eye candy.

Collection of Penguin book covers, old and new. @Flickr.
via largeheartedboy

  
April 7, 2008 | Filed Under amusement, good things | Leave a Comment 

favorite new/changed lcsh of the week (12 march 2008)

what if this is salient to my lit review??
150 Amateur architecture [May Subd Geog] [sp2008001492]
550 BT Architecture

I wonder if warrant for the creation of this heading came from books in the Who pooped in the park? series…
150 Animal droppings [May Subd Geog] [sp2007010638]
* 450 UF Animal dung
* 450 UF Animal scat

150 Captive white rhinoceroses [May Subd Geog] [sp200802022]
053 SF408.6.R45
550 BT Captive mammals
550 BT White rhinoceros

150 Corporation reports–Religious aspects [sp2008020053]

150 Dance and technology [May Subd Geog] [sp2008001264]
053 GV1588.7
450 UF Technology and dance
550 BT Technology

burn her!
150 Divination in the Bible [sp2008000721]

110 Dr. Francis Townsend Post Office Building (Fairbury, Ill.) [sp2007006425]
* 410 UF Doctor Francis Townsend Post Office Building (Fairbury, Ill.)

155 Exploitation films [Not Subd Geog] [sp2007025324]
680 Here are entered films of a sensational nature, usually offering subject matter taboo in mainstream cinema, usually produced on a low budget and often presented in the guise of preachy exposés or pseudo-documentaries.

I love the French Paradox, though it isn’t very paradoxical, actually…
150 French Paradox [sp2008000934]
550 BT Coronary heart disease–Nutritional aspects
550 BT Wine–Physiological effect

150 Indian goddesses–Arctic regions [sp2008001350]

Gayelles?
150 Lesbians [May Subd Geog] [sp 85076160]
* 450 UF Female gays
* 450 UF Gay females
* 450 UF Gayelles
* 450 UF Lesbian women
* 450 UF Sapphists

150 Mother goddesses–Arctic regions [sp2008001351]

150 Patient dumping [May Subd Geog] [sp2007010687]
* 550 BT Refusal to treat

Never heard of this genre before…
155 Rubble films [Not Subd Geog] [sp2008025550]
680 Here are entered films produced in the years after World War II, often featuring exteriors in bombed-out cities.

155 Zombie films [Not Subd Geog] [sp2007025377]
680 Here are entered fictional films that feature the reanimation of corpses that prey on human beings.
555 BT Monster films

  
April 5, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 3 Comments 

regarding popline.

In a statement published yesterday, Michael J. Klag, the Dean of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health writes that has “directed that the POPLINE administrators restore “abortion” as a search term immediately.” He is also launching an inquiry to determine why the change occurred. And also:

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction.

As reported here, it seems that someone in the USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health made a complaint about two abortion-related articles in the database that they felt were too close to “advocacy.” Those articles were removed from the database, but someone decided to go the extra step and make abortion a stop-word. The logic behind that decision has not, to my knowledge, been explained.

One good thing out of this little imbroglio is that I have discovered that Jens-Erik Mai is blogging. Promptly added to RSS Reader. However, I take issue with this bit of his post on the matter:

Classifications are political instruments… all classifications make epistemological, ethical, and political statements; there is nothing new to this. The library blogshere seems to argue that POPLINE’s move is unprecedented and unacceptable… get a grip; what is the ethical assumption behind Dewey’s religion section? I don’t see any ethical justification in the introduction to LCSH…

The first statement is absolutely accurate. For more on that, I refer you to Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. Hope Olson’s work also springs to mind. The bias present in tools like the Dewey Decimal Classification and the Library of Congress Subject Headings is glaring. We were just discussing this in my cataloging and classification course on Wednesday when we dove into DDC for the first time. If you are not familiar with the Religion schedule in DDC, it goes pretty much as follows:

Just a little biased. Just a tad. Not ok. They are working on it. The foreword to DDC22 does address what the Editorial Policy Committee is doing about the bias of the classification since they recognize they have responsibilities to diverse users. Due to the basic structure of the classification, however, they can’t alter it much without causing the classification numbers of huge numbers of already classified items to suddenly become out of date and wrong in the current system.

But anyway… comparing this to the POPLINE issue is apples and oranges. In DDC, “other religions” are still there. They still have numbers, even if those numbers are all crammed into the 290s. It is not as though someone decided to remove 297 Islam, Babism, Bahai Faith from the schedule altogether, as though it does not exist. From reading the subject heading change list every week, it seems any concept with literary warrant, no matter how bizarre, will be added to LCSH. We may not like the preferred term chosen, or the references made, but the concept will be represented there somehow.

