Not goodbye but farewell …

We’re entering the last week of exams and the end of the academic year is almost upon us. It’s always hard to say goodbye, but happily the Library remains open over the summer months. This is what to expect, Library-wise, over the summer:

• Your student card, and hence your Library account, is valid until September 2014. After that you will either re-register and receive a new card or be off to pastures new, but you will have the option to open an external Library account with borrowing rights for a further year on graduation. 
• While you are still a student with a current Library account you can access databases, e-books and your reading history. If you want to hold on to notes you have made in e-books you should export them before September. 
• In June and July, the borrowing period for all books with the exception of Short Loan will be three weeks.  
• The Library databases are provided in accordance with publisher licences that state that material should not be kept after it has fulfilled its academic purpose. Therefore we ask that you delete any online copies of materials downloaded from databases after you complete your exams. 
• Please remember to return all overdue books and clear all fines. Anything still outstanding on your account could block you from graduating or registering again next year. 

The Library will be open with full services Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm from 26 May. Have a great summer!

Twenty Five Years Ago Today ...

... Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal for what we know as the Internet. Now he is calling for a 'bill of rights' to protect its independence[i]. 

The web is changing. Once it was a non-corporate, non-mainstream space, undefined and open to innovation. Two things happened: the computing/dotcom boom, and Web 2.0, making computing and web based companies some of the world’s biggest. Their market? Web 2.0 made the web sociable and interactive, bringing us Twitter, Facebook and Google+, and in the process opened up the web to the ‘prosumer’, producer and consumer of online content – in other words, you and me.

What the big tech companies like Microsoft and Apple have in common with social networking sites is that they try to build up a monopoly by creating “walled gardens” of hardware or websites that discourage travel outside their domains.  At the moment for example you access your gmail account and Google+ and YouTube using a single password. Depending on whether you buy an iPad or iPhone or PC you are restricted as to what programs or software you can use.[ii]This inhibits freedom and discourages innovation[iii] – why innovate for a device that’s ‘locked down’? – so why have we so readily bought into the walled garden scenario of the web? 

A closed system reduces the risk of crashes, glitches and theft[iv]. Cookies installed by websites on your computer speed up connections. And then there’s the attractiveness factor: the “undeniably attractive aesthetic” of the iPhone for example[v]. As we are increasingly living our lives online (making friends, shopping, checking bank accounts), this is important stuff. 

The problem is that what with all the vocabulary about ‘friends’ and ‘sharing’, we tend to forget that our online lives are lived in a corporate environment[vi]. We’re aware of privacy issues, of course, when it comes to things like allowing strangers access to our holiday photos. Yet we continue to upload a huge amount of data about ourselves when it’s often not clear who owns the data. Austrian student Max Schrems created an activist group Europe versus Facebook in order to highlight privacy concerns:

Schrems filed a series of complaints with the Irish Data Protection Agency,
accusing Facebook of retaining data users had tried to delete and also saying that his file wasn’t long enough. Facebook refused to turn over some 
information — such as Schrem’s biometic faceprint — saying it was a trade
secret. Even though the claim that the technology the company’s applied
to personal information is proprietary seems reasonable, many lambasted
Facebook for suggesting that users’ data was Facebook’s intellectual property.[vii]

Even when you’re not signed in, social networking sites and others can track your movements and collect data that you’re not aware of having shared, such as browsing habits, and pass this data on to third party sites including advertisers[viii]. And they’re not the only ones interested. Last year the Prism scandal erupted when it was made public that the National Security Agency in the US was using tech companies’ data to monitor non-US citizens’ online activities[ix]. In 2011 US lawyers unsuccessfully tried to have a UK student extradited to face charges of providing links to pirated material on his site. When Arab Spring protestors in Egypt used social networking sites to arrange meetings and demonstrations, the Egyptian government responded by closing down the Internet[x]. Robert W McChesney, a US author and academic, sees the gathering of online information by the big tech companies, with the assent and collusion of government, as evidence that the current development of the Internet is working against the interests of an open and democratic society[xi]. 

The Web allows access to worlds of information almost unimaginable twenty years ago – most of the information used in this post was freely available on the Web. Unavoidably legislation is struggling to keep up. But at some point we, the community of surfers and Facebookers and bloggers and everyone else on the Web, have to ask: what sort of online space do we want to inhabit? And what are we prepared to give in exchange?

