Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

5/11/06 01:52 pm - single search box, my left frontal lobe!

Recently, I was talking to a non-librarian, non-techie friend about the "single search box" debate in librarianship, the idea that librarian's need to emulate the popular search engines.

She immediately responded "but Google doesn't have a single search box! Neither does Amazon!"

As she characterized it, she is well aware, as a naive user, of the difference between the various tabs on the Google front page: Web, Images, News, Usenet, Shopping -- and she uses them as she needs to. She is well aware of the difference between book and DVD searching in Amazon -- and uses them.

It would be good for librarians to remember that single search boxes do actually characterize information in different ways and don't just do keyword searching across a single massive collection. Perhaps the user interface preference should be leaning towards a Google-style text box on a tabbed screen as opposed to the exquisitely bad Wilson SilverPlatter interface, but we need to remember that Google isn't as simple as we think it is.

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1/13/05 07:07 pm - Permanent archival of online news sites

When I did my first master's degree, I learned a basic principle: all postbaccalaureate work should be publication quality. I've tried to stick to that, at least in papers with some creativity involved (as opposed to just writing to a set assignment; the student can't be expected to do graduate-level work with an undergraduate-level assignment).

When I began this independent study project, I was extremely excited about the idea of publication. My original goal was to make a publishable academic paper as well as a public product: a website which informed news consumers of the archival policies of giving news agencies. Unfortunately, I don't think I made a publishable paper. I made a number of mistakes:

• To start with, this is my first social science research paper. I have neither the format or the style down pat, and I think I alternate between too casual and too aggressively academic, without ever finding a comfortable medium.
  
• I failed to get all of the release forms I would need to get this information published.
  
• I presented my survey badly, both in the e-mail and newsliblog requests, and in the lack of a click-through explanation and release form. As a result, I got scarcely any replies.
  
• I'm sure I screwed up something else. Or many somethings else.

Nonetheless, I think my findings were important, and I'd like to share them. In a nutshell, I found that online news agencies don't make permanent archives or even limited snapshots of their layout and design, and in extreme cases, don't even make permanent archives of online-only content. The first part of this is a difficult problem. It still unsolved how best to make snapshots of something as deep, multi-layered, and dynamic as a news website. But the second problem is merely a matter of culture (print newspapers have librarians while webmasters live in the present), and needs to be fixed before an important part of the historical record is lost for good. An important part of the historical record is already lost for good; can we reverse the trend?

( Abstract )

Survey of the Archival Methods for Print and Web Newspapers [RTF]

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