Cites & insights Crawford at large.

              Cites & Insights October 2011 1

Cites & Insights

Crawford at Large

Libraries • Policy • Technology • Media

Volume 11, Number 9: October 2011 ISSN 1534- 0937 Walt Crawford

Making it Work

Websites and Social

Networks

If you’re expecting a Major Piece on library use of

social networks— or, for that matter, a Major Piece

on library websites— you’re going to be disappoint-ed.

I’m working on a very major piece on public li-brary

use of two large social networks, a book ( from

ALA Editions, probably out in late 2012, title not

yet set). I’ve just completed the first pass at back-ground

research for that book. The first part of this

essay discusses the sampling done in that pass and

the bias revealed in that sampling. The second part

offers some thoughts on public library websites—

and finding those websites— based on what I’ve seen

during that pass. The third part discusses a few

items I’d tagged as related to libraries and librarians

and their presence in social networks.

What I’m not about to do: Tell you how your

public library’s website should look or work. There

are plenty of library folk who are happy to serve as

gurus in that area, most of them with a lot more

hands- on experience in creating public library web-sites

than I have ( since I have none), all of them

with much stronger opinions on how public library

websites should look and work. Nor, for that matter,

will the second section offer a clear description of

how they do work, although I’ll offer some notes on

what I, as a user, hope to see on a public library

website. I didn’t take notes on websites except in a

couple of areas, as my purpose in visiting websites

was to see whether the libraries used Twitter or Fa-cebook

and, if so, to link to those instances. This is

anecdotal: musings, not assertions.

Sampling Library Websites

I looked at a lot of public library websites between

July 26, 2011 and August 22, 2011. I would say

2,406 of them— but that’s not true. I looked for pub-lic

library websites for 2,406 libraries/ library agencies

( let’s call them “ libraries,” although that includes li-brary

systems that report statistics to the state li-brary),

but in 176 cases— 7.3%— I didn’t find sites

that I considered to be legitimate library websites.

( What? There are library websites that aren’t legiti-mate?

Lots of them: We’ll get to that a little later.)

The Sample

The sample of public library websites is intended to be

a reasonable cross- section of America’s public libraries.

It began as a small sample ( California and at least one

other state) and became an odd halfway survey.

I downloaded library names ( or city or county

names, as appropriate) and legal service area popu-lations

for the libraries in 25 U. S. states— primarily

states that actually offer that data within spread-sheets

as part of their state library statistics, alt-hough

in a couple of cases I copied the data from

either Word or PDF reports.

Inside This Issue

T& QT Retrospective: Far- Away Services with Strange

Sounding Names ............................................................. 17

Offtopic Perspective: 50 Movie Comedy Kings 1 .......... 22

While I included half of the states, I did not in-clude

half of the libraries. As defined by state agen-cies

and reported to the Institute of Museum and

Library Science— or, in this case, as used in the lat-est

HAPLR figures, since those include a useful

breakdown of libraries by population served— there

are 9,184 public libraries, so my sample only in-cludes

26% of the libraries. On the other hand, the

libraries I sampled serve a total of more than 165

million people, considerably more than half the na-tion’s

total ( even including double- counting, which

happens in a few cases). So that’s half the states,

more than half the population— but just over one-quarter

of the libraries.

Here’s the list of states, in descending order by

the sum of service area population in all libraries

combined: California, Florida, Georgia, North Caro-lina,

Minnesota, New Jersey, Arizona, Washington,

Cites & Insights October 2011 2

Maryland, Missouri, Colorado, Louisiana, South

Carolina, Kentucky, Oregon, Connecticut, Missis-sippi,

Utah, Nevada, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Ida-ho,

Montana, Alaska, Wyoming.

That list is very strong in the Old West and Far

West, fairly strong in the South and weak in New

England and the Midwest. I believe it’s a good cross-section

of large and small, urban and rural states. The

bias is— other than California, my starting point—

deliberate: Except for New Jersey, studied before I

realized there was a problem, it’s biased toward states

with relatively few reporting libraries, so that I could

include quite a few different states while still being

able to do the sampling in a reasonable amount of

time. ( So, for example, California has 181 library

units serving more than 37 million people— while

New York has 756 serving some 19 million and Iowa

has 541 serving some three million.)

The Bias

I’ll point to Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana and

Alaska, at the very least, to suggest that it would be

inappropriate to accuse me of ignoring smaller and

rural libraries— but it’s true that the bias toward fewer

reporting agencies results in an oversampling of larger

libraries and an undersampling of smaller ones.

How serious is that bias? If you use one com-mon

dividing line between larger (“ urban”) and

smaller (“ rural”) libraries— 25,000 as a service area

population— my sample still includes nearly 62%

smaller libraries, but nearly 78% of U. S. public li-braries

fall into the smaller categories.

Here’s a table that shows how this works out in

more detail, using the HAPLR population divisions

( and most recent HAPLR numbers) as a basis.

LSA HAP LSN LSN% L of H Bias

500,000+ 84 62 3% 74% 182%

250- 499K 104 72 3% 69% 164%

100- 249K 335 214 9% 64% 144%

50- 99K 556 244 10% 44% 68%

25- 49K 952 325 14% 34% 30%

10- 24K 1,764 520 22% 29% 13%

5- 9K 1,483 330 14% 22% - 15%

2.5- 4.9K 1,310 232 10% 18% - 32%

1- 2.4K 1,524 233 10% 15% - 42%

< 1000 1,072 174 7% 16% - 38%

Total 9,184 2406 26%

Urban 2,031 917 38% 45% 72%

Rural 7,153 1,489 62% 21% - 21%

Large 523 348 14% 67% 154%

Medium 3,272 1,089 45% 33% 27%

Small 4,317 795 33% 18% - 30%

A few notes on that table:

 LSA is the Legal Service Area population.

Note that “ 499K” means “ 499,999” and “ 9K”

means “ 9,999,” and so on. “ Urban” is the

sum of the first five rows— what some reports

define as “ urban” libraries, those serving at

least 25,000 people. “ Rural” is the sum of the

next five rows— what some reports define as

“ rural” libraries, those serving fewer than

25,000 people. I’ve added a different break-down:

Large ( libraries serving more than

100,000 people), medium ( libraries serving

10,000 to 99,999 people) and small ( libraries

serving fewer than 10,000 people). I’ve done

that partly because “ rural” is such a silly term

for libraries such as, say, Darien, Connecticut

or Coronado, California.

 The “ HAP” column shows the number of li-braries

within a population bracket included

in the latest Hennen’s American Public Li-brary

Ratings. This is the total number, in-cluding

those libraries ( nearly 20%) that

aren’t included in HAPLR 2010 ratings be-cause

of insufficient IMLS reporting.

 The “ LSN” column shows the number of li-braries

checked for my 25- state survey, and

“ LSN%” shows percentages of all libraries for

each row.

 The final two columns show the relative bias

in two different manners. “ L of H” shows the

percentage of all libraries ( as reported in

HAPLR) that are within those 25 states. “ Bi-as”

is the extent to which a category is

overrepresented ( positive percentages) or un-derrepresented

( negative percentages)—

compared to the 26% of all libraries checked,

not the 50% of all states. Using my three- way

split for population size, only the smallest li-braries

( still almost half of all reporting li-braries)

are underrepresented.

Interpreting these numbers as words, the 25- state

sample includes about two- thirds of large libraries

( those serving at least 100,000 people), about one-third

of medium- sized libraries ( those serving 10,000

to 99,999 people) and only about one- sixth of small

libraries ( those serving fewer than 10,000 people).

In one way, that’s nonsense: a fair number of

those larger libraries are library systems, some hav-ing

quite a few ( smaller) individual libraries. In an-other

way, it’s true: Those library systems do in

many cases serve as the central websites for all the

individual libraries.

Cites & Insights October 2011 3

Being Realistic

If I was trying to prove something about public li-brary

websites across the nation, this sample would

be inadequate— and, frankly, I believe any sample

short of 100% is likely to be somewhat inadequate.

Public libraries are wildly heterogeneous. Even with-in

my biased sample, there are 17 libraries with legal

service area populations of fewer than 100 people

each ( that’s one hundred, not a mistyped 1,000)— and

19 with LSAs of more than one million people each.

Consider the extreme. The largest library system in

these 25 states, Los Angeles Public Library, has an

LSA of 4.095 million people. To achieve that number

of people starting with the smallest library takes 997

libraries— every library serving 10,000 or fewer, and

26 of those serving more than 10,000. If you love

classic rock, you’ll find it interesting that the cutoff

library is Winslow, Arizona.

I’m not trying to prove anything about library

websites as a whole. I’m trying to look at how a

large sampling of public libraries do or don’t use

some social networks— avoiding the usual tendency

to focus on a half dozen or so “ star” libraries that

seem to crop up so often in the informal literature.

If anything, generalizing from the 25 states

studied should tend to overstate the use of social

networks, as it’s probably true that very small librar-ies

are less likely to make heavy use— or any use—

of Twitter or Facebook than very large libraries.

The Missing 176

Before going on to anecdotal comments on web sites

I’ve seen and mostly liked, it might be worth break-ing

down the Missing 176. You may not be surprised

to learn that none of them is in the top three popula-tion

categories— that is, none serves at least 100,000

people. Two are in the 50,000- 99,999 group; seven

are in the 25,000- 49,999 group. Those nine surprise

me, and may reflect sloppy searching on my part.

Eighteen libraries where I couldn’t find the websites

serve 10,000 to 24,999 people; 16 serve 5,000 to

9,999; 23 serve 2,500 to 4,999. Finally, 34 serve

1,000 to 2,499 people— and 76 serve fewer than

1,000 people ( including 14 serving fewer than 100).

A pessimist would note that more than 40% of

the under- 1K libraries and more than 14% of the

1,000- 2,499 libraries didn’t have websites that I

could find. An optimist would note that 60% of the

smallest libraries and more than 85% of the next-smallest

did have findable websites— as did nearly

90% of those serving 2,500 to 4,999 people and

more than 95% of any larger category. All things

considered, I believe those are great numbers, and

in some states they say a lot about initiatives that

spread basic library website templates throughout a

state or region, such as the one seemingly named for

a Price is Right game. ( Yes, I do mean Plinkit.)

What you’ve just seen is an extremely rough-draft

version of material that may be part of the

book. I won’t discuss the actual findings— who’s us-ing

Facebook, who’s using Twitter, how libraries are

using either or both, how successful they seem to

be, and what other libraries might learn from that.

( I will discuss those findings in the book, but that’s

the book.) I can say this: there are thousands of li-braries—

not just small ones— that don’t appear to

use either one. If someone tells you that every li-brary

already has a Facebook page, they’re spouting

nonsense. That’s true even if “ every library” really

means “ every very large library”— no matter how

you define “ very large.”

Idle Thoughts on Public Library

Websites

If I was considering moving to a new town or city,

or if I’d just moved, one thing I’d want to do is

check out the public library via its website— and

once I had moved, I’d want to use that website. I

don’t claim to be a typical library user, but I don’t

think I bring unusual expectations to the game.

One Simple Example

Let’s see what happens with the city we moved to

most recently: Livermore, California. If I search

“ Livermore public library” ( without quotes) on

Bing, here’s what I see ( ignoring Bing’s usual absurd

result size— 3,120,000 in this case):

 The very first result is “ Livermore Web – Li-brary”

and it’s explicitly tagged as an Official

site. As it happens, that’s the right site— but it’s

also cheating, as Bing knows I’m in Livermore,

California ( it says so right up in the upper right

corner of the page). That result is in a high-lighted

box, along with a little map and link

from Bing. com/ local. Things get strange even

there: The Bing local page has a link to the li-brary’s

website— but it’s a different URL that

happens to be outdated and, after a few se-conds,

redirects— to yet another URL that auto-redirects

to a subsite of Livermore’s city site.

( Livermore’s library has a library- specific

URL— but it’s just a redirect. That’s OK.)

 That website changed dramatically since the

last time I used it. It’s still clean and usable. It

Cites & Insights October 2011 4

has the links and search boxes it should have,

and each page has the state and zip code ( I’ve

seen library pages with no state mentioned).

 Let’s say I want to know more about the li-brary.

“ About the library,” with links in sever-al

places, takes me to a page with the mission

statement, director’s name, picture and blog

link and links to other places. The first side

link is “ Hours & Locations” and further

down is “ Library Statistics,” which I’d want to

explore as a potential newcomer. Oddly,

though, the Statistics link does not give me

any indication of the collection size. It does

show key usage statistics for 2009- 2010. So I

know that 1,106,790 items were checked out

during 578,442 visits, and I know that the 87

public computers were used 182,899 times—

but I don’t know how many books and re-cordings

the library has.

 So as a potential user, I see lots of infor-mation,

but can’t readily find out whether

there’s a substantial bookstock. That’s my on-ly

gripe about the site.

No problem, right? The very first search result was

what I needed, the website makes it easy to search

the catalog or to check my own information, and

social networks are clearly visible without taking up

huge amounts of space ( these are little icons, just

big enough to be clear and useful— and they’re

working links, which isn’t always the case).

Ah, but this is an easy case: “ Livermore” is a

reasonably distinctive name. Still, what do we see

just below that first result?

