My Thoughts On Google Chrome (FWTW)

Since I have sometimes posted on things Googlish in this blog, I thought I would mention that my first experience with the beta version of Google's Chrome browser was less than ecstatic.

Until I tried Chrome, I had no idea how prevalent Macromedia's Adobe's Shockwave Flash is. Chrome definitely has a bug when it comes to the Flash plugin. I found blog postings where other people claimed that reinstalling Flash solved the problem for them, but that certainly did not work for me. On the positive side, every time Chrome put up an error message in response to the Flash bug saying that it would have to close, it never did close, and I could continue my browsing uninterrupted. I just couldn't see all the pretty, flashing pictures. Maybe that's a good thing.

I also did not experience the blazing speeds that some bloggers were talking about, especially for library-type applications like OPAC searching or pulling up result lists in WorldCat. I did find the option for the default phishing filter and turned it off, which noticeably improved speeds, but my perception was that it was still taking longer than either IE or FireFox to display results pages.

People have already started finding security flaws, and there was the EULA flap over the early version of Google's agreement that stated in section 11.1,

"By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."

The kinder, gentler version of 11.1 now simply reads, "11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services." (Remember "Don't be evil"?)

I also missed the ability to install my Dictionary.com toolbar that lets me lookup words on Dictionary.com easily plus a number of other standard browser amenities like decent bookmark management.

In short, I think Google Chrome has a long way to go yet, and I uninstalled it. (Kudos, Google, on the cute uninstall message--"Was it something we said?") I'm sure I'll be coming back for another look, though, once more of the rough edges have been knocked off. I wonder how long until the library vendors start listing Chrome as a supported browser?

People of the Book

The most thought-provoking seminar that I attended during the conference just happened to also take place on the last day of the conference. I am grateful to Anthony Elia from the JKM Library for his presentation, "Beyond Barthes and Chartier: The Theology of Books in the Digital Age". By interviewing seminary faculty members and researchers, Anthony uncovered some of the emotions and somatic connections (my phrase, not his) that people who do research in theology and the humanities have for that amalgam of cloth, glue, pressboard, paper, and ink called the book.

I cannot do full justice to everything Anthony had to say in a blog posting--you will have to wait for the annual Proceedings to come out in order to read his paper in full. I will summarize, though, the seven qualities that the responders to Anthony's questions value in books:

Tactility--the physical interaction between skin and book.

Proximity/Spatiality/Kinesthetics--you have to be present to appreciate a book; using a book grounds you physically.

Duration--maybe you could call this "boundedness". Books are linear (even if you cheat and read the last page first) with clearly marked beginnings and endings.

Sensorial aesthetics & sacral nature--the responders were impassioned on this point, even claiming that there was a sacred experience in imbibing a book equal to or transcending what they experienced in church.

Semiotics--the mere presence of books can communicate symbolically; academics tend to define themselves by their books.

Society; anthropology and sociology of books--books are objects that have literally formed our culture.

Identity/Extension/Embodiment--the anthropomorphism of books. As Anthony pointed out, most people do not feel distress when confronted with a broken computer, but a torn, damaged, or desecrated book can evoke strong emotions.

One response to all this is to conclude that if you ask a lot of loopy theology profs these kinds of questions, you get a lot of loopy answers. It would be interesting to know how faculty in science or medicine might answer these same questions. Or how I.T. professionals would answer these same questions. There is a great picture of someone hosing the mud out of servers after the 2004 flood at the University of Hawaii. I remember wincing when I first saw that picture.

Being a loopy theology person myself, though, I resonate with many of these attributes that other scholars appreciate in books. Particularly as a theological librarian, I am immersed in the printed word in a way that I am not immersed in anything else, especially since I have no television in my home. I do believe that human civilization predated books, and I believe that human civilization might outlast books, but I cannot escape a gut feeling that it will be a different kind of civilization should books go away. If there is something out there that is better than a book, I am all for it. But if it is a choice between a book-based culture or one that is solely formed by the evanescent images of mass media, I would echo the words of John Wesley, "O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God!"

