INFOMATTERS

At last? Crackdowns on the abusers

adillon — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 03:24:37 +0000

Cynics can sneer but I am impressed that President Obama recognizes information space as a forum for taking on oppressive regimes who track and suppress opposition voices online. The latest executive order which clamps down on visa and financial privileges for those known to be involved in campaigns against democracy movements in Syria and Iran might well be complicated and face challenges in implementation and appropriate use but the recognition that “malign use of technology” is widespread and should no go unchecked is worthy. Read more from the White House here

Austin Forum video now on YouTube

adillon — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:09:20 +0000

Am having a difficulty embedding it, so here’s the straight link to my intro section . Or find all four parts here: http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/about/news/view_news_item.php?ID=371

ASIST name change?

adillon — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 23:06:00 +0000

The latest ASIST Bulletin contains a challenging column by the President, Diane Sonnewald, relating to the name of the society. In short, she suggests that we might seriously consider retaining the acronym (ASIST) but allow for broader participation internationally by switching American Society to another term e.g. ASsociation for Information Science and Technology. I never liked the addition of T for technology to ASIS back in 2000 but I do feel that the time is right to adopt a more internationalist stance through our name (when on the board in 2002-4, I suggested we grab the name ISIST to cover the eventual internationalization of the society but I prefer the current idea of keeping us ASIST).

You can find the column, and engage in ongoing discussions on this topic online until May 1st by visiting QuickTopic. And of course you can find the ASIST Bulletin in full here.

Austin Forum talk coming up

adillon — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 22:11:14 +0000

With my colleagues Diane Bailey and Randolph Bias, I will be presenting a public forum next week. If you are in Austin and interested in the nature of information work, feel free to attend. Details below — wine, snacks, stimulation assured. You must RSVP to get in.

Austin Forum: Product Design: The New Interplay of People, Objects and Information April 03 5:45 PM – 7:30 PM

WHAT: The Austin Forum on Science, Technology & Society
WHEN: Tuesday, April 3
5:45-6:30pm Networking Reception
6:30-7:30pm Presentation and Q&A
WHERE: AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center, 1900 University, Amphitheater (Room 204)
COST: Free and open to the public
WEBSITE: www.austinforum.org
RSVP: info@austinforum.org

Designing a product well requires knowledge of the user and knowledge of the product-as-object. Advances in communication technology, including computational software, simulation tools and social media, place an increasing wealth of information in the hands of designers about users and objects. The challenge of modern product design is to harness that wealth of information.

This talk will cover issues in how to design successfully in an information-rich world by breaking the process into three parts: 1) understanding how users process information in information-rich environments; 2) understanding how we think of objects as they become increasingly digital and virtual via new technologies; and 3) understanding how users interact with physical and virtual objects. The panel will consider the broader implications for design as well as what happens when design falters in any one of these three areas. Location: AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center

Journal of Global Homeland Security publishes inaugural edition

adillon — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:37:10 +0000

A new journal dealing with intelligence work related to homeland security has been launched in the UK. The Journal of the Gobal Homeland Security Education Network appears this month. The goal is to publish contributions in the examination of transnational, comparative, and cooperative international efforts to ensure and advance homeland security. Full issues are downloadable for free and oddly, for a journal based in the UK, at least two of the papers have Texas authors.

Vatican opens its archives

adillon — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:53:06 +0000

Excellent story in today’s Guardian outlining the latest exhibition of Vatican treasures. There’s not access yet to the records during the Nazi era, and you sure won’t find mention of the more recent child-abuse scandals and cover-up but this is one amazing collection. Signed documents from Galileo, letters requesting permission for Henry VIII to divorce, the 1521 decree excommunicating the German monk Martin Luther which helped launch the Reformation. Not your typical collection this! Now if Google could just scan it all we could see it online

Mediation is lost: the battle is over

adillon — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:40:13 +0000

I enjoyed the article by Robert Berring in the current issue of Law Library Journal wherein he examines the impact of technology on law libraries though it is more a meditation on the future of librarianship. His analysis builds on a four-activity model of the professional work: materials gathering, records generation, arrangement/preservation, and distribution, all of which have been or are in the midst of profound change. Successful information organization and retrieval now, he argues, is the product of new systems, driven by profit and geared up for efficiency and speed of retrieval. As he says:

“There is no point lamenting this development. The battle is over and mediation of information by librarians lost”.

Provocative stuff. But if that were not enough, he ends by arguing that the shift from the paper book to the digital document also marks the end of the best scholarship in librarianship which was premised on the physical artifact. Not sure I agree with that one Robert but time will tell.

Is it information(s) yet?

adillon — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:06:10 +0000

Geoffrey Nunberg is giving the keynote at the iConf 2012 conference in Toronto and is offering a superb historical and linguistic overview of the term ‘information’. Who knew that the data-information-wisdom progression was such an old saw, to use his term, traceable back centuries. Information is “not a process” either he argues though stating that hardly makes it so (doesn’t something happen between data and knowledge?) Oddly, no push back form the audience on that one! Information used to mean refinement of thought, and Jane Austen seem’s to have used the term a lot that way, though not necessarily with nuances that have survived Hollywood versions of the books. Sadly, time may have worked against him as he rushed through tons of slides and it all sort of faded out at the end, though Jonathan Furner, as commentator, made a brave attempt to bring it all together. More to follow, the slides are promised….

The true cost of knowledge: Elsevier boycott grows

adillon — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:18:12 +0000

A campaign organized under The Cost of Knowledge banner has thousands of scholars agreeing to boycott Elsevier publications by refusing to submit or to review articles for any of their journals. Since Jan 21, when Tim Gowers at Cambridge University blogged about what he saw as the unfair economic practices of the publisher, the campaign has grown quickly. In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education the publisher argues that they really add value to the whole knowledge distribution chain but it’s hard to have sympathy when they acknowledge indulging in price gouging during for a couple of decades before claiming “we got it wrong then…but we’ve become good citizens”.

Blaming library budgets for not keeping up is a curious tactic here but the reality is that academics are slow to organize alternative publishing options. Yes, scholars provide the raw material of research and reviewing, and are ultimately the arbiters of quality, but the record needs to be managed, maintained and organized for use if it is to work. I think someone should create a new role for people who do that

Accreditation and lip service

adillon — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:12:48 +0000

“In the drive of an occupation toward professional status a substantial amount of attention is devoted to education and the establishment of professional schools, and accrediting bodies are created to watch over standards of educational performance. Too frequently these standards are more concerned with the outward manifestations of academic achievement than with the intellectual content of the discipline to be taught: the amount of study required beyond the baccalaureate degree, the number of faculty who hold the doctorate, the extent of ‘research’ activity as indicated by faculty publication, and other considerations that can be reduced to statistical quantification. Lip service is given to creativity and innovation but excessive departure from traditional course content may well be regarded with considerable suspicion.”

The words above came to mind when I listened to the latest news on accreditation at ALISE where the deans and directors were all informed, to our surprise, that more stringent reporting of student learning outcomes would be part of future accreditation exercises. These insightful words are from Jesse Shera, then dean of the School of Library Science at Western Reserve University, writing in 1967 for Science. It seems from comments from others in Dallas that there is little real input ever from the academic side on accreditation and we are left subject to the whims of the year (currently learning outcomes but these are just added to previous years’ whims as additional burdens) in an endless compliance exercise. Isn’t it about time schools stopped ceding education standards to groups who neither understand universities very well nor seem particularly well-informed on learning theory (and show no interest in correcting their deficits)? Check back in another 45 years….

Ref: Shera, J. (1967) Librarians against Machines, Science, May 12, Vol 156, 746-750.