I was informed a few days ago that my services are no longer required as Editorial Director of the Library Leadership Network. As of April 1, 2010, I’m either fully retired or unemployed, depending on your perspective and what happens in the future. (No, this wasn’t my decision.)

I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do next, but some things are clear:

• I could really use a sponsor for Cites & Insights (or, I suppose, a whole lot more donations than I’ve gotten so far!). That’s no longer “extra money.”
• If someone knows of something (possibly very part time, definitely not more than half time, definitely not involving relocating, possibly project-oriented) that suits my peculiar set of skills as a library writer, editor, speaker and systems analyst, I’d be delighted to hear about it. (Anybody setting up a center for serious evidence-based librarianship? I’d love to do some qualitative as well as quantitative research on how library blogs are working and what’s working best, for example, but that can’t happen without explicit advance sponsorship: Selling the results is clearly not working.)
• There’s mild urgency on one point: I’m supposed to be speaking in a program at ALA Annual this year, and with a nearly complete loss of earned income, it’s a little hard to justify the costs of the conference. I need to make some decisions within the next month or so…
• Yes, I’m delighted to be semi-retired. No, we’re not going to starve, be put out of house and home, or go begging. On the other hand, “semi-” suits me; I’d like to keep actively involved in the library field and believe I still have much to offer. It would be nice to have some portion of that involvement recognized as valuable in the form of compensation.

Feel free to get in touch (waltcrawford at gmail dot com). Of course, a solid sponsorship for C&I, including conference funding, would make this all a lot easier…

Businessman gets out of prison after an embezzlement sentence and returns to his mansion on a lonely, fog-shrouded island (a former pirate hideaway, which may explain the secret passages). His wife died while he was in prison; his stepdaughter’s there, as is a shifty butler. He believes that several colleagues—who framed him for the embezzlement and ran the company into the ground—murdered his wife as part of a search for the “hidden treasure” (which doesn’t exist: the losses were due to bad investments, not embezzlement). So he invites the lot of them out for a weekend. They all come, including the son of one who’s died—and, other than that upstanding son (who wooed the daughter at college, but was rejected by her because she assumed he was after her supposed money), they’re a mutually-suspicious, backbiting, nasty little group. Oh, there’s also his cellmate and former accountant…

Naturally, the launch that brought them all to the island has to go back to the mainland “for repairs.” That leaves the lot stranded. After enticing them with some specific clues and items, he leaves them to their own devices—which mostly consist of trying to find the “treasure” and stalking one another. It’s a lot more entertaining than I expected, and it all works out—sort of—in the end. (Well, not for the businessman, but you can’t have everything.) The soundtrack is clipped just often enough to be annoying, and the print’s not great. Not a masterpiece, but pretty good; with flaws, I come up with $1.25.

They Made Me a Criminal, 1939, b&w. Busby Berkeley (dir.), John Garfield, Claude Rains, Ann Sheridan, May Robson, Gloria Dickson, the Dead End Kids (Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, etc.). 1:32.

The setup: Johnnie Bradford, a southpaw boxer with a serious drinking problem, wins the championship—and, during the celebration, winds up in a brawl that leaves a reporter dead. He didn’t do it, but he passed out during the process. His manager (who beaned the reporter wih a bottle of booze, killing him) takes off with Bradford’s dame, his watch and his money—leaving him as the obvious patsie. But the cops find the victim, put out a bulletin for the champ’s car (being driven by the couple) and, in the chase, they wind up crashing and burning. The cops assume Bradford’s dead and the case is closed. Except for one detective (who blew an investigation years before), Claude Rains, who notes that the burned guy’s watch is on the wrong wrist…

Meanwhile, Bradford (John Garfield) goes to a lawyer to figure out what to do. He has $10,000 in a safe deposit box. The lawyer says he’ll get it and to lay low—then gives Bradford $250, says he’s taking the rest as his fee, and tells him to ride the rails as far as he can go. Which Bradford does, winding up at an Arizona orchard that’s also a sort of rehabilitation camp for delinquents, namely the Dead End Kids. It’s run by a feisty old lady and her beautiful daughter (Dickson—Sheridan’s the dame).

