Walt at Random

Michael Casey posted this at LibraryCrunch last night. As one of those who suggested this to him, I’ll quote the whole thing as a way of reinforcing the claim against future foolishness:

O’Reilly has taken steps to consolidate use of the term “Web 2.0”, claiming it as a service mark. This has caused several worried library folk to contact me regarding “Library 2.0” and its usage.

I first published the term “Library 2.0” in September of 2005. I have always considered the term “Library 2.0”, used alone or in combinations such as “Library 2.0 Conference”, to be in the public domain, usable by anyone, and not subject to trademark or service mark registration. I would hate to see this changed by anyone attempting to turn the term itself into a commercial venture.

It appears well-established that “Library 2.0″ is Michael Casey’s coinage. I believe his post should be strong evidence opposing any attempt by a company to register the term as a servicemark or trademark, by itself or in any generic combination such as “Library 2.0 conference.” Casey’s done the right thing here, which will come as no surprise to anyone who’s dealt with him.

This may also be a good point to remind those who believe that Walt Crawford is the foremost “anti-Library 2.0″ person around there: I’m not an anti-Library 2.0 person at all, as a reasonably careful reading of the special Cites & Insights should clarify.

I think I’ll adopt the same usage here that Peter Suber tagged me with as regards open access: I’m an independent. (Which really means largely in favor of the concepts, but choosing to continue thinking and writing about difficulties and refinements.)

Cites & Insights 6:7, May 2006 is now available.

The 22-page issue (PDF as always, but each section is available as an HTML separate from the home page) includes:

• Perspective: Books, Blogs & Style - Comments (my own and others’) about the relationship of books and blogs (and “blooks”!).
• Following Up and Feedback
• Trends, Quick Takes & Good Stuff - Five trends, two quicker takes, and two article commentaries.
• Bibs & Blather - Tweaking the sections, C&I and YBP Academia, two resources you need to be aware of, and a tentative plan for the next four issues.
• Library Access to Scholarship - Almost half the issue, but it’s been six months…
• Perspective: You Just Can’t Comprehend - Maybe off-topic. Maybe not.

I know better than to comment at The Shifted Librarian. Truly I do. It always gets me in trouble–particularly because Jenny Levine’s writing sometimes pushes my buttons, and because disagreeing with Jenny Levine is dangerous sport. But…

A while back, various bloggers were putting together various lists about all the ways libraries were driving away “techie librarians” (not the phrase all of them used). I read the lists. I have no doubt many of the complaints are valid.

Then, in this post, Jenny Levine changed the rhetoric by following a quote from a comment with this line:

How do we start the discussion about keeping our movers and shakers?

Suddenly, there was that pat phrase, the LJ Seal of Stardom, “movers and shakers.”

Maybe I overreacted.

Here’s my comment, in full:

Maybe you need to ask whether you just want to keep “movers and shakers,” the high-profile, self-promoting elite, or whether you’d also like to keep the people who make sure the innovations work properly and keep working. You know, the ones who’ll probably never be in LJ’s annual festival and might not be on the speaking tour, but who have the skills and determination to see projects through to the end. (Once in a while, a determined project person becomes higher-profile, almost by accident, and usually to their considerable astonishment, but that’s not the typical pattern.) Or are us drudges disposable?

Now, I’m sorry, but does anyone out there truly believe that “us drudges” is meant to be taken literally, as saying that anyone who isn’t a Mover and Shaker is a drudge? Sure, some of the Movers and Shakers aren’t self-promoters; that word was probably overreaction.

I won’t quote Jenny Levine’s entire response; this entry is going to be long enough as is and you can read the whole comment stream from the earlier link. Here’s a relevant portion:

Walt, interesting that you’d call yourself a “drudge,” considering how much publishing (American Libraries, books, etc.), speaking (repeated references in your blog, ALA Top Trends Panel in June, etc.), and now blogging (walt.lishot.org) you’ve done. I’m also not sure where “self-promoting elite” comes from if you’re not including yourself in that (cites & insights, etc.), and not too many drudges get invited to Microsoft’s Search Champs conference (as you were)!

