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COURSE NOTES - WEEK TWO - October 10-16, 2005

Blackboard for posted readings. Return to Schedule


Monday, October 10 and Wednesday, October 12

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.

> 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