Reading Spaces

LITA | Writing Award Guidelines

"The Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), is pleased to offer an award for the best unpublished manuscript submitted by a student or students enrolled in an ALA-accredited graduate program.  Sponsored by LITA and Ex Libris, the award consists of $1,000, publication in LITA’s refereed journal, Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL), and a certificate.  The deadline for submission of the manuscript is February 28, 2012."

For more information on this prize for student penned manuscripts on any aspect of libraries and information technology, see the guidelines at: http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/involve/committees/exlibris/guidelines.cfm

From Librarians to Informationists to Intelligencers: Adrian Johns

Listen to Adrian Johns' keynote address, As Our Readers Go Digital, given at the recent 2010 RLG Partnership Symposium When the Books Leave the Building: The Future of Research Libraries, Collections and Services.

At the symposium website, you will find a 30 minute mp3 of the talk, along with slides and a printable version of the paper. From the introduction of Johns' paper: 

"There is of course something odd about giving a conference at this moment in history the title “When the books leave the building.”  The conceit that they were confined in a building in the first place is peculiarly antique – it evokes images of those old cathedral libraries with huge, musty folios chained to the furniture.  As far as I know, it hasn’t been the case for centuries that run-of-the-mill books were kept in that kind of bondage.  Yet I do think that there is a real issue being signaled by our title – or rather, a set of issues.  They have to do with what I’ve come to think of as the “three Ps” of the move to massive digital libraries: the places of reading, the practices that are deemed appropriate to those places, and the publics that they can give rise to.

Those three things – places, practices, and publics – connote to my mind the major areas of hope and doubt associated with mass digitization.  I think that when we speak loosely of the revolutionary “impact” of the new technologies, what we really mean is a set of consequences that will have to emerge through the three Ps as those technologies are put to use.  Perhaps the places they will constitute will be radically new, for example; more likely, they will be formed by the creative adaptation and combination of existing spaces.  We have already seen this happening in offices, laboratories, and libraries (my old institution, Caltech, was one of the first more or less to eradicate its bookish library altogether).

The 3 Ps also have a very long conjoint history – longer than the book itself, if by “book” we mean codex.  My point today will be that if we approach the experiences of readers as they “go digital” through the history of the 3 Ps, we can articulate for ourselves the nature of a problem that we all face."

(Adrian Johns, 2010, "As Our Readers Go Digital," keynote address 11 June 2010, RLG Partnership Symposium When the Books Leave the Building: The Future of Research Libraries, Collections and Services. Newberry Library, Chicago, IL). 

Youth and New Media in Hong Kong: new article in First Monday

Just got word of this article by Donna Chu: "In search of prosumption: Youth and new media in Hong Kong, First Monday 15 (2), 2010 at: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2772/2451

Katherine Paterson's response to the threat of the iPad

making the rounds on the blogosphere: Katherine Paterson's response to the threat to printed and bound books; from an OpEd piece in the NY Daily News.

Teens self-regulating Facebook

This NYTimes online article by Katie Hafner describes the strategies of young adults to self-manage their Facebook "addictions".

"For one 18-year-old boy completing a college application, Professor Turkle said, “Facebook wasn’t merely a distraction, but it was really confusing him about who he was,” and he opted to spend his senior year off the service. He was burned out, she said, trying to live up to his own descriptions of himself."

new journal: Policy & Internet

The is an interesting article by Barbie Clarke on the policy implications of adolescents' use of social networking sites. See the journal web site at: http://www.psocommons.org/policyandinternet/

rip! a remix manifesto: film by brett gaylor

Free film at Museum London:

from the website:

RiP! A Remix Manifesto

Thursday, October 22, 7:30 pm
Theatre

In RiP! A Remix Manifesto (Brett Gaylor, 2008, 86 min, 14+), Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and breaking down the wall between users and producers. The film's central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film.

Admission: FREE

Question Box featured in the NYTimes

See Rob Nixon's article in the New York Times, "Dialing where the web can't reach" about answer services in Uganda and India. Question Box was conceived of by Rose Shuman and is supported by the Grameen Foundation. The project emphasizes the importance of local information as well as sustainable information systems (some Question Boxes use mobile phones, others an actual metal box).

Robert Darnton declares "the book is not dead" but...

In this Publishers Weekly article, Robert Darnton, book historian and Harvard Librarian, makes a case for books. He writes of his forthcoming book,

"...most of my book concerns current issues and the way their resolutions are likely to shape the information landscape for the foreseeable future. The issues facing the book are urgent, I believe, not merely because book professionals must find a way through the immediate financial crises that plague them, but because the publishing landscape is shifting under our feet. We are living in one of those rare moments in history when things may come apart and be put back together again in ways that will determine the future for decades or more, despite the endless innovations of technology."

13 year-old reviews the SONY walkman

This has been going around the web, but archived here for 9364:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8117619.stm