So what is the point with Wikipedia and Britannica?

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education Jimmy Wales "founder" of Wikipedia warned students about Wikipedia. He goes on to say "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia,".

When deciding to use Wikipedia or Britannica the first question is which can you get to? If I am at work at the library I will use Britannica. However if I am off campus and have to go through some kind of proxy verification or other hassle I will use Wikipedia. I would not use the free version of Britannica because of the excessive amount of advertising and the information provided is barely as much as you would find in a good biographical dictionary.

The problem is that this is not why I posted on Tuesday, December 5, 2006 The Tao of Searching: Wikipedia Britannica and missing the point. Or why even the Journal Nature missed the point. The point is: Encyclopedias are not a research destination. Encyclopedias are a starting point or a roadmap for research. Over the last few years web gurus have been using the term sticky (see Make Things Sticky) to describe a good web site. They don’t want users to just visit a page and then leave the site. They want them stay on the site. One problem with Wikipedia and Britannica is that they have great designers that adopted this philosophy. They too offer up more and more choices and links to keep the user on the site. The problem is when you are doing research you do not want to get stuck in an encyclopedia.

At Cornell University they put together a brief introduction on how to do research called “The Seven Steps of the Research Process”. Step two is: Look up your keywords in the indexes to subject encyclopedias. Read articles in these encyclopedias to set the context for your research. Note any relevant items in the bibliographies at the end of the encyclopedia articles.

This is how to use encyclopedias. If you will notice they specifically mentioned “subject encyclopedias”. Subject encyclopedias focus on one discipline or area of knowledge and therefore usually will cover a topic to a greater depth than a regular encyclopedia. It is also likely to be more authoritative in that particular field than a general encyclopedia. The quick and dirty way to find them at the library, is to go to the catalog and do a keyword search for “encyclopedia psychology” (or geology, religion or whatever your topic is). Then look for books with the word encyclopedia and your subject in the title Once you have a couple of call numbers, go to that section of the library and look at the encyclopedias you picked, also look at the books nearby. They will be on the same topic and there may be another book that will work better for you. Or you could just ASK A LIBRARIAN.

If you are on the web you can go to Google and type in “encyclopedia philosophy” (or whatever your topic is) and you should get a lot of results. When looking at the results you will want to look at the URL to see if it is a .com .org or an .edu site. A .com will probably be trying to sell you something. You will also want to read the description. Then visit a few of the sites and see which ones will work best for you. Better yet would be to go to The Open Directory Project (ODP) and type in encyclopedia and look at their collection. Or you could just ASK A LIBRARIAN.

Ultimately the only books that people claim inerrant are the Qur'an, Bible, and The Book of Mormon. Therefore, we may assume that everything else may have some errors and problems. Britannica has fewer errors by a wide margin. It is written and edited to professional academic standards, and it has years of experience in publishing encyclopedias. Unfortunately only a small portion is free, unless you have access through an institution like a library. This may involve proxy access or passwords or IP verification that may not work so well at your location or with your device. Of course you can buy access but an experienced researcher can probably find the equivalent amount and quality of information they need using the web, maybe even through Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is accessible from almost any type of web access device. It is free and is easy to use, and you can get sucked into editing entries on some of your favorite topics. It is surprising how enjoyable it is to contribute to or edit Wikipedia. On the downside any idiot like me can contribute or edit Wikipedia. It does have an unacceptable number of errors to be considered authoritative or equivalent to Britannica.

Despite the characteristics described here, the point again is that “the encyclopedia is not a research destination. Encyclopedias are a starting point or a roadmap for research.” It’s the things you discover along the way, the sense of accomplishment for finishing an assignment, or mastering a new area of knowledge, that is the destination.

Next maybe we will talk about how to pick out a book and then maybe how to evaluate information on web sites.

R Philip Reynolds

The greatest crisis facing us...

Hi, everyone :),

I am going to postpone the second half of the encyclopedia thing for a groundbreaking speech I read.

