Author: Jenny

How to Cook Without a Book?

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“But a Nook can’t read, so a Nook can’t cook. So…what good to a Nook is a hook cook book?”
–One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Dr. Seuss

I’m sure that’s not what Barnes & Noble had in mind when they named their e-reader.

A recent article in the New York Times asks if cookbooks are obsolete (leading question much?). It describes how a number of wonderful apps are sweeping traditional cookbooks and recipe cards off the kitchen counter and back onto their shelves to gather dust.

As usual, there is plenty of room for both sides. Certainly, some people will gravitate toward these apps and e-versions of cookbooks on tablets or e-reader devices, either replacing or enhancing their print cookbooks; others will ignore the new toys (audio, video, flowcharts, built-in timers and glossaries) and continue using their print books.

There’s also a middle ground: Eat Your Books offers a way to search through all the indexes of all your cookbooks for a particular recipe. The recipes themselves can’t be accessed through the site unless they are free online, but by searching the indexes of all the books you already own, you can find what you’re looking for much more easily; it’s a way of semi-digitizing your cookbooks. You can also add blogs such as Chocolate & Zucchini and Smitten Kitchen to your “shelves” and search those too.

Incidentally, the NYT article neglects to mention what would happen if one were to spill soup onto one’s iPad.

Losing “cite” of what’s important

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I’ve been thinking about citation a lot lately. (Chances are, if you aren’t a student and you just read that sentence, you’re already weeping from boredom; but if you are a student, you might have made some sort of frustrated growling sound, or perhaps banged your head against the nearest wall.) I’m in my last semester of grad school in a program where most professors require APA citation (some are flexible – you can use another format as long as you’re consistent about it). As an undergrad I used Chicago style, and in high school I used MLA, so I’ve transitioned a few times, but I was pretty sure I had APA down; after all, attention to detail is what I do. However, two professors this semester have corrected my APA style citations, which makes me think that other professors just weren’t looking that closely – or that they simply didn’t care as much about the details, just that sources were acknowledged somehow and that the writing was good.

Then this morning, I read an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Citation Obsession? Get Over It!”  The author, a teacher of writing at James Madison University, says that librarians aren’t able to help students with broader information literacy concerns (such as finding, choosing, and evaluating sources) because they are overwhelmed with anxious students needing help with citations. “What a colossal waste,” he writes. “Citation style remains the most arbitrary, formulaic, and prescriptive element of academic writing taught in American high schools and colleges.” He continues, “Now a sacred academic shibboleth, citation persists despite the incredibly high cost-benefit ratio of trying to teach students something they (and we should also) recognize as relatively useless to them as developing writers.”

The author, Kurt Schick, advocates focusing on the function rather than the form of citation. Most citation styles include the same basic information: author, title, publication date, publisher. It would seem that, with the help of a style guide, it wouldn’t be too hard to put that information in the right order – and it wouldn’t be, if all we were using was books and articles from academic journals. But information can come from a wide range of sources in a wide range of formats, and there are all kinds of exceptions. As long as the core information is there, allowing others to track down the item in question, does it really matter where the periods and parentheses are? Schick argues that no, it doesn’t – not until it’s time to publish. Until then, professors’ and librarians’ and writing center staffs’ time is better spend helping students with essential information literacy and writing skills: “We could…reinvest time wasted on formatting to teach more important skills like selecting credible sources, recognizing bias or faulty arguments, paraphrasing and summarizing effectively, and attributing sourced information persuasively and responsibly.” Students should absolutely understand the importance of acknowledging their own use of others’ words and ideas in their writing; no one is arguing that the concept of citation and attribution isn’t essential. The formatting, however, may not be that important.

Until this sea change takes place, however, the form of citation remains paramount for many professors at many institutions. For anyone required to use APA, I highly recommend the Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) APA Formatting and Style Guide. Individual college and university libraries and writing centers may have also prepared their own handouts, guides, and tips for citation. There are also citation tools like RefWorks and Zotero, and databases often have a “cite” tool built in; these can certainly be helpful, but they aren’t perfect, and students will still need to proofread for formatting errors.

Know of any other good citation style guides online? Please share in the comments.

Amazon, Library?

