Fun with Paraprosdokianisms

Thanks to my youngest brother, I have been introduced to praprosdokianisms, or paraprosdokians. We all actually have run across them; we just didn't know the ten dollar word for these delightful little humor bits.

A paraprosdokian (from Greek "παρα-", meaning "beyond" and "προσδοκία", meaning "expectation") is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax. For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists.

Some paraprosdokians not only change the meaning of an early phrase, but also play on the double meaning of a particular word, creating a syllepsis.

(from the Wikipedia article, which then offers the lucky reader a lovely list of fun ones with attributions). But from the list my brother sent me, which has different ones, I offer some that are relevant to my librarian readers:

To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station.

You're never too old to learn something stupid.

Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

Well, it's not what you think.... I am being too poetical for my own good here. The Library at New Mexico State University is canceling hundreds of subscriptions due to a $600,000 budget cut, according to an article by Paige Chapman in the Chronicle of Higher Education (dated Sept. 8, 2010 in the Faculty section). Only 20% of the subscriptions are going to be possible to replace through consortial arrangements. The rest will have to be replaced with interlibrary loan requests as needed. And of course, there is not any extra money allocated for the ILL that will surge this year. And when the ILL money runs out, it runs out and the users will just have to fall back on their wits. The worst news in the article was that they are looking at even more budget cuts -- the same or higher -- for next fiscal year.

I am so outraged at the combination of publisher and vendor greed pumping subscription prices ever higher, and the ways that legislatures budget pressures can slash away at university budgets. And libraries look like innocuous places to cut. After all, it's not anybody's salary. And it's not the heating plant, or (heavens forbid!) a sports program. How rarely will anybody get together and protest the cutting of a library budget!

But I remember forecasting that the publishers wrongly assumed that there were bottomless pockets to tap in the academic libraries, so they could go on raising their prices for subscriptions and just squeeeeeeezzzzeee as hard as they wanted to get that last drop of blood out. See these two earlier posts here, which I illustrated with the goose that laid the golden egg. You remember that story, don't you?
Killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg (2006) and a related post on The Importance of Timing (2006)

PS. I note that the link to Jacob Stein's wonderful essay is missing. Here it is.

GPO-Access Replacement Launching, and Authentication of Law

GPO-Access has had a great run as the portal for the Government Printing Office. It is still up through the end of this calendar year. But the replacement site is already up and running and it looks great. Introducing...... (drumroll, please).......

www.fdsys.gov

It has a full home page. But it works well. There is a banner at the top with a small menu, which frankly all seem to lead back to the old GPO-Access website. There is an old FAQ section, which can be helpful if you have documents questions, and you can put in new documents questions with the same section, and check your existing queries as well.

But if you skip that top banner, and look at the main portion of the page, there are three panels, or columns. The left and right columns are narrower and the center is much broader. The left column offers again to take the reader back to GPO-Access, and divides the readers into Customers, Vendors and Libraries. Then there is a blue box of Quick Links to the most popular (one guesses) URLs:

* US Government Bookstore

* Ben's Guide to Government for Kids (a useful site!)

* FDLP Desktop (for the Federal Depository Libraries)

* Catalog of U.S, Government Publications

* Digitization Registry

(The choices remind the reader that 1) The GPO is the government's bookseller; 2) The Federal Depository Library Program is alive and is run through this site; 3) the GPO is charged with digitizing much of what it has been printing for centuries, and the users will want to know what is now available electronically.)

The right hand narrow column features a changing list of "Latest Resources." Today everything listed are congressional bills and debate transcripts about Wall Street reform and health care reform. But it gives the citation, title and a hot link to pick up the full text of the document. It also offers the entire text of the CFR (Code of Federal Regulations), the Federal Register issues, the Budget for fiscal year 2011, the Economic Report of the President for 2010, and more. Except for your time and disc space, these appear to be free downloads. The large files, such as titles of the CFR can be zipped, or can be delivered in XML, with each file size noted.

The center panel has the main news:

The migration of information from GPO Access into FDsys will be complete in 2010. The migration is occurring on a collection-by-collection basis.

There is a lengthy list of the various titles and the dates for which each is carried. The list is changing day by day, as the migration continues.

