“Vices” may be “glaring as the noon-day sun,” but poems can go mighty dark. Hidden since 1811, Poetical Essay by a young Percy Bysshe Shelley appears in 2006. Millions to fight compell’d, to fight or die In mangled heaps on War’s red altar lie . . . When legal murders swell the lists of pride; …
Reading Roy Rosenzweig’s thoughtful appraisal of Wikipedia in the current Journal of American History (“Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past”), I was particularly struck by this passage: If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation to make it as good …
Please don’t take this the wrong way. It’s not you, it’s me. It’s just that I was so excited to meet you — I had so many preconceptions, I had heard so much about you. And then when I actually met you, you seemed kind of standoff-ish and, I admit, sort of different from what …
OCLC’s recent report College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources resonates a bit with the Al Gore slideshow movie I saw this weekend: it deploys lots of slick graphs and charts to frame information that can only be received with dismay. The almost 400 students surveyed by OCLC think of commercial search engines as …
If it once took a special type of person to be a library cataloguer — one comfortable in back offices & around heavy rule books, methodical, perhaps quiet — now everyone wants to get in on the action. The rise of self-cataloguing has been one of the more inexorable effects of digital media. The discovery …
What did you do on your spring vacation? Me, I communed with ancestors — and not just the vividly alive ones. My mother had collected a good deal of basic facts and figures about her family and my father’s, and had fed this data into genealogical software installed on her computer. All that rich data …
Nothing odd will do long. ‘Tristram Shandy’ did not last. – Samuel Johnson Wrong! — I gleefully thought, way back when I was slogging through an eighteenth century literature class in college — bored silly by Johnson’s lumbering, moralizing, psuedo-Oriental Rasselas, and, in contrast, completely delighted by Lawrence Sterne’s goofy carnival of the mind, Tristram …
Last year at the ARL symposium called Managing Digital Assets, I smiled inwardly to think of the grumbling likely to be kicked off by observations such as this by Donald Waters of the Mellon Foundation: …what unites our interest in digitization and open access in a digital world is that the material becomes ‘processable,’ or …
