RSS feeds for library friendly history socialites.

My intention for this site was to construct a permanent record of active thinking about the use of Web 2.0 technologies for advancing the the goals of the Friends of the Governors State University Library Historical Society, as well as actually constructing some applications of those technologies to the advancement of those goals. I figured I could "learn by doing" what I had to learn to do to do what I wanted to do. So far I haven't had much time to bridge the gap between the course objectives and long range plan for this blog. So if anybody happens to stumble on this site looking for history and feels cheated by this current morrass of thrashing about with unfamilliar media, sorry.

Images

I guess I'm not a very visually oriented person. Flickr's alright I guess, but I've just never been much of a photo freak. I think of Flikr as an online repository of images for use in more textual contexts. Like blogs and web pages. Flickr seems to hang text on the pictures as tags and comments like conversation around a stack of snapshots. I'm inclined to use pictures as illustrations of or backgrounds to text. I hold the same prejudices with respect to webless library collections. Books and journals are what libraries are REALLY all about. The graphics, audio and video materials are just window dressing.

But if you're going to create a collection of visual images there ought to be a more visual way of organizing access to the individual images. Some sort of tree or something. It was interesting to do a search for Monk's Mound pictures and then run the slide show. What was that strawberry cake all about?

Breakdown

OK, so I was way too ambitious thinking that I could cover the history of whole libraries, history and social networking up to the point where WEB2.0 enters the picture in my first blog post. Now that I have this picture in my blog, maybe I can get some sleep. I wonder if you could set up slide-shows in Flickr that would lead people through the campus in answer to their requests for directions.

Beginning and History

Libraries and history are both products of the commodification of thought. Their primary means of production is writing. Prior to the invention of writing, thought was confined to individual human beings and the communities with whom they were in face to face (usually spoken) communication. Education took the form of a running commentary on daily life by elders who had been there before. If you wanted to learn anything beyond immediate experience, you had to find somebody who knew it already and get them to tell you about it. Individuals considered particularly knowledgeable would find themselves surrounded by disciples seeking to embody that knowledge themselves. If you wanted to learn about things that happened in the past, before everybody you'd ever talked to was born, you'd have to rely on word of mouth reports of hearsay from people you never met. Perhaps pictures were drawn or carved on some durable material to assist the memories of the reciters. History was myth and the closest thing to a library was a council of elders in a cave with paintings on the walls and ceiling.

Writing apparently began as an aid to the commercial activities of religious communities in early Mesopotamian cities. The first books (clay tablets with marks poked and scratched into them) were account books and the baskets they were collected in held something more like business archives than anything we would call a library. Later work orders, requisitions, and letters of credit led to a more comprehensive epistolary including political and diplomatic subjects. As scripture became a more comprehensive transcription of society's verbal repertoire, oracles, hymns and liturgies as well as laws and proclamations and even imaginative narratives became literature. Ideas were no longer bound to the people who spoke them and heard them; they could be embodied in physical objects which could be transported to distant places and endure well beyond the lifetimes of the people to whom they first occurred. The new school of education taught reading and writing by having the student copy lists of words and model exemplars of the different genres. Collections of these exercises began to look more like private libraries.