I think that my main benefit from the Hyperlinked Library MOOC was clarity. The post that best illustrates this for me is "My Empty Reference Desk". I came to a realization that a librarian's professional blog is like a reference desk as a result of Sarah Ludwig's guest lecture.
Another big realization came in my first post about multi-tasking. When I re-framed multi-tasking as inter-leafed practice, I felt better about it. It also helped me to choose tasks that were more compatible to combine. This has helped me in both my studies and my job. I may never feel as comfortable with multi-tasking as I am with single tasking, but I know now that I can do either one.
I had the most fun writing "I Love Goodreads" because Goodreads has been such an important part of my life. Soon after I posted it, this social networking website began a process of change that was probably inevitable due to its major growth spurt. It will never be the same as it had been, but I will still look back on the old Goodreads fondly. As soon as I wrote this post, I knew that I wanted to form a Goodreads tribe. I'm glad that other members had the initiative to act as the leaders as I would have if I had the time to do so. I'm glad that the tribe accomplished something for the MOOC by establishing the group on Goodreads and providing a reading list for Context Book.
My most emblematic quote from these posts would be:
"I've been riding the connecting paths between books all my life."
This is also a prime example of a realization because I never really wrote or thought about it that way. It just occurred to me that my life had been about discovering connections between books when I heard David Weinberger say that there weren't any.
I also actually discovered phenomena that I knew little or nothing about during this course. I had only heard the word "Makerspace". Now that I know what it is, I've fallen in love with the concept. If I work for a library that has a Makerspace, I will want to establish the Makerspace fandom that I discussed in my Context Book assignment.
Another phenomenon that I discovered as a result of this class, which is already causing controversy in the library profession, even before its release is Google Glass. As I said in my Director's Brief, it has great potential and equally great danger. A tool is never inherently dangerous. It's all in how it's used. I would like to be optimistic and assume that everyone will want to use the power of Google Glass for good. Yet humanity is a complex and unpredictable species. We never really know the consequences of any new technology in advance. Some librarians believe that there is reason to be concerned about Google Glass, and I can definitely see their perspective. Threats to intellectual freedom and privacy have been a major concern to me this semester as I have been making my way through the topics in the Intellectual Freedom Seminar. With that perspective, I can't look at Google Glass without a great deal of ambivalence.
I feel that MOOCs in general are a good learning format for me. My first MOOC was on Google search, and it was also very helpful to me. I use the tools that I discovered through that MOOC every day.
I am sure I will partipate in other MOOCs. I am very self-motivated and love to explore a curriculum on topics that interest me without the pressure of grades. I think I will always want to continue my education as long as I live. I hope to encounter some of the librarians I've seen in this course in other MOOC adventures.
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Making Connections
This post originally appeared on the Hyperlinked Library MOOC.
The content in this module that had me scribbling an outpouring of notes was the video on which David Weinberger gave his talk on Too Big To Know. I wasn't responding because I agreed with his remarks, but because I didn't. I enjoy disagreeing. I feel like I'm in a dialogue with this presentation. We have common ground. I understand that Weinberger's work is about making connections which is the theme of Module 2. We do have some radically different assumptions which I first noticed when he said "Books are no good at connecting you to other books." What did he mean? I've been riding the connecting paths between books all my life. How did he not see them?
For one thing, non-fiction books of the scholarly sort have bibliographies. If there are topics raised in the book that you want to pursue, you can find the author's sources and continue reading on those topics. (I have to admit that I eventually became dis-satisfied with bibliographies because they always led me backward to books that had been written before the ones that I had already read. If I wanted to travel forward in my reading, I would have to go online to search for the recent work in the field. That's why I use Google and Goodreads.) Non-fiction books also often mention influential books in the text itself. In fiction, there are connections to be found by reading the blurbs. The authors who have written those comments usually have some similarity to the author of the novel that you've been reading. It can be a similarity of theme, approach, characters or style. If I liked the original novel, I sometimes find that an author who wrote a blurb on the back cover is just as wonderful. There are also Author's Notes and Acknowledgements that help you find connections between books or their authors. It would be difficult for me to come up with a statement that is more untrue than the idea that books don't connect with each other.
The most popular post on my review blog, The Unmasked Persona's Reviews, is "Living With Wolves in Fact and Fiction". This is a post that combines a review of Jodi Picoult's Lone Wolf with the book that inspired it, The Man Who Lives With Wolves by Shaun Ellis. I found out about this connection by reading the Author's Note. Jodi Picoult is a bestselling writer. There must be thousands of people who blog that read this author. Why was I the only one who noticed the connection between these books and acted on it? Maybe it's because I have never shared another Weinberger assumption that a book is "a stopping point". For me, it's a starting point. Once I become interested in a topic, I want to find different perspectives from the one that I encountered in the first book I read on the subject.