Library 2.0, or, How Not to Waste Time

I stumbled on a transcript from a Web 2.0 conference the other day, and I think it makes a good read. The talk was presented by Clay Shirky and is titled "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus". In it, Shirky argues that in the early upheavals of the industrial revolution, British society numbed their discomfort with gin, and in the early stages of the communications revolution, society in general numbed their discomfort with sitcoms. Just as Londoners eventually rose from their stupor and produced such valuable societal structures as public libraries, museums, and public education, so, too, the dawn of the 21st century is seeing the rise of Web 2.0 from out of the haze of Gilligan's Island reruns.

While I think it may be a bit premature to announce that we are done wasting our time watching television, Shirky has a point. Many people are finding their diversion these days on the Internet, and increasingly, Internet-based diversions involve activities that are interactive and constructive. When you step back and try to size up the behemoth that is Wikipedia, it is not unlike stepping back and sizing up the pyramids or medieval cathedrals. One wonders, "Where did people find the time to make this?" Shirky's response is that there has been a social surplus of time plowed into the wasteland of television that is now being invested in the more fruitful fields of the Internet producing wikis, blogs, DIY articles, and stop-action Legos videos on YouTube.

This social surplus of time has become an area of focused interest for libraries. I attended an Illinois OCLC Users Group conference last month on Web 2.0 technologies and libraries. It included an overview of changing views toward sharing, privacy and trust on the Internet (gleaned from OCLC's study by that title) and a fascinating presentation from Aaron Schmidt, director of the North Plains Public Library in Oregon and author of the blog, walking paper. Schmidt encouraged us to make our libraries more user-centric, and he argued that Web 2.0 technologies are great ways to do that. Thus the title of the lead article in the Illinois Library Association Reporter that just came across my desk: "Heresy and Misconduct: Evolution in Library Automation". The article's title comes from the George Bernard Shaw quote, "All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct." Allow patrons to help us catalog our books? Heaven forbid!

On Shirky's home page, he writes,

If I had to describe what I write about, it would be “Systems where vested interests lose out to innovation.”

Or maybe “Systems where having good participants produces better results than having good planners.”

As I see it, librarians are now standing at that juncture where all the careful planning of our catalogs is going to be opened up to participation on the part of our users. I do not want us to discard all that careful planning, but I am looking forward to the benefits of a greater participation in our efforts at organizing knowledge. It seems to me that would be a much better use of peoples' time than elaborate experiments with Diet Coke and Mentos.

HackCollege.com

There's a brief but interesting interview in The Chronicle's May 6 "The Wired Campus". The interview is with Kelly Sutton, the co-founder of a student technology blog called Hack College. I thought the following was particularly interesting:

Q. What is the most important way technology has changed student life in recent years?

A. It’s no longer weird to spend a lot of time on the Internet. Students will jokingly admit to spending hours on Facebook. The habits that they’re forming right now will eventually lead to different collaborations that weren’t possible in the past.

Q. What’s the biggest downside of all this student technology?

A. It’s adding a lot of overhead to a student’s life — the time it takes to check all the social networks and online platforms.

I thought this was a pretty good parallel to the changes that we have all been muddling through in librarianship. It's no longer weird to spend a lot of time on the Internet. We're forming habits that are leading to different collaborations that were not possible in the past. It is adding a lot of overhead to keeping up with the rest of our responsibilities in the analog world. (Or is even the digital world an analog experience? Hmm.)

1900 Years of Paper & Counting

Wired's Science blog has an interesting posting on the history of the introduction of paper into Chinese society. While the invention of paper officially dates back to 105 A.D., archaeological evidence is supporting the idea that paper making was already practiced in areas of China for one or two hundred years prior to Cai Lun introducing it in court.

One wonders what cyber-archaeologists a millennium or two from now will say about the first ebooks. Will they only credit a future Chinese inventor of 2105 with the first universally-adopted ebook plaque, or will they recognize the abortive and less-than successful attempts of the late 20th century?

