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Librarians As Gods
Who needs an aggregator when you've got a son who reads some of the same stuff? Nate sent me this today:
This article
talks about the impact of mass storage being so cheap. One quote that
caught my eye:
"So, what will the world look like if mass storage is not a limiting
factor?... [T]he overwhelming cheapness of storage will lead to the
apotheosis of librarianship - or, rather, of search. Overwhelmingly cheap
storage means that we will save copies of everything. But saved copies of
everything are useful only when you can find what you are looking for. I
already find it much, much easier to locate things on the publicly
accessible part of my hard disk that is www.j-bradford-delong.net than in
my private directories. Why? Google." LISNews also referenced the same article from Wired, with the comment, "I had to look up "apotheosis" and it means "to make god like". Any story that compares librarians to gods is probably worth reading."
10:56:17 PM  [];[]
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Is Barnes and Noble Today's Library?
Source: The New York Times
"Of Libraries, Superstores and Lattes"
From the article, "Given the options - free library or capitalist bookstore - and the latte at Barnes & Noble notwithstanding, the superior choice seems obvious. But maybe not. Barnes & Noble appears to be thriving, while the library hobbles along. Besotted by consumerism, it seems that we don't feel that our objects of desire, even our objects of intellectual desire, are truly valuable unless we pay for them, and dearly...But blaming the customer alone would be unfair. When it comes to marketing, Barnes & Noble is way ahead of public libraries, which our city fathers and mothers have all but written off as services to the poor and downtrodden and researchers, rather than seeing them as temples of knowledge for the masses."
--
Gary Price goes on to comment, "... it boils down to the fact that, as a whole, libraries and librarians have done a poor job in marketing/selling and DEMONSTRATING our strengths, skills, resources, and tools. Put another way, libraries, like it or not, have competition. I'm not talking competition in a monetary (although libraries need to 'compete' for money at budget time) sense but in terms of importance, usefulness, vitality, etc. in the minds of the user and non-user alike. Info professionals understand the differences between a super bookstore and a library. We also realize the differences between a web engine like Google and the library and librarian. But, have we disseminated and 'sold' these concepts in the age of the super bookstore and Google? As of today, probably not." [The ResourceShelf]
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Gaming Mobility Pushes Envelope of Experience for Education
A recent article on scenario-based learning brought to light again how well students respond to "experiences" in the learning process.
Experiences take the material being learned -- science, language, business -- and provide personalized context for that material. By making learning personal, these experiences help students go beyond memorizing facts for short-term memory storage. Learning through experience leads to the internalization of knowledge and is a prelude to actual understanding.
One of the most interesting trends in experiential computing outside the education compound is gaming -- in particular, multi-player online role playing games. These games provide rich environmental scenarios for experiences, they reinforce the experience with rich narrative, and they connect large groups of distant users intent on sharing this new experience.
And that is precisely the best kind of experience and the best kind of learning -- user/student-driven. In fact, multi-player online gaming is driven by users in its creation and marketing as well -- it is a powerful grass roots activity. The popularity is bottom up and comes not only from usage, but word-of-mouth advertising over the Web.
[Xplana]
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Starting with the Library
Made a pitch to my IMC staff today to start implementing Web logs as ways to not only create content but push it to the people that want/need it. I swear when I start talking about this stuff and explaining the "big picture" that is Web logs and RSS, I even amaze myself with the potentials that come up. And the best part is that none of it is overwhelmingly difficult. Just step by step, and the library is the first.
I'm going to mock up a site for them that follows the lead of "Tim" at Buckman in terms of setting up simple Web logs that feed into a more complex design for a home page. They want one where the book club does reviews, another for adding relevant links that can be sorted into various departments based on discipline, and perhaps another for news. Being able to "file" all of these infobits into relevant collections really caught their fancy. (And I think they even got the idea of having just, let's say Science links eventually feeding to the Science Department homepage. The whole concept of being able to create one piece of content that is categorized and stored and at the same time for made available for easy consumption by many is just very cool.)
[weblogged News]
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A post from weblogged News includes this great quote:
"I've always thought of the Internet as the largest library in the world with all of the books in a huge pile (I can't remember where I first heard that analogy, but it obviously stuck). I'm finding that weblogs seem to be like huddles of people with similar interests, sharing what they know and pointing out new resources to one another in the Great Pile."
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© Copyright 2003 Deborah Wells-Clinton.
Last update: 8/17/03; 16:53:45.
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