Week 4: Organizing Information
Kevin Kelly “Scan This Book!”
What piqued my interest the most in this article is the section covering the battle between Google and the publishers. In particular, I was just thinking about this peculiarity when Kelly points out “one curious fact, of course, is that publishers only care about these orphans now because Google has shifted the economic equation” (Kelly, 10). In working to reclaim all these ‘orphaned’ books as Kelly calls them, which he says “about 75 percent of all books in the world’s libraries are orphaned” (Kelly, 8), Google would salvage so much information that no other entity seems to be able to afford to do. Surely the benefit to the general public of being able to access materials otherwise left in the dark outweighs some publishers’ petty claim to copyrighted ownership and thus elite privilege to all the monetary profits. Not that I’m advocating trouncing on anyone’s legitimate right to their own creative works, but having an option where Google would pull any book if someone could prove their ownership to these lost souls seems fair to me. I mean, no one wants to put the time, money, and effort into establishing ownership because the outlook is bleak of ever actually finding a concrete record, as Kelly said in his example of waiting some 3 years for a definitive answer from Random House publishing, until you hit them where it hurts most—their wallets. Shouldn’t the benefits of being able to efficiently pursue a massive stockpile of literary materials take precedence over the other option of leaving these orphans to waste away, unread and unaccounted for, because someone won’t be making the money they might be entitled to? With reasonable measures in place to protect legitimate owners, I think Google should be given the green light to take on a task nobody else is ambitious or financially capable of taking on.
Hope A. Olson “The Power to Name: Representation in Library Catalogs”
At one point the author calls Charles Cutter’s philosophy on creating a controlled vocabulary for a library classification system a “misguided democratic ideal” (Olson, 647). I disagree that his desire to create a uniform practice in library cataloging was ever a ‘misguided’ intention, but rather it was a product of his time that leads to a fundamental weakness in appropriately representing all the diversity encompassed by our modern society. Cutter lived during the nineteenth century, that would be before the Civil Rights Movement, Feminism Movement, and all the other events of the twentieth century that have helped to promote racial or gender equality. I looked up Cutter’s lifespan (14 March 1837–6 September 1903), which would mean he lived during the Civil War era; that existence is a world away from where we are today, only roughly 100 years later. For that time period, Cutter’s system would have represent the model library user quite well: male, white, educated, wealthy. That time period has passed though. It is evident to me that the author is a feminist, and so she is pushing the envelope even farther in the interest of equality. I agree the current system is ripe for updating in light of all the new issues and topics that need to be more efficiently and relevantly cross-linked to better serve a modern library user. Change is slow to come especially on the scale of changing the whole Library of Congress’ operating system, but every little push, like the awareness this article provides, helps.
Michael Buckland “Information as Thing”
After reading this article, I find it hard to deny that I am less clear on the definition of ‘information’, even after the round-and-around clarification this article provides. Nevertheless, I can understand, as evidenced by this article, how such a wide variety of things, not only data or facts or texts, allow someone to gain more knowledge on something than they had before, like Buckland lists as examples: “fossils, footprints, and screams of terror” (Buckland, 356). One would have to adhere very rigidly to a narrow definition of information to be able to exclude such examples of obviously informative things from a working definition. Buckland states that “to include objects and events, as well as data and documents, as species of information is to adopt a broader concept than is common” (Buckland, 356). But, how could anyone measure consistently or deny if someone claims to have been informed by something that would not necessarily fall within the accepted scope of a definition of ‘information’? I don’t think you can. If something helps someone by informing them on any aspect, then I think you would call that information, right? It seems trying to assign a specific, concise definition to a term as inclusive, yet broad, as ‘information’ is really a moot point. It cannot be defined in any terms except general, sweeping, vague words. Information, like language, is a living, ever-changing collection; how do you pin a sentence to all things knowledgeable and expect it to function as a reliable definition? Besides in the academic arena, I don’t think you do.