Libraries and Computer Labs

The Chronicle's Wired Campus has an article about the lack of public workstations in public libraries. This article is in turn reporting on an AP story about the increasing demand for Internet access in public libraries. All of this reporting on libraries and computers has been spawned by ALA'a recently released report (227 p.; 6+ MB):

Libraries Connect Communities: Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study 2006 - 2007.

(Many thanks to Jessamyn West at librarian.net for providing the location of the ALA report.)

Public libraries, of course, operate differently than academic libraries. Where public libraries are often the sole providers of free Internet access in their communities (so say 73% of the public libraries that responded to the ALA survey), academic libraries are usually not the sole source of Internet access on their campuses. Apart from technology owned by the students themselves, there is always the computer lab, or, if your campus is large enough, the computer labs.

Which raises in my mind the question of the relationship between the library and campus computer labs. At the annual ATLA conference in Philadelphia this past June, there was an interesting and somewhat hotly debated presentation by Dr. Kenneth Boyd and his staff from the Information Commons at Asbury Theological Seminary. In the evolving world of I.T. and libraries, Asbury's Information Commons represents a melding of these two worlds where library services and I.T. services all come from the same department. Librarians at Asbury may answer reference questions about theological research, or they may assist students with the correct configuration of their wireless proxy settings or the correct formatting of footnotes in their Word documents. (Something that many of us do anyway, regardless of how closely our libraries are aligned with campus I.T.)

In theological libraries in particular, there is a noticeable generational gap between the computer skills of our younger and our older students. Seminaries tend to have more older students than many other types of graduate institutions, with average student ages trending up toward the 40s at the turn of the century. For older students, many of whom are returning to education for the first time in over 20 years, there is a profound technology shock. The last time they did academic research, they were using card catalogs and paper periodical indexes.

Which brings me to my question: Should academic libraries in general or theological libraries in specific include a computer lab as part of the library? If the library does not include a computer lab, where do students, particularly those without computer skills, learn to use computers for academic research and writing?

Space concerns often dictate one answer to this question. The 1960s and 1970s saw a lot of academic library expansion and building projects on a national scale; for many of our libraries, though, there has not been any significant building or expansion over the past 30+ years, leaving us with little room for books much less technologies that did not exist when our buildings were built. Any public library building project that I have seen over the past decade has devoted significantly more space to computers than previous designs; I believe academic library building projects have been more mixed as to how much priority is given to computer space.

If your library space allows room for a computer lab, you are still left with the question of whether libraries are well-suited to provide computer services. If 73% of our public libraries are the only available community spaces for Internet access, does that set a standard for academic libraries as well? The answer to this question is evolving; how fast it evolves is up to us.

Theological Librarianship & Transhumanism

Today's Chicago Tribune has an article on the 9th annual TransVision conference hosted by the World Transhumanist Association here in Chicago. This from the WTA's web site:

"The World Transhumanist Association is an international nonprofit membership organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities."

Please understand that I am all for the ethical use of technology, and I think that there is a great need for people from other disciplines than just science to weigh in on the technoethical issues of the day.

As a theological librarian, though, I find myself distinctly out of step with the postmodernist, posthuman drum-beat of the WTA. One reason I am a theological librarian is that I think some of the best guides to ethical human behavior have already been written, and preserving that heritage is one of my jobs. It is a heritage that usually is not even acknowledged by those enamored of technological solutions to human problems.

I believe, though, that I can appropriately use today's technology to preserve this heritage so that it may be accessible to those who become disenchanted with technology's innate lack of morality necessary to govern itself. Technological power without morality is just another name for hell. Theological librarianship has something significant to contribute to this discussion in its commitment to the preservation of a timeless Word that expands human capacities in ways that no technology will ever match.

Google Books -- Pros, Cons, and ?s

I continue to be amazed at the speed of the progress of both the Google Book Search and the Microsoft Live Book Search projects. Three years ago, who could have predicted it? Or, more precisely, with decades of predictions that some day someone was going to digitize the libraries of the world, who really expected it to happen this fast?

While neither Microsoft nor Google are disclosing their costs or total progress for their scanning projects, a March 11, 2007 article in the New York Times estimated that Google had already scanned over 1 million books at a cost of over $5 million. (History, Digitized (and Abridged), by Katie Hafner.)

