Panelists

Pnina Shachaf, Indiana University
Ewa Callahan, Quinnipiac University
Besiki Stvilia, Florida State University
Sorin Matei, Purdue University

Pnina Shachaf - Cross-cultural analysis of Wikipedia:  Norms of behavior

This presentation focused on differences in Wikipedia entries when compared to entries in other languages.  There are over 250 different languages in Wikipedia, English the largest with over 23% of the articles written in that language.  While most of the research focuses on English in Wikipedia, not much is known about it in other languages.  Most of the research is done on quality but not on the process of mass collaboration.

Ewa Callahan - Wikipedia Entries on Famous Person in Polish and English

The specific research question was asking "are Wikipedia entries on the same topic different in different languages and if so, how?"  The broad question is "would monolingual readers of Wikipedia be disadvantaged if they only had access to the entries in their native language?"

Some findings from this are that English entries are longer and have more notes and references plus external links.  There is more personal information, more controversy, and more mentioned of nationality.  The study compared to Polish entries which had more lists.

Besiki Stvilla - Problems of Cross-Language Quality Measurement Aggregation and Reasoning

I didn't take many notes here, just a couple of questions I jotted down.  Probably not useful at this point because they don't make sense to me right now.

Sorin Matei - Wikipedia Articles and Traffic Statistics

This was an interesting presentation, unfortunately I think I missed a lot of it because of personal issues going on at the same time, but I believe the most interesting point that came out of this presentation is how Wikipedia is a "snapshot of the collective conscious".  He mentioned that some of Wikipedia is not encyclopedic, but some of it is.  The analogy he gave was that it was a "giant vacuum cleaner that collects everything that is of interest to humans."

Technorati Tags:  asist2008 wikipedia research

Panelists

Andrea Japzon, Drexel University
Kenneth R. Fleischman, University of Maryland
Michael Khoo, Drexel University

The ASIS&T posts are going to get a little lighter, I think I was
less interested in the second part of the conference than the sessions
I attended in the first part.  This particular session was at the end of the day for me so I think I was a little tired too.

I didn't take many notes in this session, but here are the speakers and the topics they presented:

Andrea Japzon - Personal Values and Digital Artifacts in Personal Information Management

Kenneth Fleischman - The Ethical Implications of Values in Computational Modeling

Michael Khoo - Privacy Values and Digital Libraries: A Sociotechnical Analysis

I did take some notes during Michael's presentation.  He talked about values and privacy, first by defining values, which he said were a set of socially shared norms.  He also described privacy as a state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right (actually if my memory serves me this is the OED definition of privacy).  He stated that new technologies prompt us to rethink the idea of what privacy is.

Light update today.  It's a good thing, I have some other school writing to do.

Technorati Tags:  asist2008 information privacy values

DRM is another little pet interest of mine, and I really felt that this session gave a complete overview from very different sides of a very complicated topic.  I mentioned before that this session was rudely interrupted, it is too bad, I think it's one of the best I attended.  Fair warning, lots of notes from this one!

Panelists

Kristin Eschenfelder, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Kevin L. Smith, Duke University
Bill Burger, Copyright Clearance Center
John Sullivan, Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Kristin Eschenfelder - Can I Email This?

This presentation discussed restrictions found in licensed digital resources from a library or archive perspective.  Libraries are very concerned with digital rights management, on one side they want to preserve items, make it accessible, and continue to serve their patrons effectively.  The complicated side of the picture is that archives and special libraries are interested in using DRM themselves, they want to make things available, but they might not want it available for everyone in the world.  Examples would be maps of archeological sites, and endangered species locations.  She exclaimed that there has always been a "gatekeeper" function in libraries and archives.  The ironic side of this issue is that libraries are interested in DRM to "expand access."  Patrons can now use the information without having to travel to a remote location to do so.  One example is that New York Public Library has a collection of dance and performance videos that are digitized, but because of copyright issues they are only available inside the library.  They are interested in using DRM to make the collection available to other libraries in remote locations or for satellite viewing.

So what counts as DRM anyway?  At first she started with a very limited mental model that extended from consumer media, these are what she calls "hard technology use restrictions."  These technologies prevent you from saving, emailing, and printing and there's no obvious work around for them.  There's many examples of these in library literature including audiobooks and some subscription databases.  What she found was that there are a lot more "soft technology DRM uses".  These types of DRM will discourage use, but they don't flat out restrict it.  Some of this is accomplished by inconvenience, but some workarounds can be more obvious.  These are more prevalent in electronic products right now, and some may not even count these restrictions as DRM.  She also mentioned that if you don't limit DRM to the technology itself there are a lot of policy and law based use restrictions including license terms, our own expectations and understandings (which may vary in communities in practice), and cultural norms.

