Infomancy n. 1.The field of magic related to the conjuring of information from the chaos of the universe. 2.The collection of terms, queries, and actions related to the retrieval of information from arcane sources.
In the spirit of Bill Mahr, I have a few new rules about research. 1) Google is not a source. No, I’m sorry. You did not get your information from Google. Google doesn’t publish information, they just aggregate it. Search engines help you find information, but they are not the source of the information. When [...]
Are you satisfied with your OPAC? In all likelihood, the answer is no. Actually, the answer will porbably always be no. You can probably provide me with even more examples of how the OPAC sucks especially well in your library, but instead let’s engage in some root cause analysis. Given: OPACs Suck But why? I [...]
One of the ideas that librarians love to love is the concept of serendipity in the stacks. Anecdotal evidence supporting the power of the incidental find as a result of shelf browsing abounds. Don’t get me wrong, I too have benefited from this. Working on my senior thesis for my undergraduate American Studies program, serendipity [...]
Yesterday, I attended a session about augmented reality gaming (ARG) using the MIT ARG program. This is a location based game that uses GPS or other location services to augment the physical reality with an additional layer or virtual reality within the game. In one of MIT’s examples, this means as you move around the [...]
Actually, it might be more accurate to say that this is a a cause for good, as opposed to evil. I wrote a while back about “grey areas” on the internet – most notably that they are all grey. This is not to trot out the simplification that digital information is contained within 1s and [...]