March 2008 ISSN 1534-0937 Walt Crawford 100 Reasons for Doing Cites & Insights
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Cites & Insights Crawford at Large Libraries • Policy • Technology • Media Sponsored by YBP Library Services Volume 8, Number 3: March 2008 ISSN 1534-0937 Walt Crawford 100 Reasons for Doing Cites & Insights G G F# E D G A B, B B B A G C B A, G A B A G E F# interfered like, say, losing my job and having to reeva- G, D B G A C B A G. Half, four quarters, four halves, luate my life. four quarters, four halves, four quarters, four halves, Turns out even that didn’t do it. four quarters, two halves, whole. Quite a milestone. A nice round number. You Some of you must have hummed this by now, may be expecting a nostalgiafest. Not this time and it’s distinctly appropriate to the occasion: Old around. Nor will I give you a list of 100 items or even 100th, from the 1551 Geneva Psalter, attributed to ten lists of ten items each. Louis Bourgeois (c. 1510-c. 1561). One of the great This issue is composed of traditional Cites & In- old hymn tunes, given that name because the oldest sights sections—with each subsection numbered at the hymn using the tune (at least in the 1966 Methodist end of the paragraph that closes a subsection. Thus, Hymnal), from 1593, is (very) loosely based on Psalm 100 reasons for Cites & Insights—making it (libraries) 100: “All People That on Earth Do Dwell.” You might work, trends, quick takes, interesting products and know it better as the doxology, “Praise God, from the state of high-density optical discs, closing with Whom All Blessings Flow”—or, in a tougher mood, purely fun essays in MY BACK PAGES. Enjoy. This even “Before Jehovah’s Awful Throne.” It came to chunk of blather is the first: [1]. mind when I realized this was the 100th issue of Cites & Insights. No religious overtones here, but I do love a Inside This Issue good tune with even better four-part harmony. Perspective: Tracking High-Def Discs ................................. 6 Back in 2000, if you’d said I’d do 100 of these, Making it Work ............................................................... 10 I’d probably have laughed. My original aim was 41— Interesting & Peculiar Products ....................................... 27 which made a total of a hundred of “these,” including My Back Pages ................................................................. 32 the 59 issues of “Trailing Edge Notes” and “Crawford’s Corner” that preceded Cites & Insights. By the time I Trends & Quick Takes reached issue 25, I thought I might make it to a 50th issue, but I made no promises. In the 50th issue, I Sick Culture of didn’t say anything about anticipated lifespan—but, if pressed, I still would have said there was a less than Nonstop Accessibility even chance I’d make it to 100. Not my words. I’m not that negative on other people Then came Issue 75—or, rather, then came Issue choosing to be available all the time. I don’t choose to 72. Remember issue 72? Does volume 6, issue 2 ring do it and don’t plan to, but that’s my choice. a bell? Or perhaps Midwinter 2006? There’s another, When Dan Costa uses that phrase in “Don’t send more popular name, the one that heads the single 32- that e-mail!” (October 2, 2007 PC Magazine) it’s a little page essay—and I’d guess issue 72 will always be the rueful since it follows this introduction: most widely-read issue of Cites & Insights. (For the This cycle of e-mail abuse has to be broken, and I need first five weeks of 2007, issue 72 was still the third- your help. I’m not sure when it started, but for the past most-downloaded issue, nearly two years later.) If few months I have been checking e-mail before I go to you’d asked at issue 75, I’d have said I couldn’t im- sleep—not from my computer but from my Treo, while I agine not getting to this point—unless major events am actually lying in bed. This is a problem, I know… Cites & Insights March 2008 1 Do we need Online Anonymous, a 12-step program for good news. You have to understand that “per page” is email/IM/Twitter addicts? Costa provides a list of “rea- based on a stated amount of ink coverage, typically 5% sons not to send e-mail” in an effort to clarify the “ever- (about right for typical text documents or casual color fading line between healthy productivity and seriously graphics, way low for full-page photographs—and the obsessive behavior.” He, ahem, e-mailed it to a bunch standard doesn’t claim to address photographic costs). of colleagues, who added other good reasons—of The cost per page for monochrome pages ran from 1.4 which 29 appear