Libraries and the Future of Digitization

Interesting article in Inside Higher Education, May 30, by Andy Guess, May 30 "Post-Microsoft, Libraries Mull Digitization," about Microsoft's withdrawal from the digitization game.

Here is an excerpt: "Libraries increasingly see digitization as a preservation strategy. While Microsoft’s departure probably won’t cause significant upheaval, it will reinforce for universities the necessity of ensuring that they retain the rights to their scanned materials — or that their digitization projects will be around next semester, let alone forever. One way to do that is to continue pursuing internal, proprietary scanning projects which, for many libraries, existed for years before Google and Microsoft made it possible to vastly increase their scope and scale. Another is to work with nonprofit initiatives. But if there’s one thing libraries agree on, it’s that the competition between the two companies was healthy."

The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/30/microsoft.

State of the Internet

Akamai is using data gathered by its global server network along with publicly available information to deliver a quarterly "State of the Internet" report. The first such report (January-March 2008) is available here.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The Future of Libraries

Historian Robert Darnton has an interesting essay considering the future of libraries in his "The Library in Your Future," New York Review of Books 55 (June 12, 2008): 72-73, 76, 78-80. Comparing print and digital publishing, Darnton seeks to remind us that every era is an information, although this one is indicating that information may be more fluid than that of earlier times. Essentially, Darnton argues that we need both traditional and new forms of libraries, and that we need to learn to appreciate them both for what they represent. Darnton is always provocative, and this essay is no exception.

Technology, Artifacts, & Secrets

The reunification of Germany provided an opportunity to study how secret police have operated in repressive regimes. Kristie Macrakis, in her Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), opines, “The fall of the Berlin World in 1989 created an unprecedented opportunity for historians to examine the files of a defunct intelligence and secret police organization” (p. xix). The files are truly amazing – a hundred miles of files and 35 million index cards – reflective of a government out of control in watching its own citizens. Macrakis focuses on the Stasi’s uses of information technology (cameras, containers, radios, and computers), providing one of the most detailed analyses of how secret police function. In this volume, we get as well some insights about understanding what the artifacts of information technology tell us. Noting that there were efforts made to destroy all the equipment and other artifacts used by the Stasi, Macrakis makes this interesting comment about the secret police artifacts: ”Artifacts often reflect the ideas, beliefs, achievements, and attitudes of long-lost civilizations; they also mirror their culture. Technology talks, it speaks the language of culture . . . . the technological artifacts offer us rare and valuable insight into a very secret culture and community within which like in a secret cult, every member was trained to keep the methods and sources of their work hidden from the enemy and outsiders” (p. 196). Macrakis is careful to note that the kind of spying we see reflected in the Stasi files is something we should be aware can happen in our own democracy. In fact, she is worried that all of this stems from a “faith in technology,” arguing that “as technological developments have accelerated over the last-century, our dependence on technology and faith in it have only increased” (p. 315).

Talking to Oneself

From Rachel Toor, “Did You Publish Today?” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 22, 2008 available at http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/05/2008052201c/careers.html

What does it look like to do intellectual work? What does it look like to have an insight? To formulate a theory? To solve a philosophical problem? What does it take to get to the point at which you're ready to sit down and write something, ready to present something to the world?

Experience tells me that sometimes it looks like playing Spider Solitaire. Or twirling one's hair, talking to oneself, or sitting stock still and staring into space.

My friend Andrew, a psychiatrist, is an expert in the physiology of sleep. He has come up with a host of good ideas that have resulted in a fat sheaf of academic publications. He believes that sleep is the result of conditioning, ritual, and circumstance. You can't force yourself to go to sleep. What you can do, he says, is set up the conditions and rituals that will allow it to happen. You let the dog out (or put the rat back in her cage). You change into your footy pajamas. You brush your teeth. You get into bed. And then, having provided the right environment, eventually, you fall asleep.

That process, Andrew believes, is similar to what academics go through when trying to solve an intellectual problem. We shuffle off to our offices and plant ourselves in front of a computer. Or slink into the library and sink into a comfy chair. Or walk around the block 43 times.

We go through the motions that have led us, in the past, to cerebral success. We can no more force ourselves to make an intellectual breakthrough than we can will ourselves to sleep. All we can do is prepare the environment and perform the rituals associated with thinking.