Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery

I supposed I should be flattered that someone anonymously added an entry last summer to Wikipedia on digital reference services that copies large sections of text from the "Digital Reference" page on my web site.

The author of the entry basically copied everything from my page starting from the heading "E-mail"and continuing through the paragraph under the heading "Collaborative networks for reference." Here for example, is my paragraph describing e-mail reference:

User sends the library an e-mail with a reference query, supplying whatever information he or she feels is necessary. The library may reply by e-mail, phone, fax, letter, etc.

Here is the section from the Wikipedia entry on e-mail reference:

User sends the library an e-mail with a reference query, supplying whatever information he or she feels is necessary. The library may reply by e-mail, phone, fax, letter, etc.

Here is what I had to say about collaborative networks for reference:

In this model, two or more libraries team up to offer reference service using any of the above online formats. The user would send to a member library his or her request, which would be forwarded to the library best able to answer the question. A library may get a question routed to it because it has particular strengths in its collection that match the needs of the user. Or a member library might get a question routed to it because it happens to be open when the user makes his or her request. For example, a user in New York who tries logging on at 3 a.m. Eastern time to the chat reference service of a member library in Boston could be automatically routed to a member library in Hawaii or Australia that, thanks to a time zone difference, is open.

Here's what the entry had on the same subject:

In this model, two or more libraries team up to offer reference service using any of the above online formats. The user would send to a member library his or her request, which would be forwarded to the library best able to answer the question. A library may get a question routed to it because it has particular strengths in its collection that match the needs of the user. Or a member library might get a question routed to it because it happens to be open when the user makes his or her request. For example, a user in New York who tries logging on at 3 a.m. Eastern time to the chat reference service of a member library in Boston could be automatically routed to a member library in Hawaii or Australia that, because of the time zone difference, is open. Most collaborative live reference services operate 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

Hmmm...looks familiar. The cut and paste job is nearly untouched in the Wikipedia entry in the sections on "Web forms," "Chat reference using simple technologies," "Chat reference using web contact center software," and "Collaborative networks for reference." Here and there, the author excised a small parenthetical aside that I had on my page, but I'd say that most of my text was left unedited by the author of the entry.

The clever author thought that by leaving my web site off the bibliography at the end, no one would see the original source of the content. According to warnings like this one on Wikipedia, plagiarism is not part of the mission of Wikipedia:

DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!

* All contributions to Wikipedia are released under the GNU Free Documentation License (see Project:Copyrights for details).
* If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, do not submit it.
* By submitting your work you promise you wrote it yourself, or copied it from public domain resources — this does not include most web pages.

So what to do? Since the plagiarism took place in Wikipedia, I could of course edit the material myself to either indicate the source or do enough work on it so that I could claim a sense of "authorship" to it. Since I feel like I've already done my work by putting the content up once on my own web site, and I've really got a lot of other things I want to take care, I'm going to leave it up to someone else who feels strongly enough about what digital reference is to rewrite the entry as they see fit. I want to let someone else make their mark on the web describing what forms digital reference takes (perhaps someone who sees that my descriptions on the Teaching Librarian are now getting out of date).

To be honest, I'm more saddened by this than angered. It's likely a librarian or a library school student or somone who knows a thing or two about libraries wrote and posted this entry (at least the plagiarized portions, as there seem to have been multiple authors who have worked on this entry since it was put up in July 2004).

Jybe ho!

No, that title isn't some sort of a slur. Being a sailor (or former one, when I lived in Florida), "jibe ho" is what you yell as your boat jibes and the boom comes swinging across the deck of the boat (and pity the fool who doesn't duck in time). Here's a video of what a jibe looks like.

Anyway, as someone who's been committed to the full-blown, fancy web contact center software model for chat reference for a while, I've been wondering if Jybe is something I should be paying more attention to before I get whacked by it.

I wanted to pass along my thoughts about Jybe, now that I've given it a proper test run with Meredith Farkas from Information Wants to Be Free. But Meredith has gone and written a better account of the pros and cons than I could have, so go read her post instead.

