Recently, I had an opportunity to see the Babbage Difference Engine No. 2 (serial #2) in action. It’s an impressive piece of machinery, weighing in at about five tons, consisting of 25,000 parts. Mostly metal. It’s on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View through December, when Nathan Myhrvold takes it home and installs it in his living room, next to the T-Rex. Babbage built a few smaller models, but never saw the completion of the project after a falling out with his master builder and subsequent loss of funding from the government. Still, he had something like 12 years of funding to attempt to build the device. (He also made money on other inventions such as the cowcatcher at the front of steam engines.)

The Science Museum in London built Difference Engine No. 2 serial #1 in the late 1980s to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Babbage’s birth.

Front view showing the registers

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I recall from my youth in the Soviet Union a series of jokes structured around a fake talk radio call-in show. One example stuck with me:

Q: Is it possible to create a Communist regime in an arbitrary country? Say France, for example.

A: In principle, yes. But what has France ever done to deserve that?

I was reminded of this joke by a recent article describing how a school would be replacing its library with electronic devices. The plan is to replace the stacks with three large monitors, “laptop-friendly” study carrels, and 18 e-book readers (Amazon Kindles and Sony eReaders). They are also planning to replace textbooks with electronic versions, at least in math, and possibly in other subjects as well.

I can see many problems with this vision of the future of reading based on the notion that books are an outdated technology. I’ve written about e-books before (and I am still fond of the research we did in this space), and I find myself wondering about the wisdom of this venture by the headmaster of Cushing Academy.

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Laurent and I recently published an article (SeeReader: An (Almost) Eyes-Free Mobile Rich Document Viewer) in the special issue on Pervasive Computing in the International Journal of Computer Science Issues (IJCSI). The IJCSI is open-access, meaning that the content is not hidden behind a paywall. Open-access journals are still seen as dubious by many, and perhaps rightly so. These journals are universally new and tend to enjoy less prestige and quality than mainstream journals. In return, though, they offer fast turn-around times and wide indexing.

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Preservation is a branch of library science dedicated to the maintenance of physical artifacts. Digital preservation, its modern offspring, concerns itself with the preservation of digital artifacts such as documents, movies, audio recordings, etc. But the challenges of digital preservation are complicated by interactivity characteristic of many digital artifacts. It’s not enough to save the bits, if the goal is to understand the experience of using something in its original form. I have in mind such things as interactive fiction, video and computer games, and other similar artifacts.

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Sarah Vogel’s comment on yesterday’s post got me thinking about recall-oriented search. She wrote about preferring Boolean queries for complex searches because they gave her a sense for when she really had exhausted a particular topic, something that’s often required for medical literature reviews. But we really have multiple problems here, that it may be useful to decouple: one is the issue of coverage (did we find all there was to find?) and the other is ranking (the order in which documents are shown).

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Every once in a while a Twitter query turns up something completely unexpected. I suppose that’s one reason for having them.  My query on all things PubMed recently turned up the following gem: a blog entitled PubMed Search Strategies. What is it? A list of queries. What? PubMed Queries, in all the Boolean glory. The latest pair of posts are pharmacoepidemiology — keywords, and its paternal twin, pharmacoepidemiology — MeSH.  The queries run for 39 and 13 terms, respectively. No average 2.3 word Web searches these.

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In “The Library of Babel“, Jorge Luis Borges describes a library “…composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries… ” lined with shelves of books. Unfortunately, the books are not organized in any predictable manner, causing librarians to travel “… in search of a book, perhaps of the catalogue of catalogues…” The searches, though, are in vain, given the improbability of finding what you seek in an infinite collection.

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I just watched an interesting webcast by David Gillikin, Chief of NLM’s Bibliographic Services, about the upcoming changes to the PubMed interface, followed by extensive Q&A. There was some confusion about how existing functionality would be mapped to the new interface, and understandable concern that the familiar interface would become dramatically less so. From an outsider’s perspective, the changes that were implemented looked reasonable, reducing the clutter of the existing design with some simplified controls and a more modern look and feel.

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Well, almost.  JoDI, the Journal of Digital Information, founded by Wendy Hall and Gary Marchionini, has been publishing papers online since 1997 with Cliff McKnight as the Editor-in-Chief.  JoDI is a peer-reviewed online journal organized into several themes, including digital libraries, hypermedia systems, hypertext criticism, information discovery, information management, social issues of digital information, and usability of digital information.

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William Webber recently wrote an interesting analysis of the reports of the original Cranfield experiments that were so influential in establishing the primacy of evaluation in information seeking, and in particular a certain kind of evaluation methodology around recall and precision based on a ground truth. One reason that the experiments were so influential was that they provided strong evidence that previously-held assumptions about the effectiveness of various indexing techniques were unfounded. Specifically, the experiments showed that full-text indexing outperformed controlled vocabularies. While this result was shocking in the 1950s, 50 years later it seems banal. Or almost.

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