library+instruction+technology

and so is this post. I have had a copy of David Weinberger's new book, Everything is miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder, checked out from my local public library for six weeks. I finally made myself finish it this week. I know that David has something important to say. However, I could hardly get past the use of the card catalog and Dewey as examples of the second order of order that we must overcome in the age of the third order of order to get through the book.

Yeah, I know his point is that our old school ways of applying control over the ones and zeros zipping around on the series of tubes is in the best interest of no one. I agree that users should be able to tag their content and share their knowledge online. I am a user of Flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia, and many other digital disorder tools. I do my best to educate our students and faculty about these tools. However, I wish David would have thrown us a bone and commented somewhere in the book that librarians are finally getting on board. Most librarians will agree that our roles have evolved tremendously over the past few years. I know many are still focused on metadata, but that is a necessary evil when you are standing with one foot in the digital world and one foot in the print world. I would hazard to say that a fair number of academic librarians have embraced the new third order of order, okay maybe not everyone . 

David writes, "There's something comforting about the sight of cards spooning in a library card catalog. A world of ideas and knowledge, more than we could ever absorb, is waiting for us, carefully indexed in those neat rows of drawers. And yet the second order masks a complexity that the third order confronts head-on: We don't really know what a book is." (118-119) He continues, "card catalogs have value because of what they leave out. Melvil Dewey himself designed the current standard card in 1877…Because it's not very large, catalogers have to make tough decisions about what information to include." (119) David includes yet another reference to the card catalog used by Brown and Duguid in the Social Life of Information, "you can sometimes tell if a card has been heavily consulted by how dog-eared it is." (119)

Seriously, when was the last time you used a card catalog?  For me it was 1988 and it was my local public library in BFE northwest Ohio.  I would have been much happier to see David pick on the card catalog's progeny, the OPAC. Unfortunately, the OPAC is missing and the closest mention is a comment about the "OCLC database of books" (122) being much like a card catalog. I am at a loss as to why he didn't use the name WorldCat or even do some research to figure out the name and that a free version of it is on the web where users can be kind of social and share reviews of books. 

I know, I know…I need to move past the whole card catalog issue. I am sure that Michael Gorman had a hard time reading this book too, but it may not have passed the "scholarly enough" test to land on his desk. David has an entire chapter titled Social Knowing, where he argues that Wikipedia is better than Britannica and provides many reasons why he has taken this position. I can not say that I agree with him totally on this point either, but anything that ticks off the media identified library standard-bearer can't be too wrong.

Karen Schneider's excellent review is on the TechSource blog and additional reactions are available on the book's companion web site appropriately titled, Everything is Miscellaneous.

I read the 2007 Newbery Medal winner, The Higher Power of Lucky, this weekend. I think the amount of press surrounding the controversy of a single "adult word" is unfortunate. It is a well written book. I hope parents take the time to read the book and decide if it is appropriate for their children.

The family currently has around 75 copies. Our copy came out of processing last week. Any of the sibs, cousins, or extended family members are more than welcome to borrow it. 

I'm not sure why I'm on a fiction kick, but I have been reading a lot of it since Thanksgiving. If you've got a hankerin' to read about what the future may hold (and not in a shiny v-neck jump suit way), then have I got a Library of Congress Subject Heading for you.  Fire up your favorite library catalog and do a subject search for "Regression (Civilization) — Fiction". While you're doing that, I will share with you a couple of my recent reads. 

The Road by Cormac McCarthy appeared on a number of best book lists for 2006. The story follows the journey of a man and his son as they travel from the north to the south following a nuclear attack on the US. The characters struggle in a world that has been burnt to the ground. Every page has a reference to ash or smoke and the father and son are constantly starving or on the lookout for potable water. However, McCarthy does include some positive imagery on the journey.

Most of the scenes McCarthy created are disturbing (cannibalism or skeletal remains melted into asphalt). I was impressed by his ability to create this vivid images while using so few words.  I wasn't a fan of the ending, but you'll have to read it for yourself and see if you like it.

I discovered The Book of Dave: A Revelation of the Recent Past and the Distant Future by Will Self while browsing the new book shelf at my local public library. I hadn't read Self before, but I remember covers from some of his earlier works. I enjoyed getting lost in Self's future version of the United Kingdom. The book chapters alternate between the future and the recent past, which makes it an interesting read. The chapters set in the future follow a young man who challenges the accepted faith of the country. The chapters set in the recent past show how current events can be radically misunderstood 500 years in the future.

The most challenging aspect of reading Self's book is his use of Arpee, a written form of Cockney English mixed in with a bunch of neologisms. Self includes an Arpee-English glossary. Another challenge is the constant reference to present day landmarks of greater London. I had to rely on Wikipedia and MapQuest to get a mental image of London for parts of the book to make sense.