Just a quick link without comment to an IF issue that I think deserves the ALA establishment’s attention. Rowland Keshena of the Speed of Dreams blog has posted an item about Facebook’s recent actions shutting down Left-oriented groups and freezing their group administrators’ accounts: “Cataloging Political Repression on Facebook.” Some of the groups that have … Read more Facebook Intellectual Freedom Issue (Political Repression)
A Space for Hate: The White Power Movement’s Adaptation into Cyberspace Author: Adam Klein Price: $25.00 Published: June 2010 ISBN: 978-1-936117-07-9 A Space for Hate speaks to the media and information topic of hate speech in cyberspace, but more specifically, how its inscribers have adapted their movement into the social networking and information-providing contexts of … Read more New book: A Space for Hate: The White Power Movement’s Adaptation into Cyberspace
The big theme in the current era of librarianship is to be user-centered. Being user centered is the key to maintaining relevance, changing with the times, and erasing the barriers to access that turn many people off to libraries. In the background of the idea of user-centeredness are two parallel but very different theories: critical … Read more Motives in the conception of the “user” in user-centered service design
I just bought a Motorola Droid, which is Verizon’s Android-based smart phone, Android being Google’s OS for mobile devices. Its integration with Google gives me a lot of “power” to integrate my online tools with my mobile device, which is very satisfying. I experience it as empowering, and my attention is focused on learning what … Read more The Power of Google is Power
Poet Dave Bonta has an podcast interview series on his Via Negativa blog. His latest interview is with John Miedema, author of Slow Reading. It’s a good listen.
Jaron Lanier has a new book, You Are Not a Gadget (NY Times review), which I have to add to my reading list and bump up a few notches. There is an excerpt from it in the February issue of Harper’s: “The Serfdom of Crowds.” He’s writing along the lines of some of what I … Read more Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget
Anu Garg’s “A Word A Day” newsletter is the greatest thing in the world right now for (English) word lovers. He sends out an email each weekday that is all about a word. Each week his words are linked by some theme or characteristic. This week he is honoring Banned Books Weed with words about … Read more A.Word.A.Day this week
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
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
For Goodreads users there is now a Goodreads Group for Library Juice Press and Litwin Books. If someone out there would be interested in helping make the group lively, let me know and we can cooperate. Cheers….
A co-worker of mine shared this video with me, done by somebody she knows at the library at Indiana University. I think it is great, creates such a sunny feeling about their library’s services, and gets the important things across. I am going to talk my co-worker into copying Carrie Donovan so that we can … Read more ASK video
MIT has posted podcasts from the five plenary sessions at Media in Transition 6, at the Comparative Media Studies program’s podcast page. The plenary sessions were on “Archives and History,” “New Media, Civic Media,” “Institutional Perspectives on Storage,” “The Future of Publishing,” and “Summary Perspectives.” I think these plenary sessions were the best part of … Read more Media in Transition 6 – Podcasts
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…
The details of the upcoming Media in Transition 6 conference have been posted to the web. On the site you can now find the full program and abstracts of all the papers being presented. Full papers are being added as they come in. This conference, which has no fee for registration, is going to be … Read more Media in Transition 6 conference details
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…
Winning entry in the 2008-09 UMD Library Student Video Contest, by Jacob Strassman and Matt Moline…
When I started Library Juice Press, I was aware of some librarian-publishers who came before me, whose presses are still around. There may be others. I like to think that despite changes in publishing that make it easier to dive in I am more in line with this tradition of librarian-publishers than I am with … Read more Some other librarian-publishers
This is semi random, but I thought it might be interesting to see what comes to your minds in answer to the question: What is your favorite Wikipedia page? I actually have a favorite page, one that I like to go back to repeatedly. It’s not necessarily a good summary of my interests as a … Read more Library Juice Readers: What is your favorite Wikipedia page?
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