Books and publishing
wcrawford | July 5, 2009Cites & Insights 9:9 (August 2009) is now available--just in time for the 2009 ALA Annual Conference. That's not a coincidence, to be sure; although the issue may not be directly relevant to the conference, if I didn't publish it now, it wouldn't be out until at least July 19.
This one's 32 pages, PDF as usual, but those who detest PDF or otherwise really need HTML can download the three articles separately.
The issue includes:
Perspective: Writing about Reading 3
The theme for this installment: Rethinking books and rethinking reading. Which means most of the long essay is about ebooks…
wcrawford | June 28, 2009In the past few days, one of the best libloggers called it quits: She explicitly said there won't be any more posts on that blog.
By itself, while it's noteworthy, I probably wouldn't post about it. The writer isn't going away, the archives aren't going away, and the circumstances may be unusual.
But there's a context that might be worth discussing and pursuing further--actually two contexts, one only marginally related.
Direct context
One comment on this shutdown said that, according to the writer and a colleague, this particular blog was the only consistent liblog around (not in those…
wcrawford | June 24, 2009When I wrote this post, I left out a whole second "trigger" because of time and energy.
That trigger--once again, wondering whether my humanities background (rhetoric major, math minor) leaves me simply unable to cope with the true Scientific Mind--regarded the format used for publication.
Or, to put it another way, the widespread and vehemently-expressed view that PDF sucks (to use a polite version).
What I saw, in several conversations, was a seeming demand from text-miners that everything must be in HTML (or, better, XML) so it was easy to mine, with a complete disdain for layout and…
wcrawford | June 21, 2009Angel Rivera was kind enough, in commenting on my previous post, to say "Yes, what you do is information science."
I wonder sometimes--both about the field called "information science" and about whether what I do fits within it.
A snarky way to put this might be:
Can you do information science if you're not part of academia?
Or,
Can it be information science if it doesn't appear in the form of proper scholarly articles in proper refereed journals?
Not that I haven't had articles in refereed journals. I have--not many, but a few.
But most of what I'd call research, particularly in the past…
wcrawford | June 12, 2009Do words have meanings--meanings that change slowly over time--or did that noted logician Charles L. Dodgson get it right when he had one of his more scholarly characters, H. Dumpty, assert that:
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less
To some extent, this essay--the second major essay in the July 2009 Cites & Insights--is about the proposed settlement of the Association of American Publishes and Authors Guild lawsuits against Google over Google Book Search.
To some extent, it's a followup to the issue-length Perspective: The Google Books Search…