 The next result is also Livermore Public Li-brary,

but this one’s in Maine, and it’s fair to

say that it’s a little smaller, given that the ex-tremely

simple website shows the hours, a total

of 10.5 hours per week. During those 10.5

hours ( six on Tuesday, 4.5 on Thursday) there

are six public computers ( provided by Stephen

King’s family foundation!). The library has

more than 12,000 books. It’s an all- volunteer

library— and yes, the website does include a

link to the “ never closes!” collection of ebooks

and audiobooks. The LSA is 2,204: It’s in the

second- smallest category of library.

 Then we get a Yelp listing. Really? The Yelp

score is 5 out of 5, with 44 reviews ( Liver-more’s

library is fairly new)… but, in addition

to loads’o’ads, there’s no link to the LPL web-site.

Can’t blame the library for that, but it’s

certainly bizarre.

 Next— after a set of “ Related Searches”— we

get a link to the Library Director’s Blog, then

a link to Livermore’s primary website.

 Then there’s another ad- supported “ we’ll

make a site for every local place”— this one

Livermore’s outpost of AOL’s Patch. It’s just a

page for the main library, Livermore Public

Library Civic Center, and does include the

( normal) hours and the collection size. Of

course, there are also lots of ads. At least the

Patch site does have an ( outdated) link that

eventually gets you to the library website,

 Next— and, for many libraries I searched

for, this was first in the list— is the lib- web-cats

page from Library Technology Guides,

Marshall Breeding’s remarkable operation.

These pages have uniform layout and in-formation,

and it’s useful information if

possibly outdated ( it shows the collection

size as 130000 volumes, which is consider-ably

lower than other sources, and shows a

circulation level that’s more than 10% lower

than other reports)— and it does include a

link to the library’s webpage ( and another

to its online catalog).

 Here’s another pair of “ local info” ad-supported

sites, both from Yahoo! The first

one’s for Livermore, Iowa and has no useful in-formation

other than an address ( lots of ads);

the second is for LPL and, unlike Yelp, does

have a link to the library’s website ( along with

three ratings, all 5- star, and one “ Web review”

that’s actually a link to Yelp’s reviews).

 Next comes a link to Wikipedia’s article on

Link+, a great networked system that allows

Livermore residents ( and those who use any

of the other Link+ member libraries) to find

and check out books from nearly four dozen

public and academic libraries in California

and Nevada.

 Then we get LPL’s Facebook page, followed

by the lib- web- cat page for the Iowa Liver-more

( even smaller than the Maine Liver-more:

1,466 residents and no website).

 Next? the “ Public Libraries” site— or, rather,

the Livermore page on that site— which has,

in addition to relatively fewer ads than other

ad- based sites, an inactive ( text- only) link to

an obsolete address for LPL’s website and a set

of presumably autogenerated basic infor-mation,

some of it questionable, some out-dated,

some useful. ( The population, annual

Cites & Insights October 2011 5

visits and hours open are all aged; the num-ber

of books and serial volumes is 198,899

this time— but the circulation is way low, at

under 790,000— and there’s such unusual in-fo

as the number of MLS- holding librarians

and other full- time employees.) I’ve never

been clear as to just who Public- libraries. org

really is; it’s an odd set of stuff, not helped by

having a textual URL that’s not a link.

 And another “ let’s make a site for everything

we can!” site: Manta, which does have a

( slightly obsolete) link, but also loads of ads

and the following mysterious “ information”:

Livermore Public Library in Livermore, CA is a pri-vate

company categorized under Public Libraries.

Current estimates show this company has an annu-al

revenue of unknown and employs a staff of ap-proximately

20 to 49. Companies like Livermore

Public Library usually offer: Marion County Public

Library, Baltimore County Public Library, Detroit

Public Library, Queens Public Library and Wichita

Public Library.

To which one can only say “ huh?” LPL is most certain-ly

not a private company; the staff number is about

right; the last sentence is nothing short of mystifying.

( Marion County Public Library? What?) Mostly, the

profile seems to be an excuse to show lots of ads.

 It could be worse. The next link takes you to

yellowpages. com, where you get 34 results

for “ Livermore Livermore Public Library,”

starting with LPL but continuing with other

libraries that just happen to be within 35

miles of Livermore. Clicking on LPL’s specific

site yields the address and phone number of a

branch that’s mostly closed ( not the main li-brary),

no web link and no useful infor-mation.

This is the first site that’s not only

not useful, it’s misleading— instead of a main

library open seven days a week, it leads you

to a branch that, thanks to city budget cuts, is

only open one day a week. Gee, thanks.

 The next one is for the library at Lawrence

Livermore National Library. Then there’s an-other

autogenerated ad site: Citysearch. This

one’s interesting, as it offers LPL’s Twitter and

Facebook links near the top of the page— but

doesn’t offer a link to LPL’s website at all Lots

of ads, though.

 After that we get lots more. There’s another

Livermore, this one in Kentucky— and, for

reasons unknown, not in my sample ( McLean

County, in which Livermore is located, isn’t

in the list of reporting counties). There’s a li-brary

at a Livermore ( California) middle

school, and another school library’s page that

includes a paragraph on LPL and a link to the

Kid’s Place. ( Interesting: The school library

page twice gives this as “ Kid’s Place,” but LPL

itself consistently uses “ Kids’ Place.” So much

for authority control.)

This is an absurd amount of detail, but it’s just an

indicator of what even an “ easy” library name has to

deal with. Those autogenerated adsites show up

high in results, and in most cases they’re of no use

whatsoever.

I also tried Google. The results remind me why

I used Bing for the first pass of the study: Google’s

“ helpfulness” gives way too much space to subpages

of the first result, enough that I don’t actually see

any other site until I page down ( on a 1200x800

notebook screen). Bing has a compact set of links

beneath the first result and shows four more results

on that first page. I’d say the results are similar, but

that’s not true: Google persists in shoving more and

more subpages from the primary LPL website at me

throughout the results.

What conclusions do I draw here? There are a

lot of pages about any given public library— but

many of them are more concerned with ads than

with actually getting you to the library. This should

not be a surprise.

Thing is, though, even with three or four Liver-mores,

this is an easy case. It could be much worse.

Consider Salem

This time I’ll try Google: “ salem public library,” not

as a phrase. First link is a silent redirect to the li-brary’s

page on the City of Salem’s website and it’s

pretty straightforward— although you get a little

into the page before it’s clear which Salem this is:

Salem, Oregon. The next one has the state right at

the top— Massachusetts in this case— and the next

three after that are subsets of the first, apparently,

which is a Google tendency I find odd, at best.

If you happen to be looking for Salem, Virginia,

you’ll eventually find it— and below that the Ohio

version. But that’s not the Salem I’m looking for. I’m

looking for Salem, Connecticut— and, in practice, I

appended the state code to my Bing searches ( e. g.,

“ Salem library ct”— the Public’s usually superflu-ous).

Does that help?

For Google, the first result is for Salem Free

Public Library’s page in the Town of Salem ( Con-necticut)

site, but it’s an odd page: It has library

Cites & Insights October 2011 6

hours, but otherwise it emphasizes “ aboutness”—

library board agendas, history, etc.— with actual ser-vices

well down the page. Google nestles two subre-sults

beneath that one: a Friends page and one that

seems odd initially, given that its heading “ Salem

Free Public Library” makes it seem more central

than the first (“ Town of Salem, CT – Salem Free

Public Library”). The second turns out to be a

summer newsletter issued in PDF form. A third sub-result

goes to the library history page. After that,

there’s the lib- web- cats page with the proper link.

Then we get a featured result— one with a

“ Google review” and an insiderpages link— and this

one’s strange. The heading is, once again, “ Salem Free

Public Library,” but the link is to the town’s homep-age.

Why an indirect link? You got me. There follow

two publiblibraries. com links ( publiclibraries. com is

not the same as public- libraries. org, and only offers

lists of libraries and links, but has similarly shadowy

provenance) and a variety of other stuff.

If I’d forgotten the CT? I’d eventually find the

Connecticut library, well down the page— and,

shortly thereafter, pages for the Utah, Missouri and

New York Salems.

In this case, however, Bing has a problem, and

it’s a problem I’ve seen with Google for some other

libraries. That problem is what I’d call fraudulent

sites. To wit:

 The first result is the same as for Google: A

page on the town’s website.

 The second result has a URL that would lead

me to believe that it’s the real library website:

www. salem- ct- library. org. It’s not. It’s appar-ently

part of “ Public Libraries Directory,” and

it contains no information on Salem, CT’s li-brary.

What it does have: Ads for online edu-cation.

Odd categories that lead to peculiar

lists of sites. And this wording, under the

heading “ Public Libraries”:

An Internet- based information service on Public

Library theme, information and links to the public

libraries by state or city. Libraries by region, Ar-chives,

College and University, Digital, & Govern-ment

Libraries, National Library, Presidential,

Research libraries on the natural and social scienc-es,

history, law, economics, School Library list, Sub-ject

Specific Libraries, etc...

Online information about a public library or a pub-lic

library services.

To which I can only say “ Huh?”

Ah, but a bit later— after the lib- web- cats a yel-lowpages

page— is another one that could seem like

an official page but is actually “ A Connecticut Gen-web

Page” listing with a few Salem links— except

that the link for the public library is to the phony

site ( the second result), not the real site. ( This time,

the yellowpages result does, supposedly, have a

website link— and, once again, it’s to the phony

site.) And here’s a Salem page on american-towns.

com, with a link— oh, look, it’s the salem- ct-library.

org site again.

Then there’s the epodunk. com page for Salem,

CT. The first time I clicked “ libraries” on the side-bar,

I got a popup ad that had nothing to do with

libraries or Salem. The second time, I was taken to a

link offering a “ Profile” with no real information

and a link to… well, you can guess.

Other Cases

Salem, Connecticut is certainly not the only case. My

spreadsheet for 2,406 libraries includes at least 20

cases of “ multiple different websites.” Consider, for

example, Joseph City Library in Joseph, Oregon. The

Bing results show a lib- web- cats page first. That page

has a website link heading to a Plinkit library page

which, like many Plinkit pages, is somewhat generic

but also useful and well organized. The second result

is to a page on Oregon. educationbug. org, and once

you get through the profusion of irrelevant links,

there’s no link to the library website at all. Third is

another oddball page, on userinstinct. com, with the

heading “ Joseph City of, Library in Joseph Oregon

( or)”— a site that’s pretty obviously autogenerated

and offers no useful information or an actual link.

Then you get somewhere… or too many places:

 The City of Joseph, Oregon site leads to a li-brary

page that’s quite different from the

Plinkit page and offers no link to that page.

The City page does not offer a direct search

box, unlike the Plinkit page, and has some

layout problems ( overlapping text) that make

it difficult to use.

 Next is “ Joseph Library,” a page that’s radical-ly

different from either the City page or the

Plinkit page, cruder than either and with

oddities such as “ Up Coming Events” and dif-ferent

hours than the City and Plinkit pages

( this site has the library open 12- 4 M- F; the

others say 12- 4 Tue- Sat). This page dates

from 1999, has a “ Made with Macintosh”

logo, and enough errors in its minimal text to

make it suspicious at best.

 Then there’s the Joseph City Library page from

Online Highways, with so little information as

Cites & Insights October 2011 7

to be little more than an excuse to display

loads of ads— but that one’s fairly obvious.

 And what’s this? It’s labeled as “ The Official

Joseph Oregon site…” but it’s josephore-gon.

com, not josephoregon. org. What makes

it official? It appears to come from the

Chamber of Commerce— and, despite turning

up from this search, it has neither any infor-mation

about the library nor any link to it or

to the actual city site.

There’s more, but that’s enough to illustrate the

problem. Does Google do better? Not really: It gives

two links to josephoregon. com precedence over the

city’s . org link. The lib- web- cats page once again

shows up first, followed by another lib- web- cats

page and the useless education. bug page— but at

least the oddball Made with Macintosh page isn’t

there. On the other hand, above the Plinkit page is a

Google- generated page which has the number of

accurate links to the library’s website you should

expect by now: None whatsoever.

I find the sheer profusion of apparently auto-generated

sites at best confusing and at worst mis-leading.

The fact that most of them either have no

links to the actual websites or incorrect links doesn’t

help matters. I’m not sure these are in any way help-ful.

Citysearch, epodunk, manta, yelp, yellowpages,

awesomebusinesspages, myareaguide, corporation-wiki,

city- data, ohwy, userinstinct, citytown-info…

the list seems endless. Add to that the

supposed directories: 50states, publiclibraries. com,

public- libraries. org, educationbug, educationhq…

Problems arise when a user can’t locate the offi-cial

library website among all the crap in search re-sults—

and, much as I like lib- web- cats, its tendency

to appear before actual library websites makes me

unhappy. Real problems also arise when it’s just not

clear what the official website is— or whether there

is such a thing.

Government Hierarchies

In a fair number of cases, you’re likely to wind up

on the library page within a city or county govern-ment

website, either because that’s the only library

website there is or because the government sets

things up that way.

If there’s a clear link to the library’s website,

prominent on the page, that’s not much of a prob-lem.

If the subordinate website is effectively a li-brary-

controlled website, with catalog search, user

login ( for renewals, holds, etc.) and other features

typical of libraries but atypical for cities and coun-ties,

it’s also not a problem: Technically, LPL’s web-site

is just a part of the city’s web, but it functions as

a good library- specific website.

