Title: An Alphabetical Fable
Author: Margaret Landesman
Description: Article and Book Meet the Google - Wherein an apprehensive article (doubtless from a scholarly journal) and a rather bolder book (of the sort that may be monetizing your click stream any day now) discuss current affairs.
Link: pdf
Chapter One: Before they
Met the Google
Article and Book had lived together for
a very long time. Occasional visits from a
relative, perhaps one of the Indexes, enlivened
their days, but never penetrated deeply their
peaceful existence. [Though — then as now
— it was far better to have a relative, even an
Index, than to have no visitors at all.]
Book did go out [infrequently] — as did
Article on occasion — but on the whole they
led quiet lives. Their parents had long ago
relinquished them to their current landlord,
the Catalog, which itself was part of a larger
conglomerate, the Library.
The Library took good care of them — furnishing
heat, light, and shelf space while making
few demands — the occasional excursion
to be Reclassed or perhaps, if quite worn out,
to the Bindery.
There was talk of a new landlord, called
Storage — and of some sort of cloning procedure,
Digitization, which would reduce
them to a shadow of themselves — but a very
portable and appealing sort of shadow — and
it sounded painless. They felt slightly nervous
about what happened after Digitization
— but…
It had to do with things Electronic — Ebooks,
E-journals — E didn’t loom large in
their world — and they kind of hoped E would
go away.
It happened, though, as it sometimes
does, that it didn’t.
All of a sudden, everybody who
was anybody was Full Text. And
anybody who wasn’t somebody
was nobody in a whole new way.
This was puzzling, since they had
always supposed their text to be full
from the start.
They knew they weren’t often read, but
they comforted themselves that no one could
say for sure. Now though, they knew. No one
read them. No one ever would. [Which didn’t
mean they would sink to advertising.]
Article, feeling forlorn and a bit whiney,
complained, “You’re a Book. People cite you
and pretend they’ve read you. You have no idea
how embarrassing it is to be an Article with no
Impact Factor to speak of.”
Looming over them all was the Google.
No one quite knew what sort of an entity a
Google might be. It had a motto, “Don’t Be
Evil,” that sounded encouraging.
After that, it was sort of hard to pin down.
The Publisher and Vendor relations weren’t
at all happy about the Google. And it was
rumored Google had relatives [not blood
ones, more like imitators] with names like
Yahoo and MSN who didn’t have mottos like
Google’s.
But then an invitation came:
Come and meet the Google.
The Google will take you miles
and miles and all for free.
Uncle Press was very much alarmed. “Who
is this Google?”
“You can come too,” Book pointed out.
“You’re invited.”
“No, better to wait — we think we’ll
wait.”
Chapter Two: Meeting the Google
Meeting the Google is a very brief business.
Goes by so fast you hardly notice it. But
something happens in here and it starts with H.
[There are those who think what happens is
horrid and others who think it’s helpful.]
Chapter Three: How after you’ve
been Googled, you will fit in an iPod
“An iPod?” asked Article.
“Of course,” said Book. “People listen
to books as they drive cars or walk on their
tread-mills. They put their lecture
notes or the latest Harry Potter
— whatever — on the iPod.”
“But how do you get from the
Google to the iPod?”
“Maybe with Google maps? It
might be best not to ask, not unless
you’re in the Public Domain
anyway.”
“The world will never be the
same,” lamented Article.
“Probably not,” replied Book.
“Our forebears didn’t have to put up with
this sort of thing.”
Chapter Four: The Way
We Never Were
“Actually, “Book said, “They did. Think
how the papyri felt, with their elegance and
lovely texture, when readers started preferring
stuff made from worn out clothes and
rags. Movable type moved in; colophons left.
These self-promoting Title Pages and book
jackets arrived. And numbers on every page
— as if a page is so unimportant it can just be
categorized as 23 or 68.”
What do we do with J and K?
This is a fable — not some peer-reviewed
sort of thing. Call them JunK.
Chapter Five: Hanging on to the
Long Tail by your Metadata
“Think of it like this” Book went on.
Remember the brontosaurus — dragging its
Long Tail? Turns out it wasn’t like that.
They waved those tails in the air like banners
sailing along behind.”
“Now it is difficult to think of ourselves
as inhabiting a tail — of any sort. But, if you
have to be part of a tail — a really LONG tail
is not so bad. IF you hang on tightly with your
Metadata.”
“What’s Metadata?” asked Article.