But the outrage wasn’t about the formal terminological structure behind POPLINE. They did not alter their indexing controlled-vocabulary to reflect a change in politics or society, etc. If they had changed the preferred term in their thesaurus from abortion to murder of the unborn (or whatever they call it) with a see reference from abortion, many people would be offended but it would not be censorship.

They made the term abortion a stopword in the indexing, effectively removing the term from the index altogether, including the indexing language, as though the it carried the same semantic weight as the or and. A plain keyword search for abortion returned nothing, despite the presence of thousands of titles and abstracts in the database containing the term.

This was not a matter of bias or politically incorrect/offensive terminology in a knowledge representation. Instead they were just waving their hands saying that topic doesn’t exist in this database at all, nothing to see here. It mainly looks like someone freaked out that the database’s USAID funding might get yanked because people could find any information about abortion in the database, so they decided not to let anyone find any information on “that word.”

Sadly this is very precedented, but absolutely not acceptable. If we catch any reputable information providers doing this sort of thing, it is well worth an outrage.

  
April 5, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 3 Comments 

favorite new/changed lcsh of the week (march 19)

given my reading lately, i’m all about “domestic space”
150 Domestic space in literature [Not Subd Geog] [sp2008000957]

150 First-wave feminism [May Subd Geog] [sp2008001557]
680 Here are entered works on the feminist movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that focused on reform of women’s social and legal inequalities, especially on the gaining of women’s suffrage.
550 BT Feminism

150 Gothic fiction (Literary genre) [Not Subd Geog] [sp2008020084]
680 Here are entered works on the genre of fiction that combines elements of both horror and romance, featuring psychological and physical terror, the supernatural, castles or monasteries, ghosts, darkness, gloom and doom, etc., usually in a medieval setting. Works on the literary movement that spawned this genre are entered under Gothic revival (Literature).
450 UF Gothic horror tales (Literary genre)
450 UF Gothic novels (Literary genre)
450 UF Gothic romances (Literary genre)
450 UF Gothic tales (Literary genre)
450 UF Romances, Gothic (Literary genre)
550 BT Detective and mystery stories
550 BT Horror tales
550 BT Suspense fiction
681 Note under Gothic revival (Literature)

150 Human sacrifice in opera [Not Subd Geog] [sp2008000718]
550 BT Opera

(for the UFs alone!)
150 Male prostitutes [May Subd Geog] [sp 93007104]
* 053 HQ119-HQ119.4
* 450 UF Boys, Call
* 450 UF Call boys
* 450 UF Callboys
* 450 UF Giglis (Male prostitutes)
* 450 UF Gigolos (Male prostitutes)
* 450 UF Male hustlers
* 450 UF Male sex workers
* 450 UF Rent boys
* 450 UF Rentboys
* 450 UF Taxi boys (Male prostitutes)
* 450 UF Working boys (Male prostitutes)

150 Parents of celebrities [May Subd Geog] [sp2008001497]
550 BT Celebrities

150 Second-wave feminism [May Subd Geog] [sp2008001560]
680 Here are entered works on the period of feminist thought and activity that began in the 1960s and focused on economic and social equality for women, and on the rights of female minorities.
550 BT Feminism

150 Swimming pools-England [sp2008001268]

150 Third-wave feminism [May Subd Geog] [sp2008001561]
680 Here are entered works on the period of feminist thought and activity that began in the 1990s and focused on expanding the common definitions of gender and sexuality by encompassing such additional themes as queer theory, transgender politics, womanism, ecofeminism, libertarian feminism, etc.
550 BT Feminism

150 Woolly bears (Lepidoptera) [May Subd Geog] [sp2008001501]
053 QL561.A8 (Zoology)
450 UF Woolly bear caterpillars
550 BT Arctiidae-Larvae
550 BT Caterpillars

  
April 4, 2008 | Filed Under lcsh | Leave a Comment 

welcome to america today.

POPLINE is “the world’s largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues.”

If you do a subject keyword search in POPLINE for abortion, the result is:

No records found by latest query.

If you do a subject keyword search in POPLINE for unwanted pregnancy, the result is:

Your search found 2590 record(s).

The first three titles in the list as of right now are:

Bankole A; Sedgh G; Oye-Adeniran BA; Adewole IF; Hussain R. Abortion-seeking behaviour among Nigerian women. Journal of Biosocial Science. 2008 Mar; 40 (2) :247-268.

Jones RK; Zolna MR; Henshaw SK; Finer LB. Abortion in the United States: Incidence and access to services, 2005. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health. 2008 Mar; 40 (1) :6-16.

