Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large 7:9 (August 2007) is now available for downloading.
It’s an odd issue: Four somewhat overlapping Perspectives and an Offtopic Perspective.
The 26-page issue (PDF as usual, but each Perspective is available as an html separate from the homepage) includes:
- Perspective: On the Literature
- Perspective: On Authority, Worth and Linkbaiting
- Perspective: On Disagreement and Discussion
- Perspective: On Ethics and Transparency
- Offtopic Perspective: 50-Movie Classic Musicals, Part 2 – including Rhythm and Blues Review, Till the Clouds Roll By, All-American Co-Ed, Hi-De-Ho (an hour of Cab Calloway: how can you go wrong?), Royal Wedding…and a whole bunch more.
I believe that gray literature—blogs, this ejournal, a few similar publications and some lists—represents the most compelling and worthwhile literature in the library field today…
Yes, it’s the dreaded Britannica Blog essay. Yes, I’m late to the game. No, this is not primarily about Michael Gorman, although his blogging (his blogging!) plays a crucial role in the discussion. There will be no fisking here, tempting though it might be—either of Gorman’s posts or of some over-the-top responses…
Are librarians willing to disagree with one another?
What a silly question. Of course we are (I’m counting myself as a librarian for this discussion). Consider some disagreements I’ve chronicled and taken part in here and in my blog, just for starters….
How much do you need to know about who I am and how I deal with issues, people and organizations that might relate to my writing? What do you need to know about my ethical standards? How much disclosure assures adequate transparency?
Not included in this issue: Perspective: On Clever Names for Perspectives. And the Bibs & Blather has appeared instead as an absurdly long post at Walt at Random.
This is part of the comment on this issue of C&I that will be in next week’s “Some Things Read…” post, but I didn’t want to make you wait a week to see it:
I think you did a fine job, Walt. As I said elsewhere (probably as a comment on your blog), I was/am interested in any direction in which you took the topic and continued the conversation. Thank you!
Thanks Mark. This was, as should be obvious, an odd issue to put together. Next month (I think!), maybe more typical…and if timing works out right, maybe a new book to introduce. Or maybe not. (Not the L2 book: That one’s not happening.)
Minor nitpick: I haven’t read the entirety of Gorman’s oeuvre, and in the blog post of mine you cite, I thought I’d made that pretty clear.
Aside from that, excellent issue.
Sorry if I overinterpreted what I read in your blog. I ignored the “I’ve ever seen” qualifier…no reason to believe you’ve read Future Libraries, is there? And thanks.
Interesting as always, Walt. One Google note:
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001232.html
Minor dissent about some other remarks:
“There is no correlation between Web 2.0 (whatever that means) and ignorance or rejection of authority.”
I disagree – I think there’s a very deep correlation. “Web 2.0” is about data-mining and digital-sharecropping. Those CORRELATE (not cause, but correlate) with the YOU-YES-YOU marketing relying on ignorance or rejection of authority.
“There is good reason to believe that increased access to means of distribution will reduce ignorance in the long run.”
Maybe. But there’s also problem with the opposite. The deep issue is that ignorance sells better, and there’s a lot of money (see above) in hyping it.
Thanks (and I commented on your post, briefly). So maybe I should have said “no clear causal relationship”–of course, the ignorance being cited was of the sort that pretty clearly predates Web 2.0 altogether.