Month: November 2008

Be suspicious of Women…

Be suspicious of Women. They are given to the Reading of frivolous Romances, and at all events, their presence in a Library adds little to (if it does not, indeed, detract from) that aspect of gravity, Seriousness and Learning which is its greatest Glory. You will make no error in excluding them altogether, even though by that Act it befall that you should prohibit from entering some one of those Excellent Females who are distinguished by their Wit and Learning. There is little Chance that You or I, Sir, will ever see such an One.

Taken from The Old Librarian’s Almanack. A real update coming soon, I promise.

Google/Wikipedia: Re-inventing the damned wheel.

I’ll admit that I’m a Wikipedia/Google whore — I keep joking to a friend of mine who works for Google that when I’m done with my MLIS, I’m ready to sell out.
But joking aside, I was on Wikipedia today when I saw this advertised at the top of their donation page:

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. – — Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Yes motherfucker, it’s called a L.I.B.R.A.R.Y. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? You may have, gasp, been to one as a child? The arrogance kills me with that statement — Wikipedia, you did not infact, create the context of indexing human information for easy perusal — print encyclopaedias predate this by over a hundred years – AT LEAST. And the idea of indexing all the information of human kind AND having it available to all of human kind presumes that EVERY living human being has access to the Internet. According to this site, currently only 21% of the world’s population has access to the Internet. I’m betting and it’s just a hunch here, that there are more libraries available than Internet kiosks. Just a hunch.
I’m dropping this topic out there to be picked up later by myself — I’m also currently listening to The Google Story on my commutes, so I’m sure I”ll have more to say on this in a bit. For now, I slumber (wearing one of my Google t-shirt, of course).

Indexing the Internet

Currently, I have a 1.5″ binder that is jammed packed with articles that are assigned in one class. If I were pro-active, this binder would have been completed and sorted at the beginning of the semester over than half-way through but I am the queen of procrastination (or suck at time management, take your pick).
As I was reading the this weeks homework for that class tonight, the assigned article is about indexing as a cottage industry, I found myself surprised by the author discussing the “probability of indexing the Internet” which made me go back to the beginning of the article and look at the date — 1996. My notes in the margin? “Google? Yahoo?”
While I’ve been woefully behind in keeping the day to day (or week to week) stuff of my first semester of lib school documented as well as I would have liked, one thing that has struck me since the beginning of the program is that some of the information that is parsed to us as teaching tools is woefully out of date. I don’t mean in age, per se, but in content of the information being given. In the computer competencies class that I’m taken, the book (current, dated 2008) is incorrect about various technologies as well as gives too much information on things that for the lay person, may seem to be over wrought. I’m trying to figure out why a librarian will need to know what EEPROM is, but apparently this information is necessary for dissemination.
Referring back to the article from 1996, yes it does give a good overview of what indexing is and is not but on the flip side, how much are we to take away from this over what has changed in the last 12 years? By this I mean that clearly there has been much advancement in the field of librarianship that would warrant more current and perhaps more timely piece then something that is so aged?
I find this to be a circular argument within myself in that as someone coming into the program with such a heavy technical background, perhaps I’m jumping the gun on these topics but on the other hand, it is not like my professors are not technically savvy or incompetent — they are, in fact, neither. It just seems irksome that so many of my professors seem stuck in older information while new information arrives daily. THIS is what I do not get. For now, I am going to go mull this over a bit more and will return with a more complete update soon, I promise.