January 2012 – Glorious Generalist

This year marked my first ALA Midwinter Conference. I’ve been to Annual a few times (twice in DC and once in Chicago), and numerous smaller library conferences, but I’d always been curious about what Midwinter is like. This year I finally had an opportunity to attend, since I am serving on the LITA Education Committee and participated on the Drupal4Lib IG “FAIL!” panel with fabulous MC and librarian Nina McHale. The FAIL! panel was lots of fun, though pretty intimidating because I was sitting at a table with some incredibly smart people who have failed in what seemed to me more exciting ways. Either way, I got to talk about fishing cats at the National Zoo. And, you know, Drupal. Which I need to work on this weekend.

My favorite part of Midwinter is the fact that it’s mostly sitting down at a table with like minded people talking about issues, whether they are practical projects or general theoretical questions. It’s also small enough that you have a chance to run into people, unlike Annual where you can’t even find the people you set out to meet. For instance, walking by the Networking Uncommons I spotted Andromeda Yelton, whom I met though this blog and talk to on Twitter fairly often but had only met at Internet Librarian karaoke, where it’s hard to talk about web development.

I attended the Library Linked Data IG meeting on Sunday, which was a nice mix of people and ideas. Linked data is something I know about a lot more in theory than in practice, so it was good to get an idea of what some of the practical issues are. One concern/issue is bringing the library linked data world into the rest of the semantic web world–we have the coolest data, so we need to be a part of the conversations. Another issue is actually consuming linked data in libraries, which doesn’t have as many tools or examples available but is something that is more appealing to administrators.

Another topic was how to share information about available tools and data sets in something like a clearinghouse. One potential on ALA Connect is linked from the ALA page above, but the DLF already had a Zotero group, so that’s another potential. I mentioned to someone or other I was going to put myself through Linked Data bootcamp before Code4Lib in a few weeks so I can get beyond the beginner stage. I know I always say I will blog about things and then never do (silly clothing catalog is one major example), but maybe I will blog about this.

Either way, in the future will definitely try to attend Midwinter.

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I like the idea of this book, but I didn’t like reading it. His argument is that by keeping everything that we’ve done online that we risk two things: first, that adolescent foibles and drunken late nights will be held against us potentially forever, and second that to forget makes us in some way more human and we have to retain that. To be honest I skimmed almost everything regarding the second argument and so may be stating it poorly.

While it is in fact the case that it’s easier to find out people’s shady secrets when you can find them online, I don’t think this has changed society in any fundamental way. All human cultures have some sort of taboos that if people break they try to keep it quiet. Modern American culture doesn’t have the same sort of shame culture that Ancient Rome, Victorian England, etc. had anyway. I am sure I am wrong, but most cases of blackmail are for criminal offenses, not drinking pictures or sexual escapades. Now that DADA has been lifted this will probably take care of a lot of one of the remaining huge incentives to keep sexuality quiet–not that this doesn’t exist in a hundred other little ways in other arenas. Either way, there are things that people want to keep secret for sure, but a lot of other things that just aren’t a big deal for other people to know.

But I digress. It is well known by now that before job hunting you better clean up your digital image. I don’t see that as a problem. You can easily live a private life about which your employers know nothing, digitally or physically. The major issues arise when it comes to the intersection of personal and professional–what if you use your social media accounts for work purposes, for instance? Standards for institutional social media are changing, partly due to these sorts of conflicts. Some organizations push for more open communication, some shut it down completely.

He proposes some solutions to these problems such as digital abstinence and expiration dates for information. They are already technically possible, but I didn’t buy his argument that it was necessary to even worry about the problem. There have been a number of books on this topic lately, and this is just not the best treatment of it.

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