I attended this conference in 2006, and would have given my left foot to go again this year. The powerpoint presentations from this year’s conference will have to suffice. You may get to them from here — just pick a day for a list of presentations.
ht: Library Instruction, Technology, and Ethics
Popularity: 10% [?]
The good people over at Monergism.com have begun a new service, takeupandread.com. In their own words:
At takeupandread.com our goal is to sift through the thousands of good volumes to recommend the very best literature for your time and money. Our goal is to expose you to historically important volumes, old books that are timeless in application, excellent contemporary books hot off the press, multi-volume facsimile reproductions, small single-volume books you can read in one day, and searchable electronic books on CD-ROM. Our weekly reviews are published in the hopes of helping you build a diverse library of Christian volumes with tested theology and reliability.
Thanks to The Conventicle for pointing this out.
Popularity: 8% [?]
By now the open-source, web 2.0, collaborative creation of content debate is no longer new, and indeed, no longer a debate. The movement is here and it is not silent. And it continues to grow into just about every segment of culture, some of which I must confess I did not see coming. And some of which, I must confess, I am glad to see coming.
Most of the griping about this movement seems to be popularly expressed by those whose livelihoods are built on responsible information architecture and discovery. It seems, though, that the world would rather have greater, more ubiquitous, unrefined, customizable access to unevaluated information rather than learn to navigate the rather cryptic systems designed not so much to assist the researcher as to assist the cataloger. Wikipedia, then, becomes the standard reference source. Del.icio.us becomes the new internet guide.
But here is what I didn’t expect: rather than competing and attempting to convince the world of the value of professional information folks, they have now joined the fray. From libraries, to journalism, to religion, open-source is increasingly the new American way even among the establishment authorities.
Get ready for crowdsourcing, a trend to reassign a job traditionally performed by an employed authority in a particular field to an undefined large group of people in the form of an open call over the Internet. Two examples:
Welcome to Assignment Zero.Inspired by the open source movement, this is an attempt to bring journalists together with people in the public who can help cover a story. It’s a collaboration among NewAssignment.Net, Wired, and those who chose to participate.
The investigation takes place in the open, not behind newsroom walls. Participation is voluntary; contributors are welcomed from across the Web. The people getting, telling and vetting the story are a mix of professional journalists and members of the public — also known as citizen journalists. This is a model I describe as “pro-am.”
The “ams” are simply people getting together on their own time to contribute to a project in journalism that for their own reasons they support. The “pros” are journalists guiding and editing the story, setting standards, overseeing fact-checking, and publishing a final version.
In this project, we’re trying to crowdsource a single story…
Here’s the unexpected part: rather than competing with “open-source” journalism such as the Assignment Zero project, the Washington Examiner is joining the movement with its WECAN project.
This blog maintains a modified open-source policy to comments. No spam, but otherwise please feel free to add your two cents.
Popularity: 10% [?]
I happen to agree in many respects with Thomas Friedman’s conclusion in The World is Flat that globalization is indeed flattening the world. The voice at the other end of the McDonald’s drive-through could very well be in India.
An example of this flattening is the increasingly ubiquitous access to information on a global scale. The Google Book Search project is providing global access to book content on a scale never seen before. As long as I have internet access I can read or even download books scanned from the libraries around the world.
The Google Book Project provides another example, and a vivid one at that, of the flattening of the world. The amazing people over at Google frequently give the user a map showing all the geographic places named in a particular book. One particularly inquisitive programmer even took the time to have Google create a map showing all the locations mentioned in all the books in their database. Google is not letting me display the map, so view it here.
I recently read a book about Australia by Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country, in which he chronicles how little attention the world pays to Australia. I think he’s right. They hardly even show up on this map. By the way — this book was fascinating, I highly recommend it.
All of this raises a more interesting question for me, though. Will Western theology begin to take on a more global tone, increasingly addressing the issues of African or Malaysian or Siberian churches, or will those cultures continue to take on a more Western tone like the rest of their culture? In other words, how will the flattening of the world affect theological discourse? Is the world of confessional theology immune from the temptations of outsourcing? What are the dangers? What are the benefits? Your thoughts?
Postscript: Minutes after writing this post, this new acquisition crossed my desk: Bob Roberts, Jr., Glocalization: How Followers of Jesus Engage a Flat World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007). I have not read the book, and at first glance it appears to be primarily a practical admonition for a re-evaluation of the contemporary American way of doing missions and as such does not directly address my question. An interesting coincidence that it should cross my desk today, though.
Popularity: 8% [?]
