LIS 5703 Subjects Paper

Nathaniel Finley
LIS 5703 Subjects paper
For Doctor Michelle Kazmer
December 10, 2009


Part I
A.
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot is a do-it-yourself manual for Volkswagen repair. It describes basic repair and complete overhaul of systems as well as periodic maintenance procedures for various VW models.
This edition is a special 25th Anniversary edition. There is an introduction by the author’s wife which describes the author’s life philosophy, and a photo collection of the author and his family.
The book is also about the author’s philosophy of life, which is an approach to living and problem solving that is representative of the 1960’s counter-culture.

B.
The likely audience for this book is VW owners who want to maintain and repair their vehicles themselves. It is more useful for amateur rather than professional mechanics, since the book presents tips and procedures for working on tight budgets without specialty tools.
Two unlikely audiences for this book are scholars of the 1960’s counter culture and people who are interested in “dropping out” of established society. This is due to the author’s use of the manual as a means for describing an alternative lifestyle and approach to living which is outside of the world of capitalism and careers.

C.
Derived:
John Muir
John Muir Volkswagen or (Volkswagen)
John Muir (not naturalist)
Tosh Gregg (“other author”)
Peter Aschwanden (illustrator)
Volkswagen Maintenance
Volkswagen Repair
Do-it-yourself
Repair manuals
Volkswagen art
John Muir Publications
Volkswagen—Santa Fe, New Mexico
Books—Anniversary Editions

Supplied:
1960s counterculture—history
1960s counterculture—philosophy

Part II
A.
Volkswagen repair/Volkswagen Maintenance
Do-it-yourself Volkswagen
“How do I _____ my Volkswagen?”
Volkswagen home repair manuals
Volkswagen maintenance manuals
John Muir family
John Muir Publications
Volkswagen—Santa Fe, New Mexico
Volkswagen art
Collectible items
Special editions
Volkswagen counter culture manuals


B.
I.
I decided to use Google for the search engine because of the popularity of this item and the various ways that it can be used. I found the following:
a. A search for “John Muir” returns results for the naturalist or derivatives of that name (eg, “John Muir Elementary School”) exclusively throughout the first 10 pages of results, with the one exception of a “muirjohn” on twitter who is listed on the 10th page as a communications advisor for the city of Edmonton.

b. A search for “John Muir Volkswagen” returns results on the first five pages exclusively for the author of my item with one exception. On page three there is the first result which looks to have no connection to the author of my item. This one item also happened to download a virus to my computer.
On page seven is the first listing for learning about John Muir the naturalist while driving a Volkswagen (there are a number of sites such as this since many VW lovers are also nature lovers. “Retracing John Muir’s footsteps” is the title of this site).

c. According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir_(Volkswagen) the author of my item is a descendent of John Muir the naturalist. However, there is no further evidence of this assertion and the wiki article cites no source.

d. Searches for “How do I fix my Volkswagen?” and “Do-it-yourself Volkswagen” did not return any mention of my item on any result in the first three pages of either search. Most of these results were for discussion forums.

e. Under search “Volkswagen Repair Manual” the seventh item returned was my item from Amazon.com. These results were useful for finding Volkswagen repair manuals of all sorts.

f. Search for “Volkswagen Repair Manual Special Editions” returned a “30th Anniversary Edition” of my item on the first page of results.

g. A search for “Volkswagen counter culture manuals” returned hits for my item (thought not for any specific edition of my item) or the author of my item throughout the first page beginning with result number 2. Five of the ten results on the first page where for my item or my item’s author.

h. A search for “John Muir not naturalist” brought back the following website in position number two: http://www.sierraclub.org/JOHN_MUIR_EXHIBIT/frameindex.html?http://www.sierraclub.org/JOHN_MUIR_EXHIBIT/people/otherjohn.html
The title of this page is “Other John Muirs” and the third one on my list was the author of my item.

II.
I decided to look at JSTOR with the express purpose of trying to find mention of a connection between the author of my item and John Muir the naturalist. I quickly realized that in JSTOR there is no “subject” search possible. Default search is “full text” and there are also options for “author” “item title” “abstract” and “caption”. All results here are with the default “full text” search, which I know from experience sometimes provides incomplete results.
a. search for “John Muir” returned first page results (25 total) for John Muir the naturalist.
b. search for “John Muir” AND “Volkswagen” returned 71 results. I didn’t look through them all but only the very first result on the first page had direct relevance to my item, an article called “Independent Publishing: Today and Yesterday” (Muir published his book himself).
c. search for “John Muir” NOT “nature” NOT “environment returned 23 of 25 results on the first page explicitly for John Muir the naturalist. Nothing for my item.
d. under “Volkswagen” AND “repair manuals” 21 results were returned, none explicitly
for my item but five item titles were concerned with the history of technology or pollution/transportation issues (which to me means that they might mention my item).
e. under “Volkswagen” AND “counter culture” AND “repair manuals” 13 results were returned none of which mention my item in their reference pages although one treats the issue of technology and culture (“The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other” by Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker).

C.
Woldcat search:
1. Under subject search “John Muir” the first page did not return my item. Five items were explicitly related to John Muir the naturalist and five were obliquely or not at all related to the naturalist.
2. Under subject search “John Muir” AND “Volkswagen” the first ten results are editions of my item.
3. On the first page of results for subject searches “John Muir” NOT “environmentalist” (or “naturalist”) four results explicitly reference John Muir the naturalist (one is even authored by him). No mention of my item in the first 5 pages of results (but plenty of mention of John Muir the naturalist).
4. On the first page of results for subject search “Volkswagen Repair Manual” 7 of the 10 results were for Chilton repair manuals and only 1 (number 8) was my item.
5. Under search “Volkswagen” AND “manuals” AND “counter culture” 1 item is returned title “Classic Commercials of the 50s and 60s: volume 47”.


D.
Under LC subject heading “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc” 6 of the first 10 items were my item. Three were for Chilton’s manual and one was for an unfamiliar repair manual specifically for VW Golfs, Jettas and Cabriolets. The 10th listing was my specific edition (16th) although there is no mention of it as a “special edition” or “anniversary edition” anywhere in the listing.

E.
All of the first page results except for the VW Golf, Jetta and Cabriolet manual descriptors have only one descriptor: “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”. The manual for Golfs, Jettas and Cabriolets include three further descriptors: “Volkswagen Cabriolet automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”, “Golf automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”, “Jetta automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”.

However, following the link to author: “Muir, John 1918-” (still no correction for his death), 44 results return including a book on VW rabbits called How to keep your Volkswagen alive: or, Poor Richard's Rabbit book : being a manual of step-by-step procedures for the compleat idiot : Rabbit, U.S. Golf & Scirocco, the complexities thereof/ which is “Based on How to keep your Volkswagen alive, 1st ed., by John Muir (from the “notes” on the records page).” This item does not list as a descriptor “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc” but only “Rabbit automobile”.

The descriptor results for my item limit my information about the item. Only having one descriptor is like having a dead end. It is interesting that 60% of the items returned under this descriptor are for my item—it is somehow a unique item. Also, that there is a work whose title incorporates the words “Poor Richard’s Rabbit Book” into the original title for my item gives a clue as to the type of manual my item is: a do-it-yourself manual for non-professionals with limited funds.

Part III
A.
For reasons that will be apparent please see below. In brief, Google was far more helpful to me in locating this particular item and information about it and its author than was either Worldcat FirstSearch, Worldcat.org (which was better than Worldcat FirstSearch) or JSTOR (which was unhelpful in trying to find out particularly if my author was related to John Muir the naturalist as Wikipedia claimed he was).


B.
Introduction
In discussing the subject categories of my item and the relevant authority control issues associated with these categories I want to focus on three issues which this item raises for the cataloger and the searcher. First, how to distinguish between authors with the same name, particularly when one author of the same name is relatively obscure and the other author is very well known (even internationally recognized, as in my case). Included in this issue is the issue of how a user can ascertain whether or not two authors of the same name are related (as in my case, a very interesting question considering the older John Muir is a well known naturalist/individualist philosopher and the younger John Muir is a ‘hippy’ philosopher preaching a do-it-yourself mentality).
The second issue to be addressed is how a user can find information or a location for a special edition item. My item is a 25th Anniversary Edition with photos and an introduction by the author’s wife. There us no mention in Worldcat of this work as significant or unique from other editions.
The third issue is how to locate this item as a work of cultural significance. This issue is evident from the disparate results returned between Google and Worldcat/JSTOR when the item was searched for using the identifiers “Volkswagen manual counter culture” or derivatives thereof. Neither Worldcat FirstSearch nor JSTOR returned results which led to my item, whereas Google returned 1 out of every 2 results with references to my item or its author.
Issue 1
In my searches of Worldcat and JSTOR I was unable to effectively isolate John Muir, the author of my work, from John Muir the famous naturalist without adding the term “Volkswagen” to the search. My attempts at excluding John Muir the naturalist (or other appropriate descriptors) from my results list by using the Boolean designator “NOT” (as in “John Muir” NOT “Naturalist”) not only did not result in any returns of my item but also did not result in excluding John Muir the naturalist, who remained the predominant subject of the returned results.
One way to overcome this complaint that has been proposed in the scientific community is to assign individual authors an ID (AID) code. This system was proposed
by Farrokh Habidzadeh and Mahboobeh Yadollahie (2009) in their paper “The Problem of Who.” Not only would such a system aid in the assessment of any particular author’s contribution to science (particularly in the international community where there are multiple spellings for one name and multiple individuals with the same name), but the author’s also argue that “in this way, the key for search of digital databases would be the researcher's AID rather than name (p. 61).” Such a system—though practical in theory—is impractical in implementation on the popular level because it would require one coordinated system of ID’s for every author that has been, is, or will be searchable, and an awareness of such ID’s on the part of the public.
Issue 2
In cataloging systems with controlled vocabulary (authority control) there is no known method of recovering the specific edition (“16th Edition” or “25th Anniversary Edition”) of my item if one does not know the exact edition or that such an Anniversary Edition exists, unless the cataloger has entered this parameters in the descriptive fields (which the LCSH catalogers have not included as part of these headings). At issue here is what is called exhaustivity (Taylor and Joudrey 2009, pp. 310-313). The catalogers for my item decided that specifying the particulars of each edition or of special editions was unnecessary for this item.
Issue 3