What piqued my interest the most in this article is the section covering the battle between Google and the publishers. In particular, I was just thinking about this peculiarity when Kelly points out “one curious fact, of course, is that publishers only care about these orphans now because Google has shifted the economic equation” (Kelly, 10). In working to reclaim all these ‘orphaned’ books as Kelly calls them, which he says “about 75 percent of all books in the world’s libraries are orphaned” (Kelly, 8), Google would salvage so much information that no other entity seems to be able to afford to do. Surely the benefit to the general public of being able to access materials otherwise left in the dark outweighs some publishers’ petty claim to copyrighted ownership and thus elite privilege to all the monetary profits. Not that I’m advocating trouncing on anyone’s legitimate right to their own creative works, but having an option where Google would pull any book if someone could prove their ownership to these lost souls seems fair to me. I mean, no one wants to put the time, money, and effort into establishing ownership because the outlook is bleak of ever actually finding a concrete record, as Kelly said in his example of waiting some 3 years for a definitive answer from Random House publishing, until you hit them where it hurts most—their wallets. Shouldn’t the benefits of being able to efficiently pursue a massive stockpile of literary materials take precedence over the other option of leaving these orphans to waste away, unread and unaccounted for, because someone won’t be making the money they might be entitled to? With reasonable measures in place to protect legitimate owners, I think Google should be given the green light to take on a task nobody else is ambitious or financially capable of taking on.
Hope A. Olson “The Power to Name: Representation in Library Catalogs”
At one point the author calls Charles Cutter’s philosophy on creating a controlled vocabulary for a library classification system a “misguided democratic ideal” (Olson, 647). I disagree that his desire to create a uniform practice in library cataloging was ever a ‘misguided’ intention, but rather it was a product of his time that leads to a fundamental weakness in appropriately representing all the diversity encompassed by our modern society. Cutter lived during the nineteenth century, that would be before the Civil Rights Movement, Feminism Movement, and all the other events of the twentieth century that have helped to promote racial or gender equality. I looked up Cutter’s lifespan (14 March 1837–6 September 1903), which would mean he lived during the Civil War era; that existence is a world away from where we are today, only roughly 100 years later. For that time period, Cutter’s system would have represent the model library user quite well: male, white, educated, wealthy. That time period has passed though. It is evident to me that the author is a feminist, and so she is pushing the envelope even farther in the interest of equality. I agree the current system is ripe for updating in light of all the new issues and topics that need to be more efficiently and relevantly cross-linked to better serve a modern library user. Change is slow to come especially on the scale of changing the whole Library of Congress’ operating system, but every little push, like the awareness this article provides, helps.
Michael Buckland “Information as Thing”
After reading this article, I find it hard to deny that I am less clear on the definition of ‘information’, even after the round-and-around clarification this article provides. Nevertheless, I can understand, as evidenced by this article, how such a wide variety of things, not only data or facts or texts, allow someone to gain more knowledge on something than they had before, like Buckland lists as examples: “fossils, footprints, and screams of terror” (Buckland, 356). One would have to adhere very rigidly to a narrow definition of information to be able to exclude such examples of obviously informative things from a working definition. Buckland states that “to include objects and events, as well as data and documents, as species of information is to adopt a broader concept than is common” (Buckland, 356). But, how could anyone measure consistently or deny if someone claims to have been informed by something that would not necessarily fall within the accepted scope of a definition of ‘information’? I don’t think you can. If something helps someone by informing them on any aspect, then I think you would call that information, right? It seems trying to assign a specific, concise definition to a term as inclusive, yet broad, as ‘information’ is really a moot point. It cannot be defined in any terms except general, sweeping, vague words. Information, like language, is a living, ever-changing collection; how do you pin a sentence to all things knowledgeable and expect it to function as a reliable definition? Besides in the academic arena, I don’t think you do.
posted by lwinkle at 3:05 PM
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