We're in deep now -- Powerset furthers the assumption that Wikipedia is factual.
Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.
Monday, May 12, 2008
powerset video
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
be here at ref desk
Be here, be here now, yo?
A lower noise-to-signal ratio, please.
Light less mediated.
Info seekers need our presence.
Myanmar Cyclone Resources
STAR-TIDES working group for Myanmar:
http://star-tides.net/myanmar
Inundation maps on Burmese coast, Dartmouth:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~floods/images/2008052Burma.jpg
Addictomatic feeds for Myanmar:
http://addictomatic.com/topic/Myanmar
ICRC, Myanmar, [donations link].
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Free Guptastan
You are lucky that he is on your side.
Sphere: Related Content
It only recently occurred to me that people don’t realize that I’m absolutely serious about starting a new nation state within three or four years if conditions are historically right.
library moment: grieg
This wonderful patron (an exuberant and adventurous Russian grandmother) who I get to help every two or three weeks rushes into my office, says, "Can you hep me?"
I say I can, and she has me pull up the Wikipedia page on Edvard Grieg, and play the .ogg there of the first movement of the piano concerto so that it will jog her memory. She thanks me profusely ("Thank you, thank you," she shakes her finger at me, "I like you so much!"), apologizes for her strong perfume, and rushes off to go to sing the piece in a performance. She said she'd been so nervous that she'd forgotten the music during her commute.
That's a good reminder for me: to keep my door more open more often.
And a good reminder that sometimes granny knows just where to go for her collaborative media music archive resources without any input from you, brother.
Granny can surprise you.
Albert Hofmann gone now
Albert Hofmann, LSD inventor, RIP
Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), has passed away. He was 102 years-old."I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonderchild." -- Albert Hofmann (1906-2008)
Link to Wikipedia article
=edit:=
Wasn't it Grace Slick who said she used to believe that if everybody dropped out and read a bunch of books the world would be a perfect place? But then we grow up and see that drugs do nothing but magnify our own psychosis (maybe peppering it sometimes with hints and glimmers of something magnificently transcendental), and that no problem is ever going to be solved, in this world or in the next, by the magnification of our own psyches. We get weary of drugs, weary of our own psycho-drama, and ready for reality (a reality more real than the daily-babble monkey-mind of our 'headache gray', fluorescent lit chattersphere)?
But that's not to disparage Mr. Hofmann -- he was a brave man, I think. Sphere: Related Content
books are weapons in the war of ideas
Doesn't this mean that "books" as an idea are the right idea and that book-ism is situated somewhere opposite State-ism (or maybe particular species of facism or national socialism)? That would imply that State-isms of any kind are the idea-things that book-ism undermines and subverts; and this would (or could) potentially threaten even American-ism, or Liberal-ism, or any other idea-thing, or idea-culture-thing.
The idea that we will stand up for the idea that "we may disagree with your idea but we will die to protect your right to express it" (or Z) is dangerous to any kind of idea-culture-thing except for the idea-culture-thing that defends (or identifies itself as or with?) Z.
This is all in the realm of abstraction and ideal, of course -- making sense of the face of an idea-culture-thing that has been presented by its self through wartime propaganda.
What's missing here?
information decay
like when you let your records go to seed, and the OPAC gets cumbersome; the interface is brittle and bright. A broken bureau-asthetique, a little red and yellow grave for books and mags and The Journal of Noospheric Phenomena & Neuro-Christology. A $15,000 so-what. Shelves sagging, homebrewed references crookedly photocopied onto acidic 2lb LaserBrite, and glum librarians staring lustily off toward retirement. Bad records getting worse. Truncation and limiters splintering into arbitrary chaos, returning a search for "teen suicide" with nothing but Carl Yanni's The Architecture of Madness, claiming it's shelved somewhere between the book on medieval Italian crown-mold milling and that dusty box of realia that some bigwig on 'the board' must've once given to some middle manager as a thank-you, back before The Cosby Show wowed us all on Thursday nights.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
more information in fewer hands
Weekly News Digest from Info Today reports on the Thomson happenings:
On April 17, The Thomson Corp. announced that it had completed its acquisition of Reuters Group, PLC, forming Thomson Reuters, a provider of "intelligent information" for businesses and professionals in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, scientific, healthcare, and media markets. Thomson Reuters has more than 50,000 employees with operations in 93 countries on six continents and 2007 pro forma revenues of approximately $12.4 billion.
Update: it shouldn't go unnoticed that Thomson Reuters had to go through tough federal anti-trust scrutiny to make the merge. Librarians have a duty to develop collections of information from diverse sources... a few more major consolidations like this & there won't be any diversity of database sources to speak of. Buy small press (and build homebrew) while you still can. I'm not knocking the value of what Thomson Reuters has to deliver, but I don't like being forced into smaller and smaller cattle chutes to get at what I need.
--
Reading: Not Loompanics Press anymore. Don't forget the value of niche info.
Listening: "Nutbush City Limits"
Sphere: Related Content
gale, readspeaker
At Library Journal, Michael Rogers reports that Gale's going to add text-to-audio software into 6 of its databases (including Opposing Viewpoints!)
Hope the voices aren't super canned and tinny sounding like other such audio/text programs are, but even if they are robotic I'll be very happy to have this tool handy. Yessir.
ok, so i'm a copycat
I'm a copycat too.
But man, I love me some playlist.com... been waiting for a really good .mp3 search engine for a while now. Love it maybe just as much as I do Pandora...
Enjoy while you can, before the RIAA or the CIA or Hillary Clinton or some other finger shaker takes it all away.
(You know, we ought to shake our fingers too every once in a while...)
sphering the square
News on AOL's Sphere deal at Information Today's Newsbreaks.
Comments here...
Saturday, April 19, 2008
tags, cois, library thing
communities of interest, where descriptors have to be specific, exact, unambiguous...
tags are lazy, sloppy, hasty. taxonomies are cumbersome (cheap shot), unintuitive... but also unambiguous.
how to make tags for c.o.i.s unambiguous, precise? reference to the schema needed to define terms. building better schema, yes, but also building better ontological tools, meta-schematic maps that define where the references are, what they refer to (and when), and the context necessary to decide on one over another.
much more to learn.
how can library thing help us to make one instance of "rock" mean stone, and another instance mean the music? are tags a black hole? and they, don't they, still ultimately depend on the occasional human pruning, picking the "fucks" and "goddamns" from the record page once LT is integrated into your ILS?
we need better tagging tools.
this whole thing -- it has to be a 'how can we make this work better for us and our patrons' thing rather than a 'ooooh, i du-nnnnnnnnnnoooooo, should we or shouldn't we even dooooooo this' thing.
yes,
yes,
and hell yes. we need to do this. but smartly.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Thursday's TLA
Caught a couple good sessions in the TLA Net Fair area -- exhibitions hall.
Todd Humble of North Richland Hills talked about implementing RFIDs in the collection -- really good talk, really practical, pragmatic info. He raised the issue of read/writable tags and data swiping, which is a real worry if you go for the 'smart' library cards for your patrons (his system was wise enough not to). This guy's the real deal, right down to grinding down the surfaces of discs in order to make sure that 100% -- yes, really -- of the collection was tagged. From scraping and photocopying, creating faux covers, to foiling foil, Todd knows his stuff.
Second session was on Second Life. Ms. Lorin Fisher gave a good introductory talk on Second Life, Second Life Library (infoisland, or info archipelago now?), and the particulars of doing reference service in SL. I asked her abt making use of SL in the here/now of my community's daily, RL reference needs. I remain unconvinced that SL librarianship has much at all to do with RL service and getting the information to the people, despite the excellent points she raised about meeting professors teaching in SL on their own pedagogical turf. (I know of one prof teaching an anthropology course in SL at my college, but there are probably more doing it.) I just don't yet think SL serves the mass of us. I can't help but see it as a "wow, ain't this cool!" tool for the info-elite who have the luxury of time to romp around being a dinosaur-fairy-goth-robot in wonderland. But. That's not to say SL lacks potential, and I think Ms. Fisher did a good job in asking us to think about what that potential could be.
Otherwise, played some wii nintendo bowling (my first wii experience ever) at the HighSmith booth. They told me pretty things about library furniture and gave me a plush lizard. Actually, their tables look like the best for our hypothetical (hopefully this summer!) game night needs, unless we rig something up homebrew by trying to laminate our own table tops.
Another good day at TLA, despite being spammed to shop at the scooter store by some guy in the hall (pushed a card out right in front of me whilst I was walking. I was like 'what's it for', he was like 'the scooter expo', i was like 'not interested', kept walking. the expectation that people will take what you put in front of their faces just because you have the nerve to stick it in front of them is insulting -- and now that feller knows it don't work on us all), and slight hassling about my lacking badge when I first came in (well mister, you better go back to your truck to get it)... fair enough.
(aside, the pic of Ms. Yarrow has a story, and it has to do w/ Meg Cabot a little bit... no time now tho).
**edit: to say, that pic ain't from Transmet! my goof -- it's Katchoo, right?**
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