Presenting literature search results My colleague SMF and I have an ongoing discussion about how we present literature search results to our customers.  We know that:
1) our view of relevance is broader than our customers and we might have some very good articles that don’t explicitly use their terms in the title and abstract
2) we are very thoughtful and careful in our search strategies and cognizant of the strengths and weaknesses of the resources and tools we use (see Dave Hook’s discussion of quantifying a negative search)
3) our work provides an extremely important basis for ongoing work and can cost/save the customer or enterprise money, prestige, time – but, users of our work need to be aware of any disclaimers
4) we work with people who are used to looking inside the black box
5) we may have misunderstood or incompletely covered the subject so gaps in the results might be mistaken for a lack of information, not that the subject wasn’t searched.

So, it sounds like I’m already decided.  I like to start my literature search reports with an executive summary, and then provide a methodology section before presenting the results.  This way I can bring attention to any results as I see fit.  A couple of times, I have create a pie chart and this was well received.  Sometimes, though, it is like getting someone to eat your Brussels sprouts, not drink the kool-aid.  All this writing takes time and we charge for time and there is never enough time.  Our descriptions and disclaimers can be cut off of the results.  Our customers do trust us and sometimes just want the answer.

Anyway, I try to be disciplined about keeping a log of my search strategies and decisions I’ve made in literature searches.  I do a write up when I have time and can mostly do one later if I need to from my notes.  

This is something that should be emphasized in library school, I think.  ¶ 4:31 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Why we blog: Encourage re-use of our intellectual assets Why we blog: encourage re-use of our intellectual assets

One of my pet ideas is to use blogs for personal knowledge management (pkm). An argument is that knowledge workers do not like to submit their work to a centralized system because they lose control and accessibility – the codification approach (Desouza, 2003). My argument was that blogs are inherently personal while still allowing for search, sharing, and re-use (supporting the personalization approach, also from (Desouza, 2003).

Another reason that these centralized databases frequently aren’t used is that context is stripped from the artifact, so it becomes a disconnected document.(Desouza & Awazu, 2004). The metadata should capture some of this context and there should be a methodology section in every report (although goodness knows few librarians explicitly write out their search strategies on their research reports… more to come on this) – nevertheless, there’s no history there. Besides, all of this front-end work is expensive and discouraging (mention of this in discussions of finding vs. refinding and re-finding as use). Blogs tend to provide this context in terms of history, linking, and narrative.

If we want to become an expert or if we have a really good idea that we want to see used (not always the case as mentioned in (Desouza, 2003)), how do we publicize it? If we just enter it into a centralized system, it will get lost. Basically, we have to advocate for the idea. We have to make ourselves available for questions so that we can be known as experts. Also, we have to provide a record of work or a history so that we will be found and trusted. A directory isn’t enough, a resume is better, a knowledge map better still, but wouldn’t a blog be best?

Desouza studies software engineers. It could be that Open Source Software communities like SourceForge capture enough of the process that blogs would be redundant. SourceForge also explicitly enables reuse of code pieces and provides a wiki-like history of the software, documentation, a narrative of the development process, etc. So, a community like SourceForge, when seen as a whole can probably solve a lot of these questions. In fact, it might be better to offer this set of tools, but it’s also a lot more time consuming on both ends. For the non-programmer knowledge worker, a blog might be the best first step.

Incidentally, Jon Udell is looking for comments on his book idea to explore using professional blogs as combination CV and autobiography. Mine is kind of going that way with the exception that I do try to keep a lot of more personal, motivational, posts out of the blog. I think these things would be necessary in an autobiography. I’d really like to see everyone who publishes self-archive their work using their blogs as pointers/indexes. Talk about context (. That would allow for re-use of our intellectual assets(Davenport, Thomas, & Desouza, 2003).

References
Davenport, T. H., Thomas, R. J., & Desouza, K. C. (2003). Reusing intellectual assets. Industrial Management, 45(3), 12.
Desouza, K. C. (2003). Barriers to effective use of knowledge management systems in software engineering. Communications of the ACM, 46(1), 99-101.
Desouza, K. C., & Awazu, Y. (2004). How to put context in the knowledge base. KM Review, 7(2), 8-9.