That’s enough for the plot. Let’s say the happy ending requires an unexpected and unlikely soft spot, but was probably the only way to end the flick. Lots of boxing; I wonder whether Busby Berkeley choreographed the fight sequences? A lot depends on your tolerance for the Dead End Kids, aka the East Side Kids and the Bowery Boys. In this case, I thought they were OK, although still basically hammy little thugs. Decent print. Call it $1.50.

Jigsaw, 1949, b&w. Fletcher Markle (dir.), Franchot Tone, Jean Wallace, Myron McCormick, Marc Lawrence, Winifred Lenihan, Doe Avedon, Hedley Rainnie, George Breen. 1:10.

A printer apparently commits suicide, but a cop—also the eventual brother-in-law of a breezy Assistant DA—checks into it and also winds up dead. The Assistant DA, who never seems to take much of anything seriously, gets deeply into a web of New York neofascists (who may be in it for the money), intrigue, attempted seduction and more murders—and along the way is appointed Special Prosecutor for the case (whatever that case may be). Lively, complex plot, but Franchot Tone as the hero really does seem a little too disengaged for the role. Still, it moves. Anybody who hasn’t figured out the mastermind halfway through the film isn’t really trying, but that’s not particularly unusual.

Quite a few uncredited cameos, mostly in a nightclub: Marlene Dietrich, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Burgess Meredith and more. Some decent filming. Some damage to the print (missing bits and a white streak down the screen during portions). Not great, but worth $1.25.

Algiers, 1938, b&w. John Cromwell (dir.), Charles Boyer, Sigrid Gurie, Hedy Lamarr, Joseph Calleia, Alan Hale, Gene Lockhart, Walter Kingsford, Paul Harvey. 1:36 [1:39].

Pepe Le Moko is a French jewel thief now holed up in the Casbah, where he’s essentially impossible to arrest. Enter a no-nonsense French officer who wants him caught—and a gorgeous Frenchwoman on vacation with her fiancée. There’s not too much doubt where this will all end, but the story—a classic—is in the getting there.

This one really is a classic, with Le Moko’s slightly odd band of compatriots, his one song (well, with Charles Boyer playing thepart…), the magnificent Hedy Lamarr, a great supporting cast, fine cinematography and all the atmosphere of the Casbah itself. The only letdown (other than a tiny number of lost frames) is the soundtrack, which has background noise and occasional distortion. That reduces the value of an eminently enjoyable classic to $1.75.

Not an earth-shattering one, which makes talking about it more fun.

Namely: After I watch the fourth movie on Disc 9 of the 250-movie/60-disc Mystery Collection, which I’ll do tomorrow or Thursday, I’ll watch the four movies on the fifth and final disc of the Spaghetti Western 20-movie pack (which was a freebie). I normally watch two old flicks a week, so after two weeks, I’ll go back to Disc 10 of the Mystery Collection.

The question is, after that disc, what’s next? Which set do I alternate with the Mystery Collection?

Between freebies and ones I’ve purchased, I have six choices–four 50-movie Packs, two much smaller sets.

I’m nearly certain I won’t choose one of these two after Spaghetti Westerns:

• Mean Guns: The Time to Die Collection–another 20-pack (and another freebie), with a mix of Spaghetti and other westerns (and, unfortunately, another copy of the regrettable God’s Gun). Four movies B&W, 16 color; three from the 1930s, one from the ’40s, six from the ’60s, 9 from the ’70s, one from the ’80s. Three repeats.
• Gunslinger Classics 50-Movie Pack: An interesting mix of old westerns (including some of the singing cowboys) and more modern flicks. 31 Color, 19 B&W. 15 from the 1930s, 5 from the 40s, 2 from the 50s, 9 from the 60s, 17 from the 70s, one each from the 80s and 90s. Seven repeats–but several more are repeated in Mean Guns. (Yes, yet another copy of God’s Gun.)

