LISNews: Librarian News

Here\'s the official abstract from this interesting article in the new First Monday:

By examining the psychodynamic effects on human cognition of the adoption of the technology of writing we
can logically assess and contextualize the potential effect of the massification of networked information
systems on our day-to-day thought processes. The identification of congruent, parallel and differential
affect between writing and network technologies demands that their development be considered above and
beyond the dictates and imperatives of consumer capitalism, it demands that the Internet be thought of in
terms of public infrastructure rather than saleable capital.

The article is
The Network Society: A Shift in Cognitive Ecologies? by Mathew Wall-Smith

Information Highways has an Intersting Piece by Susanne Hasulo who says most people tend to equate information literacy with the mastery of various technologies to access and retrieve information, with less thought to how to evaluate and apply that information. She asks can knowledge workers agree on what information literacy really means, and more importantly, can these crucial skills be learned?

\"We\'re in an era where every client that phones me says \'How can I take more costs out of my business?\' Stop treating everything you do heroically and start treating your process and your [employees\'] knowledge as an asset available for use. Because the more we look at it, the more we realize that the real savings comes from exactly that, from turning data into knowledge.\"

The theory behind the Free Library is that, certainly in the long run, it benefits an author to have a certain number of free or cheap titles of theirs readily available to the public. By far the main enemy any author faces, except a handful of ones who are famous to the public at large, is simply obscurity. Even well-known SF authors are only read by a small percentage of the potential SF audience. Most readers, even ones who have heard of the author, simply pass them up.
Baen Free Library is an area that Baen Books is now making available — for free — a number of its titles in electronic format.
The theory is a very interesting read.

From the new issue of First Monday, with thanks to Library Juice:

As technologies to digitize primary source content mature and become better understood, more widely accessible, and more efficient, the volume of available digital content increases and issues of integration and aggregation become more important. Today\'s digitization project managers must give high priority to factors such as reusability, persistence, interoperability, verification, and documentation when planning their projects. Digitization project funding agencies, like the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), must give substantial weight to these same factors when assessing programs and evaluating project proposals. A Digital Library Forum convened by the IMLS and working in collaboration with participants from the NSF\'s National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library program has released a Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections to serve as a resource for practitioners and funding agencies . . .

More.