Of course, just scanning a book does not guarantee that anyone will ever be able to read it online -- witness the recent posting on the American Historical Association's blog, Google Books: What's Not to Like? There are many errors resulting from the high speed with which the Google Book Search project is being done, errors that render the scanned books unreadable or unretrievable -- the written word reduced to mere digital static.

Nor do we yet have a pleasurable way to read an online book. Online books are great for keyword searching or reading brief excerpts, but, as been noted in many places, you can't take them into the bathtub with you yet. Companies like E Ink may be close to breaking that barrier. Take note, E Ink: We want our electronic paper to be capable of color and moving pictures, and we want it to be tubworthy. It is also possible that online books will leapfrog text altogether and become part of the audio-drenched universe accessible through our iPod earbuds -- Project Gutenberg is quickly building a large collection of freely accessible audio books. Again, there are no statistics available, but a quick check of their list of new audio books posted or updated in the past 24 hours reveals 18 titles, not too shabby a rate, but still a slug's slow progress compared to Google's frenetic scanning.

A professor of mine from my library school days, Michael Koenig, has written about the three stage process of social transformation due to the introduction of a new technology. According to the theory, there is an initial stage of introduction of a new technology, a second stage of adoption where the technology begins to become broadly accessible, and then a final, third stage where the technology changes not only how we do things but transforms the very things we do. (See "Entering State III: The Convergence of the Stage Hypotheses," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 43, no. 3, 1992.) For all the problems with the Google and Microsoft book scanning projects, my sense is that we are being chivvied into a state III transformation when it comes to online books. We're already cross-eyed from our efforts to track our online journals; what will happen to our library systems when our books are online, too? On the strength of JSTOR, many schools have already discarded back runs of their serials. On the strength of Google, will we discard our old books, too?

futureofthebook.org

I'm indebted to the Chronicle's Daily Report for twigging me on to futureofthebook.org. A collaborative (and eclectic) group of authors, social scientists, systems engineers, programmers, bikers, graphic designers, and entrepreneurs have come together to chronicle the shift away from the printed page toward the networked screen, "and impact its development in a positive direction". They have an excellent blog -- if:book -- and support the "haystack" project -- http://www.futureofthebook.org/HASTAC/learningreport/about, a collaborative paper entitled The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.

There seems to be a glaring absence in all this collaboration of any input from theologians or clergy (or, dare I say it, librarians). Some of this, no doubt, is because many of us are still way behind the technology curve and are less than actively engaged in the digital dialogues blooming all around us. Some of this may reflect the internal bias of the collaborators themselves who, while not opposed to well-thought-out intellectual debate about religion and belief, seem to largely view that debate as passé as, well, television (witness their Without Gods project).

So where is a theological librarian to stand in the midst of this swirling change? That is one of the themes I intend to keep revisiting in this blog. I remain committed to God's Word as an enduring story that will live into the digital age and beyond. The history of that story is a written one -- a textual one -- but that does not mean that it is in opposition to networked media. Whether we want one or not, I'm sure someone will eventually put together an iPod Bible complete with video clips, "contemporary" Christian music, and links to web-based commentaries and resources. If the iPod Bible is to be truly well done and a benefit to the Church, we will need to listen carefully to the voices of people like the futureofthebook collaborators. People like me bring a passion for the biblical story; people like them bring a passion for networking information well. Hopefully, we can both learn from each other.

The History of Tech Support

For my first posting, I am choosing a humorous look at the history of tech support. Having a good sense of humor makes survival in a field undergoing volatile changes much more pleasant. The following YouTube video is a good reminder that, in some ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same.



Click here to view Medieval Help Desk

I think most theological librarians are conservative by nature, regardless of the bent of their theology. We have a past that we treasure, that we think is worth the sweat of our brows and the years of our lives to preserve, and yet new technologies are forcing us to reconsider the fundamental definitions of what constitutes a work, to ask how to recognize God's word in a post-literate era. We fear, among all the transitions, to have some of our text disappear.