While I found the study very interesting, I also thought it was poorly designed, with multiple places where bias could have entered the study. Particularly, the authors did not sufficiently control for gender in measuring prejudice, something Shachaf did do in a follow-up study (see references).

Here is the PDF if you want it. The entire piece is below the cut.

Discrimination in reference services: A critical review of “Are virtual reference services color blind?”

Shachaf and Horowitz (2006) present in this study an examination of academic libraries’ virtual reference when serving culturally diversity patrons. The unobtrusive study was conducted by sending various sets of queries by e-mail to a number of Association of Research Libraries (ARL) reference services which differed only in the implicit ethnicity of the addressers’ names. From their findings the writers conclude that in all dimensions Arabs and African Americans received a poorer level of service when compared with Caucasians. While these conclusions may be valid, this examination of the authors’ methods and interpretations of the data will illustrate possible entry points for error and rival explanations. Given these possibilities we find that the authors’ stated conclusions are overly strong and ultimately unsupported.

Framework of the Study

The authors’ stated purpose in conducting this study is to answer the question “Are virtual reference services color and gender blind and are they providing unbiased services to diverse user groups” or, more specifically, “who is more likely to be discriminated against online by virtual reference librarians?” (Shachaf & Horowitz, 2006, p. 503). This statement presents us with two problems. It implies that the authors expect some level of discrimination against minorities; such a statement suggests that the authors are approaching their research from what Babbie (2001) calls a “conflict paradigm” (p. 45). Such a theoretical framework could influence the interpretations of the data collected. It is important to note that this is not a necessary conclusion: in a follow-up study Shachaf and Oltmann (2007) found that there was no statistically significant level of discrimination in the reference service of public libraries. Secondly, the problem statement mentions gender as a possible source of discrimination, but as we will see the study does not measure gender as a variable, nor does it control for its effects.

Variables and Definitions

The variables Shachaf and Horowitz intend to measure are the effects of perceived ethnicity or religion on virtual reference service quality. The authors did not give an explicit conceptual definition of what constitutes ethnicity and religion. Despite being everyday terms there is much debate surrounding their exact definition. It is beyond the scope of this review to survey all the research examining ethnicity, but recent scholarship continues to question its definition (Chandra, 2006), and Shachaf and Horowitz do not give a clear source for their classifications of ethnicity. Similarly, service quality is not explicitly defined, but we can infer from the study that has something to do with “levels of service,” or the successful conformity to certain industry standards, opposed to a concept like “patron satisfaction.” In this case, because the authors did not explicitly conceptually define what service quality is, we cannot judge whether the operational definition later used is adequate to this conception.

Virtual reference in this case is limited in scope to e-mail reference, based on an earlier study by Stacy-Bates (2003). Shachaf and Horowitz’ study does not define the term “librarian,” but if we assume this to mean a library professional who has received a MLIS or equivalent degree we will have to consider the possibility that other non-professionals also responded to the e-mail queries.

Literature Review

Shachaf and Horowitz rightly identify a lack of research concerning virtual reference and cross-cultural groups (p. 501), making it slightly difficult to situate this study amongst others, althought the authors do cite an article examining face-to-face reference and international students (Curry & Copeman, 2005). Curry and Copeman (2005) did conclude that patrons were receiving substandard levels of service, but did not necessarily attribute this to discriminatory bias. While Shachaf and Horowitz do cite previous studies of virtual reference service in general, the results of these studies were not presented as context for the authors’ own findings: did earlier examinations of service parallel those found in the current study? We know that multiple previous studies of reference services in general have reported very high rates of patron dissatisfaction and low accuracy rates (Dewdney & Ross, 1994; Hernon & R. McClure, 1986). We cannot therefore judge the generality of Shachaf and Horowitz’ findings in the context of the discipline of Library and Information Science.

