“On June 8, 2004, an FBI agent stopped at the Deming branch of the Whatcom County Library System in northwest Washington and requested a list of the people who had borrowed a biography of Osama bin Laden. We said no.” A USA Today editorial, by a librarian. [lj]
Ontology is Overrated, or, why DDC is not good for organizing the web
Please go read this very long article about classification: Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags. I know it looks like it’s about computers, but it is also about libraries and tags, and sense-making and why you can’t gracefully take library classification schemes and slap them on to web pages. Go. Go now and read and learn.
It’s tempting to think that the classification schemes that libraries have optimized for in the past can be extended in an uncomplicated way into the digital world. This badly underestimates, in my view, the degree to which what libraries have historically been managing an entirely different problem.
It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you’re getting it wrong about the real world…. If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don’t privilege one top level of sense-making over the other.
[thanks adam]
Digital Odyssey Blog
This blog has some nice write-ups of talks given at the Digital Odyssey one-day conference in Toronto this past Friday. Joe Janes gave the keynote “Extending Service to the Increasingly Digital User” which was blogged by two separate people: here and here. This highlights one of the things I like best about the blogosphere generally. By reading what two different people thought was important and/or relevant about Janes’ talk, I get a better overview of the talk than by just reading one account. I hope the increase in conference blogging we’ve been seeing allows for this sort of overlap on important speeches/talks/programs.
Welcome to the Big Bibliothèque
Montreal gets a big downtown library, to house the public library collection as well as Quebec’s National Library collection. Not as fancy outside as, say, Seattle Public, but pretty feature-rich nonetheless, lots of nice photos. [thanks aaron]
wikipedia for librarians
Jenny had a frustrating time recently trying to figure out why edits she made to the “anyone can edit it!” Wikipedia were speedily deleted. Since I had been around the Wikipedia block a bit, I understood both sides to the problem: community sites don’t behave like vendor/reference sites, and Wikipedia doesn’t have the most robust feedback loops for explaining their processes. If anyone has been following this specific issue [which was resolved later] or this issue generally, you might be interested in a Wikipedia Project which includes, Introduction to Wikipedia Culture for Librarians. It’s still very much in process, but note the focus on inclusivity and appeal over brute “this is how it is” FAQs.
Main point: we can’t expect anyone to be impressed by an approach that boils down to “stand back, I’m a librarian, I’m trained to handle this”. Our success will depend on our power to persuade, to come up with better ideas and to defend them.
[thanks sammy]