the Library Channel

At the top of the new Library ReSEARCH Station you will see a banner that reads Need To Find An Article On Your Topic? The box below is our new Article Quick Search. Type your keywords into the box and retrieve articles from over eighteen different EBSCO databases. Results are sorted by relevance but you can easily resort by date or limit to academic journals. It’s quick, it’s easy, and the full text is free! Try it and tell us what you think.

Posted by Sarah Blakeslee

Image by CyboRoZ, used under the Creative Commons license.

The software that permits off-campus CSU, Chico users to access the library’s databases has been updated. Why should you care?

If you have bookmarks or URLs (Web links) in documents or syllabi which point to library databases the beginning of the URL (i.e., proxy prefix) has changed so that the five characters :2048 have been removed from the URL:

FROM
http://mantis.csuchico.edu:2048/login?url=
TO
http://mantis.csuchico.edu/login?url=

For example:

1. The old URL to the CountryWatch database was:
http://mantis.csuchico.edu:2048/login?url=http://www.countrywatch.com/ip/
The new URL is:
http://mantis.csuchico.edu/login?url=http://www.countrywatch.com/ip/

2. The old URL to a journal article in Academic Search was:
http://mantis.csuchico.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=3008927&site=ehost-live
The new URL is:
http://mantis.csuchico.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=3008927&site=ehost-live

Currently both prefixes work but after May 31, 2009 the old proxy prefix ( http://mantis.csuchico.edu:2048/login?url= ) will no longer function. To avoid broken links please update your URLs.

For assistance call:
Student Help Line – 898-HELP (4357)
Faculty Help Line – 898- 6000

Image by L Lemos, used under the Creative Commons license.

I just saw this in today’s International Herald Tribune and wanted to share it. Anand Giridharadas writes

Twitter and Facebook are, OMG, so last millennium.

Or so it seems as I look out through my window in the forested Indian village where I am living, one of those places that the future has yet to invade.

A row of modest houses faces me. All day long, as I write, their inhabitants talk. And I have discovered through their talk that the age-old sociability of the village — ambient sociability, one might call it — harbors a strange likeness to the social-networking culture we think to be so new.

They don’t do one-on-one conversation here. They broadcast. If you have something to say, yell. Bring water! Go to school! Why did you tell her that thing? The people do not limit their talk to their own homes. Their scolds and praise and commands are for the village.

They stand in a stream of soothingly mindless hubbub. They hear opinions even when they do not ask, receive advice they do not need, get a little love from everyone and a lot from no one. Village sociability is not about sharing feelings. It doesn’t dwell on you. It asks for little. It just buzzes.

And what do the Internet’s social networks offer if not this village buzz? You build networks wider than your circle of close friends, and immediately you, too, stand in Hubbub Creek.

This is not about deep bonding… Social networks offer only ambient love. They maintain not your 10 key relationships, but your hundred semi-key mini-relationships. They are not about understanding or soul-baring, but about being simply, ambiently present…

I found this comparison of residents of a village interacting with each other to friends on social networks engaging in the same types of interaction fascinating. It goes right to the heart of scholar and futurist Marshal McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message.” Many people who engage in social media may find this to be true, given that they can simultaneously be a part of a social network to connect to people they know AND be aware that they are part of a networking and communications movement. But in Giridharadas’ example, the messages people communicate to each other are not dependent on a technological medium. They are based simply on face to face interaction — which certainly represents a medium of communication, but not a technological one. Divorcing the medium from technology invites the question of what exactly a “social network” is — must it be a technological medium such as Facebook or MySpace, or can a conversation among vilagers represent a social network?

Image by freeparking, used under the Creative Commons license.

Giridharadas’ example also gets at the notion of a core group of friends as opposed to a larger group of “weak ties,” or “loose connections” — people that a person knows but is not close to. (Weak ties are a common type of connection that one makes through an online social network). Following from research by Putnam (2000) and Granovetter (1982), Nicole Ellison of Michigan State University writes about weak ties in her article The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites. My colleage Fred Stutzman, a PhD student at the University of North Carolina, and Danah Boyd at Microsoft Research New England have also written about these different types of connections. In the case of the village, it sounds like a group of people who maintain weaker ties — multiple neighbors as a community offering unsolicited advice rather than offering in-depth council to only a select group of friends. But communities of this nature can be very tight knit too, strengthening the weak ties to the point that they may not be too far off from being viewed as close ties. In the case of this village, the strength of the ties between community members is a open question — whether they are merely weak ties, or strong ties that emerged through a community networked structure.

I just wanted to take a moment to share Giridharadas’ article, as well as these two thoughts based upon it.