I never said don’t keep a well-rounded staff; you’re obviously reading my post through your own filter. Maybe you’re not aware of them, but there are awards out there for support staff person of the year, trustee of the year, reference librarian of the year, director of the year, etc. that nicely highlight all job roles in our profession. In addition, there are plenty of “drudges” from all walks of librarianship blogging and writing journal articles, which has brought them fandom, readers, new friends, and public notice. Frankly, I’m stunned you’d discont those folks so easily. After all, even “movers and shakers” and “self-promoting elite” had to start out as unknown, young babes in the woods, too. Share with us how you went from drudge to self-promoting elite and I’m sure we’ll see that same pattern.

It’s gone on since then. I thought earlier about bringing part of the conversation over here, but thought better of it–until “Matt” made a comment that I pretty much entirely agree with, but referred to me in a manner that suggested that he thought I felt differently, that I was missing the point. So I tossed in a brief little comment about why I’d gotten embroiled in this discussion in the first place:

Matt, I’ll comment here again since you mention me. Yes, there should be progress and dialogue, respect and credit (which runs both ways). There’s a sentence in your comment that gives me pause (does not being high profile automatically mean that “the work in and of itself” is all the reward you should expect?), but never mind.

Here’s the thing: All of the various lists about how to lose techie (or whatever) librarians were going along. Fine. I might gather some of them up and comment. I might not. I thought the various lists had to do with problems affecting low-profile techies as well as high-profile techies. It was Jenny L. who specifically talked about movers and shakers, changing the tenor of the whole discussion. To reverse your comment: Those who do get a lot of fanfare and credit, the so-called movers and shakers, presumably have their rewards: Fanfare, credit, and most likely an easier time moving to a better job if they get frustrated. (In some cases, maybe those who are frustrated with their library situations just aren’t a good fit and really should be elsewhere; in other cases, probably a majority of cases, there needs to be more mutual respect, understanding, and awareness. Of all “generations” for all “generations.”)

I only got involved here because of Jenny Levine’s sudden addition of “movers and shakers” to the discussion. That simple.

Here’s Jenny Levine’s response to that comment, in full:

Walt, it’s only “simple” in the sense that you define all non-”movers and shakers” as drudges. Talk about over-simplifications….

Hopefully this word count is small enough for you. *

Sigh. I see three different questions here that bother me a lot, so much so that I’m writing this post when I should be writing about library access to scholarship:

• The easy one: Is it really possible that Jenny Levine believes that I’m sincerely labeling everyone but the official Movers and Shakers as drudges, including myself? Am I forbidden from using rhetorical contrast? Is it really necessary to be that doggedly literal? How is it possible to read that comment and believe that I’m “disconting” (or even discounting) the people I believe are overlooked because they’re not Movers and Shakers?
• The tougher one: Am I wrong in believing that Movers & Shakers get a little too much attention in the field, and that they may just possibly have less to complain about than the people who make sure the job gets carried out properly (who probably aren’t devoid of ideas either)? Is the star system really what will move libraries forward in serving their communities?
• The toughest one, I hope: Do most of you regard Cites & Insights as self-promotion, as Jenny Levine labels it?

That one’s toughest because, if you do, then I’m outta here. Or, at least, C&I is outta here.

After all, if it’s self-promotion, it’s incompetent: Speaking engagements have declined to pretty much zero, I haven’t been submitting articles or proposed columns elsewhere, and I could probably write a book every year or two with the time I take doing C&I. (As I noted in a response, I am not speaking at Top Tech Trends at ALA, since I dropped off that group more than a year ago–but, at the request of the committee, I will be moderating the presentation this summer.)

Of course, if it’s self-promotion, it also seems odd that, when I refer to it, I don’t always pound home the full title, Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large. (The only reason I haven’t dropped the last three words is because they are part of the official title and I don’t want to deal with getting a new ISSN and all that…but the type for that portion of the banner keeps getting smaller, and the “real title” doesn’t include the last three words.)