Updated for formatting and to add tags
Tags: km, pkm  ¶ 3:45 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Search all public library sites? Stephen asked for a cross-search of library web pages. You can set one of these bad boys up on Gigablast, but you can only add up to 500 sites. Here's a demo search of public library pages from the mid-atlantic (MD, VA, DC, PA, DE) (VA, PA, DE are from DMOZ, not comprehensive). BTW - you can cross search all Maryland libraries using this form.

  ¶ 9:45 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  ProQuestPress Release: Dissertations via Amazon? ResourceShelf pointed to the list of bestselling dissertations of 2004 (note, a University of Phoenix business PhD is top... hm? wonder why? really? maybe he's marketing it more? most of the top sellers are from night or distance or online-only schools? are the schools marketing the dissertations for recruitment of new students? are the libraries playing a role?) but didn't mention this quote farther down:
"ProQuest is continuing its tradition of preserving and providing access to this vital material by making portions of its PQDT database available for purchase through Amazon.com. "  ¶ 9:28 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  CiteSeer: Acknowledgement Search Well that's cool. One of the uses is to find funding agencies... in this they're not alone. In fact w/biomed topics funding is all important as NIH now has the public archiving (encouragement) policy. See, for example, the MeSH Research Support. DTIC, NASA and DOE tech reports have contract number, corporate author, etc. Anyway, it's nice to have it for journal articles and conference proceedings.  ¶ 9:15 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Notes on Searching the Live Web by Hodder Mary Hodder, lecture to UC Berkeley's SIMS 141 class, 11/22/2005, available in rm format. (accessed 12/27/2005)

Live web - blogs wikis, etc., subset of web
She lists - blog pulse, sphere, technorati, bloglines, ice rocket, pub sub

Difference between static web and live web searching
- return of results (pagerank/relevance vs. reverse chronological), emphasis on live
- link searching vs. kw searching (not immediately obvious where search terms appear)
- engines find blogs by underlying structure produced by common blogging s/w (therefore not all retrieved are blogs, not all blogs retrieved)
- things drop off the front page ("aged") in liveweb search vs. google, which keeps archive (slower to crawl, relevance most important, deeper search)

Metrics of blog search
- links (technorati (last 6 mo), pubsub (not explicitly reported in search results), bloglines (forever)), different from site to site, confusing
- number of blogs searched ... bloglines gives #articles, others #feeds
- what are you actually searching? (see her venn diagram at 18:24)

• blogs no feed (~15%?)
  
• blogs w/feeds
• feeds not blogs

- number of RSS subscribers (in bloglines, feed via feedburner) -- using one or the other to look at influence or reach is inadequate... people try to extrapolate from both figures, using knowledge of subject area and how techie people are in that area

- her proposed metrics (see her blog, 22 different metrics, search only across smaller communities, not the whole blogosphere)

• blog to blog links (not blogroll, bcs on the fly)
  
• post to post links
• blogroll (decision to make a semipermanent part of the template, different relationship)
• comments
• blogserver records
• incoming traffic (people who read from bookmarks, find from web searches)

- re-order search results by "authority" -- number of links received. Sphere will allow by relevance

Splogs
- 13k blogs in an hour
- Google doesn't work as hard as they might to get rid of because of advertising dollars

What's needed
- (stop comparing everything to google and static web search from 1997)
- sophisticated interfaces
- topic browsing
- sophisticated weighting tools (more than just inbound link counts)
- adjustments to static web search to fine tune it

Her project to tag w/identity

In response to questions...
Another way to help liveblog search:
- microformats (technorati approach, rel=)
- structured blogging (pubsub approach)

Problem with co-mingling blog links with static web: her example of looking for bank location -- it's not helpful to find blog posts about the bank.  ¶ 11:06 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Search plug-in addiction I created like 4 firefox search plug-ins yesterday and a greasemonkey script. Well, I actually customized ones I found but 2 of them are now listed on http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?submitform=Find&category=14. You can search on my name. The other 2 are a intranet-type deal and a MetaLib search. It was actually much easier than I thought it would be.  ¶ 10:07 AM| (2) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Friday thing: E-S quiz....whoa. Hm. Maybe this says too much about me, but I scored 23 on Empathy and 57 on Systemizing -- I think this means that I don't give a #$%^ but like to put things in order, lol. Really, although I am heartless, it's not completely my fault. After all, I was in the military and a science major. Are librarians more likely to be systemizers? Maybe that's the science thing since I'm pretty handy and like to know how things work.... I'm an extreme type S... oh joy:

"The extreme male brain (bottom right of the graph) may be a manifestation of autism."

