Jeff Gordinier wrote a wonderful article for Details Magazine a couple of years ago about how Generation X gets the shaft, and has a new book as well. Hard to listen to him getting beaten up so badly in this interview, but he makes some excellent points, particularly about the over-commercialization of Boomer music and the contributions of Gen X women singer/songwriters like Aimee Mann and Liz Phair. Take a listen to my Pandora station “Voices Carry” and hear for yourself. (Assuming I’ve worked out most of the kinks.)

And seriously, they’ll invoke Nirvana over and over but not a single mention of U2? For shame…

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Now playing: ‘Til Tuesday - Love In A Vacuum
via FoxyTunes

MLA ‘08: Home

The Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association is in Chicago in a couple of weeks and I was just notified that I will be an official conference blogger this year. Which means that I’ll have to post regularly and somewhat frequently from the conference.

This will be my first year on the Continuing Education Committee, a posting I labored after for nearly a decade with no luck until just a few months ago. I also will be moderating part of the Not-So-Dangerous Liaisons symposium, which I’m very much looking forward to.

All the fun starts in about twelve days, so I should have more to report then.

OU-Tulsa
Call number PN 167 O75 2008

(With this post, I’m adding a feature to my blog to point out noteworthy additions to the OU-Tulsa Library book collection. In the future, for a quick run-down of all these posts, just select “book notes” under Categories on the right-hand column.)

Plagiarism is a significant problem for higher ed in the internet age. This text, edited by Caroline Eisner and Martha Vicinus, does an admirable job of bringing to light all the concerns and opportunities compositionists and writing instructors now face. Three sections, Originality, Imitation and Plagiarism, respectively, contain chapters that fully examine the nuances of these concerns in modern academic writing.

For example, the section on Originality includes discussions on copyright in the information economy, ethics in scientific scholarly publishing, open access publishing in physics, and authorship versus authority in the age of the wiki. Imitation authors consider the role of genre writing, education through imitation, and the changing nature of “common knowledge” over time. The final section, Plagiarism, discusses matters of plagiarism as part of an academic discipline, as copyright infringement, as regards detection software (Turnitin.com), and as a convention of the Western academic culture.

Nothing about this book suggests a “light” treatment of these issues; instead, authors from a diverse range of backgrounds and interests consider these issues deeply and with consideration. A commendable effort, and one which should be of interest to anyone who writes for scholarship, or who assigns writing assignments to their students.

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Now playing: Lucinda Williams - Out Of Touch
via FoxyTunes

Sadly, there is really nothing all that shocking about this. It’s a well-known, little-discussed fact in modern medical academe: If a drug company foots the bill on your research, odds are they’ll also write up your results for you, thank you very much.

Here’s an astonishing quote from the NYT write-up:

A third author, also not named on the initial draft, was Dr. Louis Kirby, currently the medical director for the company Provista Life Sciences. In an e-mail message on Tuesday, Dr. Kirby said that as a clinical investigator for the study he had enrolled more patients, 109, than any of the other researchers. He also said he made revisions to the final document.

“The fact that the draft was written by a Merck employee for later discussion by all the authors does not in and of itself constitute ghostwriting,” Dr. Kirby’s e-mail message said.

Actually, Dr. Kirby, that’s pretty much a textbook definition of ghostwriting: to write for and in the name of another. And for those researchers who actually write about the results of their research themselves, believe me, they know the difference quite well. They sweat hour upon hour over minute details of their work and their words, they push panicky deadlines, and they bite their nails during peer review.

Instead, Dr. Kirby might do well to familiarize himself with another term:

Hack writer: a writer who is deemed to operate as a ‘mercenary’ or ‘pen for hire,’ expressing their client’s political opinions in pamphlets or newspaper articles; a mediocre and disdained writer

Researchers who let someone else ghostwrite their research? They don’t get to call themselves researchers anymore. Let’s call them what they are: Hacks.

I often feel the MLS/non-MLS argument (and it’s a very old argument) is a straw man in many respects. We don’t really want to suggest that the degree is meaningless, but we should recognize that the title “librarian” should be attached to the job description, not the diploma. And sometimes that work might best be done by someone with a Bachelors, or an MLS, or an MBA, or a Ph.D.

I do wish I heard more library school students speak affirmatively about the education they’re getting, though.

Nice to see a solid write-up of my generation. I propose that we’re not only the translators between the adjacent generations, we’re also the digital pioneers that built the platform of today’s internet for the Millennial “digital natives” and the Boomer “digital immigrants” to enjoy.

This list of digital pioneer Xers should include:

• Tom Anderson, founder MySpace
• Chad Hurley, founder YouTube
• Larry Page, co-founder Google
• Sergei Brin, co-founder Google
• Pierre Omidyar, founder, eBay.
• Jerry Yang, co-founder, Yahoo.
• David Filo, co-founder, Yahoo.

And you’re all welcome, btw.

As the blogger above will testify, PubMed is not at all attuned to how modern searchers search. On the other hand, it really has never been a particularly good search engine, so I don’t know why this is striking so many librarians as a harsh criticism. PubMed isn’t bad for government work, but it has many problems as we all know.

This isn’t an information literacy issue either, I’m sorry to say. Researchers and clinicians shouldn’t have to “learn to search” to be able to run basic searches, and instead they should call the librarian when things get rough. The analogy I like to use is for car owners: Everyone should be able to pump their own gas, some might even change their own oil, but sometimes you need to hire a pro to come in and fix the transmission.

Unfortunately, many of the competing products, including my old standby Ovid, are also just terrible for running simple MEDLINE searches. Partly this is due to legacy problems with MEDLINE, partly it’s due to limitations with the MeSH and the indexing, and partly it’s due to PubMed being coded in the mid-1990s and remaining largely unchanged this whole time. Researchers used to complain about PubMed’s imprecision; clinicians complained about getting too many hits. And now, we’re going to have a new generation of searchers used to very simple, effective techniques that work fine in Google and elsewhere not getting what they need either…

I’m going to be very curious to see how this ultimately turns out, but this is clearly a significant victory for the Siegels. (Another court battle over SuperBOY has already wreaked havoc in the DC Universe.) It could also make  an interesting touchstone for discussion of copyright issues in an information literacy class.

I’m just eager for the day when Superman, Batman and other heroes developed in the early 1930s finally revert to public domain, to become truly classic heroes like Robin Hood and King Arthur. Decisions like the ones were seeing above give me some reason to hope we might see this transition happen within my lifetime.

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Listening to: Annie Lennox - Dark Road
via FoxyTunes

I used to point to the first StickerShock exhibit in my old E-Journals workshop as an example of how libraries are trying to make their constituencies aware of the appallingly high subscription costs we face collectively. Particularly astonishing to me are titles like Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering or International Journal of Solids and Structures, where the cost per use is so high that interlibrary loans might actually be more cost effective, if less convenient.

Recently my co-editor Chris Hollister and I placed the first volume of Communications in Information Literacy on Lulu.com as a print-on-demand edition. For our open access title, if we were to sell 10 copies of the print edition, we would raise enough money to pay for our web hosting costs for a full year. Granted, the cost of running our small e-journal is considerably less than the cost of producing a journal for, say, Elsevier, but then we’re not trying to make $9 billion in profits each year either.