Conceptual Connections and Information Poverty
There is a large disparity between information results in popular information environments (such as the internet) and professional information environments (professional KOS’s such as Worldcat FirstSearch of the Library of Congress). This disparity does not appear to be growing less severe, but more severe. It is not only that the popular information environment is growing at an exponential rate while the professional information environment is hindered by formalities and personnel issues. There is an essential difference in the type and quality of information returned in both environments. Understanding and exploiting these differences is becoming one of the most important keys to proficient information access services, however, as of the date of this paper there is little formal discussion focused on conceptualizing or enunciating these differences—specifically in the realm of subject description and authority control—even if there is a great deal of discussion on ways to exploit these differences. What this situation leaves us with is a deficit of approaches in conceptualizing these disparities.
The professional information environment is facing an information revolution. The internet is “democratizing” information in a way in which the traditional information profession was unable (though willing and trying) to do. However, the information revolution is not a “revolution” against the traditional information environment as such. The public is not “revolting” against an “elite” regime of tyrannical librarians who hold the keys to information access. Rather the public is fundamentally renegotiating its attitude towards information, and this renegotiation involves not only the way in which information is organized and retrieved but also the very physical space of traditional information access. In “The Library is Dead, Long Live the Library! The Practice of Academic Librarianship and the Digital Revolution”, for example, authors Lyman Ross and Pongracz Sennyeyb argue that among the many other challenges presented to the academic libraries of university campuses which “still operate under the assumption that their physical location is critical,” the reality is that “their placement on campus is progressively less important” in the age of digital technology (p. 146).” The authors also note that patron use of the physical library has drastically changed: “they (patrons) are buying coffee in our cafes, reading e-mail on our terminals, socializing with friends, or using group studies.” They are “are not using library resources or services (p. 146).”
With so much on their plates as a result of the digital/information revolution, it is no wonder that librarians and information professionals have not had the time to address some of the most demanding concerns regarding information organization and retrieval. Nevertheless these concerns are blatant and, for many users, intuitively obvious—demonstrated by the types of cultural shifts which Ross and Sennybab describe. The large disparities in information results which are received on searches in Google and Worldcat FirstSearch demonstrate that there is a type of information poverty being made apparent on the part of the professional information environment which is not a characteristic of the public domain, and yet there have been few attempts to treat some of the most underlying causes of this poverty at the point of authority control, let alone at defining the symptoms.
How do we measure information wealth? It is fine to argue that Worldcat has made libraries wealthier through its efforts and successes at international cataloging coordination. That is true. But libraries are still paupers compared to the internet when it comes to finding and realizing advanced forms of information connections particularly in the cultural domain. When it comes to authority control, it is the connections between subject headings and other descriptive fields which are poverty ridden in traditional KOS’s , relative, that is, to internet search engines.
My item is a case in point. A simple Google search for “Volkswagen manuals counter culture” returned 5 out of 10 results for my item. A .500 batting average in baseball is unheard of; in the world of information literacy I would think it indicates dead-on accuracy. According to Google, therefore, the description that I used for my book is shared by the general public. Yet Worldcat and JSTOR do not even register my item when I search them with the same descriptors. How is Google able to achieve conceptual, cultural, and informational connections which professional information sources are unable to facilitate, and what are the implications for this phenomena on our information organization tactics as a society?

Authority Control
The issue here is exactly the issue of authority control, or more precisely, what is called “the authority record”. Taylor and Joudrey (2009) define an authority record as “a compilation of metadata about a person, a family, a corporate body, a place, a work, or a subject. It includes evidence of all the decisions made and all the relationships among variants that have been identified (p. 252).” The difference between results which are generated by search engines such as Google and those which are retrieved using databases such as Worldcat Firstsearch is that Worldcat uses authority records which are independent from and exist outside of the parameters and particularly the results of any given search. This record is called an authority file (Taylor and Joudrey 2009, p. 254).
For search engines such as Google, however, the search results effectively are the authority file. There is no alternative authority exterior to the search results themselves, and each search generates a relatively unique set of results. In “Google and Beyond: Information Retrieval on the World Wide Web,” Richard Northedge (2007) describes the process by which Google arrives at search results. Because each search engine company’s particular method of arriving at search results are proprietary and secret, we can only know how Google arrives at its results through deduction, even with the assistance of Google’s results explanation pages. The way most search engines function, Northedge explains,
is to break down the page into its individual elements, usually down to word level, and to examine and cross-reference each of those elements. Significance is usually attached to the position of the element, with words in titles and subheadings often given more weight than those in ordinary body text (p. 194).
Google, however, utilizes an extra capacity for creating a page ranking hierarchy which is achieved through an algorithmic formula. This algorithm— known as “PageRank”—
relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’ (p. 194).
Google’s results, in other words, are a direct result of calculations based upon a user-created authority structure: the more popular the page is, the higher it is placed on the results list for any given search parameters. The authority of Google search results derive from the users, not from an exterior authority source created by an isolated group of individuals.
There are countless criticisms of the search engine system. Hunter R. Rawlings III (2007), who served as president of Cornell University during the years which saw the rise of Google, pointed to a number of the most bothersome faults in search engine technology (and of the internet as information source in general) in an address at the 151st ARL Membership Meeting in Washington DC on October 10, 2007. Pointing out that the system by which search engines operate attempts to strike a balance between “popularity and relevance”, Rawlings described the type of information retrieval that one can often experience using Google: “The result is that those pursuing knowledge on the Web tend to follow a "vein" of information leading along a narrow track, a track created by ‘measures of authority.’” And yet, ironically, those are the same words that could be applied to the Worldcat descriptor headings of my item, which was, namely, one: “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc”. This ‘vein’ of information led me to a dead end (since the descriptor link led me back almost exclusively to the item). Google, on the other hand, produced results which indicated that, via the balance of “popularity and relevance”, the top 5 out of 10 websites agree that How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot is more than just a “Volkswagen automobile—Maintenance and repair—Handbooks, manuals, etc” item. It is also a culturally distinct and significant artifact of the 1960’s generation. And that is not even to say that the other 5 results disagree.

Revolutionary Authority Control: A Lack of Literature
Hunter Rawlings’ analysis of internet information gathering leading us down a narrow track might be a relevant analysis for some items, but not for mine. In fact, I experienced just the opposite: traditional sources were narrow in their description and revolutionary sources were just that: revolutionary. One of the problems in approaching these disparities is that information professionals and scholars currently have no definitive manner of addressing them. A search on the “Library Literature and Information Full Text” database, for example, for such terms as “authority control, information, revolution” (or various manifestations of these terms); “Google, Worldcat”; “authority control, democratization, information”; and a number of other parameters meant to get at the heart of this issue resulted in next to nothing. A search for “democratization, information” on LibLit yielded the most promising results, but then only 33, none of which mention authority control. Am I using the wrong search parameters? Am I the only one who has faced the issue of the disparities between popular and professional cataloging results? Perhaps we are waiting for the dam to break.
What is at stake in the conflict between popular and professional information organization is exactly the issue of “authority”, as in “authority control”. Taylor and Joudrey (2009) point out that “the concepts of authority and control in a culture with an emphasis on individualism are not readily welcome (pp. 249-250),” but despite the arguments for the need for authority control professional librarians are being forced to take stock in the fact that “popular relevance” information sources such as Google offer up-to-date reflections of info org trends which are just not possible under the current authority control practices of information institutions such as the Library of Congress.
When we discuss “authority control” we inevitably come up against the notion of “controlled vocabulary”, and it is exactly these two notions which are being challenged by the information revolution. In a recent article called “Term selection: the key to successful indexing”, Zhang Qiyu (2009) reviews the golden rules of term selection for indexers creating catalog entries:
Choose your terms well, with respect for what's in the document and for the needs of the user. Identify the relevant, exclude the superfluous, spot the unsaid, make the connections, order it all in such a way as to catch the users attention and you will have achieved your goal: the creation of an index that will take users easily and directly to the information they are seeking from whatever the point at which they begin the search (p. 100).
The process Qiyu describes is a process which is more akin to art than science. Indeed, at the beginning of the article Qiyu refers to the “document or document collection” as the “indexer’s canvas” (p. 98). Nor is Qiyu unique in using an artistic analogy. Enid Zafran (2009) compares indexing to “power walking” in “Power Wording or How to Get Umph into Your Keywords”, and even an article such as Fred Leise’s (2008) “Controlled Vocabularies, an Introduction”, which treats controlled vocabularies as a science of “taxonomy”, cannot resist the urge to include poetic sentences such as: “Once a controlled vocabulary has been created, it cannot just be shelved and forgotten. It becomes a living thing which must be tended and cared for (p. 126).”
Traditionally, controlled vocabularies and authority control have been viewed as a service to the user, creating what Joe Matthews (2000) calls “consistent vocabulary, thus reducing extraneous or false retrievals or ‘noise’ (online resource).” In an era of “information scarcity” (as Michael Jensen refers to the decades—even centuries—before the digital revolution) such vocabularies served a specific and useful purpose. However, in an age of “information abundance” (Jensen 2008, p. 298) users question the validity of information authority which cannot deliver up-to-date and self-aware descriptors or classifications of items. The problem is made all the more acute when it is realized that what was at one time considered to be a science is really no more than a complex form of subjective decision making whose core functions resemble artistic creativity rather than scientific precision. In an environment where Google search results provide more open-ended and creative avenues of discovery, the “authority” of authority control is becoming more and more unwieldy and dismiss-able.