Much as I like the old westerns and more than a few of the modern ones, those can both wait a year… Which means the choice is probably one of these four:

• Shirley Temple Smiles and Curls Collection (a freebie): Two DVDs–one with three features, one with 11 shorts. One feature is in color. All are from the 1930s.
• Legends of Horror 50-Movie Pack (another freebie): An oddly-titled set, since it includes all of the movies in the Alfred Hitchcock 20-pack, almost none of which are horror films. Of the 30 others, 11 are in color, 19 B&W; 9 are from the 30s, 5 from the 40s, 3 from the 50s, 4 from the 60s, 9 from the 70s. There’s actually some good stuff here, although I’m not particularly a horror buff.
• Comedy Kings 50-Movie Pack: Six color, 44 B&W, six that I’ve already seen. One from the 1920s, 22 from the 1930s, 18 from the 1940s, 8 from the 50s, one from the 60s.
• Box Office Gold 50-Movie Pack (on 13 DVDs): All color. One from the 1950s, two from the 1960s, 26 from the 1970s, 21 from the 1980s. One that I’ve already seen. Lots of big-name stars. If this seems implausible, well, it’s another set of TV movies. (Remember TV movies?)

Heck, I could leave it up to “my two readers” (yes, I know better, as I suspect do most other libloggers who use that particular bit of false modesty): Whichever set gets the most votes in comments is the one I’ll watch first. OK, I’ll do that…but voting is only from among the four sets in the second group of bullets. And, as usual, spam is not accepted.

One piece of commentary had to do with the likelihood that people would use the same actual words to talk about the same thing–as someone commented, “after all, how many ways are there to discuss Hamlet’s ambivalence?” Two years ago, when I checked Google for the two key words, I came up with “around 57,000,” and didn’t see that any of the first 100 seemed to be the same text.

This time, I came up with more than ten times as many results (which I regard as having more to do with Google’s increasingly silly initial result numbers than anything else–yes, the database continues to grow, but by >10x in 18 months?)–and, in looking through the first 100 results, I found two pairs that sounded an awful lot alike.

In one case, a Yahoo! Answer was almost identical to a paragraph in a Wikipedia article…but split into three paragraphs and with one or two word changes. Checking dates, it was pretty easy to conclude that the Yahoo! Answer was, shall we say, an innocent failure to attribute text to Wikipedia (text which was considerably older there). (Note: I’m not accusing Wikipedia of plagiarism–the text was pretty clearly copied from Wikipedia, not to it.)

The other was odder–a fairly long commentary on a scene from the play. One was from a signed, nicely formatted, set of discussions on Hamlet’s scenes (or, rather, on scenes from Act One, with the full set available as an inexpensive ebook). The other was from an ad-supported multiple-blog site, with no apparent authorship and with a bunch of HTML-like code appearing at the top of the “post,” and with no signature. I’m pretty sure I can guess which was copied from which–and in that case, since the original doesn’t include a copyright waiver, there’s more at stake than failure to attribute.

All of which is somewhat tangential to the original story. That story continues to be that everyday language is a lot less “common” than we may think–that, by and large, sentences at least 10 words long are likely to be unique even within a corpus as large as Google’s database. (The first test had relied mostly on my own writing and on first sentences of paragraphs; the new test uses the second sentence of the second paragraph of a post from each of 150 different blogs. Very similar results…) Basically, while one identical sentence (that is, a sentence in one work that’s also found in another) is absolutely, positively insufficient grounds to assert plagiarism–it may be enough to suggest that further checking is warranted.

New and Improved Articles

• Multitasking Notes includes new notes on decreases in “media multitasking”–and reports on a small study that seems to show that heavy multitaskers are worse at multitasking than those who don’t do it all the time..
• Multitasking and Librarians includes new notes on finding a middle ground–but also on the need for focus. Some older material hss been trimmed.
• On Age, Technology and Culture raises some real questions about the willingness of (many, not all) older librarians to adapt to changing online culture–and adds a great commentary on building an online personal and professional presence.
• Engaging the Community now includes some fine examples (from one Wisconsin library) of words from the community, the kind of patron feedback you can use to strengthen your staff, your support, your community.
• Commentaries on mentoring within the library field, including a major new commentary on “libpunk mentoring,” are now in the new Library Mentoring Experiences. Some of these commentaries came from Mentoring Notes, now devoted to notes from outside librarianship.