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In case you haven’t already heard, Amazon recently announced the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. Unlike borrowing books from a public library (free! Well, your taxes pay for it), in order to borrow books from Amazon’s library, you must (a) own a Kindle, and (b) have Amazon Prime membership, which unless you get the student deal is $79/month. Is this bad for libraries? Actually, probably not.

While I don’t want to generalize, I will say that people who belong to categories (a) and (b) above may still visit public libraries, but they probably don’t rely on them as their only source of information/entertainment. Even for those who do have a Kindle and Prime membership, public libraries still offer a much wider selection of e-books for the Kindle and other e-readers than Amazon’s “library,” which offers just over 5,000 titles.  And, none of the Big Six – the six largest U.S. publishers – have jumped on the bandwagon yet, so although some bestsellers are available, many are not.

This isn’t a ploy to compete with libraries; it’s a ploy to sell more Kindle devices. The one advantage Amazon has is that it can lend any title instantly; there’s no wait time, unlike libraries, where – even with e-books – the library has a limited number of copies and only one patron can borrow any given copy at a time (i.e., library owns 10 copies of The Hunger Games, 10 patrons can borrow The Hunger Games at a time – just like print). However, Amazon pays publishers for this privilege – mostly a flat fee, but sometimes per item, as it’s borrowed. So Amazon isn’t making money on lending content – they’re just trying to make Kindle ownership and Prime membership as appealing as possible.

Further reading:

Wall Street Journal
Huffington Post
New York Times
Amazon (press release)

A Balanced Information Diet

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This evening I went to a screening of some TED talks at MIT, sponsored by the New England chapter of ASIS&T. We watched five TED talks, with a little bit of discussion between each one.

1. Raghava KK, “Shake up your story” – the artist/father talked about how looking at multiple perspectives could lead to the development of empathy and increase creativity.

2. Wael Ghonim, “Inside the Egyptian Revolution” – Ghonim described how the Internet allowed Egyptians to connect, to realize they were not alone and had shared dreams, to collaborate and speak out. He described how the “psychological barrier of fear” led to silence, but because of the Internet, “the fear is no longer fear, it’s strength. It’s power….The power of the people is much stronger than the people in power.” (After the talk, we discussed the flip side of technology: in the case of Egypt, technology allowed people to overcome their isolation, but what about when the government controls the technology?)

3. Eli Pariser, “Beware online filter bubbles” – This was the talk I found most interesting. Pariser, an online organizer and author, talked about the invisible shift in the flow of information online; search engines show us what they think we want – but what we want to see might not be what we need to see. Although the “personalization” due to algorithmic editing can sometimes be helpful, most people don’t realize that results are being filtered or tailored in this way – and we don’t decide what gets included or what gets left out.

Left to their own devices, people tend to read sources that re-confirm their existing points of view, and this was true long before the Internet (some people read the New York Times, some read the Wall Street Journal). Editors used to be our “human gatekeepers,” but now there are algorithmic gatekeepers, and they have no concept of journalistic integrity or ethics: they just want to show us what we want to see. Eventually, we may end up with a diet of “information dessert” and no “information vegetables. The information might be “relevant,” but we won’t be presented with information that is uncomfortable, challenging, important, or that presents other points of view – and we may become less and less aware that this information exists.

This addresses only a small piece of this issue, but check out the Google Transparency Report.

4. Sunni Brown, “Doodlers, Unite!” – According to Brown, doodling during a meeting isn’t a waste of time, and it doesn’t mean you aren’t paying attention – in fact, it may be helping you process information better. (After all, don’t many group brainstorming sessions end up using a whiteboard or pen and paper to sketch out ideas?)

5. Hans Rosling and the magic washing machine – This talk certainly had the best title, and was arguably the most entertaining. Swedish professor of global health Hans Rosling described the direct connection between the washing machine and reading: when his mother got a washing machine and no longer to do the washing by hand, she had time to take him to the library instead. “Thank you industrialization…that gave us time to read books!” The middle part of his talk concentrated on the developing world, climate change, and the use of resources (1/7 of the world population uses 1/2 of the resources – washing machines included).

One of the discussion questions (offered somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I believe) after this last talk was, “Do you think the invention of washing machines has increased library circulation?” In a roundabout way, it probably has: in the industrialized world, washing machines and other time-saving devices allow us to have more leisure time, which some of us do spend reading. 🙂

Many, many more TED talks are available “free to the world.” Explore, and enjoy!