Contributed by Aaron Bowen

Works Cited:

Granovetter, M. S. (1982). The strength of weak ties: A network theory revisited. In P. V. Mardsen & N. Lin (Eds.), Social Structure and Network Analysis (pp. 105-130). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Image by LaughingSquid, used under the Creative Commons license.

Three days ago The Consumerist reported that Facebook had quietly altered its terms of service — the agreement into which a person enters when s/he sets up a profile on Facebook. The Consumerist described the change in the terms of service as affecting Facebook’s ability to retain a person’s page content in the event s/he decides to remove his/her profile. In The Consumerist’s words:

Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore… Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

The outcry was enormous. This Facebook group protesting the change has grown to 98,000 members since the news broke, and the incident was reported in The New York Times, the Associated Press, and other news outlets. (The Consumerist has a follow-up post listing the different news venues where the incident received attention). Facebook quickly backtracked and offered an apology for the incident.

While it was practically over before it started, this isn’t new. Facebook has angered it’s user base over privacy issues in the past. (In fact I wrote about two previous disconnects between Facebook and Facebook users over digital privacy here). Yes, Facebook moved quickly to address this issue as it made headlines over the weekend, but it is still perhaps striking that Facebook hasn’t learned from previous stumbles with privacy issues.

So, as I frequently do, I’ll finish this post with some open-ended questions: Does an incident like this affect the way you view Facebook (especially given its prior history of incidents)? Is it reasonable to expect to retain control of one’s personal information when a person creates a profile on a social network? Or are we living in an age where digital privacy is essentially gone, and we just have to accept that fact when creating a profile? I’d love to hear what you think. In the meantime, here are three books on the topic of digital privacy that can provide some useful background in considering these questions:

Solove, D.J. (2008). Understanding privacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (BF637.P74 S65 2008, library main collection).

Rule, J.B. (2007). Privacy in peril. New York: Oxford University Press. (JC596 .R85 2007, library main collection).

Andrejevic, M. (2007). iSpy: Surveillance and power in the interactive era. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. (HM851 .A65 2007, library main collection).

Contributed by Aaron Bowen

Image by mujitra, used under the Creative Commons license.

So you’re at a friend’s house looking at the library catalog for books you might want to use in your next paper. You find one that looks useful and you want to copy down the title, author, and call number so that you can look it up the next time you’re in the library. And then tragedy strikes – your pen dies. (Alternate scenarios: you don’t have a pen, you don’t feel like copying that book’s long title down, etc).

All is not lost. You can send the information on that book to yourself via text message. Take any record in our catalog – this one, for example:

Right in the middle of the screen, underneath the bar that tells you where to find the book and whether it is checked in or not, you have a button with which you can send the record as a text message. Click that button, enter your phone number and indicate your cellphone carrier, and click send. It will arrive in your inbox in seconds. The next time you’re in the library, you’ll have all the information to locate your book (literally) at your fingertips.

Just a friendly reminder though – cellphone conversations must remain out of the library!

Contributed by Aaron Bowen

Image by pshab, used under the Creative Commons license.

A place to connect to your friends… a place to keep updated on their activities… Many of us, including myself, love being on Facebook for the benefits it affords us in discovering fun upcoming events and in maintaining friendships. But there is a tradeoff for these benefits – in seeing who we connect to and where we plan to go, Facebook learns a lot about us. And yes, Facebook has faced challenges regarding its uses of the information it collects about Facebook users.

The primary challenges Facebook has faced concern the level of control Facebook users have over what gets published to their news feed. When the news feed was first introduced in 2006, Facebook faced a backlash from its users, who wanted an easy way to limit what got posted in the feed about their activities. At first Facebook resisted, but given the strength of the negative reaction (in particular a Facebook group with over 197,000 members – and that’s down from its total membership in 2006), the company ultimately retreated and allowed users control over who could see what from the feed, and which individual Facebook applications could publish stories to a person’s feed.

Fred Stutzman, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, had a good write up of this issue. His takaway thought is that

I do believe that a gradual rollout or more in-depth consideration of user’s privacy concerns would have benefited Facebook… The takeaway here is that Facebook, like it or not, has brought to bear a very real issue in online identity. Everything we do in public or semi-public spheres can be tracked and chronicled. We don’t see our digital footprints as much because systems haven’t cropped up to collect them, but collecting them is trivial. Facebook has simply put one of those systems in front of us – wrapped up nicely as a feature – but it isn’t hard to see the reality. As we grapple with this reality – that our privacy is only a construct of a system, and that our identity can be tracked and chronicled – how will students change their behavior? We’re really only at the tip of this iceberg, but with Facebook’s new features, we’ve accelerated this discussion substantially.

Danah Boyd, a researcher at UC Berkeley and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, offers similar thoughts here and here.

Image by woordenaar, used under the Creative Commons license.