Majlessi F; Forooshani AR; Shariat M. Prevalence of induced abortion and associated complications in women attending hospitals in Isfahan. Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal. 2008 Jan-Feb; 14 (1) :103-109.

And there are of course many more titles containing the term abortion scattered throughout.

Women’s Health News, a blog authored by medical librarian Rachel Walden, reports:

The librarian who noted the problem inquired about it, and was informed that it wasn’t a simple technical glitch; the response she received was, “We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”

I’m so appalled that I was just sputtering for about 5 minutes after reading this. When did abortion become illegal in the U.S.? Wait, when did it become “best” to obfuscate (and, for unskilled searchers, effectively remove) access to topics that actually are illegal?

Oh wait… while POPLINE is hosted and maintained by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs, it is funded by United States Agency for International Development (USAID). You know, the agency with this policy, where mentioning = promoting:

Under the Helms Amendment, U.S. foreign assistance is prohibited from being used to perform or promote abortion as a method of family planning. “Menstrual regulation” and medical abortion [i.e. RU-486] are considered abortion and are thus activities that are prohibited from receiving USAID funding.

It seems to me that one’s opinion on the morality/ethics of induced abortion is irrelevant here. Providing access to scientific articles on a subject is not “promoting” that subject. How did we get here? I rather frown upon crack-smoking, but I don’t think we should remove access to all research on the effects of smoking crack, the incidence of crack smoking, etc. from databases. Where does that get us, exactly? Pretty much everyone agrees murder is terrible. Let’s make that a stopword in legal databases while we are at it.

ResourceShelf reports that so far POPLINE has made no official statement about this, but have said they will do so. I wait with bated breath to see how this will be explained. Anyone want to bet on whether the phrase “current political climate” will be used?

See also: LibrarianActivist

  
April 3, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment 

reminder

Today I was the guest speaker in Jeff Pomerantz’ digital libraries class. I spoke about personal information management and personal digital libraries. I had a rough morning and ended up leaving my drugs, my cell phone, and my notes at home. Oops. The session still went swimmingly sans notes, though I have a whole lot of room to improve on facilitating discussion in the classroom. It is always refreshing to be reminded of just how much you do know. It’s so easy to focus in on all the things you haven’t read/learned yet, but hey… I know a lot about PIM and the organization of photo collections and I can pepper my talk with citations. Which is probably way annoying…

Does this change once you are done with your literature reviews? In a way I hope so. But in a way I hope not.

Also on the teaching front, Jeff gave me a tip from his days in library school. His cataloging instructor recommended students read AACR2 out loud to each other as though it were poetry. He said it worked… Future students, watch out…

  
April 3, 2008 | Filed Under teaching | Leave a Comment 

thing i wish i had…

…and/or wish I had the skills to make for myself:

So I downloaded the BookBurro Firefox extension last night. When you are looking at a page about a book, a little panel pops up and if you click the panel, it does a search of multiple online book vendors and libraries near you to see where the book is available and for how much.

I don’t think I’ll keep it because it is slightly intrusive. You can’t configure it to only pop up when you click a button on the toolbar, for instance. I already have easy-to-use Firefox search engines for ISBN.nu (the buying option) and Worldcat (the library borrowing option) installed. If I’m actually interested in acquiring a book I am looking at online, those are very simple to use. I generally know whether I want to purchase a book for my own use and abuse, or whether I want to borrow it for a limited time, so I don’t really need these two combined.

I also don’t like how the BookBurro results are configured — they cannot be sorted by price. Also, in setting up the extension one is presented with an enormously long list of libraries to choose from. It is a non-alphebetized list. These are really basic things done wrong.

But enough criticizing.

WHAT I WANT is something like BookBurro and/or ISBN.nu and/or AddAll.com that will allow me to put in a list of ISBNs* that the tool will save. A wishlist of sorts. Behind the scenes, the tool would do a daily search of one of these price comparison sites. Then, I could see this working in various ways…

- Upon click, present me with a list of the X lowest priced copies of each book on my list
- Let me put in a dollar value for each book. The tool will notify me with a popup window or glowing icon or something when one of the books on my list has become available for that price or less.

Basing the tool on ISBN would allow pulling in some functionality from ThingISBN or xISBN to automagically broaden search to other editions.

Of course, inside the tool, it should represent the books by title/author for ease of managing the list.

There. Go. Take my idea and make yourself rich and/or famous. Just let me know when the thing is ready so I can use it.

Or, if this already exists and I just don’t know about it, please enlighten me.

  
April 1, 2008 | Filed Under etc | Leave a Comment 

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