I met Derek de Solla Price when I was a very junior editorial assistant at MIT’s Center for Advanced Engineering Study back in 1978 when Myron Tribus was director. Read more…
on TechRepublic
Funny to recall that back then we really enjoyed having those dinosaurs in the house…. Don’t laugh, someday you and yours are just as likely to end up as jetsam (or Jetsons?) from the past in someone’s fantasy on Oort Cloud.
I see that a different, more thoughtful approach to the integer issue is being taken by Mark Lindner. However, since librarians replicate information more or less routinely, I can’t accept that it constitutes activism by definition. I do agree, however, that the question is well worth raising in the context of library activities, as does the group Information for Social Change, for example. (We do have a popular “community relations and advocacy” course here, but I’m not sure whether these are among the issues covered….)
Want to own a string of pseudo-randomly-generated integers, just like the movie industry claims that it does? Here’s your opportunity, at Freedom to Tinker.
Who knows: maybe someday you’ll be able to sell these in Ebay or sue somebody for using them. (Or even use them yourself to do some math.) Get yours now!
This is such a great reading, but is it something that my future students in LIS 5433 would “get”?
On the other hand, do I really “get” it all either? Does it stop me from wanting to get the entire book from which this been excerpted? Not at all! You go, Bonnie Nardi!
So are those librarians who make their patrons’ circulation and access records unavailable for inspection by government agencies “ethical disinformationists”, similar in a sense to “ethical hackers”? “Gaming the system” through probing its weaknesses in order to protect and improve its overall structure? One of the things that I don’t recall as being mentioned in the debate about the rush to digitization is librarians’ role in protecting patrons’ privacy, which has become increasingly critical. When Google Books becomes the default, who will play the thankless role of “ethical disinformationists”?
The best thing about teaching (though I’m certainly not the best teacher, compared to some of the terrific ones I’ve had the opportunity to work with over the years, such as Bob Taylor, Marta Dosa, Pauline Atherton, Antje Lemke, Barbara Kwasnik, or Sari Biklen) is what I learn myself in my classes. Discussion on one of our competitive intelligence class forums today about how we’re focusing too much on technology and competition in the private sector– quite true! If we broadened our focus, we could be thinking about things like Sahana and what it’s doing for collaborative intelligence in humanitarian ICT. Which casts a very different light on how we think about these CI and KM issues… and how I’ll teach this class next time.
Ah… I think this is what I’ve been waiting for to jump-start my SLISebration thinking:
and the library as conversation metaphor
(or do I mean to “slow-start” my thinking?)
KMWorld has just released a list of 100 companies that “matter” in knowledge management software, largely because each seems to have defined a particular market. It would be fascinating to develop a matrix of these 100 firms and their markets and figure out where any “holes” might be.
Very interested in the recently-completed “the library as conversation” ALA report from Dave, Joanne, and Scott up in Syracuse, and the comments made by people like John Buschman. But of course there is more than one kind of conversation (and more than one kind of library!) and I’m wondering if different libraries facilitate different kinds of conversations: discussion, dialectic, dialogue, and design, per Jenlink and Carr 1996. Hmmm….