On the heels of my previous post, I thought it appropriate to now introduce you to another Reformation era man whom I respect greatly. Peter Martyr Vermigli (PMV) was an Italian priest whose theology of justification was influenced greatly by the Spaniard Juan de Valdes (coffee, anyone?). While the ecclesiastical allegiances of Contarini and Pole ultimately trumped their soteriologies, PMV chose to adhere to his Reformed theology and fled Italy. He spent time in Geneva, became a Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University in England, and fled back to the Continent when Queen Mary ran him out of town. He was a man of great influence, though one of humility and character. He was a good man worthy of emulation. I am edified when I consider him and read his writings. Luther, for example, I can’t read because of too frequently vitriolic tone.
The title of my blog is common enough (pun), but I chose it in reference to PMV’s Commonplaces in particular. My first post included the title page from that work. So I am joyed when others join me in my appreciation for Peter Martyr.
I frequently read a very thoughtful blog by Cynthia Nielson, a very intelligent graduate student and adjunct philosophy instructor at, well, I don’t know, but I heartily recommend her analysis of PMV and Turretin (PMV was in Geneva and knew the Turretin clan) on free will none-the-less. As of Feb 9, 2007, it is in seven parts and still growing. Read the first part here.
By the way, is it just me or is there a remarkable resemblance?
Popularity: 15% [?]
I’ve been using Diigo and its less sophisticated cousin, del.icio.us, for quite some time now but I have hesitated to post about the benefits of social bookmarking sites for academic research since so much of what one finds online lacks authority and objectivity.
After reading “Social Bookmarking, Folksonomies, and Web 2.0 Tools” [Laura Gordon-Murnane, Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals 14:8 (June 2006) 26-38], however, I feel as though I should offer my two cents.
Making the Move
I began using del.icio.us after Internet Explorer lost all my bookmarks. The primary benefit of online bookmarking for me, then, was initially one of convenience: I could retrieve my bookmarks from any computer with internet access while retaining the ease of marking sites from within my browser. I also switched from Internet Explorer to FireFox (if you don’t use FireFox as your internet browser, you should — for too many reasons to list here), which is a vast improvement over IE.
Shortly afterward, I discovered Diigo. Not as many people use Diigo, but for those of you who blog or prefer prefer to read page annotations from other viewers it is an improvement over del.icio.us — plus it will import and update your del.icio.us bookmarks even if you use Diigo almost exclusively. For personal surfing and blogging purposes, Diigo is the best choice. However, because more people use del.icio.us, it is still to be preferred for research purposes. I will expound on this a little more in a minute.
Tag – You’re It: the Genius of “Tagging”
Tagging is a type of “folksonomy.” In other words, it enables you to categorize content (web pages, pictures, etc…) by whatever labels are most meaningful and helpful to YOU. Look at my del.icio.us bookmarks, for example (click here) and notice how you can access my bookmarks the old-fashioned way as a plain list or by the “tags” on the right side of the screen. Clicking on a tag, such as “art,” and you will see the website I have bookmarked and labeled as “art.”
You are probably accustomed to navigating sites by top-down taxonomy. At your local bookstore, for example, you can browse their books by category. Religion, fiction, biography, etc… The user must learn to navigate the store’s schema according to THEIR categories (taxonomy). Tagging is a form of folksonomy, which means that the user (or a community of users) can generate their own schema using terms that are most helpful to them. It is a bottom-up method.
This is helpful to me since it makes my bookmarks more accessible. I can tag a website with as many terms as I like. I might tag this CommonPlaces blog as blogs, theology, art, literature, library_stuff, research, or even as “colossal_waste_of_time.”
But this is also helpful to helpful to every other del.icio.us user. This is the beauty of it all. They become not just your tagged bookmarks, but the entire del.icio.us community’s tagged bookmarks (unless, of course, you choose the option to keep a particular bookmark private and unviewable by the public). You can search the tag “art” and see every bookmark tagged as “art” by anyone else. Tired of scrolling through six million results from an average Google search? Try searching the del.icio.us tagged bookmarks to see which ones other people have selected as the most important and/or helpful.
Remember: If you are using del.icio.us or Diigo just to save your bookmarks, then choose either. But if you are intending to search other people’s tags, then choose del.icio.us since it has a vastly larger number of users.
Social Bookmarking and Online Research
I will sing the praises of social bookmarking and folksonomy all day long. But as a research librarian I have mixed feelings about promoting their use in an academic setting. Most students understand that Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, but many still cite it in their papers. It may be an accurate reflection of users’ understanding of a topic, but it is not an academic encyclopedia. If students can’t discern between appropriate academic sources and helpful but academically inappropriate sites like Wikipedia, to what extent do I promote the similar world of social bookmarking?
Using tools like del.icio.us or its many cousins (see the list at the bottom of this post) are certainly helpful for finding information, but discernment must be central to how one reads, believes, and uses this information. It should go without saying that just because someone has taken the time to put it on the internet, and someone else has deemed it valuable enough to bookmark and tag for future reference, it is not necessarily correct, authoritative, and appropriate for academic use.