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[i] Kiss, J (2014). An Online Magna Carta: Berners-Lee calls for bill of rights for web. Guardian, [online], available: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/12/online-magna-carta-berners-lee-web [accessed 12 March 2014].

[ii] Anderson, J, and Rainie, L. (March 23, 2012). The Future of Apps and Web. Pew Internet & American Life Project, [online] available: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Future-of-Apps-and-Web/Overview.aspx, [accessed December 7,2013].  

[iii] Herther, NK (2012). The Future of Mobile. Searcher, [online], 20, (10), pp. 18-25, available: CINAHL Plus with Full Text, EBSCOhost, [viewed 21 May 2013].

[iv] Zittrain, Jonathan (2008). Future of the Internet : And How to Stop It. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press, p 3. [online] available: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/dkitlib/Doc?id=10315687&ppg=12

[v] ibid

[vi] Sar, RK, and Al-Saggaf, Y. (2013). Propagation of Unintentionally Shared Information and Online Tracking. First Monday, [online], 18 (6), available:http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4349/3681 [accessed 9 December 2013].

[vii] Hill, K. (2012). The Austrian Thorn in Facebook’s Side. Forbes [online], 2 February, available: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/07/the-austrian-thorn-in-facebooks-side/ [accessed 7 December 2013].

[viii] Sar, RK, and Al-Saggaf, Y. Op.cit.

[ix] Weber, H. (2013). President Obama says PRISM “does not apply to U.S. citizens” or people living the U.S., The Next Web [online], available: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/07/president-obama-says-prism-does-not-apply-to-u-s-citizens-or-people-living-the-us/#!pjviC [accessed 9 December 2013]; The Guardian [online], available: http://www.theguardian.com/world/prism [accessed 9 December 2013].

[x] Hillesley R (2012). Internet censorship: let it rot in walled gardens, Tech Republic, [online], available: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/internet-censorship-let-it-rot-in-walled-gardens/1333 [accessed 2/5/2013]

[xi]Orbesen, J. (2013). When Capitalism Consumed the Internet. Salon [online], April 14, 2013,  available: http://www.salon.com/2013/04/14/when_did_the_internet_become_a_for_profit_venture_partner/ [accessed 9 December 2013]. 

The Information Age and the myth of anthropomorphism

If that opening hasn't put you off reading further, then welcome to this short intellectual coffee-break!

How we use words is important. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 1953) You can trace the evolution of ascribing mechanisms with human characteristics back through history to certain philosophical movements. Personally, I blame the mathematicians and logicians, those fearful meddlers and “Gradgrinds” of history, for this dichotomous mess we find ourselves in. I suppose there is a certain mentality in humanity that would like to assume that people’s behaviour and the machines we build are synonymous. If only we were all perfectly logical. These days we have a habit of talking about inanimate and stupid objects as if they are sentient beings. Regularly you will come across irate people standing over a machine with a mixture of frustration and animosity because the bloody thing is not doing what it should and won’t act within reason - like say humans would. To be clear: Computers do not have “memory” that is in any sense similar to human memory, they are not intelligent and the notion of Artificial Intelligence is just that, a notion, that many argue will never be a reality.

If you haven’t already been told yet, you live in a world that is sometimes called the Information Age and this nonsensical nomenclature has its roots stretching back to Claude Shannon, and his influential paper: A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948). Since then we have allowed the idea of information to be understood in terms of electrical blips and signal transmission, which is a branch of engineering and applied mathematics. It is important to remind ourselves that Shannon paper is entitled: “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” and was principally a paper on compressing data operations and reliably storing and communicating data. He explicitly states that: “Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.” He doesn’t care what “meaning” the messages or transmissions have. (Nor, by the way, does Google care about meaning.) Everything is simply algorithmic!

Maybe living in the world that information theorists constructed, we have forgotten how to fit our human understanding to the machines. Wittgenstein says that: “if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and designation’ the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 1953) We have designed systems that systemically take meaning or “object” from any consideration of “information”. So if you are wondering why your collection of information that you paste into a thesis/assignment/project hasn’t yielded you an “A” remember that that machine hasn’t done the understanding part. You should remember “information” is something to be engaged with and understood and isn’t just its binary form: ”01101001 01101110 01100110 01101111 01110010 01101101 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110”.