I suppose it's that need to pursue those connections that makes a librarian. When I started the SJSU SLIS program with LIBR 200, my instructor told us that librarians are generalists. His name is Mark Stover and I am very grateful to him. For the first time, I knew what to call myself. I was not a specialist, but a generalist. I was interested in everything. Maybe others in my class didn't identify with the term "generalist" as I did. The power of a label is that some people will wear it proudly. The most appalling thing about a label is that it doesn't fit everyone. Perhaps some of those in my LIBR 200 class wondered whether they were meant to be librarians. I never did. I feel that the world needs generalists. As I listened to David Weinberger, my conviction was confirmed. Generalists make connections.
If someone can't find connections between books, it would be difficult to perceive connections on the internet. This is a teachable skill, not an inborn gift. It's a skill that is the foundation of research. Students who don't see connections will be unable to form a hypothesis or assemble the resources necessary for a literature review. Even linked data won't be a panacea for people who don't see why data connect. In our colleges and universities, librarians are the ones who teach this skill to new students. The internet should produce more generalists because the number of connections increase exponentially on the internet. It isn't called a "web" for nothing. Those who can't see that it really is a web shouldn't panic. A librarian will show them the way.
The content in this module that had me scribbling an outpouring of notes was the video on which David Weinberger gave his talk on Too Big To Know. I wasn't responding because I agreed with his remarks, but because I didn't. I enjoy disagreeing. I feel like I'm in a dialogue with this presentation. We have common ground. I understand that Weinberger's work is about making connections which is the theme of Module 2. We do have some radically different assumptions which I first noticed when he said "Books are no good at connecting you to other books." What did he mean? I've been riding the connecting paths between books all my life. How did he not see them?
For one thing, non-fiction books of the scholarly sort have bibliographies. If there are topics raised in the book that you want to pursue, you can find the author's sources and continue reading on those topics. (I have to admit that I eventually became dis-satisfied with bibliographies because they always led me backward to books that had been written before the ones that I had already read. If I wanted to travel forward in my reading, I would have to go online to search for the recent work in the field. That's why I use Google and Goodreads.) Non-fiction books also often mention influential books in the text itself. In fiction, there are connections to be found by reading the blurbs. The authors who have written those comments usually have some similarity to the author of the novel that you've been reading. It can be a similarity of theme, approach, characters or style. If I liked the original novel, I sometimes find that an author who wrote a blurb on the back cover is just as wonderful. There are also Author's Notes and Acknowledgements that help you find connections between books or their authors. It would be difficult for me to come up with a statement that is more untrue than the idea that books don't connect with each other.
The most popular post on my review blog, The Unmasked Persona's Reviews, is "Living With Wolves in Fact and Fiction". This is a post that combines a review of Jodi Picoult's Lone Wolf with the book that inspired it, The Man Who Lives With Wolves by Shaun Ellis. I found out about this connection by reading the Author's Note. Jodi Picoult is a bestselling writer. There must be thousands of people who blog that read this author. Why was I the only one who noticed the connection between these books and acted on it? Maybe it's because I have never shared another Weinberger assumption that a book is "a stopping point". For me, it's a starting point. Once I become interested in a topic, I want to find different perspectives from the one that I encountered in the first book I read on the subject.
I suppose it's that need to pursue those connections that makes a librarian. When I started the SJSU SLIS program with LIBR 200, my instructor told us that librarians are generalists. His name is Mark Stover and I am very grateful to him. For the first time, I knew what to call myself. I was not a specialist, but a generalist. I was interested in everything. Maybe others in my class didn't identify with the term "generalist" as I did. The power of a label is that some people will wear it proudly. The most appalling thing about a label is that it doesn't fit everyone. Perhaps some of those in my LIBR 200 class wondered whether they were meant to be librarians. I never did. I feel that the world needs generalists. As I listened to David Weinberger, my conviction was confirmed. Generalists make connections.
If someone can't find connections between books, it would be difficult to perceive connections on the internet. This is a teachable skill, not an inborn gift. It's a skill that is the foundation of research. Students who don't see connections will be unable to form a hypothesis or assemble the resources necessary for a literature review. Even linked data won't be a panacea for people who don't see why data connect. In our colleges and universities, librarians are the ones who teach this skill to new students. The internet should produce more generalists because the number of connections increase exponentially on the internet. It isn't called a "web" for nothing. Those who can't see that it really is a web shouldn't panic. A librarian will show them the way.
