COURSE NOTES -
WEEK TWO - October 10-16, 2005
The textbook is in the book store. I'm sorry that the
price tag is a little high. Unfortunately we all pay too much for these
books. I think the book will be valuable to you. We will use it from
now throughout the course. Please read the Preface and Chapter 1 for
Monday.
On Wednesday, the
5th, you had the opportunity to hear
a presentation from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, among other
ventures. I would particularly like to hear the reactions from the
Singapore group and the Danish group to the Wikipedia. I wonder if the
U.S. students were familiar with it and use it on occasion. As an aside,
I remind you that the best way to evaluate any encyclopedia is to look up
a term, an event, or a person that you know quite a lot about so that you
can make an independent judgment about how well the tool performs (depth
of coverage, accuracy, currency, quality of illustrations, authoritative
references, logic of arrangement, value to specific audiences, balance).
We might use our new to-be-created class blog to make some comments about
the Wikipedia, Wales himself, any of his 10 "Free the ..." points.
For this week, we will begin with blogs. Is there a blog (or
more than one) on the topic you used to evaluate the Wikipedia? Have any
of you any blogging experience, either with your own blog or posting to
others or just reading one or two blogs on a regular basis?
I gave you links to several blogs that members of the SILS' community run.
Professor Brad Hemminger and others at SILS have set up both a Blog and a
Wiki in conjunction with the ASIST conference that we will all be
attending at the end of the month. You might check this out as well,
although it has not yet been populated with many entries. Both are
available from the conference link at www.asis.org/Conferences.
In addition to the Myburgh reading, two other readings
are provided but we will probably not have time enough to talk about them
for Monday's class so spend your time exploring Blogs and thinking about
the author's intent in the assigned textbook. We will discuss the
readings at some future time, possibly on our soon-to-be-created blog.
Wednesday, October 12
Because we have a guest from Denmark talking to us, I have
only assigned one reading that may have some parallel to the ideas that
Lennart Bjorneborn will be speaking about. If you have time, catch up on
the two articles for the Monday reading and/or read ahead on the Friedman
chapter as it's quite long.
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If you want to sample some of Lennart Bjorneborn's writings before his
lecture on Wednesday, you might look at his article, written with Peter
Ingwerson in a recent issues of the Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology: "Toward a Basic Framework for
Webometrics," 55(14) (August 2004): 1216-1227. The article is available
in full text through the library system. Find the journal in the list of
alphabetic electronic journals (it's page 27 under the J's); the easiest
search for a known citation like this one is by volume, issue and page
number. See if it works for you. This is an optional reading and it's a
bit hard going.
Professor David Carr's article on cultural institutions
speaks to the value of libraries, museums and other cultural institutions
as "places of the mind" as well as physical public spaces. He provides
metaphors to help us think about these institutions as agencies to
encourage intellectual growth. Workshop, conservatory and
greenhouse are the three metaphors that he suggests. Do these help
you in understanding the library as a place of the mind?
Carr also provides a set of active recommendations for
managers of libraries. Select one of his suggestions and describe how you
have observed an example of it. Select another and create a way the
library could follow it.
It is doubtful that we will be able to discuss all the
articles in our limited class time. Please use your soon-to-be-created
blog to comment on what you read. These questions may help stimulate your
thinking or you may generate your own comments.
Revised Oct. 10, 2005.
If you have questions or suggestions, please
contact
Evelyn Daniel