Quote on "aboutness" and tagging

"Things aren't about what they're about. "Aboutness" is also contextual and ambiguous. For example, if my blog entry on the JFK assassination links to the 1962 Sears catalog from which Oswald bought his rifle, the author of that catalog will not have labeled it as being about the JFK shooting. And if a scientist publishes a paper about a new polymer, she may in passing reject some closely related compound because it's too sticky -- but that may be exactly what you're looking for. So, for you the article is about what the author tosses away in a footnote. Not to mention that in much of the best writing, about-ness is an emergent property. So, while the author's intentions are an important clue, aboutness is ambiguous. Systems that too easily categorize and classify based upon a univocal idea of aboutness do violence to their topic."
-- David Weinberger at www.hyperorg.com/misc/unspokengroups.html

Quote about publishing

"As the internet and all its variant technologies become a bigger and bigger part of our lives, the comoditization of content will only increase. A blogger holding forth on the merits of his favorite brew has access to the same worldwide audience as a Pulitzer Prize-winning author ... As a publisher, our strength and our future lie in partnering with the best scholars ... making their work more accessible, meaningful, and useful ... We're no longer in the business of amassing content--quantity isn't the issues ... We will all be moving away from a just-in-case content development approach (it's all in there) to just-in-time, 100 percent relevant reference delivery."

--Ron Boehm, President & CEO, ABC-CLIO

As quoted by Cheryl LaGuardia in her e-Views and Reviews column (p. 26) in the May 15, 2005, issue of Library Journal (see www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA601030.html).

Recommended article -- Opening up OpenURLs with Autodiscovery

I'm recommending a very good article in the April 2005 issue of Ariadne -- Opening up OpenURL with Autodiscovery by Chudnov, et al.

Read it at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/chudnov/

Craigslist

Interesting quote from an article about Craigslist in the Jan 16, 2006, New York magazine:

During the transit strike, Scott Anderson, a blogger for the Tribune Company, noticed with sadness that the ride-share space on Newsday.com, a Tribune holding, was empty while Craigslist was going crazy with offers. “Yet another crisis and Craigslist commands the community,” he wrote. “How come Craig organically can touch lives on so many personal levels—and Craig’s users can touch each other’s lives on so many levels? It’s just frustrating that even when we [newspapers] try, we more often than not find we are absolutely losing what may be one of the most important parts of the business as it more and more moves online—the ability to connect people to one another and to activate conversations. To not just be the deliverer of news and information . . . but the catalyst of connection.”

Some of this could apply to libraries, too. Libraries are too slow to respond to its users' needs and changing expectations. So, they go elsewhere. Libraries used to be physical places for interaction and conversation. Now that our users have gone online, they have become "invisible users" and libraries have lost some of that "community" and "catalyst" role. Librarians have not built or provided similar virtual space.

BTW, the full article is at http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/internet/15500/index.html

Tightly-coupled systems

Loosely-coupled systems is a concept in which I am interested. I recently read a good counter example of a tightly-coupled system that I want to remember for illustrative means. The scheduling of airline flights. Some quotes:

"In a less efficient era, the waste of simple back-and-forth scheduling might have meant an extra aircraft or two just waiting idly, costing the airline money, but luckily available to fill in for the out-of-service DC-10. Now, with scheduling approachign perfection, less than 2 percent of American's fleet lies fallow at any given moment. So the nearest replacement plane happens to be in Dallas. A crew must fly it to Chicago."

"The paradox of efficiency means taht as the web tightens it grows more vulnerable to small disturbances -- disruptions and delays that can cascade through the system for days."

"Networks like this are said to be tightly coupled. A complex construction project with a timeline scheduled with perfect efficiency, all the slack squeezed out of it, may be tightly coupled and a candidate for serious disruption."

"Charles Perrow, in his study Normal accidents, extended the concept to complex systems where the coupling connects not physical parts but abstract services, people, and organizations. 'Looselyl coupled systems, whether for good or ill, can incorporate shocks and failures and pressures for change without destabilization,' he notes. 'Tightly coupled systems will respond more quickly to these perturbations, but the response may be disastrous.'

Gleick, James. Faster: the acceleration of just about everything. Pantheon Books, New York, 1999, pp. 219, 223, 224.