misma luna

Last Saturday, our weekly movie night, we watched La misma luna or “Under the Same Moon.” Unless you’re familiar with Mexican cinema, the only actor you’re likely to recognize is America Ferrera, and she’s only in it for about five minutes.

The plot, basically: A young mother is working in LA to send money to her son…in Mexico, staying with his grandmother…to make his life better. She’s undocumented. They talk once a week, when she calls him, always from the same pay phone to the same pay phone (she describes the corner at which the pay phone stands)–and they’re both “under the same moon” even though they’re in different countries.

Grandmother dies, son can’t stand being apart from mother, takes action to fix it. He’s nine years old.

I won’t say more than that. It’s excellent–well made, well acted. It’s also subtitled (not unreasonably), including the “making of” featurette (except when Ferrera is speaking). The only language option is Spanish. That’s only reasonable. We enjoyed it very much. No, I didn’t regard it as political propaganda, but then I don’t view the world as being entirely political statements.

Reservation Blues

On my long-term semi-random walk through the fiction available at Livermore Public Library (each time I go, I get three books: One nonfiction but with a narrative arc; one genre fiction, alternating between mystery and science fiction, and one fiction that’s not in a genre section and looks interesting), I picked up Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie–who I’d heard of but never read.

I can’t say I read it in a single sitting. I can say that, if the rest of life had allowed, I might have done so–and I did read it in two days, which is highly unusual.

Don’t know whether I’d recommend it to others, but I was pleasantly surprised. (OK, so the rest of you, being more up on important literature than I am, have already read this–after all, it’s been out for fifteen years, it won an American Book Award, etc., etc.. What can I say? I’m a couple of decades behind on most book reading.)

Anyway, on the off chance that you haven’t read it…you might enjoy it.

Open Access and Libraries

Going from the sublime to the…well, anyway, I just received my own copy of Open Access and Libraries: Essays from Cites & Insights, 2001-2009. (USPS for the win, as usual: Three days for MediaMail from North Carolina to Livermore.)

I gotta say, the cover is even brighter in real life than on the screen (go down a few posts to see the screen version, or click on the link above for that matter). It is, of course, my tribute to the two primary flavors of open access and some of the many shades of those flavors.

It’s also a thick book (191,000 words in 519 pages): the thickest I’ve done via Lulu, although not actually either the thickest book I’ve published or the one with the most pages. (Desktop Publishing for Librarians, published in 1990 by G.K. Hall, is about 0.05″ thicker as a page block–that is, exclusive of hardcover–even though it’s only 420 pages; The Online Catalog Book: Essays and Examples, published in 1992 by G.K. Hall, is 560 pages and 8.5×11 rather than 6×9, but it’s a little thinner, printed on lighter-weight paper. Hmm. As with this book, I did the typography for both of those.)

Is it a “good” book or a “worthwhile” book? I can’t say. I know the price is right if you want PDF: $0.

Catherine Pellegrino at Saint Mary’s College Library (in Notre Dame, Indiana) was weeding QA76 and weeded this book. She noted that on FriendFeed; I said “Might be interesting to read that book as early library automation history” and she sent it to me.

I finally got around to reading it. Well, reading part of it, skimming the rest. It’s from 1981. It’s by Howard Fosdick. It really doesn’t say much about library automation; it’s mostly a consideration of very basic aspects of computers–things that I really wouldn’t have thought most librarians needed to understand even in 1981. (Such as, for example, whether a language compiler is part of systems software and exactly how long it takes to read a record from a 1600bpi tape.)

And, after skimming it, I wondered: Was it really as primitive in 1981 as it seems, based on this book?

I was there

Not only was on involved in library automation in 1981, I’d already been involved in it for more than a decade. At that point, I’d been at RLG for two years; my possibly-flawed recollection is that by 1981 I’d just about finished (or fully finished) the design and programming of the product batch system supporting RLIN II, RLG’s full-fledged cataloging network system (based on SPIRES).

It strikes me that, by 1981, I didn’t really have to worry about whether or not I could use PL/I because it took a full 164K of RAM, where some less powerful languages only needed 120K. I know for sure I still spent a lot of time at that point optimizing program operation–but not, I think, at the levels suggested in this book.

