Jon Frater

This piece by Kate Wittenberg from EPIC at Clumbia U. is definitely worth reading.  It’s titled "Beyond Google, What’s Next for Publishing" and does a fine job of discussing how online environments are affecting (and being affected by) the publishing industry.

Here’s an excerpt to get you started:

"While we have been busy attending conferences, workshops, and seminars
on every possible aspect of scholarly communication, information
technology, digital libraries, and e-publishing, students have been
quietly revolutionizing the discovery and use of information. Their
behavior, undertaken without consultation or attendance at formal
academic events, urgently forces those of us in scholarly publishing to
confront some fundamental questions about our organizations, jobs, and
assumptions about our work.

Most students today arrive at college assuming that a Google search is
the first choice for doing research, that MySpace is the model for
creating online content and building peer communities, and — perhaps
most important — that multitasking with various electronic devices,
often from remote locations, is the traditional way to do class work.
The implications of those changes must transform our publishing
strategies.

If "digital natives" are the next audience for our scholarly resources,
shouldn’t we be thinking about new ways to organize, store, and deliver
our content? In fact, is content even what we should be focusing on for
this next generation of users, or are the tools, functionality, and
access built on top of the content what are of real value?

As publishers, we are going to have to adapt quickly and creatively if
we wish to remain true to our missions as information professionals and
yet be relevant to users. Are we ready?"

Well, are we? Get thee now to the Chronicle of Higher Education and read! Read!

From today’s New York Times (links & excerpt):

Four Librarians Finally Break Silence in Records Case

Four Connecticut librarians who had been barred from
revealing that they had received a request for patrons’ records from
the federal government spoke out yesterday, expressing frustration
about the sweeping powers given to law enforcement authorities by the
USA Patriot Act.

The librarians took turns at the
microphone at their lawyers’ office and publicly identified themselves
as the collective John Doe who had sued the United States attorney
general after their organization received a confidential demand for
patron records in a secret counterterrorism case. They had been
ordered, under the threat of prosecution, not to talk about the request
with anyone. The librarians, who all have leadership roles at a small
consortium called Library Connection in Windsor, Conn., said they
opposed allowing the government unchecked power to demand library
records and were particularly incensed at having been subject to the
open-ended nondisclosure order.

From this week’s BusinessWeek (link & excerpt):

The Library: Next Best Thing to an MBA
Across the country, public libraries are giving would-be entrepreneurs a helping hand with resources and expert guidance…

Five years ago, Farid Ali was a Web designer for a
Manhattan law firm when a friend, George Constantinou, suggested they
open a restaurant together in Brooklyn. For Ali, however, there
appeared to be a couple of small hurdles. First, his entire restaurant
experience amounted to a brief stint as a busboy some 20 years before.
Second, he had never owned his own business.

"I had always worked for other people," he says. "To
become an entrepreneur was very challenging, I wasn’t in that mindset."
So he enrolled in an online workshop for budding entrepreneurs and came
across a librarian who told him about the resources available at the
public library.

For the next two years, Ali spent three hours a
day, four days a week, poring over reference material, databases, and
digital tools at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Business Library.
Constantinou joined him frequently. Together, they learned how to write
a business plan, create a Web site for their business, and, as Ali
says, "open a restaurant." Moreover, he says, "I realized by scanning
the shelves that owning a business takes a lot more than just raising
money and finding a location."

I found this project by David Plotz on Slate.com this morning (I’m already behind the curve as he started this weeks ago), but it’s interesting to me since I started reading The Bible Unearthed by Neil Asher Silberman and Israel Finklestein over the weekend.  The Old Testament (as you non-Jews call it) is not history . . . but it is, sort of. On the other hand, it’s not mythology . . . but it is, sort of. And it’s not rules and regulations on how to be a decent person (but it is, sort of.) And the archaeological record deals with all of it, but not in the way the raw text of the bible leads one to expect if one takes it as a completely reliable history book.

I’ve started to read the Torah portions at home on Shabbat, like a good Jew is supposed to. Technically, I’m supposed to study with a group, but I haven’t gotten to that point yet. But all things in time.  And it’s interesting to me to do this because it’s the first time I’ve actually sat down to do this, so I see where Plotz is coming from in his own research. It’s especially interesting having grown up the only believer in a family of Jewish atheists. However one feels about religion in general, I think the bible is still a powerful cornerstone to Western Civilization (notice the capitalization there) and it’s worth a read. That is, the bible (as we Jews call it) and Silberman and Finklestein’s book on the archeology of ancient Israel and Judah are worth a read.  I find it’s handy to keep the bible nearby as one goes through the other book too; that’s a trick I learned dealing with Joyce in college: when reading Ulysses, have a copy of the Odyssey handy.

Updates as they happen.

If the names Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs and Cassady don’t ring an immediate bell with you, go and read this article by Donald W. Miller. Actually, even if they do ring a bell, read the article anyway; it’s a nicely organized, compact overview of some of the Beats’ better (and lesser) known history. You’ll notice at the bottom of the page, Miller notes that the article is adapted from a longer paper presented at the Fellowship of American Bibliographic Society’s Annual Symposium this past week, which makes me want to write to him to see if that paper’s to be made available anywhere any time soon.

Personally, the heaviest work I’ve ever done on the Beats was in college when Prof. John Tytell presided over the 1992 English Honors seminar, which I took. (Took it? I was at the meeting that chose his proposed seminar out of eight or nine others.) The seminar’s thrust wasn’t to the Beats particularly, although he did spend a big chunk of his life researching them (Ginsburg in particular). 

Now that I think of it, that was a pretty decent seminar: it was titled "Some American Antinomians" and spanned three hundred years of American literature.  ‘Antinomians’ in this  sense being those who go against generally accepted moral law. We covered Melville (Billy Budd, Bartleby), Emerson and Thoreau, Pound (of course–with Tytell everything comes back to Pound sooner or later), The Beats, both as a group and individually, and I’m likely forgetting bits and pieces of other worthwhile writing. But those were the biggies. The antinomian aspects of any of all these folks are debatable, but it wasn’t a bad seminar.

This entry has been waiting to be posted for over a week so I’ll hit the publish button now, but I promise I’ll write more about the seminar itself at some point in the future.

If you’ve been involved with collaborative web projects you’ve probably heard of "wikis." If not, a "wiki" is a shared website that’s generally devoted to informational projects. Anybody can post, within certain limits, anything they like as long as it’s topical. The idea being that one person rarely can know everything about a subject, but get a few thousand knowledgeable individuals together in collaboration and you will end up with a very complete information website indeed.

With this in mind, enter the Wiki of Wrongdoing. People for the American Way, a political action group that would like to see regime change in the U.S. in 2008, has implemented the same technology that Wikipedia utilizes to come up with a definitive encyclopedia of George W. Bush’s administration’s legal, ethical, moral and competency shortcomings.  If you’re into this sort of thing it’s definitely worth a look.