Categories
Media Music

American Edit

American Edit

Today there is a cyber protest going on in support of Dean Grey, a group of mashup artists that produced the American Edit. American Edit is a mashup album of works with the Green Day album American Idiot.

As I support the ability of artists to reappropriate works in the production of new art, and this work cannot possibly interfere with the sales of the Green Day album, I suggest that everyone take a listen. It’s brilliant stuff.

Categories
Digital Culture

Yahoo! buys Del.icio.us

Interesting…Yahoo! first buys flickr, and now del.icio.us.

Trying to guess the purposes of these large tech companies is a bit like guessing where a penny will land when dropped from a plane, but it’s clear that Yahoo! is trying very hard to be a Web 2.0 company.

Categories
Library Issues

Gaming in Libraries

Some really excellent blogging from Jenny over atTheShiftedLibrarian on the Gaming, Learning and Libraries conference.

More (since these people are all incredibly cool and are tagging like crazy) on technorati and flickr. Such a great topic! Here in my academic library, I’m not often jealous of public libraries. Here’s one opportunity for me to be so, since I don’t eeeeeeeeeever see us ordering games and game systems. I hope that I’m wrong, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Categories
Media

Nacho Libre!

I have found a new hero for our time. A hero that will show us the way…light our path….and deliver us from evil.

That hero is Nacho Libre.

Nacho Libre

Jack Black as a 1970’s era luchador? Yes, please!

Check out this interview, as well as yet another amazing pic. It’s directed by Jared Hess, he-of-napoleon-dynamite fame, and co-written by Mike White, who gave us School of Rock.

Plus, you know: LUCHA!

I’m so there.

Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues

Wikipedia in transition

There was quite a lot of noise surrounding the Wikipedia this past week, when two major stories broke, one concerning John Seigenthaler, Sr. (former assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s) and one concerning Adam Curry (one of the originators of podcasting).

In the case of Seigenthaler, he felt that his biographic entry was libelous, when it stated:

“John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.”

While this is obviously a harsh statement, I would be interested to know how close this comes to the legal standards for libel. Most anyone even remotely associated with the Kennedy’s has been “rumored” to have been involved somehow with the assassinations. In his open letter, published in USA Today, he stated:

For four months, Wikipedia depicted me as a suspected assassin before Wales erased it from his website’s history Oct. 5.

I certainly do NOT read the wikipedia entry as painting him as a “suspected assassin.” But I suppose if the article had been about me, I’d have fallen prey to a bit of hyperbole as well.

In an article on C-net, there are hints that Wales might be up to something new with the Wikipedia.

Wales said the Seigenthaler article not only escaped the notice of this corps of watchdogs, but it also became a kind of needle in a haystack: The page remained unchanged for so long because it wasn’t linked to from any other Wikipedia articles, depriving it of traffic that might have led to closer scrutiny.

Also, Wales said, the entry was unusual in that it was posted by an anonymous user–most new articles are published by registered members, who are more likely to be held responsible for what they write.

Thus, to avoid future problems, Wales plans to bar anonymous users from creating new articles; only registered members will be able to do so. That change will go into effect Monday, he said, adding that anonymous users will still be able to edit existing entries.

That’s less of a problem, Wales suggested, because changes are frequently vetted by members who keep watch lists of articles they want to ensure remain accurate–perhaps even articles they’ve written themselves.

The change is one of the first that would specifically limit what anonymous users can do on Wikipedia. And some may see that as a significant step for a service that’s traditionally prided itself on letting anyone participate. But Wales said the move is not a major one because, as mentioned, most new articles are already written by registered Wikipedia members, and most anonymous users’ actions are edits to published entries.

So we’re moving away from anonymity, and towards…what? There is no vetting process for memberships at Wikipedia, and not even any fact-checking about who holds an account. It’s slightly better than anonymity, but not much.

The other blowup at wikipedia came when Adam Curry was discovered anonymously editing the entry on Podcasting to erase mention of other people’s involvement, and to boost his own contributions a bit. Again, from C-net:

Curry deleted references to work presented by Technorati principal engineer Kevin Marks at the 2003 BloggerCon at Harvard University. But from Curry’s perspective, conflict of interest had nothing to do with it; he simply believed the references were inaccurate.

So what does all this mean? I think that Dave Winer said it best on his blog:

Every fact in there must be considered partisan, written by someone with a confict of interest. Further, we need to determine what authority means in the age of Internet scholarship.

We do, indeed, need to determine what authority means in the age of Internet Scholarship. And as I’ve said again, and again, and again…it doesn’t mean anything. Authority, as a whole, is a very poor, lazy, sloppy way of determining the value of information. I need to get off my ass and get this paper on authority/coherence of information sources done.

Categories
Library Issues

TheFacebook

Is anyone out there in library land leveraging Facebook for reference/instruction interactions?

Just curious…I’m trying, here at UTC, but have as yet had no students take advantage of it. I’ve created a Lupton Library group, and mentioned it in all my of classes over the last month or so, to try and get the word out. Given that it’s enormously popular, I had hopes that students might feel comfortable sending me messages via it, rather than email. I’m not giving up yet, but a month with nothing doesn’t exactly scream success to me. Fred, you’re the expert…have you seen anyone using it in this way?

