Scholar | Speaker | Writer | Teacher | Advocate
The technology brief “Particiaptory Networks: The Library as Conversation” is now available in Italian at:
http://www.aib.it/aib/cg/gbdigd07.htm3
The paper was translated by Angela Di Iorio and Marialaura Vignocchi on behalf of the Digital Libraries Working Group of the Italian Libraries Association.
Hot off the presses and now available the proceedings of the last VRD conference Virtual Reference Service: From Competencies to Assessment. Also included are the results of the Digital Reference Education Initiative (DREI) project that include full competencies for virtual reference librarians developed by the virtual reference community.
Here’s a link on Amazon:
The Lankes article on participatory librarianship and virtual reference was just published in the ASIS and T Bulletin at:
Http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Dec-07/lankes.html
There are also some other great virtual reference articles.
Todd Marshall has compiled a brief bibliography on Conversation Theory and Participatory Networks (from a scholarly perspective). It is listed below and has been added to the “Readings” page of the site. If you see things missing or want to add, please let me know.
Participatory Networks Bibliography (12/3/2007)
Bechtel, Joan M. (1986). Conversation, A New Paradigm for Librarianship? College & Research Libraries 47 (3). pp. 219-224.
Bernard, Scott. (1980). The Cybernetics of Gordon Pask. International Cybernetics Newsletter (17). pp. 327-336.
Fisher, Kathleen M. (2001). Overview of Knowledge Mapping. In: Mapping Biology Knowledge. Springer, pp. 5-23.
Ford, Nigel. (2004). Modeling cognitive processes in information seeking: From Popper to Pask. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 55 (9). pp. 769-782.
Ford, Nigel. (2005). “Conversational” information systems: Extending educational informatics support for the web-based learner. Journal of Documentation 61 (3). pp. 362-384.
Glanville, Ranulph. (1993). Pask: a Slight Primer. Systems Research 10 (3). pp. 213-218.
Lankes, R. D., Silverstein, J. L., Nicholson, S., & Marshall, T. (2007). Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation. Information Research, 12 (4) paper colis05 (http://InformationR.net/ir/12-4/colis05.html).
Lankes, R. David and Silverstein, Joanne L. and Nicholson, Scott. (2007). Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation. Technical Report. Information Institute of Syracuse, Syracuse, NY.
Laurillard, Diana. (1999). A Conversational Framework for Individual Learning Applied to the `Learning Organisation’ and the `Learning Society’. Systems Research and Behavioral Science 16 (2). pp. 113-122.
McKeen, James and Guimaraes, Tor and Wetherbe, James (1994). The relationship between user participation and user satisfaction: An investigation of four contingency factors. MIS Quarterly 18 (4). pp. 427-451.
Pask, Gordon. (1975). Conversation, Cognition and Learning: A Cybernetic Theory and Methodology. Elsevier, Amsterdam.
Pask, Gordon. (1996). Heinz von Foerster’s Self Organization, the Progenitor of Conversation and Interaction Theories. Systems Research 13 (3). pp. 349-362.
Patel, A. and Kinshuk, and Russell, D. (2002). Implementing Cognitive Apprenticeship and Conversation Theory in Interactive Web-Based Learning Systems. In: Sixth Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. International Institute of Informatics and Systemics, pp. 523-528.
Pimentel, D. M. (2007). Exploring classification as conversation. In Tennis, Joseph T., Eds. Proceedings North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization 2007 1, pp. 1-8, Toronto, Ontario. (http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1893/)
Scott, Bernard. (1993). Working with Gordon: Developing and Applying Conversation Theory (1968- 1978). Systems Research 10 (3). pp. 167-182.
Scott, Bernard. (2001). Cybernetics and the Social Sciences. Systems Research and Behavioral Science 18 (5). pp. 411-420.
Thomas, Laurie and Harri-Augstein, Sheila. (1993). Gordon Pask at Brunel: A Continuing Conversation about Conversations. Systems Research 10 (3). pp. 183-192.