However the authors do identify some key articles discussing subjective bias online from other disciplines (Douglas & McGarty, 2001; Glasser & Kahn, 2005) and there are further interdisciplinary articles, particularly from psychology, which support this study. For instance, one study found that subjects were more likely to express discriminatory biases when interviews were conducted over the Internet opposed to in the lab (Evans, Garcia, Garcia, & Baron, 2003). In support of the authors’ use of ethnic names to measure biases, studies of fictitious replies to rental ads (Carpusor & Loges, 2006) and help-wanted ads (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004) confirm Shachaf and Horowitz’s conclusions that ethnic names illicit discrimination. Furthermore, this discrimination occurs not only when ethnicity is perceived in proper names, but also when it is inferred from e-mail addresses themselves (Pittinsky & Shih, 2006).

In reference to the support for their investigative method in the literature, Shachaf and Horowitz do acknowledge that other researchers have chosen different methods to evaluate reference services, one method in particular being surveys of user satisfaction (Hernon & Calvert, 2005). Nevertheless, Shachaf and Horowitz do make a convincing case for the use of unobtrusive methods in this study (p. 504), given this method’s long use in evaluating reference services. Also, the fact that library staff would not be under direct observation means they would be more likely to exhibit natural reactions when receiving the test e-mails, a supposition supported by Evans (2003).

Methods

The methods of this study specifically measured a certain set of criteria coded from librarian’s replies to fake e-mail queries posed to 23 ARL member libraries’ virtual reference services. To control for possible sources of error the content of e-mails were drawn from six pre-composed queries with only details changed for each particular university (“Could you tell me the population of [institution’s city name] in 1963 and 1993?” (p. 505)) and the false name attached. The study was not repeated beyond the one test group.

Different names were attached to each e-mail through which the ethnicity and religion were to be implicitly judged by the reference staff providing service. However, as we have noted, the judging of names can be ambiguous, and the categories of ethnicity we not rigourously defined.. For instance, given the definition by the U.S. Census Bureau (2001), Mary Anderson, Ahmed Ibrahim and Moshe Cohen would all be considered White. In this study Mary Anderson was considered the sole Caucasian at one point (p. 505), but this categorization included Moshe at another point (p. 512). Furthermore, Shachaf and Horowitz do not sufficiently discuss the distinction between Judaism as an ethnicity or as a religion (Yerushalmi, 1991; Webber, 1997). Ahmed himself is sometimes Muslim, a designation of religion (p. 503) and at other times an Arab, a designation of ethnicity (p. 508).

As well, the study was deficient in the fact that it attempted to measure various possible sources of discrimination at once. We noted above that the preliminary problem statement included gender as a variable to be studied although none of the later interpretations take gender into account. And, as we have indicated, there is no rigourous distinction made throughout the study between ethnicity and religion. To guard against possible rival explanations only one of the three should have been measured at once, as was done in Shachaf and Oltmann’s (2007) follow-up study. As such, we can never be entirely sure if the discrimination found in this study is a factor of gender, ethnicity or religion.

In operationalizing service quality, the authors used the guidelines on virtual reference published by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) (2006) and the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) (2007) as standards by which to judge the library staff’s level of service. These are adequate definitions given that the libraries themselves have consented to adopting them as guidelines. Level of service is judged based on 23 measurements including but not limited to the word length of replies, elapsed time from message sent to first response, and the measurement of certain textual contents such as the forms of greetings and signatures. All of these measurements were collected and averaged, but the authors caution that not enough samples were taken for statistical generalizations (p. 508, 517-8). The tallying of these measurements is relatively straightforward, and the use of two coders gives us a level of confidence in their accuracy.

However, as noted above the authors did not control for the identity of the library staff who answered the e-mails. These may often have been student library assistants who may or may not be expected to be knowledgeable about best practices and industry standards in this case. This means, therefore, that the methods of this study can not accurately measure discrimination in librarians, but at best can only measure the varying levels of service in reference departments as a whole.

A final source of error which occurred during the measurement phase of the study is the fact that two of the batches of e-mails, sent under Mary and Latoya, were sent on the weekend, calling into question the calculations of response time for these two names, and possibly some of the other measurements as well.