Other New Resources

Once you’ve logged in, you’ll also have access to:

• Leader’s Digest, including new items on managerial visibility, behavioral economics, dealing with multiple news sources and why it may make sense to replace a failed leader with an outsider.
• There’s a new blog in town: Executive Decisions by Arnold Hirshon, LYRASIS’ Chief Strategist and Executive Consultant–part of the new LYRASIS Executive Advisor Program (LEAP).

The 30-page issue is a PDF print-over-the-web publication, as usual, although three of the four essays are also available in HTML form (the article titles are links). As always, My Back Pages is a PDF-only bonus.

This issue includes:

Perspective: On Disconnecting and Reconnecting (pp. 1-9)

Can you turn off all your “connecting” devices for an hour, a day, a week? Should you? A number of librarians and others discuss the virtues of disconnecting from virtual life once in a while–and maybe reconnecting with ourselves, nature and our real-world friends.

Trends & Quick Takes (pp. 9-16)

The good old days that never were, blaming the user for bad survey design, the difference between production tools and creative talent, checklists for writing and publishing–and ten quicker takes on an even wider range of topics.

Making it Work: Thinking about Blogging 5: Closing the Loop

The close of this four-part series (there was no Thinking about Blogging 3), on how we should blog–and notes on some impressive blog research, miscellaneous issues, and a brief threnody on a dead blog.

My Back Pages

Nine little essays on topics as diverse as crackpot physics, how to get diners to spend more, stretching “obsolete” past its limits–and powering a 600-watt device with a 2.5-watt source!

Or maybe I’m pricing ‘em wrong! After all, Neal-Schuman’s bringing out ten very short books on narrow aspects library technology, each 125 6×9 pages (presumably around 30,000 words, maybe slightly more), each $55. With a big prepub push where you can “buy the whole set for a mere $385!” (And LITA’s the copublisher, a situation I’ve always found interesting…) These could be the best library tech books ever, for all I know (hey, friends & acquaintances wrote half of ‘em, so I’m not saying anything negative), but it makes the prices for my books seem sort of tawdry by comparison…

Anyway:

Great Bargains on Essential Books

Some of you may have missed this, but I reduced the prices of most Cites & Insights Books (which may be exactly the wrong thing to do, but):

• Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change is now $25 paperback, $16 PDF download. (And with a dozen more copies, I’ll reach my “success” criterion: 300 copies sold.)
• The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look is also now $25 paperback, $16 PDF download. (Sixty-two copies to date, but who’s counting?)
• I believe every library school should have print copies of Cites & Insights, and that’s easier than ever for the last four volumes–with great full-color photos thrown in for good measure. Volume 6, 2006; Volume 7, 2007; Volume 8, 2008; and Volume 9, 2009 are now just $35 paperback (and when you consider the sheer size of these volumes, “just” is the right word), $25 PDF download (of course, you can download the issues for free–but $20 of that $25 counts as a direct contribution to keep C&I going).

Essential Books

I believe Balanced Libraries is still an essential book–and, if you care about blogging, so are The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look and, particularly, my latest: But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009. That one goes for a mere $35 paperback, $25 PDF. (So far, it’s a very limited edition, with a baker’s dozen sold.)

Hmm: Maybe that’s the trick: Charge $395 for each book–what you typically pay for Studies, where “you” may not include any W.a.R. readers–or charge $75 and make each one a Limited Edition, taking them offsale after, say, 100 copies are sold.

(Note: The two library blog books weren’t taken offsale for “limited edition” reasons but out of a sense of futility–the sense that people really don’t want to hear anything but unicorns & rainbows regarding how library blogs actually pan out. That’s a topic for another post that I don’t plan to write.)

Supporting Cites & Insights

I had modest sponsorship for Cites & Insights from 2005 through 2009. I don’t now. I’d love to have a sponsor, but I’m admittedly not out beating the bushes of nonexistent contacts to raise one.

