Here’s another great acronym for all librarians to know SPY BLOCK (Software Principles Yielding Better Levels of Consumer Knowledge). It’s an anti-spyware bill which, like most legislation written by people who don’t truly understand technology — or who are willfully ignoring what they know about it — is overbroad. Susan Crawford explains more. [copyfight]
Category: ‘puters
thousands of hits, good news or bad?
Somehow missed this last week — an excellent point/counterpoint [in the form of a blog entry and comment] over at the OCLC blog. Topic? That ongoing “Do we make the library more like Google, or make Google more like the library?” I think it also points out another hidden conflict area that is fast becoming a favorite topic of mine: to what extent do we let the software dictate the way the user can search, and hopefully find? ALA’s ballots are being distributed over a one week [for e-ballots] or two week [paper] schedule. Why can’t we send them all at once? Because ALA worries about server overload problems. Is this saving the time of the user? Does Google?
Pretend you’ve never ever been in a large library. Pretend you know absolutely nothing about taxonomies. Pretend you don’t know the difference between a magazine, a journal, an index and a book. Pretend you don’t know what you don’t know, and don’t know how to articulate your unknowingness. Once you’ve pretended all this, make a pretend visit to a very large library for the first time.
I go to Utah for all my porn, you?
The biggest laugh of my talk was probably when I was discussing classes I’d like to teach but can’t. I mentioned where to find the really good porn and people thoughtit was funny, something about a sort of frumpy library lady saying that made it double-plus-good, even though I really do know where it is… Thanks to Utah’s new censorware law, maybe we can just get the list of good porn sites from them.
I’ll say it again: folksonomy
Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess. An impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow.
It’s a deep philosophical issue: Ontology is a controversial subject. The idea that it’s possible to cleave nature at the joints is controversial. Yes, there are countries, Uzbekistan is a country, but ask a physicist or a biologist and the categories are very fraught.
be prepared for anything when you present.
Andrea’s at CiL and has some tips for presenters that are right on the money. I went to show off one of our library databases at an elementary school yesterday. Everything was fine until we got to the database login page. For some reason IE wouldn’t let us in, the tech guy had gone home, and no one else knew if there was a firewall or virus software on the machine. Fortunately, I had brought all the screenshots of the database that I had used when I was demonstrating it on public access TV. Oddly, the demonstration search I had used for the TV show just happened to be the same as the name of the town I was in. I walked away from that talk looking well-prepared and smart instead of tech-clueless and frustrated. And that IE problem we were having? We switched to Safari as an afterthought when I was on my way out, and we logged in to the database no problem, vexing!