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As technologies to digitize primary source content mature and become better understood, more widely accessible, and more efficient, the volume of available digital content increases and issues of integration and aggregation become more important. Today\'s digitization project managers must give high priority to factors such as reusability, persistence, interoperability, verification, and documentation when planning their projects. Digitization project funding agencies, like the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), must give substantial weight to these same factors when assessing programs and evaluating project proposals. A Digital Library Forum convened by the IMLS and working in collaboration with participants from the NSF\'s National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library program has released a Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections to serve as a resource for practitioners and funding agencies . . .
By 2010, more than 50 percent of books sold worldwide will be printed on demand at the point of sale in the form of library-quality paperbacks.
The Stake: $1,000
Jason says yes, and vint says no.
\"Nothing is as inexpensive, easy to carry around, and indestructible as a physical book. And readers don\'t want to have texts augmented with sound and pictures and all sorts of other things; you\'re supposed to imagine all that when you read - that\'s what the writer\'s there for. Plus, habits don\'t change that quickly. If you\'re in business, you have to approach the market as it is, rather than as it might be, or should be, or will be someday.\"
Lee Hadden writes:\"
A new article in Scientific American may be of interest to librarians.
Although this article discusses the various methods of teaching reading,
many librarians are interested in literacy education, and have to answer
reference questions about different methods of teaching, hyped by
television commercials aimed at anxious parents and grandparents.
One interesting example is that people are asked if the following
words refer to a flower. Then a series of words on flash cards are shown.
While \"rose\" is often chosen, surprisingly, also the homophone \"rows\" is
chosen as well.
Red [sic] more about it at:
Scientific American, March 2002, page 85 et seq. \"How Should Reading Be Taught?\"
BY KEITH RAYNER, BARBARA R. FOORMAN, CHARLES A. PERFETTI, DAVID PESETSKY
AND MARK S. SEIDENBERG Also of interest are some articles on the teaching of Creationism in
schools on page 30, and a brief historical note on page 16 from their March
1952 issue, on the introduction of logic machines. \"First formulated in the
19th century by the English mathematician George Boole [of Boolean logic
fame], symbolic logic has been developed into a powerful tool for dealing
with complex problems in mathematics and business...\" and libraries, I
From the Library Association Record:
Most of the content of today\'s world wide web is designed for humans to read, not computers to manipulate. Alan Gilchrist explores the principles of classification and indexing that underlie the concept of the \'semantic web\', which might one day lead to much more accurate and targeted automatic searching and retrieval than is possible at present . . .
More - apologies if this is a repost.
Nicholas Carroll writes: \"Pleasant emails from librarians inspired me to flesh out
the anti-thesaurus proposal, which you linked on Nov. 23.
If you missed the Anti-Thesaurus Proposal For Improving Internet Search While Reducing Unnecessary Traffic Loads, there it is. In short, he says there should be a metadata standard allowing webmasters to manually decrease the relevance of their pages for specific search terms and phrases.
If you liked the first one, The Anti-Thesaurus Part 2 will be just as interesting.
Close Minded Science is a collection of links that aims to \"to take a middle road between total close-mindedness and total gullibility. Practice pragmatism, pursue humility, and maintain a clear, honest, and continuing view of ourselves and the less noble of our own behaviors.\"
See also: Against Excessive Skepticism: Collected Quotes.
Susan Fuller has written a lecture on the changing face of librarianship, and how libraries are perceived by the public. More
I think it was Mefi that pointed me to makethemaccountable.com and This Huge Collection of alternative theories on the 9-11 tragedies. They have a collection of links and questions you\'re not likely to find anywhere else.
Did the U.S. know that the attacks were going to happen?
What are the Bush family\'s business connections in the Middle East?
Who is investigating this travesty?
Who benefits from this war?
And so on...
The steam engine was to the Industrial Revolution as the Computer is to the “Information revolution” (if you’ve ever read Stoll you know why I put that in quotes, I\'m still not entirely sold on the knowledge revolution idea). Both the computer and the steam engine were not just the triggers, but as he puts it “above all, it’s symbol”. Now, just as then, products caught up in this revolution are seeing dramatic price decreases (Moores law being just one example). Now computers prices drop each year, then it was clothing, paper, and metal.
What he points out that is so interesting has to do with the amount of time that elapsed before the industrial revolution began to break out of it’s 19th century thinking. During the first 50 years of the revolution people had only managed to mechanize stuff that had been around, they just made more of it, and it cost less.
Just as the railroad worked to shrink “mental geography”, the internet eliminates it. We can now buys books from Amazon in Seattle, or catalogs from isim in Sweden, they both get delivered in the same way. Now we only have one economy, and one market, barriers have fallen world wide.
He calls this the Knowledge revolution because the key to our current revolution lies not in the computers themselves, but in cognitive science, that is in our minds, in the minds of the people leading this revolution.
I\'ve given Library
Juice something it should have had years ago: a manifesto.
Actually it\'s an adaptation of the statement I gave New Breed
Librarian when they interviewed me for their inaugural
issue. It expresses what I think are a large number of
librarians motivations for being librarians and expresses
what is known as the \"library spirit\" from a certain
angle. It is titled \"The Ideology of Librarianship: A
Libertarian Socialism of Information,\" and it is inside,
here: -- Read More