The top of the center panel has a search bar, where you can enter a basic search. There is, however, an advanced search function where you can specify the type of material to be searched, up to five search criteria can be laid on the query. There is an excellent Help section, which I believe is the same as from GPO-Access, though I may be wrong. It is a very powerful search engine for frequent users who master the syntax and understand the various tools offered, such as SuDoc numbers and referenced citations, but even the keyword search and simple search seem to work pretty well. There is also an option from the original search bar to Retrieve by Citation, which works easily because the system provides a set of boxes for the user to enter the citation, so you don't have to guess at the correct format. Even more exciting, when I pulled up a CFR citation for 2010, I got a digital version that was "Certified by the Superintendent of Documents [pkisupport@gposupport.gov] United States Government Printing Office, certificate issued by GeoTrust CA for Adobe." This was in a medium blue bar across the top of the screen, with an image of a pen at the right side of the bar. This is exciting, the beginning of Digital Authentication of laws online.

More on e-books

E-Books Summit: There is an e-books library summit coming up September 29, 2010! Co-sponsored by Library Journal and School Library Journal, it is aimed at Public Libraries, School Libraries and yes, Academic Libraries, too. It is a Virtual Conference which runs 10 AM - 6 PM EDT, with archives available October 1 - December 31, 2010.

Keynote speakers include Ray Kurzweil, David Lankes, and Kevin Kelly. OOTJ readers may recognize Kurzweil as the developer of the Kurzweil reader and the long-awaited (still waiting, Ray!) Blio free e-reader platform that will have such mongo read-aloud features because he works closely with the vision-impaired community. And OOTJ readers who were at AALL in Denver in July, 2010 may recognize David Lankes as the keynote speaker there, who gave a very high-energy talk to us (it's mentioned on the link page shown here). OOTJ readers who also read Wired will recognize Kevin Kelly's name from that context.

On a related note, http://ecogeek.org/ blog has a very nice analysis of the Kindle and its environmental impact. You have to replace more than 20 NEW books with a Kindle to balance the environmental impact of the heavy metals and plastics and energy of its manufacture, and power for its maintenance.

End of the Print New York Times?

The New York Times is the "newspaper of record," probably the most respected and best known paper published in the United States today. Although it is the hometown newspaper for the New York City metropolitan area and a reliable source for stories of local interest, it is also national and international in the scope of its coverage. Like most other newspapers, the Times has been struggling with crafting a business model that will enable it to be relevant and financially solvent in an era when people have so many ways, many of them free, to get their news. The newspaper erected a paywall and took it down again in 2007 because of disappointing revenues, and has announced that it will start charging for content again in 2011. Times articles will continue to be accessible to search engines.

This history (and the fact that I once worked for a Times subsidiary) explains my interest when my colleague Jack McNeill pointed out a posting in today's Huffington Post. Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, "acknowledged Wednesday that the newspaper will go out of print--eventually." He did not provide any idea of how soon this might happen. Nor did he provide any insights about the company's long-term plans except to say that media companies need to remain flexible and open to new approaches. His remarks were made at the WAN-IFRA 9th Annual International Newsroom Summit in London. More information about Sulzberger's remarks is available here. According to Business Insider founder Henry Blodget , the basic problem is this:

'The economics of the online news business will not support the infrastructure or newsroom that the printed paper supports. Unless the New York Times Company can come up with a miracle new digital revenue stream, therefore, it will eventually have to be restructured and downsized (or sold to a deep-pocketed Sydney Harmon-type [sic] who runs it at a loss out of love).' [Sidney Harmon recently purchased Newsweek magazine and is attempting to revive it.]

The online Wall Street Journal now charges for access, and seems to be successful. Is this because it occupies a niche position and readers don't have many options for the content it offers? Is it because Journal readers are more affluent and can afford to pay for content? Is what the Times offers sufficiently unique and valuable that users will pay for it, or will they get their news elsewhere? What makes a paper like the Times special is the quality of the reporting, and this is expensive. If it doesn't have the revenue to pay for the reporting, will it become just another newspaper and lose the qualities that make it special?

Post-script to e-books developments

The University of Michigan Press is offering a short and medium term rental option for their academic titles. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Campus, Sept. 3, 2010, page A23 in print. I discover to my dismay that there does not seem to be a way to link to any archived version of a week-old "Wired Campus" article online. So, I will report without links.

University of Michigan Press has apparently been offering all or many of their academic titles available to rent for a semester or a year, at a discounted price. At the end of the term, the digital copy self-destructs. Now, the press is offering a shorter term lease to see if there will be interest. 261 of the most popular scholarly titles are available for for 40% of the normal list price for 30 days. Or for 75% of the full price, you get it for 180 days. For that time period, the e-book can be viewed on up to six different devices. The time begins to run when the e-book is opened.

For a digital book that costs $25.00, this is not a huge cost savings, but there are some titles that are much more expensive where the savings would be more substantial. The deal, even if savings are minimal, might be of interest to a student writing a paper, who just wants to be able to cut and paste text. When you calculate savings though, you must take into consideration that with a full purchase of the e-book, as with a print book, there is an item to return for resale.

