Tool for Thought, from the NY Times Now, strictly speaking, who is responsible for that initial idea? Was it me or the software? It sounds like a facetious question, but I mean it seriously. Obviously, the computer wasn’t conscious of the idea taking shape, and I supplied the conceptual glue that linked the London sewers to cell metabolism. But I’m not at all confident I would have made the initial.. Read More
TRLN Information Commons Symposium
This should be interesting, in large part because “Information Commons” is one of those terms that means something different to everyone. Sounds to me like what they mean here is as a physical space, like a collaboratory. Very different from Kranich‘s definition, as a conceptual space, basically a sharium. Registration is now open for the TRLN Information Commons Symposium to be held on February 23rd from 8:30-4:30. There is no.. Read More
Access to NIH-funded research postponed
NIH Revises Plan for Quick, Free Access to Study Results, from the WaPo The original proposal called for NIH-funded research to be made publicly available on the web within six months of journal publication. The revised plan ups this to a year. Well at least the proposal wasn’t canned entirely. But I’m amazed that the Director can say with a straight face that the NIH didn’t buckle under industry pressure… Read More
Blind reviewing, not so much
My friend and colleague Scott‘s blog is at least partially concerned with the trials and tribulations of the tenure trail, so it occurs to me that I ought to at least write some about that myself. (You like how I just slipped that in? A lot of alliteration from anxious anchors placed in powerful posts!) I got an email a couple of days ago from one of the top journals.. Read More
ETS information literacy test
According to this story from the NY Times, the Educational Testing Service has developed a standardized test to assess information literacy. According to this story, the test, called the Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment, …can assess students’ ability to make good critical evaluations of the vast amount of material available to them. …is intended to measure students’ ability to manage exercises like sorting e-mail messages or manipulating tables and.. Read More
Wikipedia, tempest in a teapot?
According to this post to the Dig_Ref listserv, there’s been discussion about Wikipedia on the MEDIEV-L listserv. The chain of posts is confusing, but the Dig_Ref post discusses a post made to MEDIEV-L and reposted on NetGold. The most interesting thing to me about the Dig_Ref post is that someone in the thread calls for a boycott of Wikipedia: Certainly if we maintain a strict diet of research and peer.. Read More
Group Cognition
Fred and I were talking the other day about group cognition in the blogosphere – a topic which yes, is starting to interest me. It interests me because I believe that multiple heads are better than one, and that a community can make a more thorough contribution to a topic than any one individual. Fred and I discussed this in our paper Lyceum: A Blogsphere for Library Reference in the.. Read More
Scholarly burstiness
This story comes from NewsScan, a couple of days ago: THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING: THE WEB, OF COURSE The distinguished computer scientist Ramesh Jain says in his blog that his interview with John Gehl for Ubiquity received widespread attention and demonstrated that the importance of paper publications is becoming less significant compared to appearance of ideas or articles in cyberspace: “None of my articles that appeared in well respected journals.. Read More
Study of the impact of the internet on library use
The IMLS has funded the University at Buffalo School of Informatics to conduct a follow-up to a study of the impact of the internet on library use. “At that time, we found that 55 percent of the library users surveyed had Internet access at home,” D’Elia says, “so it was clear that use of the two information sources was not an either-or proposition. Internet users also use the library rather.. Read More
Wikipedia
I experienced a bit of manual trackback yesterday, as I followed a trail of links that started with this post from BoingBoing, to this op-ed by Larry Sanger, and finally to this response by Clay Shirky. Shirky writes about expertise, and Sanger would have us believe that the wikipedia crew thinks about expertise as if it were a bad thing. Not just with a lack of respect, what Sanger refers.. Read More