Radreffies' blogs

Iceland will be Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2011. This will provide a unique opportunity to present Icelandic literary culture to

As the days get closer to Burning Man, I'm getting more and more excited about not just the amazing festival that is Burning Man, but also about the Burning Man 50k. Running an ultramarathon at Burning Man was a dream of mine since my very first Burn, and I am so excited that I will actually be doing it. In the beginning, I was worried it would just be me, Murray and Jon, but it looks like we'll have a solid crowd. There's 35 people who have sent in their RSVP full info to me, but 83 people on our Facebook page said they were going to do it!

This year, packing is an additional struggle b/c I'm including finishers' rewards, Heed, numbers, and other assorted supplies needed for the race. Also, I'll bring my fuel belt, some gels, extra endurolytes. And of course, what costume should I run in? I'm thinking my favorite tutu might be good (with some Saucony sneakers and a sports bra!) - and body glide everywhere that it can possibly go!


Yesterday, we got some unexpected media attention! Wired magazine picked up on it, and wrote an article (without reaching out to me), "Burning Man Readies for Its First Ultramarathon." So exciting! And now this additional media attention has a few more runners reaching out to me! We also got in another website, Blisstree, on "Burning Man Ultramarathon: Things We'll Never Do." They make it sound unappealing! Honey, this is nothing compared to Badwater or Marathon Des Sables (Sahara MultiDay).


One guy wrote me, saying he had always wanted to go...and now he's in the midst of a divorce and thinking abt it. I encouraged him to come, telling him my story. (Talking to God about how unhappy I was in my previous relationship; God gave me some great advice.) I told him he'd def get a lot of clarity into his life, his relationship, his future.


Burning Man is a week long party, yes, but it's also a lot more. I'm excited for those quiet moments I'll have - running around the playa in the ultramarathon, riding my bike to a friend's camp across the playa, wandering around in deep playa late at night to look at art...I know I'll get a lot more clarity abt what I want and need and what I'm looking for. I know, but it will also provide the necessary motivation for me to move forward. Funny, it has a reputation as being a place for drugs, but this year, Burning Man will be attracting a new group of addicts: endrophin junkies.

I've been fascinated by the struggles with, and now the apparent embrace of, social media by the U.S. Armed Forces. When I first saw that the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs was tweeting, it signaled the military's shift towards strategically harnessing new media to advance the Armed Forces public affairs goals and "compete in an evolving global messaging space". And lest you assume that Admiral Mullen just tweets what he had for lunch, his social media strategy clearly outlines his goals to engage and expand audiences. (Incidentally, in addition to following who you'd expect, such as his wife and President Obama, Admiral Mullen also follows The Economist, Oprah, Thomas Friedman, Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulus, and UNHCR).

Below are a couple of examples of the military's web presence in the 21st C. network. Of course, while providing useful information for servicemembers, their families, researchers, students, and the general public, they are also public relations outlets. But in our rich information landscape, that's true of many "authoritative sources" (all the more reason for teaching critical thinking about information):

Department of Defense Social Media Hub
"Designed to help the DoD community use social media and other internet-based capabilities to share responsibly and effectively, both in official and unofficial capacities." See especially their "How To" guides, which explain the basics of various 2.0 tools, and highlights examples of how servicemembers are using social media.

Pentagon Channel
Head over the the 'shows' section to browse the wide range of video and audio broadcasting available online, including "This Week in the Pentagon" and the American Forces Press service weekly podcast for military news; "Battleground", featuring historic films from past wars; and "Downrange", a newscast from Iraq and Afghanistan. On the lighter side, check out "The Grill Sergeants", a cooking show featuring top chefs in the military, and "Fit for Duty: Pilates" for a good workout.

Information as Power, U.S. Army War College
To learn more about these practices in the context of security issues, check out this electronic library of academic work by and for the U.S. Army related to information as an element of national power. You'll find publications such as "Bullets and Blogs: New Media and the Warfighter", "Information Operations as a Deterrent to Armed Conflict", and "War in the Information Age".

Debian Day was great.

I heard snippets of Biella Coleman and Hans-Christoph Steiner's introduction to the day that morning as I sipped my coffee outside the auditorium. I liked Biella's use of humor and Hans' presentation in which he urged participatory software structures (as opposed to a dichotomy between producers and consumers). I'm looking forward to seeing the recordings up on the DebConf10 site.

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There are already a few blog posts about our shared experiences in Vermont. What I can say about Immersion is that it stretched me really far as a teacher, as a student and as a librarian. I learned a lot about how I like to learn (and how that affects what I teach, and that one of those things is that I need time to reflect, contemplate and collate what I've learned. Being back in Brooklyn I've been on to other things but I hope that soon I'll get a chance to share here and also implement what I took away from Immersion (that hopefully doesn't violate the copyright statement--couldn't let that go without mention!).

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HOPE was a really amazing conference. The hackers (in comparison to librarians, who I normally conference with) were really engaged and industrious--they gathered data, archived events, created gizmos, and provided not only segway rides but also hammocks throughout the three day's events. I'm dropping my notes here in one gigantic mess, but there's audio and video up over at http://thenexthope.org/talks-list/ if you want to see/hear it for yourself.

