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Thursday, May 31, 2007

like a chameleon

I believe in books; the physical chapters, pages, ink, everything about the physical book I love. The ability to stick one in your pocket, your bag, your car to make sure there is always something worthwhile to read. And then I started checking out blogs and thought to myself, "Self, this is a whole bunch of horrible crap" and considered myself pretty cool for not reading blogs anymore.
Side note: Education is the key to anything. People don't like modern music or modern art usually because of a lack of understanding or lack of interest based on a lack of education. 5 minutes later with a dose of education there is a change in attitude andwhile it's not a complete 360 at least there's less terror in their eyes when you say the word "modern".
If you walked into a Barnes and Noble typically there's a new book table located fairly close to the entrance. Walk over and peruse its offerings. Frankly, most are pretty useless and worth less than the paper they are printed. How does this relate to my attitude about blogs, which has changed, by the way.
Blogs are not designed for what I'm doing here, telling my story. Who cares? Blogs are/should be repositories of links to multiple important/relevant information for other people looking for that same information. Correct me if I'm wrong, but increasing the amount of links for a certain page increases the possibility of someone interested or partially interested in that topic to be able to find that link. If they also read my blathering; awesome. My favorite part about blogs is that I can ignore the bad ones and they don't waste anything except space and their author's time.
Good blogs reveal good/great links to better/greater things.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

To burn or not burn or ship me your unwanted books

I can't say that I completely agree with this course of action thought it definitively caught people's attention. It hurts to look at this piles of charred ashed books. Just because people aren't reading the books you have is no reason to throw a fiery tantrum. Let me give you my email address and you can send me some books; it's not a problem.


http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/28/book.burning.ap/index.html


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I'm seriously looking forward to being a librarian. I've been working on 2 archival projects on the side which is what really whet my appetite for this profession. At least I was working on these projects until I started graduate work. I'm thoroughly enjoying this graduate work though I wasn't completely prepared for the intensity of the amount of work that was needed right off the bat. The worst part is the reading is so stinking enjoyable that I find myself lingering when I need to consuming which is unfortunate. Another item that has been driven home to me in working with the Hot Topic for this week is that I am very bad at working with other people. The one real group project I performed in my undergraduate work was actually a spectacular failure. Hopefully this group project with the Hot Topic discussion goes better; it has seemed to. My fellow Luddites have seriously rocked the boat with this presentation. This ambivalence to group projects directly relates to my feeling towards professional associations. I'm sure this will improve as I research further.

For example: http://www.lwb-online.org/index.html
http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/

Monday, May 28, 2007

and now for your listening pleasure



LibriVox



I think this is an interesting way to distribute readings. possibly an exellent tool for libraries 2.0 style.

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Thursday, May 24, 2007

First: this video, combining power point and voice over is hilarious: you should watch this especially if you just read Kuhn.
I don't really to discuss Kuhn at this point though I do think his ability to look at paradigm was interesting and worthy of further thought. I'm learning a lot especially about how little sleep I actually need and how much I haven't missed the panicked feeling of how am I going to finish this book in time to write the review and go to sleep before I have to go to work. But it's good. A lot of the ideas we're exploring such as web 2.0, libraries, understanding information technologies and so forth have been skirting around my peripheral knowledge and it's really awesome to bring them into the forefront and really understand what's going on. The worst part about the reading is that it's so interesting and I really want to marinate in these texts except 2 am comes on much sooner that I expect.
My one area of real frustration has been these online discussions which were not what I envisioned at all. I was thinking that we would be discussing the class, what we are reading but instead we're dealing with grades, requirements and picking at the syllabus. I understand there is syllabus shock as I get it every time I pick it up but let's read a bit more carefully here and poke and courseweb a bit more as all the information is there. I do spend 50% of my day on a computer and/or the Internet so I may be a bit insensitive but common sense is common sense.

Monday, May 21, 2007

waves of information

Information. Data. It is frankly amazing and almost ridiculous to view the volume of information that is available to 21st century individuals. The Internet is the obvious medium and message of this informational tsunami and I'm curious how this is going to affect humanity's preception of time spent in actually reading the collected material. I already find myself collecting, i.e. bookmarks, pdfs, mp3s, etc., and have to stop in order to spend time with the items collected to analyze, decipher and assign value to based on the inherent quality of the items. Are these worth keeping/not worth keeping etc?. I find myself like a kid in a blueberry field trying to fill my bucket as fast as possible but without the intent/ability of actually ever ingesting the berries so that eventually they grow old and moldy without ever being tasted. Frankly, the blueberry picker doesn't care because the purpose of the picker is just to pick and the supply of blueberries seems infinite but the ability to discern the quality of blueberries one is picking should be based on some criteria i.e. for pie, jam, pancakes, what have you, as the end result of the information gathered establishes the reason for its being gathered.
Is it better then, to understand a margin of the information available through careful consideration and analysis to prevent the information from going moldy? If I, a lone individual, have a difficult time balancing information wanted against information available, what qualifies me as a potential librarian to provide correct information to patrons? The reader response to information's application to one's research/needs defines the way the information is gathered and thus utilized. The collection of books seems different because the value behind them is monetary; I buy the book because I want to read it. My private library has more value to me than the public library that has the same, and more, books because I have sacrificed/exchanged something to retain the book.
When "trolling" for information on the web, the quality of the information is based on its relevance to the current state of interest that is currently occupying my mind. This causes the level of value to shift dramatically from day to day if not hour by hour. This is a bit half-baked for which I apologize but my mind is spinning pretty hard on this right now. The informational situation seems as though one must sell his soul to the information genies just to stay abreast of the crest but in doing so, causes one to miss out on the content because of the form in which it is generated.
Would appreciate feedback, thoughts and comments. I think/learn best when other people interact so I look forward to your feedback.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

good and bad

Good-already stoked about the reading for LIS2600. I admit it; I'm a geek. The idea of handling and placing content in context while controlling that content without censoring the content is very interesting. Challenges idea of library being an archive for already released information with the idea of the library fulfilling an active role in the disemenation of information. Fits in with the marketplace of ideas or the mythical museum. With my degree in music, and being a bit of an elitist, moving from the museum to the marketplace is an interesting exercise. I'm pretty savvy at finding information online but being introduced to the world of scholarly e-publications is just incredible. Example follows.

Bad-My laptop bsod'd and is convinced that no os was ever installed. I wasn't even doing anything strenuous to it so I hope I can resurrect it enough to retrieve pertinent information. I think a new hard drive is in the near future unfortunately; such a bloody pain.

Monday, May 14, 2007

First post

Hurrah for school beginning again! Will post more "class-appropriate" items in future.