last post: privatising information by stealth

I put a YouTube post up on my first post so I thought I'd just cut to the chase here and give my general web 2.0 and library thoughts.
So I read the OCLC web 2.0 future of libraries link. Some very interesting thoughts from some very nerdy looking people. The pick for mind, both visually and content wise, was the fellow cheerily pictured with the boat oar and his pithy controversial comments such as "it may no longer make sense to “collect” in the traditional sense at all" (although he did leave himself a little escape hatch with his inclusion of the word "may") and "We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills". If this was Oprah, I'd be wooping. Though, not necessarily because I agree, but because they sound like fighting words to me, and I reckon we don't get enough of those in the library community.
Personally, my take on web 2.0 is that libraries need to get much more actively involved "from the inside" rather than whooping from the sidelines (if I can go back to my Oprah analogy, in case you missed it).
I think that using all the technologies in the learning 2.0 program is a great idea, but really I think we need to move far beyond just using other companies gadgets and gizmos to and going "wow that's pretty cool, what a nifty idea" to being the ones that are coming up with the ideas and actually inventing the gizmos.
I have said this before, but, for example, rather than encouraging everyone to use blogger, I think libraries, especially state and national libraries should be setting up their own blogging sites for their users. Where will Blogger be in 100 years? Who will be looking great grandmother Ethel's blog from when she was a teenager? Rather than entrusting all our cultural data to corporate conglomerates, why not put it in the hands of our oldest, and most esteemed public institutions, our libraries?
Frankly, I think we need to start doing these things or we will become irrelevant and then disappear (yikes).
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing (gulp). I suppose it depends on whether you're ideals are more free trader or socialist. It seems to me that public libraries are pretty much a classic example of the socialist ideal of equal access to services provided to all and funded by taxes. Which is one model, but not the only model.
It does seem funny to me though that if you suggested privatising libraries you would get a whole bunch of very emotional opposition, but there doesn't seem to be that much debate about the quiet privatisation of the information industry that is happening now by default (gee, it would have been nice to have been able to have written this blog without the spell checker telling me that I had spelt privatisation wrong because I didn't use a z...).
In this learning program, we blogged with blogger, we put our rss feeds into google reader, our photos into Flickr, our videos into Youtube and assigned it all metadata with delicious. Private companies from start to finish. At no point did libraries make an appearance as providers of home produced innovation or services.
Working for the past year at SLV, I've come across the vast and methodically produced indexes of resources that have been created by library staff in the past. For example, we have card catalogues for images in magazines, articles in books and journals, music scores in anthologies, theatre programs, art exhibitions etc. Recently I catalogued a book from 1910 from the Library of Congress that was a comprehensive list of government publications for the last decade. It seems to me that libraries used to see themselves as content providers, actively providing tools for finding information. At the moment, it feels more like we have resigned ourselves to using the services of the private sector. At the risk of sounding totally alarmist and like a bit of a crack pot, that seems like the slow road to oblivion.
So what would I like to see us doing? SLV's my connected community is a step in the right direction. Why shouldn't libraries be creating their own search engines? Why are there no widgets for searching Libraries Australia from your desktop? Why can't people keep a blog as part of library genealogy websites? Why aren't libraries helping people to organise their bookmarks and tags to share with others (we seem to have fair amount of experience in the creation of metadata)?
The superficial answer is, of course, that libraries don't have the funds. The deeper underlying answer though is that, really, our society has decided that it's information is best entrusted to and run by the private sector on an advertising funded basis. Which is a perfectly feasible model. But if there is anyone that would feel uncomfortable about "public" libraries, say, putting up billboards for retail products in and around their buildings and in the front covers of books and on their web front pages, then that would seem to suggest that we ought to be having at least some kind of community debate about whether we want to switch to a private model of information custodianship, as we are doing at the moment.
Personally, I think what would make me whoop what be seeing a little "powered by OCLC" logo on a google page...

