Both talks went well today. One was in the morning to an undergraduate information science class. High point: mentioning something about gopher sites and realizing that the students in the class were 7 years old when gopher was popular. The afternoon talk was larger, maybe 50 people, and may be available in streaming video one of these days. You can read all the notes from my talk here.
Author: jessamyn
open source ILS project releases pre-alpha demo
The open-ILS blog has announced a release of their open source integrated library system demo available, if I am not mistaken, as a Firefox plugin/extension.
out of town
I’m out of town until Tuesday. Anyone in the Raleigh/Durham area feel free to come to my talk Monday at 2 pm at UNC, details here.
I’ll say it again: folksonomy
Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess. An impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow.
It’s a deep philosophical issue: Ontology is a controversial subject. The idea that it’s possible to cleave nature at the joints is controversial. Yes, there are countries, Uzbekistan is a country, but ask a physicist or a biologist and the categories are very fraught.
ALA and porn, other people’s opinions
I don’t spend a lot of time reading what the American Family Association says about ALA and pornography, but from time to time I check in. You never know when someone will use one of these pages as a “to do” list and show up at your library. So, without further commentary – except to note that “pray” appears before “reaserch” on the AFA’s list of steps — please see Plan2Succeed’s Library Porn Removal page and The American Family Association’s Library Internet Filtering page