getting married and having kids

Now and then I hear that reference service differs between public libraries and academic libraries in that public libraries give answers, whereas academic libraries teach.
I’ve never accepted this definition. True, it is not useful to make distinctions when you are running a collaborative multi-type reference service, but mostly, I just don’t see it, and [...]

a different digital divide?

I came across a post this morning by Joshua Schachter, “on url shorteners“. He begins:

“URL shortening services have been around for a number of years. Their original purpose was to prevent cumbersome URLs from getting fragmented by broken email clients that felt the need to wrap everything to an 80 column screen. But it’s 2009 [...]

media cloud

I thought of Rachel and Anne-Marie’s Online NW presentation just now because I was playing with Media Cloud, which is trying to quantify the discussion about “traditional media” vs. “derivative media”.
Ethan Zuckerman (again with him today!) talks about the new project from Harvard’s Berkman Center in a 20+ minute video. Trying to watch the un-synced [...]

tomes, groans and micro-loans

As part of the reading and thinking I’ve been doing that lead up to my post last weekend, I’ve also been thinking about the question, if not books, then what?
Aaron Schmidt addresses this idea in his recent post, “libraries might not provide content in the future & it’s okay“. He talks about how much content [...]

a paradox in librarianship

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about literacy lately, as maybe you can guess from my recent-ish posts. Deep into Gunther Kress’ Literacy in the New Media Age, I find myself analyzing the structure of what I read and write, and especially outside of literary contexts.
Recently at organic gardening class for example, I [...]

the long road to darkness

The other day, Anne-Marie posted about online craft tutorials and pointed out that they often assume some skill or knowledge on the part of the reader. If not, the reader can search for more tutorials or ask questions in the comments.
I think that one of the things she is suggesting is that information literacy lessons [...]

serious readers

Just a quick post about the Levenger catalog that comes to my house, offering “tools for serious readers”, including pens, notebooks, bookshelves, “reading tools” and books such as a replica (”facsimile”) of the Sarajevo Haggadah.
That is to say, this catalog is not for me. It comes addressed to my father-in-law, who has never lived with [...]

the case of the feted feline

It all started as a winter weekend trip to a Forest Service cabin nestled between Mt. Saint Helens and Mt. Adams. I was looking forward to no electricity, no cell phone service, no people, and carrying all of my food, water and bedding a half mile by snowshoe and sled into what remains of the [...]

post-text information retrieval

I’m interested lately in how the internet would work, especially in regards to information retrieval, without text. I’m aware that the computernet is not just about information retrieval - plenty of what goes on has more to do with social interaction (including commerce and all types of communication) than it does looking stuff up.
I have [...]

thoughts on a working theme

I’ve said this two or three times in different ways in the past few months, but I figure it was time to copy and paste it so I could share it with y’all.
Books are artifacts of our culture and will continue to exist for a long time, and maybe some will exist forever. At one [...]