Subject/Object

It’s been a long time since I’ve had something substantial to say. This goes along with me not really being interested in reading blogs and keeping up with the debates there–both in the library blog sphere and in with my feeds in general. This is not the first time I have gone through these periods of decline, and I know I am not the only one who has blanked on their blog writing.

However, there have been a lot of positive developments in my career over the last few months, and I hope to deal with them in the next few posts.

First of all, I have submitted myself to some book review editors, and I currently have two books I am reading for two different journals. The first is an academic examination of blogs and the blog sphere for The Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship. The second is a collection of unpublished writings by Kurt Vonnegut for Library Journal. The second is only the standard 200 word review, but the first is a substantial one thousand words.

I really should have tried to finish the longer one over Christmas, because now it is getting in the way of school work, but I have decided to work a few hours less this semester to fit in writing, school work and applying for jobs.

It is great to finally have a change to publish my writing. And, hopefully, I will have a peer-reviewed paper to add to them, which I will talk about in my next post.

Here is a review of Pnina Shachaf and Sarah Horowitz’ 2006 article “Are virtual reference services color blind?“. It is an unobtrusive study of e-mail reference which purports to discover discrimination against Arabs and African-Americans based on the names appended to e-mail queries.

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.

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