why the wikitorial didn’t work, and why we knew it wouldn’t

I like wikis, it’s no secret. I also like Wikipedia. That’s one of the reasons I winced at the Wikitorial project because I knew in my bones that it would 1) fail 2) bring with it the “see? wikis suck!” crowd. I like this post explaining why it didn’t work [upshot: poor planning, lack of vision, lack of wiki understanding to prdict problems]. For some crazy reason, this made me think of fingerprinting patrons in libraries, or maybe RFID. [web4lib]

direct democracy @ your library conference

I’m not sure how many people really feel like they need to have a say in how ALA conducts its business. Membership Meetings at ALA have been a chance for rank and file ALA-ers to have a chance to discuss issues and write, discuss and even pass resolutions. In the past, the quorum for the meetings was set sufficiently high [1% of membership] that it was hard to get the requisite number of people for them to act offically.

Thanks to a bylaws amendment ratified by membership, quorum is now set at 75 members, though the bylaws currently do not reflect this online [don’t get me started on how hard it was to pry all of this information out of the ALA website]. There are at least two resolutions coming before membership this time around. I’ll be at both of these meetings. If you want to get a peek at ALA democracy in action, the meetings are at

Saturday 4-5 pm [before Barak]
Monday 11:30-12:30

Personal Digital Collections

I was talking about Google’s persistent cookies on my way home from the Sleater-Kinney show today. One of the things my law student boyfriend was wondering, was if there had been attempts to subpoena IP-linked cookie-enabled tracking information — from Google or elsewhere — in the course of law enforcement activities. I couldn’t point to a case. D-Lib has an article this month about Personal Digital Collections which is sort of a way of thinking about the digital information that people keep and create and present about themselves. The article explores how these digital trails are created and maintained, and what challenges they present for curators and archivists of the next generations.