OCLC Founder Frederick G. Kilgour Dies

See the following link for the OCLC founder Frederick G. Kilgour’s Obituary–he was 92.

 http://columbus.bizjournals.com/columbus/stories/2006/07/31/daily12.html

 Anthony

Relational Content: Cataloging and the Web

It seems as if a great deal of contemporary discussion about information deals with relational content: that is, how information interacts, if in fact inanimate objects can interact–but this is the nature of anthropomorphizing everything.  This brings to mind the much-talked-about NY Times Magazine front-cover article (Kelley, Wired Mag) about the future of books, just over a month ago.  One of his comments was that books don’t “relate” to each other on the shelves, but that the nature of the web, with links and ubiquitous URLs and everything pretty and nice, you would have a world (or universe!) of complete interconnectivity.  Now, I could be completely off track with this, but it seems to me that there are “things” called classification systems, such as Dewey and LC, for example, and the purveyors of this (to some) arcane knowledge are cataloguers of one brand or another.  I know that there was great outcry from this specialized breed of library scientist, and perhaps for good reason.  So where does the individual or collective cataloguer go from here?  Perhaps a better question is: what is the idea of “relational content” mean–both in the cataloging sense and on the web?  And how does this play into this week’s articles, especially Calhoun?  I think that many in the library community recognize the internet/web as a powerful function, but I believe there is a need for a greater push toward understanding (through teaching) the relationships between the internet/web in its functions and capabilities and traditional forms of information structures, systemcs, architecture…like cataloging.  The world of MARC or LC and the likes of microcosms of PT, BS, BX, and other fields have greater relationships to one another than the flimsy links on a webpage, that are often done more out of the idea “this is interesting,” rather than the tempered sensibilities of the scholarly “cf.” 

24-hour Access, e-Books, and the Digital Divide

My recent response to a classmate regarding the “24-hour access” question is below:

The one big question that needs to be asked–and it seems to be based on our pervasive and perhaps inculcated nature of being “who we are” and “where we are”–is “what does 24 hour accessibility mean?” For many of us, this may in fact be possible, partly because we are all participants in LEEP, so it is assumed that we all have accessible computers. But this is not necessarily true. Some students use the computers at work, because they don’t have home computers; and then there is the wider portrait of “who in society owns a computer.” Consider that roughly 87% of the world’s population does NOT own a car; now a car is not a computer, but computers do cost something. Even within the United States, I would be surprised if more than 30% of the population owned a computer. World-wide, I’ve seen numbers between 3-5% (for example, see: http://www.omni-ts.com/newsroom/linux-software-environmentally-friendly.html). Even if 30% of Americans owned computers, there are so many other issues to examine–including literacy, percentage of readers, types of readers; so, 24-hour access is the brainchild of digital age, and the step-child of the digital divide.

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So what can we take away from this? There is much to be said about the burgeoning e-book or e-text. My main concern (and I hate to sound so socialistic or like a throwback to early Leninism!) is about the basic accessibility. I don’t think e-books/texts shall “infiltrate” the market for many, many years. The issue of their usage will be basically curtailed at the public library door: if you need some sort of device to read a book (i.e. e-book), it adds cost and technology needs that many people just can’t afford. So, there is much more to think about here.

Knowing Media and Textual Confusion

There was an interesting offering from a classmate recently (I think it was on either the wiki or blog), that spoke about “internet sources.”  What exactly “is” an internet source can be a complicated question, even in the library science community.  But the issue that was raised in the short dialogue provided by this person demonstrates how “internet” as a location (however amorphous it may be) is confused with the expression of “electronic environment.”  A physical text that is scanned goes from physical environment to electronic environment, but this does not necessarily make it an “internet resource.”  So what is going on?  And can the language of the electronic age cause interminable confusion, with examples such as these?

Looking at this, let’s take an actual title: “Faust” by J.W. v.Goethe.  It was written nearly 200 years ago, and published as a physical entity.  Now, if we scan this document/text and make it available, say, through a PDF, which is available “through the internet,” does Goethe’s work become an “internet (re)source?”  According to the younger, internet-imbued generations, (as in the blog comments), this would indeed be an “internet (re)source.”

The role now of librarians and other education-related professionals is not just make the distinctions, but to teach and educate people about distinctions.

e-textuality: space and time

This title perhaps sounds like a meeting of sci-fi writing and philosophical platitudes, but the issue at hand concerns the place of e-texts (or, “e-books” for example) and the frequency of these media in differenct fields and disciplines. 

Depending on the range and studies and the material inherent in those areas (e.g. biology, chemistry, computer science), there are needs in the realm of how this information is processed and disseminated.  The information frequency and turnover of information is greater in the realm of the sciences; the term “advancement” has a more significant lag-time in the humanities, where debates about more subjective matter can be deliberate, drawn-out, and pondered over for substantive chunks of time.  This is the dilatory nature of understanding historical questions, streching them out in every which way.  The time/space of obsolescence is far less in humanities research than in the sciences; if we consider this, the subject of e-texts (such as journals) in the sciences being far more numerous than in the humanities may be one of the points of provenance–essentially, that e-texts are needed for high-spead “advancements” in the sciences, much more than they are needed in the humanities.

And what influence, impact, or other result shall this have in our world?  Good question…! 

Now in WordPress (Also in Blogger): e-textuality

Hello all!

This is just a brief comment in WordPress Blog, as I’ve been a long time user of “Blogger.”  But now have finally gotten on to the WordPress bandwagon!

I am fairly interested in the e-text question, if we may call it such, as it comes up quite frequently.  And there seem to be a number of issues (direct and tangential), that are of great importance to our understanding of “textual environments.”  Many people write or speak about the e-environment: the e-text, the e-book, the e-whatever, but the use of language around e-expressions is rhetorically nebulous.  What and where is this talk really about?

More to come…

 Anthony

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