For my symposium entry, I created a list of five ways my thinking changed thanks to this class.
Due to some life circumstances, I was not able to participate in this class every single week. But I know I was not alone, and as we’ve all caught up, I’ve been so grateful for everyone who responded to my posts (even as I was spamming you these past couple of weeks), posted interesting and heartfelt things themselves, and made this course great! Thanks for being here.
“It’s not working!”
“I need help!”
Those are the two sounds I’m listening for amidst the chaos. It’s loud during my volunteer shifts at the STEAM LEGO robotics program, between the sounds of kids digging through their LEGO kits and the snapping together of bricks, shouts of glee or mild sibling spats, the beeping of the Bluetooth connections and the robot sound effects (the kids love to make their robots bark or meow, and the software kindly has it built-in).
Continue reading Infinite Learning: Library as Messy Classroom
Over a decade ago, I was struck by a scary exhibit during a visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. The exhibit is about the “Digital Dark Age”: the problem that arises as technology moves on too quickly, and people do not convert their data from obsolete formats (floppy disks, CDs, even older digital file encodings) into something that they can still access and read.
In the Hyperlinked Library, we’ve been learning all about how libraries need to change and evolve; at the same time, we have to meet our patrons where they are, and that might involve a pile of old home movies on VHS. To that end, and inspired by my own local library’s historical archives, I propose a Digital Memory Lab as a worthy use of our imaginary ideal funding and space.
I find it ironic that we know how important stories and creativity are when it comes to the library and why we’re here. And yet, AI’s current popular forms–large language models and art generators–have consistently devalued those stories and creativity, that human element. I know there is a big push to adopt and get comfortable with new technologies in the library. Or, even if we don’t want to use them ourselves, we have to know what’s going on so we as information professionals can guide people to use these tools wisely and understand their limitations.
I get that. I’m still very uneasy with a technology that has stolen creative work, accelerated the use of limited environmental resources, and begun to drown out human voices. (That last one is personal–I submit stories to fiction magazines, and I don’t want them to get overwhelmed by AI spam and have to close! Human-made stories are infinitely more surprising, interesting, humorous, emotional–everything I want out of stories.)
So for this reflection on the power of stories, I decided to try a side-by-side comparison. I wrote and recorded my own story in my own voice, and then I told ChatGPT to generate a story and used TextSpeakPro to narrate that one as well. Have a listen and/or look at the transcripts, and see what you think. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you where my own preference lies.
My story: https://recorder.google.com/7e0037a1-abbb-42b1-aefe-83a19b7b86de
AI’s story: https://textspeakpro.com?id=Uq50B-83q01-asv75
Transcripts after the jump.
Continue reading Reflection 4: Blending stories with new horizons, for an AI challenge
There’s a Tweet that pops up every now and then on social media. It says, ‘my girlfriend regularly tells me “if free public libraries didn’t already exist and someone tried to invent them, they would be condemned as a socialist plot” and I think about that a lot.’
After learning about the New Models and all the ways public libraries have evolved into what they are now, I began to wonder: if public libraries didn’t already exist, what would I invent to take their place? Socialist bogeymen and taxpayer costs be damned–what does the community actually need? What does an ideal third space look like?
Continue reading Reflection 3: New Models (A Library From Scratch)
I’ve been thinking a lot about privacy lately.
For this reflection, I was originally going to focus on AI’s role in Hyperlinked Environments, but some things happened recently* which have made me very aware of how easy it is to find my address on the internet. A hyperlinked environment full of the latest technology means that information flows freely. It’s never been easier for me to find out whether that restaurant I liked is still open, which of my old classmates work at a company with an interesting job posting, or what people with similar reading habits think of the book with a pretty cover that I just spotted on the library’s display table. By the same token, all the available technology means that whoever digs deep enough can find my reading preferences, every place I’ve ever worked, my mother’s maiden name, and exactly where I live. From a privacy and personal safety standpoint, that scares me.
It’s a good moment to think about community. Since January I’ve watched and felt helpless as friends worry about their federally-funded jobs, as oligarchs try to shut down parts of the US government that help people, as our president destroys long-standing alliances and reneges on agreements.
Needless to say, it’s an interesting time to learn about hyperlinked communities, when it feels like the global community is falling apart. I keep thinking about Danah Boyd’s (2016) observation of a “digital white flight,” as white teenagers left behind MySpace in favor of Facebook, almost twenty years ago. We’re still segregating ourselves, because where you hang out online says something about who you are. If you’re still on X (née Twitter), does that mean you support Elon Musk? What about Meta and how it’s getting rid of fact-checking?
“You are not a format. You are a service” (Schneider, 2006). The library of the future (and present) must shift from “book warehouse” to “center for discovery, learning, and creation,” for people, and librarians should be careful about romanticizing book-as-object over what the book says–i.e. “the content or the container?” (Stephens, 2016).
Welcome to my blog for INFO 287: The Hyperlinked Library!
I have just begun my second semester at the iSchool. Last term I got three of the core courses out of the way, so other than INFO 285 and ePort, I’m very much in choose-your-own-adventure (electives) mode.
In 2021, I left the tech industry after about 15 years of experience working as an engineer. I intended to go back eventually, but I wanted to take at least a year off to recover from burnout and work on my fiction writing full-time. Since then, not only did I write a lot (and learn just how hard it is to get published, though I’m still working on it), but I realized I didn’t want to go back to the tech industry after all.
Reading, information, and community have always been important to me, which led me to libraries and getting an MLIS. I plan to work in public libraries and determine my ideal mix of patron interaction and back end, where I know my tech skills will come in handy. One of the highlights of my first term was taking INFO 200 with Professor Stephens and immersing myself in the information behaviors of a specific community. INFO 287: #hyperlib felt like a natural next step to explore how libraries can and should move beyond only books to better serve the communities they’re in, while integrating technology in a healthy way.
Outside of school, writing, and reading (a lot), my other interests include running, knitting, puzzles (especially crosswords), trivia, Dungeons and Dragons, and hanging out with my cats. The obligatory cats picture is included, of course, along with the sweater I knit while watching lectures last fall.
