Sunday, March 18, 2007
Friday, March 16, 2007
Blog Post #5- Weaving the Web
His closing chapter opens with the question, "Can the future Web change the way people work together and advance knowledge in a small company, a large organization, a country?" We can answer that question. We know that the Web has changed the way libraries work and the way they advance knowledge.
Berners-Lee observes, "that people seem to be naturally built to interact with others as part of a greater system". Blogging? Flickr? MySpace?
"If we lay the groundwork right and try novel ways of interacting on the new Web, we may find a whole new set of financial, ethical, cultural, and governing structures to which we can choose to belong, rather than having to pick the ones we happen to physically live in".
I thought about our class visitors, Erik and Jaap, and how we were introduced to their library in Holland from their physical visit, yet we can continue to learn about their work at the Delft Library via the Web.
In a discussion of his goal for the Web, Berners-Lee describes a system that would take advantage of "ingenuity, inspiration, and intuition of individuals in a special way". We've seen examples of libraries subscribing to those technologies that maintain that goal. And for those librarians that have shied away from the technology, they may want to visit Berners-Lee's insights to understand the true nature of the Web and to use the evolving Web2.0 tools to provide their patrons with the information and services they need and want.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Friday, March 2, 2007
Blogpost #4 Library Blogs of Note
Ricklibrarian is written by”baby boomer” reference librarian, Rick Roche of the Thomas Ford Memorial Library in
I learned of the blog through an article, Balancing the Online Life in the January 2007 issue of American Libraries.
“In demonstrating his points, the speaker completely lost me. You may not need to write code, but you need to read it and know what bits to take, how to combine it, and where to put it. He moved a little too fast for me in this presentation. I need to start again with this topic” (Roche’s comments about a Mashup Application presentation at the Internet Librarian 2006 conference).
Ricklibrarian , “a review of books, websites, movies, or anything worth reviewing with comments about libraries and librarianship”, is valuable for it’s diversity of content as well as the observations and spirit of its creator.
It's comforting to read these musings from a fellow boomer who's challenged, but not defeated, by the new technologies, and whose adventure and humor make for enjoyable and informative reading.