OK, that’s probably not fair. RLG, and UC Berkeley before it, had much stronger computing environments than most libraries would have access to. Still…I developed the first working version of the Serials Key Word System in 1973, eight years before 1981, in PL/I (and wrote about it in my first published article, in the March 1976 Journal of Library Automation). And, you know, that Serials Key Word System used full MARC II as an input format.

Were computers still using core memory in 1981? I suppose it’s possible for mainframes; I’m certain the Datapoint multiterminal data entry system (based on a Z80 CPU with 128K RAM, developed in the mid-1970s; I wrote the time-sharing environment, but based on a highly sophisticated OS with direct database support built in) didn’t use core memory!

Not missing the good old days

Admittedly, I remember 1981 as being a little more advanced than this book seems to portray (although the author does view PL/I as the best language for library automation, which I’m pretty certain was true for the time). But that doesn’t mean I remember it with a lot of fondness.

Yes, it’s “wasteful” in some ways that today’s PCs spend 1GB+ of RAM just on the operating system–and probably most CPU cycles as well. But isn’t it wonderful that RAM and CPU power are both so cheap that we can afford to be “wasteful”? I’m guessing the 2-year-old, low-priced notebook I’m using to write this is sitting mostly idle (just opened Task Manager–yep, CPU usage is running 2% to 5% as I write this, occasionally spiking higher). And that’s fine with me. It means I can edit in high-res proportional type instead of 5×7-matrix fixed characters on an 80×25 green-on-black (or, if you’re lucky, amber-on-black) screen–and use about 1/3 the power for my whole two-screen system that the old CRT terminal used all by itself. All that waste CPU power is saving me time: Whoopee.

That Intel core 2 duo CPU in my notebook is a little underpowered by 2010 standards–only two threads and a mere 1.66GHz. By 1981 standards? Were there any mainframes with that much computing power?

And, if you really want silly-season numbers, the 1981 book devotes an appendix to the IBM 3330 Reference Card. That’s a disk drive, hot stuff for its day. The 3336 Model II disk pack had a total capacity of 200 million characters (200 megabytes). I know the drive itself was huge; I don’t know how much a pack cost, but I’m guessing it wasn’t cheap.

I also remember much later, when RLG needed to add a terabyte of disk storage (probably in the late 1990s). That procurement process was a big and expensive deal–but who could imagine adding a terabyte of disk storage to a library automation facility in 1981?

Now? I could go pick up a 2TB disk drive for about $180 if I had use for one. It would fit neatly next to my notebook. (I could probably get it cheaper than that by mail order.) Two terabytes. That’s how many 3336 Model II disk packs? Ten thousand of them, by my calculations.

I’m pleased to announce that Open Access and Libraries: Essays from Cites & Insights, 2001-2009 is now available via Lulu.

The 519-page book is available as a free PDF download or as a 6×9 trade paperback for $17.50. (If you’re wondering, I get $2.10 of that $17.50. For every three print copies published, I can buy lunch…)

I’d like to think that the cover treatment is obvious for anyone who knows much about OA. I could be wrong.

Why this book?

In short:

• I’ve stopped writing about open access within Cites & Insights for a number of reasons.
• When I asked a couple of knowledgeable people–specifically Peter Suber–whether a collection of those essays might have some minimal value, the answer was Yes.

From the time I made the draft PDF and some different trial ePub versions available (through April 26, for reasons that aren’t relevant here), the PDF has been downloaded 123 times and the epub versions have been viewed/downloaded anywhere from 71 to 290 times each. So, even with lots of ebook-oriented folks looking at those versions just for fun, I conclude that a few dozen people find enough value in this to download it.

In long–here’s the introduction to the book:

This book brings together articles (and, in a few cases, sections of articles) on open access and other aspects of library access to scholarship that appeared in Cites & Insights (citesandinsights.info/).

Articles appear exactly as they did in the original journal, modified only to fit the book’s page size and typography. No updates or corrections have been made (except for one or two typographical errors. Articles appear in strict chronological order. There is no additional commentary.

