where does it break down?

Posted on by jessamyn
One of my particular skills that isn’t necessarily library related is being able to analyze systems and see where their weak points are. This can make me a bit of a pest around work [“well what happens if your plan doesn’t work as expected… what is the Plan B?“] but I like to think that the stuff I design is more fault-tolerant than the average stuff. In the reference world, this is the difference between giving someone an answer versus a good answer versus “I don’t know” as an answer. It can be tough to measure the cost of failure in this example, but it’s not as tough in other situations. Susan Feldman talks about the high cost of not finding information.

What we can’t do is measure the increase in creativity and original thinking that might be unleashed if knowledge workers had more time to think and were not frustrated with floundering around online…. Information disasters are caused not by lack of information, but rather by not connecting the right information to the right people at the right time.[lisnews]

revolution?

Posted on by jessamyn
One of the side effects of moving within anarchist circles is that you don’t take the word “revolution” at all lightly. This has made the past decade rough in terms of palatability of advertising. Sometimes when there is particular envelope-pushing, I am at least interested in marketplace revolutions. Reality Publishing claims to be on the forefront of just such a revolution… everyone chips in for the book’s publication, everyone helps write, everyone gets to share in the fruits of the labor. Their first project is about the Dean campaign. Nominally democratic [if badly copy-edited] I don’t know if I would call it a revolution, but anything that challenges current business models in publishing is a good start.

komputer kog, or “I got an MLIS for this?”

Posted on by jessamyn
Speaking of my job, I would like to chime in with a hearty “hear hear!” to this sentiment.

”Research-related issues are within our job parameters,” said [librarian] Nevin Gussack… “Signing people up and making up numbers [to log on], as a professional, is kind of demeaning. I don’t like being a disciplinarian. I like being the purveyor of information. I would rather teach than be a policeman.”