A note of thanks is due to the following folks for alerting me to Jybe in the first place and making it sound compelling enough to merit experimentation:

• Paul Pival at the Distant Librarian (among others on this site, see this post)
• Sarah Houghton at the Librarian in Black (see this post)
• Michael Stephens at Tame the Web (among others on this site, see the 4/19/2005 post titled "Jybe 2.0 is Here (RIP VR)")
• Randy Reichardt on Scitech Library Question (see this post)
• Karen Coombs on Library Web Chic (see this post)
  

Indexing topics on this site

I added a new feature to this site today: categories for the posts. Although Blogger doesn't allow me to create categories, I set up a somewhat clunky workaround. I created a del.icio.us account and tagged all my posts. If you click the del.icio.us/digitalreference link on the right under "Categories" (assuming you are not reading this in your aggregator) you'll see all the tags I created. There are posts that have been tagged on things such as:

• cooperative_reference
• reference_interaction
• SMS_reference

Caveat lector:

• I am not a cataloger or an indexer. Expect some idiosyncratic tagging here (your comments are encouraged).
  
• I'm likely to add tags to posts already tagged to increase access to my postings (your suggestions are welcomed).

I had been debating whether or not I wanted to go to the trouble of setting all of this up. In poring over the site statistics lately, though, I realized that many of the more popular posts were ones I wrote months ago. There seem to be a fair number of new readers who first come to this blog via an older posting that was found in a web search or that was linked to from some other site. I can't assume that anyone other than my most devoted readers (Hi Mom!) have been following my posts since I launched this blog last year. So for those of you new to the blog, consider the categories an easy way to see what I've already written about and to access those topics of interest to you.

How users feel about coop librarians

My post from yesterday about the benefits of being in a chat reference cooperative prompted an interesting question in the comments section that asked how our users feel when they realize they've been connected to a librarian from other college library. Until I can post a more complete reply that question, let me point out that I wrote a brief reply in the comments section.

I'm not quite sure of the best way to reply to comments left at the end of postings. If I post my reply as a comment, will the original commenter think to go back to see if I've written my reply there? Or should I respond by doing an entirely new post, which the original commenter is more likely to see? My messier solution for now: post a new message mentioning the comment and noting my own follow-up comment.

Legal research questions in digital reference

Glen Bencivengo, a former professor of mine from library school at the Pratt Institute, has asked me for help in locating librarians who have experience assisting patrons via e-mail or chat reference with legal questions. More specifically, he:

would like to know the volume and general nature of any legal research questions librarians may get when doing virtual or digital reference. Public librarians are dealing with pro se patrons more and more as attorney fees go up. Are "virtual" librarians getting questions? Typical questions are: what is the statute of limitations for a malpractice action? what form do I use in order to file a motion for changed circumstances ( dealing with the amount of child support, for example) Does my state recognize "common law marriage?"

If you have an experience in handling such questions in the e-mail or chat environment for your library, please contact Prof. Bencivengo directly at bencivengog@wpunj.edu.

SMS reference in Australia

Correct me if I am wrong, but it looks like one Australian library is the earliest of the early adopters of SMS (text messaging) for reference services. The library at the Curtin University of Technology has been offering a SMS-based reference service at least since the summer of 2004, maybe a bit earlier. The library has posted a few news items that offer some details on how the service is being used:

• "Library & Information Service Priority Strategic Initiatives"
  
• "Student wins $50 asking about Library’s opening hours"
  
• "Congratulations to our 4 ‘grin and bear it’ winners!"

Given that Altarama, the company that offers the only software I've heard of designed to connect SMS to library reference services, is Australian, it's not a big surprise that an Austrialian library is the first to adopt the technology.

Two librarians from the Curtin University of Technology made a presentation about this new service ("Txting Librarians @ Curtin") in February 2005 at the Information Online conference in Sydney. You can view their paper (a PDF) and their slide presentation (PowerPoint) from the conference web site.

