Daily Thoughts 4/21/2009

Original caption states: "Located on the Ground Floor Corridor, the White House Library features a collection of selected works to represent of a full spectrum of American thought and tradition for the use of the President, his family, and his staff."

Daily Thoughts 4/21/2009

Today was another incredibly busy day. I reviewed a new librarians orders with them before they were sent in. There were a few orders for books related to libraries. I am looking forward to getting Pop Goes the Library: Using Pop Culture to Connect with Your Whole Community by Sophie Brookover and Elizabeth Burns.

I also went over a new arrangement for our technical service area with one of my colleagues, and spent some time sorting through books which came in separating reference books and books that needed to be processed immediately.

I am planning on ordering many of the plays and musicals which are currently running on Broadway as well as several books which people have requested.

On the way home, I finished reading Here Comes Everybody, The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky. There are a lot of interesting ideas throughout this book. For example, on Sourceforge, a site for free open source software, only 5% of the open source software accounts for most of the traffic. Open source allows for lots of experimentation and failure, people are free to create the software and fail at it with little consequence. The software that succeeds becomes very successful because people very quickly add to the successes.

Web Bits

I made it into The Best of the Web blog directory. This is not so easy to do. It is a human edited directory of web sites that is very particular about who they will add. http://blogs.botw.org/Arts/Literature/

Daily Thoughts 4/20/2009

1977 Stamp United States 4 Cents.

Daily Thoughts 4/20/2009

I decided to create a Linked In page. Linked In is a professional social network. It is mainly focused on making contacts for business and networking. I had a page before, but it was never fully filled in. I only have a few contacts right now. This will change rapidly, I think.

Today has been another long day. I have been pulling oversize books from the regular collection to be put in the oversize collection. This is making the shelves a bit more presentable and freeing up some space. Tomorrow, I will start shifting some of the older books in the 700s (art and music) section to the storage area.

I also went over ordering with one of our new librarians. We are ordering job books for the city; building inspector, fireman, account clerk, and payroll clerk. Civil service functions which keep the city running.

We are also reorganizing the cage for technical processing where the new books come in. The shelves are going to get new labels by dewey number or category, and the inside is going to be rearranged. Our first priority is getting all of the reference books done, then processing the books with current 2009 dates on them.

Last Saturday, a carpenter came to inspect the area where our new slat walls are going up for displaying the new books. It should be a big improvement in the way our library looks.

I read some more of Here comes Everybody. As I read and observe more about the idea of software based platforms that become organizations, I am recognizing some additional characteristics of these companies. They are global in scope, they can reach anywhere an internet connection exists, they are multilingual because either they will use translation programs or hire people or recruit volunteers to translate the platform, and they can rapidly gather people together over seemingly trivial activities.

Daily Thoughts 4/19/2009

Ancient greek man with wax tablet Painting by ancient greek painter Douris (about 500 BC) . The image almost looks like a laptop computer.

Daily Thoughts 4/19/2009

I am reading the CREW Manual from Texas State University. They have an interesting acronym for weeding or as some people call it deselection.

M = Misleading (and/or factually inaccurate)

U = Ugly (worn and beyond mending or rebinding)

S = Superseded (by a truly new edition or by a much better book on
the subject)

T = Trivial (of no discernible literary or scientific merit; usually of
ephemeral interest at some time in the past)

I = Irrelevant to the needs and interests of your community

E = The material or information may be obtained expeditiously
Elsewhere through interlibrary loan, reciprocal borrowing, or in
electronic format.

Mustie

There were also a few interesting selection lists in the online manual as well.

Video Round Table’s Notable Videos list at
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/rts/vrt/initiatives/notablevideos/index.cfm

“Top Fifty
Gaming Core Collection Titles” from Young Adult Library Services online at
http://wikis.ala.org/yalsa/index.php/Gaming_Lists_&_Activities#

I started reading Here Comes Everybody The Power of Organizing Without Organizing by Clay Shirky. The book started out rather slow, but has become interesting in the second chapter. It is about how the new communication tools make it possible to very quickly organize around a common interest for very little cost with minimal needs for hierarchical management.

This is a fragment of a sentence from P.107 of Here Comes Everybody, "The more an institution relies on information as its core product, the greater and more complete the change will be."

The book reminds of the earlier book on Google and Wikipedia which I have read. There seems to be a common thread running through these organizations. They are platforms for doing a specific task, Google started as a search engine, and Wikipedia started as a free encyclopedia. They both are becoming much more by harnessing a new set of social and organizational philosophies.

There seems to be an emerging pattern in the new social platforms; The are built initially by a very small group of people, they can scale very quickly, they require some kind of voluntary participation, there is usually a common interest attached to each platform (books, photography, fashion, etc.), all rely on continuous incremental improvement, all have easy to follow measurements, there is a strong customer service ethic, the technology is easy to use, they rely on the virtual world (not the physical world of atoms), and they can easily move into new ventures. You can say this of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Flickr, and many other successful social network platforms.

All I can say for libraries is that not far down the road, we have to be prepared to change rapidly. Google has previously indicated with books if it is in a library, it is worth scanning. The public domain is going to become a giant free platform available through dozens of different channels, flickr, Wikipedia, Google, Project Gutenberg and other locations. This platform is going to expand rapidly as people add to it forming novel ways of handling information. Wikipedia is already morphing into Wikibooks, Wikimedia, and other things. The technology comes first, then a period of disruption, and finally a new reality. I am not sure what it will be, but it will be a lot different than todays libraries, publishing and bookstores.