A similar challenge came in November of 2007 with a program called Facebook Beacon. Beacon allowed a person’s transactions with certain e-commerce websites to be reported in the news feed. For example, if a person rented a DVD from Blockbuster Video or bought something on Overstock.com, this transaction would show up in his/her news feed. This led to stories such as the one recounted here and here, where someone’s holiday gift purchases were reported to everyone they knew on Facebook, including the people for whom they bought the gifts. But as some pointed out, the issue ran deeper than just gift giving surprises being ruined. Noting the possibility of information one might wish to keep deeply private being shared, Facebook user Nate Weiner asks in the Herald Tribune article linked above, “What if you bought a book on Amazon called ‘Coping with AIDS’ and that got published to every single one of your friends?”

Beacon caused a huge outcry, reported throughout the traditional media and throughout the blogosphere. This outcry only intensified when MoveOn.org began a petition to make Beacon an opt-in program and started a related Facebook group (Opt-in means a person had to agree to have stories of their transactions published to their feed, rather than just see them show up automatically).

While the company ultimately relented and apologized for offending its users, the Beacon issue won’t die. This past Tuesday, August 12, a group of Facebook users filed a legal complaint against the company for not initially making Beacon an opt-in program. We will see where this complaint goes, and how long Facebook will continue to face privacy-related challenges like this.

These are the two big incidents that caused considerable public reaction against Facebook’s privacy practices, but there are other incidents as well. Sarah Perez sees privacy issues with Facebook Connect, the Facebook application for the iPhone. Danah Boyd points out that unless a person opts out, his/her Facebook profile can be indexed by search engines like Google.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to attack Facebook — I use it and enjoy it myself. Up to a point, I am even willing to sacrifice some information about my online activities in order to use it. However I do believe it is worth knowing about the information Facebook (and other social networks as well) will gather from people who use the service. What do you think? Is Facebook’s repeated lack of sensitivity to privacy issues a concern? Have they made adequate adjustments to address privacy concerns one might have? Will this issue affect how you use the site, and/or what you do with it? I would love to hear your thoughts or personal anecdotes about this issue.

Contributed by Aaron Bowen

Image by margolove, used under the Creative commons license. Thanks to Will Richardson for pointing to this image.

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan observed that “the medium is the message” — in other words the communication mechanism from which we receive a piece of information is more than just a dumb conduit. The communication mechanism — a radio station or a news website, for example — itself shapes (at least in part) how a person reacts to or thinks about the information s/he receives. Information can be communicated as a sound byte or as a lengthy article, as being scholarly or popular, or as being of critical importance or merely of passing interest. And how the communication mechanism treats a piece of information affects the level of significance a person attaches to that information.

It is with this idea in mind that Nicholas Carr poses the question “Is Google making us stupid?” in The Atlantic. Carr’s idea is that the massive volume of information available on the Internet causes people to want the information they receive to be condensed down it its essential elements so they can glean what they want or need to glean and move on to the next topic they want to or need to learn about. Carr says this affects his reading and thinking habits — instead of immersing himself in a lengthy thought process to consider information and develop his own knowledge, he now wants bare bones information in a rapid fire manner. And he says that other thinkers he knows have experienced the same tendencies to want just the facts before moving on to a new topic.

Certainly information overload has been amplified with the Internet, and many would say with the blogosphere in particular. It has itself been the topic of many an article or blog post, as has the converse desire to get away from a constant flow of information. And information overload is certainly an issue to consider as the Internet continues to integrate into people’s daily lives around the world.

But that said, I will challenge Carr on several points in his article. One, he assumes that reducing an intake of information to sound bytes makes a person “stupid” (to borrow his word). I dispute this. Certainly a person can be less informed about an issue if s/he merely gleans sound bytes rather than examining an issue in depth, but whether this lack of immersion leads to “stupidity” is I think an open question — a question that rests in part on how one defines stupidity, and also on the idea that reliance on sound bytes as sources of information makes a person stupid. While Carr may be correct in connecting sound bytes to stupidity, he never fully addresses this connection. And it is a connection I find open to debate — depending upon a person’s needs or circumstances, perhaps a sound byte is all s/he needs to gain the info s/he wants.

Also, is Google to blame? Why? Is it the fact that Google is the search mechanism of choice for many people? With McLuhan in mind, to what extent is Google responsible for shaping the information a person encounters, and to what extent is it just the delivery mechanism of information that is available on the Internet? Carr gets into these questions, but I found his explanation of why Google should be treated as a main suspect in causing information overload lacking. He seemed to simply assume that, since there is a lot of information on the Internet, and since Google is the main portal to the Internet for many people, Google is thus responsible for overloading people with information. While I don’t disagree with this view, I don’t see an inherent connection between Google an information overload. It is just one possible connection that rests on how a person accesses the Internet (Google, Yahoo, some other search portal), and how much information s/he takes in from the Internet.