Findings and Summaries

The Shachaf and Horowitz conclude that “on all the dimensions of service quality that were evaluated” Arabs (Muslims?) and African Americans were discriminated against (p. 512). Apart from the possible sources of error we have already suggested, we feel that this conclusion is overly strong given some of the results of the study. Often these two names were given average or above-average service compared with the other names. For instance, in the measure of total answers (Fig. 5) Ahmed received the median number, and in the measure of follow-ups and concluding remarks (Fig. 9) he was equal with the Caucasian name, Mary, although we concede that he did receive a poor level of service on such measurements as response time (Fig. 1). As well, some level of bias was exhibited through the authors’ dismissal of one measurement where Ahmed received the highest level of service as “anecdotal” (p. 516). Looking at Moshe, he seems to have overly inflated results under both response time and length of reply (Fig. 3), making us wonder if he received a response which distorted his averages. The most we could conclude from these findings is that on some of the measurements there was a level of discrimination, but more study is required for solid conclusions.

Particularly troubling were the implications drawn by the authors from these interpretations: “Findings indicate that librarians respected Moshe and Mary more than they respected Ahmed” (p. 514). This conclusion goes beyond the scope of the study, which was designed to measure service quality, not levels of respect. Shachaf and Horowitz admit that anxiety about names could account for some of the low scores for both Ahmed and Chang Su (p. 514). While we do not deny that some of the measures could indicate discrimination, one cannot conclude lack of respect from these findings alone.

Conclusion

Given the ambiguous definitions, the lack of control for gender when measuring ethnicity, and the other sources of error we have identified, we conclude that the results of this study only suggest the need for further investigation. While we agree with Shachaf and Horowitz in admitting the results of this study cannot be generalized, we disagree with the strength of the authors’ conclusions. At best the study indicates some level of possible discrimination against these groups, but the data is far from conclusive on all points, and, given the level of possible error, such a conclusion can only be made tentatively. Furthermore, while the literature in this area does support the authors’ hypothesis, given another set of libraries at a different time, we would not be surprised to see the levels of service differ substantially. With these considerations, we cannot affirm the suggested causal connection between ethnicity and virtual reference service levels at this time without further research.

References

Babbie, E. R. (2001). The practice of social research (9th ed.). Stamford, CT: Wadsworth.

Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. The American Economic Review, 94(4), 991-1013.

Carpusor, A. G., & Loges, W. E. (2006). Rental discrimination and ethnicity in names. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 36(4), 934-952.

Chandra, K. (2006). What is ethnic identity and does it matter? Annual Review of Political Science, 9, 397-424.

Curry, A., & Copeman, D. (2005). Reference service to international students: A field stimulation research study. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 31(5), 409-420.

Dewdney, P., & Ross, C. S. (1994). Flying a light aircraft: Reference service evaluation from a user’s viewpoint. RQ, 34(2), 217-231.

Douglas, K. M., & McGarty, C. (2001). Indentifiability and self-presentation: Computer-mediated communication and intergroup interaction. British Journal of Social Psychology, 40(3), 399-416.

Evans, D. C., Garcia, D. J., Garcia, D. M., & Baron, R. S. (2003). In the privacy of their own homes: Using the internet to assess racial bias. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(2), 273-284.

Glasser, J., & Kahn, K. B. (2005). Prejudice and discrimination and the Internet. In Y. Amichai-Hamburger (Ed.), The social psychology of the Internet (p. 247-274). Oxford: University Press.

Hernon, P., & Calvert, P. (2005). E-service quality in libraries: Exploring its features and dimensions. Library & Information Science Research, 27, 377-404.

Hernon, P., & R. McClure, C. (1986, April 15). Unobtrusive reference testing: The 55 percent rule. Library Journal, 111(7), 37-42.

International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. (2006, December). IFLA digital reference guidelines. Retrieved Feburary 11, 2007 from IFLANET: http://www.ifla.org/VII/s36/pubs/drg03.htm.

