It is wonderful to meet librarians from all over the world. It is also quite expensive.
But our new social technologies change the economy of meetings. We can open up our physical meetings to virtual participants - and we can continue our conversations through the web - after the bodies return home.
Therefore I was happy to stumble across a blog post by my good colleague Niels Damgaard (picture) in the IFLA SL Newsletter.
The web is entering a new phase.
Production is moving from goods to texts.
Distributing music - from Edison to iPod
Industrial economies are material: they process and combine natural resources (matter) into standardized, mass produced goods. Knowledge economies deal in symbols: they process and combine textual resources into new, mass produced texts.
Three things are required in order to understand the new knowledge society.
The role of high technology. The role of human relationships. And a set of adequate concepts.
Negroponte with OLPC prototype.
The long civil war in Sudan destroyed much of the educational infrastructure in the South.
After the peace agreement between North and South in 2005, reconstruction began. Norway is involved in a program to develop university education in the South. Three of the participants in the LATINA course, from the Upper Nile University, come from this program.
The LATINA summer course uses the blog system WordPress as a shared learning platform.
In addition we asked all participants to create their own blogs at the start of the course. Such course blogs can be used for many different purposes. One of them is focused reflexion. Yesterday we gave the class the following task:
Today we are doing digital stories at LATINA: the concept, discussion, tools and production.
I note that the ALA conference in Anaheim also deals with digital storytelling:
Everyone has a story.
Being able to turn your story to something that can be shared with others enhances self worth and benefits the community overall. Their story lives on after they are gone. As libraries, we have the training and in some ways, duty to document and archive society’s culture and history.
We have the ability to share this knowledge with others that are even outside of our communities through technology.
Summer schools are surprisingly popular - all over Europe
Now I look forward to the new summer school at Oslo University College. The school itself, and the LATINA course, starts on Monday, June 23. We expect about fifteen participants, from China, Croatia, Ethiopia, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, and Russia and Sudan.
The evening, which is celebrated by open air parties and bonfires and, is called Sankthansaften (Jonsok, St. John’s Eve).
Institutional repositories don’t work as long as they depend on voluntary participation by scholars.
Cory Doctorow at Harvard.
Harvard will now make IR deposit the default rather than the optional choice. Caveat lector has a very interesting, close-to-the-jugular analysis of Harvard’s new policy- which the big academic journals will hate.
The Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus was hired by the Greek cities of South Italy to help them in their resistance to the expanding Romans. After a bloody battle - which he won, he exlaimed: One more victory like this - and I am finished.
Resources
This friendly project from University of Rochester uses the blog eXtensible Caralogue to share information, experiences and creative thinking:
River Campus Libraries is studying how best to develop an open-source online system … eXtensible Catalog (XC) … to allow future library users at any level of proficiency to get more out of academic library collections. … The first phase … will produce a plan that will include:
The project will share its information goods with the rest of the world (”outreach”)l. They already provide lists of literature on various topics - which are valuable because selected with current needs in mind (”bibliographies-in-context”).
Personally, I am particularly interested in their user studies comments - which look eminently sensible. Nice work!
Stuart Weibel has a most interesting blog post on Google’s book digitalization project:
Source: Stuart Weibel. Cows and the Colossus