I was reminded of the article and quiz by Richard Akerman, who is even more heartless than me...  ¶ 9:33 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Everything Bad, Gorman, Levy, Liu Everything Bad, Gorman, Levy, Liu:  How we read electronic media

The new Current Cites (December 2005) (via e-mail) has a review by Leo Robert Klein of an article on reading in digital libraries (Liu, 2005) this connected to several other things I’m looking at right now.

The essence of the argument is that while the digitization of information has enabled powerful tools like hypertext, it has dramatically altered reading for the worse by fragmenting attention, discouraging deep reading, comprehension and retention.

This is what Gorman was complaining about (Gorman, 2005) (in part).

On the other hand, there is Every Thing Bad is Good For You (Johnson, 2005).  I only just started reading it so I can’t give a thorough review of his point of view or argument (in fact, there’s nothing in the cover bio about the author’s qualifications to write such a book and this *may* be important).  What I’ve read so far says that narrative in new media is much more complex, greater cognitive dexterity (my words, if they make sense) is required to interact with video games (trivializing the different if you’re just saying fine motor control), and to judge games/internet/media on book standards is wrong/unfair/inaccurate.

Levy’s article is a bit older, but carefully reviews the history of reading and attention.  He states that “in reading, the partiality of attention means both that the document itself is selectively attended to and that to which the document points is also only partially grasped. As a process that is linear in time, it is only capable of fixating on one small fragment at any one instant.” (Levy, 1997, 206).  He goes on to talk about a change in design of the New Yorker because readers moved from consuming each issue as a whole, from cover to cover, to only “dipping in.”  He talks about disaggregation of books into smaller and smaller chunks in the same way moving images on television have become “sound bites” (see my discussion of disaggregation of journals by APS and IOP).

He argues that “current work in digital library design and development is participating in a general societal trend toward shallower, more fragmented, and less concentrated reading” (Levy, 1997, 202).  Also that “while one might argue that hypertext is integrative because it permits information units to be gathered up and linked together, it is exactly the integration of fragments that it encourages. And at the same time, as larger units, such as journal articles and even books, are put into hypertextual form, the creation of links among their parts contributes to their further fragmentation or atomization.” (Levy, 1997, 208)

Liu’s new article is essentially a literature review of studies of reading in digital environments# (2005).  People do browse and scan more documents and look for keywords.  Also, more emphasis is placed on putting the main content above the fold or in the lead paragraph.  This has been true for a long time in newspapers, but it is being done in scientific literature.

These articles all report what the authors believe is happening without clear scientific evidence of why or if it’s good or not.  Anyone who took lots of standardized reading comprehension tests was told to read the questions first, then scan the document for answers and then move on – that’s the best way to get the most correct answers on the SAT and other tests.  So, we also do this when the time constraints are self- or world-imposed instead of just test-imposed and we continue to do it even after we’ve finished our last standardized test (the GRE, hopefully).  As I keep saying, and Levy also says, how we read is really based on context.  I think bloggers like everyone else sometimes read intensively and sometimes scan for facts.  In reality, librarians in public service should be *much* better at scanning for facts than the majority of the population – are we really expected to read that whole article from Physics Review Letters to see if it’s relevant to our customer?  Of course not!  We scan for keywords many, many times a day.

Final thoughts:  I want real scientific work on this area with valid, reproducible results.  Librarians are frequent and skilled keyword scanners, but should also be good intensive readers for scholarly, peer-reviewed articles in their own field once the article is identified to be of interest.


#nb:  I feel that there are some large problems with the methodology and presentation of results in this paper so will not refer to his results, but use his article as a literature review. 1) he doesn’t provide his survey 2) “sample of convenience” – not clear how participants were selected 3) shows *perceived* answers, not actual (IOW, he doesn’t measure the differential in time spent or any of the other questions, and he doesn’t do a critical incident method – he asks the participants to say what they think has changed over the past ten years… this doesn’t tell you what has changed, rather what they perceive is different – this could be impacted by media, participation in the study… 4) mixes in his ideas and what he’s read in the literature with results – his survey results do not support his statements.  For example, he states reasons the participants are spending more time reading online, but the survey asks no questions on this.  He is either stating the obvious (so not necessary), or saying more than the survey shows.