Conclusion
Until professional information catalogers find a method of conceptualizing and treating the information disparities which are evident between traditional and revolutionary KOS’s, amateur and even professional information seekers will continue to use general search engines as their go-to source for information selection. Libraries and traditional cataloging schemes will be used to find physical objects, but not to find the kind of nuanced, unique, and heuretic connections that many users find to be the most enriching aspects of research. When we approach the issue of “authority 2.0” (to adapt Jensen’s terminology) from the perspective of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot, there are a number of causes for concern for the future validity of authority control. Information organization which is vested in the hands of a small group of elite artist-types who have neither the broad specialization nor the capacity to deliver conceptions of cultural artifacts which reflect users’ needs in an up-to-date fashion is hardly “authority”, and it is to the credit of the librarian community that so much of the literature is focused on implementing new technology into the information landscape rather than preserving older and more traditional information organization paradigms. In this way libraries have been able to avoid the association of “authority” with “tyranny” when it comes to information retrieval, but they have not yet completely dodged the mounting suspicion of irrelevance.

Addendum
In a very useful article entitled “‘Have You Searched Google Yet?’ Using Google as a Discovery Tool for Cataloging,” Jennifer Lang (2007) argues that Google and other search engines are an excellent way for librarians to find information about an item which is incompletely presented to the cataloger (due to damage such as no book cover, partial presentation such as receiving a DVD or CD with no cover, etc. Lang also cites Google’s archive of cached websites and Google’s translation tool as useful for catalogers). Lang conducted an informal survey of professional librarians and found that of those responding to the survey “under the age of 40, almost 95% reported using Google in their cataloging, while a little over 85% of the catalogers over 40 reported the same (p. 8).” “Many respondents consider Google important for authority work,” Lang concludes, “and others reported using Google for the same reasons I do, including its translation and caching functions (p. 8).”
Lang’s experience is that Google helps her to supplement her information about any given item and thus helps her to properly catalog that item. My argument is that Google helps us to conceptualize an item in revolutionary and popular ways. Google aids the cataloger in achieving a greater degree of what Taylor and Joudrey refer to as “depth indexing (Taylor and Joudrey 2009, p. 310).” While Lang’s article and my comments to it are still “practical application” discussions, they at least take us closer toward discovering a meaningful way to discuss one of the most significant challenges to the librarian profession that has presented itself during these early years of the digital/information revolution.



Works Cited
Habibzadeh, F., et. al. (June 2009). “The problem of ‘Who’.” International Information
& Library Review v. 41 no. 2, pp. 61-2.

Jensen, Michael (October 2007). “Authority 3.0: Friend of Foe to Scholars?” Journal of
Scholarly Publishing v. 39 no. 1, pp. 297-307.

Qiyu, Zhang (2009) “Term Selection: The Key to Successful Indexing.” The Indexer 27
no3, pp. 98-100.

Lang, Jennifer (2007). “‘Have You Searched Google Yet?’ Using Google as a Discovery
Tool for Cataloging.” Library Philosophy and Practice v. 2007, pp. 1-10.

Leise, Fred (September 2008). “Controlled Vocabularies, An Introduction.” The Indexer
v. 26 no. 3, pp. 121-6

Matthews, Joe (July 2000) "The Value of Information in Library Catalogs." Information
Outlook Online. Online resource http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FWE/is_7_4/ai_64694218 last accessed December 05 2009.

Northedge, Richard (April 2007). “Google and Beyond: Information Retrieval on the
World Wide Web.” The Indexer 25 no3 192, pp. 193-5.

Rawlings, Hunter R. (2007). “Knowledge, Information, Authority, and Democracy.”
ARL 255 1-5 D.

Ross, Lyman, et. al. (March 2008). ““The Library is Dead, Long Live the Library! The
Practice of Academic Librarianship and the Digital Revolution”. The Journal of
Academic LibrarianshipVolume 34, Issue 2 pp. 145-152.

Taylor, Arlene G. and Daniel N. Joudrey (2009). The Organization of Information.
Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Zafran, E. (April/June 2009). “Power Wording or How to Get Umph into Your
Keywords.” Key Words v. 17 no. 2 pp. 47-8.

the baptized

the baptized final version by Nathan Finley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I used Windows Movie Maker (which really comes with some challenges but was adequate for this assignment) for the video, audacity for the audio, and the Gimp 2.6 image manipulator to create stop-motion and text-enhanced images.

The Eternal Return

The Eternal Return by Nathan Finley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.


Song "2025" CC Sampling Plus 1.0 by DoKashiteru

I used Windows Movie Maker (which worked fine for me) and Gimp for my movie.

Copyright Wars

Copyright Wars by Nathan Finley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I don't know if Barbara Kruger uses quotes in her work or attributes them to their owners, but my attribution of the quote to Fassbinder is part of my argument. (Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a German "New Left" film director who supposedly made this comment in a response to a question concerning the difference between himself and the radical German left-wing terrorists of the RAF.)

Photo credits:
VHS throwing girl: original photo: "The Joy of Throwing Stones"
CC attribution 2.0 generic copyright by polandeze

Copyright logo: public domain

Video Cassette:
CC attribution share alike 2.0 generic copyright by
currybet

http://www.flickr.com/photos/currybet/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

B-29 bombers: public domain

The Work of the Librarian in the Age of Technological Reproduction

THERE is, of course, a man (if he isn't a woman) behind the
librarian. When the librarian leaves his office or the counter, the man
steps forth... If someone says “So-and-so looks like a librarian,” he is
probably thinking in terms of the old-time librarian, spectacled, round-
shouldered, peering, and surrounded by an astral aura derived from the
immemorial dust that time has dropped gently on his books.
-Author unkown, from “The Man Behind the Librarian:
the Results of an Enquiry” in Library Review, vol. 9, issue 8, 1944 (URL).

The aura of the librarian is as dusty as a witch’s spell
or as the passages of space between lines of poetry, cast away in a Charles Halloway-esque attempt at redemption. But before we cast about in our own mutterings of Shakespeare let us remember who had the last laugh: because just as Mr. Cougar crumbles to dust in his attempt to outsmart the angel of history, so, too, does the machine. Perhaps, after all, only Halloway was right.

Technology is moving as rapidly as this opening paragraph, with as many connections and inquisitions, and sometimes it makes just as much sense. There is something poetic about its movement, however, something dynamic and progressive. And most of all, democratic.
Walter Benjamin argued that the mechanical reproduction of works of art (through mass copies, photographs, and assorted other methods) destroys the feeling of awe that the spectator feels when gazing at, say, a painting by Monet. This feeling is inspired by what Benjamin called the “aura” of art. The aura, according to Benjamin, was not something inherent in the art itself, but was based rather on the historical and cultural values—values that are political in nature. Monet is impressive because he represents a major development in the history of art, and because society has deemed his work to be impressive. But is he any more impressive—intrinsically—than the work of another and less popular impressionist painter?
Benjamin’s friend Theodor Adorno agreed with him that mechanical reproduction “shatters” the aura of art. Not only do major art works become commonplace through mechanical reproduction, but they lose their history and uniqueness within a historical context. Monet’s singular and unique work—awe inspiring as an exhibition at a major art museum—is commonplace and ordinary hanging over the booth at the local truck stop. But does that make a viewing of the original any less dramatic? Or are lesser known works, works without such dramatically spectacular auras, truly less resonant?




