Social Networking Reads

I've come across quite a few interesting articles lately. Here are some of the ones I've enjoyed the most.

Time Spent on Twitter Soars by Over 3,700%, Facebook up 700% from PR 2.0

New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets from Harvard Business' Conversation Starter

Archives? What archives?

Bush E-mail Records Could Be Lost to History
from the Lost in Translation blog of the National Journal

This makes me so angry. We KNEW this was happening, now seems a little late (but better than never, if only in terms of precedent for the future) to be suing people about it.

Here's a little gem from the article:
There's a couple of issues relating specifically to Vice President Cheney and the office of the vice president. It's our understanding that the vice president's office came up with stamps that said "treat record as classified." Or as "secured compartmentalized information." Now, classification is not sort of just a generic term, it's actually a term of art that refers to classification according to the standards that have been established by the president in an executive order. The executive order is 12958. Things that do not meet the standards of the executive order should not be labeled as classified. So it was improper to label some of those things, at least, as classified. And the problem is that once you label it as classified, it makes it far more unlikely it's ever going to be released, because it's going to require significant additional significant review to determine if it's really classified or not....

Now we'll just have to wait and see if Obama's administration does better...

The first thing is, we would like the new president to state up front and clearly that he is committed to preserving the historical record, the documents, presidential decision-making. That's something that we feel like the Bush administration has not wanted to do.

It seems like the sort of thing we could count on him for, but after all this mess, I am feeling far from certain.

Don't Friend Me, says David Lee King

Recently I was happy to have found David Lee King's blog about libraries and web technology. There are a lot of good conversations going on over there - most recently about Twitter and libraries friending patterns, plus a follow up where I perhaps waxed too rhapsodic in the comments.

He talks about libraries just friending other libraries rather than reaching out to their community. I added to that my experience of being friended by lots of libraries and librarians spread all over the country. Perhaps it's a unique scenario, since I use Twitter purely as a means of staying in touch with friends, but I did put that I was a library school student in my profile. And for a while, I was accepting all the friend requests that I recieved from librarians, so long as we seemed to have something in common in addition to that (usually knitting).

But eventually I let almost all of them go - they weren't twittering about things that interested me, and I had a really hard time imagining they were interested in the fact that my cats can be annoying, or that I love my crockpot. As far as library institutions go... if I don't have some sort of connection to them, I'm not sure why I would want to follow them. Besides, many of them don't pass the following/follower ratio rule (if there are a large number of people who you follow who don't follow you in return, I am probably not interested, either). I do follow places that I have some connection with - SF BART, for example. If the library in my neighborhood had a Twitter feed, I would follow it. But just because someone, somewhere has some connection to library science is not enough for me. Not for the way I choose to use the tool.

Which is not to say I don't wish my fellow library-related people and institutions well. I do. I just don't necessarily want to read about all of them every day. Life is too short, and time too precious.

Dewey Debate

Huzzah for the idea of moving away from Dewey, that's what I think, though I know the idea is still hotly contested.

Build the Open Shelves Classification

linked from the comments here at "Do We Dewey?" where there are a range of interesting comments, including one pointing out that Dewey is easier for young children to learn. That may be, but I don't think it's a good enough reason to stay with a system that is completely outmoded in its world view. In the Enlightenment*, Western scholars, including Melville Dewey, thought they knew just about everything there was to know in the world, and created a classification system accordingly. They couldn't have been more wrong - and in current times we need a system that can embrace and fully accommodate world cultures and non-Western/Christian thought; one that provides a framework but leaves some flexibility for the future.

DRM funtime

This, THIS is why I still buy my music on CD. Seriously, people.

This week, Yahoo Music e-mailed customers who purchased music from their site and let them know that as of September 30, 2008, Yahoo Music will go dark.

And they will take the DRM key servers down with it.

That means that anyone who legally purchased tunes through Yahoo Music will lose the right to transfer that music to other devices or computers, even though they paid for that right.

Sucks to be you if you choose a service, put down your money, and then something happens to the service.

Keeping It Digital

I just wrote a paper on how government agencies are handling email and the fact that many of them "preserve" emails by selectively printing them. Looks like some have realized that's ass-backwards, though according to J. Timothy Sprehe , they're not going far enough: Keeping It Digital.

I agree that legislators and government agencies in general don't really understand electronic media. This is a really SCARY thing when you think about how dependent we are on it to function - how much of our information is stored there, and how easy it is to lose or tamper with it.

Library Anime

This is awesome. An anime film about saving libraries from litigation against the freedom of expression.

I should look for a translation of the book it is based on.

Library Linkage

I have been thinking about using this space to collect some of the interesting library/information related articles I come across. I do want to track some of these interesting tidbits, and especially now that I've subscribed to the LISNews feed, I've got more of them than I can mentally organize.

Also, I haven't read them all yet. But I'd like to.

Here are a few to start:

Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?

Architectures for Collaboration:Roles and Expectations for Digital Libraries