Getting Serious

This is supposed to be a closing post. The Web2.0 for Libraries introductory online course for which it pretended to meet a requirement is drawing to a close. I hope that now, without the distraction of accomplishing assigned technical innovations under pressure of deadlines, I might actually be able to do something here. It was interesting to realise once again, however, what a terribly bad student I really am. Something to think about whenever I get that notion to go back and pick up a graduate degree.

Podcasts, YouTube, libraries and hLibrariesistory

Libraries collect and distribute more than books anymore. We circulate audio tapes and CDs, video tapes and DVDs and computer data CDs and DVDs. Just as our hardcopy collections incorporate extra-print media, so will some of our online offerings sing and dance as well. After this course I'm in ends I fully intend to continue developing this blog and the other web tools (point 0) to which I've been introduced and get some sleep, too. Video and audio files are definitely intended to play a role.

MyFacebookSpace

Libraries are spaces devoted to the collection and facilitating the use of books. Modern technologies have liberated books from the confines of bound paper and collapsed the topology of contiguously distributed space. The big idea of MySpace is the possesion and control of a URL by an individual. Facebook socializes like URLs with commodified content.

Why Wikis Will Webowate the Power of Wode Wide Webowution

Non-violent, non-controversial world's commonest revolutions, incorporated, some time ago began to develop an organizational scheme for mediating the production and propagation of ideological superstuctures coordinating the efforts of private individuals and enterprizes to establish a global community of cooperative humanity. N-vn-cwcr,inc.'s think tank, the Center for Mythological Studies in Business and Ecologistics, proposed the formation of a Peripheral Intelligence Agency (PIA). Rather than gather infomation in a central place for analysis and presentation to the elite decision makers of a bureaucratic hierarchy, the PIA would gather and distribute intelligence holographically and simultaneously through a network of co-equally independently operating agents openly mutually informed. The focus of PIA intelligence gathering and breifing activities would be provided by Peripheral Reasearch Organization Joint Editorial and Collection Teams (PROJECTs). The original plan, in those days before the advent of the internet, was to coordinate the PROJECTs through local and network broadcast television programs.
The TV thing always seemed to smack of hierarchical centralizaton and so the PROJECTS
never really got off the ground. Now there's wikis and the world wide web, and sooner or later PROJECTs will be seen self-organizing within a PIA, non-violently and non-controversially realizing the world they share in common.
Where do libraries fit in? They are part of the Peripheral Intelligence Agency's Managerial, Accounting and Technical Expertise Resource (PIA MATER).

Tag Teams: The Future of Professional Labelarians

Is Paul missing Big Blue, the cattle logger Babe? You bet he is! Why, in his current state of confusion he can't even tell his axe from a hole in the ground! He's hacked his way through a whole forest of blog posts, flickr pictures, chocolate covered news feeds and other rssmadazles till his head can't spin any faster and the cobwebs are gathering truly world widely.
Whatever happened to the places for everything and everything in them? Have their library of congressional numbers been washed in a new dawn's dewey decimation? Can we get a handle on ...just getting started.......
Back to beginning again (after Sarah's comment and wiki week 7):
Blogs are online repositories of repeated postings of content from an identified individual, together with more or less occasional comments from viewers (and reviewers) of that content. Through the magical interconnectedness of the World Wide Web of computer assisted electronic communication, the content of each blog is a resource that can be accessed from anywhere else on The Web by its Universal Resource Locator (URL). This is like the spot on the shelf designated by a Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal call number. Only not.
Call numbers classify books according to their contents so that books about the same thing or by the same author get shelved together where we can find them and browse for others like them. URLs are more like bar codes in that they are assigned to blogs and other web resources without regard to their content.
Of course, the content of any particular book tends to remain fairly constant through time while the content of a blog or some other types of web pages is expected to change frequently.
When a source of web content is expected to refresh itself frequently with new content, Really Simple Syndication feeds information about updates to viewer/reviewers who, thinking they might be interested in the forthcoming content, subscribe.
The class seemed to agree that Deli.cio.us was likely more useful for libraries than Techorati. I've found it personally so so far but have been wondering why. I guess it comes down to the wider range of resource types that Deli facilitates access to as compared to Technorat's narrower focus on blogs. Blogs are more or less lasting links to their bloggers but their contents are as mutable and only as reliable as those bloggers. The web pages I've collected in Deli so far (Algonquian language related sites) are more book-like. They are dedicated to a particular subject and although the contents are updated occasionally, the changes are more like revised editions of books.
Blogger has their bloggers label each of their posts so the contents will be more intuitively retrievable for future reference. Deli.cio.us and Technorati let viewer/reviewers tag other people's web sites for their reference purposes regardless of how the original resource owners have labeled them. These labels and tags correspond to the subject headings, keywords and descriptors of traditional library catalogs and indexes, but generally lack the systematic rigor and comprehensive organization of these more formal categories.
Those more formal categories are often listed in outline form. These lists take the form of hierarchical trees with the more comprehensive concepts branching out into ever more specific notions. Now the trees have been leveled and their branching structures reduced to linear lumber.

What's a library to do?

Libraries are places where collections of written materials are preserved and arranged for specific on demand use. Private individuals maintain and use their own libraries, but for most of human history only the very wealthy or intellectually elite could afford this privilege. Libraries have always gone along with educational and research institutions as well as the most powerful commercial, legal and political establishments.

When written materials were all produced by hand they were very rare indeed. Gathering what little there was of such materials in central repositories in the care of experts in their preservation and retrieval made sense in terms of maximizing their social utility. The concentration of informational resources in close association with concentrations of political and economic power fit right in with the hierarchical ordering of society as a whole.

Then the mass (re)production of written words through printing made them available on a scale undreamed of in earlier times. Similar technological innovations made other material goods more widely available as well and improved the opportunities for quality of life and quantity of leisure for intellectual self improvement for many more private individuals than previously. Books, magazines and newspapers were still physical objects, however, and their production and distribution were subject to limitations imposed by physics and economics. The procurement, housing and care of anything more than a modest collection of written materials was still well beyond the means of the vast majority of individuals. The demand for a more informed workforce and citizenry by more democratic economic and political institutions led to the creation of public libraries professionally staffed.

Written words are now represented in electromagnetic form. Once the words of a book or a journal article have been reduced to this form, they can be redisplayed on the screen of any computer monitor connected to the world wide web of electronic data communications technology infrastructure. Written words in this electronic form do not have to be collected in a common repository to be made accessible, but a collection of addresses of internet connected locations from which they can be accessed is necessary for access to be responsive to need, and the accuracy of the addresses and the integrity of the representations must be established and maintained.

RollYo and LibraryThing are the beginnings of a do it yourself response to the need to reorganize our approach to the newly mediated written word. RollYo collects trusted collectors of directions to online word sources in order to give reliable directions to resources in response to specific keyword queries. LibraryThing collects descriptions of collectors collections and determines their interconnections in order to facilitate communication between collectors about their collections based on mutual interests. I'm not sure what roll traditional hard copy based libraries have to play in these processes other than providing good examples of selection and organization and also making sure that representations of the materials that are unique to their own collections are made electronically available.

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.