"Google Dilemma" by Grimmelmann

Jessamyn West, whose website proclaims that it "[puts] the rarin back in librarian," linked in her July 15, 2008 post to lawyer/law professor James Grimmelmann's talk on "The Google Dilemma." While fully footnoted, the talk is not a legal quagmire (which is even murkier than a doctoral dissertation swamp.) "The Google Dilemma" is a good introduction to Google-bombing and the mysterious workings of that search engine's ranking system, and the social/legal ramifications of both. There's a brief summary about the deletion of results based on a nation's laws -- China, Germany, and France being the example. The last two, like some other countries on the European continent, have anti-hate-crimes laws which require the deletion of any search results which link to hate-sites. In the case of Germany, the original laws (that may have been amended since first enacted) were mandated by the allies after World War II as an attempt (successful) to protect against the resurgence of the Nazi Party. I hadn't known that France had similar laws, and I don't know when they were enacted, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of the statutes had the same motivation as the German ones, although without a mandate from other countries.

China, one is tempted to say of course, requires the deletion of sites with certain political content. Grimmelmann has an interesting display of the results of searches for Tiananmen in Google Images and in the Chinese Google Images site. The results from the non-Chinese site include the by-now iconic image of the individual protestor facing down the tanks as well as other images from the protests, but the Chinese results do not.

Title of this post: just having fun with double letters.

Questions!

Jessamyn West, in her December 10, 2007, blogpost, commented on a Slate article about Yahoo Answers. That was my introduction to that site. For a reference librarian, it's pretty interesting stuff. I signed up and started answering questions. My library is a specialized one, so there's only a limited range of reference questions. The questions on Yahoo Answers are closer to those asked at a public library desk; I find the broader range a nice change.

My observations after just a few days (also posted, more or less the same, as a response to West's post:)

Many of the questions on Yahoo answers could be answered with an online search (Barney or some other one -- see my 10Oct07 post for use of Barney.) I'm not sure why those posting didn't try that -- but, then, maybe they did, but had little success due to misspellings, which are surprisingly common in the queries. As the old question goes, how can you find a spelling in a dictionary if you can't spell the word?

Many of the questions are "ready reference" -- librarian talk for a reference question that can be answered with a quick look-up. A phone call to a local library would seem to work as well as a posting. That service would seem to be one in need of some marketing by libraries.

Just as in a public library, some questioners online want all their homework done for them, including assignments that ask for essays, not just factoids. One responder to a question in the former category outlined how the questioner ("asker" in Yahoo terms, grrrrrrr) could approach the assignment. I hope the questioner rated that response highly. Of course, as any public librarian knows, a lot of parents come in to do their kids homework for them. Or at least to check out the books with the answers. Maybe it's an improvement to have the kids themselves posting the questions?

In library school, a friend joked that there are five answers that can be used to answer all reference questions: the only one of the five I remember is "a member of the carrot family" -- my friend claimed she used that to answer any questions from her mother about the identity of a plant. So far I haven't had a chance to use it, but maybe it will come in handy soon.

Flogging Blogs

Of the two technologies covered by challenges 1-5 (blogs and photos,) the blog would seem most appropriate for my section of our library. The social aspect of photography seems unlikely to appeal to our patrons, who are mostly not local residents, and who are all adults. Far be it from me to say that adults are not narcissistic, but I think that there is less of a need to create a social nexus via photos on the part of adult researchers.


Photos of some of the rarer items in the collection could, however, be helpful --- or at least decorative.

After looking at the four libraries on the link from challenge 6, I have these comments:

• I wonder about the wisdom of a library allowing minors to post their photos on the library's website: or are those teens all 18 and older?
  


• I was entertained by the comment of one teen on the PLCMC site, that putting the library on Second Life would do away with the need to go to the library in person. For some reason it reminded me of the patron at my local library who once needed to renew for the third time the Cliff Notes item he had checked out. Maybe the similarity is not needing to read something.
  


• I wonder why Ann Arbor's list of new books in Spanish only describes them in English.
  


• Denver's homepage is useless for linking to the podcasts they have.
  


• I wonder who is being left behind in the rush to produce podcasts for kids. Just what is the socio-economic distribution of ipods, etc.? Probably a lot broader than I think.

I read about RSS Feeds, signed up for Bloglines, subscribed to a few, and was disappointed in the results. Bloglines doesn't display the entire blog. For instance, for the SF Public Library's Magazine and Newspaper section's blog, the feed doesn't display Herb Caen's typewriter, the ultimate in icons for SF Chronicle readers of the past. I miss Herb, although I also really like Leah Garchik's column, which is the closese replacement. Her "Overheards" (which, the last time I looked at it online, didn't appear in that version) can be priceless. My favorite, a mother overheard speaking to a young child: Eat your donut and then you can have a treat.

The bloglines feed for David Silver's Silver in San Francisco omits the links (using Feevy -- which I am now interested in) on the right of the blog to the most recent posts from a variety of other blogs. I've found Silver's links very interesting, particularly because a number of them are from Spanish-language blogs.

I was also disappointed that Bloglines seems to want to force a user to read only in one language: at least that's what I sense from the language specification, and the statement that blogs in other languages would be translated as much as possible. It might be fun, however, to set the link for one language, then sign up for blogs only in another. For a great column on an English-language website apparently translated from some other language, see Jon Carroll's column in the August 13th San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/; click on columnists, then on Carroll, then on archive. Leah Garchik is also under columnists.) His quotes are from the accessories section of http://www.apparelop.com/. I was laughing out loud on the streetcar when I read it - fortunately, in SF no one notices or moves away. (Or asks what's so funny.)

Getting back to Bloglines, I unsubscribed to my links -- it's just as easy to have the blogs I like bookmarked, so I can see them in their entirety.

Thanks in part to the links from David Silver's blog, and from Lipstick Librarian (written by someone I knew in library school,) I have already found some interesting library-related blogs, including the SFPL Mags/Newspapers one noted above, and Jessamyn West at http://www.librarian.net/.

23 Things #6-8