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Camden, N.J., preparing to close all its libraries.

The library board in Camden, one of the nation’s poorest cities, is preparing to close all three of its branches by the end of the year, saying its funding has been slashed so drastically that it cannot afford to keep operating.

This just in: GPO is gearing up to facilitate cooperative cataloging projects in FDLP libraries. This is great news for all those uncataloged-bound-with-unanalyzed series that every agency seems to have (yeah I'm talking to you Department of Agriculture Bulletin!). This push to catalog will make depository collections much more findable and usable!

Many libraries in the FDLP have voiced interest in establishing cooperative cataloging partnerships with GPO to exchange cataloging records, work together to catalog older materials, or enhance existing cataloging records to meet current cataloging standards. GPO has created guidelines for the establishment of partnerships that have a cataloging component. Federal depository libraries that are interested in possible cataloging partnerships are encouraged to review the guidelines and contact the partnership coordinator.

Radical Reference and the Future of Academic Librarianship ... Truly radical reference is coming out from behind that desk and bringing that crucial ...

A few days ago, the Washington Post interviewed David Walls, GPO's new -- and first! -- preservation librarian. We're really excited to work with GPO and Mr Walls on building our public digital govt information preservation architecture.

David Walls is overseeing the transition at the GPO to digital archiving

By Lisa Rein. Friday, July 30, 2010; B03

The U.S. Government Printing Office provides Americans with permanent access to government information, printing about 2 billion pages every year.

As it celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, it has hired its first preservation librarian to oversee, among other things, the transition to digital archiving. David Walls comes to Washington from Yale University, where he worked as a preservation librarian for 12 years.

Walls, 47, just finished his fourth month on the job.

Q.How did you get interested in library preservation?

I volunteered years ago in the rare-books collection at the Baylor University library in Texas. I got bitten by the bug then. It's a very small field and a young one. You could probably put every preservation person in the U.S. in one large hotel ballroom. Most people who do this work are in academic settings or private libraries, but there are government libraries, too, beyond the Library of Congress. You've got the National Library of Medicine, for example.

Why did the office create a position for a preservationist?

We're in an era of digital publications being produced all over government. We're continuing to supply printed copies of the Federal Register and other publications, but most every federal agency is producing things with only digital content. If you get on almost every federal Web site you'll click on things that, in a previous age, would have been produced in a report or a book.

The GPO is updating a digital system we rolled out last year to disseminate and authenticate all of this government information. If you go to http://www.fdsys.gov, you'll see the Federal Register, the new health-care law, the financial reform law, congressional bills, the president's budget on there. And a lot more, of course. We're designing a new server that's more robust. The federal digital system is part of our mission.

Where were government documents such as legislation and the federal budget preserved in the paper-only days?

This is an organization that for 150 years has been distributing publications to various libraries across the country. It's called the Federal Depository Library Program. There are 1,220 of these libraries in the U.S. and Guam, usually departments or units within other libraries. Georgetown Law Library is one. They may specialize in saving Supreme Court briefs or statutes at large. A library in Missouri might preserve Small Business Administration publications or Fish and Wildlife documents.

Some libraries accept everything the government puts out and keep it forever. Others select which stuff to keep. Right now, we're reaching out to this community to do a basic review of our operational plan, to look at our content and develop a set of preservation services to offer the libraries, digitally as well as on paper.

Some publications the libraries carry are old enough to become brittle. If we're about permanent access to government information, what is our plan for reaching out to these libraries to make sure that happens? My job is to provide some leadership and act as a facilitator.

What is digital security, and why is it important?

We need to make sure the information that the printing office disseminates is secure. So right now, we're doing an internal audit project to make sure our digital repository is trusted. It'll be preserved according to modern standards. Think of it as a bank audit. A bank has to go through an audit to make sure it's a trusted repository of money. The same is true for us.

What are the challenges of carrying out the agency's mission without paper?

The paper publication had a physical form, so there was some intellectual control over what it was and where you could find it. You could sit there for quite a long time without worrying about it becoming obsolete. You weren't going to go into the library one day and find out that a publication was inaccessible because it was in a different file format.

With digital, you have the whole issue of how do you know it's authentic? That all the information is there? The digital publication requires almost constant vigilance.

Our friends at Sunlight Labs have done it again! They just released a tool called PoliGraft. Paste the url of a news story or blog post into the tool (or better yet, install their handy bookmarklet in your browser's tool bar!) and the tool analyzes the story, mines it for names, corporations etc and quickly spits out the interconnections between the people, organizations and relationships contributions associated with the story. The data mined by the tool is provided by the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute for Money in State Politics.

For example, here's a NY Times article about Elena Kagan's confirmation to the US Supreme Court and here's the PoliGraft results including the original text and the report on aggregated contributions and points of influence of the many politicians named in the NYT story. A very cool tool indeed!

[Thanks @stereogab!]