Last but not least, I do think people are frequently able to discern for themselves whether a sound byte’s worth of information will be adequate to their needs, or whether they need a more in-depth discussion of an issue. And depending upon what they are looking for, they know to turn to a source that meets their needs — say for example a newspaper website to quickly get up to speed on the day’s events, or a book for an in-depth examination of an issue. Besides Google, people in the CSU, Chico community can and do turn to the Meriam Library’s catalog and research guides for targeted, scholarly information. And library use is expanding, not just at Chico State, but throughout the United States generally. The Pew Internet and American Life Project, for example, reports that members of Generation Y turn to their public libraries in greater numbers than any of their preceding generations:

With their libraries as guides, these Gen Y’ers will be well equipped to find information they want or need while avoiding unnecessary info that would only increase information overload.

Contributed by Aaron Bowen

Images by TheTrident and AJC1, used under the Creative Commons license.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported today that Blackboard Vista has released a Facebook application to alert students when something changes on a Blackboard course Web page. From The Chronicle’s article:

Students eagerly spend hours on Facebook, where they socialize and communicate with friends. But they’re often far less excited about logging into Blackboard, the course-management system used at hundreds of colleges, where they participate in required class discussions and check when their next test is scheduled. So Blackboard has created a Facebook application for students that brings their academic information into the social-networking site.

For privacy and security reasons, the Facebook application does not actually pull academic data from Blackboard onto a user’s Facebook page, said Karen Gage, vice president for product strategy at Blackboard, in an interview on Tuesday. Instead, it pushes a notification to Facebook users when something is new on their course Web pages, such as when one of the user’s professors has posted grades. Then the student has to log into Blackboard to see the grade itself.

What do you think about an application like this? A useful tool? Or would you rather not think about academics at all when you log into Facebook? And more specifically, is this something you would be interested in seeing integrated into or disconnected from CSU, Chico’s Blackboard system?

Contributed by Aaron Bowen

Image by Luc Legay, used under the Creative Commons license.

Stephen J. Dubner writes a fascinating post on one of the New York Times blogs, in which he poses the question

Has social networking technology… made us better or worse off as a society, either from an economic, psychological, or sociological perspective?

The Times gathered some views from different scholars who have examined social networks as part of their research agenda. Their responses offer some valuable insights into the transformative effects — both good and bad — that social networks have on the lives of many people.

Danah Boyd at UC, Berkley notes that social networking services are themselves neutral. She writes that “These sites are tools. They can and have been used for both positive and negative purposes.” Steve Chazin, marketing officer at a .com company, writes that he “believe[s] social networking technology has changed our lives for the better, but at a cost,” and goes on to weigh the ability to easily connect to ones friends at any time against the desire to occasionally disconnect. Comparing connections that social networkers make to their close friends to connections they may make to others they don’t know as well (or don’t know at all), Judith Donath at the M.I.T. Media Lab writes that social networks can “devalue the meaning of ‘friend.’” While acknowledging that this devaluation is possible, Nicole Ellison of Michigan State University argues here that social networkers are able to distinguish between the two types of friend. Based upon research she and her colleagues have conducted, she writes that

“We’ve asked users in surveys and interviews about how many Facebook “Friends” they have and how many of these are “actual” friends. Our respondents can articulate how many of their “Facebook Friends” are “actual friends” – about one-third, on average. This suggests to me that… Facebook users are able to distinguish between the term used by Facebook to indicate one’s contacts and “friendship” as traditionally conceived.

The other question that neither the Times blogger nor the responders addressed is what exactly they mean by “society” when asking if social networks have made society better or worse off. I’m not going to begin an extensive discussion of the ideas that go into the concept of “society,” but instead simply point it out as an issue to consider when thinking about the NYT’s question. Beyond that, I think the question of positive and negative effects of social networks is a good one, and I look forward to further discussion of the topic.

Contributed by Aaron Bowen

In the 19th century, newspaper readers could look forward to reading the latest installment of a novel in addition to the daily news. Charles Dickens is one of the best known authors whose works were originally published serially in newspapers and magazines.

DailyLit is a contemporary version of serial literature delivered to your email rather than the front porch. At DailyLit, readers can subscribe to receive installments of novels delivered on a daily schedule and at a time specified by you. Many “classic” novels that are out of copyright are available for free (and there’s no registration or subscription fee.) Or you can choose from more current titles, which range in price from $5-$7. Each installment takes about 5 minutes to read, and if you want to read more you can request the next installment be sent immediately. Who knows, you may summon up the courage to tackle Crime and Punishment, or take up learning Spanish. Thanks to DailyLit I’ll finally get to cross Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie off my “to read” list…

Contributed by Liz Colson