The title of this post refers to the book Reading and Understanding Research by Locke, et al., assigned for my class in indexing and abstracting. It is, as you might guess, an introduction to reading “research” (we’ll get to what that is in a moment).

I’m going to suggest that there are a number of possible forms for such a book, among them these three:

• a book about scientific research, discussing the scientific method, hypotheses, etc., and providing tools to distinguish between what’s scientific and what’s para- or pseudoscientific, which might be either for a lay audience or for undergraduate and graduate students in natural and social sciences
• a book for skilled professionals (or students of skilled professions) such as nurses, counselors, teachers, and others, to understand social-scientific research that is applicable to their profession
• a book about critical thinking generally, for a lay audience or students to apply in understanding academic research across many disciplines in the natural and social sciences and humanities

The back-cover blurbs on this book lead one to expect the first sketch above, and so does the introduction of the book. The focus is explicitly said to be on empirical research and to exclude history, philosophy, and other non-empirical lines of study.

However, I find the treatment less than satisfactory, if this is the goal. Whether the audience is a layperson or a student of science, the descriptions of scientific research are woefully inadequate. The word “hypothesis” is barely mentioned, and the concept of whether the hypothesis is testable doesn’t seem to be anywhere at all. The scientific method is loosely discussed, but it’s never called the “scientific method”. There is some discussion of “shoddy research”, under which I suppose pseudoscientific research would fall, but there’s very little discussion of how to actually detect this.

I’m not exactly trying to say the book is bad, or not useful, however. On reflection, this book is actually the second of the sketches I made above. The authors are all professors in Education departments, training teachers, and the book really appears to be aimed at their students. They want teachers to be able to read articles from psychology and sociology and other related disciplines and apply them to their work (and it could be pretty useful to librarians seeking to do the same thing, if you’re not familiar with how research works in the social sciences). This is a fine goal, but the back-cover blurbs and introduction really oversold me on what the book was all about.

As for its applicability to my indexing and abstracting class, with all due respect to my instructor, I think it could be better. I think the third of the sketches above would serve best, because it applies across all academic disciplines we might be called on to index or abstract. Why focus purely on empirical research and exclude philosophy, literary criticism, history, and so on? Although they might not be “scientific” per se, they’re analytical nevertheless, and a good book on critical thinking as applied to academic discourse should exist somewhere out there in the bibliographic universe… Now I should go find it to recommend for the future…

John Rollins, of John Rollins Booksellers in Kalamazoo, passed away the other day. I really like Rollins bookstore when I lived in Kalamazoo. It was big and bright and had lots of books like a chain store, but was independent and full of friendly, helpful people. Unfortunately it gave way to Borders, Barnes & Noble, etc. in 2000.

LibraryThing is now showing relationships between LC subject headings and user-assigned tags and the results are really interesting. Lots of forward-thinking librarians and web-2.0-ologists have been claiming for a while that subject headings and tags can coexist without eating each other’s babies, but we haven’t had any place to see it in action until now. (PennTags, for example, incorporates tags in the catalog, but doesn’t show relationships between tags and subject headings.)

It’s really pretty cool how much information can be derived simply by observing the co-occurrence of tags and subject headings, without any directed human input matching them up.

I think RJO’s comment on this post (the second one) is pretty insightful. I’ve been noodling around with LibraryThing and listening in on the LibraryThing Google Group, and one of the things that occurred to me as well was that it might be useful to have private tags, for things like shelf location and read/unread status, in addition to public tags, which really make sense in the social-networking atmosphere connecting up tags and subject headings and everything.

The library world is going to be continuing to watch LibraryThing for interesting experiments in bibliography. It’s a perfect test-bed for these kinds of things, because its user-base is a dedicated one that cares about adding tags, etc., because they are their books. I don’t know how easily any of this translates to the catalog for a particular library, because the average dedication level for users is lower, but there are potentially lots more users as well. As we see more experiments like this, time will tell.