She gave examples of various soft restriction types:

• Publishers who use an "extent of use" protection measure, which is blocking extensive or suspicious extent of use, monitors batch sizes, and blocks IP addresses.
• Restriction by Frustration, or content chunked out.  Users may only see a certain amount of information per page and there is no convenient way to print or email.  NetLibrary is famous for this.
• Obfuscation, or when the interface does not adequately advertise or use functionality.  They're not sure if this is just bad interface design or if it's intentional.
• Omission, or user functions are only possible through browser or operating system tools.  This tends to be confusing for users.
• Decomposition, or the hybrid nature of html content makes saving, emailing, or transferring content difficult.  A normal user isn't going to know how to manage the "html bundle" of files and it is difficult to know if publisher intention again.
• Threat, or declarations in the form of EULA or popups to discourage users.

Kevin L. Smith, Mitigating the Effects of DMCA Anti-Circumvention Rules

Kevin gave an excellent overview of the legal aspect of DRM.  I did a huge research paper with DRM so a lot of these were not new to me, but with such a complicated topic it's always good to go through these again.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) does define DRM as "technological measures that effectively controls access."  This definition is not very helpful.  The copyright law was set up as a sort of self-help.  He gave an example of you putting up a fence to protect your flower bed from intruders.  Copyright law is a form of "fence" or a way to enforce rights directly without having to rely on the law.  But what he said about DRM is that we've turned back to the law to enforce the "fence."

There are instances where we're required to use DRM measures, the TEACH Act is one of them.  The Act states that you "must use technological measures to reasonably prevent retention and downstream dissemination." 

Kevin talked about the DMCA and its legal protections.  It is illegal to circumvent technological measure, except under specific exceptions:

• Encryption for Research
• For Libraries (but limited)
• Law Enforcement
• Privacy

A lot of these are unclear and not very helpful though.  There is an authorization for other exceptions called "rule making", which is determined by the Library of Congress, but this again has some limitations, one being the exceptions only last 3 years.  Other provisions of the DMCA include forbidding "trafficking" in circumvention technology, or selling DRM circumvention technology is illegal, and other rights remedies, limitation, or defenses to copyright infringement are not affected, including fair use. 

There are problems with DRM in Higher Education including use of databases of public domain material.  It is ok for vendors to use DRM to protect their product, even if the content is in the public domain.  If a professor would like to create a film clip compilation in a classroom situation, the use is fair, but they can't do it if it means circumventing DRM.  Software available to convert DVDs to digital files may not inform users when circumvention occurs (an example is HandBrake).  Use of foreign DVDs may be impossible due to region codes (although it's not clear if foreign codes fall under DMCA), and legally purchased music may not play on classroom equipment.

Then he went through mitigation in the three branches of government:

• Executive Branch
• Library of Congress' "rule-making" every three year, which he said actually gets done.
• Six exceptions were created in 2006 including one for film where media studies professors can create film clips compilations for classroom use. 
• But what this does not include is:
• K-12 Education
• All Subject Libraries
• All Legally Obtained Copies
• The reason why this is so narrow is because the decision was made based on one compelling story by one individual.
• We need to tell better stories.
• Legislative Branch
• FAIR USE Act of 2007, introduced in February 2007 and died in committee. 
• This would have added more exceptions
• Right for Compilations
• Right to Circumvent for Fair Use
• Right to Circumvent for Preservation in Libraries
• Access to work of Public Interest for Criticism, Scholarship, reporting or search.
• Essentially this would have put fair use back into anti-circumvention rules.
• Judicial Branch
• Paper "Fair Circumvention" Timothy K. Armstrong
• Courts should not only read fair use back into DMCA but use same factors to analyze any circumvention situation.
• Paper "A Reverse Notice and Takedown Regime To Enable Fair Uses of Technically Protected Copyrighted Works" by Graeme B. Dinwoodie
• The user would inform the rights holder of intent to circumvent for a specified purpose.
• The rights holder could object, or not, if there is an objection the user could ask the courts to decide.

Bill Burger - DRM:  Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management?

Bill is from the Copyright Clearance Center so he gave some background about this organization.  They were created in response to the rewrite of the copyright act in 1976 and as a suggestion of Congress to have an organization handle permission and licensing between rights holders and users.  Academic licensing only accounts for 10% of their revenue.  Their mission is to work as an intermediary, to make it easy for content users to "do the right thing", and they are not the "copyright cops".  They try to meet the needs of their constituents.  They can be found at Copyright.com.

Copyright allows rights holders to control a number of things.  He defined DRM briefly, but that was already done so he talked about the CCC's views on DRM.  The CCC makes no use of DRM.  They feel it typically stands in the way of both repertory and spontaneous pay-per-use licensing.  Many of their customers are frustrated by it and therefore they are not advocates, but they do understand what it is being used.

We live with DRM everyday, he gave examples of Apple FairPlay, ebooks, Amazon Kindle, DVDs with Content Scrambling System, Blu-Ray with Advanced Access Content System.  He said we "swim in an ocean of DRM."

Content users want convenient access to information, the ability to use and share information.  They do not want to be bound by formats and devices, and they want a reasonable, understandable pricing system with few of no hassles.

Copyright holders want to protect their intellectual property, keep control over distribution, and to be compensated for the use of their content.  They want to produce materials for catering to their customers' needs to to understand how their content is being used.

