Here’s a post I thought I would never write:
I believe that Jack Stephens has it right in this post regarding a potential ALA Blogging Round Table.
Oopsie corrected!
Not only Right, which Stephens always is, but correct.
I thought I would never write it since Stephens has a nasty habit of attacking me at various times, in some cases because he’s somehow convinced that I’m anti-copyright. He doesn’t allow comments at akk, which makes things even more interesting. (I very briefly blacklisted him from commenting here, but lifted that blacklist after thinking it over.)
But in this case, I believe that blogging isn’t an equivalent library interest to, say, government documents or maps & geography or social responsibilities (not that I’m all that fond of SRRT…) or intellectual freedom or…
I could be wrong, of course. That’s a given.
As to his other post, in which he faults KGS for her most recent post on the potential Round Table…well, I’m not biting. KGS does link to the post in question–and that post certainly names the person KGS is disagreeing with. (That person is me, not Jack Stephens.) Doesn’t mean I think KGS is right; I don’t. Does mean I don’t see that she’s engaging in a blindside attack–in this case.
A couple of minor points relating to the KGS and Michael Golrick posts directly and indirectly cited here:
- LITA’s Fuzzy Match Interest Group, now disbanded, was not created to put on skits. It was created as a forum for research papers and other reports in the vein of the Journal of Irreproducible Results and ASIST’s SIG CON.
Some truly remarkable papers were presented during the time the IG existed, including papers from some of the most prominent names in the field.The skits at LITA National Conferences were a special activity, involving the talents of some particularly creative Fuzzy Match members and the…um…singing and thespian talents of the rest of them/us. - Michael: A teeny-tiny clarification that will only matter to ALA process mavens: I’m not a Past President of LITA, I’m a Former President. I was Past President, the year after I was President. That seems like it was a long time ago, maybe because it was. LITA, unusually, has conference ribbons for its Former Presidents, a nice touch.
Thank you, Walt, for the very nice post. I would have sent a trackback rather than leave a comment, but I recall you said that you don’t like trackbacks.
I remember criticizing you for your caustic reference to the “tiresome ‘piracy’ argument,” and for your strange attempt to differentiate “casual file sharing” from “real” piracy. I did not and do not think that you are “anti-copyright.”
With regard to Karen Schneider’s post, I did not understand you to be arguing that a blogging RT would conflict with LITA under the ALA Bylaws (the substance of her comment), where that was my main point in quoting and highlighting the passage. That is, I believe the point she is challenging was clearly mine, not yours. Not so important.
I did send a trackback to Karen Schneider’s blog for my response, but for some reason it hasn’t appeared yet.
It’s not so much that I don’t like trackbacks as that this WP configuration doesn’t show them.