“They used to call it cataloging.”
“Oh.”
“Your metadata gets stuffed into the tail
along with you, so that when the Google is
crawling the tail, it makes a copy of all your
words — gobbles them up. And then when
people Google any of your words, they find
you.”
“Google crawls? And gobbles?” Article is
by now definitely apprehensive.
“Well, yes.” replied Book. “Anyway, it
means that when people are looking for something
and they type some of your words in,
they find you — and maybe they never knew
about you before. Now that they know about
you, they can come looking for you and, who
knows, maybe you will turn out to have been
a seminal article.”
Chapter Six: Life in the Long Tail
“How will they know my address?” worried
Article.
“Tails are like any real estate — Location,
Location, and Location. Some people think
moving to an Open Access neighborhood
means more readers will find you.”
“But their crime rate is high — they’re not
protected by Peer Review.”
“Don’t be silly — NAR moved and took
her peer review with her, early on in the first
wiggle of the first wave of the long tail.”
“NAR?”
“Nucleic Acids Research. Remember?
From O.U.P. — nicknamed NAR.”
Chapter Seven: NAR Moves to an
Open Access Neighborhood and Takes
Peer Q. Review Along
“Open Access,” lectured Book, “ just
means the universities or whoever hatched
the articles pays the publication costs up front,
instead of laundering the money through publishers
and the campus library. Much more
efficient.”
“Isn’t that vanity publishing?”
“Not if you take Peer Q. Review
along.”
“I don’t remember Peer having a Q.?”
“He added it —stands for Quantum
Dot.”
Chapter Eight: Social Networking
[to get your Tags into the Ubiquitous
Zoosphere where they will be Found,
Even in a Quantum Dot]
“Peer is into Social Networking — hangs
out on MySpace and Second Life,” Book went
on. “He heard Quantum Dots would be the
Next Big Thing, so he added the Q. Thought
he might attract more Tags that way.”
“What,” enquired Article, “are Quantum
Dots? Tags?”
“Tags to float in the tag clouds. I’ll explain
about the QDs later, but there is this new thing
called ‘tagging’ ”.
“Tagging isn’t new — we’ve had them
since kindergarten — yours come from the
Library of Congress and live in big red books
— and mine are in the Indexes — I suppose
they’re in the computer now?”
“Yes, but these new tags aren’t decided
between you and the librarians. Anybody
can tag you with any word they want. — and
everybody else can see them and find you too
— if they use the same words.”
“Isn’t that dangerous? What if they don’t
like me? Won’t everyone know it?”
“Yes.”
“I see.” said a resigned Article. “So what
happens next?”
“Everything will get smaller and faster and
smaller and faster — and the Tail will get longer
and longer and thinner and thinner till you
can hardly see it, but it will float like a balloon
up into the Zoosphere. (excuse me, but you
need to go to the end of the line.) Eventually,
the whole long tail with all of us hanging on
by our metadata will get so small it can curl up
and fit itself into a Quantum Dot. “
“With the brontosaurus? Or without?”
“I’m not sure about the brontosaurus, but
the tail definitely fits. And you can put the
whole thing on a Quantum Dot printed on the
inside of a paperback or on a business card or
wherever. Information will be Ubiquitous
— it’s called Ambient Findability — try
googling that — you might even find it in the
library catalog.”
What do we do with V?
This is a VERY silly story. That’s because
librarians have no training in alphabetical
fables and they are having a hard time adapting
to this new world and just walk about mumbling
over and over ‘People don’t like to read
books on a screen.’
Chapter Nine: The Final Word
“It’s your Words that make you — they’re
the only thing that counts — if more people
read you, why do you care whether it’s Times
Roman 14 on vellum or stored in a Quantum
Dot?”
“Words are the end of the story. The rest
is just footnotes.”
Footnotes:
X — is for a crossroads. Perhaps books and
articles are at a crossroads — where they may
go in new directions?
Y —. If you have to ask what Y stands for,
you are too out of it to be reading this fable.
(Y stands for YouTube.)
Z — Though not quite the problem Q
presents for alphabetical tales, Z is nonetheless
best relegated to a footnote. Only somehow it
snuck in above out of order.
Colleagues have enquired as to why I wrote
this story. I wrote it because my children had
lovely little alphabetical tales called Ant and
Bee when they were little. And because I have
a collection of alphabet books. Now that I
am fully cognizant of just how many letters
there are in the alphabet, I will not be writing
another.