When to Use Social Bookmarking Sites for Research
I will be teaching incoming doctoral students about research next week. More specifically, I will be teaching them about doing academic research in our library based on Thomas Mann’s Oxford Guide to Library Research: How to Find Reliable Information Online and Offline (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Click here for the Table of Contents to see some of what we will cover.
My assumption is that these students are willing to put forward the time and energy to do substantive research rather than to piggy-back the often mediocre work that another person has done and published on the internet. When all the steps for effective library research outlined in Mann’s book, including the use of online academic databases through the library, are exhausted and the resulting leads are digested, or in the unlikely case that no leads are unearthed, only then will I refer a student to general online searching — and even then it is for the purpose of unearthing resources which the student still needs to evaluate in terms of authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, and coverage — and even then I desire to equip them with knowledge of particular search tools and strategies. “Googling it” is not an effective search strategy, but it the only thing most people know to do.
So here is my question: do I reserve such instruction until they hit a dead end or do I recognized that human hearts are lazy (mine included) and that they will be searching the internet at large anyway, so I may as well equip them with effective search skills from the beginning? Studies show that most searchers go to Google, search for one or two keywords, and look at the first page of results from tens of thousands. There are wonderful shortcuts to finding materials on the internet (and, yes, even through Google — i.e., the Advanced Google book Search, or Google Scholar, both of which I use daily for citation searching) including social bookmarking sites. Using these can render the internet a useful tool.
So the question of when to use social bookmarking sites in the course of academic research is really one of information competence. I find that most students are one of three types:
Social bookmarking sites should therefore be used to accomplish different goals depending on the student. For the first category of student, social bookmarking sites should be used to learn basic computer and internet skills. For example, as the student finds websites deemed helpful for any purpose (weather, news, tracking golf handicaps, etc…) he is more likely to return to those sites if the site is bookmarked and tagged for future reference. For the second category of student, deciding on appropriate tags for a page helps the student discern what may be important or unique about that page’s content. They are moving toward information competence. Both of the first two categories of students should use social bookmarking for personal rather than academic purposes. Only the third category, those students who have already achieved a fair measure of information competence should be encouraged to use social bookmarking services for academic purposes — and even then it is merely to discover additional threads of information sources.
Links to Popular Social Bookmarking Sites
Popularity: 20% [?]
LibriVox, in their own words:
volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.
From Aristotle’s Poetics to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, LibriVox has much to keep us enlightened (read: entertained) for quite some time. Feeling playful? Read (or, rather, listen to) Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Feeling devotional? How about Andrew Murray’s Absolute Surrender? Like to watch “House” on Tuesday nights? Try listening to P.G. Wodehouse’s My Man Jeeves (Hugh Laurie played Mr. Wooster in the tv version of Jeeves and Wooster, based on this series of books). Feel like a trip down memory lane to Jr. High? Try Jack London’s Call of the Wild or White Fang. Feeling theological? Try C. S. Lewis’ Spirits in Bondage. Only have time for a brief diversion? Try a poem or a short story.For the entire catalog, click here.In short, we no longer have an excuse for eschewing the literary.
Popularity: 16% [?]
According to this online quiz, I apparently am. Well, of sorts:
Take the quiz and report back. It would be an interesting exercise in the demographics of my readership (assuming I have one). And remember: there are no wrong answers. Only ignorant ones. Did that sound snobby?
Popularity: 14% [?]
NOTE: I’VE CLOSED COMMENTS ON THIS POST SINCE I WAS RECEIVING SO MUCH SPAM TO THIS PARTICULAR POSTING.
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The trend in academic libraries is moving toward providing reference and research assistance in ways that the patron finds most convenient: phone, email, IM, etc… I’ve been offering reference assistance via IM (instant messaging) for almost a year now, and I’m assuming that type of assistance will continue to grow in popularity.
Skype is similar to most VoIP telephone calls, but is free to other Skype users. I guess the reason why most libraries don’t use this sort of service is that most libraries don’t offer much in the way of distance education support. We do.
So for you distance education students out there, feel free to register for a free Skype account and call me for help. All you need is a microphone and speakers (and camera if you want to see me while I try to help you).
Skype ID: SBTS.Reference.Desk
MSN Messenger IM: reports@sbts.edu
AOL IM: SBTS Reference Desk
Library 2.0, here we come.
Popularity: 17% [?]
Try Collarity. It claims:
The Collarity Compass enables publishers to deliver more effective site and Web search results by providing each visitor with the power to automatically define what is most relevant for them and provide search guidance for future searchers. Every visitor on a publisher’s site becomes both an information provider and an information consumer. Every user’s searches accrue to the benefit of every other user. As site visitors search, the system automatically and anonymously gathers, organizes and shares search knowledge.
Popularity: 5% [?]