'Impressionism in Autumn': this photo has a CC Attribution non-commercial 2.0 generic copyright by tanakawho (flickr username)

LIS 5703 Representation and Description Paper

Information Organization
LIS 5703 Fall 2009
For Dr. Michelle Kazmer
By Nathaniel V. Finley
Representation and Description Paper
Thursday, October 29, 2009

Abstract:
Today’s data is seeking ways to not only transmit information, but to transmit information in such a manner that is not lifeless, it is not sterile, but rather that the information that is transmitted in metadata can be a reflection somehow of the life in the work itself. This is the same motivation, I argue, that inspires Worldcat to offer a users’ comments and feedback section to its subscription service, and to allow users to write taglines for items in its service provided to the general public. Certainly there is still a need for the IP, but it is only with the help of the general public that a new style and art of metadata entry can be realized. _______________________________________________________________

I. Introduction

The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set was created in 1995 “in order to have an internationally agreed-upon set of metadata elements that could be completed by the creators of electronic documents (Taylor and Joudrey 2009, p. 213).” With its emphasis on international validity as well as user-creation vice specialist-creation Dublin Core is meant to be user friendly and flexible. Non-rigidity and accessibility ensure, as Greenberg et. al. (2002) argue, that through the use of Dublin Core “resource authors can create professional quality metadata.”
Dublin Core was never meant to be used by the information professional, who, as Greenberg et. al. argue, “are people who have had formal training and are proficient in the use of descriptive and content-value standards” and “generally produce high quality metadata (Greenberg et. al. 2002).”
“Resource authors,” on the other hand, “are individuals responsible for the creation of the intellectual content of a work (Greenberg et. al. 2002).” In this view, therefore, there are two types of catalogers: the professional, who regularly and fairly successfully catalogs information sources; and the resource author, who irregularly and perhaps seldomly catalogs information sources but could be engaged in cataloging at least his or her own information source. In this view, Dublin Core was designed as a simple alternative to information organization that allows the information creator to bypass the information specialist and participate in a do-it-yourself environment.
Not everybody agrees with this analysis, or at least not everybody understands Dublin Core as being primarily a do-it-yourself system. In a recent article by Anita Coleman (2005) the author argues that “providing resource descriptions for information
access is…a costly business and…libraries have relinquished new forms of materials to others. DC was envisioned as a simple way to get novices–people who are new to cataloging information resources for discovery–as a way to help solve this problem (p. 156).” In other words, Dublin Core was not envisioned as a do-it-yourself project at all, but rather as a way to get the general population to help librarians do their jobs. The purpose of Coleman’s article, in fact, is to teach people how to create a Dublin Core record that 1) is helpful in the goal of information discovery; 2) is complex enough to adequately describe new media resources as well as traditional media resources; 3) can be integrated into a library using MARC and AACR2R or other standards (Coleman, p. 155). For Coleman—radically at variance with Greenberg et. al.—Dublin Core is just one more tool for the systematization and coordination of information.

II. My Dublin Core Record

A. Explanatory remarks

What I chose to do was to use Anita Coleman’s directions and find out what results I get with my item. I chose a classic text for the auto mechanic do-it-yourselfer (appropriately enough). The version that I have is a 1995 25th anniversary edition with a number of features not included in earlier editions.
Two reasons I chose to follow Anita Coleman’s directions is that they are the easiest and most complete directions that I have found outside of the Dublin Core user manual (hereafter DCUM) which is located at http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/. While the DCUM is a complex directory of terms, purposes, appendixes and also directions—and is sometimes ambiguous in its directions—Coleman’s steps are relatively lucid and easy to follow (though not always). At times, however, there are inconsistencies between Coleman’s directions and the DCUM, in which cases I have opted for DCUM directions. As one of the hallmarks of the Dublin Core system is its flexibility and adaptability I thought that this approach was justified given that one of the goals of my project is test Coleman’s thesis against that of Greenberg et. al. Where I could find no resolution to a particular problem in either Coleman or DCUM I simply invented. My justification for this approach is that this is exactly what Dublin Core was created to allow for: inventiveness on the part of the user (within limits—I leave it to the reader to decide if I have overstepped these or not).
Following Coleman’s directions, here is the Dublin Core record that I created for my item, presented in a simple two column table:

B. The Record

ELEMENT NAME: ELEMENT VALUE
Title: How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive
Title.subtitle: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for
the Compleat Idiot
Creator.namePersonal: Muir, John
Subject : Auto Mechanics
Subject : Volkswagen
Subject : Manuals
Subject : Do-it-yourself
Subject : 1960’s countercultural history
Description.note: Quotation from item introduction by author
Description: I am a man, engineer, mechanic, lover-feeler who
has worked and felt with cars of all description for
many years. This book contains the product of these
years: clear and accurate Procedures to heal and keep
well your Volkswagen. I don’t expect you to become a
mechanic—I have done that! My understanding and
knowledge will be yours as you work. You supply the
labor, the book will supply the direction, so we work
as a team, you and I.
Publisher:
Contributor.namePersonal: Gregg, Tosh (co-author)
Contributor.namePersonal: Aschwanden, Peter (illustrator)
Date: 1995-06 (2nd printing of the 16th edition)
Date.firstedition: 1969
Type: Physical object
Type: Text
Type: Image
Format: Text
Format.other: Book, paperback
Format.other: 460 pp.
Format.other: 28 cm.
Identifier: ISBN 1-56261-190-9
Source:
Language: Eng
Relation.isversionOf: 1st Edition
Relation.firsteditionDate: 1969
Coverage: Volkswagen types I, II, III, IV and Fuel Injection
Rights: Restrictions Apply
Rights.type: Copyright
Rights.date: 1994
Rights.owner.namePersonal: Muir, Eve
Audience: General Education



C. Table Explanations:

1. The title automatically presented a problem. Coleman does not approach the issue of subtitles, nor does the DCUM. Am I to use a colon and put both the title and the subtitle in the title line? Coleman (2005) tells us to “Enter the title information as found in the resource. Use capitalization and punctuation as found in resource (p. 159),” which is fine if you have a copyright page or other LOC information. But what if you only have the cover? The only distinction that the cover and the cover page make between the title and the subtitle is a smaller font.
So I decided to use the option of repeating an element more than one time (Coleman, p. 157). I also used an inventive structure found in the textbook The Organization of Information (Taylor and Joudrey 2009, p. 217) which provides a copy of a Dublin Core record using the “.” to distinguish subgroupings under a larger element heading. I have employed this technique throughout.
2. The creator is the author. Coleman does not say anything about inverting the name to family name followed by personal name—in fact she says to reproduce the name exactly as it appears on the item. However the DCUM specifically directs the cataloger that “personal names should be listed surname or family name first, followed by forename or given name. When in doubt, give the name as it appears, and do not invert.” In this case there is no doubt, so I inverted. I also added the “.namePersonal” value which is found in Talyor and Joudrey (2009, p. 217).
3. “All of the DC elements are optional, repeatable, and
modifiable by qualifiers. All elements are optional, which means
that any of the DC elements may be omitted. All elements are repeatable; this means that if there is more than one person who created the resource, and you can use the Creator element as many
times as you need to record the names of multiple creators. Similarly, all other elements (Title, Subject, etc.) may be repeated as many times as needed (Coleman 2005, p. 157).” I followed Coleman’s directions on repetition here again, and as all subject fields were equally valued I did not use any sub-values for the elements. The inclusion of the subject “1960’s countercultural history” is a topic that I will discuss below in the comparison between my Dublin Core record and the OCLC MARC record for this item. I also included the subject “Do-it-yourself”.
4. I included the description note as per Taylor and Joudrey (2009, p. 217). The Table of Contents is lengthy and does not offer a view into the philosophy behind this book, which is part of the experiment of my project here as I hope to make clear below. On the other hand this quotation doesn’t give an indication of the level of mechanic expertise that is in the manual. The DCUM also recommends including this field “since the Description field is a potentially rich source of indexable terms (http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/elements.shtml)” but I don’t think that the description will provide many “indexible terms”. Nevertheless, the DCUM specifically tells the user that the description element “can be copied or automatically extracted from the item if there is no abstract or other structured description available (http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/elements.shtml),” and this is truly the most succinct statement of description of this book that I have found from the author himself.
5. Publisher: the DCUM specifically states “If the Creator and Publisher are the same, do not repeat the name in the Publisher area (http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/elements.shtml).” Coleman doesn’t mention this and it doesn’t make sense that I
would not include “John Muir Publications” as this element value, but the DCUM is the final authority for this project.
6. For contributors there are two, and Coleman specifically directs the user to use parentheses following the inverted name to indicate the role of each contributor (Coleman 2005, pg. 162).
7. Date entry follows directions from both Coleman and the DCUM. Although I didn’t find any authority that allowed me to do so, I thought it was important to specify in this section that my item is the 16th edition of the book (and 2nd printing) so I included the year of first publication as well.
8. Type: these are the three applicable DCMI type vocabularies.
9. Format: this is the most confusing of all of the element values. Apparently there is a strict set of values that are called MIME values but there is no authority that I could find for employing these terms. Coleman tells us to provide the physical dimensions of the book but then goes on to tell us that we are only allowed to use the value names which are provided as IMTs. The Dublin Core user manual was no better. So I followed her directions and used the term “other” for subcategories of elements other than text (see Coleman 2005, p. 165).
10. ISBN is provided on back cover.
11. Source: I was really confused about source, and nothing I could find led me to the conclusion that you (Dr. Kazmer) were giving us—that source is only used if the object has changed form. I left it blank only per your directive.
12. Language: RFC 3066 Code as per Coleman’s directions (2005, p. 167).
13. For the Relation Element I used Coleman’s directions, which were clear enough except when it came to how to list the relationship. I chose to use the same form that I had found in Taylor and Joudrey.
14. Coverage in my case was easy. The manual covers Volkswagen types I, II; III, IV, and Fuel Injection. It says so right on the cover.
15. The copyright page lists the rights of the book at time of publication.




