Category: Library & Information Science

In a follow up to this post on cataloging , Sanford Berman is Nerve.com’s, Crush of the Week .

And now I get to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, only without the pork. :-)At UTK’s School of Information Sciences I was in the Ph.D program with Dick Kawooya. Among other things Dick is helping to build connections between UTK SIS, MU SISLT and Makerere University in his home country, Uganda.

Berman was a librarian at Makerere in 1971-72 according to his bio. And it only took me one person to make the connection. Thanks Dick for connecting me to the most famous (or should it be infamous?) cataloger of our time.

The Wikipedia definition is a bit sparse, but universal service is the idea the everyone should have access to telecommunications. Classically this idea has only been applied to basic telephone service, it’s why 99% of the United States has the ability to have a land line telephone.

This Slashdot discussion talks about the problems with broadband on America. The US is now 16th in the world in broadband use per capita. Other countries see the benefits of broadband why not the US? Broadband access is the new digital divide. And the US as a country is on the wrong side of it.

Note: Now that I’m back in the LIS world full force, I’m trying to get back to more of way I started this blog, to comment on things librarianish. (is that a word?) 🙂 Look for more of these type of posts in the future.

If you are a member of ALA’s Library Research Round Table, Doug Raber is running for Vice Chair/Chair-Elect. The polls are open. Vote early and vote often. 🙂

It seems that American Library Association president-elect Michael Gorman doesn’t like blogs or bloggers. Any guess what? Bloggers don’t like him either. And it’s bad when people who blog about library and information science have such a major disagreement withe the head of ALA. Makes you wonder how relevant ALA is. (Disclaimer: I’m a member of ALA)

Gorman now says the article was satire, but the damage has been done. I think Gorman just has a basic misunderstanding about what blogging is and is now at a loss to defend this view. With people like Gorman leading ALA, no wonder people think librarians are obsolete.

For a while now there has been a bit of a feud going between Rory Litwin of Library Juice and Blake Carver and the community at LISNews. It began with Blake’s article at LISNews wanting some right wing counter-balance to the left wing tilt of the LISNews community.

This led to an initial response from Rory that Blake had “gone batty“. That gets followed up May 14 by a more detailed criticism. Which of course led to a response from LISNews.

And now there is Rory’s response to that LISNews feedback. And of course, the LISNews community responds.

My take? LISNews as a news gathering mechanism is as neutral as it can be. People can submit anything to LISNews that they want. It gets read by the “Authors” (I’m one of them) edited and posted. That is neutral. The comment moderation is not. The authors have the ability to moderate comments, as do others. There the leftist slant of LISNews shows up and right leaning comments to stories are usually badly moderated and are thus harder to find.

Here I must disclose that I am very left leaning. But I don’t often comment or moderate. But Rory took what could have been valid criticism and initially phrased it as a personal “attack” for lack of a better term. (Blake Carver of LISNews has gone batty). That lead to attacks in him personally and so on and so on. But Rory jumped into the fire and then judging by the latest Library Juice couldn’t take the heat and came away burned. Maybe that explains his musings in Library Juice, “Please stop being excited about the Web – especially ‘blogs“.

But following the discourse on this topic has been fun, to both sides I say “Please continue.”