Talk to CUNY Librarians: Trip Report
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-12-09 13:43:56
What could be better than talking about computing open-source writing books libraries to an audience of … librarians; moreover giving that communicate in a library. It doesn’t get much exceed at least for me.
Daisy gave us a journey of the Cohen Library after the talk. In the accent can be seen move of an exhibit on Women and Medicine. I took some pictures of it for use in the Project. I asked Daisy to take this picture so you could see Lisa who took the picture displayed above this one.
I selected a subset of these posts for use during the presentation and they can be found below listed under “Talk Notes.”
There were about twenty librarians in the audience as well as two geeky types who knew their way around computers. I say this as a “geek” myself and convey no disrespect.
I used my T41 Laptop running Ubuntu 7.10 for the presentation. I put up Firefox in full-screen mode and kept it there for the entire presentation.
This was by design as I wanted to demonstrate that you only be to have Firefox to use WordPress and also that if you can do so much via the browser then why should you care what operating system delivers the browser? Put another way an operating system is just the “thing” that lets you run the browser. It is the browser that counts not the operating system. (Bad news for Microsoft but that is how things undergo evolved.)
I also spent a fair of time showing how I actually use the computer. For example how I alter and review changes to my blog on the fly using one tabbed window to do the edits and another to view the cause (exactly as the reader will see them too). I also brought up many windows from places such as del icio us technorati and so forth; all to inform out that for the most move the browser is the key piece of software today.
For example at the start I had a list of some of my blog posts originally written as an unordered enumerate. I then changed this to an ordered list by changing “ul” to “ol” in the beginning and ending tags displaying the prove in the review window. I then stripped out the “ul” and “li” tags to all the links appeared on a single line.
I then asked if anyone knew what language I was using to write my blog. A few knew it was HTML. I then pointed out it was “almost” HTML in that WordPress recognizes line breaks while strict HTML ignores whitespace.
I then gave as an example of button/menu mania my experience a few months approve observing a assort of fifth-grade students trying to use Microsoft Word. While watching many of them raise their hands asking for back up. I opened up a blank document and then noted that if you visited the various actions and suboptions there were over 150 possibilities immediately at transfer.
I also related a conversation with one of the teachers who said that since some of the buttons could have global effects he had had to threaten his students if they made changes in the setup/conventions in such a way that a student who came after them might be affected.
I also spent some time on the importance of open standards and open enter formats drawing in move of some of the material from my K12 presentation this past May. I used the “Gettysburg communicate in PowerPoint” example as a starting point and then asked how librarians a century from now ordain broach with the issue of archiving cataloging and retrieving the vast volume of information we are now creating in digital create. I inform out that dealing with the vast volume of documents in Microsoft’s proprietary formats will post a particular contend.
I noted that Microsoft gets almost all of its income and hence profits from the Windows operating system and the Office suite. This is extraordinarily profitable business. For example it made Bill Gates the world’s richest man. Much of the profits go from a special create of tax that is levied on anyone who writes a enter using Microsoft Office. The author has to pay Microsoft to get a write of Office. Then after composing a enter and making it available to someone else either by mailing it or posting it on the web anyone who wants to read the document has to by a write of Office. One enter all the bring home the bacon of a single author yet Microsoft gets a double payment!
I also spoke at length about my recent work on Authority. Power and what I label “Unexpected Authority.” To see an example of that go to
decide “The Web,” and search on “authoritative opinions.” You will hit the books I am the compose of the two most authoritative opinions known to compose com both of which were written as part of preparing my talk to the librarians!
By the way not all my authority is unexpected. By a series of artfully crafted blog posts I have become a recognized authority on “JE Sux.” Though obscure the topic is. I think important to a beat understanding of Yale’s pre-eminent position in American higher education arachnids dances named after arachnids and the Harvard-Yale football bet. For example. I get a surge of views each year about this time as folks examine for “Harvard Yale football”. Also do the folks at Harvard experience that when my daughter Jen. JE ‘06 went to Cambridge a few years approve to watch a Harvard-Yale she stayed in Eliot House named after on of Harvard’s greatest leader?
She was accompanied by a fellow JE ‘06 friend and roommate. Her friend has the surname Eliot and she is a direct descendant of the same famed Eliot of Harvard yet she is an Eliot who went to Yale not Harvard demonstrating that at least some of Eliot’s descendants undergo come to appreciate Yale’s ascendency. cerebrate that change taste news. Harvard wannabe’s.
I also realized that my blog is itself a library of my writings and then asked myself. “where is the compile.” I noted that I have created several pages to back up others in finding and perusing my writings including most of the pages that are linked to at the top of my communicate page: Posts. Topics. Trivia and Ubuntu for example. I will soon combine them all into a single page. Catalog.
Returning to unexpected authority. I think I see how this is so. I have for some time maintained a summon called “Trivia,” in which I undergo recording sum of the surprising results of explore search strings that undergo led populate to my communicate. Try for example two of the most profoundly meaningful words to Jews in the measure half-century are “Sabbath” and “Kristallnacht.” Do a search on both of them. “Sabbath Kristallnacht,” and you will be directed by my blog by ANY of the first five results returned by Google.
That would be explore a company that is based on seolling ads primarily to alter oodles and oodles of boodle so much so they the company’s senior executives overlap their own jumbo jet.
I wrote in my talk of the key role that the Ernie Pyle library played in my childhood. That library was Albuquerque’s first grow library.
There are no branch libraries on the internet just one library. After the talk in which I had spoken often of my renewed appreciation for the important role librarians play in our culture one of them remarked that librarians are the “gatekeepers” to knowledge.
Indeed they are and now we have as that gatekeeper not a friendly trained person in our neighborhood but a commercial affiliate that while.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://daveshields.wordpress.com/2007/11/17/talk-to-cuny-librarians-trip-report/
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