The short article quotes Heather Newman, UM Press's trade-marketing manager, for several points. They hope the short-term lease interests students who need books for single citations or a single paper, or the use of a single course. The discount, she said, was determined by balancing book-production costs against what customers can spend. They are testing both rental costs and delivery options, trying to "align production costs with consumers' budgets." I thought that was a rather ominous-sounding way to produce scholarly texts. But I suppose university presses have to remain solvent. They hope to expand from the current 261 titles to 325 by the end of the year.

The article interviews Prof. Albert N. Greco, who teaches marketing at Fordham University's business school. Mr. Greco believes that the business model is a good one, addressing three problems the textbook industry has been facing:

1) competition from used-book sellers;
2) high return rates;
3) expensive production costs.

Greco says with digital books, all these problems are either eliminated or much reduced. But he notes that students may decide that the loss from not being able to resell the book is not worth the discount they receive at the purchase. Still, he predicts that by 2015, digital books will have taken off in universities, though he agrees, that it will be up to the students to decide.

*Note from Betsy: Nobody I have seen writing about this has done as good a job as Lyonette Louis-Jacques analyzing what students (at least law students) will want in a textbook. Her comments in a presentation on the issue were excellent. But summing up things that I recall and notes from this blog over the months we have commented on e-books, the most important things in e-textbooks seem to be:

1) Interface and Hardware
Customer satisfaction rests heavily on the design of the device and its software. How easily can the user flip pages, locate text, highlight material, enlarge tables? Does it handle color? Can it work on laptops or is it designated for a certain reader machine? How heavy is it? How long does it take to learn to use? If you are going to have the entire school on e-books, plan to offer tutorials for everybody on the most important features. There is a learning curve!

2) Battery Life
Laptop batteries rarely last more than an hour and a half without recharge or being plugged in. Dedicated e-reader batteries last much longer, but if you really mean to use e-textbooks throughout the day of school, you need to plan to have outlets in every classroom.

3) Subjects are not equally e-friendly
Math-heavy subjects are difficult in digital formats because the tables and formulas are difficult to read without easy enlargement. Tables are usually pop-up affairs that cannot be enlarged, and this makes digital versions very hard to read. Also, the Kindle and Sony Reader do not handle color. For many law textbooks this will not matter, but be alert, because a few courses, this may make a difference.

4) Weighty Matters
Students will welcome being able to carry just ONE item rather than hauling multiple heavy law books, or making multiple trips to and from their lockers with heavy law books, and a laptop or notebooks. They will, if the reader has a great interface, be thrilled to be able to take notes on the same device as the textbook, and have the outline aided from that text as well.

Blogs in the Spotlight

The National Law Journal's supplement, Law Schools--A Special Report, highlights five "pioneers in law blogging," who are some of the best-known bloggers in legal academic--Professors Douglas Berman (Sentencing Law and Policy); Paul Caron (TaxProf Blog); Christine Hurt (The Conglomerate); Brian Leiter (Brian Leiter's Law School Reports); and Eugene Volokh (The Volokh Conspiracy). The brief profiles of the bloggers contain some interesting nuggets about why they started blogging and how they juggle their time commitments. Professor Hurt revealed that it is difficult to start blogging, at least for some people. Academics are accustomed to sharing their work with colleagues and to reworking their ideas many, many times before publication. "The thought of throwing something up on the computer scene [sic] for the whole world to read in five minutes doesn't resonate with a lot of people." Professor Berman began blogging in 2004, and has "learned to rein in his impulse to post fast-and-furious reactions to news and events. ... Over time, [he's] gotten more sensitive to being more mature, to resist the significant urge to go for the quick, sexy, clever comment." All of the professors interviewed say that blogging is a tremendous incentive for keeping up to date in their area of expertise and makes them more effective classroom teachers.

Scholarly E-books on the Way

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article at page A12 of its print issue for September 10, online if you have a subscription. "Publishers Join forces to Sell E-Books to Libraries," by Jennifer Howard, surveys several efforts by publishers to either set up consortia or otherwise get digital versions of scholarly monographs to academic libraries. She speaks with Garret Kiely, director of the university of Chicago Press, who is watching several efforts, but whose press already markets e-books. Kiely says that 80% of Univ. Chicago Press' e-book sales came from sales to consumers through e-tailers like Amazon.com, while only 20% of their e-books sold to libraries. Nevertheless, he and others of the university press publishers are pushing hard to develop a way to package their books in a digital format that will appeal to academic libraries. Here is the run-down of who is working on these projects, though I recommend reading the whole article:

