John Miedema, author of Slow Reading, will be speaking at a forum on the Future of Reading at the Library of Congress, on October 22nd. The forum is sponsored by the Library of Congress’ Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC).
“Verbiage” is a derisive word describing prose that uses many words to say not a lot, or more particularly, prose that uses words carelessly, to create impressions without attending to what the words actually mean in a specific sense. For techies, “verbiage” is stuff that English majors add later for the benefit of end users, … Read more “Verbiage,” “Intuitiveness,” respect for language, respect for users
Something to notice when Facebook, Myspace, and other social networking sites address concerns about privacy is the way they focus on users’ ability to control other users’ access to their information, but neglect to mention their own use of that information. When they enable users to set up different levels of access to parts of … Read more Privacy smoke-and-mirrors
Two recent articles in the mainstream press are telling us that paper books and physical libraries are dead (Boston Globe and CNN.com). One of the easiest things to forget about the death of the book is for how many years it has been declared. A few quotations from past decades, from authors who were responding … Read more Death of a thousand paper cuts
Just a brief note on a topic I will return to later… I find that librarians think of change in one of two ways: Change is happening to the profession; or Change is happening in the environment (social, cultural, economic, political) and the profession determines how it will change in response. These two ways of … Read more Professionalism and attitudes toward change
There is a common assumption that trends should be identified quickly so that we can more quickly and more fully adapt to them, in order to stay competitively ahead-of-the-curve and relevant. But trends are not all the same. Let me give you an analogy. I have heard of two primary policy themes in response to … Read more Interior space as a social cause
John Buschman sent a link out this morning to this article by Chris Dede in the current EDUCAUSE Review, “A Seismic Shift in Epistemology. The article examines the deep changes in the meaning of knowledge in the academy and elsewhere that are being effected by new technologies, with a focus on Wikipedia and other Web … Read more A Seismic Shift in Epistemology
I attended Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission in Cambridge, MA, April 24-26. (Follow that link for a summary of what the conference was about.) Here are my thoughts about the conference after returning home. Of primary interest to me, coming from Duluth, MN, where it was below freezing yesterday, was … Read more Media in Transition 6… Reactions…
“Exploring the Ethical Implications of Technological Change through the Thought of Walter Ong and Other Media Theorists” That’s the title of my paper for the conference coming up this weekend in Boston, Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission. The paper is not the greatest thing I’ve ever written, but it is … Read more Exploring the Ethical Implications of Media Technology Through the Thought of Walter Ong
This is going to be my obnoxious post for the year, the kind of post I write periodically that leads to ugly Google results on my name. There are things that I sometimes need to say that I know a lot of people won’t like. Helps me maintain a sense of integrity, I guess. Like … Read more Library 2.0 talk enters backwardation
Library of Walls: The Library of Congress and the Contradictions of Information Society Author: Samuel Gerald Collins Price: $32.00 Published: April 2009 ISBN: 978-0-9802004-2-3 Printed on acid-free paper “The experience [of reading this book] was something akin to watching a reality show featuring Jorge Luis Borges, Marshall McLuhan, Michel Foucault, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Virilio … Read more New from Litwin Books: Library of Walls
In the most recent issue of ALA’s email newsletter, AL Direct, there is an item (“More authors turn to web publishing”) about the growing popularity of author services companies like Lulu.com and Author Solutions as mainstream publishers cut back on the numbers of titles that they take on during the economic downturn. That’s true as … Read more POD vs. author services publishing
I’ll be at the [Midwest] Library Technology Conference 2009 next week. I’ll be presenting a poster on our library’s widgets along with Doreen Hansen, a member of our Computer Work Team. Say hello if you’ll be there and you know me from here. I haven’t networked in Minnesota like I should…
Interesting post at Stay Free! commenting on a New York Times story about kids using YouTube as their primary search engine for information about topics assigned for homework. Carrie McLaren gets into some of the differences between text and video as information media…
Since the second half of last year I’ve been reading a lot of financial news, where the major theme of the financial crisis is the “crisis of trust” – banks not wanting to take the risk of extending credit to counterparties. But we’ve been living through a worsening crisis of trust in another sense for … Read more The Other Crisis of Trust (and a question about what it means for Info Lit)
The services of electricity to libraries, however, are by no means exhausted by the electric light. It is capable of rendering aid even more important, and the more so in proportion to the extent of the library. The need for rapid communication throughout large buildings has been in some measure met by the telephone, whose … Read more Library Tech, circa 1899
I am a big Netflix user. Netflix has a library of about 100,000 movies that users can watch. Because of the size of the library, much of their business comes from customers who have a strong interest in film and want to see movies that they’ve read about in books and are not otherwise easy … Read more The Netflix Prize – not what’s needed
Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control, by Raiford Guins. This new book from University of Minnesota Press is about how media technologies are being built for consumers with features that allow them to do their own censorship. The author is talking about “TVs equipped with V-chips, Internet filters, editing DVD players, clean-version … Read more Book of note: technological censorship
Just noting a book review in First Monday, of Lee Siegel’s Against the machine: Being human in the age of electronic media. According to the review, this book is a little deeper and more interesting than most books about how the internet is changing us for the worse…
Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission International Conference April 24-26, 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology CALL FOR PAPERS (MIT site) In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while … Read more Call for papers: Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission