Cites & Insights for March 2010

Cites & Insights 10:3 (March 2010) is now available.

The 26-page issue, PDF as usual (with HTML separates for each essay), includes two essays:

Making it Work: Philosophy and Future (pp. 1-22)

Two clusters--one on the philosophy and values of libraries and the other on high-profile statements on libraries and their future.

Perspective: Writing about Reading 5: Going Down Slow (pp. 22-26)

Slow reading and related topics.

Cites & Insights 10:2 available

Cites & Insights 10:2 (February 2010) is now available.

The 32-page issue (PDF as usual, with individual articles available in HTML, using the links below) includes:

T&QT Perspective: Trends & Forecasts (pp. 1-16)

A heaping helping of trends, forecasts, ghosts of trends past--and deathspotting. (No, this roundup does not include the Midwinter LITA Top Tech Trends--or any other trendiness actually appearing in 2010. Maybe later.)

Perspective: Music, Silence & Metrics (pp. 16-25)

Are the loudness wars mushing up your music? Maybe so. I report on the problem with excessive dynamic compression, some steps being taken to identify and combat the desire of producers to MAKE IT ALL LOUD, and two sets of real-world metrics. If you ever really listen to music, you should care about this issue.

Offtopic Perspective: Mystery Collection Part 1 (pp. 25-32)

Notes on the first six discs in the 250-movie, 60-disc Mystery Collection, including half a dozen Bulldog Drummond flicks, three Dick Tracy--and eight Sherlock Holmes. Here's a mystery: Will I keep doing C&I long enough to review this entire set? That would take us into Volume 14...

Cites ON a Plane 2010: Pre-Midwinter non-issue available

That's right--here's another non-issue for your reading pleasure to and from Midwinter, with (almost) no new material:

Cites ON a Plane 2010

Stuff That Originally Appeared in Cites & Insights - 50 pages

Perspectives ON...

• Conferences in a Time of Limits


• Ethics and Transparency


• Semantics, Reality, Learning and Rockstars


• Disagreement and Discussion (with followup)


• The Middle


• Numeracy, Naïveté, Google & Pew


• The Literature

Note: The links in the bullets are to the original essays, all of which appeared in 2007 and 2008. The essays in Cites ON a Plane 2010 (PDF as usual) have had URLs removed and in some cases been trimmed slightly to make them fit.

Caveats and New Material

While 25 sheets (50 pages, printed duplex) is nothing compared to the paper you'll cope with during Midwinter, this non-issue is primarily intended for ereading. It has bookmarks for the essays and subheadings (but no table of contents), and it does reflow (although how well it reflows...well, that's up to your PDF reader). It supports Adobe Reader's text-to-speech capabilities (strange as they are).

But then, 25 sheets isn't all that much...

This non-issue will disappear on or about January 19, 2010. It might be included in the book version of Volume 10, but it might not (50 pages is a significant chunk of an already-thick volume).

The new material in the issue consists of an introduction and one, count it, one paragraph added as a postscript to the first essay. Here they are, for those of you who wonder but who really aren't planning to download the whole issue:

Ceci N’est Pas Une Édition

Cue Magritte, not spinning in his grave. This is not an ejournal. More precisely, this is not an issue of Cites & Insights and doesn’t carry an ISSN, proper date, volume and issue number, or masthead.

Other than this introduction, footers citing the source of each essay and one very brief update, this is entirely selected reprints—on the theme of the second word of the issue’s non-title: ON.

No table of contents. No HTML separates (those are all readily available). Just a chunk of plane reading (and I’ll try to make sure the PDF is reflowable, although I don’t have a lot of control over that)—albeit in the new typography.

The non-issue will disappear as soon as I return from the 2010 ALA Midwinter Meeting. It may be included in the trade paperback Cites & Insights 10: 2010.

Why? Well, Cites on a Plane 2007 seemed to get a lot of downloads, so I thought I’d try it again. Total prep time was under three hours, so…

Postscript to the first essay (On Conferences in a Time of Limits):

“I’d be surprised if ALA Midwinter and ALA Annual don’t shrink somewhat, although ALA Annual attendance varies so widely that ‘shrink’ may be hard to measure.” Count me surprised by record attendance at the 2009 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago. I believe we’ll continue to be in a time of limits, and it’s certainly true that some conferences have shrunk or disappeared. Otherwise, it’s too early to comment.

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When will the next real issue emerge? Shortly after Midwinter. Probably very shortly after Midwinter.

Cites & Insights 10:1 (January 2010) now available

Cites & Insights 10:1 (January 2010) is now available.

The 30-page issue (PDF as usual, with HTML versions of the first three articles also available) includes:

Bibs & Blather (pages 1-6)

Announcing But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, at a special earlybird price; also announcing the trade paperback version of Cites & Insights 9: 2009--and reduced prices on all Cites & Insights Books. Finally, some words about supporting Cites & Insights, which currently lacks sponsorship.

Making it Work Perspective: Thinking about Blogging 4: Declines and Ends (pages 6-22)

Quotes and comments about blogging in decline, how individual blogs change--and the process of pausing or ending a blog.

Interesting & Peculiar Products (pages 22-25)

Five items and four group reviews.

My Back Pages (pages 25-30)

As always, a PDF-only bonus section--this time including notes on Apple apologists, buying friends by the thousands, disappearing technologies, the eternal stereo silly season and Wired's equally eternal silliness--and the typographic change you'll see if you read C&I as a PDF.

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Peering into the future:There will not be a Midwinter issue of Cites & Insights; the next issue will (probably) be February 2010 and will (also probably) appear after Midwinter.

Might there be a non-issue similar to the fabled "Cites On A Plane" (which exists only in the trade paperback version of C&I 7: 2007)? Possibly. Check back around January 6...

Cites & Insights: Opinions desired

It's the interregnum between volumes of Cites & Insights, and also the end of current sponsorship. That's a natural time to play with the layout of the publication (postponing, for now, more substantive issues such as the future of the publication).

So I'm interrupting the series of introductory posts on But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 (thanks to the multitudes who've already purchased it, and I hope he or she will enjoy it...) to invite reader opinions on a possible change to C&I.

Berkeley Book or Constantia?

For the last five years, Cites & Insights has used Berkeley Oldstyle Book as a text face (with Berkeley Bold for boldface, since Berkeley Book doesn't have a bold version and "bolded" typefaces are inherently ugly). It's one of the most readable serifs in the business; my alma mater knew what they were doing when they commissioned the typeface from Goudy nearly a century ago.

But it's also very much a book typeface, a little light on the printed page.

I've become quite fond of Constantia, one of the typefaces introduced by Microsoft along with either Windows Vista or Office 2007. I love the traditional non-lining nature of its numbers (to me, they're much easier to read than modern lining numerals). I like the overall flow of the typeface.

But it's heavier than Berkeley Book--and sets just a little wider as well.

What Do You Think?

I plan to make a decision before I produce the January 2010 issue (most of which is already written). I'll need to decide by Friday, December 18, since I plan to produce Volume 10 Issue 1 around December 21.

So here's the deal:

• Take a look at the Constantia version of Volume 9, Issue 13.


• Compare it to the published Berkeley Book version.


• Yes, they're both PDFs; there's no other way I could show you Berkeley Book, since that's a licensed typeface (paid for, not transferable to other machines).


• Tell me which you like better--send email to waltcrawford at gmail dot com.

One important note: The Constantia version is three pages longer...but part of that is because I wanted to generate a quick test, which meant not going through the issue to do copyfitting (e.g., tightening the text in some paragraphs to eliminate a one-word last line). I'm nearly certain that copyfitting would bring that down to 34 pages and possibly to 33 pages--it will require a little more space, but not as much as you see here.

So: Opinions?

Oh, and if you know of a possible sponsor...that would be even more appreciated.

But Still They Blog now available

But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 is now available--at a special early-bird price through the end of the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting (January 19, 2010 or thereabouts).

This 319-page trade paperback provides a sweeping look at liblogs (blogs created by library people but, generally, not blogs that are official library publications), with trends, facts, figures, graphs, and profiles for each of 521 liblogs.

What's Here

The liblogs included here (you'll find the whole list in the sidebar) appear because:

• They're in English.


• They began in December 2008 or earlier.


• They have at least some relevance to libraries and librarianship, although that point gets stretched in a few cases.


• They had at least three posts during March-May 2007, March-May 2008, or March-May 2009.


• They were available on the web in the summer of 2009 (even if they'd ceased).


