AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Next Presentation

This afternoon I felt the inspiration to begin working on my next presentation, the one coming up at the Theology and Pedagogy in Cyberspace Conference in April. (My inspiration was somewhat instigated by impatient emails I’d been receiving, but since the emails hadn’t worked yet by themselves, I trust that some extra agency fueled my ruminations this afternoon.) I want to connect old-school library research functions to the ways that students (and we) think about online research.

In order to make a point about old-school research, I wanted to talk about the cards that used to inhabit library books. If you're over, oh, 18? you’ll know what I mean; you young folks, however, will just have to believe me when I say that libraries used to track their collection by vast arrays of cards that indicated who had withdrawn a book, and when it was due back. But what were those cards called? They aren’t “library cards”; those are your personal license to use the library. What were those sign-’em-out thingies called?

My guess was “circulation cards,” but Liz Lawley advised me (from Japan) that they were properly known as “book cards.” So that settles that question.

Then I chatted with Kevin Marks about a cool Technorati feature request: what if you could run a conventional web search, but that the results were weighted by comparison to a particular site’s links (or a collective of sites’). That is, what if I wanted a dishwasher like David Weinberger’s? I could call David and ask his brand, but some of us aren’t bold enough to call him cold. Why can’t I search for the term “dishwasher” with the results prioritized by how strong their links are to David’s pages? Thus, if you looked for “philosophy” as it’s inflected by David’s links, you’d turn up a lot of Heidegger, but (I estimate) not so much Bergson. There’s probably a Bergson booster out there somewhere, though, whose site would generate a very different list of “philosophy” sites. If you used my site as a seed for this sort of search for “biblical interpretation,”, you’d come up with few inerrantist pages and more liberal and postmodern pages; if you searched with the seed site of Pat Robertson, though, the results would be reversed.

Kevin reminded me that links don’t tell the whole story; his Vote Links would enable me to differentiate an enthusiastic link about a good book from a link to Amazon that points toward a particular weak novel without much plot that alleges esoteric secrets behind that well-known secret-keeping institution, the Church (by which is meant the Roman Catholic Church, as though Orthodox and Protestants didn’t even exist, which is handy for the plotless book because if there had been disaffected secret-keeping clergy around the time of the Reformation, we might have actually encountered evidence for the preposterous premises the book puts forward). I could Vote Link “-” for The Galileo Code, and Vote Link “+” for one of Rowan Williams’ books, adding tremendously useful metadata to the bare link. All great stuff, and it stands to be very helpful for my presentation.