I blog about tech stuff only very rarely, but this is something I really want to share. If you’re at all concerned about online privacy, you will want to know about the Network Advertising Initiative’s “Behavioral Advertising Opt Out Tool.” Go to it, and it will show you which advertising networks have installed tracking cookies on your computer. You can check the boxes and click through at the bottom to instruct all of those networks to opt you out of their spying, which they are legally obligated to do. Now, it is also possible to block specific sites from setting cookies on your computer using complicated settings in your browser, but this tool is easier, and lets you opt out of networks that have not found you yet.

To say something general, I would say that it is a good thing that so far we have been able to get national policies set up that allow us to opt out of privacy-compromising systems, and we have to keep doing that, but our right to opt out is meaningless unless we are actually able to figure out how to do the opting-out process, and then go and do it.

Personally, I find it hard to take seriously the claim of some that they “want to see more relevant advertising served up on [their] browsers [or wherever else].” Advertisers never know us as well as they think they do, and when they do hit close to home, it’s just spooky. I am not comfortable when the opaque networked computer that is everywhere with the soft synthetic voice knows what I had for breakfast. There is too much of a potential for power without accountability when we lose our privacy in that way.

There are other useful tech tools for privacy that readers might tell us about in the comments. This is one I like because it is so quick and easy and doesn’t require me to go through ten proxy servers, etc. Some readers may also be able to provide information about the limitations of this tool.

(Be sure to read the comments below if this interests you – Commenters have some important things to add here.)

More and more, I find that the library profession’s efforts to stay relevant in the age of information technology are in fact eroding our relevance. As a result of these efforts, it is becoming less and less clear what we offer that is different from what everybody else offers in the information economy. The reason is that our response to change around us has mostly been to repress those aspects of librarianship that are not directly reflected in new technological tools that other people claim as their domain more securely than we do. We keep saying that as librarians we are web designers, information architects, web searchers, information scientists, user experience experts, and on and on, when each of those things is already a profession filled with people who make a stronger claim to it than we do. What we can claim is librarianship, yet most people – not only outside but within the profession – have forgotten what that consists of other than “books.”

In ALA, accreditation standards for masters degree programs in library science still refer to areas of competency that can be taken to define the profession. Yet in nearly all other ways, ALA is attempting to sell libraries and librarians on the basis of skills that everybody knows other people offer more distinctly, and so, it seems, are most library bloggers and magazine commentators.

Despite the relative consistency in accreditation standards over time, it is presently a challenge to point to practicing librarians in order to demonstrate to people what it is that librarians do that others can’t do so well, simply because, and I hate to say it, most of us are not so exemplary. There has been intense pressure on librarians for decades to focus on technology at the expense of something that is now difficult even to remember, that being a set of intellectual components to what we do that concern our knowledge of what is IN our libraries (physical and digital) and a well-practiced insight regarding the connections to be made between that information and our users.

Consider the great and not-so-great librarians you have known. In my experience, the great ones are great (I am thinking about reference librarians here, just to be clear, because that is who I have worked with) because of a combination of an enthusiastic desire to help, good communication skills, insight, general knowledge (not to be underestimated in its importance), and a compound of skills at connecting the dots between the particularities of users, their needs, the clues, the relevant bits of knowledge in memory, the access points, the information structure, and the hermeneutics and heuristics of helping. A library school curriculum providing a mix of traditional librarianship and intellectually challenging multidisciplinary studies (instead of the busywork that is challenging mainly for the physical stamina it requires) can support these defining skills. (Even if there is no strong case to be made for the existence of a tested knowledge base that we can called “library science,” it is still necessary to support the work of librarians on the basis of relevant theory and research, and to teach it in master’s degree programs. Because of librarianship’s theoretical foundations, multidisciplinary though they may be, we are able to make a claim to professional status, and we are able to claim a degree of autonomy in institutions that allows us to do work that matters.)

Now, we all have good days and bad days, but how many of us know as much as we really should to be good at the “librarian” part of our jobs? I have a good idea of how I use my knowledge of our resources, and I know that I wish I knew more. I don’t wish I knew more about our search tools – those are designed to be easy to use for librarians and the public alike, and I don’t regard our ability to use them as anything special. Where I feel that greater knowledge would help me to be a better librarian is across the board – within my assigned subject areas, yes, but in all subjects, and particularly about things like scholarly communities, the research into reading behavior, learning theory, media studies, and all of those fields that are connected to what we do. I think that improving my general knowledge and working to improve my insight into people are the most effective ways I can work to become a better librarian.