But sometimes there is no such link— and

sometimes the library’s only website is clearly con-trolled

by a higher body that isn’t much concerned

with library issues. In those cases, you’re likely to

get a lot of library history or a lot about library gov-ernance,

but not much of what you’d want as a po-tential

library user. That’s a shame. I’m not going to

name names, here or elsewhere; after all, it’s not al-ways

something a library can control.

Quaint and Stylistic Issues

I’ve gone on far too long on this stuff. The book

may mention some of the issues in finding Face-book

and Twitter accounts from library websites—

e. g., cases where there’s no link at all (“ find us on

Facebook” doesn’t do it, unless that’s a link) and a

few cases where the link’s just wrong. If you’re won-dering,

I found 380 libraries where I couldn’t find a

Facebook or Twitter link on the library’s website but

did find a Facebook or Twitter account through

Bing— and at least half a dozen where there’s a Fa-cebook

icon that either isn’t a link at all or is a link

that doesn’t work. Out of more than 2,200 websites

I actually checked, I suppose that’s not bad— but out

of 1,141 Facebook- using libraries, it’s more than a

33% problem rate. ( In some cases, the missing link

may be deliberate: The Facebook page shows no

updates for quite a few months.)

I do find some sites a little quaint. Visible coun-ters?

In 2011? Animated GIFs? Really?

Multicolored text? Sure, on a kids’ page. On a

library’s home page?

Then there’s the killer— one I’ve seen on library

websites and city websites, although less frequently

now than a few years ago. To wit: Do your pages

show what state the library is in? There are a lot fewer

unique city and county names than you’d expect—

look at the number of cities named Livermore, not to

mention Salem, Johnson County, Lincoln or the like.

For Lincoln, you have your choice of

www. lincolnlibrary. com, www. lincolnlibraries. org,

lincolnpl. org, libraryatlincoln. org, lincolnpublicli-brary.

org, www. lincolnlibrary. info, www. lincoln. lib.

nh. us, and www. lincoln. library. on. ca. They’re all le-gitimate

public library websites, for Lincoln in Rhode

Island, Nebraska, Massachusetts, California, Illinois,

Illinois again ( this time Springfield— the first one

doesn’t have a city name on the site itself but says “ of

Lincoln, Illinois” in the site identification), New

Cites & Insights October 2011 8

Hampshire and Beamsville and Vineland in Ontario,

Canada. If you explore the results further, there’s also

a page for the one in Lincoln, Alabama— and there

may be others. Some of these sites show the state at

the top of the page; at least one or two don’t show it

until the bottom of the page.

There’s my grumble for this issue. It’s much

longer than I’d planned ( I was aiming for about

3,000 words, and this is roughly 6,000 so far), but I

think the details are useful. Now, let’s look at a few

other commentaries on libraries, librarians and the

web and social networks.

Making it Work:

Websites and Social Networks

About the only things these diverse items have in

common are that they relate to libraries or librari-ans,

they relate to websites and social networks ( but

not blogging— that’s a separate cluster), and I

thought them interesting enough to be worth tag-ging.

As usual, they’re in chronological order.

Why We Should Adopt ALAConnect

That’s not the full title of Emily Ford’s May 13, 2009

essay at In the Library with the Lead Pipe; it contin-ues

“ A brief review and rumination on ALA’s new

online community.” ALAConnect was indeed new at

that point, and although Ford started out pessimis-tic,

she found herself hoping

that ALAConnect will be able to reach individuals

who haven’t been able to attend conferences and

engage with their colleagues about ALA- centric is-sues.

If ALAConnect can draw this constituency to

use it, then the tool might mean some real changes

for ALA.

She points out that even the early version provided

some group working tools that should be helpful for

ALA committees working “ virtually.” She also found

usability problems— most of which she blames on

Drupal. The first one struck me as interesting, may-be

because it’s something I wouldn’t plan on doing

in ALAConnect ( I’ve been a user almost since its

inception, but rarely visit it):

One of the first things I attempted to do in ALACon-nect

was build my social network. I quickly discov-ered

that it takes too many clicks to add a new

friend. After you have found a friend to add and suc-cessfully

add that friend, the system returns you to

your profile instead of the “ My Network” page.

I’m not an “ online networking junkie” ( Ford’s self-description),

but I can’t see doing this— although

maybe that’s me. Ford says privacy is also an issue:

There are some pretty robust features for privacy in

ALAConnect, but it’s hard to figure out what’s what

without doing your research. You can choose to

keep your membership in communities private, but

your official ALA work will display to members.

That last clause suggests a tension between privacy

and ALA’s sunshine laws. Except for awards and

scholarship committees ( and a very few other tempo-rary

exceptions), ALA committees are required to act

in public; “ your official ALA work” should display to

members. ( You can’t be on an ALA committee and

have that membership be private in any case.)

Ford’s next privacy complaint strikes me as

“ Everybody should work the way I do” in nature.

First, she’s astonished that her phone number shows

up on her profile— and then finds that it only dis-plays

to people she identifies as contacts. She says,

though:

This overlooks two simple questions: Who is going

to call me when they could shoot me an email, and

why was this piece of data even imported into ALA-Connect?

My answer to the first: Because sometimes the phone

works better, at least for some people. The second

follows from the first. ( Ford swipes at phone num-bers

twice: “ Why we need a phone number to dis-play

in an online social networking tool is beyond

me.” See my answer above— and note that ALA-Connect

is an online community tool, not necessarily

a “ social networking tool.”)

The next part’s interesting: Ford’s upset that she

can’t mention her multiple Masters and include all

of her schooling— and, in an ALA community, she

wants to be able to connect with alums of her col-lege,

“ which seems to be a logical way to network.”

If ALAConnect is The Only Social Network Librari-ans

Use, that’s true enough— but as part of an offi-cial

ALA community? Really? She notes a Facebook

group that provides that functionality; maybe Face-book

is the place for it. She discusses how ALA-Connect

should connect with all the other social

networks— and here Ford notes what seems to be

missing elsewhere:

The problem here is that ALAConnect is not sup-posed

to be a social networking site. Rather, it is in-tended

to be a professional networking site. This is

an important distinction to note, but I wonder if it

is a distinction that users will make.

It is an important distinction. LinkedIn isn’t

MySpace with a coat & tie, and ALAConnect

shouldn’t be either.

Then comes “ The Social Context.”

Cites & Insights October 2011 9

The question is: for ALA members who feel disen-franchised

and disenchanted, can ALAConnect be a

democratizing factor? Can a social movement form

in this virtual space to give ALA members what

they need from the organization? I think it’s possi-ble,

but whether this happens will be determined

by the system’s users.

Ford discussesALA’s structure ( which she finds

“ scary, unwieldy, and seemingly unnavigable”) and

recognizes that ALAConnect must work with that

structure— but sees a tension between the ALA ties

and networking.

Her verdict?

Despite some of the criticisms I’ve discussed in this

article, I think it is a tremendous resource with

great potential. Content, including communities

and discussions, can be user- generated. Structures

and conversations can center around an issue, not

around a division, something that ALA desperately

needs in order to be able to involve a larger com-munity,

to make the ALA structure more open, and

to make the association’s work more relevant to to-day’s

librarians. The fact that the system is part of

the ALA structure may dissuade some users, but

there is a growing online community of non- ALA

members who have created ALAConnect accounts

and are using the resource.

ALAConnect offers everyone in libraryland ( not just

ALA members) a way to get involved in professional

discourse, to engage in professional networking, and

to create their own professional communities online.

What we need to do is to join ALAConnect en

masse, create groups, engage in communities, and

make ALA what we need it to be. ALAConnect is just

a starting point, but I honestly think that if we start

there, the sky is the limit. It’s up to us to make sure

we use the system in a way that is meaningful to us.

The third sentence above makes interesting political

assumptions about ALA and “ today’s librarians,” but

since I’m not one of the latter I won’t comment.

Since I never saw ALAConnect as a replacement for,

say, FriendFeed’s LSW room or the social networks I

am involved with, I’d come at this very differently:

Does ALAConnect work to further ALA goals?

There are 16 comments. I think I mostly agree

with Steve Lawson’s second paragraph:

From the review, I get the impression that the site

mostly works, but is kind of clunky, confusing, and

duplicates what we can find in other sites. But the

last paragraph encourages us to all go adopt it right

away. Happily, I don’t think that will happen. I’d

prefer to see our communities grow more organi-cally,

finding the channels and tools that suit them

on their own, rather than depending on ALA to

deliver everything. I can understand why ALA of-fers

more services and functions to members than

non- members, but that simple fact will keep most

non- members ( such as myself) from being very ex-cited

about trying to build communities on ALA’s

turf. [ Emphasis added.]

Jenny Levine offers some detailed responses, and

clearly took Ford’s ideas to heart. I second this:

I’m not convinced that members want their social

lives mashed up with their professional ones. For

example, if we import Facebook info into Connect,

I don’t think we can offer a granular method for

displaying information only from your “ profession-al”

groups or only your “ safe” status updates. If we

were to display that complaint you posted about

work, a colleague, or your affiliation with the “ I

Love Popcorn” group on your Connect profile, how

are you going to feel when your colleagues see that

on your professional presence?

I just checked in at ALAConnect ( which does now

have a “ Classmates” tab). I continue to find it work-able

as a way to discuss things within and around

ALA groups— and neither compelling nor necessary

as a replacement for actual social networks.

Why I’m over people Twittering Conferences, Meetings

The first paragraph of this June 11, 2009 post by

Bobbi L. Newman at Librarian by Day completes the

title: “ and anywhere else two Twitter users happen

to run into each other.” Although I may be misread-ing

it slightly, I’m fascinated— not only by what

Newman’s saying but also by the fact that Newman,

who I regard as more connected than most, is saying

it. ( Am I wrong to regard her as highly networked?

The first thing in the rightmost column of her blog

is “ Find me on” followed by seven links, five others

in addition to Twitter and Facebook.)

It seems like a day doesn’t go by without signing into

my Twitter account to see a stream of tweets from

someone going by with a # hashtag I don’t recognize.

I’m not talking about a couple of tweets, I mean the

full- on stream. I’m begging you, please stop!

I’m all for the idea of sending a Tweet when you

hear something remarkable, moving, or innovative,

but based on the number of Tweets I see flying by

every other sentence is worth exclaiming over,

somehow I doubt this.

What she sees happening with these tweets is simi-lar

to what I’ve called liveblogging ( except there,

you get all the disjoined sentences in one swell foop

at the end of the session), and I’ve certainly seen it

on Twitter and elsewhere. As she says, “ too many

people are using Twitter as their personal note tak-ing

system. Get a notebook, a netbook, or a pen and

Cites & Insights October 2011 10

paper, whatever, just stop Tweeting!” I’d go one step

further: If you’re going to report on a presentation,

report on it— tell us what it was about and what you

got from it— don’t just string together sentences and

immediate impressions.

The chances of this happening? Hell ain’t quite

that frozen over just yet.

Newman provides seven detailed points of what

it means when you’re live- tweeting a session. I’m

tempted to quote the paragraphs in full ( but since

this publication doesn’t use Creative Commons’

Same- As attribute, I’d technically be violating New-man’s

license), but here are the key points with my

paraphrases in [ brackets]. If you’re Twittering:

 You’re not paying attention [ She does say

“ multitasking is a myth”]

 You’re not contributing

 You’re crying wolf [ Too many tweets dilute

the key points]

 Someone else is probably saying the same

thing [ Boy, have I seen that with hashtags]

 You’re losing your followers [ They may not

unfollow, but they’re not paying attention]

 You’re making it hard for people to find the

info later.

 You’re not blogging. “ If I want real infor-mation

about a session I missed I’d so much

rather find a blog post.”

She has a suggestion for those who can’t resist tweet-ing

sessions prodigiously: Set up a separate account

strictly for that purpose. She adds a comment about

backchannel conversations, putting it a little more

bluntly than I have: “ Aren’t they really just the equiv-alent

of two people talking to each other in the back

of the class? It might go unnoticed in a large audi-ence,

but in a small group it’s just rude.”

The first commenter disagrees— but agrees that

it makes sense to set up a separate account for this

sort of tweeting. Lori Reed partly agrees and adds

her own pet peeve: People whose tweets automati-cally

show up as Facebook status updates. Kathryn

Greenhill, not surprisingly, says there’s no right way

to use Twitter— she loves getting floods of tweets. So

do some others. Indeed, I see more disagreement

than agreement. Not that everybody disagrees. Terry

Doherty mentions “ respect for the speaker” ( what a

quaint notion!) and— two years later— Newman still

stands by her original post. ( I really do find it hard

to deal with one expressed notion: There’s no time

to read blogs with well- formulated posts about ses-sions—

but there’s plenty of time to cope with Twit-ter.

Really? I can keep up with > 400 blogs with no

trouble at all; I’ve long since given up on reading

everything in my modest Twitter stream, one where

I’m only following 52 people.)

I guess my comments are that of course there’s

no rulebook for Twitter ( just as blogs are and should

be whatever bloggers want them to be)— but also

that livetweeting is even worse than liveblogging at

losing the import of a conference session or speech

in the minutiae of what’s being said each minute.