This book appears only for the record. It is not a comprehensive overview of OA during the first decade of the new millennium, and it is not even a comprehensive view of what Walt Crawford thinks about OA. It is what it is: A record of what I published about OA during that decade, quite possibly omitting some short pieces.

The first C&I article related to OA, before that name was well established in the field, appeared in May 2001. (At the time, the term was FOS—Free Online Scholarship.) The last, as I was concluding that I was no longer able to value to OA-related discussions, appeared in November 2009. Quite a few appeared during those nine years. I’ve also included one “disContent” column from EContent that’s directly on topic (that column appears as submitted, not necessarily exactly as published).

It’s possible, even likely, that some OA-related commentary within Cites & Insights doesn’t appear here—for example, predictions from Peter Suber and others would have appeared in larger Trends & Quick Takes articles, not picked up for this compilation.

Thanks to Peter Suber for agreeing that this might be a worthwhile compilation.

But There’s No Index!

For which I apologize. I had planned to include a partial index—including people, journals, article titles, but probably not topics—using Word’s indexing facilities.

It was not to be. Perhaps it’s the sheer length of this book; perhaps it’s the number of sections. Maybe there’s some obscure bug in Word2007.

Whatever the case, whenever I go beyond the first 60 pages or so, using “Mark All” and “Mark” as appropriate to flag index points (hey, Peter Suber’s name appears a few dozen times!), then save the result, then open that result…well, the result is chaos. Last time, the 519-page book suddenly turned into 1,290 pages, with multiple lines of headers from various chapters making up a huge and unchangeable page footer on each page.

If this was a project expected to yield significant income, I might prepare a separate index document—but for a book this long, that would take scores of hours. I honestly can’t justify the time for a book that’s being given away in electronic form and sold for barely more than the cost of production in print form.

If this book is useful, maybe some reader will generate an index. If not, well, again, my apologies.

Actually, I have a pretty good idea what was causing the autoindex blowups (it was a bug, but between my ears more than within the software)–but the fix would make indexing more effort than I could justify. (It has to do with indexed terms appearing within page headings…)

What’s Here?

Here’s the table of contents–noting that articles appear in strictly chronological order.

Introduction. 1

Getting Past the Arc of Enthusiasm.. 3

Scholarly Journals and Grand Solutions. 23

The Access Puzzle: Notes on Scholarly Communication. 34

The Access Puzzle (January 2003) 50

Scholarly Article Access (Formerly The Access Puzzle) 58

Open-Access Journals. 64

Sabo, SOAF, SOAN and More. 70

Getting That Article: Good News. 89

Scholarly Article Access (November 2003) 92

Scholarly Article Access (January 2004) 102

Tipping Point for the Big Deal?. 113

Library Access to Scholarship. 121

Library Access to Scholarship (June 2004) 131

The Empire Strikes Back. 140

Library Access to Scholarship (September 2004) 167

Library Access to Scholarship (November 2004) 193

Library Access to Scholarship (January 2005) 210

Library Access to Scholarship (March 2005) 221

Library Access to Scholarship (June 2005) 233

Library Access to Scholarship (November 2005) 248

Library Access to Scholarship (May 2006) 261

Thinking About Libraries and Access. 279

Pioneer OA Journals: The Arc of Enthusiasm, Five Years Later 285

Pioneer OA Journals: Preliminary Additions from DOAJ 296

Library Access to Scholarship (December 2006) 313

Open Access and Rhetorical Excess. 334

Library Access to Scholarship (July 2007) 355

PRISM: Enough Rope?. 366

Harvard & Institutional Repositories. 382

Signs Along the Way. 399

OA Controversies. 408

The Death of Journals (Film at 11) 430

Library Access to Scholarship (November 2009) 443

Closing Notes

It’s a 6×9 trade paperback because single-column serif text set on a 4″ line is just about optimal for reading long text…there’s a reason most text-oriented books (other than mass-market paperbacks, which squeeze every word possible onto each page) are 6×9 or thereabouts.

