November 5, 2002

Seeing what you mean I'm collecting visual displays of thesauri for the purposes of example in future information literacy sessions: plumbdesign's visual thesaurus Highwire Press' TopicMap (click on icon beside title) Communication Concept Explorer (subscribers to ComAbstracts only)   5:09:14 PM     The reason why Amazon.com first started out by selling books... I don't many folks realize that Amazon was conceived first and foremost as an online Wal-Mart. Amazon only took the form of an online bookstore because of electronic inventory lists: It was while brainstorming ideas in the then-unfamiliar area of electronic commerce that Bezos came to his deceptively simple conclusion: The most logical thing to sell over the Internet was books, largely because two of the country's largest book distributors already had exhaustive electronic lists. As Amazon.com has long since established, no single bookstore, even a superstore, can carry a comprehensive inventory of the books in print. The distributors, carrying thousands of titles, in effect act as the warehouse for most stores, particularly smaller independent booksellers. When customers ask a store for a book it doesn't have, the first place many of them will turn to fill the customer's order is Ingram or Baker & Taylor, the two largest distributors. These companies' inventory lists, once regularly circulated to bookstores on packs of microfiche, went digital in the late 1980s along with others in the book trade - an unheralded benchmark that would enable Bezos to offer books online through the virtual retailer he envisioned creating. 4:52:49 PM     Can you tell I'm cleaning my desk? Melvl Dewey was responsible for file folder and the filing cabinent [Flanzraich, Gerri. "The Library Bureau and Office Technology". Libraries and Culture, Vol. 28, No. 4, Fall 1993.]. I make mention of this because libraries have a legacy of providing not just information but tools to manage information. I have been playing with the idea that libraries should invest some of their energies into demonstrating how (library) technology can applied to manage one's personal collection of information or research. So I'm planning to perpare something similar to this guide to Personal Bibliographic Software. Eventually. 1:30:42 PM     The Bogdanov Affair We all laughed when the physicist Alan Sokal wrote a deliberately silly paper entitled Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity, and managed to get it accepted by a refereed journal of social and cultural studies, Social Text. But around October 22nd, many of us began hearing rumors that two brothers managed to publish at least 4 meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax - and even got Ph.D. degrees in physics from Bourgogne University on the basis of this work! [link from Seb's Open Research] 10:52:26 AM     This page, why weblogs, touches on many of the reasons why I believe a university should include free access to blogging software with any free server space they may provide for their students. If the library was able to provide semi-permanent personal server space to students, I would like to provide blogging software (though Moveable Type or Manilla, I suppose) and being a librarian, would be tempted to call the space a virtual 'library carrel'. My favourite excerpt: About a year ago, I asked my first year composition students whether they did much reading and writing outside of class. Most of them said, "No." But when I asked them if they wrote emails, used AOL IM, and surfed the Internet, they almost unanimously said, "Yes." To them, the Internet and other forms of electronic discourse were not associated with their concept of "reading and writing" in the school sort of way. I imagine that this difference might be because one is "fun" and the other is "work." But regardless, I've come to feel that reading and writing the Web is a way for me to tap into a writing space that students already use--and more importantly, want to use. 9:29:59 AM     Journals Ranked by Impact: Information & Library Science 9:29:54 AM

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