The place I return to for an idea of librarianship that is singular yet multidisciplinary, and humanistic yet technological, is Jesse Shera’s work in the field, specifically his text from the early 70s, The Foundations of Education for Librarianship. Shera had his greatest impact as an early developer of library automation systems in the 50s and 60s, but following that he worked to define librarianship per se in its new technological context. His view of librarianship was in part based on the idea that automation should give librarians time to focus our attention on the problems of communities and their information needs, and how to connect to them, freeing us from technical busywork. He lived long enough, however, to see the profession become machine-oriented and dedicated to refining these tools of efficiency. As he wrote in the decade before his death, “Librarians would do well to remember Moses or Pieta and think somewhat less frequently of Shannon and Weaver,” and “Librarians persist in sublimating librarianship to the lure of the machine.” (From “Librarianship and Information Science,” in The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages, ed. by Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield. Published by Wiley, 1983.)

There is no Jesse Shera for our time, but I can echo Juris Dilevko’s call to “re-intellectualize the profession” (The Politics of Professionalism: A Retro-Progressive Proposal for Librarianship) and recommend Richard J. Cox’s thorough diagnosis of contemporary library education (The Demise of the Library School: Personal Reflections on Professional Education in the Modern Corporate University). I recognize that librarianship should be different from what it used to be, but I think it ought to be more than what it has recently become.

Jaron Lanier has an Op-Ed in the August 9th issue of the New York Times, titled, “The First Church of Robotics.” It is a brief revisitation of some ideas from his recent book, You Are Not a Gadget, which was reviewed in the Times earlier this year. What Lanier has to say about artificial intelligence in information systems and its consequences is highly relevant and timely.

As technology is more and more the means of surveillance and control and not just information access and interaction, the role of the Hacker has become central to new scenarios of freedom and rebellion. That’s why I’ve always loved 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. I recently saw the Spring 2010 issue and was glad to see the journal is still being published.

I bring it to your attention now because that issue contains a one-page article (in print only) about the potential to hack Endeavor’s Voyager Library Information System. The article describes some of the data that should be accessible to a hacker with moderate skill. (The point of this article and many articles in 2600, and to a lot of what hackers do, is to point out security holes to the public, rather than to exploit them for private purposes, but it is conceivable that an ILS could be used by the state, and the PATRIOT Act certainly pushed in that direction.)

Ron Day and Hamid Ekbia of the IU library school have an article in the new First Monday titled, “(Digital) experiences.” The article looks at three types of “digital experience” using analytical perspectives on modern “experience” coming from Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin.

Day’s and Ekbia’s work gets at the roots of some of the things I have written about in Library Juice over the years. I recently read Ron’s book and plan to read Hamid’s book soon.

A Space for Hate: The White Power Movement’s Adaptation into Cyberspace

Author: Adam Klein
Price: $25.00
Published: June 2010
ISBN: 978-1-936117-07-9

A Space for Hate speaks to the media and information topic of hate speech in cyberspace, but more specifically, how its inscribers have adapted their movement into the social networking and information-providing contexts of the modern online community. While many books in recent years have addressed the notable ways that popular internet culture and cyber trends such as blogging have democratized the community of information seekers and providers, little research to date has addressed the darker element that has emerged from that same democratic sphere. That is, the huge resurgence and successful transformation of hate groups across cyberspace, and in particular, those that promote white supremacist ideas and causes. In 2009, hate speech and white power movement organizations in the United States are on the rise once again, fueled by new issues but with familiar themes. Among them, the nomination of the first African-American president of the United States, a national economic crisis that has triggered ethnic scapegoating, and an immigration debate centered largely on illegal Hispanic immigrants. These are just some of the emerging social issues by which today’s hate groups have framed familiar messages of blame, anger, fear, resistance, uprising and action.

The author’s interest in this book project evolved from examining the powerful effects of what many media scholars commonly deem the “hypodermic needle” of mass communication – propaganda. Being the grandson of two Auschwitz survivors who documented their stories through oral and written tradition, his research in the modern day forms of hateful propaganda emanates from a desire to pursue the unanswered question of how the fever of racist sentiment can sweep over a civilized society as it has done so brutally in the past. A Space for Hate focuses on the white power movement, in particular, by using hate-based websites as a concrete and measurable field for examining racial and ethnically targeting messages in the age of information and technology. Perhaps nowhere is this phenomenon more widespread today than within the unguarded walls of cyberspace. The increasingly acceptable domain of racist and anti-Semitic expression within such commonplace websites as Wikipedia, an “information” tool, and YouTube, the younger web community’s digital hub, initially suggested the need to further research the way that cyberspace was allowing blatant hate speech to once again flourish within mainstream popular culture. That investigation led to an investigation of white power movement websites where the new face of hate, in fact, does not resemble the book burning rallies of the neo-Nazi banner but rather the popular forums, media convergence centers, and information tools of social networking websites.