Yes, you can download the PDF and print it out, and maybe save a couple of bucks (if you can print 519 pages for less than $17.50). You won’t get the cover, and I’m afraid you’d be wasting a lot of paper on a typical 8.5×11″ printer–but it’s your choice. The paperback version is there as a convenience; I obviously don’t plan to get rich off $2.10 times an anticipated sale of one to ten print copies. Especially since I bought one copy for my own records–and that wipes out the profit on the first seven sales.

The typeface is Berkeley Oldstyle Book, which is still my preferred text face for books (and was the C&I typeface for several years).

Oh…about the ePub version:

1. I never did find a truly satisfactory conversion that didn’t cost money.
2. Lulu seems to have offed a lot of their FAQs in favor of articles that are harder to make my way through, and at this point I don’t quite understand how I’d attach an ePub version to the project.

Therefore, until further notice, I’ll leave the most recent ePub version available from this post; just click on the link. Other versions will disappear as I get around to it.

Since I posted a grump about some stuff early on in David Kaplan’s The Silicon Boys, I should close it out with a few words now that I’ve finished the book.

Maybe one word would be enough.

Meh.

Read as semi-fiction, it’s OK. Read as insight into Silicon Valley as of 1999…I’m sorry, but even pre-crash (the dotcom crash), I just don’t buy that everybody was Just In It For the Money, that there “is no soul” anymore, that it’s all just big jets and wealthy venture capitalists.

Oh, I buy that these are the people Kaplan chooses to focus on–he’s best buds with the big VCs and has no apparent interest in anybody worth less than eight digits–but taking this view for reality is about as meaningful as his incessant focus on Woodside as the, I don’t know, heart of Silicon Valley.

One thing’s very clear: He may pretend to be hard on SV players…but he’s very much on their side. It’s amusing that Larry Ellison has “tense problems” with the truth. Various other escapades and sabotage are just, you know, boys being boys. But Bill Gates–he’s EVIL!  And Microsoft’s Mountain View facility is “near the dump.” (In other words, near Shoreline Park, a beautiful facility that was originally a garbage dump…and Microsoft’s just a little further away than, well, Google.)

Speaking of Google: The book is dated 1999. Of Google, there is not one word mentioned. Yahoo is the last big story, and it’s clearly the Biggest Thing that’s Ever Going to Hit Silicon Valley.

Well, why not? In 1999, Google’s founders weren’t obscenely wealthy…and thus of no real interest to Kaplan’s predetermined storyline.

I would push at stuff like his claim that Silicon Valley had an 80% divorce rate in the late 1990s (I can’t prove that’s false, but I’m 99% certain it’s nonsense), but what’s the point. This is semi-fiction, probably very strong on details of venture capitalism and selective stories of individual excess.

As a meaningful account of Silicon Valley? Meh. Maybe there’s a reason the 2000 edition has a different publisher (one I’ve never heard of) than the 1999 edition I read.

(And I promise: I’m not going to start doing book reviews.)

…the less you trust? That’s probably not right, exactly.

I’ve probably posted about this before: The frequent case that, if you know a subject fairly well, you’ll find that articles and books about that subject are wrong, at least in some details. This isn’t a big surprise.

But when you hit something on page 25 of a 300+-page nonfiction book that’s a snide aside, and also happens to be absolutely wrong, it can either shake your confidence in the book as a whole or, better, alert you to treat it as, um, semi-non-fiction.

The book in question: The Silicon Boys by David A. Kaplan–published in 1999. I expected an amusing, interesting, perhaps revealing read about the doings in Silicon Valley just before the bust of the dotcom bubble. It became obvious very early on that Kaplan was intent on making the people of the mid-Peninsula look venal and foolish, that–at least early on–he’s more interested in money and excess than in creativity and worth. That’s OK; I can filter for that attitude.

But here’s a quote from page 25:

“But most start-ups incubate within the confines of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in flatland towns like Palo Alto, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Cupertino, Milpitas, Sunnyvale, and Mountain View (a town that has neither), the high office rents notwithstanding.”