Unique Items and Digitization
I really heard Michael Stephens in the Hyperlinked MOOC's Module 7 lecture when he complained about the fact that an item that was unique should have been digitized. I understand his perspective, but it's important to know why very few unique items are digitized.
There is a great deal of unique material out there in archives. Some of these archives share facilities and technical services staff with a library. I recently toured one such institution, and the archivist said that it would take him another year to complete the creation of finding aids for this archive's collections. Since I took a course on Archives and Manuscripts at SLIS, this didn't astonish me. I know about the challenges involved in the processing of archival materials.
Let me tell you about finding aids. In addition to a couple of paragraphs about the nature of an archival collection, finding aids provide some descriptive details. The collection may contain hundreds of items. A library cataloger is usually describing one item at a time. When a cataloger creates MARC records of archival materials for the library's catalog, they are described at the collection level. A patron will then know about the existence of a collection, but will only have a general idea about its contents. A finding aid is more specific. The items are ordinarily organized in folders that are contained within boxes. The finding aid of a collection will most often describe it at the box level. If there are fifty boxes in the collection, the archivist will record the box labels on the finding aid. Please note that this is two levels of description above the individual item level. If an archivist had to describe every single item in a collection, the cataloging backlog would probably take decades to resolve. Finding aids are digitized using the metadata standard Encoded Archival Description (EAD) which I also studied at SLIS.
The creation and digitization of the finding aid is a prerequisite for digitizing items in the collection. Digitized objects need metadata. The finding aid gives patrons important background about the collection even if it doesn't include specific metadata about the item itself. So the next step in the digitization process would be to locate the object. This isn't necessarily a simple matter. There might be a number of boxes that contain similar materials. The archivist will need to examine the labels on every folder within those boxes in order to find the one item to be digitized. Then the archivist will scan the object, and provide item metadata that will usually appear on the same web page as the digitized object. This entire process is time consuming and labor intensive. It's also costly. Could mobile technology assist with the process? Well, a mobile phone could photograph the object, but that isn't really a problem that needs to be solved. I think that the barriers to digitization of unique materials from archival collections illustrate that technology isn't always a panacea. Unique materials are too complex to be described by a computer. This process still requires skilled human beings.
There is a great deal of unique material out there in archives. Some of these archives share facilities and technical services staff with a library. I recently toured one such institution, and the archivist said that it would take him another year to complete the creation of finding aids for this archive's collections. Since I took a course on Archives and Manuscripts at SLIS, this didn't astonish me. I know about the challenges involved in the processing of archival materials.
Let me tell you about finding aids. In addition to a couple of paragraphs about the nature of an archival collection, finding aids provide some descriptive details. The collection may contain hundreds of items. A library cataloger is usually describing one item at a time. When a cataloger creates MARC records of archival materials for the library's catalog, they are described at the collection level. A patron will then know about the existence of a collection, but will only have a general idea about its contents. A finding aid is more specific. The items are ordinarily organized in folders that are contained within boxes. The finding aid of a collection will most often describe it at the box level. If there are fifty boxes in the collection, the archivist will record the box labels on the finding aid. Please note that this is two levels of description above the individual item level. If an archivist had to describe every single item in a collection, the cataloging backlog would probably take decades to resolve. Finding aids are digitized using the metadata standard Encoded Archival Description (EAD) which I also studied at SLIS.
The creation and digitization of the finding aid is a prerequisite for digitizing items in the collection. Digitized objects need metadata. The finding aid gives patrons important background about the collection even if it doesn't include specific metadata about the item itself. So the next step in the digitization process would be to locate the object. This isn't necessarily a simple matter. There might be a number of boxes that contain similar materials. The archivist will need to examine the labels on every folder within those boxes in order to find the one item to be digitized. Then the archivist will scan the object, and provide item metadata that will usually appear on the same web page as the digitized object. This entire process is time consuming and labor intensive. It's also costly. Could mobile technology assist with the process? Well, a mobile phone could photograph the object, but that isn't really a problem that needs to be solved. I think that the barriers to digitization of unique materials from archival collections illustrate that technology isn't always a panacea. Unique materials are too complex to be described by a computer. This process still requires skilled human beings.
3D Printers and Intellectual Freedom
Hugh Rundle presented a number of arguments against libraries owning 3D printers in his blog post “Mission Creep” at http://hughrundle.net/2013/01/02/mission-creep-a-3d-printer-will-not-save-your-library/. There was one argument that I found myself wrestling with. What if a user wanted to print a gun? Wouldn’t the library be morally responsible for any crime committed with that gun? Could libraries become unsafe as a result of users printing weapons? How could libraries stop them from doing such a thing if the library owned a 3D printer?