An identity incompletely centered…

Still from 2009, this time June 14, 2009, Lorcan

Dempsey posts at his eponymous blog. Around that

time, Facebook started allowing people and organi-zations

to claim Facebook URLs— e. g., his own

www. facebook. com/ lorcand. He uses “ lorcand” on

Twitter as well.

I decided to consolidate on lorcand a little while

ago, when I switched from the more opaque lisld

on Twitter. Of course, this was late in my online

life, meaning that - as most others do - I have a

fractured online identity: it is pretty decentralized. I

feel that I ought to more actively adopt some cen-tering

strategies ( see below) but it never gets to the

top of the list.

Dempsey quotes Andy Powell on his own “ fractured”

network identity and the desire to consolidate net-work

presences, and offers some reactions. He notes,

“ It seems clear that managing our network presences

and the relationships between them is becoming of

more interest” and finds that he’s becoming more

conscious of “ signing” his network presences con-sistently

( or deliberately not doing so).

To take an example close to home, I wrote some

longish reviews on items in Worldcat; recently, I re-alised

that I would like the system to be able to

support in some way my assertion that I was their

author, and now it does by linking to a profile page.

I have tended to use lisld as a handle in a variety of

places. Now, I would probably more consistently

use something like LorcanDempsey where I was

more concerned about ' signature', although I am

quite attached to lisld ;-)

Here’s an interesting point, especially given the se-cond

part of the essay you’re currently reading:

Of course, Google is a strong bottom- up centering

service ( see Tony Hirst's interesting suggestion that

an institution's de facto home page is the first page

of Google results in a search for that institution).

My first- page Google results tend to be dominated

by this blog, but there are also current and previous

work pages, some articles come and go, and more

recently Wikipedia and Facebook make a showing.

None of these is at a domain name controlled by

Cites & Insights October 2011 11

me. This blog was established as an internal OCLC

communications tool for a year before it was exter-nalised

so it is ' located' at OCLC ( in several ways).

Now, I am sure that it gets a ranking ' lift' from the

OCLC domain name, but it also means that I can-not

bring it with me as it now stands if I ever leave.

In a sense, I lose some of that network capital. Of

course this is quite reasonable from another view,

but it does raise interestingly the balance between

individual and institution.

If a public library’s home page is not on the first

page of Google or Bing results— and, for that matter,

if that’s true for me as well— we’re in a whole heap

of trouble here. ( Turns out that’s not true for me—

I’m happy enough with the first 15 or 20 results

from my name as a phrase on either service, but

most public libraries shouldn’t be.) And, given

Dempsey’s next note about name uniqueness, I’m

especially happy that the first result for my name,

my own web page, shows up in search engine sum-maries

as the disambiguation paragraph distinguish-ing

me from the ornithologist. Finally:

Now, I know that there are various initiatives un-derway

which may make our identities more porta-ble.

I assume - hope - that we will end up with the

ability to port our identities flexibly, but that we al-so

retain the ability to support decentralised identi-ties

which may not know very much, or anything,

about each other ;-)

So do I— but I’m also aware that Google is particu-larly

interested in us having firm, centralized,

Googleized identities, ones that Google and other

Lords of the Universe can verify. In which case, to

be sure, I’m Walter C. Crawford, not Walt Crawford

( and the ornithologist is also Walter C. Crawford, so

that ain’t gonna help).

Jonathan Rochkind’s comment is too good not

to quote in full:

A contrasting theme might be times when some

people WANT to keep their identity split in several

parts, but the increasingly searchable and intercon-nected

internet makes that difficult.

Several people who work in academia have told me

( and I feel to some extent myself) that they have

trouble with facebook precisely because it brings

together their work colleagues and non- work

friends in one community/ identity they'd prefer to

keep seperated. And, from a different end, I've

heard of students being in fact disconcerted to find

professors and librarians on facebook, because fa-cebook

is for social life, not school. And, likewise,

I've heard from professor friends that they don't like

it when their students contact them on facebook,

because the professors view facebook as for social

life not work too!

Hmm. I don’t remember ever explicitly claiming

specific URLs for either Twitter or Facebook— and I

find that my Facebook URL uses a form of my name

that, while certainly good enough, isn’t my common

“ waltcrawford” online identity: walt. crawford. And

yes, I have been pretty consistent about using

waltcrawford, although waltc still shows up here

and there.

Community and archival

This post, by Dorothea Salo on August 11, 2009,

while The Book of Trogool was still an active blog on

ScienceBlogs, is interesting in several ways— both

for what it says and for what has and hasn’t hap-pened

since then. Well, and for where it appears: in

a blog that’s no longer there, on a blog network

that’s since been sold to a publisher who’s insisting

on a “ real names” rule that may be driving out even

more bloggers.

Salo’s talking about Friendfeed— which she

treats as essentially defunct, since by August 2009 it

had been purchased by Facebook. She liked being

able to listen in to portions of the scientific commu-nity,

as do ( not “ did”) I. She liked the Library Socie-ty

of the World on FriendFeed— and so do I. She

was pretty convinced that FriendFeed was doomed:

The writing is on the wall for FriendFeed; it'll limp

along for a bit and then be shut down. Sic transit

communitas mundi.

That might be true, but “ a bit” has turned out to be

at least more than two years— which, in social net-working

or web terms, is a pretty damn long bit. To

date: Not one sign that Facebook plans to shut

down FriendFeed. It’s not being actively developed

or promoted; to some of us, that’s a good thing,

since the modest size makes FriendFeed more man-ageable.

The direct point of the post? Some of the scien-tists

think that FriendFeed should have tools to al-low

users to archive posts and comments, and even

argue there should be “ a public archive made of the

complete public timeline.” Cameron Neylon assert-ed

“ There is gold in there for future sociologists

( they just haven't realised it yet). For the rest of the

research community here there is immense value

tied up in here which we would like to continue to

get at in the future.” Salo’s not so sure.

I want to draw a distinction between personal val-ue,

community value, and archival value. Items of

considerable personal value may have limited or no

Cites & Insights October 2011 12

community value. Items of considerable personal or

community value may have limited archival val-ue—

archival space and attention are not infinite

( and growing more finite by the day). Archival val-ue

is often hugely overestimated…

So where is FriendFeed on this scale? For me per-sonally,

the value of the content I have put there is

so low that I'm not planning to archive it. ( I have a

somewhat laissez- faire attitude toward life-archiving

anyway; I have no ambition to appear in

history books.) Likewise, to me, the value of the

community content. The community interaction

has been hugely valuable to me, and I hope it can

survive FriendFeed's demise, but the frozen re-mains

of that interaction? Limited if any value

( again, to me; I don't argue with Cameron's or any-one

else's value perceptions.

If we are to estimate the archival value of Friend-

Feed interactions, I think we need to ask: how

much research work is happening here that hap-pens

nowhere else and that can inform further re-search

work? The second criterion is crucial. If it

doesn't create additional knowledge, it's not worth

archiving. Harsh… but archival space and attention

are not infinite.

Sorry, sociologists and historians of science: I don't

think FriendFeed makes the cut. A lot of social

software doesn't, especially considering the difficul-ty

of archiving it at all. Archival is not typically a

desideratum of these systems ( and I frankly main-tain

that Facebook's stickiness regarding personal

information is one reason I left it after zeroing out

my profile), so it takes real effort to save anything.

Blogs and wikis may well make the cut— not en

masse, to be sure, but on an individual basis. I've

argued before and doubtless will again that libraries

need to look seriously at their faculty's blogs, host-ed

in institution- space or no. The same questions as

above are important. If it helps, think of blogs as

gray literature, much of which absolutely has ar-chival

value.

This is relevant and important even if FriendFeed

survives for another few years or decades… because

FriendFeed isn’t really the point. Some gray litera-ture

does have archival value; in other cases, it de-pends

on your definition of “ archival” and “ value.”

( On the gripping hand, Jason Scott and his merry

band are doing some remarkable things, and disk

space really is getting awfully damn cheap.)

Wednesday, feeling sort of old, but overly

paranoid/ panic- y

That’s Christina Pikas writing on August 12, 2009 at

Christina’s LIS Rant— at that time, also on Science-

Blogs— and the title is “ an imitation” of a post I’d

written on August 10, 2009. ( The link in Christina’s

post yields a 404 because, after I moved back from

ScienceBlogs to my own domain, the posts all dis-appeared.

You’ll find “ Monday, old and insufficiently

paranoid” here, if you’re interested. Excuse the for-matting:

That’s what happens when you import

from TypePad to WordPress.) We were both re-sponding

to Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed.

I’d seen a bunch of “ We’re all doomed!” posts, and I

wasn’t buying it.

Christina isn’t necessarily joining in the doom-cryers;

the bulk of the brief post is her assessment of

FriendFeed itself:

I love friendfeed. It's really the porous boundaries

between the groups that really does it. You get to

know people because things they share/ post are

" liked" by people you know and trust. I've been in-troduced

to tons of librarians and scientists I would

never have met in other settings. A few scientists

and I also wrote an abstract for a paper about how

friendfeed works - each of us was from a different

country! Blogs that never get any comments are

" liked" 20 times and have 62 comments in friend-feed

for multiple posts. It somehow gets over the

commenting barrier. THIS is more like what people

were talking about 5 years ago with aggregating

conversations from across the web.

I don’t disagree; LSW on FriendFeed is probably my

most worthwhile social networking space.

Looking at Diigo, I find that I have half a dozen

items tagged “ sn- friendfeed.” That’s not enough for

an article, but maybe I should note a few of those

here. One, by MG Siegler on October 17, 2009 at

techcrunch, tells me that “ FriendFeed has turned

into a ghost town.” There’s a lot more to it, but that’s

the gist— and I don’t buy it. Maybe it’s become a

ghost town for SEOs: Can’t say that I mind. Sure,

Robert Scoble gave up on it: Such a shame.

Maybe it really is that the social network hip-sters

were no longer happy. Thus Louis Gray on

February 9, 2010 on “ How Google Buzz Validates

but Marginalizes FriendFeed.” That’s right: Since

Google Buzz was inevitably a huge success, there’s

no doubt about Gray’s conclusion: “ You could be

using FriendFeed in the future, but it will be called

Buzz.” ( Surely you’re using Google Buzz and have

been since early 2010. Aren’t you? Hey, it’s Google:

how could it fail?) Or, hey, you could bring that

post forward to July 10, 2011, change “ Buzz” to “+”

and give it to another author, Dare Obasanjo:

“ Google+ is the new FriendFeed.” Or is Google+ the

new Google Buzz? End of digression; also end of

Cites & Insights October 2011 13

that Diigo cluster. Now, back to making it work.

Apparently I just wasn’t tagging MiW stuff the same

way in 2010, but I do have one item from that year:

IOLUG speaker’s notes on online identity

That’s Jenica Rogers on January 5, 2010 at Attempt-ing

Elegance. It’s her notes from a presentation she

did on online identity. Rogers is strong on maintain-ing

a personal and professional online identity, and

notes that she wouldn’t have been speaking at IO-LUG

without that identity.

As a result of my own experiences, I think that hav-ing

an online identity, if you are an information

professional, is an incredibly worthwhile endeavor.

We are responsible for our own development as

professionals, and as a profession, and the commu-nities

of practice I’ve found online are astonishingly

rich and incredibly beneficial.

She shows how you’d find out about her through

Google results. It’s a discussion worth reading ( and

following online—“ Jenica Rogers” is a reasonably

distinctive name, although it’s worth noting, if you

use Bing, that the librarian at SUNY Potsdam is not a

track & field person currently in the 9th or 10th

grade, and that Jenica’s former hyphenated married

name may always be with her online).

Take as a given that you probably do want an

online presence. Here’s a great paragraph:

Parts of you the person will leak into your online

identity, even if you try to stay professional. And if

you try to stay personal, the professional will leak

in, too. Why? Because we are all whole people, not

just pieces of ourselves, and we bleed across

boundaries. You talk to your family about work,

and you talk at work about your family; online life

is no different. And some of our online tools – no-tably

Facebook – actively promote that blurring of

lines. Facebook makes you WORK at keeping peo-ple

separate. Facebook’s privacy controls are com-plex

and hidden and change constantly. Facebook is

becoming ubiquitous, and setting itself up as a

conduit, a funnel, that gathers all your information

from around the web and feeds it into your profile

page, and so the President of my college, my 19 yr

old cousin in Italy, my college roommate, and my

Library Technology Coordinator all have access to a

baffling array of information about me.

I’m not going to quote or dissect the whole presen-tation;

go read the post yourself, although I’m sure

the actual speech was more fun. Consider, though,

these three paragraphs from “ the ugly” section of

online presence:

I was told, for example, by another library director,

that I would never have a leadership position in an

academic library if I continued blogging and shar-ing

so much of my true thoughts about the profes-sion

and our daily work, and about my own daily

life online. He seemed terribly threatened by the

idea that librarians in leadership positions would

speak openly about their thoughts; he seemed to

feel that it would threaten the power structure,

challenge the status quo, and generally leave a lead-er

vulnerable to … something.

