Category: hi

Hi. Sorry to be scarce, I’ve been reading a lot and working a lot. Today I taught some senior citizens how to use a word processor [hint: typewriter metaphors work well] and tried to find ways to do outreach to the convent. I’m also finalizing my plans for the Australia talk and moonlighting at one or two other things, including one fun library web site Movable Type upgrade/design assist.

I wanted to point out an interesting collaborative information gathering exercise that I recently witnessed in the online world. The question “Why can’t I find photos of Abu Ghraib torture using Google Images?” When I ran into the issue, it had shown up on the group weblog MetaFilter where many interesting pieces of information came out fairly quickly

• try AltaVista, it works better for this
• Yahoo no longer licenses Google search results
• some other ways to search if you want to find those images
• making and testing hypotheses about how often Google Images updates its archive
• an actual email from someone at Google explaining the problem
• feedback from someone using the Google Search Appliance explaining what they found
• links to a larger Slashdot discussion
• a Google Answers question asking the same question of their “experts”

If you follow along closely you’ll notice that the original question was pretty much answered and the information [i.e. pictures] located elsewhere and yet the only for-profit part of the equation, Google Answers, decided to delete the question (which I saw, but, sadly, did not locally cache) entirely from its knowledge base with no explanation or even a placeholder. I’ve always got a host of ready answers to the question “How is Google different from the library?” but now I have a new one “You can ask the librarians about the library itself and still get an answer.”

Hi. Michael McGrorty and I and Eli sat around talking politics in Los Angeles this past weekend. While I think the current administration will be marginally worse for libraries [and much worse for people] than the alternative, let’s just rememebr that all John Kerry said about libraries in his big suck-up-to-everyone speech at the DNC was about putting one on a chip. Don’t get me wrong, I feel bad for everyone who feels bad this week, but let’s not act like the Great White Hope just walked out the door on us. The decline of libraries and funding for libraries in the US didn’t start with Bush and while I suspect it won’t end with Bush, I’d argue that it wouldn’t have ended with Kerry either. Americans are changing their mind about how they feel about the public good, about sharing, and about other people in general. This election didn’t cement that, it reflects that. So does the decline of libraries. Let’s get started now, shall we, fixing it?

Hi. Are any librarians who are responsible for staffing public access computing facilities feeling some sympathy today with poll workers stuck with malfunctioning voting machines, lack of backup procedures, insufficient provisional ballots and grumpy support staffers and voters? Remind me what problem were these machines supposed to fix again, and at what cost?

Hi. I’m a little tired and have been taking bad notes, though I did see the Power of the Napkin Sketch work wonders this evening. Both Eli and Fred have some good commons-meeting-oriented notes on their sites. There may also be some notes on Peter Levine’s site. There likely won’t be any wrap-ups here because 1) Fred and Eli did such a good job I see no reason to be redundant 2) my big picture thinking about the whole commons issue sums up a lot of what people were talking about, unhelpfully, as “details” 3) I’m already halfway to Australia in my mind, even though I’m not going for a few weeks now.

Hi. I had a great time at the Dartmouth conference which has to go down in history as one of the best-run conferences I’ve been to. People stuck to time limits, were generally interesting and engaging, had stories to tell, kept to the topic and I saw a lot of informal talking and chitchatting during the two hour long lunch and poster session. I got to meet a contributor to Revolting Librarians Redux, meet some other new folks, talk to some folks I knew and learn a few things. I’m on my way to Cerritos California for the Workshop on the Information Commons that, alas, has no web site, but you can read the bibliography that we got [in print and online]. So, posting will be sparse and I’ll likely not post much in any big way until after the election so I figured I’d leave you with one link and one quote that came over the Council listserv this week. The link is to Michael McGrorty’s presidential poll results from his admittedly unscientific polling, plus his always insightful commentary. Lastly, this from Boston Public Library president and fellow Councilor Bernie Margolis