If you’re on, feel free to look me up and friend me.

Categories
Sewanee

Sewanee in the news

Two stories that mention Sewanee, both in the New York press, and both in the same week?

WTF?

In any case, they are both great reads. The first is a scathing look at academic plagiarism from the New York Press, and the second is a New York Times story (first born child required, or you could bugmenot) revolving around the culture and traditions among southern universities. The New York Times article reminded me a great deal of this blog entry, and the accompanying discussion of the Sewanee Mace, that I thought I had mentioned previously. I also stumbled across this collection of stories/photos of the Mace, which is a subsection of the Sewanee Online History Museum. Yes, you heard me right…the Sewanee Online History Museum. (Aside: Boy, could they use some web design. Having a menu at the bottom of the page? WTF?) Here’s a great picture of the Mace from the NYT site:

Sewanee Mace

Categories
Library Issues

Why no coders?

Just a quick note that in trying desperately to keep up with the ton of phenomenal writing going on in the biblioblogosphere, I somehow missed this post by Meredith that sums up some of the thoughts I’ve had about library systems departments.

I’ve wondered this myself…having gotten my degree in a department that emphasized both LS and IS, and had a significant number of opportunities to learn code, why more people with those skills aren’t recruited.

The sad fact of the matter is that it’s largely salary based. If you know PHP/MySQL/Java/AJAX stuff these days, you can make much, much, much more than any library is going to be able to offer you. I dabble in PHP/MySQL stuff, and I’m certain it was a large part of my being hired in my current position, even though I don’t directly deal with it on a day-to-day basis. But I also know that if I wanted to market myself in that way, my stock would jump quite a bit. I’m happy being a librarian, but it’s hard for a new programmer to look at $30K vs $80K and choose the $30K.

With that said…if I were a library director, I’d be scrambling like crazy for funds to hire a full time programmer. The amount of benefit there would so far outweigh the salary needs that I can’t even describe it.

EDIT: Turns out Jenny said a little something about this the other day as well.

Categories
Digital Culture Media Music

Second verse, same as the first…

A phenomenal new service launched yesterday: Mp3Tunes.com…unfortunately, I’m not quite sure how long it will stick around. Seems a bit…like mp3.com, and the lawsuit that effectively bankrupted them.

* YOUR ENTIRE MUSIC COLLECTION ONLINE
o All functions of the MP3tunes Locker work inside iTunes!
o You can store your entire music collection online with a Premium MP3tunes Locker ? unlimited storage!
o Sync your entire collection to any of your computers or devices with a Premium MP3tunes Locker
o Play your music inside iTunes or anywhere you have an Internet connection with a Basic or Premium MP3tunes Locker
o Back-up your playlists and create new ones online with a Premium MP3tunes Locker
o Webload and Sideload free music on the net directly into your Basic or Premium MP3tunes Locker
o The MP3tunes Oboe Software Suite required for backing up, syncing and playing your music in iTunes free and compatible with Windows, Mac & Linux.
o The MP3tunes Locker works with any web browser on Microsoft Windows, Apple or Linux computers.
o MP3, MP4, M4A, M4P, AAC, WMA, OGG, AIF, AIFF and MIDI files are compatible with a MP3tunes Locker

It’s an AMAZING service, though. I’d pay $40 a year just to ensure a safe backup of my music (currently over 100 gigs or so…). The streaming to any computer is just gravy. I’m tempted to try it out, and just pray when the inevitable lawsuits occur.

Categories
Library Issues

Scholarly publication, take 7847

This is a response that I sent out on LITA-l, but felt needed archiving here on the blog.

Originally written by Anita S. Coleman on Wed, 30 Nov 2005 on Lita-l:

The point is that blogs simply and plainly ARE NOT scholarly communications. They may be communication pieces, tools, etc. written or produced by scholars, but they are not scholarly communications. Just as non-peer-reviewed articles in trade magazines, newsletters, popular and general interest periodicals are not part of the body of literature regarded as scholarly articles, and are not weighted for tenure and promotion as do the “traditional” scholarly peer-reviewed literature.

“Simply and plainly”? They may not be of a form traditionally considered scholarly…does this mean they are intrinsically not so? Or that they could not become such?

Sitting aside the traditional view of scholarly information sources (see my views on that here), is there a better method of review than open publication and comment? Can anyone intelligently argue that allowing anyone to comment on your paper is worse than the current “insider only” method of scholarly publication?

There’s a lot of baggage tied up in academia’s love affair with the vetting of information sources…issues of authority, issues of access, issues of relevance…but with the current moving us towards individual or university self-archiving and the web taking publishing out of the hands of the few and into the hands of the many, we’re overdue for a shift in the academic publishing paradigm. So yes, I have to say…I think that blogging SHOULD be taken into account for issues of tenure and promotion. I think that any production of knowledge is a valuable one.