III. The MARC Records:

A. Full MARC Record:


LC Control No.: 00267638
LCCN Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/00267638

Type of Material: Book (Print, Microform, Electronic, etc.)
Personal Name: Muir, John, 1918-

Main Title: How to keep your Volkswagen alive : a manual of step by step procedures for the compleat idiot / by John Muir & Tosh Gregg ; illustrated by Peter Aschwanden.
Edition Information: 16th ed., 25th anniversary ed.
Published/Created: Santa Fe, N.M. : J. Muir Publications ; Emeryville, Calif. : Distributed to the book trade by Publishers Group West, 1995.
Related Names: Gregg, Tosh.

Description: 460 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.
ISBN: 1562611909
Notes: At head of title: 1200, 1300, 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800 & 2000.
Includes index.
Subjects: Volkswagen automobiles --Maintenance and repair --Handbooks, manuals, etc.

LC Classification: TL215.V6 M8 1995
Dewey Class No.: 629.28/722 21








B. Numeric MARC record:

LC Control No.: 00267638
LCCN Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/00267638

000 01169cam a2200265 a 450
001 12023767
005 20001207154304.0
008 000527s1995 nmua f 001 0 eng
906 __ |a 7 |b cbc |c origcop |d 2 |e ncip |f 20 |g y-gencatlg
925 0_ |a acquire |b 2 shelf copies |x policy default
955 __ |a to ASCD pb04 05-27-00; jg00 06-13-00; jg12 10-03-00; jg08 to Dewey 11-29-00; aa01 12-07-00
010 __ |a 00267638
020 __ |a 1562611909
040 __ |a DLC |c DLC |d DLC
050 00 |a TL215.V6 |b M8 1995
082 00 |a 629.28/722 |2 21
100 1_ |a Muir, John, |d 1918-
245 10 |a How to keep your Volkswagen alive : |b a manual of step by step procedures for the compleat idiot / |c by John Muir & Tosh Gregg ; illustrated by Peter Aschwanden.
250 __ |a 16th ed., 25th anniversary ed.
260 __ |a Santa Fe, N.M. : |b J. Muir Publications ; |a Emeryville, Calif. : |b Distributed to the book trade by Publishers Group West, |c 1995.
300 __ |a 460 p. : |b ill. ; |c 28 cm.
500 __ |a At head of title: 1200, 1300, 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800 & 2000.
500 __ |a Includes index.
650 _0 |a Volkswagen automobiles |x Maintenance and repair |v Handbooks, manuals, etc.
700 1_ |a Gregg, Tosh.






IV. Comparison Evaluation

A. Introduction

Do-It-Yourself Cataloging
In “Author-generated Dublin Core Metadata for Web Resources: A Baseline Study in an Organization,” Greenberg et. al. present an argument for having an author-generated cataloging system. This is by no means a new argument, and has gained in popularity since the development of the internet. What the authors are saying, however, is very pertinent to what I came across when I was writing up this assignment.
In “Metadata”, Anne Clyde (2002) argues that there is a tangible difference between the agendas of librarians and artists:
"When a librarian creates a catalog record for a book, it is usually with the aim of assisting the library user to find relevant information. When a web site developer creates metadata, it is often with the aim of achieving high search engine rankings and bringing “traffic” to a web site (p. 45)."

While that might be partly true, we should not underestimate the desire of internet users to do information organization “themselves”. John Rikfin, in his book The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where all of Life is a Paid-For Experience (2000), makes the argument that far from being in the throws of late capitalism as earlier generations of Marxist scholars claimed, we are now finding that capitalism has actually transformed itself from a property-based market to an access-based market of which the chief characteristic is the need to “experience”.

The Age of Access…is governed by a whole new set of business assumptions that are very different from those used to manage a market era. In the new world, markets give way to networks, sellers and buyers are replaced by suppliers and users, and virtually everything is accessed. (p. 6)
In the Age of Access, Rifkin argues, owning material property is not as important as the ability to access somebody else’s property in order to have a unique experience and create a cultural product. For Rifkin it is important that “we are making a long-term shift from industrial production to cultural production…we are making the transition into what economists call an “experience” economy ( p. 7),” whereby experience means a commodified cultural encounter through the vehicle of (more persistently) somebody else’s property. Cars and motorcycles are no longer owned they are leased; condo units are sold as part of large pre-designed communities of access; and the internet has created a whole new dimension of experience for which access is the keyword. In the world of hypercapitalism, doing-it-yourself is part of the imperative.

John Muir, the author of my described item, is quoted as having once said “leaders are no longer necessary.” But John Muir was a drop-out, a man who left a family and a high performance position in the 1950s to become a yoga fanatic and a VW mechanic. And yet he left us with one of the world’s truly unique pieces of auto-mechanic descriptors: an entire book dedicated to recording his love for a car and a philosophy of life, and to giving people access to the experience of “doing-it-yourself.”

Do-it-Yourself and Authority Control
The greatest difference that I see between my record and the LOC MARC records is that there is to a degree a lack of humanity and a sterilization in the MARC record. This sterilization is most readily perceived in the difference between the information I provided and what the MARC records provides in the subject fields. I chose to describe my item in a way which is not found in the MARC record; namely through the descriptor “1960’s Countercultural History.” Needless to say, I am approaching this item as not only an automotive handbook but also as a primary historical document.
I base my argument for this approach on three pieces of evidence.
1. The foreward by Eve Muir (John’s wife) opens with a philosophical summation of life and love. This is in keeping with the contents of the book, which I will discuss below. It is a New Age philosophy, and one that I think is unique in the annals of auto-mechanics manuals and mechanical textbooks.
2. This book is a product of a countercultural participant. John Muir was a married man with three children who was an engineer for Lockheed (photos of Muir’s first family are included in the family album) when he decided to “drop out” of society and move to New Mexico. This book contains photos and philosophical remarks that are records of the 1960’s countercultural movement.
3. The text itself is widely regarded as one man’s discourse on life. You would be hard pressed to find an auto mechanics book that instructs the reader—for example, when buying a Volkswagen—to “get away from the car and the owner…to let your mind and feelings go over the car and the idea of the car. What has its Karma been?...find a quiet place, assume the good old Lotus and let the car be the thing (Muir 1995, pg. 22).” This is a countercultural approach to buying a car, and the manual itself can be read as a sort of hippy’s approach to auto mechanics.
Therefore I am arguing that this book is more than just an auto-mechanics manual. It is also a primary document of interest to historians or enthusiasts of the 1960’s counterculture.

The issue here is only partly one of authority control. I, an amateur (as of today) participant in the superstructure of information organization, have no access to the leading organizational record of this item. I have only very limited agency in determining how this record is maintained or what metadata is used to describe this item. But this is really only the tip of the iceberg, and it is true that the MARC system has been very successful at serving the needs of our culture’s information organization imperative.

The conflict which I described in the introduction to this project indicates more precisely what the problem is. On the surface, the conflict appears to be between a group of authoritarian librarians who will employ novice amateurs to perform some mundane cataloging. But this is only on the surface. Because what is truly going on is a revolution in how we think about and use metadata, and it is toward this discussion that I would like to now turn.

B. The Age of Access

The amateur and the information professional
Boydston and Leysen (2006) voice concerns about the relationship between the amateur and the professional information specialist in their article “Observations on the Catalogers’ Role in Descriptive Metadata Creation”:
"Some authors have also expressed concerns about cataloger’s participation
in metadata creation. The primary focus of this criticism is the
inflexibility of some catalogers. In order to participate in metadata creation, according to DeZelar-Tiedman and McCue, catalogers need to
be more flexible in their approach to standards. They need to extend
their knowledge of standards beyond MARC and the ‘catalog-centric
model’ (p. 12)."

These remarks do a very good job of introducing my argument: the amateur information specialist is finding it more and more difficult to navigate the world of professional information organization, and are looking for (and finding) many new ways of achieving similar ends through rather different means. This is a huge paradigm shift which reveals itself in every facet of librarianship, and is creating waves throughout scholarship and society at large. For the IP, the most alarming and yet, I think at the same time, exciting aspect of this shift is the narrowing divide between the IP and general public.

In this article, Boydston and Leysen make some very good arguments for why professional catalogers should become more involved with metadata description. However the authors fail to bridge the gap between the professional cataloger and the amateur, although they do voice speculative concerns for the future necessity of professional catalogers. “Perhaps in the future, library administrators will find it more cost effective to hire subject specialists or lower level staff to create some descriptive metadata (p. 13).” My argument is that it must not be one or the other; that in fact it is the potential of the combination of the professional and the amateur that makes today’s cataloging environment so exciting.
Particularly, I am arguing that it is only through the combined efforts of those with the experience of any given cultural artifact—be they subject specialists or novice/amateur information analysts—(in my case, my knowledge of the history of the 1960’s countercultural movements as well as my personal experiences with the book in question) as well as those with the empirical expertise in information organization, that the proper form of metadata self-expression will be able to emerge. I do argue that it will emerge, rather than be created (which is in the end a Heideggerian argument and this is not the place to pursue it more closely). However, it is worth noting that my position is in some conflict with the position which understands metadata as a tool, as we read argued in much of the current literature about metadata. A recent article by Richard Smiraglia will serve as an example.