Meanwhile, if you find C&I valuable, you can help keep it going by contributing directly. You’ll find the information and the PayPal “Donate” button right there on the C&I home page, just below the contents list for the current issue.

I will note that, if I had $1 for every downloaded/opened copy of Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0,” that would cover sponsorship-equivalent for the next seven years But then, if wishes were horses, we’d be up to our ears in…well, never mind.

• Read & Learn: Completing the Transition discusses and celebrates the completion of the move and consolidation of 359 articles in the old LLN to 188 new and improved articles in the new LLN.
• We’ve restored the “What’s Hot?” list, currently showing the 27 most widely read articles for February 2010 (scroll down from “New in Read & Learn”). Why 27? Because three articles tied for 25th most widely read.
• When you go to Leader’s Digest, you’ll find new notes on “futures thinking,” the availability of 65,000 free ebooks from the 19th century (courtesy of the British Library), and the assertion that “real leaders don’t do focus groups.”

• It was pointed out to me that GA won’t track if the user doesn’t have cookies enabled and Javascript enabled. Nothing I can do about that.
• Seth Finkelstein thought it might have to do with HTML errors, and noted that the W3C Validator found a bunch of those on the Walt at Random home page.

So I thought I’d see how tough it was to correct those errors–and whether it made a difference. (I also thought I’d see whether the errors were mine or were in the templates & addons I used.)

There were a bunch of errors, but that includes cascading errors (where one apparent error is really the result of another error–boy, do I remember those from programming, especially in PL/I!). It turns out that about 80% of the “errors” were mine, mostly because I’m used to HTML parsing being fairly forgiving–namely:

• Using all-caps operators where HTML requires all-lower-case.
• Using <br> as a standalone, rather than <br />–but that was both in my own code and in a portion of the template.

I managed to fix them all, although in one case that made the right sidebar a bit less attractive (Validator just wouldn’t accept one particular nested-list). Took me 2, maybe 2.5 hours. Except for the added infelicity in the right margin, it made no difference to the average viewer, I believe, since the visible results were the same. But, presumably, it would make Google Analytic results a little more plausible. Maybe?

Depends on your definition of “a little.”

The changes have been in place since February 23. I’ve had a chance to look at two full days running on a clean, zero-errors home page vs. the same days on Urchin.

There may have been a little increase in pageviews and visits logged by Google Analytics–but not much of one. Here’s what I see for comparisons on the 22, 23 and 24:

• Sessions: February 22: Google Analytics 58, Urchin 1,492.
  February 23: Google Analytics 79, Urchin 1,439
  February 24: Google Analytics 81, Urchin 1,398.
• Pageviews: February 22: Google Analytics 77, Urchin 4,455
  February 23: Google Analytics 115, Urchin 3,213
  February 24: Google Analytics 132, Urchin 3,093.

And, mysteriously, the second-highest post in a full page reports on Google Analytics is a post from the very first year of the blog (on mondegreens), with 34 views…where that post is not even in the top 50 on Urchin.

Possibilities

I do note that none of the GA reported pages is a /feed/index page, where quite a few of the higher ones in Urchin are (these presumably being RSS views of pages?). That could account for some of it–since the GA code is, as recommended, right before </body> in the page, it’s part of the footer, which doesn’t get fed to RSS. Since I regard readers-via-RSS as fully equivalent to readers-”in person,” I’m not thrilled about losing those counts.

But if I filter the Urchin pages report to eliminate everything with “feed” anywhere in it, that eliminates less than one-third of the views, still leaving them way more than 10x as high as GA shows.

I’m not sure what else might be going on. I flat-out don’t believe that 90% of Walt at Random viewers have either cookies or Javascript disabled. (But I could be wrong.)

Resolution

For me, for now, for my own sites, the solution is simple: I’ll take the Google Analytics tracking code out of the template and rely on Urchin for my statistics, since it’s actually (presumably) looking at logs. The GA code is extra overhead for the internet; why waste it?