I’m continuing to think about this and what might work for “book queues”. A few tidbits:

• Apparently some library systems allow “active” and “inactive” holds, which might kinda help the problem (i.e., place an “inactive” hold on things you don’t want to read yet).
• An argument for the processing happening inside the library: people on long holds lists. See the comments on this post at Seattlist. This isn’t generally my situation, but I see the problem.

I have Netflix, and one of the things I really love about it is the queue. Every time someone tells me about an interesting movie, I just add it to the queue. Eventually it comes up to the top, or sometimes I’ll bump something up that I’m really interested in seeing.

I really wish library holds worked this way, but they don’t. I can’t just place a hold on an interesting book that someone mentioned, because I don’t want it right now, I want it after I’m finished with the current book or two I’m reading.

And I’m not exactly sure the library is the right place for the queue to live, anyway, at least for me. I buy a lot of books (something of a book junkie), plus I often read things I already have or that have been lent to me by a friend. I want to keep track of all of those books in my queue, but I don’t need or want to get them all from the library. This kind of queue integrated with something like LibraryThing would be perfect.

Well, my Netflix queue has about 200 DVDs on it (many are multidisc TV series, so it’s not really quite as bad as it sounds). I’m convinced there’s probably about that much in my mental queue of books as well, but there’s no way I can remember that many. The pain has gotten to the point that I decided to stop whining and do something about it.

I’ve built a prototype system in Ruby on Rails, because it rocks my world for getting web applications up and running in a hurry. (Rails also gives you all kinds of AJAX-y goodness without much work.) It’s heavily modeled after the queue in Netflix, with basically four sections: the queue, the current reading, saved books (not in the queue because they’re not released yet), and a history (which I haven’t implemented yet). It pulls information from Amazon’s awesome web services using a Ruby library. Right now that’s pretty rough, but it’s clear how it would work. (Even better would be an API for LibraryThing or something like that.) I also envision that eventually it would incorporate ideas from Jon Udell’s Library Lookup to check for availability in your favorite libraries (and of course it could give you a current price on Amazon or other booksellers as well). Unfortunately there are no automated ways (as far as I know) to place holds in OPACs, so you’d still have to do that manually, but at least it could point you directly to the hold page for the work.

You can see the live demo. It’s still quite rough around the edges, but I think it gives a fairly good idea of what I’m aiming at. It’s also totally unsecured, so I’ll trust you not to go crazy with it and tie up my machine. (If you click the link and don’t get anything, you can probably assume something bad happened. If it does, I’ll bring it back up later with a password and you can email me to check it out.)

I had the pleasure of attending Library Camp a couple of weeks ago at Ann Arbor District Library. I thought it was a great event. As a student, it gave me a great, low-cost way to go to a conference (or “unconference”) and talk to other librarians—as well as patrons. I think it was great to get really interested non-librarians (like [Superpatron Ed Vielmetti], the instigator of the whole event) in a room with a bunch of librarians and just hash over issues.

You can get good summaries of what went on elsewhere (the L2 wiki, Ryan Eby, John Blyberg among other places), and my memory is fuzzy at this point anyway. But I do have a few thoughts to share:

• I thought the unconference format worked well. Basically, there’s no preset schedule or speakers. Everyone shows up, talks about what they’re interested in, and a schedule gets created. I think it’s a great, low-cost way to get people together and talk about something, and it can easily be replicated.
• The Ann Arbor District Library is wonderful! Full of people, especially kids, and lots of interesting stuff going on. The day of Library Camp there was also a video game tournament going on.
• One of the issues I started to get really jazzed about was the idea of a Netflix-style queue model for borrowing. General consensus was that the current holds models in ILSes and the business processes of libraries don’t support it very well. I’ve been cooking up some ideas in this area (and another little Ruby on Rails project). More on this coming soon in a post.
• Most of all, it was great to meet people and just talk about libraries. Check out the photos on Flickr.