So, where do we go from here?

I’ve had a great run–never as a Mover & Shaker, but as a contributor in a number of different areas. I’ve been able to accomplish a lot more than I ever expected, mostly through keeping on keeping on. (Starting out by writing MARC for Library Use because it had to be written and nobody who was qualified to write it would touch it–so I wrote it out of sheer desperation.) And yes, I’ve even done a few dozen keynotes and a few dozen other speeches, always by invitation, never through self-promotion.

I like to think that I still contribute to the field, primarily through C&I.

But damn, there’s a lot of other stuff I could just as well be doing. All of it suiting my basically-lazy personality better, some of it more fun. If Jenny Levine is right, then maybe it’s time to hang it up.

Comments invited–here or via email [easiest: waltcrawford via gmail].

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*Footnote: The smiley face is WordPress’ doing: It auto-translates certain emoticons from text into icon. The original response has a semicolon, hyphen, right-paren.

Rochelle Hartman posted this at the LJ Tech blog, pointing to a site that tests a website for readability.

Well, what the heck…

Here are the results for W.a.r., presumably just for the home page, not the whole blog:

Reading Level Results Summary Value
Total sentences 439
Total words 4738
Average words per Sentence 10.79
Words with 1 Syllable 3131
Words with 2 Syllables 1029
Words with 3 Syllables 380
Words with 4 or more Syllables 198
Percentage of word with three or more syllables 12.20%
Average Syllables per Word 1.50
Gunning Fog Index 9.20
Flesch Reading Ease 68.73
Flesch-Kincaid Grade 6.35

So I write at either a sixth-grader’s level or that of a high school frosh. Wonderful. Well, such is the charm of a pseudo-Asimovian writing style (much of Asimov’s simplicity, none of the grace or creativity).

This doesn’t come as a great surprise. One of my columns is based on word count, and the editor and I found that I need to submit about 20% more than the stated word count in order to fill the available space: I use lots of short words. Not necessarily because I don’t know any longer ones, but if you choose to make that supposition, who am I to argue?

I’m doing some early editing on pieces of the next Cites & Insights. In “The Library Stuff” section, I have this sentence:

It’s an interesting treatment, although I wonder about the seeming inevitability of, say, journals in art and architecture going all-digital.

[If you wonder about the context--well, the issue will be out within the next two weeks.]

I do leave Word’s real-time spell check and grammar check on. Sometimes, grammar check has a really good suggested alternative.

In this case, Word gave the evil green squiggle to “all-digital” and suggested “all digital” as an alternative.

So, OK, what the heck. I changed the hyphen to a blank.

And Word gave the evil green squiggle to “all digital.”

You guessed it: The suggested fix was “all-digital.”

Who needs editors when you have advice like that?

In my post celebrating this blog’s first year I noted, “I’m trying out a new neologism, since I’m as sick of biblioblogosphere as others: any takers?” while using “biblogworld.”

I have no problem with neologisms that serve a purpose and roll pleasingly off the tongue. I can get sick of overused, trendy, or pointless neologisms pretty quickly; the same is true for neologisms that are ugly or hard to say.

In this case, a number of people had noted that they really didn’t like “biblioblogosphere,” mostly because it really doesn’t roll pleasingly off the tongue or keyboard–it’s too Germanic for most tastes. (In construction, not in derivation.) More recently, there’s the other issue–a sphere implies a center, and the world of library-related blogs has no such center.

“Biblogworld” is a non-starter, as the comments have made clear. “Library blogs” has the problem that the part of the arena that most interests me doesn’t consist of library blogs so much as blogs by “library people.” Library blogs–those run by and on behalf of specific libraries–can be enormously valuable if done right, but they really fall in a different, if related, category. And “Librarian blogs” is a little tricky, although it would allow me to investigate as an interested outsider–but it would also eliminate great blogs by other library people who don’t (or don’t yet) hold the degree. (Sorry, but as long as I’m an ALA member and nobody’s chosen to give me an honorary MLS–and boy, is the latter improbable–I’m unwilling to call myself a librarian. Drives my MLS-holding wife crazy, it does, but there it is.)

