Author: Kristina

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

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

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…

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.

sousveillance and oligopticons

Dodge, Martin, and Rob Kitchin. 2007. “‘Outlines of a world coming into existence’: pervasive computing and the ethics of forgetting.” Environment and Planning B-Planning & Design 34, no. 3: 431-45.

Abstract: In this paper we examine the potential of pervasive computing to create widespread sousveillance, which will complement surveillance, through the development of life-logs—sociospatial archives that document every action, every event, every conversation, and every material expression of an individual’s life. Reflecting on emerging technologies, life-log projects, and artistic critiques of sousveillance, we explore the potential social, political, and ethical implications of machines that never forget. We suggest, given that life-logs have the potential to convert exterior generated oligopticons to an interior panopticon, that an ethics of forgetting needs to be developed and built into the development of life-logging technologies. Rather than seeing forgetting as a weakness or a fallibility, we argue that it is an emancipatory process that will free pervasive computing from burdensome and pernicious disciplinary effects.

I’m happy to find this article because I’ve been saying this about forgetting for a while now, but had nothing to point at.

music for writing.

It’s difficult for me to read anything dense if there is music or other auditory distraction. Sometimes I’ll play nature sounds to drown out other sounds. Ocean and Storm are my favorites.

For writing, however, music is essential. Somehow having music playing entertains some over-analytical and busy part of my brain that gets in the way of pushing words out.

What works best for busying that part of my brain is instrumental (or mostly so–if the vocals mostly blend in, it’s ok) music without a strong beat or any abrupt changes. Complexity in the music is good, but it can’t be obvious about the complexity. This category ranges from insanely loud guitar rock to quiet ambient stuff. Here are some favorites:

Mogwai — This would represent the insanely loud guitar rock end of the spectrum. The Scottish guitar army. It was while writing and listening to their Happy Songs for Happy People that I realized how well this type of music works for me while writing. After completing a particularly long review, I couldn’t listen to Mogwai for months without feeling slightly ill. Now that I’ve collected more writing music, I love Mogwai again. [hear/buy]

Rhys Chatham –
A Crimson Veil — A composition for 400 electric guitars, recorded live at Sacré Coeur in Paris. It was comissioned by the city of Paris for the Nuit Blanche Festival and performed in 2005. It is drony, shimmering, vast, and soaring. I wish I could have heard it live. [sample/buy elsewhere (i’m mad at emusic)]


Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven — another in kind of the same vein. [listen/buy]

Explosions in the Sky — I have several of their albums and they are all great for writing. They get accused of being Mogwai-ripoffs, so of course I would like it. [samples @ amazon]

Loop Guru – Third Chamber and Loop Bites Dog — Electronic, trancy, world-music inspired. I love Loop Guru’s more energetic and bouncy albums like Amrita…All These & the Japanese Soup Warriors and Loopus Interruptus, but Third Chamber and Loop Bites Dog are very mellow and work great for writing. [listen/buy]

Yume Bitsu — More orchestral guitars. Here’s one description: “space-drone quartet Yume Bitsu play ambient rock music that could be the soundtrack to a psychedelic art film — or a psychotropically stimulated excursion into the deep space of consciousness.” That’s nice, but they have a 18 minute, 29 second song entitled “The Frigid, Frigid, Frigid Body of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg.” That is enough for me. [samples @ amazon]

7oi — A very recent find. 7oi is an electronic music composer from Iceland who makes up some of the best song titles ever. Much of this music is good for writing, but not all, so I pick and choose what goes on the playlist. [hear/buy]


Steve Roach — “ambient-atmospheric-electronic music” [listen/buy]


Stars of the Lid — “a duo specializing in drone-based ambient music” [listen/buy]

A mix: My friend Jens recently put together a mix called Shiver 2, which I’ve enjoyed for writing.

And there is more, but that’s all I’ll write about now because, er, I need to go actually do some writing.

interesting article.

O’Hara, Kieron, Richard Morris, Nigel R. Shadbolt, Graham J. Hitch, Wendy Hall, and Neil Beagrie. 2006. “Memories for life: a review of the science and technology.” Interface: Journal of the Royal Society 3, no. 8: 351-65.

Abstract: This paper discusses scientific, social and technological aspects of memory. Recent developments in our understanding of memory processes and mechanisms, and their digital implementation, have placed the encoding, storage, management and retrieval of information at the forefront of several fields of research. At the same time, the divisions between the biological, physical and the digital worlds seem to be dissolving. Hence, opportunities for interdisciplinary research into memory are being created, between the life sciences, social sciences and physical sciences. Such research may benefit from immediate application into information management technology as a testbed. The paper describes one initiative, memories for life, as a potential common problem space for the various interested disciplines.

treasures of random link clicking.