Take out that snide little parenthetical phrase–which, as far as I can see, serves no narrative purpose other than to put down Mountain View for pretentiousness–and I’d wonder a bit about “flatland towns” (most of the places named are cities with 60,000-100,000 population, and most of them have a fair amount of topographic variety) but go right on.

But “a town that has neither”? Did this jerk ever actually get out of his car in Mountain View and look either to the west or east? No, Mountain View doesn’t contain mountains itself–which the name doesn’t imply. The name implies that Mountain View has views of mountains. Which it does. On clear days, both east and west. On less clear days, only west.

Actually, within a three-page spread, I come across other nonsense. “The mountains”–hmm, on page 24 there are mountains bordering silicon valley, but on page 25 there aren’t–”are utterly inhospitable to development, filled with ravines, covered by poison oak, prone to burn, laced with earthquake faults, and susceptible to slides.” You could change that to “Most mountain land is protected against development” and it would be more correct and more meaningful, but less–what–damning? (Earthquake faults? Yep, the only earthquake faults around here are in the mountain ranges. Sure…) And he says San Francisco “constitutes a terminus to the north,” but in fact silicon valley ends considerably south of SF (I think most people would say Redwood City is about as far north as it goes). And on page 26, “If it weren’t for maddening round-the-clock traffic jams on the main drag, Highway 101″–well, sorry, but I was taking morning flights out of both SFO and SJC in those years, and “round-the-clock traffic jams” is just plain nonsense. At 5 a.m., you could breeze through either direction.

Oh, I’ll keep reading the book–but as semi-fiction. If he’s wrong on straightforward facts, why should I assume he’s right in his claims about the people in the valley?

Note: We no longer live in silicon valley. We now live in wine country, to our surprise…and radiation-lab territory, to be sure. Yes, we can see mountains from here too, in both directions.

I’ve done several books through Lulu, most of them highlighted at the bottom of this page.

I’ve always been happy with the resulting book quality–the printing has been excellent, the covers have been great, the binding has been acceptable. (Lulu’s not responsible for the content itself: It’s a services agency, not a publisher.)

Until now.

My wife, the smart one in the household (also the actual librarian) has been working on a family history for some time–some years, that is. She brings her reference-librarian skills and writing skills to the task, and has done a great job of combining stories from various family members, additional stories through research, and solidly verified facts into a narrative–enhanced with lots of family pictures. The story grew too large for one book, so it’s now in two volumes (one for each side of the family), in each case with more than half the book made up of family group sheets (yes, she’s an Ancestry.com subscriber).

We assumed we’d use Lulu to produce the books, not anticipating any outside sales (except from members of the extended families who she doesn’t already know). We ordered test versions last fall, finding that there were some issues with how Word & Acrobat handled photos (which we could, by and large, fix–which now means the PDFs are 51MB and 150MB respectively!). The books were fine in all other respects–but my wife used them to do another pass of page-by-page, line-by-line copy editing and correction.

We did new versions a few weeks ago, this time ordering six copies of the smaller book (my wife’s aunt needed five copies and needed them now) and another test copy of the larger one. The copies arrived with some problems–the paper quality seemed lower than before (no longer bright white), the print quality was a little worse (possibly a side-effect of the paper)…but most of all, after sitting out for a few hours, flat on their backs, the books were warped–with a couple of areas curved up more than a quarter-inch from flat, and the front cover “wavy” in general. I’d never seen this before. (Both books are 8.5×11″; one’s about 240 pages, the other about 440 pages. The 240-page books were warped more than the 440-page one.)

I sent in order problem reports on both orders. After automated responses requesting them, we also sent in digital photos documenting the warping. After a while–four business days–Lulu service did respond, and said they’d replace the copies.

Which they did–this time using expedited shipping (at Lulu’s cost). The replacement copies arrived yesterday. And, well…here’s the message I sent to Lulu service. (Turns out Lulu regards these trouble incidents as closed, so I’ll have to send the message in new incidents.)

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[Service rep's name here:]

There’s good news and bad news here.

Good news: Your expedited delivery reached us yesterday–both shipments.

Further good news: The print quality is better, at least on the larger volume, and maybe on the smaller one.

