librarian.net » hughmcguire http://www.librarian.net putting the rarin back in librarian since 1999 Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:37:42 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 what are you for? http://www.librarian.net/stax/2238/what-are-you-for/ http://www.librarian.net/stax/2238/what-are-you-for/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 03:15:06 +0000 jessamyn http://www.librarian.net/stax/2238/what-are-you-for/ My pal Hugh McGuire — you probably know him from Librivox, he swears on his blog too — wrote a post with some words to the wise: Defining What You Are For (just like porn). He explains how one of the reasons porn is so darned profitable is “[b]ecause the porn biz understands exactly what it is for” and then wonders if other institutions like newspapers and libraries really understand what they are for. It’s not primarily a post about libraries, but since Hugh is the president of the Board of Directors of the Atwater Library (a library with a drupal website and an apartment inside it, those who know me know that I hyperventilate as I type this) this is a topic near and dear to him.
But the real value a newspaper performs is not giving me good articles, it’s putting it all together. The mere provision of information is worthless now, because anyone can do it (even me).

This is why blogs – at least in the techno-intelligencia – win. Blogs are excellent selectors of information, while newspapers are pretty clunky at it – because for the past 300 years they existed in an ecosystem where information was scarce. Now information (and access to it) is abundant. So a site like BoingBoing becomes one of the most popular on the net: their craft is not providing information, it’s selecting it. And they’re good at it.

]]> http://www.librarian.net/stax/2238/what-are-you-for/feed/ 13 librivox serendipity http://www.librarian.net/stax/1523/librivox-serendipity/ http://www.librarian.net/stax/1523/librivox-serendipity/#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2005 15:17:25 +0000 jessamyn http://www.librarian.net/stax/1523 A few people had sent me a link to LibriVox before I left on the trip and it was in the queue to look at when I got back. I ran into Hugh McGuire at the Open Content Alliance Open Library Launch (his blog notes) and was happy to be able to say “Hey your link is in my inbox” and then get to talk to the man himself about the work that he does with group of dedicated volunteers. With a tagline like “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain” you’ve got to believe they have big plans. The specific project involves volunteers recording chapters of books and making the audio files available. The broader vision is to have “all books in the public domain to be available, for free, in audio format, on the internet.” You can have a copy of Call of the Wild to use however you want and whenever you want, thanks to LibriVox and the four volunteers who read and recorded the chapters. What are you waiting for, go volunteer to read something! Hugh is also on the board of Canda’s oldest lending library in case you were skeptical about his librarian cred.

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