A Space for Hate speaks to the interests of readers of media and information studies material by focusing on three central spheres of hate speech in cyberspace: the legal/ethical concern, the cultural context, and the information aspect, each of which leads into the main body of the study of a series of hate group websites. First, any work on hate speech must begin by addressing the ‘free speech versus hate speech’ debate that has always surrounded the issue of hateful rhetoric in the media, and is further currently being tested on new ground in the World Wide Web. Tied into the legal debate of hate speech on the web are the ethical issues of the internet space itself such as its unregulated content, decentralized and unaccountable domain, and limitless exposure to younger audiences. Second, and perhaps most relevant to this topic is the cultural youth element of cyberspace, specifically those popular trends that have allowed hate-groups to adapt and flourish often under the camouflage of a “user-friendly” social network community. Finally the book investigates exactly how these hate groups are entering into the mainstream media culture by playing on traditional formats which convey their movements as tools of information – educational, political, spiritual, and even scientific in nature.

Many librarians, when asked what is involved in being a librarian besides checking out books, will say something to the effect of, “I don’t know the answers, but I know how to look them up.” Where a doctor has knowledge of medicine, a librarian has knowledge of how to find out knowledge of medicine. (Or how to organize and store knowledge of medicine for later retrieval, and how to connect people with the medical knowledge they need.)

An overarching problem in LIS, as I’ve said before in different ways, is that we have confused “knowing how to look it up” with technical knowledge of tools.

Knowledge of the tools is important, but is worth nothing without knowledge of the materials on which the tools operate. By analogy, knowing how to drive a car is of little value when you don’t know where you are and have no map and don’t know how to read one anyway, and you’re late to an appointment. To extend the analogy, it solves nothing in that situation to make technical improvements to the car, regardless of how fast you can make it go.

We are making vast technical improvements to the tools we use to find things, making them more powerful (in some respects) and easier to use. At the same time, however, we are gradually forgetting – by way of de-emphasis and de-prioritization – the general knowledge and domain-specific knowledge that enables us to do what we do at the reference desk.

If you’re a reference librarian, consider the thought-processes that are involved in answering a challenging reference question. Knowing the tools is helpful, obviously. But knowing what to do with them, based on your knowledge of the question’s subject area, is what gives you abilities that your patrons couldn’t pick up so easily. The knowledge that enables us to find things is knowledge of what Paul Otlet theorized as “the biblion,” the bibliographically interconnected world of information in documents and books. (The knowledge that enables us to interpret users’ information needs hermeneutically is another kind of knowledge altogether, but I won’t go into it here.) We can start with a couple of clues, infer a couple of different clues, and move from there into a rich inroad of relevant material, because we have knowledge of the field and the historical and conceptual relationships within it.

Actually, the initial exposition of the idea of knowledge of something versus knowledge of how to find something out, or at least the one our tradition goes back to, had nothing to do with knowledge of tools and was all about bibliographic knowledge, the ability to follow a thread from one place to another in the web of science and culture. It was a conversation between Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1775. As well as we know it, it went like this:

“No sooner,” says Boswell, “had we made our bow to Mr. Cambridge, in his library, than Johnson ran eagerly to one side of the room, intent on poring over the backs of the books. Sir Joshua observed (aside) ‘He runs to the books, as I do to the pictures; but I have the advantage. I can see much more of the pictures than he can of the books.’ Mr. Cambridge, upon this, politely said, ‘Dr. Johnson, I am going, with your pardon, to accuse myself, for I have the same custom which I perceive you have. But it seems odd that one should have such a desire to look at the backs of books.’ Johnson, ever ready for contest, instantly started from his reverie, wheeled about, and answered, ‘Sir, the reason is very plain. Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it.”

(This conversation was quoted by Andrew Keogh in his address to the American Library Association Annual Conference in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1907, and is reprinted in Speaking of Information: The Library Juice Quotation Book.)

I have an ambition to do some research that lays out the thought processes involved in answering complex reference questions, the knowledge and creativity that we bring to the table, over and above our understanding of search interfaces and index structures. If you would be interested in helping with research along these lines, please let me know.