Bad news: The warping is as bad, or nearly as bad, as on the previous order. There’s slight warping as soon as we tear the shrinkwrap–and within five hours sitting flat on a shelf, the books are significantly warped.

I don’t believe there’s any point in sending new copies of the books. It’s hard to believe that four separate shipments, presumably processed at four different times, all coincidentally have the same problem–unless there’s a more general problem in either manufacture or handling.

I believe Lulu needs to look into how 8.5×11 paperbacks are being handled (since, so far, that seems to be the trouble spot). Somehow, these books are coming out in a condition that causes them to take on permanent warping when received.

Note that this was *not* the case a few months ago, when we ordered the trial copies of these two books (my wife’s done a lot of copy editing since then), or when I’ve purchased copies of my own 8.5×11 books (although those books, after standing upright for some months, do develop cover warping).

We’ll have to look at these after a few days and determine whether we can go forward with opening the books for general sale, or whether we have to find another route (e.g., CreateSpace). Since my wife’s put in several years writing, researching, gathering materials and refining these books, she is–needless to say–disappointed.

I do encourage you to raise an appropriate flag within Lulu. Something is wrong with the production or handling. It needs to be fixed.

Sincerely,
Walt Crawford

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At this point, while I still generally like what Lulu does, I’m more than a little uneasy, particularly when it comes to “big” books (that is, 8.5×11 size–so far, I haven’t heard of problems with 6×9, but that size isn’t feasible given the number of photos in these books).

The one hopeful thing: The first books do seem to be flattening out just a bit, after a couple weeks. They’re still far from flat, however.

Note: If you purchase C&I books (there’s still the 10% April sale, and I see that one book has actually been purchased this month), inspect them carefully. If you find production problems, ask for replacements–and if they’re warped, they may improve over time. I don’t think the same problem will arise with 6×9 books, but I can’t be sure…

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Final update (I think), April 13, 2010: It’s now clear that Lulu support is taking this issue seriously; they’re being informative and noting explicit steps to track down the source of the problem (part of which may have been a bad shipment of paper). They’re also doing their best to make amends.

I’ll stick with previous advice:

• Lulu is a great way to get specialized/short-run/no-run books done. (In the case of my wife’s two books, the only way to get the books done with no up-front costs, I believe–CreateSpace doesn’t do 8.5×11, and even 8×10 tops out at a lower pagecount than the larger of the two books.)
• When you get a shipment from Lulu, inspect the book(s) carefully. If there are problems, let them know right away–and if the problems are visible, you might as well just attach a digital photo of the problem.
• They will respond. It may take a few days, but they will respond, and I believe they’ll do their best to resolve the situation.

Post removed as no longer relevant.

Open Access and Libraries: Essays from Cites & Insights 2001-2009 is now available as a free PDF and a $17.50 trade paperback from Lulu.

If you recall EPub, First Attempt (three whole days ago), I had tried two free options for creating an ePub ebook file from a fully-formatted book in Word form–that is, either saving it as PDF and converting it via Calibre, or saving it as Word’s “filtered HTML” and converting it via Calibre.

I wasn’t thrilled with either method.

• The ePub-from-PDF version had great-looking type, but the page headers and footers were included within the stream and there were a number of other oddities, including a useless Contents band.
• The ePub-from-HTML version (surprisingly, much larger than the ePub-from-PDF version) had a working Contents band and no extraneous page headers and footers, but the onscreen type, while clearly a rendition of the actual type used in the book, was pretty awful.

I can see that a fair number of people have looked at or downloaded the two versions. So far, I’ve had no actual feedback on how they do or don’t work either on ereaders or on ereader simulations.

Meanwhile, I realized that there was a third option: RTF.

• Here’s an ePub-from-RTF version. It’s halfway in length between the other two–bigger than the from-PDF, smaller than the from-HTML. It clearly makes no attempt at all to provide the original typeface(s). The content panel is essentially unpopulated and useless. The contents within the book itself are odd.
• On the other hand: It looks pretty good…no extraneous footers or headers and the type looks good (depending on the typeface you choose, since it’s entirely your choice.)

Whadda you think?