* Project MUSE - currently produces e-journals, and wants to move into MUSE Editions to provide scholarly monographs. This is a consortium of 110 midsize university presses. Scheduled to debut July 1, 2011 on an "integrated platform" that should allow users to access journals and monographs in the same search result. They expect to offer "between 250 - 500 titles from the fall, 2011 lists of a pilot group of presses." Muse hopes to add backlist titles soon afterward, but not textbooks. In the future, participating publishers would make the digital version of a monograph available simultaneously with the print version. The cost structure would be similar to the current Project Muse, with discounted, tiered pricing. Eventually, Muse Editions could include "any nonprofit scholarly publisher in the humanities and social sciences..." who wants to join. Sadly for law libraries, this still excludes our largest publishers, unless we can convince our leading scholars to follow the new science model and create a nonprofit venue in which to publish their scholarship.

* JSTOR - Also currently producing an e-journal database. Wants to move into providing scholarly monographs working with a group of ivy and large university presses, "If we together can come up with a compelling service and business model..." This group is sponsored by Ithaka, a non-profit formed to assist academic organizations to use new technology to "to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways." They are not yet firmly committed to producing a salable forum for e-books themselves.

* Un-named proto-consortium - A group of university presses which have received two grants from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are studying what libraries want in e-book packages from university presses. Alex Holzman, director of Temple University Press, in a presentation at the Association of American University Presses annual meeting last June, told the audience that his group used a large grant from the Mellon foundation to hire consultants to study business models and survey academic librarians about the e-book options they want. Then, they will use a smaller grant from the same foundation to develop a business plan, finalize the features to offer, and create a Request for Proposals from potential partners. According to the Chronicle, they have interest from more than 50 university presses.

Student Loan Crisis

Kudos to my colleague, Marc Greenbaum, who alerted me to this fabulous graphic describing the terrible state of student loans, which he first saw at Above the Law, but which actually originates at www.CollegeScholarships.org courtesy of Jess.net. I wanted to include the image here, but it does not display well at OOTJ, because our window is too narrow and cuts off part. I highly recommend a visit, because it illustrates, not just how students are falling into debt, but how a series of changes to the law over decades has stripped them of the protections offered to borrowers in nearly every other situation. Now, student loan defaulters are no longer protected by

* Bankruptcy

* Statute of limitations

* Truth in Lending regulations

* Fair Debt Collection Practices Act

* Right to refinance

* State usury laws

* No protections from garnishment of
- Social Security income
- Disability income
- Wages without court order
- Tax refunds withholding

* Suspension of state professional license

I had not realized that students were being harassed and pressured so fiercely. There is a movement building and perhaps lobbying on behalf of the growing number of families affected by unbearable student loan payments will begin to move Congress to make changes in the laws. The problem is how much money the private lenders will be able to pour into lobbying to keep their profitable schemes in place.

30 Ways to Rate a College

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a short article that surveys the ways that different organizations rate colleges. Dated August 29, 2010, by Alex Richards and Ron Coddington, the article is mostly an interactive map, which lays out on the left six different publications which rate colleges. Then, it lays out on the right, eight blocks of categories on which each organization ranks the colleges:

* Admissions selectivity and student demographics
* Evaluations
* Finances and spending
* International diversity
* Service
* Financial aid
* Student, faculty and alumni achievement
* Teaching

In each category, are from two to seven measures. Next to each measure is a circle with a number showing the number of raters who use that measure to rank colleges. The interactive feature lets you click on the publication name and "turn off" their lines on the map, or turn them back on.

Some of the categories listed above are fairly straightforward and self-explanatory. But others are less so. For instance, the two measures under "Service" are:

* Army/Navy ROTC size
* Alumni serving in the Peace Corps

Each of those measures has one publication using that measure to rate colleges, by the way, Washington Monthly. Some of the measures are strange and make you wonder what it actually has to do with the quality of the school. "Percentage of federal work-study grants focused on community service," for instance, might tell you something interesting, but I am not sure what it tells you about the quality of the school. That appears as a student demographic, and is measured by Washington Monthly. You can argue a lot about what any of these numbers tell you about a college, and whether the numbers alone tell you anything worth knowing.

The point of the article is actually how few points of agreement there are among the various organizations that rate colleges on the measures they use for ranking. They also point out that most of the numbers being used are input measures, and very few are output measures. One of the few, perhaps only scholarly works is Outcomes Assessment In Higher Education by Hernon & Dugan (2004). It is a serious attempt by respected academics to survey and evaluate methods of rating colleges and universities. They suggest new options as well, looking at input and outputs to be measured. I don't agree with all the suggestions, but it's a worthy effort, and I don't know of any other by people in the academy.