References
Gorman, M. (February 15, 2005). Revenge of the blog people. Library Journal, Retrieved 12/21/2005,
Johnson, S. (2005). Everything bad is good for you : How today's popular culture is actually making us smarter. New York: Riverhead Books.
Levy, D. M. (1997). I read the news today, oh boy: Reading and attention in digital libraries. DL '97: Proceedings of the second ACM international conference on digital libraries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, 202-211.
Liu, Z. (2005). Reading behavior in the digital environment: Changes in reading behavior over the past ten years. Journal of Documentation, 61(6), 700-712.
  ¶ 4:11 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Blogging for PKM with multiple blogs? Not trivial. I'm trying to write a thoughtful post about a couple of things I'm reading right now and I wanted to cite something I've blogged about. I searched all kinds of ways on my blog... then remembered (ah-ha!) ... that was on a conference blog, not my personal blog. Hm. So I might just copy all of my notes from that conference here for PKM purposes. I think only having the posts on the conference site was good for publicity and marketing but a month out, maybe not a big deal?

So anyway, how to you m your pk if your pk is blogged in several places?  ¶ 1:38 PM| (1) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Ugh, teachers assigning wikipedia edits? Ugh. From a post by A.V. on Web4Lib.

However even non-controversial articles can sometimes fall prey to
disheartening (for those who care about what they wrote or corrected or
reorganized)and constant vandalism.  To give but one example: It would
seem (or so the regulars surmise) that the very non-controversial
"Industrial revolution article" has been assigned as a class (or a
multi class) exercise in a school with good Web access, somewhere.  As
a result we have been recently getting swarms of infantile vandalism (
Jason is a -expletive deleted-)(our teacher Miss -name X- is a
-expletive deleted-) on the article, at more or less regular intervals.

This is exactly what I feared would happen when I saw W.R. demonstrate vandalizing a page on another wiki, but ten times worse. These teachers have the same understanding as the guy who wrote the Sigenthaler article --" ... well no one really uses this as a reference or believes anything it says."

It's one thing to throw trash around in your own home, but to throw your garbage out in a park or community space is much different.  ¶ 1:13 PM| (4) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Confused about the long tail? Dr. Garfield posted the citation to this article on ASIS&T's SIGMETRICS DL.

MEJ Newman. "Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law" Contemporary Physics v46 n5 (September 2005): 323-51. doi:10.1080/00107510500052444

The link in the title is only for subscribers via metapress (it's a T&F title)

Anyway, don't let its presence in a physics journal throw you, it's actually a nice little overview of power law distributions. Since blog popularity also seems to follow this distribution, you've probably heard about this if you've been around in the blogosphere.

Update: 12/15 Courtesy of QLB on the discussion list, it's also available (free!) on cond-mat  ¶ 5:21 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  What's New in MathSciNet: RSS feeds for Journals I haven't seen anyone else mention this...

What's New in MathSciNet: "Current awareness of journals using RSS

For those using RSS feeds for current awareness, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 links are provided on the bibliographic information page for each journal covered by MathSciNet. These links will provide updated information about a journal issue as soon as that issue is loaded in MathSciNet."  ¶ 8:59 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) : 10,000 Earth & Ocean Scientists. Five days. : Dec. 2, 2005: Previewing a Week at AGU I just saw on Real Climate (there by accident, but maybe I'll sub if they really talk about science, not politics, but anyway)... Woods Hole commissioned a reporter to blog the AGU annual meeting. Now *that's* cool... except for the fact that it doesn't appear that there's real blog navigation or commenting or linking, you kind of just use the boxes on the left to navigate, I guess.  ¶ 5:37 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  An new Carnival of the Infosciences(#17) Aack. I really wanted to submit, but I left it until the last minute and internet access went out at my local public library where I was subbing. So it's still really good and worth a read. Anyway, if you're reading this, you probably have seen my would-be submission :)  ¶ 3:50 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  CIL2006: So Exciting As Steven Cohen mentioned, the preliminary program(pdf) is out... and I'm on it (twice!). It is very exciting