The Academic Word List (AWL) – developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. 570 word families that appear frequently in academic texts, but are not in the most frequent 2000 English words. Divided into 10 sublists based on frequency.

Effective Use of Microsoft Word for Academic Writing – This looked helpful for a moment. I’m always up for learning better ways to wrangle Office products. And then I noticed it is a 1 hour, 24 minute video presentation. Which makes me want to run screaming.

I do not like information transfer regarding skills via “presentation.” You cannot skim over what you already know. The speed at which humans can speak and take in speech is frustratingly slow for this kind of information. It isn’t dense enough.

I am freshly irritated about this because I recently attended a 4 hour class in which I learned a small amount of content I could have sucked up myself in less than an hour. But I wouldn’t have gotten the practice at putting what I learned to use. Or so I have been telling myself.

But back to the topic at hand… this Word presentation is on ResearchChannel.org, which I have never seen before, as I don’t do TV (can’t sustain interest in any one show over a season).

Remarkable speakers, researchers and scholars present revolutionary thoughts and discoveries on ResearchChannel. The University of Michigan, the University of Washington and the National Science Foundation are just a few of the world-renowned institutions that participate and whose programs are featured.

Despite my frustration with presentation-watching, this may come in handy for keeping my brain occupied while I am exercising.

The Martini Method for finishing a PhD – Ha! No really, this blog–academicproductivity.com–looks like it might actually be good. Because the key to academic productivity is another blog to read… but no really! Look! The Interruptron is going on my computer tomorrow because since I’ve stopped tracking all of my time by the minute in a spreadsheet (and outputting pretty pivot charts to show how much time I spent brushing my teeth versus folding clothing), I haven’t been as good at maintaining a work/rest schedule and productivity has slipped a little. The Interruptron makes graphs. I love it already.

And now back to taking notes from the book I need to return to ILL tomorrow.

continuing my obsession with indexes

I wish each entry of a bibliography in any book or paper contained the page number(s) on which said entry was referenced or cited.

I seriously love books that have indexes of cited authors (footnotebegin) though you then have to look for the specific paper by that author (footnoteend) or include this information in the general index.

Sections of notes at the back of the book are somewhat more useful in this sense than a bibliography, but so difficult to quickly skim.

I started this entry because my curiosity was killing me:
What part of Radar Handbook by Merrill I. Skolnik cites “A Mother Goose for Antique Collectors by Alice van Leer Carrick?

But then I realized I had just been the victim of a Google Books mistake. The front cover, back cover, and two pages of Notes from Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America by Steven M. Gelber are tacked onto the end of the book scan of Radar Handbook.

I’m currently reading Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America, which is where I saw the Mother Goose thing cited. So this really doesn’t get me anywhere.

Anyway, I’m absolutely loving this book and I want to scribble notes in it everywhere, so I’m ordering my own copy. Yes.

read today.

Barreau, Deborah K. The persistence of behavior and form in the organization of personal information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. forthcoming.

Bernstein, Michael; Van Kleek, Max; Kargar, David, and Schraefel, Monica. Information scraps: how and why information eludes our personal information management tools. Transactions on Information Systems. in review.

Danskin, Alan. Tomorrow never knows: the end of cataloguing? Presented at. World library and information congress: 72nd IFLA General Conference and Council, IFLA-CDNL Alliance for Bibliographic Standards; Seoul. 2006 Jun 6; c2006.

Hertzum, Morten. Small-scale classification schemes: A Field study of requirements engineering. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 2004 Jan; 13(1):35-61.

Kwasnik, Barbara H. The Role of Classification Structures in Reflecting and Building Theory. Advances in classification research : proceedings of the … ASIS SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop; 1992; c1992: 63-81.

Payne, Stephen J. A descriptive study of mental models. Behaviour and Information Technology. 1991; 10(1):3-21.

Schmidt, Kjeld and Simone, Carla. Coordination mechanisms: towards a conceptual foundation of CSCW system design. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 1996; 5(2/3):155-200.

Star, Susan Leigh. Grounded classification: Grounded theory and faceted classification. Library Trends. 1998 Fall; 47(2):218-232.

Wu, Harris; Gordon, Michael D., and DeMaagd, Kurt. Document co-organization in an online knowledge community. CHI 2004; Vienna. 2004; c2004.

Tomorrow some heavy note-wrangling and writing begins.