This assumes that 3D printer technology is advanced enough for the printing of guns that would work and cause actual harm.
For guidance on this issue I consulted PC Magazine’s August 2012 article “Can A ‘Printable Gun’ Change The World?” by Damon Poeter which can be found at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2408899,00.asp . This article states that a printed gun would be likely to explode in the hand of its creator which implies that the technology isn’t that advanced. Yet this situation could change. Programming a 3D printer not to accept weapon files will only prevent them from being printed until some hacker finds his or her way around the programming. This brings us back to the question of a library’s moral responsibility for whatever emerges from a library 3D printer. Yet couldn’t someone argue the same about books? After all, who knows what dangerous or morally repugnant ideas might appear in books? Someone might borrow a crime novel then go out and re-enact a homicide described in its pages. Is the library responsible for that? Shall we empty the library’s shelves because the reaction of readers to books can be unpredictable?
There was a time when librarians thought that libraries should only carry the most “wholesome” and “morally elevated” books, and should restrict access to everything else. There are those that believe that libraries should still censor. According to an article by Judith Krug called The Aftermath of the Children's Internet Protection Act , Supreme Court Justice Rehnquist wrote in the plurality opinion in United States v. American Library Association that libraries should “deny access to resources that aren’t of requisite and appropriate quality.” This opinion dealt with a case brought by the ALA to remedy the inadequacies of internet filters which screen out legal websites. As I recently pointed out in a discussion post in SJSU's LIBR 234, the Intellectual Freedom Seminar, the decision to place the burden of ameliorating the deficiencies of filters on libraries isn’t the only one that could have been made. Will we one day be saying that although 3D printers prevent anything illegal from being printed, they also prevent the printing of perfectly legal objects? Will an ALA intellectual freedom activist like Judith Krug need to tell us again that it isn’t the mission of libraries to restrict access? Will librarians need to enter a code to enable the use of the 3D printer when we are satisfied that a user doesn’t want to use it to print any object that might be harmful? How will “harm” be defined? Will library staff need to monitor 3D printer users at every moment to make certain that they aren't contravening regulations about harmful objects?
This is a technology with troubling implications. I don’t presume to present solutions to the complex hypothetical situations that could arise once 3D printers become more sophisticated. We can’t truly know all the consequences. Yet someone should stand up for the ALA’s position on restriction of access if we don’t want libraries to be the type of institutions that imprison minds rather than setting them free.
For guidance on this issue I consulted PC Magazine’s August 2012 article “Can A ‘Printable Gun’ Change The World?” by Damon Poeter which can be found at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2408899,00.asp . This article states that a printed gun would be likely to explode in the hand of its creator which implies that the technology isn’t that advanced. Yet this situation could change. Programming a 3D printer not to accept weapon files will only prevent them from being printed until some hacker finds his or her way around the programming. This brings us back to the question of a library’s moral responsibility for whatever emerges from a library 3D printer. Yet couldn’t someone argue the same about books? After all, who knows what dangerous or morally repugnant ideas might appear in books? Someone might borrow a crime novel then go out and re-enact a homicide described in its pages. Is the library responsible for that? Shall we empty the library’s shelves because the reaction of readers to books can be unpredictable?
There was a time when librarians thought that libraries should only carry the most “wholesome” and “morally elevated” books, and should restrict access to everything else. There are those that believe that libraries should still censor. According to an article by Judith Krug called The Aftermath of the Children's Internet Protection Act , Supreme Court Justice Rehnquist wrote in the plurality opinion in United States v. American Library Association that libraries should “deny access to resources that aren’t of requisite and appropriate quality.” This opinion dealt with a case brought by the ALA to remedy the inadequacies of internet filters which screen out legal websites. As I recently pointed out in a discussion post in SJSU's LIBR 234, the Intellectual Freedom Seminar, the decision to place the burden of ameliorating the deficiencies of filters on libraries isn’t the only one that could have been made. Will we one day be saying that although 3D printers prevent anything illegal from being printed, they also prevent the printing of perfectly legal objects? Will an ALA intellectual freedom activist like Judith Krug need to tell us again that it isn’t the mission of libraries to restrict access? Will librarians need to enter a code to enable the use of the 3D printer when we are satisfied that a user doesn’t want to use it to print any object that might be harmful? How will “harm” be defined? Will library staff need to monitor 3D printer users at every moment to make certain that they aren't contravening regulations about harmful objects?
This is a technology with troubling implications. I don’t presume to present solutions to the complex hypothetical situations that could arise once 3D printers become more sophisticated. We can’t truly know all the consequences. Yet someone should stand up for the ALA’s position on restriction of access if we don’t want libraries to be the type of institutions that imprison minds rather than setting them free.
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