Bookmaking for Beginners

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On Saturday, I took a Bookmaking for Beginners workshop taught by Sarah Smith through GSLIS Continuing Education. The workshop began with a short lecture about different kinds of bindings through history, and how contemporary artists are re-using and making books. The rest of the day was all hands-on: we started with the one-sheet fold-up and the accordion structure, then the blossom fold, Turkish map fold, and Korean map fold; then we learned how to make single-section and two-section pamphlets, and finally how to do chain-stitch.

All the books! From top to bottom: Blossom fold, Korean map fold, accordion fold (with covers), woven flexagon, Turkish map fold, two-section pamphlet, one-section pamphlets, chain-stitched binding.

From left to right: two-section pamphlet, one-section pamphlets (3- and 5-station), and Korean map fold.

This is the Korean map fold book: it’s the same one that looks like a little cedar block in the previous picture. It’s bulky because it contains six pieces of 8.5″x11″ paper, folded into 8 sections each.

This is the two-section pamphlet; the sections are each made up of four sheets of paper, each folded in half once. The cover has a pleat in the middle, and there are three “stations” (holes) where the waxed thread goes through all the layers to hold it together.

This is a one-section pamphlet, also with three stations. I gave the other pamphlets rounded corners, but I folded the edges of this cover in, so it has French flaps (like fancy trade paperback editions sometimes do).

All four pamplets: the top two have five stations, the bottom two have three.

Standing up like this, these remind me of The Monster Book of Monsters from Harry Potter (when Hagrid teaches the Care of Magical Creatures). On the left is the blossom fold; on the right, the Turkish map fold.

Here’s the Turkish map fold, open. It does fold down nice and flat – I think I have a city map of Paris folded in a similar way.

This has the best name of all: woven flexagon. We started with one long sheet (the cream-colored paper), and used a blade to make slices about 1″ apart; then, we took the colored papers and wove them between the slices. It’s quite cheerful-looking, but I have no idea what I’ll do with it.

A simple accordion fold, with covers made of binder’s board covered with decorative paper. We got to use polyvinyl acetate (PVA), an archival-safe plastic adhesive, to glue the paper cover over the board. Sarah showed us how to tuck the corners in with a bone folder to make them smooth and sharp.

The same book, lying open. I preferred the sewing to the folding; I couldn’t make the folds 100% exact. Sarah also showed us how to make an accordion fold with pockets, which I would have liked to cover with the binder’s board, but mine didn’t quite stack straight.

Finally, the chain stitch – this is the longest book, with five sections, or signatures, sewn together.

Here’s the chain-stitched booklet, closed. The stitching makes a nice pattern.

Other than being pretty, the chain stitch is also a nice binding because it allows the book to open flat, which is good for journals and sketchbooks, because you can write or draw deeper into the margins without worrying about the gutter.

All the bindings!

A flock of books – all hand-made in less than seven hours. Even though I probably won’t be using these bookmaking skills in a practical setting anytime soon, the workshop was a good experience: I learned new things, stretched the part of my brain that relates to making tactile things, and created a physical product to use or give as gifts. All in all, a Saturday well spent.

Amazon, Overdrive, Privacy?

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Sarah Houghton, a.k.a. the Librarian in Black, has posted a 10-minute video offering her point of view on “why the Kindle format lending from Overdrive is anti-user, anti-intellectual freedom, anti-library, and something that all librarians should be aware of and disturbed by.” One of her core issues is that, when Kindle users borrow e-books from the library, Amazon keeps track of those records. Customers may be used to Amazon tracking their purchases, but libraries are much more careful about patron data.

The American Library Association (ALA) website has a section devoted to intellectual freedom, and to privacy and confidentiality. This section states, “Lack of privacy and confidentiality chills users’ choices, thereby suppressing access to ideas. The possibility of surveillance, whether direct or through access to records of speech, research and exploration, undermines a democratic society.” Therefore, “confidentiality of library records is a core value of librarianship.” Amazon does not care about keeping your reading or borrowing history private and confidential, and this is what Houghton – and many other librarians – are upset about. Patrons may be willing to sacrifice privacy and confidentiality for convenience, but many libraries have privacy policies in place – supported by state law – specifically in order to protect patron privacy. That isn’t something that ought to be given up lightly.