Pittinsky, T. L., & Shih, M. J. (2006). Identity cues: Evidence from and for intra-individual perspectives on poisitive and negative stereotyping. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 36(9), 2215-2239.

Reference and User Services Association. (2007, Janurary). Guidelines for implementing and maintaining virtual reference services. Retrieved Feburary 11, 2007 from: http://www.ala.org/ala/rusa/rusaprotools/referenceguide/virtrefguidelines.htm.

Shachaf, P., & Horowitz, S. (2006). Are virtual reference services color blind? Library & Information Science Research, 28(4), 501-520.

Shachaf, P., & Oltmann, S. (2007). E-quality and e-service equality. In Proceedings of the fortieth Hawaii international conference on systems sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. Retrieved Feburary 11, 2007 from IEEE Computer Society Digital Library: http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2007/2755/00/27550247c.pdf.

Stacy-Bates, K. (2003). E-mail reference responses from academic ARL libraries: An unobtrusive study. Reference & User Service Quarterly, 43(1), 59-70.

United States Census Bureau. (2001). Overview of Race and Hispanic Orgin. Retrieved Feburary 11, 2007 from http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-1.pdf.

Webber, J. (1997). Jews and Judaism in contemporary Europe: Religion or ethnic group? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 20(2), 257-279.

Yerushalmi, Y. H. (1991). Freud’s moses: Judaism terminable and interminable. New Haven: Yale.

If we are building a library or bibliographic classification, then Philosophy presents a problem, particularly if we are building our classification on the lines of consensus with science and education, that is, matching our main classes to the university disciplines.

1. What is the relationship between Philosophy and the other disciplines? How is X related to the Philosophy of X? Should Aesthetics, the philosophy of the beautiful, be classed with Art? Bliss does does so, feeling this collocation is efficient. Yet, given the rule of consensus, is it more worth wild to keep these discussions with philosophy?

2. What is the nature of philosophical writing? At one hand, it aims at Truth and is written as non-fiction. Yet, at the same time, a great bulk of what philosophy does is comment on and dialogue with other philosophers; in this way it resembles literature. Should we therefore class philosophy by topic? Or should we arrange it alphabetically by author? Or, to see the dialogue, arrange it by broad historical periods?

3. What is the nature of secondary writing in Philosophy? In most disciplines, literary criticism for instance, we separate the act of creating literature and writing about literature. However, in almost all cases, writing about philosophers is itself doing philosophy. Except if we were writing the most general survey, adding one’s own commentary and interpretation is itself philosophizing. Are we to keep all secondary commentaries along with their primary texts? What about Averroes’ commentary on Aristotle, worth reading in its own write, or Heidegger’s commentaries on Hegel and Schelling? When does a commentator not deserve their own attention? What about if we are writing about multiple philosophers, even in the same micro-document (an essay in a book of essays)?

This is fine; I come from Humanities where research involves reading until it is the night before the due date and spewing whatever logical commentary you can get out onto a page. This class is necessary for me, not only because it is a required course but because I need to get at least an A- to do a research project or optional thesis.

However, for some reason the instructor has decided that it is perfectly alright to teach an entire statistics class in 5 weeks, for only 45 minutes each week. So, after talking for 2 and 1/2 hours about research in general, there is a break and then we learn stats for the rest of the extended class.

The problem is now I have an exam on Monday where I have to know 74–yes, seven-four–terms and concepts. And not just definitions: an A level answer will deliver 6-8 sentences on each concept, describing what each is, its context and some problems. An A level answer will go beyond the textbooks assigned to 2-3 other sources. And there is no recommended reading list.

Seventy-four. For all those counting, that is a minimum of 444 sentences I have to come up with. The beauty part is that each test will be a randomized selection of 20 concepts. The test actually consists of a slip of paper with 20 numbers which correspond to the questions you are to do.

