Thing 2, Part One

Ok, ok, some brief thoughts on the articles and video content for Thing 2 of the North Texas 23 Things....

1) Video, Stephen Abram, who is Vice-President of Innovation at Sirsi-Dynix.

Lots of glittering generalities; does some name dropping, but unless you know what he's talking about re: the dropped names, and are "in the know", you are left asking yourself, whiskey tango foxtrot, over? Guess I have to google that stuff to learn more of the context.

3) Read this webpage about Web 2.0 (link)
Good overview of Web 2.0, though no specific mention of the use of Web 2.0 in Libraries; this you have to infer, using your own imagination. I dunno, I guess you could "tweet" overdue notices and "your book is now in", hold-for-pick up notices; If you used an open-source ILS like Koha, I bet you could customize it to do these tweets automatically rather than make a circ clerk do it manually. There, how's that for Lib 2.0 thinking and innovation? But I'm just a dumb Aggie, what do I know...

4) Watch the video on this page (link)


Yeah, it was pretty good, but at the end I found myself asking, in German, "Na, und?" (Yes, and...?); Tried to "think about Lib 2.0" as I watched, as the frame for the link suggests, but came up kinda blank. I also dispute its characterization of text vs. digital text just a little bit. "Regular Text is linear"; uh, no, it doesn't have to be. I was doing "hypertext" linking with my World Book Encyclopedia set as a young lad in the early 1980s, jumping from article to article as this and that caught my fleeting interest. I was reading "Which Way?" Books long before Hypertext started; Back in graduate school I laughed at "hypertextuality" in a PoMo course and even bought my professor a cheap paperback copy of a YA "Which way?" book and plopped it on his desk and said "there---Hypertextuality. Direct your own narrative. Not new."

Since I've already read 3 outta 4, I'll go ahead and read the essay @ #2, and comment on it in a separate post a bit later on.