That was three years ago. I’m proud to have proven

that director wrong, because I think transparency

and communication are the cornerstone of a strong

information exchange, and I’m proud to continue

contributing to that. But I did make changes to how

I approached my online identity after the conversa-tion

because it was clear that the leadership of the

profession was not ready for what I wanted to

share. And it was clear to me that I was going to

have to wait. I dug in my heels, made changes I

wasn’t happy with, and said to myself, “ I can wait

this out.” Someday, one of three things will happen:

1, all of those cranky old bastards will retire. 2, I

will outgrow my youthful rebellion, or 3, the inter-net

will change dramatically and rapidly and my

stand on this issue will become irrelevant.

I suspect answer number 3.

Rogers, with whom I frequently agree and frequent-ly

argue, makes a number of good points about the

lessons she’s learned and that others should learned.

I leave most of them to you, but I think she’s got

one that needs to be repeated, even if it’s not univer-sally

applicable: As a profession, librarians aren’t

really ready for online identities— and need to be.

Great post, with lots of stuff I haven’t men-tioned.

I’m in some ways a reluctant online partici-pant,

and I’m nearly twice Rogers’ age, but I agree

that most people really do need to have online iden-tities—

and to think about what those identities are.

[ W] e’re smart. We’re thoughtful. We can each find

a way to have an authentic online presence we’re

comfortable with, and start to integrate ourselves

into the new information landscape around us.

Sure, it’s scary, and weird, and a bit challenging, and

sort of alienating.

But do it anyway. The view from the top is amazing.

Sounds about right.

Social Networking Best Practices

This post is from “ Miss Information” and appeared

on March 14, 2011 at Closed Stacks. After an intro-duction

from the days when few libraries were in-volved

with social networks, we get this

paragraph— which begins with a falsehood, at least

Cites & Insights October 2011 14

unless this person means “ academic libraries” when

she says “ libraries”:

Just a few years later, almost all libraries have Face-book

pages, and we are figuring out as a profession

just how we’d like to use them. Are we engaging

with our community on these pages, asking for

feedback? Are we promoting programs? What ex-actly

are these pages for?

I am nearly certain that most public libraries do not

have active Facebook pages. I am pretty nearly cer-tain

that there’s no simple answer to that last ques-tion.

The post has six numbered paragraphs. I’ll

quote the boldface portion for each one, with

[ summaries] if I think they’re useful:

 Have a personality. [ Don’t just post events;

post what might be interesting.]

 Ask questions, interact.

 Act like a person. [ She seems to be saying

that the library— which is to say, whoever

controls the library’s Facebook page— should

respond to Facebook friends’ updates and

comments as the library. Maybe.]

 Make your followers feel like the in- crowd.

[ Send Facebook information before you share

it elsewhere. Really?]

 Keep an eye on what the most people inter-act

with. [“ Keep doing what works.”]

 Expand. [ Facebook’s not enough— she now

has “ a Foursquare, a Gowalla, a newspaper

column, a local cable television show…”]

I wonder about a couple of these, but I haven’t really

started going through several hundred samples of

tweets and updates yet. And, in one of those blog

mysteries, there are “ two responses,” of which one

appears to exist.

Which social network should I use as a librarian?

Phil Bradley asks this provocative question in a

piece that appeared some time recently on Phil

Bradley’s website. ( I tagged it on August 23, 2011; I

can’t find a datestamp on the article itself.) I’m

nervous about discussing Bradley pieces— we seem

to misunderstand one another in some fundamental

way, or maybe it’s just that I shouldn’t be critiquing

someone of Bradley’s status— but this is a good

piece, even if it does wholly ignore one social net-work

that more than 700 librarians find worthwhile.

He was inspired to write the article by Google+:

Sure, it was new and exciting, so we all signed up

for it because, well, it's Google's latest attempt at

social networking, so we all had to take a look.

What most of us did was then write an initial post

something along the lines of ' OK, yet another social

network to look at', with an existing element of

despair. Unlike Twitter, where many people's first

tweet would be something like ' I'm trying out Twit-ter',

with an overtone of curiosity and interest.

What we then found were all of our friends who

would update their Facebook or Twitter status with

' I'm trying out Google+'. At some point something

has to give, doesn't it. So let's start by looking at the

major networks, and seeing just how useful they

are, and what you use them for, before trying to

work out how to dump one or more of them, or at

least use them differently!

He discusses Twitter for news, LinkedIn for jobs “ and

discussions” and Facebook for, well, Facebook.

They’re all good, down- to- earth, funny discussions;

you’ll find them worth reading, even if you don’t al-ways

agree with Bradley. Then there’s “ Google+ the

game changer”—“ the big stick that’s stirring every-thing

and everyone up.” He mentions others, but

mostly just Flickr and a couple of specialty networks.

Ah, but then comes the real payoff:

It's really easy to base your decision entirely on

your personal interests. The simple answer is just to

say ' Facebook for friends, LinkedIn for professional

discussions, Twitter for news and Google+ because

errr, it's Google. It's a tempting thought, isn't it.

Quick and easy decision made then - delete a few

people here, add a few people there and you're

done. Or, if you want to get really serious, don't

bother with Google+ until everyone else uses be-cause

until everyone else uses it there's no point in

changing is there?

The problem is that there's two ways of using social

media, when you start to think about it. If all that

you're interested in personal stuff, go right ahead

and make a choice such as the one above. However,

as librarians, we should have an interest that trans-cends

that. We need to look at social networks in

rather different ways, and as such, we need to be

more closely involved with them than your average

( because librarians are never average!) web user.

Over the page I'll go into rather more detail.

That second page discusses social networks as

search resources and continues from there— this is

an extended article. I don’t think I need to comment

on the second page; it’s worth reading and thinking

about. The third page is on “ solving the problem” of

network overload.

Portions of Bradley’s conclusions:

So, at long last I've reached what I regard as a good

answer for the question ' which social network should

I use?' You should use all of them - or at least as many

of them as you have found valuable. Make use of any

bookmarklets to add pages that you find useful, and to

Cites & Insights October 2011 15

alert your followers, groups, circles or what have you.

Monitor the activity from arms length whenever pos-sible,

and only go to the resource( s) when there's an

absolute need. Try and incorporate everything into a

single tool if possible, or failing that, make sure that

what you add into one resource can be quickly trans-ported

across to another.

I'm sorry to add this last section in, but I think it's

important that I do. Proactive use of social media

networks is not a nice add- on, or a thing to spare a

few minutes on a week. You can get away without a

media presence for only so long and those days are

fast becoming numbered. The more you can like,

+ 1, and the more people you can follow, have fol-lowing

you, and add to networks spread across re-sources

such as Delicious or Slideshare, the more

authority you will have. This will benefit you, your

organisation and your users…

The last portion, and much of what precedes it and

argues the need for ( all?) librarians to be recognized

as authority figures in online communities, is one of

those areas where my worldview is simply differ-ent—

and Bradley may well be right. Go read the

article; make up your own mind. And remember

that FriendFeed really hasn’t disappeared yet, alt-hough

it’s becoming invisible to the Gurus of Social

Media like Robert Scoble and Friends.

The changing professional conversation

If I have qualms about including Phil Bradley’s ex-cellent

thoughts in one of these essays ( not because

of what he’s saying but because of our apparent dis-agreements),

I have no qualms about almost wind-ing

up this essay with Meredith Farkas— now on the

Left Coast and still one of the most thoughtful, de-lightful

and level- headed librarians on the online

scene. This piece appeared August 23, 2011 at In-formation

Wants To Be Free.

Farkas is on Twitter a lot more than I am: “ li-brarianmer”

has 2,291 followers, follows 376 people

( what a great ratio!) and, as of this writing, has

4,700 tweets. She has found Twitter useful profes-sionally

and personally: “ In spite of what people

might say about its value, I have gotten a lot out of

Twitter professionally.”

But if I try to recall those conversations, that great

piece of advice, or that link to that article that

someone posted to Twitter maybe a year ago, I usu-ally

find myself at a dead- end. While Twitter can be

a great medium for having conversations with

many, many knowledgeable and interesting people,

I am frustrated by the ephemeral nature of those

conversations. I was working on creating slides for

a presentation yesterday, and I remembered that a

friend had posted a link on Twitter to an infograph-ic

that would have been really useful to me, but it

was a long time ago and would have been nearly

impossible to find. I ended up searching Google for

over 20 minutes before I finally put in the right

keywords and found a blog post that included the

link I was looking for.

Sure, there are workarounds, but it’s not easy… and,

as Farkas says, maybe it’s OK that “ Twitter mimics

the real world, where we don’t record our conversa-tions

and have to rely on our memory to recall what

was said.”

But it’s not just Twitter. Very few of us are only hav-ing

conversations in one space. Twitter. FriendFeed.

Google Plus. Facebook. I have friends in all of those

and while some are friends in all of those spaces,

many of them I can only interact with in one of

them. I have given up on FriendFeed because I just

don’t have the time ( and I never got into Google

Plus), but I know I am missing meaningful interac-tions

with friends I care deeply about. But who can

be everywhere? Is there anyone who can have

meaningful interactions with their networks in all

of those spaces? I find that difficult to imagine. And

who wants to have to go to four different places to

have conversations? Do you post the same things to

all of them?

It’s a shame that Farkas has dropped FriendFeed. I

do see her point, however, and she cites another

person who’s troubled by the dispersal of online

conversation.

I’ve been blogging for nearly seven years now and

my blog is an amazing record of my changing inter-ests,

views and more. It’s also a great record —

through comments and trackbacks — of the con-versations

I’ve had and that others have had about

my ideas. You can really get a sense of the tenor of

conversations around certain topics in the past by

looking at my blog comments. Though there are

certainly things I’d like to delete from that history,

it does represent me at a specific time in my profes-sional

and personal development and I appreciate

having that window into the “ me” of two, four, or

six years ago. And how many times have I gone

back to a post of mine it for ideas for an article or a

presentation?

Not that blogging isn’t distributed, but it’s at least

mostly findable. “ With comments and trackbacks, it

still is relatively easy to follow the thread of a con-versation

that happened many years ago across the

blogosphere. This is something we lost when we

jumped into the stream. And maybe that’s ok most

of the time, but there are moments when we might

like a record of those conversations; where what we

Cites & Insights October 2011 16

feel we ( or others) are writing about or linking to is

significant.”

Farkas has found blog posts quoted in peer-reviewed

articles; I think I have also, although I’m

nowhere near as quotable as Farkas. That’s im-portant

to her as a tenure- track librarian; I think

blog posts do play a significant role in the profes-sion’s

development. Can streaming conversations in

various social networks do as well?

I know it’s futile to argue for a return to blogging as

the primary means of professional conversation in

social media. But I think it’s valuable to consider

what we lose by replacing blogging with stream-based

social media ( not supplementing, but replac-ing).

A loss of control, of history, of scholarly rele-vance

and perhaps of deeper and more meaningful

discussions…. There are things I post to Twitter that

I think others might like to know about that I don’t

feel merit an entire blog post. Twitter has a lot of ad-vantages

over blogs for a lot of things. But it is not an

adequate replacement for the kind of thoughtful

conversations one can have via blogs. There were a

lot of blogs that I loved years ago that have become

nearly ( or truly) defunct as their authors have moved

to Twitter or FriendFeed to have the majority of their

professional conversations. I know it’s just the way

things go, but I can’t help but feel some disappoint-ment

that it’s the way things are going.

As someone looking to build or maintain a coherent

presence online, I think there is still value to carving

out one’s own space on the Web, rather than just

contributing ephemeral insights through microblog-ging.

There’s a place for both, but, for me, at least, I

want to find a way to centralize and control my con-tribution

to the profession. And I’m just not sure

how to do that with what I write in “ the streams.”

I’d like to think it isn’t either/ or, but I know some

bloggers have largely abandoned their blogs in favor

of networks. Are these the same bloggers who would

have faded away in any case? I don’t know. Am I one

of them? Well, I certainly appear a lot more frequent-ly

on FriendFeed than I do at Walt at Random…

In which I act like I have it all figured out

If some wording at the start of the previous sec-tion—“

I have no qualms about almost winding it

up…”— strikes you as odd, that’s because the “ al-most”

wasn’t there: When I first wrote this essay,

Farkas’ piece was the last one discussed. Then Steve

Lawson had the audacity to post an essay on August

30, 2011 at See Also…, and it’s good enough that I

couldn’t just ignore it. Lawson notes Farkas’ post

and a couple of others and summarizes:

The upshot… is that the authors feel pulled in

many different directions by all the social media

sites where they are active. They feel it on the

writer’s side, where they feel a lack of control over

things they write and then post on sites that they

don’t own…

Lawson finds that he’s less worried than he used to

be about lack of control and about finding and re-locating

interesting stuff you read, and although he’s

not usually in the advice business, he makes an ex-ception:

“ So here’s what I do, or what I would do if I

were still more worried about this problem of frag-mentation–

your mileage may vary.”

His five steps— the italicized lead sentences and

my [ paraphrases] of his expansion:

 Blog more. [ If you have something interesting

to say, blog it— don’t just tweet. “ Let Twitter

or Google+ or whatever be your first draft of

your cool idea and the blog post be the se-cond

draft.”]

 Blog less. [ Edit your posts, cutting 25% to

75% of the words.]

 Ignore almost everything. [ He uses Friend-

Feed and subscribes to about 20 blogs—“ And

I mostly ignore everything else.” But read the

whole comment.]

