News May 25, 2007 (mp3 file: 7.05 MB, 7:30 min.)
Conversations;Library Card Sign-Up Month and Banned Books Week; "Ready-to-use techniques, lessons & listening cassettes for early childhood."
I was—finally—catching up on my rss feeds yesterday. (Note to self: practice what you preach about keeping up…) There are many ideas swimming around in my head and I won’t drag you into that surf with me but I wanted to mention a couple of books.
“Everything is miscellaneous” by David Weinberger is about digital disorder—classification, in a way, and Weinberger has some interesting things to say about libraries and our classification systems. (It’s interesting to me, though, that he is saying all of this in a book, a physical object with information, that is going to be physically categorized in a single, particular place in libraries and bookstores….) I have just begun the book but it promises to be thought provoking matter for the library world. Here are just two principles that are interesting for us to think about and…well, let’s have conversations about them:
- Information is most valuable when it is thrown into a big digital “pile” to be filtered and organized by users themselves;
- Instead of relying on experts, groups of passionate users are inventing their own ways of discovering what they know and want.
What do you think about that? How do you feel about that? Do those statements make you want to stand up and shout, “Yes!” or do you want to say, “Nope, no way, no how. That path is fraught with all kind of danger; I’m trying to examine my reactions to Weinberger’s principles within the context of my basic belief that “Information wants to be found.” (Note that that does not include misinformation, though that seems to want to be found, too.) I’m still examining and thinking. I’d love to talk with you about it.
(There is a one-hour video on Tech Talk of a presentation Weinberger made about these concepts—it’s not a bad place to start; link is below.)
The other book is one that I’d actually already read but am now revisiting: “The Cluetrain Manifesto: the end of business as usual,” which has become something of a classic in the business and marketing world, and is certainly being discussed in at least some circles in the library world, too. You can also read these “95 theses for the people of earth” on the web at www.cluetrain.com. Though geared toward business and corporations this, too, has some ideas and concepts for librarians to think about. If I had to summarize it in one short phrase it would be “Have conversations with your users—real, meaningful conversations, “ but that’s probably doing a disservice to the richness of what the authors have to say to us (and for us, as consumers.) I hope you’ll take some time to take a look at the theses, and see how you feel about them—the individual theses or the Cluetrain as a whole. In some ways, I think small libraries have a real advantage in all of this—you know your “market” or community and you do converse with them because you know them all pretty well. But, what are your conversations about?
Here are just a couple of the theses: (Ttry changing “company” to “library” and “markets” to “patrons):
18: Companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.
19: Companies can now communicate with their markets directly, If they blow it, it could be their last chance.
73: We’ve got some ideas for you, too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we’d be willing to pay for. Got a minute?
So, what do you think? Do you see any implications for libraries in these? For example, libraries are concerned about our patrons getting good, reliable information. Not a bad thing, and we certainly know there is some less than reliable information out there—on the web, from Aunt Tillie and peers on the playground. Do we need to enter the conversation to be able to, well, converse with them about information and share what we know—and let them share what they know?
Lots to think about. And let’s have some conversations about it. --Karen
Links from today's podcast:Book reviewd by Marcia:
- Ready-to-use techniques, lessons, & listening cassettes for early childhood, by Jerilynn Changar and Annette Harrison. The denter for Applied Research in Education, c. 1992.