In “Introducing Metadata” Smiraglia presents the traditional, pre-Era-of-Access-view of metadata and the task of the cataloger. “Casting the role of metadata under the aegis of resource description,” Smiraglia argues that “our RESOURCE DESCRIPTION NEEDS are grounded in the needs of our users to find, identify, select, and obtain some information thing (book, article, map, score, data set, etc.).” This leads Smiraglia to two conclusions concerning metadata. First, that metadata are tools for the proper functioning of catalogs, search engines, indexes, etc—all of those things which help users to find, identify, select, and obtain…etc. Second, that the primary test of the metadata tool is its functionability in regards to interoperability. Interoperability, Smiraglia argues, “a way to move seamlessly from one tool to another (Smiraglia 2005, p. 3).
We shall revisit some of Smiraglia’s ideas later in this paper, but for the
moment I would like to clearly state my position on Smiraglia’s definition of metadata as a tool whose primary worth lies in its ability to function interoperably. In other words, Smiraglia’s position holds that metadata is primarily a tool, and only secondarily a communication. My position is exactly the opposite. I maintain that metadata is primarily a communication, and as such only secondarily a tool.

The Post-Industrial Discursive Circuit
The move towards increasing complexity in society’s avenues of information access is becoming apparent in more and more walks of life. Alan Liu, in a recent article entitled “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse” (2004), argues that metadata is becoming a new form of discourse, approachable in similar ways as we once approached texts or works of art:
"An increasing number of businesses, publishers, booksellers, university libraries, and digital text archives now use databases and XML to manage the jostling, dynamic bundle of data objects we once called books, articles, reports, or songs. But now that XML is being integrated into standard enterprise and personal productivity software…ordinary authors and readers—especially those working in institutional settings—will be influenced as well. Authors and readers will join with their institutions to complete a new discursive circuit we might call, updating Friedrich Kittler’s media analysis, discourse network 2000 (p. 49).”

Liu goes on to call this form of discourse a “post-industrial discourse,” where
“what is at stake is indeed what I called an ideology of strict division between content and presentation—the very religion, as it were, of text encoding and databases (p. 56).”

Comparing my own Dublin Core record and the OCLC MARC record one sees this new metadata discourse at play. The two (three) records are conversing with one another. The younger, more vibrant Dublin Core record, using the open-ended transformative nature of the Dublin Core approach, is issuing a challenge to the older record, which wants to describe the item only as a maintenance and repair manual. I struggled with a way in which I could invoke, through the metadata, the excitement of particularly this, the 25th Anniversary edition-- which includes photos of the author as a man who gave his life to the pursuit of “dropping out” and being self-sufficient, and helping others to do the same. That a book of this nature would cause such a sensation as to achieve its 16th printing in 25 years seemed special to me, and untranslatable incommunicable in the metadata used to describe it by the MARC record.

Ann Baird Whiteside (2005) argues that even new forms of metadata inscription are not sufficiently meeting the needs of information seekers when it comes to cultural heritage artifacts such as art and architecture—which arguably, my item could be listed as. “Occasionally,” Whiteside writes, “AACR2 rules have been applied to works of art, but they fall far short of meeting the specific and idiosyncratic needs for describing works of art, architecture, cultural objects, and images (p. 16).” This is the conflict that is becoming more apparent as the post-industrial metadata discourse gains momentum. The old ways are simply too sterile, to restrictive, or not descriptive enough for the needs of today’s information consumers—or the needs of the “discursive circuit” itself.

That the needs of the discursive circuit are not being met is apparent, for example, in new IP literature such as a 2009 article by Mary S. Woodley where once again the failure of metadata interoperability functions is mourned and in which the author bemoans the fact that “unfortunately, there are still no magic programming scripts that can create seamless access to the right information in the right context so that it can be efficiently retrieved and understood (p. 1).” What I am arguing is that to a post-industrial mind this statement is outdated because for Woodley the problem is still a matter of information retrieval first and foremost. Woodley’s point is the same as that of Richard Smiraglia: metadata are tools which serve a function and the test for how well they serve that function is the test of interoperability.
It seems as if these commentators have to some degree missed out on a larger evolution in thought that is occurring outside of the IP profession. If what is at stake is the “an ideology of strict division between content and presentation” (as Liu argues), and one proof of this is that the grassroots information cataloging movement is made up of the authors of cultural artifacts themselves, then the question is no longer primarily how to use tools to “create seamless access to the right information in the right context so that it can be sufficiently retrieved and understood” (as Woodley argues) but rather how to experience metadata in such a manner as to allow it to make its contents known to us. The variation is subtle but marked: tools are for exploiting, but an experiential approach to metadata is a partnership.

Sheila S. Intner, in a recent article entitled “Struggling Toward Retrieval: Alternatives to Standard Operating Procedures Can Help Librarians and the Public,” makes the point very well:
"The advent of one-stop shopping in full-text databases, connecting a patron searching for bibliographic elements directly with documents,
demands we stop looking at resources as fodder for bibliographic databases and start looking at them as a set of holistic choices that patrons
select. Cataloging is no longer separate from the material it describes. It
is part of the material now and must advertise its contents to the greatest
extent possible, because librarians are no longer an integral part–albeit a
behind-the-scenes-part–of the retrieval process (pg. 79)."

In other words, cataloging and metadata description are no longer merely functional operations which utilize the tools of the IP trade. There is today a much more direct and as-of-yet ill defined correlation between information platform designers and the information that is made accessible—even in the way in which the information is made accessible. Perhaps, after all, there always was.

Even though Intner is sensitive to the need for a more holistic approach to cataloging, she still falls prey to approaching the needs of the user without due consideration for the needs of the data because she approaches the problem as if the solution lies completely in the hands of the information specialist. She argues that:
"The principal problem I see with the way librarians approach cataloging
is that we still start with the material and take from that material what
we think is needed by patrons. Common sense dictates that we need to
gather bibliographic information for identification purposes and that it
should be gathered from the materials being cataloged, and I would never
try to suggest we stop doing it. But we know this process does not completely fulfill our obligation to make materials available to patrons. We should progress to the point where we start with patrons and ask how to
make what they need accessible from the material (p. 77)."

The strict focus on the patron—as understandable as it is in a service- oriented profession—leads Intner to what I consider to be mistaken projections for avenues of problem resolution:
"To do this means beginning with studies that reveal how patrons search, the psychological effects of different access routes and delivery systems, and how various metadata systems are interpreted by patrons at different levels of expertise. Then, taking what can be learned from such studies, we can reinterpret cataloging objectives in patron-centered terms that might produce different results from those of our traditional cataloging systems (p. 77)."

This just seems like an awful lot of trouble to solve a problem whose resolution is not only already in play, but is threatening to overtake the very notion of the Information Professional, namely the activities of the grassroot amateur information specialist.

The Existentiality of Metadata
.
In 1958 a Romanian born Holocaust survivor-poet was presented with one of Germany’s highest literary prizes. In his acceptance speech of the Georg Büchner Prize in Literature, Paul Celan granted to literature an ontological position that equaled if not superseded that of humanity. “But,” Celan (1986) told his audience, “the poem speaks (“Aber das Gedicht Spricht.” For a discussion of existential elements in Celan’s poetry see Szondi, 2003). In a similar manner John Muir argued that a vehicle is not merely a lifeless piece of technology. In his introduction to “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive” Muir argued that “the type of life your car contains differs from yours by time scale, logic level and conceptual anomalies but it is “Life” nonetheless (p. 3).” In the age of access the discourse of metadata, as John Liu argues, is a discourse over the life of metadata. Not a metaphoric life, but an existential life of the same character as that which Paul Celan granted to poetry in 1958 and John Muir granted to the automobile in 1969, just as the metadata of my Dublin Core record is speaking to the metadata of the OCLC MARC record. Today, perhaps, as more and more of everyday life’s necessities depend upon the proper maintenance and communication of metadata, we are realizing that metadata itself has a certain type of existence, and far from allowing itself to remain sterile metadata, through the practice of grassroots novices and information professionals alike, it is forcing its way into a new voice, and a new form of self-description.

