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- Marie Kennedy is the Serials & Electronic Resources Librarian at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. This blog is about organization, librarianship, and sometimes monkeys and/or bananas.
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which is the marked category: print or electronic?
stimulating post today on SERIALST, an email forum devoted to serial publications. the author posed the question if we should distinguish in catalog records which publications are in print format because patrons now expect that a serial is chiefly published electronically. until now we’ve assumed that any publication is in analog format and have only distinguished in the catalog record when it is electronic (really we distinguish the alternate format if it’s something other than print, but for this discussion let’s stay on the binary distinction print-electronic).
what we’re witnessing here is a cultural shift, where the thing that used to be assumed is no longer assumed. this is exciting because these shifts tend to happen slowly, imperceptibly, and you don’t notice it happening until, for example, all the sudden you’re calling digital photographs “photographs,” when “photographs” used to only be analog. when did the change take place? it’s hard to pinpoint, so being able to note a time in history where you can see a shift occurring is exciting. today’s forum post is such an occasion.
making this kind of distinction is called “marking”. the “unmarked category” is the expected or usual thing, whereas the “marked category” is out of the ordinary. until now, serials in print were the historical norm and were not distinguished with any special notes in a catalog record. the forum post today suggests that patrons now expect that electronic format is the expected way that serials are published, making the print version out of the ordinary.
the models for marking fall into two general categories: either/or or type-of. the either/or, or antonymous, model, suggests exclusivity, such as noting that two terms are in opposition. an illustration of this is found in the terms like and liked. term-1, like, is the norm/unmarked in english because the present tense is the assumed tense, whereas term-2, liked, is past tense, less commonly used, and therefore marked. the type-of, or hyponymous, model, suggests a hierarchy or superordinate structure. in this model, term-1 would be considered a kind of the root. in the same way, term-2 would also be a kind of the root. days of the week, as an example of this model, could be considered the root, with workweek as term-1 and weekend as term-2 (Battistella, 1990).
if we decide to start noting in the catalog which serials are published in print, when will we begin that process, and how? stay tuned to the discussion by subscribing to the SERIALST forum.
Battistella, E.L. (1990) Markedness: The evaluative superstructure of language. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Interview with BIGWIG
BIGWIG badge from ALA
At the recent annual meeting of the American Library Association (ALA) I attended the BIGWIG meeting. BIGWIG (Blogs, Interactive Groupware Wikis Interest Group) is an interest group in the division of ALA called Library and Information Technology Association, and was most recently headed by Jason Griffey. After ALA I corresponded with him about the impetus for BIGWIG and asked him about its progress so far. Here’s how he responded.
MK: Jason, how did BIGWIG come about?
JG: In 2004, Karen Schneider and Clara Ruttenberg thought there was a need to press LITA on the fact that blogs and wikis were increasingly important communications tools, and formed the Interest Group to explore the possibilities. After Karen S. roped Karen Coombs and myself into doing a presentation on blogs and blogging at ALA Annual 2005, the two of us and Michelle Boule stepped into leadership roles in BIGWIG, and decided that blogs and wikis, while interesting, were moving from exciting to understood pretty quickly. We’ve worked over the last 3 years, with the help of Jonathan Blackburn and Tiffany Smith, to expand the coverage of BIGWIG to be more of a general purpose technology incubator for LITA.
MK: Talk about the reasoning behind the BIGWIG URL being outside the ALA domain.
JG: The URL you are talking about is our website YourBIGWIG, at www.yourbigwig.com. That came about largely from discussions that Karen, Michelle and I had regarding the byzantine nature of the ALA and LITA, and how the insistence on face to face meetings really killed the possibility for virtual participation. We were all interested as well in increasing the transparency of the operations of the organization, and moving BIGWIG towards having more voices involved in the overall decision making parts of the IG. We felt that increasing transparency by attempting to utilize what was, at the time, a very poor Content Management System (nothing against ALA, just that Serena is not exactly intuitive) wasn’t going to make us more effective, but less. Moving to a platform that is open and has the ability to grow without the overhead of bureaucracy holding it back had its appeal. So we bought a domain, asked Blake at LISHost.net if he would host us, and put up a Drupal based site to help us organize things.
