Category: me!

revisting relevance

Posted on by jessamyn

I was poking around on Amazon.com today and noticed two things

  1. They have changed my name from Jessamyn Charity West to Jessamyn West which means that clicking on my name gets you all the books by the other Jessamyn West. I can only imagine why this happened and, to be fair, they would be changing it back to how it was before. I complained and they changed it, but not before telling me that this sort of munging of author names was “a feature” of their system. The change is recent, the Google cache still contains my full name.
  2. Amazon’s Statistically Improbable Phrases which is a whole new approach to the sticky issue of “aboutness” Add ot this the existing tools of concordance and readibility and you’ve got two things 1) strong “keeping up with the Joneses” pressure to submit to the Inside the Book program 2) the beginnings of cataloging by robots.

This all came to me a day after getting a fat envelope from Sandy Berman which included, among other things some articles he had written about “bibliocide by cataloging” where subject headings assigned by OCLC or LoC or OCLC member libraries and passed down to thousands of libraries via copy cataloging are so vague as to be essentially useless as finding aids. Do these Amazon features solve this problem or compound it? Eli also expands a bit on what I said about Google a few days ago; these issues are not disconnected.

“Why catalog in-house? Why catalog locally? And why not outsource the whole operation? Because critical, creative catalogers within individual systems are the last and only bulwarks against the often error-laden, access-limiting, and alienating records produced by giant, distant, and essentially unaccountable networks and vendors.”

redefining relevance

Posted on by jessamyn

Everyone has their own ideas about when the overpopulation of the Internet started resulting in a noticable lack of quality. Generally this point is somewhere along the lines of “A year or two after I got here….” For me it was when I started noticing that FAQs were being used for marketing purposes and no longer had the “just the facts” helpfulness that I had grown to expect from anything called a FAQ. Plus, I had to walk two miles in the snow just to get to the Internet and even then we had to use a hand crank to get it started.

This is all an elaborate lead-up to say that I spent some time in library school learning about the concept of relevance and now do-no-evil Google is trying to tell me their ads are relevant? Feh.

NHLA day one, first talk

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m giving two talks at NHLA. I gave the keynote today — I LOVE getting to talk about big ideas, keynotes are fun — and now it is online: Until We’re All Robots: Sensible Approaches to Technology in Libraries. It won’t make too much sense unless you look at the printable version with the hidden notes, but you’ll notice I am starting to get a little craftier with the presentations.

presentations without powerpoint, how I do it

Posted on by jessamyn

I give many of my talks using a very basic HTML template that creates the illusion of slides. It has a few advantages

  • it’s free
  • it works on any browser and any OS
  • my talks take up very little space, file-size-wise
  • I’m not using someone else’s proprietary software or the same old clip art you’ve seen a million times before
  • talks are available in the same format online and off
  • easy print option with extra space for hidden notes [new!]

There are a few downsides as well

  • it’s not totally standards compliant. If you need total compliance, use S5, it’s great.
  • you do need to know a little HTML to make it work for you
  • Since you’re not using PowerPoint, you may tend towards wordiness.

People have been asking about it, so I’ve decided to make a blank presentation with all the stylesheets and whatnot, available for downloading. It’s just a basic HTML page, two stylesheets, a sample image or two, and a styleswitcher. Try it out, tweak it, let me know what you think.