Pro DRM people want to limit piracy, allow for digital distributions of high-value content, and protect the integrity of the content.  DRM is necessary to encourage the transition of publishing from print to electronic.  Without DRM, publishers will be less likely to make that transition.

Those against DRM see it as a huge hassle, and a technology that is easily hacked.  DRM punishes your best customers and can be a crutch to avoiding more progressive business models.  DRM can be anti-competitive (take iTunes for example) and it slows technological innovation.  DRM also undermines Fair Use rights.

John Sullivan - DRM:  Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management?

John was last to speak from the Free Software Foundation, he gave some background on the foundation.  FSF is an advocacy group, they believe that users should have the following freedoms with software:

• Run the program
• Study the program
• Look at the source code
• Improve the program
• Make and share copies
• Share modified versions with others

Their license will tell you what you can do with the program, not what you can't do.  It is part of a community and a movement and open source is a branch of this.  We encounter and use a lot of free software including Apache, Firefox, OpenOffice, and HandBrake.

The FSF treats DRM as an ethical and social problem rather than a bad business model.  They created the group DefectiveByDesign which has targeted companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Netflix, Warner Music, BBC, EMI, and the Boston Public Library.

DRM makes us insecure which is why they treat it as a social problem, rights holders make us install software on our computers to access content.  This software is proprietary and most of the time "phones home" to the company that controls the rights.  The software is essentially spyware, and users are often not aware of what it is doing.  He also discussed non-traditional computers like the iPhone, which he mentioned that at least with a windows computer you can install what you want, with an iPhone the applications are approved by Apple.  It is a walled garden with restrictions and we lose the freedom to develop.

DRM also destroys copyright terms.  Media formats are enforced independently outside of copyright, an example of this is the US Constitution on the Kindle or the 9/11 Report in a PDF where you can't copy and paste out of it.  It also restricts free speech, like the DeCSS code on a t-shirt.

So this is basically where his presentation was forced to end due to a rude interruption from one of the conference organizers.  It's too bad, this was an excellent presentation and I enjoyed the many different angles of it.  It's such an important topic too.

Panelists

William Jones (moderator), University of Washington
Fred Stutzman, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Catherine Marshall, Microsoft Research
Gary Marchionini, University of North Carolina
Allison Brueckner, cAliCo Information Consulting

I really enjoyed this session, except for the fact that the presentations were rushed through, although all were excellent.  This session was purposely set up this way with a 30 minute "introduction" and then an audience participation component for the rest.  Ok, conference confession... once people start asking questions I tune out.  I want to see presentations by smart people who know lots on a topic.  There were 5 people, and a total of 30 minutes to speak, so 6 minutes per presentation, and almost every presenter went over, and every presenter had great slides they had to skip or leave out!  This was still a good session, but it's too bad on the format.

William Jones - The Web to Change the Real World

William is the author of the book, Keeping Found Things Found:  The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management, one I keeping meaning to buy and read!  The topic of personal information management does interest me, I think regular readers of my blog might see that not only is it an interest, but a struggle for me at times, and I almost feel an obligation to address it as somebody who is interested in information management.

This quick introduction really started with a series of questions and thoughts.  Here are a few that I wrote down (interlaced with some of my personal thoughts):

• The web making the real world more real. 
• As a side note I want to express my dislike of using "real world" as a label for the "offline" world, to me online is just as real as offline.
• Wed to replace the real world?
• I know this was phrased as a question, and again, "real world" as label, which I dislike, but my personal answer... no.
• The Good and Bad of the Web
• "It's all on the web?"
• "It's all gone?"
• "I'm so glad to find more people like me here."

These are kind of vague statements, but this was just an introduction... some of these were addressed more with the other presenters.

Fred Stutzman - Old People, Facebook Disasters

What an awesome title for a presentation!  I'm glad I got to talk to Fred more at his poster the next day, I think he has some interesting research on Facebook and privacy online.  He talked about how people disclose their information and some self-reporting studies on privacy.  Some notable comments include the fact that "Facebook isn't new anymore" and that people do care about privacy, but they still put their information online anyway.

Then he asked, "Do you change your Facebook privacy?" and commented that Facebook doesn't come with an owners manual.  I did some research into this topic myself with another classmate here at Wayne State so I'm well aware of Facebook's hidden, but granular privacy settings.  So to answer the question, yes I change my Facebook privacy, but sometimes this is very time consuming, so I can see the incentive to not doing it too.

Then to the topic of the presentation, "Old People Facebook Disaster", which is a statement that older people are now being faced with the problems that undergrads are dealing with, but in our professional lives.  He mentioned MoveOn.org's Facebook Privacy petition, and a people search engine Spokeo, which is designed to find the "juicy" tidbits about your co-workers or job candidates (I just signed in now, and it is amazing how much it pulled up from my gmail contacts... there's networks I didn't even know some of them were on).

My favorite quote from the whole conference, and maybe the best takeaway from this presentation was this though:

"In the future everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes."

I think this quote came from a photo... didn't catch the source, or where, but it's brillant.

