Reinventing Knowledge in Times of Change

Currently reading Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet by Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton.  I am interested in claims of knowledge reinvention during times of upheaval.  In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger promotes our time of the World Wide Web as reinventing knowledge.  Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen and photosynthesis, also promoted his time of the American and French Revolutions as reinventing knowledge. 

Eras of massive change, such as Priestley’s and our own, encourage us to believe that our time on earth is the most important in all of history, so important that even knowledge is transformed.  In their book, McNeeley and Wolverton look at actual changes in knowledge, primarily through the institutions that promoted them.

First up is the library at Alexandria.  The change here is from the spoken word to the written word.  That’s a huge change in knowledge.  Writing and books existed before the library’s founding in 300 BCE, but only as an adjunct to the spoken word.  Because authors dictated their words to scribes, writing was a service, not a scholarly activity.  The speaker, not the writer, was honored.  That changed when the Alexandrian library began collecting scrolls and providing scholars with convivial living arrangements. 

During the transition from speech to text, there was much argument about the value of written ideas as opposed to spoken ideas.  Socrates preferred the spoken word which he felt was more truthful.  You could gauge the veracity of ideas by the reputation of the speaker.  In contrast, the written word was separate from the author and there was no way, at least in Ancient Greece, of judging the reputation of the writer. 

According to McNeeley and Wolverton, the oral versus written argument continued through the 18th Century.  It continues today with two forms of research – reading about ideas and talking about ideas with colleagues.  If you want the latest information, do you reach for a database or a telephone?  Do you feel more comfortable with a distant author or someone whose reputation you already know?

Social interaction on the Web may be another continuation of the argument.  Are social sites the digital equivalence of oral rhetoric?  Web connectivity encourages the free exchange of ideas, like a spoken discussion with a much bigger conversational group.  The medium is written, but speed encourages spontaneous interaction.  Many sites have reputation systems to help users gauge the veracity of other users.  One might suggest the quality of discourse on today’s social sites is far below that of the ancient Greeks, but remember they didn’t write everything down.      

28
May 2009
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All Things Being Equal: Sorting Articles in One Issue of a Journal

My university and public libraries both offer the E-Journal Portal service.  Enter the name of a journal and the portal shows which databases deliver full-text articles in that journal.  Each database responds to this type of search with its own display personality. The differences in their presentations have implications for intellectual honesty that demonstrate once again the necessity of organizing information with an understanding of subject parameters.      

ProQuest does this type of search best by offering a journal title drilldown, which first presents a journal page with available issues listed in reverse chronological order. Clicking a date retrieves all articles in a single issue.  Two sorting options are offered.  The default is alphabetical by article title.  A page number sort replicates the table of contents.  ProQuest’s search screen provides a different user experience.  That list of retrieved titles sorts by “most recent first” (default) or by relevance.  In the journal title drilldown, those two sorts have no value because all articles have the same date and equal relevance.  Thus ProQuest provides different sorting capabilities for the two techniques.

            Gale’s Academic OneFILE offers journal title drilldown with no sorting capabilities.  It opens with the journal page and a list of available years.  Each year expands to display its issues in reverse chronological order.  The resulting titles display in page number order, but that is not the indicated sort.  The only listed sort option is publication date, which is actually the search criterion.  With the search screen technique, relevance is added to date as a sort option.  By eliminating the relevance sort from journal title drilldown, Academic OneFile acknowledges that relevance has no value for a list of titles from a single issue, but it offers no realistic sort capabilities.  Instead results are delivered pre-sorted by page number, with the sort indicated as publication date.           

EBSCO’s journal title drilldown is similar to Academic OneFile with the first page offering a list of years that expands into issues in reverse chronological order.  However in its sorting options, EBSCO acknowledges no difference between the journal title drilldown and search screen techniques.  Its Business Source Elite and MasterFILE Premier both allow sorting by date, source and relevance for results retrieved with journal title drilldown or from the search screen.  All three sorts are useless in a list of titles from the same issue of the same journal.  Selecting any of these sorts in journal title drilldown returns a list of titles in page number order, which like Academic OneFile, is not offered as a sort option.  Business Source Elite at the academic library offers a fourth option, a valuable author sort, but the public library’s MasterFILE Premier eliminates that advantage.

OCLC’s WilsonSelectPlus does not offer journal title drilldown.  Users of E-Journal Portal are simply taken to an empty search screen.  Those who want the drilldown must try a different database.  If they stick with WilsonSelectPlus, they are rewarded with advanced sorting capabilities, but not with a one-click list of articles in a single issue. 

Both ProQuest and WilsonSelectPlus maintain their intellectual honesty in the entire process.  ProQuest offers a separate journal title drilldown with distinct sort capabilities, thus recognizing that these results have different organizational parameters than the results from a search screen.  WilsonSelectPlus does not offer journal title drilldown.  While that is disappointing, the database is honest about its capabilities.  Academic OneFile is halfway there.  It does not offer relevance sorting for a list of titles from the same issue, instead it labels a page number sort as date.  EBSCO recognizes no difference between results obtained by journal title drill down and the search screen, providing a surreal user experience as the three sorting mechanisms of date, source and relevance all return titles in page number order.        

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May 2009
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