For more discussion of SMS in libraries, check out Geoff's post in blogdriverswaltz. Also, I now see that the two librarians from Curtin who did a presentation mention it in a comment on Michael Stephen's post about my earlier post on SMS (how's that for a self-referential tangle!)

Benefits of cooperative chat services

Today I was doing some number crunching of data from sample weeks of chat reference service here at the library at Baruch College. I've been looking only at sample weekly data from the spring and fall semesters for the past few years that we've been part of the 24/7 Reference Academic Cooperative. In so doing, I turned up an interesting insight: for every one non-Baruch patron (i.e., a patron who is affiliated with another library in the cooperative) that Baruch librarians help, four Baruch patrons get helped by librarians from other libraries in the cooperative. In short, there's a huge benefit to being in a cooperative service. Our library is getting far more in return out of the cooperative than we have to put in.

Librarians here at Baruch monitor the cooperative service ten hours a week (Monday to Friday from 10 AM to 12 noon). During those hours, we are more likely to be helping coop patrons (about one-quarter of our chat sessions are with Baruch patrons, the other three-quarters are with coop patrons). In exchange for agreeing to cover the coop service a mere two hours a day (weekdays), our library can be assured that the remaining twenty-two hours of each weekday (and the entire weekend, too) are covered by the coop.

In truth, we are actually covering the coop service twice as much as we are actually required to. At the moment, 24/7 Reference only requires libraries in the coop to agree to cover the service five hours a week. Now that 24/7 Reference has merged into Questpoint, I'm not sure what the new time commitment might be. Given that we've already been covering it for ten hours a week since we joined in July 2003, it wouldn't be a problem if the minimum time commitment required by the coop increased somewhat (we're already doing more than we have to).

IM and security

As I rethink whether or not our library should be using IM as well as web contact center software for chat reference, I also need to take into consideration security issues, such as those detailed in this post on TechnoBiblio.

I'm thinking about IM

For years I played down the value of IM as a software solution for chat reference. I've been a believer for years in the fancy web contact center software that online merchants like Lands' End pioneered on their sites. But now I'm beginning to think we should add an IM reference service to complement our chat service that is currently powered by the software from 24/7 Reference. What made me start to rethink IM? All those posts of Michael Stephens at his Tame the Web site. Missed all his posts on this topic? Here's a link to all of them.

MindManager maps for library instruction

Keith Stanger at the Bruce T. Halle Library at Eastern Michigan University posted a comment here pointing out the way he uses maps created in MindManager for library instruction. His maps are so wonderful that I thought I'd highlight them here. On his web site, click on any of the topics listed on the left side of the page under the heading labeled "Finding Print and Internet Resources - Suggested Indexes." For example:

• anthropology


• education


• psychology

You'll note that on his maps, he's added in links to the individual sources listed. I'm definitely inspired by these!

Another MindManager map

Here's a map that better illustrates the ability of MindManager to create graphic representations of related information. This map was one I put together as I crammed for a mid-term exam in my Russian history class a few weeks ago. I was trying to get a handle on the main groups formed in opposition to the Russian throne in the late 1800s. The MindManager software I used to create it saves the maps in its own proprietary format (although they do offer a free reader download for those who want to view maps but now create them). If you download the free reader, then you can view the version of the map in its native file format and its full glory.

The software also allows you to convert the map into a number of different file formats, including JPEG.

link to JPEG version of the map
link to MMAP version of the map (requires free reader)

Baruch College's reference blog

Last fall, a colleague of mine at the Newman Library at Baruch College and I set up an internal blog for reference staff. It's kind of a jury-rigged thing from Blogger, but it works well enough for now. Today, I gave a presentation about the blog to fellow librarians from other libraries in the CUNY system. As I mentioned last week, I've been playing around with a piece of software called MindManager that is supposed to make it easy to brainstorm and to present information graphically. Today I found a good use for it when I cobbled together this handout for my presentation. I'm eager to use MindManager for handouts in the many workshops I teach each semester. It makes it quite easy to slap together elegant looking charts, especially ones that need to indicate hierarchy or a web of relationships. I'll try to post them here from time to time.