Suggestions? Some short phrase or pleasing term that encompasses the field of weblogs written by one or a small group of “library people” (as identified by themselves) and at least in part vaguely related to libraries and/or librarianship?

I can even provide a Cites & Insights hook. Yes, I do plan to do a newer, larger, different version of the “investigation” I did last year, and I’d like to have a good name for it.

Today’s Jon Carroll column in the San Francisco Chronicle is well worth reading.

I don’t think additional comment is needed (and besides, when I think about how the honorable term “Family” has been hijacked by a bunch of extremist organizations…well, I start to lose it too).

Our Saturday night DVD movie was Flight of the Phoenix–the new one with Dennis Quaid, not the 1965 original with Jimmy Stewart.

My wife doesn’t much care for flying. Amazingly, she made it through the first half hour with only the comment that “I’ll never get on an airplane again.” (Not likely to be true, but it will take a really great cruise on the other end of that flight…)

The rest of the movie? Good, compelling, not too many lapses in logic and continuity. (I don’t remember the 1965 version, so can’t compare. I added both the new and old War of the Worlds to our Netflix queue at the same time, so we can make a comparison.)

But this isn’t a movie review. We enjoyed it. You might; you might not.

We had time to watch the 41-minute “making of” featurette. We were looking forward to it: To what extent did they actually try to accomplish the key plot element, and what were filming conditions actually like (in Namibia, substituting for the Gobi desert)?

We were disappointed in the featurette, for two primary reasons:

• The studio tried too hard to make the featurette a mini-movie, with lots of dramatic music sometimes swamping the dialogue. That’s minor.
• The director, John Moore, apparently can’t say ten words without one or two of them being f*ck or f**king. This got real old real fast. Either word used appropriately is, well, appropriate. Either word used instead of having a real vocabulary is just annoying. It got to the point where we both cringed a little whenever Moore appeared on screen

Actually, John Moore generally impressed us as being a first-rate a**h*le. We’ve never seen any of his other movies. With any luck, we never will. It’s fair to say there weren’t a bunch of quotes from cast members saying what a pleasure Moore is to work with. Admittedly, the filming was done under tough conditions–but geez, Moore seems to be a real pill.

So I decide to give Business 2.0 another try. And get to the “Wheels” section of the April 2005 issue, with a review of the Mercedes-Benz CL65 AMG. And these sentences:

The CL65 AMG is, in fact, everyone’s kind of car. There is not a single aspect to the vehicle that a reasonable person could find fault with.

Bwahahah….Let’s see now:

• Fuel economy: 12mpg city, 19mpg highway. I find a lot of fault with that, since the car I drive (not a hybrid) gets better than twice that mileage in both cases. Maybe the writer’s world will never run out of fossil fuel; must be nice to live there.
• $186,520: Almost precisely 10 times what we paid two months ago for my wife’s brand-new top-of-the-line Civic EX. Enough difference to pay for 16 high-end cruises or a vacation home in many parts of the country.
• …for a two-door coupe that weighs 4654 pounds and is 196.6 inches long: A big, heavy, beast of a car with wide doors combined with rough access to the rear seat. The review doesn’t comment on turning radius, but I have my suspicions…
• The speedometer goes to 220, but the top speed is electronically limited to 155 mph. The point being, I presume, that this overpowered beast (604HP) could go at an even more absurd rate of speed if it wasn’t “locked down” to something over twice the top speed limit in the U.S.

Not mentioned in the review, of course: It’s a Mercedes-Benz, which means you’ll spend a fortune on service, given the uniformly lousy reliability ratings and high servicing costs of the brand.

I guess I’m just unreasonable. I’m not going to shame anyone else for buying this car–heck, it gets better gas mileage than a Hummer, at least–but nothing to find fault with? In your dreams.