Wednesday, March 22
Searching the New Digital Formats
3:15 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Christina Pikas, [mpow]
Greg Schwartz, Louisville Free Public Library, & Publisher,
Open Stacks Weblog
Pikas discusses tools and techniques for searching the blogosphere and
mining information in Weblogs while Schwartz discusses finding information-
rich podcasts in your topic area.

tag: CIL2006  ¶ 1:09 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  The Chronicle: 12/9/2005: Information Anarchy or Information Utopia? Article by James G. Neal (not sure if it's only to subscribers?)
"We will be legacy, responsible for centuries of societal needs and records in all formats. We will be infrastructure, the essential combination of space, technology, systems, and expertise that define our excellence. We will be repository, guaranteeing the long-term availability and usability of our intellectual and cultural output. We will be portal, serving as a sophisticated and intelligent gateway to expanding interactive multimedia content and tools. And we will be enterprise, more concerned with innovation, business planning, competition, and risk."  ¶ 4:59 PM| (1) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Announcing: Quoth the Raven, the Blog of the Maryland Chapter of SLA I wasn't sure if we were ready to go live, but what the heck....

If (like Catherine in a comment to my last post) you'll be attending the SLA Annual Meeting next year in Baltimore... you may want to subscribe to the new SLA Maryland Chapter blog.

I already have a request to find places to hear Industrial music... what else are you all looking for? We'll have a guide with restaurant reviews, too, as well as cultural events.

If you're a member of the Maryland chapter and want to blog. Contact me or another member of the board.

BTW- if you're puzzled over the name, check this out or this. (Nevermore!)

tag: sla2006  ¶ 1:11 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Connoteeea, Conno-tay-ah, Conno-tee I corrected someone at DASER -- then realized that I didn't actually know how to say Connotea. Ah-ha! Now there's a little screencast showing how to use it... con oh tee a (and she's American if that matters).

Update 12/8: The videos are available from the Connotea "about this site page" in Flash, Windows Media, QuickTime formats.  ¶ 5:47 PM| (1) comments |cites (technorati) |

  New blog: the Blog Section of the IT Division of SLA Very cool.

Update: I should really, really have said where I found out about it... I am *so* sorry. I read about it on Catherine Lavallée-Welch's blog, EngLib.  ¶ 5:35 PM| (1) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Daser posts, Sunday 12/4/05 Please see original posts on http://asistdaser.tripod.com/daserblog/index.blog?from=20051204
Stevan Harnad, Southampton, U Q at Montreal: (no title)
Mood: on fire
Notes by Christina Pikas


Data and slides available online and may be reused. There were slight technical difficulties.

Why do researchers publish?
Not for money but to communicate results

Open access is:
free, immediate, permanent, and full text online access
primarily peer reviewed journal articles, theses

Why?
Lawrence 2001, more citations to online articles than offline articles in the same venue (not open access effect)
To what extent were Lawrence's results only a CS effect? The compared OA vs. Non-OA in Astro
(he states that there are basically 12 astro journals, all astronomers are at institutions that cover these 12 at minimum, so to them there is open access) and other physics, sociology and biology.
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

Lots of fast moving graphs here, based on a robot that gathered 1.4 million self-archived articles across about 10 fields (not phys, but does include some social sciences). Grouped articles by # of citations (in bins), then graphed for each bin, #articles for each pub year. Did the same for non-open access articles. Then took the ratio of one to the other, found (I believe and I think he'll correct me) that in general, open access articles are more highly cited across disciplines than non-open access articles.

Dollar value value of citation (a la Diamond 1986 and adjusted to current year money), $85/citation... The UK is losing 300k potential citations and 1.5B GBP based on the above calculations.

Research assessment, research funding, citation impact
All of the factors that are used to evaluate researchers and research groups.... correlate highly with citation counts. Citation counts would better highlight a really good article in a lesser journal.

Changing Citation Behavior
Peak of the curve is moving earlier and earlier. Citations may occur within 3 weeks of self-archiving (!) These charts come from citebase. Self-archiving has speeded up citation behavior, immediacy, and the movement of physics.