Catherine Marshall - Personal Digital Archiving

Catherine's presentation was one that I really wished we had more time for.  She had a great topic, and many of her points were skipped and missed.  She had several "myths" of personal archiving, five, I think, but only barely got through three.  I'll just go through what I do have though.

Myth #1, "Storage is Cheap, we should keep everything".  But, she added, human attention is not.  It is not emotionally, or intellectually viable to keep everything.  It is easier to lose stuff than it is to maintain it.  One interesting statistic is that there are 3 billion personal photos on Flickr, and Facebook has 5 billion (that was 6 months ago), this is bigger than the nation debt!  What do we/should we keep?  If you look to scholarly work we see that we normally just keep the final drafts and the datasets.  I personally believe this is good advice when dealing with digital photos... I spend just as much time deleting ones I don't want to keep than I do editing the ones I do want to keep, but for many, it's easier to keep everything.

Myth #2 "Today's kids are digital and they all know what to do..."  She said that kids are fearless but they are still likely to rely on a family member to take control of non-digital archiving (kind of makes me wonder how this will change the personal archiving landscape as these kids grow up and have their own kids!)  Young people are better at capturing, creating, shaping, and sharing, but they are no better at keeping things around.  She did talk about the "suddenly it was just gone" aspect... how any one of these services we use to keep our personal archives could pull the plug at any minute, and that's it, our stuff is gone.

Myth #3, "Digital stuff is not just distributed over multiple stores"... unfortunately this is where my notes end.  I think she flipped to Myth #5, and was over time anyway, it was all just a flurry of me trying to copy everything down.  It's a bummer, some excellent stuff in this presentation, like I said, I wanted more.

Gary Marchionini - Multimedia surrogates and Self-representation on the Web

This discussion focused on the many identities we keep online and the challenges of this.  Gary discussed what is known (the perception we portray) and unknown (the perception others give us that we might not know exists).

Known

• Real life photographs
• Avatars that we represent
• Web pages/online presences
• When we ask the question, "What do I want people to know about me?"

Unknown

• Reflections by other people via blogs or social networks
• Photos posted by others of us, we may not be aware of some, like photos of us at events and conferences.
• Is this interesting and troubling?
• Ambient reflections done by machines should be more troubling.
• I agree!!! I don't worry about a lot what pictures people are posting about me online, but I worry about this.  I've had my own experience with this with the search engine Spock.  I think this was the most important point of Gary's presentation and I'm glad it was mentioned.

Allison Brueckner - Second Life

Allison really is the resident Second Life expert in ASIS&T, and I think that's awesome.  She has a business in Second Life and one of the members who have made the ASIS&T Island in SL possible (which I still need to carve some time to look around).  For this presentation she talked about the different Visions of Second Life and how some of this is perceived both in and out of the world:

• Utopian Vision
• Ubiquitous web accessibility
• But the reality is that the technology is a barrier to access
• Wireless & Broadband for all
• Technology for all
• Keeping and open mind and open spirit
• Everybody can dance!
• No judgements, and no bias
• Dystopian Vision
• There is terrorism, famine, and hatred
• In Real Life and Second Life there are:
• Grievers
• Copyright issues

So what is reality?  She said we should take the good with the bad in Second Life and in Real Life.  We have choices in both.  Then she also posed the question, "What about life be like without any form of Information Community Technology?" 

I'll answer, probably not very fun or interesting.

Panelists

Heather D. Pfeiffer, New Mexico State University
Emma Tonkin, UKOLN, University of Bath
Mark R. Lindner, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
David R. Millen, IBM T.J. Watson Research
Margaret E.I. Kipp, College of Information and Computer Science, Long Island University

Heather D. Pfeiffer - Tagging as Metadata

Heather talked about knowledge in language and how we understand syntax (symbols), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (context) in that language.  She mentioned the conceptualization of an ontology and how relationships can be drawn between concepts.  Which lead into concepts as tags.  There was an interesting comparison example between documents in the 1600s and in the 2000s.

In the 2000s the word "upon" is not used, King has been updated to President, and Crown appears in both.  In the 1600s Documents Crown refers to "Swedish money" and to government (in relationship to King), in the 2000s Documents Crown continues to refer to money but there is no longer a relationship to government because of the shift to President instead of King.

Emma Tonkin - Ten Minutes of Language Development

Emma started with a little exercise by naming places from "The Atlas of the True Names of Places", something she picked up in her travels.  Some of them were fun and interesting like "Empty Place", "Little Venice", "Land of People Who Are Their Own Masters", and "East of the River of Shellfish".  She mentioned a three-step ontology development plan which was to identify concepts, label concepts, and identify relations.  The assumption is that this is an easy process, but realistically identifying and discussing labels is hard.  She asked us to consider the following; 350 N High St is important to us now, because we are at this conference, but then also consider place vs space and position vs. location, labels like 'home' and 'office' mean things to us personally but meaningless to others.

I actually find this discussion interesting, but less so in the context of tagging and labeling and more so in social contexts of geo-location.  But I can see how these labeling concepts can apply in the tagging discussion.