here. Let’s not linger on whether cents per page for the HP Officejet K5400dtn, a relative- checking email obsessively has positive correlation with ly expensive printer with big cartridges (the black car- healthy productivity; that gets into the whole multi- tridge yields around 2,300 pages), to 4.4 cents for the tasking/CPA thing. The reasons are at least amusing Lexmark, a cheap printer with small cartridges. I was and well worth reading. You’ll find a longer list at delighted to see that the Pixma ran less than three cents www.gearlog.com/2007/06/costa_living_50_reasons_not_to. per monochrome page and less than a dime per color php (I guess the column gets written four months be- page—but I still print most pages in “fast mode,” using fore it appears in print). half as much ink per page. The #1 reason in the online column didn’t make The article also considers total cost of ownership it into print: “You’re drunk.” Neither did these first- for light-duty and heavy-duty use over three years. rate reasons not to send email: While the big Officejet would cost the least for sup- 6. Reply All includes the subject of your e-mail.....yes, plies over three years, it would be almost the most Stephanie Chang, Editor of PC… I am talking to you. expensive as a light-duty printer because the purchase 7. Reply All often includes your coworkers, subordi- price is high; the Lexmark would cost the most to run nates, and superiors and can easily be forwarded to their but the least overall—if you average 80 monochrome family and friends. and 20 color pages per month (that’s very light use). If 8. HR is on there, too. you’re what I’d consider a medium user but they call It’s a fine list. I wonder how many hundred copies “heavy duty” (200 monochrome and 100 color pages have been circulated by email. Thousands? Tens of per month), the big Officejet’s the cheapest any way thousands? [2] you calculate—and the smaller Officejet is the most expensive. Kodak’s “cheap supplies” printers? Most Ink Costs and Reality reports say they’re not really all that cheap—and, in The cost of supplies for inkjet printers has always this case, those were the only monochrome cartridges been troublesome and cloudy—troublesome because yielding considerably less than 500 pages. Sure, you those full-color 8x10 photo-quality glossy-paper ren- can buy the cartridges cheap, but if there’s not much ditions may be costing $1 or more, cloudy because the ink in them, they’re not bargains. [3] standards for stating supply costs have been lacking. According to PC Magazine, there’s progress. Life without Software ISO/IEC 24711 specifies a test procedure for testing That’s the title on Scott Spanbauer’s article in the De- ink cost; ISO/IEC 24712 defines the types of pages to cember 2007 PC World, recounting his one-week at- print. “In theory, yield claims based on the ISO/IEC tempt to give up local (“desktop”) applications for a standard should be fully comparable, regardless of the week, working solely on the web. It’s an interesting manufacturer.” As reported in the October 2, 2007 account. For Spanbauer’s needs the move may make issue, PC decided to run its own tests against five sense, although one wonders just what all those mul- models that offer claimed yields based on the ISO/IEC tiple AJAX sessions will do to responsiveness. standard: a Canon Pixma MP600, HP Officejet J5780 When someone says “basic e-mail, word and Officejet Pro 5400dtn, Kodak EasyShare 5300 processing and spreadsheet needs,” note that different and Lexmark X3550. Three of these are multifunction people define “basic” differently. Your specialized and units, two just printers. My new printer is as close to a basically useless Word features may be ones I use Pixma MP600 as I could find—a Pixma MP610, pre- every day, and vice-versa. I’m not a good candidate for sumably an incremental upgrade. PC used the most moving everything to the web, even though my work cost-effective cartridge in cases where you can buy mornings are primarily done using web applications ones with different capacities. (and thin-terminal remote desktop apps). You might “All the claims passed our reality checks”— in every find this possibility interesting, and maybe connectivi- case, the manufacturer’s claims were legitimate. This is ty won’t be an issue for you. Worth a read. [4] Cites & Insights March 2008 2 Life in 2032? Good Sound Matters…or Does It? To kick off PC Magazine’s second quarter-century, Two commentaries on sound quality in an age of Lance Ulanoff offers his own projection of what he iPods appeared late last year in general-interest media.