Open access - how?
Archives without an institutional self-archiving policy remain nearly empty.
What prevents us from open access in the form of self-archiving is keystrokes, not copyright

Awareness of author compliance (study?)
81% would willingly comply with self-archiving policy. 5 archives that have mandates are some of the largest (so this works) ... examples CERN, Southamption. University of Tasmania vs. Queensland productivity (?) +archives +librarian assistance +mandate ... (See upcoming D-lib article by Arthur Sale?)

388 institutional archives worldwide (they've found), vast majority are empty. In Germany every institution has an IR, but no policy (and sometimes no tender loving care)

Audience questions
a: Have the successful archives in the above mentioned Australian universities experienced citation effects?
a: early yet, but some

q: Infoglut or version control-
Will there be problems with too many versions... or access to the correct version
a: no, researchers just want the materials. researchers know what they're doing, what's a post-print, what's a pre-print, and what's good literature -- this is not done by librarians but is part of being a professional researcher

Robot -- didn't specify that articles were true OA, just that they were available online fulltext for free at the time of the crawl. Future work may try to address this

Q: about the wording of self-archiving... SH says that it's a supplement to subscription access.

Q: citation life cycle -- doesn't that bias this because articles might be self-archived only after they have proven to be good articles (I may have gotten this wrong sorry D.S.)
SH: they are studying latency, life cycle, immediacy

daser2005
Updated: 12/5 to add tag and picture, correctly spell the speakers first name.

Posted by asistdaser at 9:56 AM EST | post your comment (0) | link to this post  ¶ 1:45 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Daser posts, Saturday 12/3/05 Please see original version on http://asistdaser.tripod.com/daserblog/index.blog?from=20051203
Introductions...
Mood: caffeinated
Notes by Christina Pikas

We're now doing introductions. There are people here from IOP, APS, AIP (so physics is well represented), Springer, Biomed Central, and other academic, governmental, and corporate organizations.

High energy physics, medicine, astronomy, chemistry, and engineering environments are all represented.
daser2005
Updated: 12/5 to add tag and picture, signature  ¶ 1:43 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  DASER... I'm blogging DASER (Digital Archives for Science and Engineering Resources conference) real-time over on the DASER blog.

Caveat Lector is also real-time blogging (from about 5 feet away).  ¶ 11:21 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Personal Role Management Pointed to on ResourceShelf (for my benefit?!?)

So I've long complained that tools and resources don't understand multiple identities/personalities, etc. online. See here, here, and I know there is at least one other place where I talked about multiple personalities. Oh, and I stood up and asked the question at the PIM panel at ASIS&T.

The article is:
Catherine Plaisant and Ben Shneiderman with H. Ross Baker, Nicolas B. Duarte, Aydin Haririnia, Dawn E. Klinesmith, Hannah Lee, Leonid A. Velikovich, Alfred O. Wanga, Matthew J. Westhoff. "Personal Role Management: Overview and a Design Study of Email for University Students" December 7, 2004. Available online at: http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/trs/2005-30/2005-30.htm
(not sure why we're finding it now? wait, they say they've been doing this since 1994 -- why hasn't anyone implemented their suggestions yet?)

Note: I put different roles in different windows of Firefox, with tabs for each search or related item for that role... I wonder if I could use session saver to archive the various roles so that I don't have to decide to keep to ditch (cognitive process) every time I switch roles???

Another thought, in Gmail, why can't you have it automatically change your signature when you change the "send from" e-mail? Likewise, is there a way in outlook to automatically respond to internal e-mails with an internal signature and an external for external? I can actually do that with my phone... why not e-mail?

Will the new Vista (formerly longhorn) with the stacking ability, allow some version of this?  ¶ 10:04 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Whew. Worth reading. Really. Now FRL and others have pointed to this article in multiple places, so I finally read it. (full text is at the link, scroll down.)

Siva Vaidhyanathan. "A Risky Gamble With Google." Chronicle of Higher Education
Volume 52, Issue 15, Page B7

The presumption that Google's powers of indexing and access come close to working as a library ignores all that libraries mean to the lives of their users. All the proprietary algorithms in the world are not going to replace them. There was a reason why Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, and others of their generation believed the republic could not survive without libraries. They are embodiments of republican ideals. They pump the blood of a democratic culture, information.

I must admit that I've pretty much blown off any and all complaints about the whole library project thing, but, wow. Anyway, worth thought.  ¶ 7:47 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |