Category: Reading

>In 1971, CJR wrote of the promises of cable television: “One can bring to every home two-way, broad-band communications that can provide a whole galaxy of new services,” including “facsimile reproductions” of newspapers and magazines, and “access to information banks at libraries, medical centers, ect.” (Emphasis added.) Remember, this was before the Internet as it exists now was even a gleam in Al Gore’s eye. What we might call “content” today was still “information.”

-Language Corner, Merrill Perlman, *Columbia Journalism Review,* Nov/Dec 2011

"In this I join two friends and colleagues who’ve made related calls. Siva Vaidhyanathan has coined the phrase “Critical Information Studies” to describe an emerging “transfield” concerned with (among other things) “the rights and abilities of users (or consumers or citizens) to alter the means and techniques through which cultural texts and information are rendered, displayed, and distributed.”  Similarly, Eszter Hargittai has pointed to the inadequacy of the notion of the “digital divide” and has suggested that people instead talk about the uneven distribution of competencies in digital environments.”

via The Late Age of Print 

“Usually I was not so moralistic, believing as I still do that it was my duty to teach the curriculum and not to pontificate, to inspire debates, not weigh in with verdicts. I did on one or two occasions tell my students they were living in a society that valued people of their age, region, and class primarily as cannon fodder, cheap labor, and gullible consumers, and that education could give them some of the weapons necessary to fight back.”

-Garret Keizer, “Getting Schooled: The re-education of an American teacher,” Haper’s Magazine September/2011

I am so fired up to teach after reading this essay! Helping students achieve information fluency is one of the reasons why I became a librarian, to watch students’ worlds get larger and more complicated, and watching them grapple with all of life’s ambiguities.

"If archivists are no longer commonly depicted as antiquarians stopped over old ledgers in dusty basements, they are not generally acknowledged as people consciously construction social memory to meet or reflect contemporary neds, values, and assumptions-or as the professionals who control the past by deciding which stories and storytellers (i.e., records creators) of that past will be remembered and be retold in the future."

-Terry Cook, Controlling the Past: Documenting Society and Institutions.

 

"As long as librarians, archivists, and museologists (not to mention other information professionals) continue to be educated in isolation from one another—for example, with few standards that cross disciplinary boundaries in terms of organizations, preservations, and user access—real boundaries to collection, management, and access of materials will remain."

Lisa M. Given & Lianne McTavish “What’s Old Is New Again: The Reconvergence of Libraries, Archives, and Museums in the Digital Age.” Library Quarterly 80(1), January 2010, p. 23