 Keep everything else in one place forever. [ He

used to use del. icio. us and now uses

Evernote. “ You don’t have to ever look at

most of those notes or links ever again. Don’t

groom your folksonomy, don’t spend a mo-ment

wondering if you should keep a link or

cull it. Keep it. Back it up. Space is cheap.” I

use Diigo, and I tend to agree.]

 Don’t delete your accounts. “ Just trust me on

this one. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

There are no comments on the post. It’s generally

good advice. I’m a disaster on his second point,

which doesn’t mean it’s wrong— but I’m getting to

appreciate the fifth one. I don’t go to LinkedIn hard-ly

ever, but my account’s still open. If I stopped go-ing

to Google+, I’d leave the account… and so on.

Conclusions

Grand conclusions? I don’t have any, although I

suppose you could take these as points worth not-ing:

 I don’t know if it’s mandatory for a serious

library professional to be active on one or

more social networks, but it’s certainly getting

there— and if you’re not already retired, I’d

Cites & Insights October 2011 17

say it’s silly and counterproductive to avoid

them entirely.

 It. Is. Simply. Not. True. that all libraries or

“ almost all” libraries are on Facebook. Period.

Full stop. False. I doubt that it will ever be

true; there are just too many libraries, here

and elsewhere, that barely have the resources

to stay open a few hours a week.

 It’s certainly useful to maintain a coherent

presence on all the social networks where you

want to be a single persona— and it’s probably

silly to think that you can maintain fully sep-arate

personas that will never be linked.

 Maybe you should be everywhere, but that

way may lie madness, at least for some of us.

 Blogs still rank high on the semi- permanence

scale, and it may be unfortunate that conver-sations

seem to happen less often in blog

comments. It’s not the end of the world, and

it’s ( fortunately) not the end of conversations.

 Oh, and FriendFeed is still around. As of 3: 10

pm ( PDT) on September 17, 2011, the LSW

group on FriendFeed has 726 subscribers. It’s

open for more. It won’t overwhelm you. It’s Ste-ve’s

primary professional network. Mine too.

T& QT Retrospective

Far- Away Services with

Strange Sounding Names

Remember Cuil? A little more than three years ago,

it was all the rage— a new search engine developed

by ex- Googlers using “ a form of data mining to

group Web pages by content.” Cuil started up on

July 28, 2008, claiming to have a larger index than

any other search engine— 120 billion web pages at

the time. The company was hot stuff: It raised $ 33

million in venture capital.

Back then, I printed out leadsheets from inter-esting

discussions of Cuil, but somehow never got

around to putting them together or discarding them.

Looking at them now— eight of them— I see just to

what extent Cuil was a two- day wonder: Five of the

items are from July 28, 2008; two are from July 29;

and one laggard item is from August 1, 2008. It

turns out I also tagged one item on April 14, 2010.

What did library folk and a few others have to say

about this wonderful new search engine at the time?

Now what’s cooler than being Cuil?

That was Chris Zammarelli at Libraryola on July 28,

2008— and I can’t provide a link because Libraryola

has gone the way of Cuil, although without burning

through $ 33 million. Zammarelli did an ego search

on Cuil, with pretty dismal results.

Of the first 11 results displayed:

Four of the results were dead links;

Two of the results were the same link;

Four of the results were results older than January

2008;

Two of the results displayed photos that were irrel-evant

to the links they were attached to.

There’s more— but I can’t discuss it, since I only

printed the first page. ( Libraryola is still around—

but now it’s all in some Cyrillic language, other than

ads, and translating the first couple of paragraphs

suggests that it’s a typical ad landing page.)

Cuil Launches— Can This Search Start- Up Really

Best Google?

Danny Sullivan posted this on July 28, 2008 at

search engine land. That’s the natural question, espe-cially

for Sullivan’s site.

Can any start- up search engine “ be the next

Google?” Many have wondered this, and today’s

launch of Cuil ( pronounced “ cool”) may provide

the best test case since Google itself overtook more

established search engines. Cuil provides what ap-pears

to be a comprehensive index of the web, of-fers

a unique display presentation, and emerges at a

time when people might be ready to embrace a

quality “ underdog” service.

It’s a thorough discussion, noting Cuil’s “ impressive

pedigree” of founders, listing the four major areas it

claimed to distinguish itself ( big web index, unique

relevance algorithm, unique results display, privacy)

and discussing each of those.

Given that Google and Bing each now probably

have many times the indexed pages that Cuil had—

and that neither one mentions the index size— it’s in-teresting

to get Sullivan’s immediate response to Cuil’s

claim to index three times as many pages as Google:

Sigh. Yes, size matters. You want to have a compre-hensive

collection of documents from across the

web. But having a lot of documents doesn’t mean

you are most relevant.

That’s followed by a lengthy self- quote from Sep-tember

2005 ( when Google stopped mentioning its

size). He found the whole discussion of size dis-heartening

and pointless. Sullivan also pokes at the

improved- relevance claim at some length, noting

Cites & Insights October 2011 18

that Cuil seemed to be using popularity despite its

claims to do otherwise.

The display difference— well, if you’re one of

those who likes multicolumn sets of paragraphs ra-ther

than a nice column of results, you would have

loved Cuil. Oh, and Cuil suggested search topics as

you typed— which some of us still don’t much care

for. Finally, Cuil claimed it wasn’t logging IP infor-mation

on searches. Sullivan didn’t seem to think

this mattered.

The final section of a long discussion ( one that

sometimes feels like an apologia for Google) is “ Will

Cuil Succeed?” Briefly, Sullivan thinks it could “ pick

up a little share, maybe a point or two,” but that it

was unlikely to be a Google- beater, or even a Mi-crosoft-

or Yahoo!- beater.

Not so Cuil

That headline was used a lot on and after July 28,

2008, but in this case I’m looking at Doug Johnson’s

post at The Blue Skunk Blog. Johnson did the same

thing as Zammarelli— well, wouldn’t you? He ran an

ego search. Of course, “ Doug Johnson” isn’t the

most unusual name in the world. He found the first

page of results “ let’s say, interesting.” I see a maga-zine-

format page with 11 items. The first is a Wik-ipedia

article on Doug Johnson, keyboardist for

Loverboy. The second, third, fifth, and ninth are

about the library Johnson. Others are for various

sports- related Johnsons and one media person—

and, last on the page, an odd price- comparison link.

Johnson’s comments?

While I did like the Lover Boy implication and that 3

of the first 10 results were related to me, none was a

direct link to either my blog or website. And the pic-tures

are a mess. Who are these people? Not me. The

little graphic of the bottle comes from my column on

the Education World website but is placed next to

the hit on Wikipedia that lists other Doug Johnsons.

( Yes, there are quite a number of us out there.)

While one of them looks like a direct link to his

website, I’ll take his word for the picture mess, es-pecially

since Zammarelli found the same problem.

Johnson offers a screen shot from the same search

done on Google; that one has his website first, his

blog second. After that come sports figures and oth-ers.

No photos and much briefer results.

Johnson doesn’t really offer a critique, other

than the picture problem.

Cuil

Terry Ballard kept the title simple for this July 28,

2008 post at Librarian on the edge. Ballard wanted to

see some serious competition for Google:

It's always been my fondest hope that someone

would come along and give the Big G a real taste of

competition. I don't have anything against Google -

I just think that competition will help bring out the

best in them. Naturally, when I heard about this on

the morning news, I couldn't wait to try it out.

Of course he tried an ego search— and wasn’t im-pressed

with the results. The drill- down feature on

the right side suggested as a subtopic “ People from

St. Louis,” and Ballard isn’t from St. Louis.

Most amusingly, they add pictures to each page de-scription.

In the case of my entries, there are doz-ens

of pictures of somebody else named Terry

Ballard. Their formula really should ensure that the

picture comes from the page they are describing.

Enough other people were interested that their

servers were swamped in the afternoon. My verdict

is that I love the concept but the product isn't quite

ready for prime time.

By now, a theme seems to be emerging: The presen-tation

is interesting ( although I’d find it frustrating

if I wanted to plow through results)— but you

shouldn’t add pictures to every excerpt unless you

know enough to add the right pictures.

Wayne Bivens- Tatum used the same title for his

own post— a day later, July 29, 2008, at Academic

Librarian. After trying a couple of searches, “ so far I

don’t see why I would use this much.”

I searched “ academic librarian,” for example. Of the

eleven hits on the first page, four were to this blog.

It’s nice to know I have such “ authority,” but I

thought four was about three too many. Three of

the four hits had pictures of people beside them. I

have no idea who the people are, but they’re defi-nitely

not me. I also searched “ bivens- tatum.” The

hits are all relevant, and there’s a nice spread, but

again the pictures have nothing to do with me.

He also wonders about the relevance ranking:

If the top left hit is the most relevant, then appar-ently

a Shakespeare authorship website I made in

library school is the most relevant web page related

to me. Maybe they know it’s the first web page I ev-er

created, so it has a certain sentimental value.

This paragraph sums up part of my problem with

Cuil’s whole approach:

The layout is presumably to prevent the need to

scroll, but I would like an option in the preferences

to have more hits on the first page. When I’m look-ing

for information, I want more text, rather than a

Cites & Insights October 2011 19

tastefully arranged page with images scattered

across like knick- knacks. I might like the search re-sults

better if I wasn’t ego- cuiling, but I don’t think

I’d like the layout.

cuil – search the largest web index

That title, on a July 29, 2008 post by Michael at

infodoodads, surprises me a little: It takes Cuil’s

claim at face value. The writeup notes a “ startling

black background” for the search- entry page and

says that bigger is nice, but “ it does little good if the

information is poorly matched to the search.”

Michael’s ego search yielded his staff page in the

first page of results— but it’s an old staff page, yield-ing

a dead link. He liked the way results are pre-sented

and didn’t seem too concerned with the

image- match problem, even though he does note

that, on a second try, the “ thumbnail” for his staff

page is “ from an image not found on my page.” His

conclusion? “ Interesting. Give it a shot!”

This is the first of the posts checked that has

comments— and the first of those is particularly in-teresting:

From someone named Mike who blogged

at Buttermouth, and who admitted to being a

“ Google enthusiast and loyalist” ( really?)— and who

clearly doesn’t understand that “ it’s” means “ it is,”

not “ belonging to it”— the assertion is that Cuil

found the old staff page because it only searches

through websites established before June 2007. In

the linked post, he calls Cuil a “ 33 million dollar

flop or better yet, the ‘ Waterworld’ of online ven-tures”

and flatly says the company “ is built on

FALSE marketing and inferior results.” He also

claims that the index size is a lie, based on a metric

that is, in my opinion, nonsense.

Librarians Exploring Cuil

That’s the title for a Daniel A. Freeman post on August

1, 2008 at the ALA TechSource Blog— although it turns

out Freeman also posted “ A ‘ Cuil’ New Way to Search”

on July 28, 2008. That first post has an interesting core

paragraph, which I’ll quote without comment:

Cuil is of particular interest to librarians because its

new features attempt to provide a more nuanced,

interactive set of search results. In other words,

Cuil tries to emulate the experience of a more pro-fessional

search, the kind you might get with the

assistance of a librarian. For years we’ve been ques-tioning

effect of search engines on librarians, and

due to some recent events, many of us may be wary

of a search engine developing such broad power.

Personally, I have trouble seeing the launch of Cuil

as a detriment— call me naïve, but I think there will

always be a place for reference services. Cuil, like

Google before it, will probably just become another

tool we can use professionally.

The August 1 post is interesting because of what

seems like a defensive attitude:

In the culture of the Internet, the sound byte and

24/ 7 cable news networks, as soon as something is

praised, it gets torn down and trounced. This process

has accelerated so quickly that it sometimes seems

like the two things are happening simultaneously.

This has definitely been the case with Cuil As soon as

Cuil developed a mainstream media buzz, the main-stream

media was there to kill the buzz, declaring it

“ No Threat to Google”. As anyone who watches cable

news knows, it can be tough to have a conversation

when all you’ve got is two diametrically opposed sides

screaming their heads off at one another.

By comparison, Freeman finds librarians’ discussion

“ a lot more rational and down to earth.” Sure, it’s

good that librarians were exploring the service be-fore

attacking it out of hand— but the commentaries

I saw ( and cite above) are negative about Cuil be-cause

of the results. And I really do wonder about

this final paragraph:

Google is still the unrivaled leader among search

engines, and I suspect that probably won’t change

for a long time. But is Cuil a big deal? Absolutely.

In a time when conglomeration and monopoliza-tion

limit so many of our choices, Cuil is a remind-er

that as long as there is freedom of ideas, there

will be freedom of choice. It doesn’t matter if Cuil is

a threat to Google or not. As the first high- profile

effort to try to improve upon Google’s core model,

Cuil matters.

It’s hard to remember the state of the art in July

2008, but I thought that both Yahoo and Microsoft

( I guess it wasn’t called Bing back then) were chal-lenging

Google’s model. I certainly agree that mo-nopolization

isn’t great ( and wish more librarians

would seem concerned about single- supplier fu-tures,

rather than welcoming and pushing towards

them), and I use Bing as my default search engine.

