Welcome to my blog!

Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea

This is an great article I ran across in the NY Times on Information Literacy:
Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea

Peep Library Research

A study of small fluffy creatures and library usage:
Peep Research - Staley Library, Millikin University, Decatur, IL

Michael Gorman

Michael Gorman's Revenge of the Blog People! article caused a bit of a stir among librarian bloggers. It seems that he is angry with bloggers in general because a few took issue with what he wrote in a LA Times piece complaining about the Google Print initiative. It is interesting that the president-elect of the American Library Association (ALA) is stirring up so much controversy.

Mr. Gorman defines a blog as an "electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web". I wonder if he views web sites to be in the same category. Just as there are a wide spectrum of different kinds of web pages, there is a large variety of blogs. To brand all blogs as being the work of the unpublishable is wrong.

In the LA Times piece suggests that there is little value to digitizing large amounts of works because people will never take the time to read an entire book at a computer. There is some validity to this argument. But I believe in the next ten to twenty years there will be very large breakthroughs in the field of computer displays. Eventually it will be possible to read things on a computer as conveniently as reading them on paper. Starting the process of digitizing books is an experiment that will pay off eventually. E-Books have their drawbacks now but they will only improve with time. The experiments of today pave the way for the future.

Starting a New Blog

When I was in library school in 2004 I created a blog over on eBloggy and journaled my thoughts there. A few months back their server died and I lost all my posts. I have a crude backup of all my entries but I am not sure that I want to re-post them -- many of those posts have been incorporated into my web site anyway. I decided that Blogger looked like a good way to go with a new blog.

The title of this blog is taken from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that I read in my Organization of Information class titled The Library of Babel. I invite you to read the Wikipedia article on the story -- it contains a link to the actual story as well.

I plan to journal about library related items in this blog. I have also started a personal blog where I will write about other things such as my search for a job as a librarian and my interests such as games I play.