Blog 7 - (Watt, Mullin, Baio, West, Lepore)

A few disparate readings to sum up in this blog post. Mullin on the subject of IMSLP was well written and thorough, but not timely. The article is from 2010, so many things have changed since then. I was surprised that the author went into such great detail about how to search and find things on the site when feature was being updated even at the time of writing. I was also interested to hear that IMSLP is, at heart, a Wiki. Though it seems some librarians and libraries are adding content, and perhaps the site’s robots, individual users can also contribute.

Watt’s presentation about informational literacy is well taken from my perspective. Students, and in fact everyone, need to learn how to be skeptical of things in life. There are more specific issues of primary and secondary sources and scholarly vs popular that should be covered in a more formal setting. However, every person needs to learn how to be skeptical of what they see online, on tv, advertising, etc so that they can think critical. He approached this from the perspective of a historian, though I have always conceived of it as one of the basic principles of science. Look for evidence, be skeptical, think critically, revise your thoughts.

Biao, West and Lepore are all circling around the same general topic of archival information on the internet. I found this topic to be most engaging. That said, I didn’t care for the West article. Who came up with the idea to portray Google’s relationship with librarians as a crappy relationship? This seems like a fictionalized version of the Biao article, essentially covering the same information. Both Biao and West seem to be taken with the idea that Google was somehow better in the past. Maybe they were, maybe not, that’s got something to do with the Lepore article and struggling to interpret the past...I guess I don’t really sympathize with their romanticizing. Google is a company. They want to make money. We shouldn’t be holding them up as a standard for ethics and societal good. The reason we have governments, public libraries, schools, non-profits and so on is to take on the tasks that are going to be good for humanity. We can’t count on industry to do that. I was really interested about the mention of the Internet Archives game repository and even tried to go play some Defender. Sadly I couldn’t make it work.

The Lepore article presented a few more topics. The problem of footnotes, content drift, and reference rot is familiar and new all at the same time. I’m sure most of us have experienced this in one way or another. You search for a website where you have looked before but *poof* it’s gone! It’s a problem. To hear that the same thing is happening to lawyers and scholars is at once reassuring but also terrifying. Isn’t there a better way? The solution presented towards the end of the piece, perma.cc, they say is really a band-aid. Wouldn’t authors get mad about that if you could perma.cc their article and now anyone with that link can see your copyrighted work? Or is that not how it actually goes? Also, since we know all the links will change in the future, why does the APA manual include URLs in citations? They may work for a little while but ultimately they will fail. Maybe in combination with the date information you will be able to get it from the Wayback Machine? But not every citation with a URL includes a date?! Finally, the robots.txt exception seems too easy. Is that what all the politicians do nowadays so that no one can prove they said anything one way or the other? Perhaps all of this interneting we’re doing now will seem insignificant and infantile in just a few more years anyway. I was amazed at how forward thinking some of the internet pioneers presented in the article were in the 80s and 90s. We’re still grappling with these issues now and they really saw them coming.

Lastly, we discussed Peabody and Sherman at dinner with my parents and MK just before I read this article. She had never seen the cartoon and we had to explain it to her. Quite the coincidence.