At the iSchools conference right now, and I did get to hear Stephen Wolfram speak about the new Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine. One thing that struck me was that an audience of librarians would probably have fumed at his offhand comment that now “everybody is their own reference librarian,” but would have politely applauded anyway— this audience of information scientists pretty much wanted to tear the framework of “Alpha” assumptions apart, and did so with relish. (Special kudos to the woman who was signing the entire keynote address and subsequent debate to a group of people in the front row!) Dr. Wolfram did garner considerable applause at the end, though obviously the Q & A could have gone on for another hour or so…..
Anyway, Wolfram Research graciously offered a tour of their in-town facilities (which conveniently turned out to be right next door to my hotel), which I went on tonight. Very, very nice staff who showed us around (though clearly not through anything sensitive: we saw things like their graphics department and their developer servers, and any questions that touched on proprietary things like the Mathematica algorithms or where the “real” servers were located were politely brushed aside. One thing, though, that I really liked: Wolfram Research has a library, with librarians, who are obviously deeply involved with such things as marketing research for the company, helping with the identification and curation of data for Alpha, and a variety of other activities. The librarian who showed us around said that Wolfram himself valued the services of librarians highly, both for his company and for his own research.
After all, he is indubitably very clever indeed!
Here’s a resource that I never would have known about without a link from Thom Hickey’s blog! If I ever wanted to research ships’ libraries, this would be a great place to start. An amazing spare-time project from librarian Peter McCracken, founder of Serials Solutions (now owned by ProQuest). What have you done with your library degree lately?
I missed this from Steve Fuller when it was first published in Tamara, so it’s an interesting find for my spring 5033 class reading list. (He’s not exactly Wenger’s wingman on organizational culture, but he brings up some fascinating issues about intellectual capital, even though I think most KM practitioners would argue that they aren’t nearly as influenced by Thomas Stewart, nor nearly as influential themselves, as Fuller seems to think they are!)
Another interesting post on the “Do Libraries Innovate” session, from new blogger “The Robot Librarian” (not to be confused with other new blogger “Robot Librarian”), started me thinking again on the possible implications. If libraries are indeed what hold librarians back from innovating, would they be better off as library-free librarians? Read more…
I have two tracks in mind for the fall course I’ll be teaching, given the variety of folks I’m hoping to attract to the class: one Library 2.0-oriented and the other information entrepreneurship-oriented. So I was trawling the web for some ideas to spark discussions in the second track (“Intellectual Venture Capital”) and came across the concept of “dark tourism,” which is currently being studied (and marketed) by certain academic-related institutions such as the Dark Tourism Forum in Lancashire. “Dark Satanic Mills”, indeed!
Hmm, Marc Andreessen is now blogging. Unlike the famous “Fake Steve Jobs” blog (which I *won’t* link to, but which is easy enough to find if you’re curious), this one looks authentic, though I’m somewhat bemused by the fact that it actually seems both intelligible and useful to the average reader like myself. Can it be that Andreessen’s always had crossover dreams of becoming a librarian?
Like this, from Thomas Custer of Niche New Media, which represents some serious information entrepreneurship (from Columbia, Missouri, no less!)
Okay, this fall in 5433 there should be an information entrepreneurship track, and we’ll definitely be talking about Guy Kawasaki’s latest dotcom venture. Truemors reminds me somewhat of Pud Kaplan’s original dotcom startup, which was also a rumor-based site (specifically, about dotcoms in trouble, how’s that for both prescience and parody?) Read more…