One way to approach this form of self-description is through the notion of metadata schemes. “The term scheme,” Jane Greenberg (2005) observes, “has historically been applied to classificatory and terminological systems used in library catalogs and other information databases, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification(DDC) system and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH); this practice continues with little debate–if any (p. 22).” In the language which Greenberg uses, schemes organize and reveal themselves to their users in a manner that is, to use Liu’s terms, that of “transcendental data.” So, for example, Greenberg argues, “These (data structures) are the higher-level structured schemes that may require or recommend the use of schemes containing acceptable data values (e.g., DDC or LCSH) (p. 22).” In Greenberg’s experience, the schemes themselves communicate (“require or recommend”) what is necessary for their proper operation, creating a partnership between the operator and the system. Greenberg employs Kant to bring the notion of the communicative metadata scheme into the realm of the human operator: “Kant reasons that a schema is a system based on experience and the gathering of empirical data. Kant’s model, emphasizing experience and empirical analysis, is applicable to developments underlying metadata schemes today (pg. 22).” In order to understand and properly employ metadata schemes (or other ‘schemas’), the human operator must use both experience and empiricism. This is in stark contrast to Woodley’s argument for the urgent need or empirical research to discern the needs of information users, and forms to my mind a much more complete picture of the existential relationship between the human information specialists (whether professional or amateur) and the inhuman but nevertheless communicative system with which they interact. If therefore, the goal of metadata is to communicate information, and not just merely to be a tool for information exploitation, than as Kant argues the onus for lucid operation of metadata schemes lies on both those with experience in the cultural sphere (either subject specialists or amateur information specialists with interests in specific subject fields) as well as those with the experiential and empirical knowledge of metadata operations. In other words, the amateur and the professional need to get together to create and allow to be revealed new metadata schemes that communicate effectively within the new metadata discourse network. The funny thing is, this already seems to be exactly what is happening and what was meant to be happening all along. That is, problem is not necessarily one of interoperability or even authority control. The problem is a sort lack of Hegelian self-consciousness on the part of information professionals.

For example, one solution to what I perceive to be the existential dilemma of metadata is offered by Norm Meideros (1999), who also speaks to the need for IP’s and amateurs to get together :
"The more adventurous application for Dublin Core metadata within the library community entails the creation of records to be contributed to a shared catalog. This Dublin Core-specific database would index all 15 elements, and make searching and/or limiting on these elements possible. This approach utilizes cooperative efforts, and results in a search engine that consists entirely of human-authorized metadata, whether manually input as such, converted from another standard, or harvested. Since the metadata creation is moved from the content provider to the librarian in this scenario, controlled vocabulary can be utilized, and database maintenance routinely performed. These metadata surrogates would form the basis for a de facto scholarly search engine (pg. 58)."

But what Meideros described in 1999 as “the more adventurous application for Dublin Core metadata within the library community” is actually what Taylor and Joudrey inform us was the purpose of the Dublin Core all along: “The Dublin Core…was created in order to have…(a) set of metadata elements that could be completed by the creators of electronic documents (2009, p. 213).” In other words, let the user create Dublin Core records! That’s why Dublin Core was created. Isn’t this the motivation for Coleman’s article: to help amateurs (“novices”) create records that could be truly useful in the creation of new catalogs? And then, just as Meideros envisaged in 1999, assimilate those records into a navigable search engine which will allow IP’s to create new metadata. Eureka! Like I said, I thought that was the point of Dublin Core to begin with.

C. Conclusion

What began as an attempt to understand what the discourse between two competing methods of interpreting Dublin Core metadata was all about—the one party perceiving a new movement of grassroots artist-based methods of self-cataloging, the other understanding the grassroots as being a function of the larger industry of information organization—is now transforming into an argument that the two can no longer exist without each other. In order to bring the cultural artifacts of the industrial (and particularly the late-industrial) era most lucidly into the post-industrial or—as Rifkin would have it—hypercapitalist world, librarians must rely upon grassroots and novice do-it-yourselfers to see what we cannot see, to be the experts in the minutiae of cultural production that individual catalogers are unable to access. Information Professionals must also find a way to broach the grassroots/establishment divide possibly by completing the process of incorporating Dublin Core records into the creation of MARC or other information organization systems. We might take exception to Anita Coleman’s assimilation of the users of Dublin Core, but her attempts to ease the way for novice do-it-yourselfers is, in the end, very much along the tradition of John Muir the philosopher of the Volkswagen, who urged his readers: “You supply the labor, the book will supply the direction, so we work as a team, you and I.”




Works Cited
Boydston, Jeanne M. K. and Joan M. Leysen. “Observations on the Catalogers’ Role in Descriptive Metadata Creation.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 43, vol 2 (2006) 4-17.

Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke Dritter Band. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1986.

Coleman, Anita S. “From Cataloging to Metadata: Dublin Core Records for the Library Catalog.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly vol.40 iss.3/4 (2005) 153 -181.

Clyde, Anne. “Metadata.” Teacher Librarian 30 no2 (2002): 45-7.

Greenberg, Jane. “Understanding Metadata and Metadata Schemes.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 40, Issue 3 & 4 (September 2005): 17-36.

Greenberg, Jane, Maria Cristina Pattuelli, Bijan Parsia and W. Davenport Robertson. “Author-generated Dublin Core Metadata for Web Resources: A Baseline Study in an Organization.” [Online] Available at http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/viewArticle/42/45 (Accessed October 29, 2009).

Intner, Sheila S. “Struggling Toward Retrieval: Alternatives to Standard Operating Procedures Can Help Librarians and the Public.” Cataloging &
ClassificationQuarterly 36, no. 3/4 (2003) 71-86.

Liu, Alan. “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 49-84.

Muir, John. How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step By Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot. Santa Fe, NM: John Muir Publications, 1995.

Rikfin, John. The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where all of Life is a Paid for Experience. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2000.

Smiraglia, Richard P. “Introducing Metadata.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 40, no. 3/4 (2005) 1-15.

Szondi, Peter. “Reading Engführung.” Celan Studies. Stanford University Press, 2003. (pg 31)

Taylor, Arlene G. and Daniel N. Joudrey. The Organization of Information. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2009.

Whiteside, Ann Baird. “Cataloguing Cultural Objects: New Descriptive Cataloguing Guidelines for the Cultural Heritage Community.” Art Documentation 24 no 2 (Fall 2005) 16-18.

Woodley, Mary S. “Crosswalks, Metadata Harvesting, Federated Searching,
Metasearching: Using Metadata to Connect Users and Information.” [Online]
Available at http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/intrometadata/path.html. (Accessed October 29, 2009)

Why is the study of the European Holocaust important?

At first glance the title of this blog and the question it raises might seem out of the scope of librarian studies or the librarian profession in general. Librarians might concern themselves with the burning of books or the totalitarian aspects of German literary history during the Third Reich, but as far as studying the European Holocaust goes a librarian's job seems well out of context. Possibly, and possibly not. I hope to come to some more definite answers regarding this issue in this and subsequent blogs.



Before approaching the issue of the librarian's role, the role of new media, and the role of "electracy" in the study of the European Holocaust, however, I want to look more closely at why this question is still important for us today.



There has been a lot of finger pointing in the American public recently and an awful lot of name calling going on. One of the chief and most angering aspects for all sides has been the use of the term "Nazi" and its corollaries to deride and undermine the programs of either the left or the right. One example of this name calling was made public recently when an ex-marine, in a video-taped town hall meeting, chided Senator Brian Baird (D -WA) for his stand on Obama's health care package, even going so far as to call Nancy Pelosi a Nazi and to remind the audience that the term "Nazi" is short for "National Socialist". For this citizen, the term "socialist" was a sure sign that any government-run health program, ie, "socialized medicine", is the work of Nazis. You can view the clip here:

http://hotair.com/archives/2009/08/22/video-marine-goes-nuclear-on-democrat-over-obamacare/





While it is true that the beginnings of the German welfare state are to be found in the years of the Third Reich, it is a real stretch to call American liberals Nazis. The overarching views of the Democratic party are extremely contrary to National Socialist doctrine. Gay rights is one issue that proves this point. Abortion is another. A pacifistic rather than militaristic foreign policy is the most obvious difference, and the fact that an African-American is the leader of the party as well as the President of the United States demonstrates that not only the Democratic party but Americans in general do not adhere to Nazi doctrine.




Nevertheless, we find current in the public forum the accusations and attempts to form connections between Germany's National Socialist history and American current events.



The problem that I have with this trend is pretty straight forward. Beyond the hazy fog that such aspersions cast over the American political system (who are the good guys, who are the bad guys?), these kind of accusations threaten to create an equally hazy fog over the Nazi past of Germany and Europe. This, I argue, is far from a good situation.



In the late 1980's a lively and public discussion occurred among mostly German-language historians over how best to approach the National Socialist past. This discussion has since become known as the Historkerstreit, or "historical conflict". There were broadly two main camps represented in this conflict. On the one side where the historians who attempted to explain Germany's past by finding the root causes of the Holocaust in 19th and 20th Century sources. Germany's "long 20th Century" is to be understood, in their view, as a progression that led to a massive outpouring of negative and murderous policies. For some historians, the normal German as well as the Nazi official all became caught up in a historical wave of hatred which swept them away and allowed for the terrible events of 1933-1945. One famous historian with this view is Martin Broszat.


(Wikipedia has a good article about Broszat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Broszat)



On the other side of the debate was a more conservative outlook. This one approached the history of the Third Reich as a murderous anomaly, unique not only in the history of Germany but in the history of Western Civilization. Historians from this second camp argued that to view the Holocaust as anything other than the acts of monsters who assumed control of Germany's power structure was to run the risk of losing sight of the very barbarity of the Holocaust. One of the major proponents of this approach was historian Saul Friedlander.