For my work? They’re looking into it. (There, I think the “plausible to reported” multiple is nowhere near as high…)

I like Urchin. It defaults to a weekly view with a nice range of options, and you can expand it to a much broader timeline (although it runs into trouble if the timeline is too long or the logs to be analyzed too large: I’m not sure which). I’ve done reports on an entire year. For the reports I mostly care about–for C&I, file download figures (for PDF) and pageview figures (for HTML)–exporting reports works well. Robots (spiders) are separated out into a separate subsection. The number seem consistent–that is, there’s nothing in any of the numbers to suggest faulty logic, and at least some download/pageview numbers are consistent with what I’d expect from other sources.

Recently, I decided to try Google Analytics as an alternative (without disabling Urchin, to be sure). Urchin’s now owned by Google, and I believe Urchin 6 distinctly reflects that–and the ownership does mean that Urchin help is mostly not working very well. Unlike Urchin 5, Google Analytics doesn’t analyze server logs: You have to put tracking code on every page you want it to track, and it relies on calls to Google’s own servers. I only wanted to try it for Walt at Random, and since very page uses the “footer” code, it was easy enough to put the GA code segment into that portion of the site’s HTML–just before the “</body”> tag, as suggested by GA. (This clearly wouldn’t work well for Cites & Insights, where the numbers I’m most interested in are PDF downloads.)

I wanted to try GA partly because that’s currently the tracking method for use of the new Drupal Library Learning Network. (The old one used MediaWiki, which has strong usage-reporting built right into the system.)

The code went active on February 15, in the morning, and has now been active for a little more than a week.

And I don’t believe the results.

Some Quick Comparisons

Here’s what I find, comparing GA’s report covering February 15 through February 22 with Urchin’s for the same period–but noting that Urchin’s daily run was apparently yesterday morning, covering a small fraction of yesterday’s use and presumably making GA’s numbers higher by default:

• Sessions: GA reports 491 “visits.” Urchin reports 11,287 “sessions.” (No, there are no typos there: GA is reporting 4.3% of the number of sessions reported by Urchin–just over 1/25th.)
• Pageviews: GA reports 633 pageviews. Urchin reports 29,306. The difference here is even larger: GA is reporting 2.2% as many pageviews as Urchin.
• Visitors: GA reports 406 visitors (which means almost nobody came back–82.69% new visits). Urchin reports 2,005 IP addresses, which I take to be the same thing as visitors. A much smaller difference here, since Urchin seems to find people returning. Still, GA’s reporting only 20% as many different IP addresses as Urchin.
• Popular pages: GA says that only two current posts were visited 20 times or more–the “Social Networks/Social Media Snapshot” with 31 visits and “Open Access and Libraries: Be My Guest” with 29. (Things drop rapidly after that, with, for example, “Catching Up (sort of, a little bit)” getting 11 views.) By comparison, Urchin shows 206 pageviews for the Open Access post, 162 for Social Networks and 110 for “Catching Up”–and an LLN repost with 151 views in the middle.

At Least One Of These Must Be Wrong

So which is it? Does this blog have a very small readership with very active commenting, which would have to be the case for the GA numbers to be right, or is GA massively undercounting for various reasons?

While it wouldn’t much bother me if the first was true, it does seem a little out of proportion to the 830+ Feedreader subscriptions for this blog as of today–and, frankly, with the number of downloads for the Open Access and Libraries PDF. (28 during that same period.)

I’ve already been told (a) that Google Analytics won’t work if a user doesn’t have Javascript enabled or doesn’t allow cookies, (b) that GA is apparently intolerant of less-than-perfect HTML. It’s also quite possible that (c) I somehow mangled the code cut-and-paste–but in that case you’d expect no stats at all, or at least not the kind of stats I’m seeing. (161 pages visited during the 8 days–but visited very rarely.)

For the blog, I really don’t care. I’ll probably remove the GA tracking code after a while, and I’ll certainly rely on Urchin for numbers. For Cites & Insights, where there’s a reason to care, I can’t really use GA in any case–I’m not going to add tracking code to all the HTML articles, so all I’d be tracking is visits to the site, not readership for the publication.

For Library Leadership Network…well, there I care.