Week One Readings

I feel like I should have a lot more to say about the OCLC 2004 report, but I work in an academic library where the focus is on information literacy; in particular, teaching historically underserved and disadvantaged populations how to conduct small-scale research and adjudicate between competing sources of information, so I feel like I’m living at least parts of this report. Often, this means steering library patrons towards Encyclopedia Britannica rather than Wikipedia or Google, even if Wikipedia is accurate.
In addition, this means both library staff and the library budget focus on electronic resources rather than books, and based on the OCLC report and Vaughan’s article, my library is not alone. Even though Vaughan’s article on UNLV’s Lied Library is published in Library Hi Tech, there is not one mention of books, journals, or anything else that involves ink on plant matter.

Random thoughts
Re: the Vaughan article: Man, it must be nice to have all that state/institutional money and support.

Lynch (pdf) asks an awful lot of libraries and library staff in his article, without much of a roadmap. I realize it’s a jumping off point, a way to start the discussion, but it seems like an immense task, and he doesn’t discuss how or where to start. Also, while Lynch doesn’t mention the digital divide – race/class based information literacy and information technology inequalities – it seems based on his article that it will only get wider. It wasn’t an optimistic read. At least we know what we’re up against, I guess.

In Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, the author posits that the rise of print capitalism (novels and newspapers get special mention) helped unite nations, creating groups of people who could picture each other doing similar things every day in a common vernacular language. I wonder what the effect of blogs, wikis, Twitter feeds… will have on our ability to imagine each other performing similar daily tasks, not only within borders, but globally (provided it is done in English, which I’ll probably discuss later in the semester).