Drop In To DkIT Library

Library skills training sessions seem to have a dramatic effect on use of Library resources (book borrowing, e-resources and visits to the Library) as evidenced by the spikes in usage in the first term, when most of our training sessions occur.  It has been shown elsewhere that students who use the Library are more likely to do well in exams[1].

So to encourage more of the impressive usage of quality Library resources by DkIT students and staff we are offering an open policy of booking in the second term for both student groups and staff to help you all in your academic pursuits. Click here to go to Skills Training booking form.

We are also offering drop in sessions so you can brush up on your skills. Introduction to the Library provides an overview of how to use the Library and its resources to pinpoint the information you want. The Harvard Referencing Session covers the style of referencing used in DkIT as well as how to use referencing management software, online tools to help gather and store references as you read.

Everyone is welcome. All sessions will take place in the Training Room on Floor 2 of the Library.

Introduction to the Library
Tuesday 4^th February, 1-2pm.
Wednesday 5^th February, 1-2pm.

Harvard Referencing
Tuesday 11^th February, 1-2pm.
Wednesday 12^th February, 1-2pm.

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[1] Bowles-Terry, M. (2012). Library Instruction and Academic Success: A Mixed-Methods Assessment of a Library Instruction Program. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, [online], 7 (1), available: http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/12373 [accessed: 28 February 2014].

How to Save References in MultiSearch

It’s important to keep a record of your reading when preparing academic assignments. As you read you’re forming your ideas about a subject and even if you don’t quote directly from your sources, you still need to credit them. Keeping a record of your reading is also useful when you’re organizing the structure of your assignment or if you want to chart the course of your research.

When running a search on MultiSearch, you can automatically save your records without needing to create an account. The important thing to remember is that records save to a temporary folder – you will lose them if you don't take some action on them before closing out of your search session.

1. Click the + sign beside the record to save it. You can save as many records as you like. Records save to the Saved Items file at the bottom of the page. Click to view them.
   
   
                                   
2. At this stage you can view the record as a Harvard Reference, print it or email it to yourself. When you email the record, you get the reference but not the document which you would have to view in full text and save separately. MultiSearch may not generate perfect Harvard References: check DkIT’s booklet on referencing, Credit Where Credit is Due. 
   

If you have an EndNote Web account, you can also export the record to EndNote by clicking on the EndNote tab and inputting your EndNote Web username and password. If this doesn’t work, you may need to download the Cite While You Write plugin from EndNote Web, which is already installed on all Library PCs.

That’s it! Two simple steps that make preparing assignments a lot easier. Click here to view this guide as a pdf document.

3 months, 39 USBs

Last semester, 39 USBs were found in the Library and never claimed. As well as USBs, a constant stream of lost textbooks, phones, key-rings and clothes finds its way to the Library Desk. We make every effort to reunite these items with their owners: if there are contact details we will contact you to let you know your property has been found. Otherwise, clothes and other items can be picked up at the stand opposite the Library Desk. Anything more valuable or personal such as keys, phones and USBs can be claimed at the Desk.

Sadly, some items find themselves unloved and abandoned. We keep everything we find for three months, but if items are not claimed during that time they will be given to charity, recycled or discarded. For more information about what will happen to unclaimed items see our Lost Property Policy – you can also read a copy at the Lost Property Stand.

So what of our 39 USBs? On this occasion, they’ll be formatted and sent to a refugee school where they’ll help somebody else make a new start. But the moral of the story is, come to the Library Desk as soon as possible if you’ve lost something in the Library – next semester might be too late.  

Introducing the Kindle ...

Our four new Kindles have their launch on Monday 14th October at 2pm. The launch will incorporate a brief information session on how to borrow and use the Kindle, and in case you miss it, this will be repeated on Wednesday 16th October at 11am.

The beauty of the Kindle is that there's no need to stuff yet another huge tome into a bag already bursting - all your books can be stored on one portable device. Titles in the collection at the moment include The Economy of Ireland by J.W. O'Hagan, and Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling). View the full list of titles from Monday by searching for 'Kindle' on the Library Catalogue. More titles will be added in the coming months. Suggestions are welcome - come to the Library Desk or email acquisitions@dkit.ie.