She had some good examples in her presentation which are difficult to parse out here, but she presented us with a game board and how the labeling of things depend on a variety of variables, including location and context in language.  The example she gave was pharmacy (UK) and drugstore (US) and how this could be what she called a Deadlock Situation if there's an even representation of people using that language or labeling.  Whereas if you're in America this same label could turn into a Majority Voting situation if you say had more representation for drugstore than you do pharmacy.  What is the probability that we come to a consensus?  She mentioned that we actually don't want perfect accuracy.  What happens if we moved the drugstore location?  The labeling problem is that "if nothing ever changes, nothing interesting ever happens."  Which means this is a "living system."

David R. Millen - Patterns of Collaborative Tagging in a Large Organization

David started with some background about the project and how they went about studying tagging in the enterprise.  He also gave some background on Dogear, IBM's internal social bookmarking tool.  Their goal was to examine enterprise as a group, and IBM is a good company for this because it has the tools already in place plus they are very large, global, and multilingual.  The research group looked at three different core groups when they studied tag use; Development, Research, and Corporate.  They observed broadly, and within these groups, that there was more similarity than differences.  The number of unique posters is about 50% and relatively steady across the 3 groups.  They are looking at this number as a metric or a "return on contribution".  They want to know if that ratio stays the same across all 3 groups.

The research group studied tags per bookmark and also observed tagging on the internet versus the intranet.  What they found was that there were more tags on the intranet, which wasn't so much what they expected.  They think that this may be because of the homogeneity of the intranet, or similar kinds of resources.

They studied frequency of tags and classified these into categories of topic, content, and owner.  They found a lot of tag consistencies and within the 3 groups of study they found consistency to what they would expect the group to be interested in.

Then they also studied private bookmarks, what they found was that the amount of private bookmarks that are tagged is stable and low.  What they were able to determine from this, and he said this is "good news", was that people are sharing.

He summed up by stating that tags are good markers of organizational interest in a large group and he also mentioned that tagging in IBM is not isolated to Dogear, there is tagging going on in other social spaces withing the organization.

I found one of the more interesting areas of the presentation to be the "roles" of taggers in the organization.  He said they've determined 5 roles, but went through 3 in this session.

• Evangelist:  These taggers are trying to cultivate an audience on a term, they want people to find them so the tags are also self-serving.
  
• Publisher:  These taggers want to draw attention to the content and bring people to resources.
  
• Small Team Leader:  These are conventional tags used by small groups so they can easily find resources.  They have determined that these taggers are less active.

Mark R. Linder - Integrating Tagging:  Tagging as Integration

I admit I didn't take much notes here, more on tagging in language, context, and use.  There's a couple of resources listed in the proceedings on information seeking, semantics and knowledge organization.

Margaret E. I. Kipp - Social Tagging Process

Margaret spoke on the process of tagging and trying to figure out what something is about.  The process of tagging seems simple on the surface, but figuring out what something is about can be a little more complicated.  Tagging looks like a classification index on the surface so it's natural to want to compare it to that.  When you look at a consensus graph on the Clary Shirky's article, Ontology is Overrated, you see that the most popular term is ontology.  The first 6 terms are subject related, followed by the name of the author, then followed by a tool.  Maragaret broke down different uses of classification:

• User Classification:  The author and user are placing different contexts on the article.
• Information Management:  The user may be tagging something to find again later.
  
• Communication:  This is where you see more non-subject terms like 'todo', 'toread', 'funny', and 'cool'.  Also tagging and for small groups appears, which may indicate a community.
• Discussion of Aboutness: There is a fair amount of agreement when put together with the whole group, but as you look at individual taggers you do see some disagreement.
• Expression of Interest:  Tagging in itself is an expression of interest, if you weren't interested you wouldn't tag it.  But tagging can also indicate a degree of interest, to read, or to buy later, for example.
• Review or Criticism:  Terms like boring, fun, or funny indicate some emotional reaction to an item.  This becomes and ultra condensed review and mixed with other terms might be useful to the somebody else.
• Projects and Groups:  Tags from CiteULike that indicate course numbers or groups for communicating resources are an example.
  
• Time Sensitive Classification:  The term 'toread' represents this, the meaning can change over time.  Once you read and item the tag becomes irrelevant, or maybe you never read, or you read and don't remove it later.

Technorati Tags: asist2008 tags tagging communication

Panelists

• Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information
• Ann Prentice, University of Maryland

The basis for this presentation was generated by the Information Science Education Committee and some results published in a white paper on the committee's page on the ASIS&T Website.  As an IS student it was an interesting topic, and I really enjoyed listening to Clifford Lynch speak about the topic.

A large part of the discussion here are the different disciplines that Information Science touches, and how to find commonalities between them.  Clifford mostly spoke by way of experience but he had some interesting thoughts that I'll just summarize here.

