Latest Post

reading list

A post a few weeks back by Rory Litwin at the Library Juice blog asked, What is the coolest library/info related book or article (or blog post, I guess) that you have read in the past year or so? Post something in the comments here – I am hoping we end up with a nice, [...]

Featured Post

Asides

• Eventually, the intellectual and technological elite, which includes me, and you also, is going to have the same arguments about writing as we are now having about reading. People will shift away from keyboards to produce written words. We'll speak into microphones, at first clumsily and eventually efficiently with our own individual shorthands. Words commonly mistransformed by software will enter formal and spoken language. Academic papers will be written about it, this time not without irony. There will be backlash. Writing is a lost art, we will say. Anyone can put text on a screen, but real writing is done with fingers pressing on keys, with keys pressing back on fingers in kind but ultimately yielding. Our new writing, in contrast, yields to the computers representing it. Then we will stop writing altogether. by caleb #
• i'm contemplating the fact that print-on-demand and "the disney vault" both exist. that is, even if you can have any cultural artifact reproduced, and for sale, on short notice, it doesn't mean that the rightsholders will agree to let you purchase it, for any price. by caleb #
• Confused about what happens now with the GBS settlement?  There's a reason for that. by rachel #
• a problem with hypertext as a media is that pieces of it tend to disappear. linear documents may disappear but by in large, when present, they remain whole. this is a problem for libraries and for commercial publishers. for content creators and consumers, is it a boon? by caleb #
• I usually only post about American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association, if I am going to make fun of it. The November 2009 issue has great columns by Joe Janes and Kate Sheehan, but however, also an interview with David Weinberger. I just may love to hate this guy, but he reads a lot of interesting stuff and talks about it, so I was intrigued by his comment that "Andy Clark points [out] in a book called Being There ... that our species externalizes consciousness. Take away a physicist's whiteboard, and she can't do her work." He is also referencing Marshall McLuhan and stating that the web has brought "epochal change". I immediately related to the quip about externalizing consciousness because I use writing (e.g.) to help organize my thoughts. But I shudder at Weinberger's use of "species" - isn't what he describes a cultural, learned behavior? Substituting nature for nurture is a rhetorical device that bugs the hell out of me. I care enough to ILL Clark's book to find out the deal. It looks like it was on cognitive science, was published 11 years ago and may be a little dated. I think this means that I'm either crawling under a rock or coming out from one, but at least now I can recycle this magazine! by caleb #