The Filipino Librarian talks about how the capacity to experiment with technology, or not, creates the real digital divide.
Category: ‘puters
Lease Morgan: systems librarianship is within your grasp
Eric Lease Morgan answers the question “What should I know to be a good systems librarian?” and ends with this caveat
Please do not be overwhelmed. All of these things can be learned and practiced on your desktop or home computer. They lend themselves better to server-class operating systems such a Unix/Linux, but learning about these operating systems is challenging in itself and not readily applicable to librarianship. All you need is the ability to read books, the desire to learn, and the time to do it.
how responsible is the librarian for the internet?
Steven IMed me about the library director who was suspended with pay because of patrons — including a registered sex offender — allegedly viewing porn in the library. The City Commissioner is recommending that she be fired. I posted it to the Council list and was told the Washington office was aware of the situation. Rochelle wrote a few words about it, and now the entire affair has been slashdotted. The library has filters apparently, but they’re imperfect. The staff does walk-throughs of the computer areas but, apparently, they are imperfect also. Let’s also rememebr that this is Florida, the state that doesn’t let sex offenders into hurricane shelters and perhaps you’ll see what we’re up against.
stop the press… or … the scanner
The Google Print Library Project is going to hold off scanning books which are still under copyright until November. More over at Wired. This information was available on the official Google Blog [according to another Google blog] and quoted in the BBC article, and elsewhere, but the post itself is no longer there. Curious. [update: the post wasn’t missing/deleted, it was being update with new info, it’s back]
wiki from the inside, the first 30 days of LISWiki
LISWiki, the first 30 days, an essay on Ex Libris written by John Hubbard.
o here’s my sales pitch that I’d like to close with: if you’ve ever had a thought about libraries and librarianship that you wish to share, don’t keep it a secret! I don’t care if it’s some incredibly insightful revelation, making mundane clarifications about library terms, adding in-depth analysis on a library issue, or just copy editing my sloppy prose.
It’s understandably alarming to surrender your work to public editing, but Wikipedia demonstrates that such sharing can be highly effective; a community-built knowledge base has the capacity for far greater scholarly achievement than the sum of its individual contributions. Since our profession is built around facilitating access to information, we owe it to ourselves and to our successors to freely contribute to an open community encyclopedia of library-related knowledge.