• There are more people now interested in information science that are also narrowly interested in computer science.
• He thinks there should be undergraduate programs in IS because too many people don't hear about the field until they wonder what to do with themselves.
• IS isn't out there as a profession to a vast part of the population.
• Clifford is seeing a more systematic use of information in society including advertising, propaganda, and information literacy.  There's money being spent and commercial activity is being shaped, he believes this is sort of unclaimed and unexplained territory.
• He talked about a sort of "bag of skills" to Master's Students (not so much PhD students because he believes that they should be well set in what they are researching).  He says what they need to teach us is how to build prototypes and work under time pressures, what they don't teach us is how to live with the results of building prototypes under time pressures.  They're not teaching enough how to do analysis.
• We need to think deeply about how to address scale; social scale technology, how technology has an impact on information, ramifications of RFID, and understanding everything from impact to the analysis.
• He discussed some how it is difficult to do research in our field in an academic setting because of limitations we've set up, things like data analysis using human subjects, and access to research is locked up in vendor databases.  He mentioned that there is a lot of parallel research outside of the academic setting because they're not locked inside the same restraints.  Researchers at companies like Microsoft or Yahoo! often tell him that they can't do the research they're doing in a university.  He feels that we need to reach out to this other research and do large scale simulation.
• Clifford talked some about personal identity in Library & Information science, and how librarians have historically had a strong and proud professional identity.  They have always been strongly tied to a set of values that they defend, and librarians have historically been tied to libraries.
• During the 60s and 70s the profession became diffused with information science.  One question he pondered, but doesn't really know the answer is whether information professionals should have a strong professional identity or do they need to?  He's never had one himself, or rather doesn't get excited about having one... he started as a computer scientist though.
• I think one of my favorite points from his remarks was when he said, "Maybe we need people who are less worried and willing to roam widely."
• He finds the word "competence" scary, and worries that we try to design programs for Master's students that "teach you enough."  He noted that "we can't possibly teach you everything you need to know."  There's just not enough time, and my other favorite point he brought up was the best thing we can do (as LIS Students) is to leave with a professional mind set to continue learning.  He said the "key roles" is to get people to think like information professions; "you never know enough" and it is "necessary to keep learning."

I didn't take much notes on Ann's presentation, she talked a lot about some of the observations and results from the white paper, but there were some good things there too.  The white paper is available on the ASIS&T website, as I mentioned.

The last day of the conference, I did stick it out until the end.  Not too much to recap either.

I attended a panel called "Golbal Perspectives in Wikipedia Research" where I was introduced to one of the panelists during the session on Twitter (I put something on Twitter when she was speaking, and she added me as a friend as the next person was speaking).  I did walk up and say hi to her after it was done.

The Plenary Session with Connie Yowell called, "Digital Media and Learning" was really the highlight of the day on Wednesday.  Some good insights and I took some excellent notes.

I started in a panel called "Civic Engagement, Youth and Community:  The Role of Place, Education, Information and Technology in Shaping Civic and Political Discourse", but I wasn't feeling well toward the end so I left.  I almost considered leaving the conference then, but since there was only one more session after this I though I could stick it out just a few more hours... and I did start to feel a tiny bit better.

I also enjoyed the last session which was called, "Waddling Around the Digital Iceberg: Use of Virtual Spaces and Environments by children, Preteens and Teens". 

Now that I have my notes compiled I do intend on elaborating more on some of these sessions.  One session that I did want to see (I think Tuesday), but missed for no reason other than I think it got lost in my 40 page program somewhere and I was in la la land at the time, was on social networking at conferences (appropriately enough).  I found somebody's notes from that session through a technorati search though so maybe I can incorporate that into the recap of social networking at the conference I plan on writing.

Technorati Tags: asist2008

This was a lighter day for me, and that's probably ok because it seems that by Tuesday I start to significantly wear out and lose energy fast.

The first session I attended was an excellent panel on Digital Rights Management called "DRM:  Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management?"  There was a very well rounded set of presentations included in this panel.  I was sorry to see how this one ended though, by what seems like a true communications error, the panel went over time, and was rudely stopped.  The ending times for sessions were not included in the programs, and the sessions on the first two days of the conference were a full two hours, while the rest of the week were 1.5... so there was confusion as to how long they lasted.  The panel did go over, but the disappointment happened when a meeting organizer rudely stormed into the room and told everybody they had to get out so they could set up for the next session.  The rudeness continued, the organizer had an immense attitude problem, I'm sorry to see such a person representing ASIS&T in this capacity to the attendees, members, and guests.

I ducked into a poster session after this and talked to a few people doing some great research.

I talked to:

Frederic Stutzman, Experience and Privacy:  Exploring the Disclosure Behaviors of Established Facebook Users

• I co-wrote a paper on a similar topic with a classmate last Winter so this topic was especially interesting to me.

Lisa Kleinman, Technology Use in Meetings: Information Handling & Polychronicity

• I basically walked up to Lisa and said, "oh my gosh, this is me."  Very fascinating to me that somebody is doing research on this topic.

Joe Sanchez, The Educator's Coop:  A Virtual World Model for Real World Collaboration

• I first saw this poster on Flickr before the conference.  I enjoyed the opportunity I had to talk to Joe.  I think he's doing a lot of great work in Second Life!