• They were known to me--either because they were listed in the LISWiki list of blogs or the LISZen list of blogs or because they showed up in one of a hundred or so blogrolls that I checked.


• They were "visible"--in this case, having a Google Page Rank of at least 4 in either early fall 2008 or early summer 2009.

That final criterion was used deliberately to narrow this study's focus slightly from the 2007-2008 study (which continues to be available, The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look.). I'd hoped to get down to 400-450 blogs, making analysis easier and the book shorter. I didn't manage to do quite that well, although the list of 607 blogs from the earlier study did come down to 480 (there are 41 new blogs).

If you're wondering: Only 50 liblogs were eliminated because of their low visibility. The others were either non-English [19], defunct (that is, no longer viewable in August 2009 and with no clear trail to a new URL or blogname) [15, plus three that now require passwords], or didn't have at least three posts in March-May 2007 or March-May 2008 [37]...or, in three cases, really didn't have any posts that had anything at all to do with libraries.

What's Discussed

I'll be doing a series of posts and articles over the next few (many?) months noting some of the metrics and offering some of the content, but here's the gist:

• The first chapter discusses the age of liblogs, blogging platform used, and currency as of September 30, 2009 (how long it had been since the most recent post).


• The second and third chapters discuss posting frequency and changes in frequency.


• Chapter 4 considers the length of blogs--and, more interesting, the average length of posts in blogs (and the changes in both of those metrics).


• Chapter 5 deals with conversations: Number of comments per blog and per post and changes in conversational intensity (number of comments per post).


• Chapter 6 considers standouts and standards--blogs that score consistently across multiple metrics or multiple years.


• Chapters 7 and 8 consider patterns of change across three key metrics (frequency, average post length, average comments per post) for 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 respectively.


• Chapter 9 considers correlations and averages, including averages for a very large subset of the liblog universe that might be considered "typical."


• Chapter 10 considers why people blog and how blogs change.


• Chapter 11 discusses stopping and pausing.


• Unlike last year's study, this book distributes blog profiles throughout the chapters, typically including a profile when the blog shows up as noteworthy in one particular dimension. The final chapter includes profiles for "the rest of the liblogs"--50-odd blogs, some of which are indeed noteworthy for content but don't happen to stand out in metrics.


• There's an index of blogs (with all mentions) and bloggers (only when they're actually named). The page on which the blog is profiled appears in boldface in the index.

Special Pricing

From now until the end of the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting (roughly January 19, 2010), But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 will be available for a special introductory price:

• The 6x9 trade paperback costs $29.50. (Lulu Media Mail shipping is now a flat $3.99 for all paperbacks, at least in the U.S.)


• The book is also available as a downloadable PDF for $20.00

Those prices will go up $5.50 and $5 respectively after Midwinter.

Reduced Prices on C&I Books

Prices on all other Cites & Insights Books have also been reduced, effective immediately:

• The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look is now $25 paperback, $16 PDF.


• Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change is now $25 paperback, $16 PDF.


• All four 8.5x11 trade paperback annual editions of Cites & Insights (including the massive 2009 edition) are now $35 each for paperback, $25 each for PDF. That includes Volume 6, 2006; Volume 7, 2007; Volume 8, 2008; and Volume 9, 2009.

Cites & Insights 9 available as trade paperback

Cites & Insights 9 (2009) is now available as a 434-page, 8.5x11, trade paperback, exclusively from Lulu.

The volume includes all 13 issues, exactly as published (typos and all), except that the two book covers in the January issue are in grayscale, not color.

It also includes a contents list showing the articles and pages in each issue, and a volume index.

The price is $50, for either the paperback or a PDF download; a portion of that price goes to support the ongoing publication of Cites & Insights.

The book is printed on bright-white 50lb. paper (my copy looks great!).

As to the cover (a wraparound color photo--you're only seeing the front part here):

Taken by my wife on Molokai, years ago, on the Kaluakakoi golf course running alongside our room at what was then, I believe, a Sheraton at the Ke Nani Kai resort on Molokai's isolated west coast. (The hotel's been closed for some time...tourism on Molokai is an iffy thing.) The only manipulation done to the picture (scanned from a 3x4 print) was to flip it horizontally, so most of the tree would be on the front cover rather than the back. Crappy type position is entirely my responsibility.