Wenger, Etienne. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Today someone asked me about how the new LC report (http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/draft-report.html) meshed with participatory library concepts. Much of this is very compatible: user create materials, wider cooperation, distribution of tasks, etc.
However, a central tenant of participatory is the focus on conversation and how artifacts only make sense in the context of someone’ use. Perhaps it is the nature of the beast, but this approach to bibliographic control is in making descriptions of artifacts more standard and more efficient. So it is participatory in process, but not result. What would help is a recognition (perhaps as part of the cohesive philosophy of bibliographic control discussed) that any artifact, and thus it’s description, gains meaning and utility in the context of communities and conversations. Further that these conversations and context often exist BETWEEN records and items.
My question for the committee would be how could bibliographic control incorporate contexts between items or be applied to conversations and non-document like objects? What are your thoughts?
Thank God for the New York Times making their archives available on the web. While doing some research I ran across this little gem from 1912:
“THERE is a certain type of girl who seems born to be a librarian. She is ambitious, but not specially creative; fond of books, but with no marked aptitude for writing; intelligent and well educated, but not inclined to take up the work of a teacher, with its heavy demands and its cramping limitations, or to go into an office where literary tastes are usually at a discount.”
A worthwhile read:
OK, I got the Kindle (I’m an eBook freak, sue me). There are plenty of places to read the reviews, and the potential criticisms, so I won’t retread that ground. Rather, a clarification and a funny story.
The clarification first. I’ve read on several posts about the Kindle charging for free material, and restricting everything to a proprietary format that is DRM’d. Yes, the books you buy through the Kindle/Amazon store are proprietary and DRM’d. Yes, if you e-mail a document directly to the Kindle it costs 10 cents. However, if you have a computer with a USB port (Mac or Windows), putting your own content on the Kindle is easy and free. Amazon really messed this up in their marketing, but in the manual it shows you how to put a txt file directly on the Kindle, or how to convert a Word or html file for free. Instead of e-mailing it directly, you can email it to an alternate address, and they send you back the converted file all ready to copy over USB…free. Have a speech you want on the Kindle? Free. Itinerary? Free. Project Gutenberg texts? You guessed it.
OK, now the story. I turn it on and browse around, and find a menu “Experimental.” In there are services Amazon is playing with and one is called “Ask Kindle NowNow” that reads:
Ask us any question you want. Real people will research your question on the Web and send up to three answers to your Kindle, usually within in ten minutes.”
How am I not going to try this? So I ask “what is meant by participatory networks?” Sure enough a couple of minutes later, sent right to the Kindle, an answer. I’m reading through it and get really excited that they are talking about social networks, then Web 2.0, then Library 2.0! Wow, I say, Amazon knows about libraries! I keep reading and something starts sounding awfully familiar here. Sure enough the whole answer was a direct quote from the tech brief I co-authored for ALA. There at the end is a URL that points me right to the brief. So at least I was cited and can be happy that someone in NowNow land found my stuff, I just wish there was a bit of a preamble.
A little while later I got two more answers. The second one pointed to a CoLIS paper I did, and the third pointed to an item Todd Marshall posted on http://participatorynetworks.com/ . Looks like I have to do some more looking into NowNow (just found http://www.nownow.com/ ). Also interesting in light of the recent DigRef discussion on commercial grade services and eRef.
Click “Read More” for the full responses.
Continue reading “Kindle and NowNow”
OITP will be hosting a meeting to discuss participatory librarianship and the library and information science curriculum with LIS programs in the greater New York City area on December 18th, 2007. The meeting will be held at the Pratt School of Information and Library Science in Manhattan.
For more information please contact David Lankes at rdlankes@iis.syr.edu
Keisuke Inoue, doctoral student at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, explains his current research in applying participatory concepts to information retrieval and virtual reference.
Virtual Reference Service: From Competencies to Assessment. Lankes, R. David, Westbrook, L., Nicholson, S., Radford, M., Silverstein, J. (Eds.). (2007). New York: Neal-Schuman Pblishers.