Then I just looked at:

Jacob Kramer-Duffield and Carolyn Hank: Babies in Bathtubs: Public Views of Private Behaviors Represented in the Flickr Domain

Gary Geisler, Paul Stenis, Jesse Martinez and Allison King: Game Scholar: Do We Need a Reference Database

Then I had a great lunch with Keith Instone, Information Architect Lead for IBM.com.  I tried to pick his brain for ways to go with directive study and he gave me plenty of ideas!  He also did not try to sell me band fruit... it turns out Keith is a Band Booster at the same high school I went to, so I remember band fruit sales very "fondly".  Although, I'm happy to support the band, I just don't think I can eat that much citrus in order to do so!

Finally, I went to "Values and Information:  An Interdisciplinary Investigation".  It doesn't look like I took a lot of notes at this one though.  I thought it sounded relevant to some things we may be discussing in my Information Policy class, I'm not sure if it really was though.

The rest of the evening was relatively low key.  I spent some time talking to Jodi Schneider, somebody I became acquainted with on Twitter and met for the first time in person at the conference.  I think she mentioned finding me through Karen Schneider, which I think is funny because I met Karen for the first time at IA Summit and I previously knew her from Twitter as well... and they have the same last name!  Ok, maybe that's not that weird, but I really like meeting Twitter friends at conferences!  I also made a bunch of new Twitter friends, it was fun following everybody at the conference.  I will try to follow up with a blog post about how my social scouting went at ASIS&T, but I have a mess of session posts to write first.

I had every intention on going to SIG-CON later that evening, but I ended up skipping it yet again (I didn't go last year either).  I think by Tuesday evening I just get really worn out.  Maybe next year!

I'm fairly certain I took enough notes today to fill up 4 blog posts so I'm just going to do a recap of my day, and post some more detailed after the conference (I really promise).

The early morning session I attended was called "Whither LIS Education".  I was a little sleepy so I don't think I ever caught the name of the committee or the report that this panel was formed around, but the main speakers were Clifford Lynch and Ann Prentice.  I didn't have a real pull to this session other than I have a lot of respect for Clifford Lynch and what he has to say, and I really enjoyed his thoughts on LIS Education.  The panel was structured as some observations by Clifford, then Ann came in with some numbers and observations from the white paper... which she mentioned where somewhere on the ASIS&T website.  If anybody knows where, please let me know.  The hunting down process would be easier if I even had the name of the committee.  I sort of wish some of these things were published better, or made more readily available for us... as a side note, I can't even get into the proceedings section on the ASIS&T website either, so for all I know there's a gold mine of things there that I'm also missing.  But I also wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't too.

The second session I attended was "Tagging as a Communication Device:  Every Tag Cloud has a Silver Lining", with a panel of 5 different people; Heather D. Pfeiffer, Emma Tonkin, David R. Millen, Mark R. Lidner, and Margaret E. I. Kipp.  Some of the discussions echoed thoughts from a tagging session I saw last year at the annual meeting, but the highlight of this session for me was David R. Millen's talk on IBM's social bookmarking tool, Dogear, and how he's studied patterns in collaboration and tagging in the enterprise.  His contribution to this panel was also a breath of fresh air, without going on a large rant, I really wish there was more representation from practitioners at ASIS&T.  I do enjoy the contributions and the research from the academic institutions, but I would really enjoy a more balanced conference in this respect.  I've been lucky enough at this conference, this year, to find some people who aren't all in academia, or have their PhDs or working on their PhDs.  I've even discovered that there are Master's students like myself at this conference who have no intention of getting their PhDs, and I'm really working this out to be the theme of the conference for me this year.  Overall I do enjoy this conference, and I like the opportunity to meet people in many different areas, and I think I will continue to enjoy these opportunities in the future too.

I only had enough energy for three sessions today, the last was titled, "My So-called Life on the Web."  The panel was William Jones, Fred Stutzman, Catherine Marshall, Gary Marchioni, and Allison Brueckner.  Lots of really good topics here, unfortunately the presentations were rushed.  I was really disappointed that Catherine couldn't even get through hers.  What struck me most about this session was how different the tone was compared to the opening plenary.

After the sessions I stepped in and looked at a couple of the posters from today.  I didn't get a real chance to scope them out though.  Today I also met some new Twitter friends, was introduced to a Twitter friend I already had in person, and had a great conversation at the bar with another MLIS student for some time before the Alumni Reception.

I was tableless for the Alumni Reception, but I stopped in and talked to some of the Michigan people, and I even caught up with somebody who I met last year and finally saw for the first time this evening.  I spoke a couple of times with a former professor at Wayne State, Dr. Yunfei Du, and caught up with what he's up to now, and then headed out to dinner with the NOR-ASIS&T (Northern Ohio) Group. 

As sleepiness reigns, I'll have to save my wrapup of the individual sessions for another day.  And because I'm so sleepy I'm just going to post this into the wild without proof-reading (I'm so reckless)!  I'm certain tomorrow will be another day jam packed full of excitement, so it's probably best I get to bed soon.