(Wikipedia also has a good article on Friedlander: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Friedl%C3%A4nder)



I see value to both sides of the argument. On the one hand, I agree that the Nazi high officials were monsters. I agree that they had murderous intentions from the beginning. My studies have confirmed in me that the Nazi party was founded not on any positive basis, but on the basis of hatred and warfare and above all anti-Semitism--these were not later developments but were intrinsic to the Nazi party from its inception.

At the same time, I realize that these same Nazi officials were human...all too human. And it is exactly that which can turn a human being into a murderous machine of hatred that concerns me.



Compared to the European Holocaust, the holocausts that were unleashed on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945 were tiny. But the deaths of these two cities and their inhabitants is forever etched in my imagination and forms a sort of a bookend to the WWII experience. In Europe we had the death camps, in the Pacific we had the A-bomb.



The two events are more similar than a cursory analysis might indicate. Both events were calculated to end conflict. In Germany the belief was that by killing the Jews a new and united Europe would emerge. In Japan the bombs were dropped in order to bring a defeated Japan to surrender.




Beyond these obvious points, however, these experiences share strikingly similar cultural significances. In both events there were no dead bodies to bury or to morn. The survivors lived with great physical and emotional traumas for the rest of their lives. Many of the survivors ended their lives prematurely through acts of suicide (famously Primo Levi and Paul Celan in Europe, Tamiki Hara in Japan. There are some very interesting similarities, even, between the poems of Tamiki Hara and Paul Celan. For example, these two famous ones:


Engraved in stone long ago,
Lost in the shifting sand,
In the midst of a crumbling world,
The vision of one flower.
-Tamiki, 1951 (?)



Deported into
the land
with the unmistakable trace:
Grass,
written assunder
-Celan, 1958)



Both events also (obviously) have countless numbers of interpretations from every conceivable angle filling up rows of book shelves at any given library.


Finally, and significantly, both experiences were the results of the deadly use of technology.


All of that is not to say that there is anything similar about the two events from an ethical perspective. We as humans do not and cannot condone the European Holocaust. However, many of us--particularly Americans (and I am one of these) feel that the use of the A-bomb in that particular historical moment was a justified action. Many people do not agree with this analysis, but whether we justify the use of atomic weapons or not most people would agree that the United States incurred upon itself a great and terrible responsibility when it ushered in the nuclear age.



The popular mind does not think "holocaust" without associating these two events with one another. In fact, the European Holocaust provides us lessons from which we learn how to avoid creating a nuclear holocaust.



It is on this last point that the study of the European Holocaust is so fundamental and continues to be essential for us today. If the European Holocaust is allowed to be fogged over by political rhetoric, if the facts and realities of the European Holocaust are sacrificed to political maneuvering, we as humans have not only lost sight of the victims of Nazi Germany, but we have lost sight of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and with it the reality of our own precariousness in relation to our nuclear capabilities today. This would be the most dangerous position of all, for it would mean we are one step closer to being the cause of the complete dissolution of life on earth for millions if not billions of years.


The study of the European Holocaust remains fundamental to us today because without it we lose the memory and the language of genocide, of mass murder, and of the constant possibility of technological devastation. I would like to look more closely in the next blog at the specifics of the technological devastation and the philosophic discussions and understandings of this issue. To conclude this post, however, I want to offer a few words of warning and encouragement.


We as Americans cannot allow our political agendas to cloud our memory of the European Holocaust. Our fathers, grandfathers, and for some of us great-grandfather fought a terrible struggle against a great evil. We are not Nazis. We might be a bit militaristic at times. We might push the limits of democracy, and we might come closer to socialising many of the industries that have traditionally been in the private sector. But so long as we continue to be a culturally dynamic people, so long as we continue to fight for the equal rights of all of our citizens, so long as we continue to celebrate the successes, achievements, and contributions of all of our citizens no matter what race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or any other qualification, we can be sure that we are NOT Nazis. It is only when we confuse ourselves about what a Nazi really is that we begin a march toward a more cruel and inhumane society than that generation who fought to end the tyranny of the Third Reich could have ever have envisioned for us.

1st LIS blog: what is LIS and why is it important for me to write a blog about it?

My name is Nathan Finley and I am just beginning an MA course in Library and Information Sciences (LIS), in which I hope to develop a number of Web 2.0 skills (and Library 2.0 skills) as well as advance my understanding of a number of philosophical/theoretical issues dealing with the technological age. This can be pretty heavy duty stuff, and I decided to use the blogger platform as a method of organizing/trying out some thoughts and discoveries both as a practice in public discourse and as a private meditational tool.
Of course I've read a number of other blogs, mostly political in nature, over the course of the last several years, but I never really thought about starting my own. Until now. I just began Nancy Courtney's Library 2.0 and Beyond and my brain is buzzing with what to me are good ideas. Since I'm just beginning my MA program I thought this would be a perfect time to start a blog and keep a record of my thoughts as I progress through the next year and a half. I'm hoping that this will clear away some of my cobwebs and refine my thinking/writing for class. In order to help facilitate this endeavor I have written the following introductory blog as a sort of manifesto for myself and any potential readers. Comments of all and any sort are welcome--don't think you have to follow my creed if you talk to me!

My guiding thoughts are probably along the lines of this: what does the technological revolution really mean to us as citizens, as participants in government and community networks, as artists and lovers and thinkers and dreamers? In order to contextualize this question I'll review something that I learned while studying at the University of Florida.

Dr. Greg Ulmer, who I had the chance to take a graduate course with at UF, coined the term "electracy" to indicate how radical of a transformation he thinks we as humans are undergoing at this time. The new media communication tools that are revolutionizing our lives are as tangibly transformational, according to Dr. Ulmer, as the advent of literacy was 3000 years ago. Thus he is calling the new skill sets associated with the new media "electracy" (wikipedia has a good article on electracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electracy). Mark that he's not saying the the new media platforms are akin to the advent of the printing press. No, he's thesis is far more radical. What Dr. Ulmer argues is that we are living in a time of transformation as radical as the dawn of human writing itself.

Wew. That's pretty radical. I mean, if I sit down and think about it a number of realizations come to mind. I think about how the ancient Druids of the Celtic world were notorious for distrusting the new medium of writing--and they're pretty much extinct for all practical political purposes. I think about how the pre-historic peoples of so many societies--from ancient Greece to the Scandanavian countries to Africa and the Middle East--all finally broke down and made written records of their oral traditions, thus creating the first historical documents of their peoples.

Also, however, I think about how much oral traditions still persist even today. The spoken word is still very much a vital part of our culture: poetry jams and hip-hop communities, stand-up comedy and presidential addresses are all part of our oral traditions in the West. So the new medium doesn't do away with the older medium, the one just displaces the other as a primary signification tool in our lives. That's a relief as a book lover!

But how does such a radical transformation effect the way we think about ourselves? How does it make radical and far-sweeping changes in the way we narrate our own stories--as individuals, as cultures, as political bodies--on a fundamental level? How do we gauge that foundation and anticipate or even observe its swings and transformations? Finally, and very important: how does it effect the way we perceive--the actual physical activity of sensing--the world around us.

While these might seem like somewhat common sense questions where the answers are right before our eyes I am starting this blog with the hypothesis that we have not even begun to understand how radically transformed an "electrate" culture is relative to a "literate" culture. As much as we today have difficulty imagining what a purely oral culture would have looked like, how it would have operated, and that it could have constructed such elaborate and well thought out cosmologies as the Vedas or Homer's Iliad (yes, some argue that this was an oral poem before Homer wrote it down), so it is nearly inconceivable to think about what kinds of changes the new technologies will entail. My firm belief is that all things are cyclical in nature--some argue spiralic. What goes around comes around. Are we beginning a new loop, are we witnessing the end of one, is there any way to rationally see where we are heading without getting into some really wild new age mumbo-jumbo?


One of the chief reasons I am starting this blog is to make a record of my thoughts and reactions to the material that I will be learning, with a particularly close attention being placed on the "evolutionary" changes wrought on society by technology. In order to stay away from the really wild and out-there theories like I see on New Age blogs (end of the Mayan calender type of stuff), I'll try to stay as grounded as I can in the texts and philosophies that I have used or am using in the course of my studies. I do warn any readers from the outset that I am not going to hold back on looking into what might be some really weird spaces. I want to get ABSTRACT with this. But I also want to have a solid center to come back to.

There is one note that I should make and that is that I am heavily informed by Christian texts and will come back to the Judeo-Christian traditions time and again in my discussions. I do have an interest in working through some theoretical notions that I have in regards to technology and the Biblical texts but I warn you up front that the Bible rubs me the wrong way. I am so heavily informed by it because I have a strong familial background in the Bible. But what rubs me in an even worse way is the political agenda of Bible students and so-called Christians. So if your stomach is turned by religio-political agendas, be aware that I am aware of my own agenda and one thing that I want to do in this blog is to look more closely at my own agenda (and those of others) in this time of upheaval which many find themselves going through.

Now I'm tired of talking about what I want to do with this site, and I want to get down to doing it. Since the introductions are over, I'll close this first blog and get prepared to write my first real entry. thanks to anyone out there who finds this and wants to keep reading!