January 17, 2012, 6:59 pm
By Brian Mathews
Wikipedia and several other web services are going dark tomorrow. They are shutting down– largely to make a political statement, but I can’t help but feel they are also trying to make a point about their cultural value. College students everywhere are lucky it’s not during prime paper-writing season or else they might be forced to actually use their library’s website.
Library Blackout
The blackout scenario is something that has playfully come up everywhere I’ve ever worked. The conversation (usually at dinner, in bar, or at the end of an outreach planning meeting late in the afternoon) goes something like this:
People (faculty) don’t appreciate the library. I bet if we turned off our proxy (access to all digital content) for a hour then we’d get their attention. Then they’d see just how important the library is to their research.
Inferiority complex, maybe…
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August 10, 2011, 8:06 pm
By Brian Mathews
There is an interesting essay by Chris Colin in the current issue of Wired about the culture of online criticism. It opens with this:
You don’t have to read this essay to know whether you’ll like it. Just go online and assess how provocative it is by the number of comments at the bottom of the web version.
The piece touches on the growing ratings phenomenon. Perhaps Amazon played a big part in this by establishing a system in which every product can be rated and commented upon. When I was looking to purchase a new toaster, the user feedback factored into my selection. I wanted to see what others said about the “toast boost” capability. It’s not enough to just read the manufacturer’s list of features; I wanted data for real people.
Netflix lets subscribers rate films. Wikipedia lets readers rate entries. Apartment Ratings lets tenants review properties….
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April 21, 2010, 12:25 pm
By Brian Mathews
My
post “File Sharers Swap Scholarly Materials
Too”
has been the most read item on this blog. People seem to really like that theme
so I’ll explore it a bit more. Often when we talk about Open Access,
Institutional Repositories, the Publishing Crisis, or similar topics it tends
to be very esoteric. There is a lot of rhetoric, debate, and models that honestly
I think only accountants and lawyers can get excited about. I’m not so sure
that the average faculty member really cares about the economics of the
publishing industry or a court’s interpretation of fair use. We’ll save that
for another day.
What
I’m really interested in is how all this stuff applies to the world outside of
libraries. I found it fascinating that The
Pirate Bay had some (expensive) academic materials and not just Jay-Z
tracks or episodes of LOST. So, what if there was a site designed to collect
academic…
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May 30, 2006, 8:31 am
By Brian Mathews
In Post-Memorial Day recovery I submit the thoughts of a student. The post asks: What do you do with papers that other people wrote?
I decided to stay out this one, but fascinating to read — students chime in about bibliographic management systems. I am intrigued by the “what if you had something that was kind of iTunes-like, but for papers and slides and stuff, and you could sort and search and organize and have a central place to stash all of them?”
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January 17, 2012, 6:59 pm
WHAT IF? The Library Blackout Scenario
By Brian Mathews
Library Blackout
The blackout scenario is something that has playfully come up everywhere I’ve ever worked. The conversation (usually at dinner, in bar, or at the end of an outreach planning meeting late in the afternoon) goes something like this:
Inferiority complex, maybe…
Read More