Kim Leeder at Envirolibrarian has a brief review of the 1997 book by David Shenk, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, which says that the amount of information easily available to people ends up harming more than helping civic participation. It sounds like an interesting book; I wasn’t aware of it. Since that book Shenk … Read more Data Smog
First Monday’s current issue is about the openness movement, including open access publishing, open source software development, and information projects with distributed authorship. One article is especially interesting: Sandra Braman’s Tactical memory: The politics of openness in the construction of memory, which deals with interesting questions about the possible implications of the openness movement for … Read more The politics of openness
Urgent message from the ALA Washington Office: On Wednesday, July 28, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the amended H.R. 5319, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), by a vote of 410-15. We believe the legislation will now go to the Senate, which may or may not have time to vote on this before their … Read more Contact your Senators about DOPA
The Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) would deny E-Rate funds to libraries that do not block whatever social networking sites and chat services the FCC puts on a “bad” list. DOPA has just been passed by the house and is now in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. At ALA Annual in New … Read more DOPA Resolution
I’ve recently gotten into Wikipedia as a contributor, as Jessamyn West noted recently. She encouraged me to start editing articles during the ALA Midwinter Meeting back in January, but I didn’t start doing it until the head of reference where I work assigned me to learn about it so that I could teach the other … Read more Wikipedia and Why Librarians Make Good Wikipedia Contributors
Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past, by Roy Rosenzweig, originally published in The Journal of American History Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006): 117-46, and republished on the web by The Center for History and New Media. This article discusses Wikipedia from an historian’s point of view, and provides … Read more Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past
Check out Barbara Fister’s thoughts on Library 2.0 and the culture of reading in her posting on the ACRL blog. She refers and links to a discussion in the mainstream press which I have been neglecting, about how the medium of the web is affecting reading and book culture. This discussion involves Kevin Kelley, Lee … Read more Barbara Fister on Library 2.0 and the culture of reading
Steve Lawson at See Also, which is an interesting blog, has created an informative Reading list for Library 2.0 skeptics.
Library 2.0 is a powerful idea that finds itself in an awkward predicament. It is an idea that has emerged out of what amounts to a separate discourse within librarianship, that of younger, web-centric librarians who have often have a sense that they are remaking the profession from the ground up for the digital future … Read more The Central Problem of Library 2.0: Privacy
Danielle Dennie found new hands to take over the LibrarianActivist blog. They’re also Canadian – recent grads of the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. Here is the announcement. Congratulations all around and best wishes to the reborn blog.
Here’s a riddle: What does the musical interval of a fifth have to do with discussions of multiple literacies, the millenials, and Marshall McLuhan’s predicted decline of print literacy and the corresponding rise of a more multi-sensory way of being, thinking, and judging? Answer: play the high note and followed by the low note of … Read more Print virtue and the ontology of the Bo-ring
Perhaps the most pressing issue facing librarianship is one that is unlikely to receive serious scholarly attention. It is, to put it simply, a battle presently being fought between two camps of librarians. Some may cite generational conflict as the primary conflict in librarianship today; baby-boomers representing traditional knowledge of librarianship as well as bibliographic … Read more Geeks and Nerds Battle for the Soul of Librarianship
The person behind the LibrarianActivist.org blog (whom I have communicated with by email but who blogs anonymously) has stopped blogging and is looking for someone to take over the project. I would say that that blog has been somewhat unique among progressive library blogs for its Canadian perspective and somewhat anarchist sensibility. (If the blogger … Read more Librarian Activist blog looking for a new blogger
Now that I’ve officially had my blog for almost month, I can reflect a little bit. Things might still change, but I have to confess that at the moment I feel somewhat outside the mainstream of library blogging culture. My blog entries aren’t getting a lot of links to them and I don’t feel much … Read more Questioning the Techie Mission
Ten years ago, in the Spring of 1996, I was learning of my acceptance to library school and introducing myself to the world-expanding wonders of the internet. (I intend that sentence to be read without irony, as I can recall clearly what a revelation it was when I first browsed the web, sent and read … Read more Information Literacy versus “The Librarian’s Stamp of Approval”