Post 4

If I had to concoct a motif shared by the studies of Howland et al. (2009) and Young & Madans (2009), it would be the coexistence of the old and the new, and the question whether such is possible.

Young & Madans, who were affiliated with the Hachette publishing conglomerate, have written an apologia for the use of XML--not just at the end of a book's production but throughout. The authors are at pains to portray the technology as sympathetically as possible to the less than tech-savvy. This results in some fairly gross oversimplifications: for instance, the statement that "there is only one difference between XML mark-up and traditional editorial mark-up of your content, and that is the difference between tagging a digital file and manually marking up a physical manuscript" (p. 148). That "difference" literally applies to any digital process: doodling on a manuscript in MS Paint, say. The authors more substantially articulate their business goals than their technological ones. There is much talk of shifting models, of efficiency, of how those who resist this (any?) new way of doing things are benighted and the rest enlightened.

In the study conducted by Howland and colleagues, of the BYU libraries, the old way of doing things is played by library subscription databases, and the new by Google Scholar. The locus of concern was how "scholarly" were the articles  found in each. The researchers found--surprisingly to me--that, on the whole, the articles found using professional search techniques were as scholarly in library databases as on Google But Howland and colleagues--unlike Young & Madans--do not proclaim that Google is superior on account of its lower cost and overall greater compatibility with the new economics of et cetera. Their conclusions are modest, to the effect that, in the absence of comprehensive data, there is presumptively room for the old and the new.

References

Howland, J. L., Writhg, T. C., Boughan, R. A., & Roberts, B. C. (2009). How scholarly is Google Scholar? A comparison to library databases. College & Research Libraries, 70, 227-234.

Young, D. & Madans, P. (2009). XML: Why bother? Publishing Research Quarterly, 25, 147-153.