Today’s New York Times has an informative little item comparing the environmental impact of producing an ipad versus that of a paper book: “How Green is My iPad?“

I just bought a Motorola Droid, which is Verizon’s Android-based smart phone, Android being Google’s OS for mobile devices. Its integration with Google gives me a lot of “power” to integrate my online tools with my mobile device, which is very satisfying. I experience it as empowering, and my attention is focused on learning what it can do and then on using it. My attention is not focused on Google itself and what its growing ubiquity may mean.

I am paranoid by nature, but I don’t have a vision of what Google’s growing power is going to mean decades from now. I know, however, that power corrupts. So I think I should be more scared than I am about the fact that:

• Google records my search data
• Google data-mines my email
• Google tracks my visits to sites that use Google Analytics
• Google is buying more and more websites and services and integrating the data it collects on them
• Google maintains a database of my contacts
• My Droid has a GPS that tells Google my location (I have the option to share it or not share it with friends – thanks for the privacy feature)
• The usability and power of Google’s services compel me to share more and more of my own information with them – calendar, finance, shopping, documents, email
• Google is exploring a service to manage our health records; I think it’s already available in beta
• I can see my house on Google, from the street and from the sky
• Google is becoming hungrier for financial returns. Its ad service is becoming more profitable, but if they can think of more ways of making money from their data, they will.

As I said, I don’t have a vision of the shape that all of this power will take. But it unquestionably adds up to power. Technologically, there is an economy to data integration that lends itself to Google growing larger and making competition more difficult. It is not like a dot com that can disappear when the fickle public notices a different one, because its strength lies in its huge database of user information. It is not so easy to migrate away from Google at this point.

The talk I gave in Alberta on February 5th was recorded. The recording is now on the web in mp3 form. Toni Samek’s introduction feels a bit grand, but the real me will be on the mic shortly. The recording itself came out all right. Not all of the audience questions are audible, but as a whole I think it works well enough to post:

• Podcast
• Slides
• Event information

Notice that I am not using the word “ontology.” I’ll get into why later, but if you’ve read any Heidegger you can guess…

Hope Olson, Sandy Berman, and many others who have done work based on theirs, have shown how classification systems tend not to represent all users well. Hope Olson has described the problem in terms of its philosophic roots by deconstructing classification systems using methods that come from Derrida. I think it is clear and very interesting the way classification systems reflect positivistic assumptions about reality that lead to a presumed “view from nowhere” that reflects the dominant culture. I’m glad that there is a lot of work being done in this area right now, and especially the way people are tying these ideas to new topics like folksonomies and contemporary identity issues.

However, I can’t help thinking that an unjust “official” classification system is not a big problem as long as it is transparent to the user. Let’s say I’m deviant in some way, and I want to find information that is relevant to me using institutions that are connected to the Library of Congress through its standards. Am I really going to expect the Library of Congress to be hip to my understanding of things? No, I am not going to expect that. I am going to do what I am accustomed to doing as a deviant person, which is my choice anyway: I am going to translate the official language, in which I am fluent, into my own deviant street language. That kind of translation skill is part of daily life for anyone who negotiates between formal and informal contexts, streets and offices, subcultures and dominant cultures. The official classification system may reinforce a sense of alienation, but as long as it is transparent to the user, I would not agree that it presents a barrier to access. The cognitive skills involved in making use of an imperfect classification system are very interesting to me (whether we’re talking about reference librarians or end users).

The next plateau of information technology, which we are beginning to reach, is, as I see it, presenting a new problem concerning these issues. Simplified interfaces with artificial intelligence under the hood are “freeing” the user from having to understand either the mechanism of the search or the underlying organizational system, but one thing that this means is a loss of transparency. The user is expected to trust the virtual helper to understand his or her information needs, and it is likely that this virtual helper is going to make assumptions about the user and the context that stem from the assumptions that are embedded into the official classification structure. Without access to the official vocabulary or the mechanism of the search, the user is less able to adapt the tool to his or her needs. Without access to the original text, the user doesn’t have the opportunity to do a translation…

Jaron Lanier has a new book, You Are Not a Gadget (NY Times review), which I have to add to my reading list and bump up a few notches. There is an excerpt from it in the February issue of Harper’s: “The Serfdom of Crowds.” He’s writing along the lines of some of what I have been blogging about here, but from the perspective of an early tech industry insider. Also, he is an amazingly writerly writer for someone with his background…

Slides to go along with my talk at the University of Alberta in Edmonton this morning…

My friend Ramona Islam shared with me an interesting blog post by chemist Jean-Claude Bradley, discussing the reliability (or non-reliability) of scientific reference sources that are considered trusted within the discipline. I find it especially interesting in terms of implications for projects like Wolfram Alpha and other attempts to build automated reasoning systems around inconsistently-defined and questionable data.