Hi. I updated my Five Technically Legal Signs page with the addition of a reworking of one of the signs submitted to me by a graphic designer and some small formatting changes and an explicit Creative Commons License.
Author: jessamyn
do you believe me more if you paid for my advice?
Everyone needs to make personal decisions about how much weight to give a particular piece of information, particularly if that information conflicts with something you think you already know to be true. I often put it this way “You love your boyfriend and hate the Yankees. Your boyfriend loves the Yankees. Do you re-evaluate your boyfriend, or re-evaluate the Yankees. Or both? Or neither?” Put another way, if the New York Times prints something that goes counter to your beliefs, do you believe them because they’re an authority? What if it were Wikipedia? What if it were an Indymedia site? What if it were your neighbor, or me? In any case, articles on this topic fascinate me. The Harvard Business School has published one recently called The Hidden Cost of Buying Information where Francesca Gino’s research strongly suggests that people overweigh the value of information that they have paid for.
Gino’s results are based upon an experiment where subjects were asked to answer different sets of questions about American history and were provided the opportunity to receive free advice as well as costly advice—the same advice, as it turned out. Gino’s conclusion: When the advice is costly, subjects are more inclined to take it into consideration and use it. And that conclusion can have profound consequences for consumers, managers, and organizations in their decision making, she says. [lisnews]
nominate your favorite small/rural library
My library serves a patron base of roughly 30,000 so we’re not eligible for the Library Journal award for the Best Small or Rural Library in America but perhaps you know one that is?
what in the world is a wiki?
What can you do with a wiki? Well… Here’s what I have been working on lately, wikiwise
- I’ve been keeping up the Opac Manifesto. Feel free to add anything you can think of, I’m putting this one to bed this weekend. Some version of this will appear in Searcher magazine
- Some friends of mine are looking for housing during ALA Midwinter and I decided to try out a housing share page. Again, contribute if you have anything to add.
- My Australia notes page. This is locked, but you can see how an online scratch pad might be useful.
Ashcroft resigns
John Ashcroft — the man who called librarians “hysteric” — has resigned.
“The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved,” Ashcroft wrote in a five-page, hand-written letter to Bush.