The Problems of Philosophy as a Discipline in Bibliographic Classification: The Example BC1 (Feb 2007)

Examines the problems of Philosophy as a discipline in general bibliographic classifications based on educational consensus. Through an examination of the first edition of Bliss’ Bibliographic Classification (BC1) and its basis in a theory of a pedagogical order, the following problems are addressed: philosophy and its relation to other disciplines, the distinction between literature and science in philosophy, and the distinction between primary and secondary works in philosophy. Concludes that Bliss’ extensive use of alternative locations, particularly in the main class of Philosophy, represents Bliss’ inability to successfully deal with these issues.

Discrimination in reference services: A critical review of “Are virtual reference services color blind?” (Feb 2007)

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).

Mass Media Criticism: An Orientation (Dec 2006)

Work I did for Information and Its Social Contexts, this projects explicates a number of lengthly quotations from five authors working in the area of media criticism. Not intended as a standard bibliography of a subject (although there are extended references), this orientation aims to have students begin to think critically about the topic as they engage in research.

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p>The DSpace Digital Repository: A Project Analysis (Nov 2006)

A short look at the DSpace software with some pros and cons. Actually, after this paper was submitted a lot of literature on DSpace came out, so the articles I cite refer to earlier versions of the software

Serendipitous Browsing: A summary and commentary of Thomas Mann’s “What’s Going on at the Library of Congress?” (July 2006)

Written before I formally started school, presents an discussion of Mann’s article and offers come commentary.