The Brothers Grimm Synchronous Reference Service

{As was suspected, Ethan is the fairest of them all}

According to the American Library Association’s discussion of reference services, “reference work arose in the late 19th and early 20th century.” Now, the non-existent ALA footnotes indicate that this statement is not exactly true, although it is an understandable misstatement. As the Brothers Grimm point out in their collection of scholarly essays, the first reference service actually occurred “once upon a time.” In a dark wooded kingdom, ruled by a very stern queen, there was a special synchronous reference service that was available through a two-way mirror exchange. The service worked by dressing up in a regal gown, standing in front of a magical mirror, and asking the mirror a question. Now, originally, the mirror also utilized asynchronous messaging, leaving foggy messages while one was taking a shower, but this was terminated as people tended not to bathe during “once upon a time.”

Today, this form of reference service has been supplanted by newer computer technology, as the use of a mirror can be very unflattering to the user. Luckily for us, however, the Brothers Grimm recorded a few reference exchanges for posterity:

Chat log saved on Gloomy Night, Once Upon A Time

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Reference User1: O mirror, mirror upon the wall, Who is the fairest fair of them all?

Mirror Operator: Hello mighty queen. Try asking “where can I find… yadda yadda”

Reference User1: Fine. Where can I find out who is the fairest fair of them all?

Mirror Operator: Ok, definitely don’t look in the mirror, cause that ain’t the answer…

Reference User1: But…

Mirror Operator: Did you try an encyclopedia, maybe a dictionary?

Reference User1: Uhm… Are we talking about Snow White again?

Mirror Operator: Look, I don’t normally suggest this, but you could try hotornot.com/

----------------------

Chat log terminated by user

An Extremely Elongated Nose-stick is Speechless

{Ethan stars as Pinocchio}

An Extremely Elongated Nose-stick is Speechless

A play by P. Nocchio

~

Pinocchio: (Talking with a short ruddy nose) In Ambient Findability, Peter Morville, drawing on the concept of pace layering, talks about tagging as a “fast layer” of information architecture. According to Morville (2005, 141), user tagging will influence with increasing momentum the underlying makeup of websites, which change at a slower pace layer. “[O]ver time,” Morville writes, “the lessons learned at the top are passed down, embedded into the more enduring layers of social and semantic infrastructure” (Morville 2005, 141). So, user tagging will influence the development of websites. This is good because, as Morville (2005, 53) states, “[m]etadata tags applied by humans can indicate aboutness thereby improving precision."

A Short Ruddy Nose: Uh, I’m skeptical. Can user tagging really improve the precision with which you can find a digital object?

(Pinocchio grabs his entourage and together they walk to youtube)

Pinocchio: Of course it does. Just look here:

(Pinocchio reveals a funny video of the U.S. President trying to speak)

Pinocchio: (Talking with a medium sized nasal protuberance) We can easily find this video by searching the tags: “George” or “W” or “Bush” or “funny.” There are multiple tags to increase precision!

A Medium-Sized Nasal Protuberance: (Sounding a little bit stuffy) You are telling me that the tag “W” is precise? No. Tagging a video of George Bush as “George” or “W” or “Bush” or “funny” isn’t precise. What would be precise is “George Bush” or better yet “Bush, George W.” and…

Pinocchio: (Talking with an extremely elongated nose-stick ) No, like anything entrusted to a torch wielding, unwashed mob of people, precision will exist! “Mob indexing,” “free tagging,” whatever you call it, it works well.

An Extremely Elongated Nose-stick: (Is speechless).

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P. Nocchio’s Work Cited

Morville, Peter. 2005. Ambient Findability. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Publishing.

Long Journey to Tulsa Inspires Bad Poetry

{And Ethan says: “but look its Basho and me”}

Driving to Tulsa nearly two times a week makes me go crazy and because I get tired of talking to myself, I tried to do something different. I make poems while driving! So technically they are not all haiku, but oh well...

On the Road to Tulsa

~
The descending bird;
its shadow passing,
through the slumbering grass.
~
That single glance;
the limbs of a tree,
waived beneath the cloud
~
Lost droplets of rain,
washing from my car;
a misty screen.
~
Now a fast-dimming horizon,
the clouds bequeathing,
an ascending moon.

My Wiki Article

{Ethan contributes too}

I wrote a small article for AmbientLibrarian which defines Morville’s concept of “ambient findability.” I organized the article with a definitional section and then tried to provide a few examples of concepts which illustrate the idea of locating “anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.” The article is available here.

One interesting problem I had is how to format the citations. Wikipedia has an article which describes how it would like sources to be cited in its pages. In general, the Harvard system seemed to be the preferred format – in part due to a desire to maintain consistency. However, in AmbientLibrarian the existing articles did not use this citation style; rather, they used instead what appeared to be the Turabian format. So, to maintain consistency, I used the Turabian format for my article.

Scandalous Secret Revealed; Books Cower in Fear

{Ethan reveals it}

I spent Monday trying to find an article that is not available online. Eventually, I discovered I would have to get in my car and drive 30 or 40 minutes to a library to look at a book containing this article (or microfiche). I cursed The New Yorker. I was upset because I know the magical secret to a happy existence, as scientifically verified by a group of researchers. In a collection of "[s]urveys of faculty, students, and scientists in non-university settings," Boyd et al (2004, 137) found proof that accessing information online, instead of physically traveling to an information agency, saves users time. According to Boyd et al (2004, 137), "[o]ur surveys show that this [accessing information online] saves them about 15 minutes per reading on average (emphasis added)."



----Source----

Boyce, Peter, Donald King, Carol Montgomery, and Carol Tenopir. 2004. How electronic journals are changing patterns of use. The Serials Librarian 46 (2): 121-114.