online apps and stuff

Had a bit of a play with the online word processors. Pretty nifty all this application on the web stuff.
One thing I'm noticing more and more is that to be part of the web 2.0 world you need to have a truck load of usernames and passwords. It's made me think that I need a new aproach to managing them.
I am thinking using the new capabilities for storing documents online might be of use for keeping a list of usernames - though keeping a list of passwords online would be a bad idea I think.
Also tried playing around with yahoo widgets and Google desktop today. Lots of fun but may just contribute to information overload. I got excited about yahoo widgets a while back but soon stopped using them and forgot about their existence altogether. Still the idea of having lots of bits and bobs at your fingertips is pretty interesting. The clincher is like with all of these other web 2.0 services, can you find a way to effectively work them into your every day task routines so that they actually make a positive difference?
I tried to install a couple of widgets that would let me post my blog to blogger from the desk top but, alas, couldn't make the settings work. It would have been so beautiful, sigh.

pumped1qj

pumped1qj
Originally uploaded by allbritton_dave

Hmmm, this guy looks like several rows of uncut sausages squeezed into a pair of speedos. Somebody's been having some fun on photoshop.
Flickr is a good way of sharing images with people, another way of eliminating fiddling round with CDRs, or memory sticks, or unwieldy file attachments. Not too sure about it's library applications particularly. I do think the national library's initiative to get people to export their flickr pics to Pictures Australia is great idea.

Tagging

I created a delicious account a while back but kind of stopped using it after a little while. The Learning 2.0 program gave me a good opportunity to go back and revisit my account and think about how to use it in a little more detail. I installed the delicious add-on for Firefox so that I can upload my bookmarks. I am hoping this will help keep my home and work links in sync. The only problem with that is that it may actually turn out to be easier to have different bookmarks for home and work use...but we shall see.
I also set up some delicious tag subscriptions and then subscribed to them in my google reader.
Not so sure about the merits of technorati. Google has a dedicated blog search function now, which I imagine would perform the same function, and it would seem easier to be able to search in lots of formats from one place. Funny how much competition there is in the web 2.0 world with different companies setting up services that do the same thing.
One other thought strikes me this week. You can spend a lot of time organising your life without achieving much at all. Like building a library of books that you will never read. Which I can relate to being a cataloging librarian.
Which brings me to tags. There was a lot of talk when I was doing my librarian course about folksonomies. Are library metadata techniques antiquated? Personally, I even have trouble finding information via LCSH, and I work intimately with it every day. I suspect free form tags would probably work just as well.
I am a little confused at this stage whether or not you are meant to put tags in a seperate words or one word eg. John Howard vs. JohnHoward and whether upper case and lower case matter. Not that I would be likely to be tagging much about John Howard mind you...

#6 RSS

Hadn't used Google Reader before. Nifty to be able to put different bits and bobs together in one place. I think the challenge though is to figure out a way of working your reader viewing into you're everyday routine, figuring out how much time you want to spend sifting through the stuff that you subscribe to, prioritising what you want to know about. Otherwise, subscribing to your feeds can be like subscribing to reader's digest, novel at first but less novel the more rubbish you find yourself bombarded with. Maybe, some links to using RSS readers effectively could be incorporated in the course?

#5 Wiki's

Yeah, sure Wiki's why not? I once used a Wiki for a uni assignment as part of my library course. The task was to put together and run a information literacy training program. Because we had to work as a group, and it seemed to make sense to have links and information about resources all together on a webpage, it worked well to use a Wiki where we could all work collaboratively without constantly emailing stuff to eachother and ending up with confusion of latest version of documents etc.

mpaosshtumpodern

Okay so here's a video of a fellow playing the banjo like it's a sitar.



And, here's some proof that coffee is, of course, good for you.
http://www.lincoln.ac.nz/story22430.html

And here's some samples from the a fictitious list of books in Richard Brautigan's "The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966":

THE CULINARY DOSTOEVSKY by James Fallon. The author said the book was a cookbook of recipes he had found in Dostoevsky's novels.
'Some of them are very good,' he said. 'I've eaten everything Dostoevsky ever cooked.'

THE STEREO AND GOD by the Reverend Lincoln Lincoln. The author said that God was keeping his eye on our stereophonic phonographs. I don't know what he meant by that but he slammed the book down very hard on the desk.

PANCAKE PRETTY by Barbara Jones. the author was seven years old and wearing a pretty white dress.
'This book is about a pancake she said.'