Blog #7: Happy Halloween

Reactions on “ Scholars perspective: Impact of digitized collections on learning and teaching”

I always love when the conversation or one’s perception lands on the ideal popping concept of social power and its influences. In the reading of David Harrington Watt, he brings up a few quotes from historians/ teachers of what their hopes are for their students. One of the quotes being “I want them to understand the way social power influences which sorts of primary sources et preserved and digitized and which do not”.

 I’ll preface my interest with this quote with the fact I have been reading a lot of news recently, so my added interest could be stemming from that. But conspiracy theories aside, the more we read the more we can understand how the realm of academia works. Then apply that to how media and “journalism” might spin the research for only purpose is to cast doubt on mostly agree upon concepts in a given field. In our class we practice finding things (papers, books, journals...etc) that are hard to find if you don’t know how to correctly search. I bring this up because even if the idea that a primary source could be tossed out because it has evidence or conclusions that don’t jell with whatever entity has influence on it’s archiving. It would be far easier to archive it and have it so much limited access that that it might as well be lost. We are already dealing with enough corporate funded studies that interpret their findings with a heavy degree of bias. Regardless of that mess of troubling horrors, the library in terms of material in relation to monetary investment should be enough of a nightmare to satisfy this Halloween season.

The barriers of education are already so tied with a monetary investment that to account for size and access that a school’s library verse another school you didn’t get accepted to, is annoyingly frustrating. While interlibrary loan is a beautiful thing, you can easily see how $9 million dollars to a library is very different from $34 million. All of this only harks on our need to make a virtual realm in which was can access and research from.   

Reactions on “Review of imslp.org from Notes”

Aw yes, Imslp, the lesson saver of “oops I forgot my music at home” website of the ages. A review of imslp was quite nice to read, for it brought up a few interface issues I came across during the early years I used imslp. While nowadays I barely use the imslp website when search. I found it was easier to add “imslp” to any google search and it would give me the direct link I needed. Personally my favorite part of imslp is looking at a composers’ works. Always nice to see what types of ensembles a composer leaned to.  I’m happy to know that IMSLP should continue to grow as the community continues to archive.

Reactions on “ Never Trust a corporation to do a library’s job”

Why get the nostalgic gamer mind going. I’m pretty sure I sunk an extra few hours in to looking up these games like Spacewar and Pitfall, which then lead to just searching for other old school games and playing them. Regardless of the lovely amount of procrastination that happened, it’s sad to hear google’s struggle with the need for money and less lawsuits.  But they are right, having access to history like this is very magical, even more so when you add what was cutting edge and exciting in the gaming community to be available years later at your finger tips. Lastly, Andy Baio final point is sadly very true. “We can’t expect for-prot corprations to care about the past…”, Baio point shouldn’t be grim, but should highlight the needs for collaboration.

Reactions on “ Google’s slow fade with librarians”

            I really enjoyed this break-up letter. I wish we had more information on why. But if I were to guess, and not take the time to full google this question (awe the irony) then I would look into Google’s lawsuits during the year before the drop in communication. At the same time, I think it’s best that libraries aren’t so tied to a corporation that is today’s google or ABC’s..whatever they call themselves now. While I understand and appreciate what they do. I still value how nice our library is in comparison to other college libraries I’ve seen. 

Reactions on “ The cobweb: Can the internet be archived?”

Too much data, if only we had Data to go through this much data, then maybe we could hold onto some of this data that Data got from this data. Besides my love of Star Trek, the issue we face with The Wayback Machine, is where science fiction meets reality. Overall I find this fascinating when put in the context of comparing the library of congress to be an inch of information in this mass array of computers. If there were ever a need for a truly useful AI, this would be the time. Mind you, with the mass of information that that AI would have to deal with, a Skynet type of uprising would also be justified. Hopefully the mass of cat related videos and articles might sway that result. But it seems like every day the issue of trying to archive this information becomes more daunting. Also sidenote, pop ads seem to be so evil that they time travel in that information web. I don’t think we will ever be able to escape the bots that spam these ads everywhere.