Month: June 2007

booktruck on Gorman

Posted on by jessamyn

I haven’t been digging too deeply into the Gorman back and forth because I’ve said my piece and unless he says something radically different, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. It’s been fun to read a few more spirited responses than mine, I like what booktruck has to say.

[H]e has an opportunity to fulfill a role as a public intellectual talking about libraries, archives and information topics that are important to the public, and he blows it on a self-referential argument chasing some bygone ideal of what it means to have reasoned discourse (bypassing, like, the last 70 years of western thought!), and in a needlessly puffy and alienating style that would (in a perfect world) never pass muster in a “real” scholarly setting.

Also don’t miss a counter-essay from Matthew “An Unquiet History” Battles. What is particularly interesting about his response is the bizarrely snooty comments it receives especially the first few.

[I]n the end, we’re still left with a Wild West ethos on the Web where kids armed with a powerful new toy (yes, yes, the toys and tools are “creative” too!) can hide behind anonymity, shirk responsibility, pretend to be professors of Church doctrine a la “Essjay” (in the recent Wikipedia scandal), and trash and defame the character of a John Seigenthaler. All with impunity and in the name of progress, creativity (there’s that word again!), and “wildly individual consciousnesses” (Battles is too good a stylist to float such a phrase).

If that’s the high-level discourse so often lamented to be lacking from “blogs” then I can say I don’t much miss it. It’s just blogging with a bigger vocablary, truly. Wouldn’t it be sad if the Britannica Blog just turned into another “you think you’re so great but you’re really not so great” back and forth? “Where Ideas Matter” indeed!

Not going to ALA

Posted on by jessamyn

I forgot to mention here, I won’t be at ALA. I was planning to go. In fact I may still be on the schedule but my dear friends decided to get married in Brooklyn that same exact weekend and the choice between paying my own way to DC to be on a panel and paying my own way to NY to be at a wedding was pretty clear-cut. Close readers will note that this is the second time that I’ve passed up Annual to go to a wedding. It must be a popular weekend.

There are a few neat things going on that people should go to. The Hollywood Librarian premiere Friday night (trailer, behind the scenes video). I’d link you to the ALA press release about this but their search form is broken, as is their contact form. My friend Pete, a librarian who works at MediaMatters, is DJing a dance night with some other folks on Saturday night. No cover, no dress code, lots of librarians. More details here. I look forward to reading about the conference on the bazllion blogs covering it.

quickie Ubuntu update

Posted on by jessamyn

printer + internet success!

So it’s been a while since I checked in from the Ubuntu installs at the library. Life intervened in a ton of ways. I went back over to the library today. I spent most of my time helping a Ukranian artist woman wade through the 250 emails in her inbox spanning almost two years. Every time she’d see a lost job opportunity or a note from a friend from eight months ago she’d say "see, this is why I have to know this, I lose work not knowing this…" I had to agree to a point but also mentioned that checking her email — however that needed to happen — more than once every 18 months was probably part of it.

So, I was in prime form when I went downstairs to check on the Ubuntu machines. The handyman had installed the ethernet drop from upstairs and I had limited time. This is what I did in about 20 minutes.

– made basic user accounts on each machine and changed the password on the admin accounts from the one I put on the YouTube video
– Set up the desktop for that account to have Firefox and OpenOffice on it (for now, we’ll move to games and IM once this is established as working)
– Plugged both computers into the switch I got. Hey check that out, they’re on the Internet. That was simple.
– Plugged the printer into one of them (HP 6100 series all on one blah) and went through the install printer routine. Hey look IT JUST WORKS, and prints.

Now one of the machines prints, both of them are on the internet, they’ve got a non-admin account on both of them and a locked down admin account with a new password. Next time I’ll do software updates and get the other printer working via the network, flesh out the desktops some and write some documentation. Woo! (crossposted from Flickr)

Michael Gorman, blogging on Britannica

Posted on by jessamyn

A few people have pointed out Michael Gorman’s blog posts, appropriately enough appearing on the Britannica blog. For reasons that evade me he has one general post split into two parts. Web 2.0 The Sleep of Reason Part I and Web 2.0 The Sleep of Reason Part II. Let me just say that Michael Gorman is a smart guy and I just wish the things he said didn’t sound so… snooty. Statements like these “The task before us is to extend into the digital world the virtues of authenticity, expertise, and scholarly apparatus that have evolved over the 500 years of print, virtues often absent in the manuscript age that preceded print.” are things I can totally get behind but then he follow-up in his later post with “Google cofounder Sergey Brin has said that ‘the perfect search engine would be like the mind of God,’ but most of us took that to be billionaire hyperventilating not blasphemy.” and I don’t understand why he has to be that way.

My take on what is happening has less to do with the nature of scholarship and more to do with the blurring of the idea of “research” as something we do for entertainment as well as scholarship. This may be something I think because I’m not really affiliated with an academic community and perhaps things have changed more than I am aware of, but I don’t think the idea of the expert is going away, only that it’s shifting in many of our interactions. So instead of us asking our expert mechanic for his or her opinion, we’ll check not only Consumer Reports but also epinions and maybe Edmunds.com when we’re buying a new car. We have more data because of the Internet and the network generally, and in many cases there’s no reason plain old humans can’t do something with that data. Gorman glibly refers to the idea his relief that there is “no discernable ‘citizen surgeon’ movement” but why is there a problem with citizen journalism? Especially if, like tagging and folksonomies, these trends are offered as supplments to the existing canon of options, not as supplanters of them?

update: aaaaand Clay Shirky’s reponse to Michael Gorman made boingboing

be social – explaining social networks to librarians and parents

Posted on by jessamyn

I did a short tour of some New Hampshire libraries over the past few days. I did a little talk called MyWhat? Decoding social technologies.. It’s only about five slides but most of it was doing a tour of some of the more popular social networks [Facebook, MySpace, Flickr] and showing how they worked, how kids were using them and what parents and librarians should know.

Remember that a lot of the digital divide that we deal with now isn’t that people don’t have computers per se, it’s that they’re not in networks and groups of people that understand them and can answer complex questions about them. The library is often an integral link in this equation. A lot of my time at these talks is spent answering questions about how these social tools work, how I use them, how librarians might use them, and how kids and teens can use them safely and effectively. A lot of the print materials I’ve come across err on the side of caution which is not a bad idea but often there’s no “Hey you really SHOULD try this” couterpoint. I hope I was able to offer that somewhat.