The funny thing is, there are no formulas on the test. So, I am really learning 74 concepts which I would still have to go back to a textbook to learn again if I were to ever use them in research design. Pointless. I dislike memorization, my brain does not work that way, and a test which requires the cramming of concepts is a poor indicator of learning. I guarantee you that 20 minutes after I leave the test I will have forgotten every single one of those terms.

What I don’t understand is that my professor seems like a really intelligent guy. I don’t know if I am learning anything from the lectures, but as an individual he is alright. Why he insists on this format and not some short essays which would draw upon more than one of each of these is beyond me.

Earlier today while working in the library I was listening to a podcast of CBC’s Ideas. It is hard to describe to American friends and colleagues the love many Canadians have for the CBC, but I guess I wouldn’t get NPR as well. You know you are becoming an older member of the Canadian intellectual class when you stop listening to pop music and just tune into CBC radio all day.

In any event, this first part of a two part episode was on the sociologist Richard Sennett, who I had never heard of but had some very interesting ideas about public space and why modern western culture has such a hard time with it. He is influenced by Jane Jacobs, amongst others, and I think I see his work as Jacobs with a lot of historical and cultural studies to support him.

What he was saying is that our level of publicness and privateness can be seen from the little cultural rituals and gestures we preform, and that this level changes throughout history. A lot of the loss of healthy public space he attributes to the influence of early Christianity. He is particularly worried about the fear most westerners have when confronted by a stranger for no good reason, and our particular horror if we were ever to be touched on the wrist or shoulder by a stranger who is looking to talk to us.

But in the 18th Century, or in the Arab world, this is a totally normal occurrence; in fact, in these cultures one goes out of their way to make physical contact before speaking. Similarly, in the 18th Century it was common for women to entertain people while in bed, in the sense of have men and women over, inviting them in as she was getting up, drinking coffee and talking while she brushed her hair or wrote letters. The concept of the bedroom as private space is a creation of the Victorian era (whose prudish attitudes wrecked many, many things in my opinion). Or even the bath, which is the epitome of private personal space, is not so in many cultures where public bathing is the norm.

So, conclusion. When writers are so amazed by the public life we lead on the Internet, it is not something particularly new, but only a return to older forms of public life that were lived in previous times. We have this inheritance from Victorian morality and Christian sensibilities of inwardness and privacy which I don’t think are universal and were not universal throughout time. What we will find is that there is nothing unnatural or scary about living publicly.

“It’s theater, but it’s also community: In this linked, logged world, you have a place to think out loud and be listened to, to meet strangers and go deeper with friends,” writes Nussbaum. True, but it is also a return to a public life we had in the past. Richard Sennett noted that when he started people questioned how the fact that Greeks exercised and bathed naked together could shed light on their political lives. It does shed light, and I think our own publicness does so as well.

Now, discuss.

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For instance, my partner, she insists on placing the travel mugs in the same drawer with the tupperware containers. Classes, in classification theory, are grouped based on similar properties and distinguished from co-ordinate classes based on an unlike property. Her idea, as far as I can tell every morning, is that travel mugs have lids, are used outside the house, and are not made of glass.

I, on the other hand, continue to move them to the cupboard with the glasses and china mugs, on the basis that they are also made to hold coffee and tea, and they are not made to hold solids.

Think there is a solution to these different paradigms of hot beverage container storage? Nope.

I just picked up the latest issue of KO here, and there is a really good article for people interested in the internal classification of websites.

One point which seems so obvious to me now is the idea of faceted categorizations of blog posts, or faceted folksonomies. Looking at the Italian cite Biblioatipici they use a set of seven fundamental categories, in between the number set out by Ranganathan and the Classification Research Group (CRG): Entities, Products, Instruments, Agents, Space and Time. Subclasses are entered freely under these.

So, here I am overjoyed, a way to cut a balance between pre- and post-cordinated order, right. Seems I am not the first one to make that connection.

I guess del.icio.us has that ability, but I never really made the connection between theory and practice, or the slightly different jargons on the web and in the literature.

A good article, discusses DCC and JITA as well.