Group items tagged

Not necessarily a library video, but an interesting idea.  By encouraging the audience to approach information the way they approach food (i.e. by emphasizing quality over quantity, as it's impossible to eat all the food), the focus of our information world goes from "information overload" to "information consumption." 

An interesting article, however it ultimately repeats what writers have been saying for some time, that the book itself is no longer the primary method for delivering information, and what libraries should focus on is specialized collections of information. However this article seems to look at primarily unique collections of rare or historical documents, which would be of little use in a discipline that relies on current information.

The author raises a good point: is there really a way to teach information literacy in a transferrable way?  Or does teaching it in a particular enviroinment (i.e., backing up concepts with hands-on experience) go further to illustrate the subject?

An article that addresses a problem which has come up before, namely "junk" books made from electronic files, in this case physical copies as opposed to eBooks, but with the same problems. Material in the text is missing, as well as the publisher and print date, edition, the notation about original language or any information about the author. Such information, separated from the original work, means that the context and in some cases documentation for the book are lost, which could harm research and preservation in the long run.

"The ALA Washington Office held a special informational session on Sunday afternoon to let librarians get a head start on helping their patrons enroll for healthcare through the new Affordable Care Act, which aims to provide reasonable health insurance for all Americans equally, regardless of any pre-existing conditions."

The Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC) is a project that aims to bring together online resources and archival materials on historical person, to basically allow a researcher to know where all the records are to understand a person. What I found in the prototype is that it resembled a catalog of sophisticated authority records. This could be useful for someone needing quick information or seeing how a historical figure fits in context, but I question if in the end it doesn't repeat information found almost as readily in other resources such as Wikipedia.

This is an interesting article about a course called "Lying About the Past" run by T. Mills Kelly at George Mason University. He encourages his students to make fictitious stories up to show how readily people will accept things as the truth, such as a lost pirate or a lost recipe for a historic beer. This angers some people but shows how quickly wrong information can spread and be accepted. In particular the article notes the one website that caught the false stories was Reddit, where a centralized exchange of information is encouraged and once doubts were voiced the material was verified by several people, as opposed to Wikipedia where the material is controlled by a minority of editors and most users are passive readers.

An article I find interesting not so much because it says anything new but that it repeats something that was said even when I was in library school, that with electronic communication we have too much information which leads to burnout or being overwhelmed, and all this time there still has not been a consistent approach to managing or streamlining it.

An article that notes the dwindling demand for general information specialists at the Free Library of Phildadelphia, which used to field 400 phone calls a day among a rotating staff of 14 librarians, and is now done to 1 librarian and 9 assistants who deal with only a handful of phone calls and more often do front line customer service and technical support work, with many information requests now handled by online chat.

An interesting about scientists deliberately holding back information on a new Botulism toxin, which still raises issues on censorship--other researchers who may have a valid need for this research won't have all of it, and where is the line drawn between dangerous information and only potentially so?

This is a cool idea-- basically, it's a way to link the data in Wikipedia across languages to cut down on redundancy and help the information flow across language barriers.

A short article about Aaron Swartz, one of the founders of Reddit who committed suicide recently. At issue is not that he was accessing an archive of unauthorized articles from Jstor, but if the prosecution and potential sentence fit the the crime and if overall more information should be free

The 2.8 petabytes of storage space was donated to the Vatican by EMC, as part of its Information Heritage Initiative.

An article that makes some good points about copyright, namely that the information we need to access, repair, or modify equipment we own is often copyrighted in itself. Which means by virtue of copyright we are unable to access the service manuals, error codes, or diagnostic tools we need to do anything with a technological device. The author makes a point that while works of art may be restricted by we own a performance right to it, physical objects we own outright.

A somewhat gloomy article tangentially mentioning libraries but focusing more on how the revolution of robots and automation in industry has carried over to software in today's information processing jobs, and that even in recent good economic times jobs continue to be lost.

A related concept to T-Pen, but focused more on collecting together references, summary, bibliography, and related information from manuscripts in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi Cambridge. It allows material that ordinarily would have to be handled with care or viewed from a microfilm or facsimile copy to be used with no fear of damage and considerably enhanced by the additional reference material.

Includes one of the best brief descriptions of metadata that I've found. The author also, using example photos, illustrates the importance of metadata and its relevance to a material being used.

Nice! Thanks for sharing Jennifer.

Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen recently returned from a trip to North Korea and discuss the role of the Internet in repressive countries.

An article I found interesting both for how the Douglas County Libraries was trying to own rather then license much of their e-resources and store it on a server, but also how they were working with the metadata for those resources, converting it bu a crosswalk from the publication industry's XML-based ONIX (ONline Information eXchange) or simple Excel into Marc.