I've been listening to the recordings of usability interviews as i drive to work. From the series of usability tests last December and this last series from a few weeks ago, i have been struck by the preference for journals expressed by some of the students.
My postgraduate work was in physics, so i recognize that there's a spectrum in the form of "publish or perish." Still, i recognized the value of a good monograph on a topic. Generally, physicists don't seem to write books until there's a solid understanding of a principle, at which point the book often trumps papers. (I pause to remember my advisors theory that in counting papers for tenure decision that someone should go through and see how many later papers retract or substantially amend previously published work, giving those a "count" of -2. As a student, i was annoyed by one particular experimentalist's repeated introduction sections --i had to dig through repetitive text to see if anything substantial was added to the record.)
This morning i listened to a very savvy student talk about his research for a literature review in psychology. He completely dismissed books as "secondary" sources. For a topic such as his -- an open research question -- he's probably right, yet the first result on a search links to an online text from Wiley. The publisher of this book describes it as:
This book series aims to provide a critical overview of the research evidence concerning the diagnosis and management of the most prevalent mental disorders and a survey of the relevant clinical experience in the various regions of the world.
The first five volumes of this series - dealing respectively with Depressive Disorders, Schizophrenia, Dementia, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Bipolar Disorder - have sold out (the last one after only four months). A second edition of the first four volumes (completely updated, with several chapters totally re-written) has just been published in paperback. The volume on Bipolar Disorder has been reprinted and is now again on the market.
It seems to me that a review of the literature might well start with such a book published in 2002 and then fill in the following several years with journal articles. While this is, by definition, a secondary source -- it's not completely worthless.
Instead, books are dismissed by many of our survey students. I suppose i should reflect on this as just a swing in the pendulum. These novice academics are just learning about the value of primary research/sources. As they progress, they may learn that the books published by the researchers in their field, the first often derived from a dissertation, hold the value of original and "primary" thought that has a depth and full understanding that can't be absorbed from a dozen journal articles.
I'm not very good at naming things, and even had help in naming this blog. I didn't name RedLightGreen, either, but i've been point person for every internal and many external comments about the name. They're all mixed. So it's with a certain sort of pleasure that i read this Mozilla FAQ about Phoenix Firebird Firefox.
From an announcement to the RedLightGreen partners:
The February RLG Focus has just been issued, and there's an article on
RedLightGreen that features some discussion of the Coffee Tour, and also
summarizes "what we've learned" in the last few months.
http://www.rlg.org/r-focus/i66.html
Did i mention we promoted a new interface, with a new "cool" feature called "Your List?" The "Your List" feature is why we prompted for a default citation format -- something that didn't make sense in the registration flow before this. The "Your List" is something other folks had asked for -- we wish we had it in place at launch.
The colors are brighter -- "younger" -- too.
And we updated the data right before ALA. As RLG migrates the full Union Catalog to a new infrastructure, our ability to add new records into RedLightGreen in a sensible manner is hampered by a cascade of dependencies and priorities. As soon as the Union Catalog is in its new home, i hope we'll be able to make a more sensible connection to the continually updated records. Until then, we'll have to make do with these batch loads.
Did i mention i had the flu?
*** Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Supports Further Work on RedLightGreen
In December RLG received an appropriation from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for continued support of the RedLightGreen project. The Foundation's award enables us to embark on improving and promoting RedLightGreen to an audience of institutions and individuals that can make this service self-sustaining. User studies at the current pilot partner institutions will inform the kinds of service extensions and business models that offer the most value to RLG members, customers, and sponsors.
This significant grant is the third awarded by the Foundation for the RedLightGreen concept and execution. The first, in June 2001, supported planning stages; the second, in April 2002, enabled most of the development for the pilot service launch.
The pilot site has been in use since last September, and on January 27 we implemented a number of enhancements that reflect what we've learned from users over the first four months: see http://redlightgreen.com. The upcoming February "RLG Focus" will contain an article on "what we've learned since launch."