Cuil CEO Rips Users, Asks Them To Please Shut Up

Now— ignoring hundreds of other items from the

second half of 2008— we jump forward to April 14,

2010 and this Michael Arrington piece at

TechCrunch. Arrington notes what happened with

Cuil: Its early poor performance yielded not only

criticism but poor continuing use. Come 2010, the

company was launching “ cpedia,” an attempt to cre-ate

“ automated articles about queries.” Arrington

found the results— which, of course, now yield dead

links—“ sort of strange, but as an experiment it cer-

Cites & Insights October 2011 20

tainly have legs.” Having seen other attempts to au-to-

generate articles or useful pages, I’d start out

skeptical and probably get more so. In any case,

that’s not the heart of this item.

This is: After some negative comments on the

new attempt, Cuil’s CEO wrote the kind of blog post

a CEO should never write. It begins “ Wow, the

haters are out in force today” and adds this swipe at

active web writers:

First up, Cpedia does very badly with people who

write much more on the web than people write

about them. Given the 1 billion people on the web

one might think this unlikely, but it happens. When

we try to summarize the information mentioning

these people, we run into a problem. Almost none

of it is about them. It’s about random things they

have opined on. Dave Parrack, Farhad Manjoo,

Louis Gray, I’m talking about you.

He continues, noting how Cpedia builds its so-called

“ articles”— assembling sentences from other

sources, with links— and offers a truly unusual

commentary on people’s assertion that the Cpedia

results are lousy:

A third complaint was that our machines did not

seem to really understand the material. People

complained of rote recitation, rather than an in-depth

understanding. It was ever so. As a child I

was made to learn Irish. The Christian Brothers be-lieved

in a Platonic theory of learning, where all

knowledge was recollection, so they would beat us

with leather straps until we “ remembered” our Irish

vocabulary ( this actually works). I, however, could

never get full marks, no matter how well I remem-bered,

because my Irish, while technically correct,

had no “ blas”.

Blas, for those of you not from the West of Ireland,

is the polish a hurley gets from the sliothar when

used by a player of unusual skill, a patina on the

surface of the wood testifying to the depth of talent

of the player that had used the stick. Fair enough.

Cpedia does not have blas – it’s a machine.

Huh? Then comes the claim as to what Cpedia actu-ally

does:

Cpedia is not an attempt to build something that

knows all current knowledge and can write a mean-ingful

essay on any topic – that would be a stretch

goal. Rather, we are trying solve a much simpler

problem. When people search the web for infor-mation,

a lot of times the first few results do not

contain all the information there is about the sub-ject.

Almost no one can continue through all the

other pages, because they are almost all regurgita-tions

of the same material, with perhaps a few extra

nuggets. Cpedia processes all the pages about a top-ic,

and extracts the unique ideas.

That would be impressive— if a computer could ac-tually

do it. Could it? Could Cpedia?

Then things get strange at the very end:

The promise of Cpedia is that you will find infor-mation

that you might otherwise miss. It often

works for me. Your mileage will vary. If you find

that the page about you is completely random, the

only advice I can offer is a poem my six year old re-cited

at breakfast:

A wise old owl sat in an oak,

The more he heard, the less he spoke,

The less he spoke, the more he heard,

Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird.

In short: If you try Cpedia and the results are crap-py,

shut up about it.

What happened with Cuil? According to Wik-ipedia,

it reached a peak of 0.2% of web traffic in

late July 2008— just after startup— and dropped to

0.02% by Septmeber 2008— and down to 0.005% in

October 2008. Remarkably, it lasted until September

17, 2010, at which point it was shut down, with

employees informed they wouldn’t be paid. ( As al-ways,

the Discussion page for Wikipedia’s article

may be more interesting than the article, with many

of the comments coming on July 28, 2008.)

Who cares?

Why spend close to 3,000 words on a one- week

phenomenon that’s long since disappeared? I think

it’s instructive to look back at things like this now

and then. You may disagree. In this particular case,

I’d argue that Cpedia was nonsense from the begin-ning—

and that Cuil’s display confused æsthetics

with usability, making it an attractive nuisance. On

the other hand, the image problem was just plain

faulty design and operation: Insisting on an image

with every search result is nearly sure to lead to mis-leading

outcomes.

Basically, Cuil just didn’t work very well. The

results display took too much space. The images

actually got in the way— they didn’t help find the

right results because they were wrong so much of

the time. And the index itself was apparently old.

Add to that operational problems ( some sites found

that Cuil’s crawler was causing problems, many

people found that they couldn’t get to a second page

of results), and it’s scarcely surprising that Cuil

cooled off very rapidly.

Cites & Insights October 2011 21

Then there’s Knol

Remember Knol? I do. It was an interesting attempt

to provide a signed alternative to Wikipedia— that

is, articles by identified experts with clear writing

voices, not the bland, “ neutral” assemblages that

Wikipedia articles tend toward.

It came from Google— and that might have

been a weakness as much as a strength. Oddly

enough, the timing’s similar: Knol opened for public

use on July 23, 2008. By January 2009, it was up to

100,000 articles— but, since articles can be advertor-ials

and there can be many articles ( by different au-thors)

on the same topic, that may not mean much.

It’s Google, so it requires real names as Google de-fines

them ( an interesting issue), and it uses CC BY

licenses ( although individual authors can substitute

BY- NC licenses). Interestingly, Knol uses “ nofollow”

on outgoing links— so that Knol links won’t affect

search engine rankings.

I looked at Knol early on. I liked the idea in

some ways— I believe the required anonymity and

deliberate lack of writing style both damage Wikipe-dia’s

usefulness— but I didn’t sign up, at least partly

because Knol required verification with a credit card

or phone number, partly because I felt no need to

attempt “ authoritative” articles and never lacked

ways to get my own personal writing out there.

Knol is still around— but there have been no

new announcements or release notes since Decem-ber

2009. The address is knol. google. com. When I

checked the site on September 2, 2011, “ What’s

new?” articles were edited as recently as 19 minutes

and one hour previously— but they were all editing

changes. I’d say Knol isn’t in the public eye, but

clearly still serves many special audiences. Notably,

it’s still explicitly marked beta, more than three

years after it became publicly available— unlike

Google+, which lost the beta mark almost immedi-ately.

I don’t see any indication of total number of

articles; that may be just as well, given that an arti-cle

can be almost anything. ( Checking Librarianship

as a search, one of the articles is— well, it’s a person-al

webpage. The only connection to librarianship

that I can see is that the article includes a list of li-braries

holding a particular title— and, probably the

reason for the result, citation of an article in Issues

in Science and Technology Librarianship.

Exploring a little further

Knol is still there: That much is clear. Alexa doesn’t

show traffic statistics for the site ( which is a sub-domain

of Google); apparent alternative names are,

as I’ve grown to expect, parking pages or dead.

A search for the phrase “ library 2.0” yields only a

page in some Arabic language. Without the quotes,

59 sites show up— the Arabic site first, a long and

odd article “ Knol Citation Goes Mainstream” second,

and an odd mix of sites after that— including “ Es-senes:

Did they believe in Jesus,” several iPhone-related

items, still more self- references (“ Knol First &

Second Year Odyssey” by the same authors) and

many more. ( The “ odyssey” says that page views

passed one million in 2010, with “ about 110” new

articles. There’s clearly a missing qualifier here; those

stats cannot be for all of Knol. Articles in English that

are actually about Library 2.0? I didn’t find any.

To try to get a slightly better sense of the site’s

current nature and activity, I tried a few things:

 Looked at “ top authors” in English. The first

one, Murry Shohat, has 314,000 views for 22

knols— including “ How to Quickly Write a

Basic Article Review” ( 93,000 views!), “ To-ward

a Pragmatic and Dynamic Knol Library,”

“ Knol Writing Tips,” “ Move that stuff: Pump

Craigslist Ads with Big Pictures” and “ Knol

Help 911.” Oh, and “ The Who’s Who of

Knol,” “ Knol Top Authors with High Page

View and Badges,” “ Knol Site Metrics Reveal

Good, Bad & Ugly” and “ Plagiarism on

Knol.” Sense a theme here? The second one,

Peter Baskerville, has about 140 Knols— and

most of those in the first 20 have fewer than

100 views ( and are very specific accounting

topics). Ah, but here’s one with 13,000 views:

“ Knol— its possibilities.” Indeed… Third,

Jagadeesh M, proclaims himself an SEO.

Fourth— and the first I’ve encountered with

more than one million pageviews— is Krishan

Maggon, a pharmaceutical consultant with

about 168 knols to his credit.

 Let’s look at recent articles in a couple of are-as,

where “ recent” is from August 1 through

August 31, 2011 ( searching on September 2,

2011). “ Librarianship” yields 17. First: “ Pub-lishing

your Scientific, Technical or Medical

manuscript”— which is really “ about” open

access publishing and largely a pitch for

iMedPub, a “ crowdsourcing medical publish-er”

that is not an OASPA member. Second:

“ Resume Guide.” Third: “ Rosetta Stone.” All

the rest: sections of George Peabody’s A- Z

Handbook of the Massachusetts- Born Mer-chant…

Knols that are even slightly relevant

Cites & Insights October 2011 22

to librarianship: None, as far as I could see.

How about Blu- ray, a fairly popular term? Six-teen

articles— how to rip Blu- rays for the

Mac, another two or three how- to items, an

ad knol for a wedding video firm, and a

whole bunch of knols by Anonymous, rich

with odd wording and legal issues.

 Well, how about Open Access? Narrowing

the search to exclude the phrase within con-tents

( as opposed to title, summary and other

elements), I get down from 237 to 52. It’s an

odd mix, with a fair number of items from

PLoS, iMedPub and other OA publishers, and

nothing I’d consider to be a useful independ-ent

discussion.

 Did I mention odd wording? How’s this for an

article title: “ Epson 8350 – the quite finest

Epson that I in fact recommended” with the

following abstract:

I purchased the Epson 8350 to alternate a five- 12

months- age- old Sony 720p projector in my family

space. Like all projectors, your app and rewards

will rely strongly on your own individual dwelling

possibility and lighting illnesses. My space is not

going to be a devoted theater area, and has some

ambient lgt through the evening.

Maybe that’s a good place to stop. Clearly knol is

being used by some medical folks and scientists.

Equally clearly, it’s rife with articles that wouldn’t

make the cut anywhere else, except— maybe— blogs.

“ Lighting illnesses”? Authoritative, perhaps, but not

for me. ( This particular writer has 15 knols to

date— with a total of 375 pageviews. The one with

the most pageviews, “ lg bd590 best price,” is fasci-nating—

and since it’s published under a CC BY li-cense,

I can quote as much as I like as long as I

credit wester taslim. Here’s the summary.)

Introducing the particular major Blu- Ray Disc ™

Individual in which may possibly merchant at the

same time since movement! The particular precise

BD590 gives someone the particular really very best

with all the Net as well as wi- fi access in order to be

able to NetCast, nonetheless that’s not necessarily

each and every. Obtaining any 250GB difficult hard

drive, almost all of the desired discretion may pos-sibly

have a home in 1 area, allowing one to right

away recognize fresh audio, images, residence mov-ies

at the same time since LARGE CLASSIFICA-TION

VOD by means of Vudu ™ . Whenever 1

gizmo may possibly offer this kind of distinct nu-merous

residence discretion selections, an individ-ual

truly must find out — is this kind of the

particular Blu- Ray Disc ™ Individual, as well as sev-eral

point significantly far better?

Honestly. I can’t make up stuff like that. Reading the

whole article, I honestly couldn’t be sure exactly

what was being reviewed, although it seemed to be a

Blu- ray player with a hard disk.

Offtopic Perspective

50 Movie Comedy

Kings, Part 1

After enduring the Legends of Horror megapack,

this is a nice change of pace— fifty comedies, mostly

very old, many fairly short. The first comedy 50-

pack was revealing and frequently entertaining; I’m

hoping this one does as well.

Disc 1

Colonel Effingham’s Raid, 1946, b& w. Irving Pichel

( dir.), Charles Coburn, Joan Bennett, William Ey-the,

Allyn Joslyn, Elizabeth Patterson. 1: 12 [ 1: 10].

The setting is a Georgia town of 30,000 in 1940,

where a good- ole- boys group of genially corrupt

politicians has run things for generations, thanks to

an apathetic population ( less than 20% bother to

vote). There’s only one party, and the town still

smarts because it didn’t get burned down on the

way to Atlanta in the Recent Unpleasantness. Into

this, a long- time Army Colonel ( born in this town)

retires and Takes an Interest.

The narrator is the Colonel’s young cousin ( who

never knew him), a bright young reporter on one of

two daily newspapers who doesn’t feel the need to

cause trouble— he goes along without much

thought. There’s also the pretty young society edi-tor,

daughter of the former editor/ owner of the pa-per

( now part of a chain run out of Atlanta).

The basis for the plot: The power group wants to

rename the Confederate Square to honor a former

mayor, well known for taking the town for as much

as he could. The Colonel, who’s wangled a war col-umn,

takes umbrage and makes a counter- proposal,

to plant a circle of 13 trees to honor… well, you

know, this is the unrepentant South. The good ole

boys figure to play this to their advantage: They’ll

plant the trees, but also build a new courthouse

with, of course, the mayor’s brother- in- law getting

the contract. The Colonel doesn’t see a need to re-place

the 150- year- old courthouse, brings in his

friend who’s the retired head of the Army Corps of

Engineers to offer a second opinion, and things

take off from there.