Two little semi-related items:

A few weeks back, we were watching our weekly Saturday night DVD–a Netflix blend of indies, mainstream (non-horror, low violence, broad-ranging otherwise), whatever local critics thought well of. I don’t remember the movie; I do remember that my wife felt that the characters used the F-word so casually as to be irritating and not particularly realistic.

Last night, the picture was Human Nature (a charming and very well made little movie that I’d recommend). The F-word was used a number of times. Neither of us found it at all objectionable–because it was always contextually appropriate and what you’d expect a real person to say under the circumstances. (By the way, that’s two unusual and very good movies in a row, with an actor who links them: The Station Attendant, which we saw a week ago, is also first-rate. Peter Dinklage, the dwarf who’s the star of the latter, has a small but pivotal role in Human Nature. As usual with Dinklage, he’s very good in both.)

The other item: Reading the San Francisco Chronicle’s Book Review section today (almost entirely locally-written). Near the end was a review by Kenneth Baker, the Chron’s principal art critic, of Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, the surprise best-seller from Princeton University Press. Good review.

Except for one thing: Throughout the review, buried near the bottom of the fifth page of a serious book review section, what you saw was “bull—” and “Bull—-”.

I must say, I never thought of San Francisco as so conservative that “bullshit” was too strong a word to be used in public, particularly when it’s part of the title of a serious work. (Which is indeed about bullshit, and the extent to which it’s worse than deliberate lying).

Note that I’m fairly conservative: I won’t use the F-word on this blog or elsewhere in print. But not use bullshit? Now, that’s bullshit!

How do you spot radio & tv announcers (and others) in Northern California who haven’t been here long, particularly those who moved from Southern California (and thus can’t be spotted by accent)?

Get them to give a traffic report or just talk about traffic, routes, etc.

There’s a dead giveaway: The

For long-time locals, it’s “880″ and “101″ and “280″ and “273″ and the like.

For them Southerners, it’s “the 880″ and “the 101″ and so on.

Another post with the deep significance you’ve come to expect here.

Here are two lists of–well, let’s call them “thingies” for now. What do they not have in common?

• NISO, INCOLSA, EBSCO
• OCLC, RLG, ALA

The six terms do have some things in common:

• They all refer to entities in the library field.
• They’re all spelled with all caps.

The difference is one that seems to be fading away in English, and I think that’s a shame:

While all six are initialisms, only the first three are acronyms.

And yet you see “IBM” and “ALA” and “IEEE” and many other initialisms called “acronyms.” They’re not.

It’s not an arcane distinction. An acronym is a word formed from the first letters of a series of words. It’s automatically an initialism (that is, an abbreviation made up of the first letters of a series of words)–but it’s also a word.

The first response in Google when you enter “define acronym,” sparklist, gets it wrong: “An abbreviation formed from the initial letters of a series of words.” That’s an initialism.

The next seven would be ambiguous, except that two of them use as examples initialisms that aren’t acronyms (IEEE and LRC). Then there’s one that gets it right, but doesn’t use the word “initialism” for the broader range (using “abbreviation” instead).

Here’s the most succinct correct definition I find in Google’s lengthy list:

an abbreviation which is made up of the initial letters of a group of words, and is pronounced as a single word, for example: RAM (Random Access Memory). [a UK site that seems to have gone south]

Call me a fogey (Steven Cohen made me promise to avoid the usual qualifier with that term, at least until my next landmark birthday), but I like to retain distinctions in language. If someone tells me “ALA” is an acronym, I’d expect to hear something that would sound like one term for a deity. (OkLuk and Rilg are too silly to even contemplate as acronyms.)

Incidentally, Wikipedia’s lengthy article on acronyms and initialisms, which has been modified hundreds of times, “gets it right” in Wikipedia’s apparently-preferred non-judgmental style–that is, it says that many dictionaries, but not all, make the distinction. Oh well, I’ve always liked Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries, so I can live with descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) coverage. But I also like this distinction: I believe it’s useful.