Home
Todd Suomela's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
"But access is not all that digitization can do for us. Why should we limit ourselves to thinking about digital facsimiles as being akin to photographs? Why should we think about these artifacts in terms only of the texts they transmit? Let’s instead think about digitization as a new tool that can do things for us that we wouldn’t be able to see without it. "
"Public and policy discussions of higher education over the course of the twentieth century have focused on one issue in particular: access. "
-
"There's a huge incentive set up in the system [for] asking students very little, grading them easily, entertaining them, and your course evaluations will be high," Arum says.
Both the exhibition and the book are the outcome of Andrea Grover’s research as a Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellow at Miller Gallery and the Studio for Creative Inquiry. In her curatorial statement for Intimate Science and in the introduction to New Art/Science Affinities, Grover explains that contemporary artists working in the art/science matrix are distinct from their 1960s predecessors, a shift she attributes to the networked communication and open-source culture enabled by the internet: “Artists two generations ago were dependent on access to technicians, labs, computer time or manufacturers to realize works of scientific or technological complexity.” In contrast, “practitioners now have greater agency to work fluidly across disciplines and beyond rarified institutions and industries.”
"Today, I’d like to suggest that the traditional research library faces a similar challenge. The library collection is simply a bigger version of the encyclopedia: a seemingly exhaustive but actually (in the great majority of cases) very limited information portal that invites increasingly-skeptical customers to “start your research here.”"
-
But in its fight to retain a strong position in the marketplace of researchers’ time and attention, I think the library’s most powerful weapon is the type of material we usually refer to as “special collections.” Patrons can get commercially-published books and articles from any number of sources, but if your library owns a truly unique document (like a daguerrotype portrait of a 19th-century actor, or the handwritten diary of a Mormon pioneer, or a typescript transcription of an oral history) then access to that document constitutes a genuinely unique value proposition. Historically, we in research libraries have tended to consign special collections to something of a ghetto—a benign and beloved one to be sure, but one that is somewhat outside the mainstream of everyday library services.
That has to change. Greg Silvis, of the University of Delaware library, put it very well when he argued recently that “the future of libraries will not be found in commodity (catalog) records for commodity books.” Serving as a broker for resources that exist in many different copies in multiple formats and that can be found easily through Amazon or iTunes and purchased at reasonable prices is not an area of growing opportunity for libraries. Where we offer real and unique value, value that separates us from the competition, is in those areas in which we have no competition.
"But while I certainly want academic history to continue valuing clear, non-technical prose, I also think we should try to have a more realistic sense of who we reach and how we reach them. The myth of accessible academic history has its costs as well as its benefits.
To begin with, the myth of accessibility can devalue some of what academic historians do uniquely well. We produce knowledge about the past regardless of whether there is a mass market for the knowledge we produce. And since I don't believe that the mass market does a good job of determining what's worth knowing, I think we ought to moderate our polemics against specialization. Many good ideas--even ideas that eventually have a profound impact on broad, public conversations--start in abstruse corners of academic work. Think, for example, of Kuhn and the idea of a "paradigm shift.""
-
In this regard, it's interesting to compare the academic discipline of history to such disciplines as English and philosophy. There's actually huge popular interest in cultural criticism and philosophy, as the existence of E! (the cable network and website) and the voluminous "philosophy" section in any bookstore attest. But academic English scholars and academic philosophers understand themselves as doing something fundamentally different from, respectively, E! and the Deepak Chopra-heavy "philosophy" section of most bookstores. Academic historians, on the other hand, tend to see a variation of our own craft when we look at the History Channel or the New York Times Best Seller List.
And yet, this myth of the accessibility of academic history is, in many ways, a very productive one. As I've already said, I value readability. And though few academic historians are writing books for audiences much beyond our subdisciplines, let alone beyond the academy, the notion that one should write as if one were addressing a literate, general audience helps historians counteract the tendency of academic discourses to get ever more abstruse and hermetic. At least when I was in graduate school, many other disciplines seemed on occasion to put a positive value on their own abstruseness, presenting it as a sign of technical sophistication (e.g. philosophy and economics) or even their explicit opposition to negative values that they associated with readable texts
"Interface design encompasses three distinct, but related constructs--usability, visualization, and functionality (Vertelney, Arent, & Lieberman, 1990). Recently, a fourth component of interface design has emerged as a critical factor--accessibility. Interface design is most often associated with the development of Web pages, computer software, and multimedia, but is relevant to the creation of any instructional media or technical equipment. "
The defining question of the information age is no longer who’s online, but how they got there. In a Colorlines.com investigation, Jamilah King explains how big telecom created two Internets—one in which consumers and their content enjoys some, limited protection and another in which they are left prey to mobile wireless companies’ decisions. People of color, who have closed the traditional digital divide with their smartphones, are streaming into the latter space—and as a result, racial inequity is being wired into the 21st century economy.
As the world is speeding up, becoming more complex and more inter-connected, it is becoming increasingly more important to be able to see what is going on in a wider sphere. There are a lot of forces at work that sabotage this. Information silos that keep things to themselves, inside their own sites, to hold on to customers and be more valuable. A culture where few people report on things, and most others just re-transmit the reports, without taking time to verify anything for themselves. Protocols that encourage information to be disconnected from their sources. For better or for worse, the Internet was constructed that way. You don't know if the e-mail you just got really was from the person it says it is from. You don't know where most of the information on web pages comes from. Better, more trustworthy, less fragmented technologies can be developed.
In the meantime, your best bet for seeing the world more as it is, is to seek out unfiltered, unguarded communication channels. Seek out or create feeds of stuff that it would be impractical for anybody to doctor or police. Poke holes through the armor of large organizations, force them to open up unfiltered streams of any kind.
Yale University aims to change all that. In an announcement on May 10th, the university says its libraries, museums and archives will provide free universal access to high-resolution digitisations of holdings in the public domain
Concerned with the current state of American education, the College Board convened the Commission on Access, Admissions and Success in Higher Education to examine demographic, socioeconomic, public policy, and educations trends that affect college access and success.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in access
-
FSO Links
This list contains the links...
Items: 6 | Visits: 2389
Created by: DGL Department
-
10.GTD Tool List for Digital
紹介ページが邪魔なのでそれを省いたリスト。ツール先オンリ...
Items: 44 | Visits: 362
Created by: Emi OKU
-
MA ICT in Education
Logins to sites I need to ac...
Items: 15 | Visits: 193
Created by: Charles Davis
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo