Muddiest Point

Am I a fool for not believing all of this "No Place to Hide" stuff?! Maybe I am. I don't know. I don't think I am. Maybe I shouldn't even be typing this because someone might be creepin' over my shoulder, looking for my personal info. YIKES!

Unit 13 readings

No Place To Hide seems awfully paranoid to me. I recognize the importance of protecting patron's account information, as well as keeping confidential the materials that they check out from a library, but the insinuation that "They know where you live, the value of your home, the names of your friends and family, in some cases even what you read" seems awfully conspiracy theory to me. Should I work in a lending position, I would certainly do my best to protect the privacy of patrons, but I don't know that Big Brother is as prevalent as No Place To Hide wants us to think.

Muddiest Point

I do really love the idea that libraries are integrating loads of 2.0 technology into their operations, but I can't shake the feeling that blogs & wikis still seem kind of...unprofessional. Could that change? Will that change? I don't know. Blogs to me are still sort of lifejournal-y and thus kind of emo and college-y. Aka unprofessional.

Unit 12 readings

Wikis are inarguably quite useful. They're collaborative and interactive and really, really easy to use. I think they're a little annoying, but ultimately good to know and use. I see no reason why wikis and libraries cannot coexist & cohabitate with results that are anything less than successful.

I love social tagging, and I use folksonomies like crazy. My flickr relies intrinsically on tags, as does my del.icio.us. Incorporating them into library catalogs scares me at times, but Penn has had such dazzling success that I don't see why it wouldn't work everywhere. And probably with really great results.

Comments

Commented on:

Kerri's blog


and

Maggie's blog

Muddiest Point

For all of the plain, visible quandaries with digital libraries, they exist in astonishing numbers. Do we owe this to the laziness of users or is it actually that librarians and computer scientists truly are bedfellows? I think it's the former.

Unit 11 readings

Mischo writes, "The goal of seamless federation across distributed, heterogeneous resources remains the holy grail of digital library work." How could we even achieve this? Not all authors are going to agree to this equal distribution. They want money, right? Not. Gonna. Happen. Also, this point really intrigued me, as it's definitely something I've noticed working reference at Hillman: "It is interesting that Google Scholar is being held up as the competition for both campus institutional repository systems (at least in terms of search and discovery) and academic library federated searching." This is tangential to the Digital Library issue, but I think catalogers will have to totally revamp catalogs to better reflect and serve the kind of searching that both students and the public will likely be doing as a result of using & loving Google.

The "Dewey Meets Turing" article brings up some really good points. The authors wrote, "The disruption to the library community was greatly exacerbated by many journal publishers' business decision to charge at a premium for digital content. This decision has been forcing academic libraries to cancel subscriptions, undermining their role as conduits to scholarly work," a point which so greatly frustrates me. Journal flipping, at the rate which we're going, makes me immeasurably nervous, and similarly, I think it does a great disservice to public patrons who will be unable to access things they otherwise could have accessed.

Maybe I don't yet trust digitization and digital libraries enough. Who knows.