Carnival of the Infosciences #71

A quiet couple of weeks in the biblioblogosphere? Maybe or maybe not, but there was only one submission for this edition of the Carnival, so we'll get to that first.

Mark Lindner recommended Iris Jastram's post on Information Literacy and Foreign Language Curricula. An interesting story about how sometimes the profs are a step ahead of us, and we need to play a bit of catchup, an enviable place to be in:

And then I slap myself in the forehead and remind myself that this is a wonderful thing. My faculty are actively engaging the question of how to develop their students' higher reasoning skills, and they've latched onto info lit as one of the methods for accomplishing this. And this isn't actually "my" turf. It's our turf.

And now on to some of my choices for the last couple of weeks, most from the biblioblogosphere and some from the world beyond, but I hope still relevant.

It seems that the buzz book these days (and there's always a buzz book) is Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. I picked it up last week at the Unversity of Windsor bookstore, but I haven't read it yet; it seems to be about how traditional notions of organization are breaking down in the face of tagging, folksonomies and very good search algorithm. In other words, you don't need to organize you stuff if you can just tag it, search for it and find it right away. There has been a lot of commentary and reviews of the book so far: Cory Doctorow, Ed Yourdon, Will Richardson and Peter Morville and many others.

Did Digg do something? asks Robert Scoble. His commenters respond. So does Laura Cohen. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check the Digg Wikipedia page as well as this one describing the AACS encryption key controversy in some detail.

Walt Crawford has had a couple of particularly stimulating posts in the last two weeks: Citizen vs. consumer and Lackluster veteran: Bias, much?. Neither are directly about the library world, but both concern the way we view ourselves both in society and our relationship to technology. Both have tons of back and forth comments, making for an interesting conversation.

Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around the Clock organized the incredibly successful Science Blogggers conference in North Carolina this past January as well as editing the accompanying anthology. He's announced details for next year's edition here and here. This year Christina represented and next year I hope to as well.

Some quick hits:

• Branding the library by scholarly publishing consultant Alma Swan. Swan worked on the team that prepared the RIN report Researchers' use of academic libraries and their services. Optimal Scholarship is a new blog that's worth watching.
  
  
• Mark C. Chu-Carroll of Good Math, Bad Math on Bad Software Design: Getting the Level Wrong. Lots of wisdom here about building usable interfaces.
  
  
• The CogSci Librarian has a couple of good posts on the future of reference service.
  
  
• Bruce Schneier is a computer/security guru of the highest order so when he asks Is Big Brother a Big Deal? I want to know the answer.
  
  
• danah boyd writes in The Knowledge Tree about Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?
  
  
• Rory Litwin's Why Web 2.0 is leading back to full cataloging is an interesting counter point to the Weinberger book mentioned above.
  
  
• Check out Digital Odyssey 2007 - Blog and presentations online at the conference blog.
  
  
• And on a lighter note: Job titles, Sharing

If anyone's interested, all the links in del.icio.us.

Update: I should also mention that the next Carnival is at Connecting Librarian. Don't forget to submit!