Cites & Insights October 2011 23

It’s amusing and well played, nothing terribly serious

but good fun. The motivations of the narrator are a

little odd: After he sees all of the society editor’s

calves and two inches of thigh, he discovers she has

legs— and this brings him to join the Georgia Na-tional

Guard ( which then gets called off to WWII)

and become an advocate for reform. Truly. There are

also a couple of mildly amusing running gags. Some-times

distorted music on the soundtrack, but a very

good print with rich tonal range. I’ll give it $ 1.25.

Country Gentlemen, 1936, b& w. Ralph Staub ( dir.),

Ole Olsen, Chic Johnson, Joyce Compton, Lila Lee,

Pierre Watkin, Donald Kirke. 1: 06 [ 0: 56].

How you feel about this one depends mostly on

how you like shtick and the duo of Olsen & John-son

( whom I don’t believe I’ve previously encoun-tered).

The two play con artists on the lam with a

bunch of worthless gold- mine bonds who wind up

with an oil- well scheme and… well, it’s mostly an

excuse for a remarkable series of lame jokes. Cer-tainly

fast moving and lots of punch lines; if the

high- pitched laugh of Olsen doesn’t drive you nuts,

you might enjoy this. I’m not sure what the missing

ten minutes might have added. I give it $ 0.75.

Freckles Comes Home, 1942, b& w. Jean Yarbrough

( dir.), Johnny Downs, Gale Storm, Mantan Mo-reland,

Irving Bacon, Bradley Page. 1: 05 [ 0: 59]

A bank robber needs to get out of town, so gets

driven out and takes a bus… where he sits next to a

college kid going home to his 500- person burg,

Fairfield. The bank robber figures this is a great

place to hide out. Ah, but the reason the college

kid’s come home is largely that his pal has done

something incredibly stupid that endangers the

family- run hotel he’s temporarily managing.

That’s the setup. The reality? On one hand, there’s

the ever- charming Gale Storm. On the other, there’s

not much to redeem this flick. I won’t go through

the rest of the plot ( such as it is) or the ethnic-humor

byplay ( featuring Mantan Moreland and

Laurence Criner). Let’s just say that, what with

sound problems and occasional dropouts, I wasn’t

impressed. Would the missing six minutes help?

Well, I dropped off during the last quarter for a few

minutes— it’s really exciting throughout— and when

I rewatched it, it made no difference. At best, and

being very generous, $ 0.75.

Goodbye Love, 1933, b& w. H. Bruce Humberstone

( dir.), Charles Ruggles, Verree Teasdale, Sidney

Blackmer, Phyllis Barry, Ray Walter, Mayo Methot.

1: 07 [ 1: 05]

This one reminds me that comedies, perhaps more

than most genres, are very much creatures of their

time and setting. I’m not sure whether this is a farce

or an odd American version of a bedroom comedy,

but it’s all a little strange— and I suspect Charlie

Ruggles was the chief draw in 1933, given his ec-centric

mannerisms and the credits.

The plot has to do with alimony, “ alimony jail”

( which seems to involve lavish lunches with most

of the inmates dressed to the nines, while other in-mates

scrub floors), assumed identities, stock ma-nipulation,

a businessman finally Discovering his

secretary and… well, I think there’s more. Portions

of the plot seemed mysterious to me, but that may

be my fault. Not really knowing what to make of it,

I’ll give it $ 1.00.

Disc 2

Hay Foot, 1942, b& w. Fred Guiol ( dir.), William

Tracy, Joe Sawyer, James Gleason, Noah Beery Jr.,

Elyse Knox. 0: 48 [ 0: 46]

This wartime B feature is a charmer— fast moving,

funny and with a nice balance of logic and slapstick.

Sgt. Doubleday ( a very young Tracy), a young soldier

who made Sergeant on the basis of his book learning

( and apparent eidetic memory— for text, that is) is

Colonel Barkley’s assistant, disliked by the blowhard

marksmen ( Sawyer and Beery) who don’t care much

for book larnin’. Thanks to some plausible accidents,

Barkley ( Gleason) gets the idea that Doubleday,

who’s gunshy, is an even better sharpshooter than the

two marksmen— while Doubleday’s enchanted by

Barkley’s beautiful daughter. ( This turns out to be

the second in a series of six Hal Roach Studios short

comedies starring Sgt. Doubleday.)

Lots of laughs as the two blowhards get themselves

in trouble as they’re trying to bring down Double-day.

The print’s tonal range is excellent. The per-formances

are all appropriate; Gleason is

particularly good as the slightly pompous Colonel.

There’s one big problem: Just enough print damage

( in the form of missing frames) to make some of

the dialogue hard to follow. Even with that defect

and its short length, this one is an easy $ 1.00

Her Favorite Patient ( orig. Bedside Manner), 1945,

b& w. Andrew L. Stone ( dir.), John Carroll, Ruth

Hussey, Charles Ruggles, Ann Rutherford. 1: 19

We begin with a beautiful young woman stopping to

pick up a sailor who’s on his way to Chicago for 30-

day leave… and then another sailor down the road

and another. She needs to stop off at the little town

she grew up in to say “ Hi” to her uncle, one of two

doctors in town— but the town’s grown a lot and her

uncle’s hoping she’ll stay— she’s also an MD— instead

of taking a research position in Chicago.

Before that happens, she mistakes a test pilot for an

old friend, much to his date’s dismay; this confu-sion

plays out again over a couple of days. What

Cites & Insights October 2011 24

follows is a series of happenstances and subterfuges

with the overall effect of keeping her around… and I

realized partway in that this is really an early ro-mantic

comedy with wartime overtones.

Quite good, all in all, with Charles Ruggles fine as a

slightly bemused and very busy doctor and John

Carroll ( the pilot) and Ruth Hussey ( the woman

doctor) both good, as is a solid supporting cast. One

review calls this “ frothy” and I think that’s both right

and a compliment. I would note that the IMDB list-ing

shows this film as 1: 12, presumably based on da-ta

contributed by someone who viewed a truncated

release. In fact, as the original Variety review makes

clear, the movie originated at the 1: 19 of this print.

Not great, but fun, a good print, and worth $ 1.50.

Affairs of Cappy Ricks, 1937, b& w. Ralph Staub

( dir.), Walter Brennan, Mary Brian, Lyle Talbot,

Frank Shields, Frank Melton, Georgia Cane, Phyllis

Barry, William B. Davidson. 1: 01 [ 0: 56]

Here’s another short B movie with one great virtue

for a comedy: it’s funny. Walter Brennan— playing a

crusty 60- year- old although he was a mere 43 at the

time— is head of a San Francisco shipbuilding

company and has been out of the country for a year

or more. During that time, things have gone to hell

in a handbasket in his home and his company—

with his nemesis, head of an automation company,

ready to take control of his company and become

father- in- law to one of his daughters, while the oth-er

gets divorced.

To try to set things straight, he gets his kids and the

soon- to- be ex- husband, plus his former general

manager and ex- fiancée of the daughter and bossy

mother of the soon- to- be- ex ( who’s taken over the

household and bought enough of the company’s

stock to assure a merger with the automation com-pany)

out on his yacht for a weekend sail… which

turns into an 8- week adventure down to the Marque-sas

( incorrectly labeled “ uninhabited”— I’ve been

there, and at least some of the Marquesas have year-round

residents). At that point, feeling that he’s failed

to get people to straighten up, he stages a shipwreck.

That’s just part of the plot, and there’s plenty of plot

to keep things moving. A fast- paced little film with

a fun cast. Lyle Talbot as the ex- fiancée is excellent,

as is most of the cast. Apparently five minutes are

missing, but I didn’t see any continuity gaps. I

found it thoroughly enjoyable, but since it’s under

an hour I can’t come up with more than $ 1.

All Over Town, 1937, b& w. James W. Horne ( dir.),

Ole Olsen, Chic Johnson, Mary Oward, Harry

Stockwell, Franklin Pangborn, James Finlayson.

1: 03 [ 1: 01]

Another Olsen & Johnson flick, this time with the

two playing Olsen & Johnson, a vaudeville team—

one that’s trying to get a musical- seal act going

while staying in a cheap vaudeville hotel. They get

a tiny check and are overheard in a way that makes

them sound like millionaires; this leads to Putting

On a Show in a jinxed theater; which leads to prob-lems.

Eventually, there’s a murder and, well, lots of

frantic farce.

Basically, this is an extended vaudeville act. I find

the Olsen & Johnson shtick tiresome after a while,

which makes the movie itself a little tiresome. Also,

there’s one key scene where there’s enough missing

footage to scramble the dialogue. All things consid-ered,

I give it $ 0.75.

Niagara Falls, 1941, b& w. Gordon Douglas ( dir.),

Marjorie Woodworth, Tom Brown, Zasu Pitts, Slim

Summerville, Chester Clute. 0: 43.

A shaggy dog story or curiously innocent bedroom

farce, depending on how you look at it— the whole

told as a flashback by a guy about to jump off Sui-cide

Point at Niagara Falls to a peanut vendor ( who

apparently sells peanuts for those who get hungry

on the way down…).

You see, this guy had been dating a farmer’s daugh-ter

for 20 years and finally struck oil, so now he

could afford to marry her. They’re on their way to

their honeymoon and encounter this apparent cou-ple

trying to fix a car alongside the road… Well,

things go on from there. Let’s just say the guy’s a

born meddler, the couple ( who weren’t a couple,

but become one) are charming and it’s all fluffy but

fun, although with few real laughs. It’s also really a

long short subject, too short for even a B movie.

The best I can do is $ 0.75.

Disc 3

Here Comes Trouble, 1948, b& w. Fred Guiol ( dir.), Wil-liam

Tracy, Joe Sawyer, Emory Parnell, Betty Compson,

Joan Woodbury, Beverly Lloyd. 0: 55 [ 0: 50]

“ Filmed in Cinecolor”— but this print’s in black and

white, unfortunately. It’s pretty good slapstick in the

service of a reasonable plot. We have a crusading

newspaper publisher/ editor whose police reporters

keep getting beaten up and quitting and whose

daughter’s in love with a returning serviceman who

was a copyboy at the paper. The father isn’t wild

about the copyboy marrying his daughter… and fig-ures

that promoting him to police reporter might

kill two birds with one stone.

That’s the setup. Add a service buddy of the son

who’s just joined the police force ( and in his case

“ police farce” might be better), the fact that the

criminal mastermind is also the comptroller of the

newspaper, a burlesque queen… and you have a

Cites & Insights October 2011 25

very good, almost 20- minute climactic sequence.

Color would have been better, and this is a short

one, so I’ll say $ 1.00.

Hollywood and Vine, 1945, b& w. Alexis Thurn- Taxis

( dir.), James Ellison, Wanda McKay, June Clyde,

Ralph Morgan, Franklin Pangborn, Leon Belasco,

Emmett Lynn. 0: 58.

A romantic comedy, emphasis on the comedy, with

a surround story that makes no sense. It’s told in

flashbacks from the office of a tycoon, and is sup-posed

to be the story of how he got started— but

there’s not a thing in the picture that suggests the

guy ( who started as proprietor of Pop’s Burgers)

would go anywhere.

The flashback, though, is charming, and that’s 95%

of the picture. It’s the old Hollywood story but with

several cute twists and relies heavily on a remarka-ble

stunt dog. Cute and well played, albeit short

and with an outer plot that doesn’t lead anywhere.

All things considered, including its length, I’ll give

it $ 1.00.

Lost Honeymoon, 1947, b& w. Leigh Jason ( dir.),

Franchot Tone, Ann Richards, Tom Conway, Frances

Rafferty, Clarence Kolb. 1: 11 [ 1: 09]

Somewhere between a B programmer and a feature,

this one’s interesting— part romantic comedy, part

identity confusion, with just a little slapstick

thrown in. The gist: A young woman returns to the

British boarding house she’d formerly stayed in,

knowing that a friend of hers died, leaving two very

young ( twin) children who the landlady’s taking

care of. The woman also knows the friend was a GI

bride in WWII— and apparently the husband has

disappeared to America, with a known city but not

address. She decides to assume the dead mother’s

identity ( modifying her passport) and take the chil-dren

to America to confront the husband.

That’s the setup. Now there’s the apparent hus-band—

a young architect, engaged to the somewhat-shrewish

social- climbing daughter of his boss. He’s

astonished when he gets a cable from the Red Cross

informing him that his wife and children are on

their way, because he’s not aware that he had a wife

and children. But he did have a six- week amnesia

episode during the war, a period of which he re-members

nothing, so maybe…

Everything follows from that, and it’s actually pretty

well done. The ending’s silly, and maybe it had to

be. Not great, not bad. Some missing frames and a

problematic picture at first, so I won’t give it more

than $ 1.25.

The Animal Kingdom, 1932, b& w. Edward H. Grif-fith

( dir.), Ann Harding, Leslie Howard, Myrna Loy,

William Gargan, Ilka Chase. 1: 25.

I guess this is a comedy of manners, and that’s the

only basis on which I can call it a comedy at all.

The primary character is a small- press publisher, a

terrible disappointment to his wealthy father who

wants him to be a Proper Person. The publis