Just a rough recap of my day, because I promised myself I would record of my this for public consumption. 

Plenary Session, "Transforming the Internet?"

Panelists

• Genevieve Bell, Intel Digital Home Group
• Howard Rheingold, UC Berkeley and Stanford
• Andrew Keen, author "Cult of the Amateur"

A very interesting talk, and I have to say I don't think I agree with a lot that was said during this talk.  I suppose I expected some of that going in though...

First off, Genevieve presented on the topic, "Transforming the Internet?", then Howard Rheingold and Andrew Keen gave a few different insights to what Genevieve presented.

My head hurts too much to really sum up everything mentioned in the presentation, but here's a few points that I did get down.

• There are many futures to the internet, it's about more than just the technology we use to connect.
• The internet is moving off of computers and to other devices; phones, televisions, and it is become more transitive.
• China has eclipsed the number of American users on the internet... how do we deal with people entering the internet where Enlgish is not their first, or even second language.
• Different types of infrastructures, "find the 'killer app' and it 'screws' it for everybody else"... she used BBC's iPlayer as an example.  The idea being that the popularity of something kills the infrastructure enough to disadvantage "normal" users.
• Internet regulations, especially in the way of the government as stakeholders.
• Socio-technological concerns like privacy, authenticity, reputation, and access.
• She summed up by talking about how to design for the web, and how there is the possibility of "many webs" and no fixed notion.  Information passes through devices in many ways.

I mentioned my head hurts, it was actually killing me through this session, I think it had much to do with the drive and not the actual presentation, it was hurting before I walked in the door... I really did try to concentrate, but I know I missed a lot.  Next up Howard Rheingold discussed his thoughts which focused a lot on literacies.  Then Andrew Keen... oh Andrew Keen, I am still not a fan...  No I haven't read the book, "Cult of the Amateur", yes I have always intended to, I don't like people who criticize what people say without reading the book, but his thoughts have never been popular with me based on a number of interviews I've seen him do now.

Andrew talked about his theory of the internet quite a bit, views on authenticity, the attractiveness of anonymity, the normal "fears" that people have.  He said that "the internet is not the real world, it is an idealized world".  He actually goes as far to say that most individuals are not ready for this technology and that what worries him is the "idealized" vision that people will have on the world because of the internet.

The most interesting comments came right before the question and answers though... my favorite:

Genevieve discussed how offline conversations can manifest themselves into online conversations, and vice versa.  Andrew's response somewhere in there, "How do "they" manifest disappointment? (meaning the people participating in the online environment) Genevieve's response was "How do they manifest disappointment now?" (meaning the people in an offline environment)

Which sort of hints why I'm not a fan of Andrew's thoughts... I felt he's too focused on the individual and does not give any credit to how communities form and operate online.  His "idealized internet" is too idealized, and he's creating fears out of situations that really aren't a big deal.  He says the internet is not reality, but I disagree... the internet is a part of a lot of people's reality, it is certainly a part of mine and I don't see anything wrong with that.

There was a lot that came out of this session, I know there was a lot I missed, and there was certainly a lot I disagreed with... even some of the less harsher views of the internet seemed harsh.  I'm not saying there are not issues with authority and privacy online, but I think there's a lot that is overexaggerated at times, and I don't see those issues any different than many of the issues cultures have dealt with without the internet... they're just presented in a very transparent way now.  It's kind of here to stay... or at least I hope so, I think I would be bored without the internet.

Poster Sessions

I visited poster sessions next, I found out last night that my advisor was presenting!  Here are the three I found most interesting:

• Bin Li: An Inside Look at Travelers’ Information Suitcase (my advisor at Wayne State, yea!)
• Elisabeth Jones, Harry Bruce, Predrag Klasnja and William Jones: I Give Up! Five Factors that Contribute to the Abandonment of Information Management Strategies
  • Personal information management has been a real interest of mine lately so I enjoyed this poster.  The main take away is that regardless of the tools that people use, there does seem to be a commonality to why people "quit" their systems.
• Paul Aumer-Ryan:  Interface Effects on Digital Library Credibility Judgments
  • Paul has been looking at "no results found" results from digital library search systems and how users may take that information to definitively mean no results, when the information could actually be there. 

After the poster session I went to the leadership program, there's not much to really say about this, I thought it was more interesting last year actually... this year it was more of a question and answers thing with the various leaders in ASIS&T.  I was mostly frustrated with lack of internet and phone signal by this point anyway.

Finally, I added some images to Flickr from the Welcome Reception and the dinner with SIG-Management.  I edited the photos, but I'm too tired for doing the full blown tagging tonight, but if others want to tag for me, have at it.  I think anybody else can tag...

At the dinner I passed my camera around the table and just let other people take the pictures, I liked this!  I got more pictures than what I normally would've taken myself and I got some interesting perspectives too, not to mention a couple pics of myself, one with closed eyes, one without... I definitely think I'll be trying this fun trick again.