Luciano Floridi writes in his “Against Digital Ontology” (Synthese, 2009): “Konrad Zuse is acknowledged by many as the father of digital ontology.” Zuse apparently also built the first digital computer, in Nazi Germany, even before ENIAC.
Thank heavens I’m untenured. Otherwise I’d feel even more ignorant than I do right now, not having known any of this.
I am anxiously awaiting JoAnne Yates’s book on the internationalization of standards. She was one of the theorists at MIT that I interviewed for my dissertation, and, judging by her previous work in a number of areas, especially the role of systems in American managerial thinking, I suspect that she’ll have some very provocative things to say about standards in general (though perhaps not those standards of particular interest to the LIS community). The information society runs on standards, however, so her book is sure to “set the standard” for future work on this.
And, on the topics of negative data and unintended collections, here’s Simson Garfinkel’s “Drives Project,” in which he demonstrates that disposal of data is never quite as easy as one thinks.
Dr. Garfinkel has also just authored a thought-provoking piece in MIT’s Technology Review about Wikipedia’s view of truth (or, as Stephen Colbert famously said, its “truthiness”) as ideally (though not actually) consisting of exemplary references to stable and sourced documentary evidence. Long before Wikipedia existed, however, Patrick Wilson made a similar “indictment” of librarianship in his brilliant book, Second-Hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority. (Though librarianship’s “second-hand knowledge” is biased towards prestigious peer-reviewed scholarly articles rather than towards freely accessible online popular ones.)
As we move towards more involvement with primary data, however, as some people have suggested (notably, Andrew Dillon and Glynn Harmon at Austin), are we reaching for First-Hand Knowledge? And what are the implications of that for the profession?
And the consequences of that kind of collection: intended and unintended?
Google’s Knol has just announced its official launch, after six months in beta. Interestingly, since Knol’s distinctiveness is supposed to lie in its “moderated” feature, the fact that Wikipedia has recently announced an “approval system” which appears to work in a somewhat similar way is unlikely to be a coincidence. (I also love the fact that both competitors use the same font, which I believe is “American Garamond”regular, though if I had time, I’d certainly use Identifont to double-check….)
And here’s yet another Answer Man competitor, this one claiming to offer the “true knowledge answer engine”, (and, since it’s now in beta, perhaps at this point one might want to try it with some question about “hubris”, for instance….)
Hard to believe that Ron Day was ever a “junior” faculty member here at OU, with things like this already on his mind…
as if Smiraglia’s views on instantiation of “the work” weren’t complicated enough…
to wrap my brain around in terms of the possible (though not, I think, probable) future of digital collections.
This website is the “library” left by the late William Kent, a database theorist whose 1978 book Data and Reality is still well worth reading by any information professional (especially those interested in the pragmatics of data and how that relates to the philosophy of information.) I never met him, but visiting his library makes me feel a great sense of loss.
“Integrating Information lifecycles” redux, courtesy of this article from Law.com about “RAM discovery”:
“If temporary or ephemeral information is not routinely retained, the emerging common law principle is that the requesting party must take effective affirmative action, including, when necessary, the seeking of a preservation order, to require that a producing party place transitory information into a form from which production can later be made.”
Adaptive structuration, anyone? (Note: this Lego set of Anthony Giddens in his study is not from an official Lego site.)
Hmm, the well-known ASK (anomalous state of knowledge) model with its depiction of iterative retrieval requests by a human being to “the” information system in order to solve a badly-understood problem by supplying underspecified resources
[see Belkin N, Oddy R, Brooks H (1982) ASK for information retrieval: I. Journal of Documentation 38(2):61-71]
works just a little too well with this view from The Church of Google. What on earth would Paul Kantor say if it turned out that ASK were actually a metaphysical theory?
Well, time to revamp my syllabus for KM/LIS 5433… more metadata (or, as Joe Colannino would no doubt justifiably point out), more supradata.
Recommendations:
5.2.1 Communicate with LIS Educators
5.2.1.1 LC and ALA: Convene a biennial meeting with LIS educators and trainers, perhaps in coordination with ALA and ALISE, to discuss changing policies, procedures, processes and practices, the levels of demand for qualified professionals in the area of bibliographic control, and base levels of knowledge required, in the first instance, of those who will work in bibliographic control and, in the second instance, of all professionals. Read more…
I had a wonderful time yesterday at the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Library System’s Staff Day, where I gave a little talk about some emerging technologies for librarians, largely based on the class I teach here at OU. They were a great audience (with lots of SLIS alums, as I was happy to find out!) but as usual I had far more material to share than was reasonable, and much was missed! I promised to provide a list of the “ten tools” with their URLs from my slides, so here they are:
Amaya (open-source web authoring program)
Audacity (open-source sound editor)
Diigo (social bookmarking tool used by class)
DocStoc (wannabe YouTube for professional documents)
GIMP (open-source photo editing)
Lite-C (simple language for 3D game design)
Portable Apps (free software carrier)
WikiScanner (identification of organizational sources for Wikipedia edits)
And here are the two blog posts that pretty much sum up why “this stuff” is so important:
“20 Reasons Learning Emerging Technologies is Part of Every Librarian’s Job” (from the Librarians Matter blog)
“Under the Hood of Web 2.0″ (from The Other Librarian blog)
Special thanks to my 5433 class for providing almost all of these goodies, to Kellie of last year’s class for inviting me, and to Josh of this year’s class for being such a good sport in the session!
