Virtual Dave…Real Blog

Lankes has been invited to give a lecture as part of the Lazerow Lecture series at the Pratt School of Information and Library Science on April 28, 5:30-6:30. The lecture series is supported by ISI Thomson. Here is the title and abstract.

Reference: An Island of Chaos in a Sea of Order

Much of librarianship is about bringing order to the wilds of the information environment. Books, articles, media and documents are wrestled to the ground, branded with a classification and corralled onto a shelf (either virtually or physically). Reference started its existence as a bridge from a patron’s unordered view to a structured collection. However, as the amount of disordered information available to the average user has far outstripped cataloged collection, reference’s unique inductive nature has come to the fore. Reference has become a creative author and tool creator in the library. This lecture will explore the unique nature of reference in libraries, and examine the potential of reference to secure libraries place in the 21st century.

No, not that MacArthur grant…this one funds the creation and the “Credibility Commons” which includes Reference Extract.

the Credibility Commons is an experimental environment enabling individuals the opportunity to try out different approaches to improving access to credible information on the World Wide Web. Tools will be provided to researchers as well as the public, allowing them to try out search strategies, collections and other approaches to improving access to credible information. The Commons can be viewed as a collaborative space in which to share ideas, data sets, results and innovations. This project is sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation who is deeply invested in improving access to credible information on the World Wide Web.

I’ve uploaded a module on installing TikiWiki, an open-source portal system here:

http://quartz.syr.edu/rdlankes/Teaching/LAMP/tikiwiki/tiki.html

You can get the audio through my Podcast, and I think I’m going to try something wacky and video blog it…try and distribute the video through my Podcast feed.

Be afraid, be very afraid. When you’ve gotten me in a conspiratorial mood over the past few months you may have heard me grumbling about how higher education is the next target of the U.S. Department of Education and education reformists. Think of No Child Left Behind days of national testing, “rigorous” academic standards (read national curriculum) and the like but for universities.
No, you say, Higher Education is different! We’re the best in the world…etc.

Here’s the scenario that happened in K-12 education…see if it sounds familiar: a group of concerned business leaders get together and say that the education is failing to prepare the work force for high tech and competitive jobs (anyone heard Bill Gates recently on why they are setting up research centers in India and China). The Department of Education and members of Congress start talking about how these education institutions can be both locally controlled, and more “accountable” (this is a key word in education circles… it is often operationalized as standardized testing and methods for federal control) considering the sizable federal investment. State wide projects are highlighted on how they can improve (it always seems to be Texas). No Child Left Behind gets passed with bipartisan support.

Now…read this ( http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/09/commission ):

“Miller sought to shake that complacency from his very first statements at Thursday’s meeting — and he even got a head start on that. A profile of him that appeared in Thursday’s edition of USA Today quoted Miller as calling it “highly probableâ€? that the commission would recommend instituting some kind of national testing to measure college students’ learning, along the lines of what’s done in elementary and secondary education.”

Then look at the commission set up by the U.S. Department of Education here: http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/meetings.html

Note this presentation: “A Transparent Approach to Higher Education Accountability: Developed and Implemented by The University of Texas System”
Now listen to this piece from NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5205322

Even if you don’t buy into conspiracy theories, I think it would do us all some good to keep up with the workings of this commission.

As part of my current digital library course I’ve developed a series of modules talking about LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and different open source packages. I’ve made the audio portion available on my podcast. Now you can see the full thing:

Apache and HTTPD
LAMP Introduction
MySQL and PHPMyAdmin
Changing the Root Password on MySQL
PHP
Sphider
WAMP
WordPress

Also available now, though not LAMP, a tutorial on the Nutch Search engine.

“Customer Service in Libraries” Jackson Library/LIS Speaker Series, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, NC

Abstract: A discussion of active and integral customer service by academic libraries.
Slides: http://quartz.syr.edu/rdlankes/Presentations/2006/sGreensboro.pdf

Slides now available from my talk as part of the lecture series:

A discussion of active and integral customer service by academic
libraries.

I’ve been playing with inductive clustering of digital reference questions. To this point I’ve been visualizing this in 2D, but I have been keeping track of three dimensions.

I’ve discovered a great little development application distributes as part of it’s developer package called Quartz Composer. It uses a visual programming language to directly tap into Apple’s graphics architecture. It’s inputs aren’t too rich, but I managed to get MySQL data dumped into it using RSS. While it seems a bit of a kludge, it works pretty well.

Here’s an animated GIF showing the digital transactions clustering in 3D:

Here is a quick MPEG movie showing how you can fly around the cluster at any point. What you’ll see is a screen capture of me moving around using the keyboard and mouse:

3D Cluster Move

Here’s just a pretty rotating movie of a small subset of the data:

3dplay.mov

“Reference Authoring” School of Information’s iForum, University of Texas, Austin, TX
Wednesday, February 8th, 2006

Abstract: Digital reference is not just reference interviews online. The main difference is the production of a “reference artifact.” In face-to-face reference, work must be done to retain the transaction (it must be recorded, or written down…action must occur), whereas in digital reference the opposite is true (the e-mail must be deleted, the database purged). This may seem like a small difference at first, but it is critical. With recorded transactions knowledge bases can be created, pathfinders authored, training can occur with real data, etc. This use of digital reference output is called reference authoring. This presentation will explore reference authoring, the use of induction and complexity research to manage knowledge created through reference authoring and the increasing intersection between reference and information retrieval.
Slides: http://quartz.syr.edu/rdlankes/Presentations/2006/RefA.pdf