This is pretty ridiculous. The FBI recently sent a letter to Wikipedia (PDF) demanding that Wikipedia take down the FBI seal shown on the wikipedia article on the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Does the FBI have nothing better to do than hassle Wikipedia (who's written a thorough and informative description of the FBI)?! As one Redditor named TheCid mused: "Somehow, I think a shit-for-brains lawyer at the FBI thinks Wikipedia and Wikileaks are the same organization, and decided to try to get at the latter via the former."

The problem, those at Wikipedia say, is that the law cited in the F.B.I.’s letter is largely about keeping people from flashing fake badges or profiting from the use of the seal, and not about posting images on noncommercial Web sites. Many sites, including the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display the seal.

Other organizations might simply back down. But Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau’s lawyers had misquoted the law. “While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version” that the F.B.I. had provided.

F.B.I., Challenging Use of Seal, Gets Back a Primer on the Law
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: August 2, 2010

[Thanks GovTwit!]

As a reference and instruction librarian, I always have my eyes open for sources that make government information accessible and relevant for general reference questions and instruction sessions. I especially like websites that provide a wide range of information, make that information browsable by topic, and that don't require the user to navigate the administrative or publication cycle to get to the meat of these materials. I'm also partial to sources that include media, such as podcasts and video, which helps me sell these sources to undergrads at the reference desk and through online class guides. The good news is, it's getting tough to keep track of them all! A couple of my favorites:

GAO topic collections
Feature reports and testimonies on a number of policy issues, from biofuels to terrorism, presented in a browsable topical list. Check out their podcast and videos too.

U.S. Department of State
Wide topical range of publications and background information, browsable by policy issues, countries & regions, and more.

Oyez
An online archive of the Supreme Court, Oyez allows users to browse for cases by issue, such as due process, federalism, civil rights, etc. Also includes some audio of oral arguments.

Your favorites?

More reporting on the hearing this week on Public Access to Federally-Funded Research:

In his testimony to the House Committee On Oversight and Government Reform, Alan Adler of the Association of American Publishers, said:

Publishers strongly believe that American taxpayers are entitled to the research they've paid for.... But taxpayers have not paid for the private sector, peer-reviewed journal articles reporting on that research.

...Peer-reviewed articles published in scholarly journals are not research, federally-funded or otherwise. They describe and explain the process, findings and significance of research. They require substantial amounts of the publisher's resources to ensure that their content is accurate, new, and important.

Or, as Barbara Fister comments at Inside Higher Education,

Sure, taxpayers are entitled to federally funded research, but "peer-reviewed articles published in scholarly articles are not research." No, they are the intellectual property of publishers, because they're the ones who spend all kinds of money to make sure the science in them is accurate.

I'm not kidding. He actually said that. It's publishers who make sure the research is "accurate, new, and important." That peer review you do for free? They have to spend millions to make sure you do it right.

So we have no problem, and taxpayers have to right to this stuff because it's not research.

Publisher argues free access to research violates administration's transparency initiative, By Aliya Sternstein, NextGov (07/30/2010).

...But a mother of two children diagnosed with a rare disease, who also testified at the hearing, said access to such articles has been critical to treating their illness....

My girls and I went for a great 4.5 hour run at Bear Mountain. There were stomach aches, hills, great views, more hills, tripping, peeing behind bushes, mud, freaking out about running out of water, talking about the deliciousness of chocolate Accelegels (that was all me, on the chocolate Accelegels...like pudding, I tell you!), talking about boys, and stupid men, and bad dates, and good dates, and what we did last night...Andrea and I were collectively on less than 2.5 hours sleep, but we substituted some caffeine for sleep, and all that dancing I did the night before - I'm pretty sure it's what propelled me up those hills.



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Welcome to the podium Emily Keller to the guest blogger podium for August 2010! Emily is the Political Science and Public Affairs Librarian at the University of Washington (full bio). Thanks also to Shari Laster for posting to FGI for the month of July!

Take it away Emily!

Great Moments in Librarianship is sort of a more selective ref grunt.

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Happy birthday United State Census! It was on this day in 1790(!) that the counting of the first US census was begun. Title 13 of the US Code defines the census and the collection and publication of the census and other statistics required to make the federal govt run. So happy birthday census! You don't look a day over 200 :-)

The first enumeration began on Monday, August 2,1790, little more than a year after the inauguration of President Washington and shortly before the second session of the first Congress ended. The Congress assigned responsibility for the 1790 census to the marshals of the U.S. judicial districts under an act that, with minor modifications and extensions, governed census-taking through 1840. The law required that every household be visited and that completed census schedules be posted in ‘‘two of the most public places within [each jurisdiction], there to remain for the inspection of all concerned...’’ and that‘ ‘the aggregate amount of each description of persons’’ for every district be transmitted to the President. The six inquiries in 1790 called for the name of the head of the family and the number of persons in each household of the following descriptions: Free White males of 16 years and upward (to assess the country’s industrial and military potential), free White males under 16 years, free White females, all other free persons (by sex and color), and slaves.