Here is a list of ways that digital technology seems to change scholarly research methods. The service that librarians have provided has been to offer a map of 'what is there' based on their knowledge of how knowledge is produced, recorded, and stored. So keeping up with such changes is necessary, as we try to understand how the library's intermediary role is changing or, as some people believe, dissolving.

I will be using this blog to track my progress on the Nebraska Library Commission's "23 things" program. This is the first post for that.

Digital Enclosure

Noted in the German archivists' blog Archivalia, a study that takes note of the process of digital enclosure:

The public domain is a rich resource and an essential foundation for the Internet public library. It includes centuries of great literature and is a chronicle of civilization and learning. Before the Internet, there was little argument over what people could do with public domain works. They could do anything. But technology makes it possible to impose new technical and contractual protections that can be applied willy-nilly to in-copyright and public domain works alike. The lawyers and economists call this the “enclosure” of the public domain and it looms large as the future of the Internet public library plays out.

http://www.blc.org/news/BLC_summit_white_paper_9-29-08.pdf

Nonsense words and seven and a half things

New nonsense:

Consporgulation: The application of Inter-forward Programming to maximal efficacy in customer management functionalities.

Thingwally: Thinggummy's nemesis.

Its an easy transition from this nonsense to the "seven and a half habits of highly successful lifelong learners." I have always been puzzled by the American tendency to present ideas about learning as if a therapist on Valium were speaking to an audience on Prozac. I can think of some fairly chaotic and nasty things to say about this, but as criticism of a superficial little slide show, it would be a waste of time. Be a little more frank? --If you don't continue to learn you will be either brain-dead or a serf with a big screen TV? I laughed especially hard at the notion of a written contract, which I suppose is just a nice, well-intended, middlebrow thought experiment. While I was trying to speed-up my trip through the site, the words of an old song that was popular in the early seventies came to me, the one about "all the little houses made of ticky-tacky." And inside them, how about all the little minds, "filled up with nicky-nacky?" Little homilies turn me off.