Daily Thoughts 04/20/2012

Drawing of the Reading Room, the People's Palace, Mile End Road, London. Illustration from the Century Magazine, December 1890, p. 175.  This is a link to a kind of interesting article on the institution.  http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/london/125.html

Daily Thoughts 04/20/2012

I read some more of Too Big To Know on the way to work this morning.  David Weinberger is writing about crowdsourcing which I find rather interesting.  For example, Kickstarter http://www.kickstarter.com/  is a crowdsourced way to fund creative projects.  Another crowdsourced idea is the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing which runs different programs from a screensaver on home computers.  It is a way to use excess computing power while people are not using their computers.  The project originally started as SETI@HOME a screensaver which would help the process of searching for alien signals.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing

This morning, I updated the Facebook and Twitter accounts for the library.  We are having Ellen Datlow who is an editor run a panel with three authors, John Langan, Gregory Frost, and Laird Barron on May 8, 2012 from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. on the anthology Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allen Poe
http://www.mountvernonpubliclibrary.org/Book-Reading

Thinking ahead to May, there is also the Book and Bake Sale by The Friends of the Library on May 4 and May 5.  It is always nice to get some coffee, buy a few books, and have a baked treats.

It reminds me that I checked the gift books this morning and picked out a few titles to add to our collection.  I also checked the displays to see that they were in order.  I am working with Title Tales to pick out books which we plan on ordering.

I also spent some time thinking about programming today.

I found one of those odd events that is a little puzzling.  The title is The Future: What Does It Mean?  It is sponsored by Metro and ASIS.  I am a member of My Metro.  It should be quite interesting.  It is an open discussion about the future of information with a mixture of information professionals and science fiction authors.  http://www.facebook.com/events/309056385827702/

I read some more of Too Big to Know on the subway going home.  I learned about how complex data is now being shared in specialized networks of experts.  Some of the data is too knowledge intensive to fit in standard texts and is stored in computers.  On an outside thought, I have noticed two recent startups in New York focused on expert communities, the first is http://www.petridish.org which is a community focused on funding interesting scientist projects,  and the second is http://www.quirky.com which is a social community focused on product development.  This is a bit different than what David Weinberger is writing about, but there is connection because of the focus on specialized data.