Grammar matters.

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My dad sent me a link to this article today: “7 Grammar and Spelling Errors That Make You Look Dumb.” I highly recommend it if (a) you’re one of those people who cannot keep “your” and “you’re” straight, or (b) you’re one of those people who can keep “you’re” and “your” straight, and it drives you crazy that your friends, students, coworkers, etc. can’t. Within the article, there’s a link to Grammar Girl, which is also an excellent resource. Another one of my favorites is The Oatmeal, which delivers grammar lessons via comics (usually including dinosaurs or dolphins or something else amusing and lighthearted, yet memorable). Finally, there’s a great Hyperbole and a Half comic on the non-word “alot.”

Like it or not, grammar matters. I try to be non-judgmental and open-minded about a lot of things, but I absolutely judge based on grammar and spelling, and these resources allow me to admit that and justify it a little bit. In the grand scheme of things, is grammar important? Well, as the first article says, yes: potential employers and hiring committees are going to judge also. Should it be important is another question, but for now, it is. Everyone who has to write a cover letter or put together a resume is probably going to be judged on their grammar. Written communication is important – as is attention to detail, especially if you’re applying for a job. So if you’re in category (a), take advantage of the opportunity to learn from comics.

(c) The Oatmeal

Digital Public Library of America

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For those interested in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) project, Simmons GSLIS will be streaming the plenary meeting, which is taking place this Friday, October 21, in Washington, D.C. Here’s the agenda: there are a number of amazing speakers, including David Ferriero (Archivist of the United States) and John Palfrey, chair of the DPLA steering committee and author of Born Digital. Maureen Sullivan (ALA President 2012-13) and Robert Darnton of Harvard University Libraries (and author of The Case for Books) will serve as moderators at different times of day. The Beta Sprint projects will be presented at 1:30pm.

This is a project I’m interested in and have been following for some time. I’m sorry I can’t be in D.C. on Friday, but looking forward to seeing what they have come up with. A “national digital library” is such a huge project, it’s hard to wrap your mind around – but if Europe can do it, maybe the U.S. can pull it off as well.

In defense of editors

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“The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” [Amazon top executive Russell Grandinetti] said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.”

That’s a quote from a recent New York Times article about Amazon edging out publishers and dealing directly with authors. I can’t tell if it was quoted faithfully or taken out of context, but if it is a true statement of expression, I have to disagree. Even the best writers – however you define best – need editors. Not every author-editor relationship is a life-changing or earth-shattering one, but editing does improve books: editors might pose the right question at the right time, or suggest cutting an element that doesn’t move the story forward, or suggest a new angle. Writers can become so immersed in their own work they are unable to look at it clearly and objectively; here, too, an editor is helpful.

This is not to say that bad books don’t get published, even with an editor (define “bad” however you want – it’s out there). And it’s not to say that it’s completely impossible for an author to write and publish a work of quality without an editor – but that’s the exception, not the rule. After all, there are dozens of authors writing today who are top-notch, “experts” at what they do; those authors are still working with editors. Even Amazon is employing editors (though nameless executives won’t say how many).

The publishing industry gets a lot of flack. It’s not Wall Street; no one I met while I was working in publishing was in it for the money. It’s not innocent, either (come on, HarperCollins, 26?), but it does have a function, and it is a valuable part of the process by which an author produces a book and that book becomes commercially available. Amazon represents a legitimate threat to traditional publishers, but this is not the end of the world, let alone the industry. Radio wasn’t the end of books, TV wasn’t the end of books, and the Internet isn’t the end of books. If anything, the Internet proves how badly editors are needed.

Borrowing e-books from the library

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This is by no means a universal set of instructions, but the New York Public Library (NYPL) blog has posted step-by-step instructions for how to check e-books out of the library with a Kindle. It’s a great visual walk-through, which is good because there are a lot of steps. I prefer the step-by-step screenshots, though – it’s the next best thing to having someone walk you through it one-on-one. (There’s a link to a video from OverDrive, as well.)

We aren’t “there” yet, but it’s exciting to see the progress being made with libraries and e-books.