"The greatest crisis facing us is not Russia, not the Atom Bomb, not corruption in government, not encroaching hunger, nor the morals of the young. It is a crisis in the organization and accessibility of human knowledge. We own an enormous "encyclopedia" - which isn't even arranged alphabetically. Our "file cards" are spilled on the floor, nor were they ever in order. The answers we want mat be buried somewhere in the heap, but it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place them side by side and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need.
Call it the crisis of the Librarian.
We need a new "specialist" who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. (n) We need a new science to be a perfect secretary to all other sciences."

Who wrote this? David Lynch? Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin?
Nope

Robert A Heinlein in 1950 in a piece originally called "Where To?". In this piece Heinlein makes several predictions or extrapolations about the future. It was repeated as "Pandora's Box" in the book The Worlds of Robert A Heinlein published by Ace Books, New York in 1962. In the 1962 version after twelve years of thought and history had gone by he amended some of his predictions but this one remained the same. Then in 1980 it was again reprinted by Ace Books in Expanded Universe Robert A. Heinlein as "Where To?" (pp 317-371). He again had the opportunity after thirty years of reflection and history to revise his statements. Many of them were changed but this one was not. In his list of the forerunners of these "synthesists" that he makes in 1965 he mentions several job titles but does not include librarian as one of them.

In Snow Crash by Neal Stevenson, Bantam Books Paperback 1993 (p107) we read:

"The Librarian daemon looks like a pleasant, fiftyish,
silverhaired, bearded man with bright blue eyes, wearing
a V-neck sweater over a work shirt, with a coarsely
woven, tweedy-looking wool tie. The tie is loosened,
the sleeves pushed up. Even though he’s just a piece
of software, he has reason to be cheerful; he can move
through the nearly infinite stacks of information in the
Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a
vast web of cross references"

The "librarian is a piece of software that programs itself.
In her article I Librarian Hilda Kruger described "Having an agent methodically crawling the Web, gathering the information you’ve specified, is a bit like having a full-time reference librarian residing in your PC."
(INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | SEPTEMBER 2005 p124).
She talks about these Intelligent Software Agents (ISA) burrowing into our lives but we are way beyond that I have two different types of agents downloaded as add ons to my FireFox browser.

One is "Clearforest Gnosis" http://sws.clearforest.com/Blog/?page_id=32 its function is to:

ClearForest Gnosis uses advanced natural language processing techniques and ClearForests’s Semantic Web Service (SWS) to
extract meaning from the content of any web page.

With a single click, Gnosis will identify the people, companies, organizations, geographies and products on the page you are viewing. Using the built-in navigation sidebar you can gain immediate understanding of the page’s contents.

The other is "read4me" XUL http://read4me.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

"Client front end to read4me server. read4me is a Python feed-reading web service. It reads RSS or atom feeds and, using Bayesian statistics, reports how much you will like the articles. This project includes a server and a Firefox extension client."

Then I organize it all with Zotero

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources:

- Automatic capture of citation information from web pages

- Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages

- Flexible notetaking with autosave

- Fast, as-you-type search through your materials

- Playlist-like library organization, including saved searches (smart collections) and tags

- Platform for new forms of digital research that can be extended with other web tools and services

- Formatted citation export (style list to grow rapidly)"

In her abstract Kruger says "One of the main concerns of this paper is the continued relevance of information professionals as infomediaries in our future society." Maybe it has already gone from continued relevance to no relevance? Out of all of these books and articles being written there is a way forward offered in "Snow Crash" The Librarian states:

"I was not coded by a professional hacker, per se, but by a researcher at the Library of Congress who taught himself how to code. He devoted himself to sifting through vast amounts of irrelevant detail in order to find significant gems of information."

The hero of the story "Hiro Protaganist" replies "So he was kind of a meta-librarian." Is this our path? most of these projects including the two browser add ons I described are either open source or accept help from others in their development. The whole point behind Web 2.0 and Opensource software and publishing, is group participation. Do we follow their lead? It appears that the direction our profession has been to try and impose upon the web and its users, meta-data and proprietary databases and it was the wrong direction. Maybe it is time for a radical new direction. Maybe it is time for meta-librarians as programmers? If we can't take the lead in these new projects maybe we can at least make a valuable contribution.

Lets talk it over and I will make a list of new job duties for the meta-librarian and get back to that encyclopedia mess.

R Philip Reynolds