This gives us the freedom to do things quickly, try new technologies, integrate the larger information community, and generally experiment…something that is hard to do under the auspices of a larger organization.
MK: Did BIGWIG exist before it was part of LITA, or did LITA create BIGWIG?
JG: You know, it’s fair to say that LITA created BIGWIG as it exists today. But that’s not exactly a compliment, since the onus for creation was a dissatisfaction with the existing structures and use of technology. We’ve tried, during our existence, to model modern technologies and digital norms in hopes that LITA will see the benefit and absorb some of those as a better way of doing business. Our first attempts at this were installing and using the LITABlog and LITAWiki for division business, and once that was well established we moved on to reinventing the conference session by holding the Social Software Showcase in 2007.
MK: What’s been your biggest challenge so far?
JG: The biggest challenge for BIGWIG has been mobilizing those interested in what we’re doing. That was another driver for YourBIGWIG, to try and put together someplace for people to become active and help us push the envelope.
MK: What’s the mission of BIGWIG?
JG: In three words: “Do Cool Stuff.” A bit longer mission statement would involve some of the things I said above about modeling appropriate digital information and communication behaviors for groups that are still, to some degree, stuck in the last century. To put it in the terms Clay Shirkey uses in Here Comes Everybody, we’re trying to take things that are beneath the Coasean floor and find a way to see if they are useful inside the organization as well.
MK: Other than the technology showcase, what do you hope to accomplish via this group?
JG: Taking over the worl^h^h^h^h…I mean, BIGWIG is moving into a role within LITA as a technology incubator, where we’re the skunkworks for the larger organization. I personally hope that BIGWIG becomes the place within LITA that the most edgy technologies are being explored and pushed, and where we’re willing to bleed just a little in order to be on the edge. I hope that we can find people that are doing innovative things with technology that translate into doing showing others how to do cool things with technology. I hope that we can innovate and educate.
MK: Does BIGWIG aspire to being more than an interest group (IG)?
JG: I’m not sure what BIGWIG aspires to be. We definitely aren’t the typical IG. IG’s, in the LITA world, are designed to be very rough, possibly transient discussion groups that can put on programs at conferences. The real work of the division is done by committees. The problem with this model is that while committees are appointed positions, IG’s are meritocracies….they spring into being because of pure interest, and are driven, again as Clay Shirkey puts it, by love. So in some ways BIGWIG wants to work towards a new model of organization, one driven by the love of the technology.
MK: Does BIGWIG serve sections other than LITA?
JG: I’m not sure how much we “serve” LITA, even. We kind of sprang into existence within LITA, but we are talking with other groups about how our models might help them as well….the hope isn’t that we are a service-organization, but instead that we are a guide or consultative group. We’ve already worked our way through some of the areas that other divisions are just coming upon, and we certainly have in our membership people who understand not only the technology but the social mores and norms of the new online world. We’re always available for consultation.
(this interview is being simultaneously published at http://sns.mlanet.org/blog)
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Standards are people!
Q: Who writes the standards?
A: You do!
This was my take-away message from the recent conference of the American Library Association. The library world likes standardization, or formalizing the best way to exchange bits of information. I attended quite a few sessions about standards and realized a few things:
1) NISO only employs four people. FOUR! That means that all of the actual work filtered through them is done by volunteers. Still, how do they organize all of that work and have time to show up at conferences and have breath to talk? I do not know. It is impressive.
2) Standards are written by real people. I assumed Adam Chandler hovered an inch or two off the ground or had some vague glow about him, but when I saw him give a presentation on ANSI/NISO Z39.93 (aka SUSHI) I realized that he is human, just like the rest of us. And he needs help implementing the new standard, so if you’re interested, get in touch with him.
3) Standards are not “They.” Standards are “Us”. At the NISO update at the conference I saw a brief presentation on two working groups, with hopes that they will someday be standards. In order to become standards, lots of discussion has to happen first to get agreement on what is actually the best way to do something. I2 and KBART are such working groups. These working groups are lead by people interested in making information exchange smoother and more efficient. In other words, these groups are lead by people like you and me.
Get involved! NISO has a nice web page about how to do just that: http://www.niso.org/participate/
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