BiblioTech Web

Here’s a very cool quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was written over 25 years ago. Even though the book was comedic, or at least tongue in cheek, it was also rather prophetic. Douglas Adams had a good eye for where technology could lead us.

A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.

Isn’t that insightful? And becoming more true every day.

This morning CNN.com reported that the journal Nature recently performed a study that was published in an online article yesterday. This study concluded that, in covering scientific topics, Wikipedia is about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

They did side-by-side comparisons of articles on a wide variety of science-related topics and concluded that factual errors, like the Kennedy-related one that’s been big news lately, are the exception rather than the norm.

Based on 42 articles reviewed by experts, the average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while Britannica had three.

Of eight “serious errors” the reviewers found — including misinterpretations of important concepts — four came from each source, the journal reported.

[Jimmy] Wales [founder of Wikipedia]said the accuracy of his project varies by topic, with strong suits including pop culture and contemporary technology. That’s because Wikipedia’s stable of dedicated volunteers tend to have more collective expertise in such areas, he said.

The site tends to lag when it comes to topics touching on the humanities, such as the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature for a particular year, Wales said.

Next month, Wikipedia plans to begin testing a new mechanism for reviewing the accuracy of its articles. The group also is working on ways to make its review process easier to use by people who have less familiarity with computers and the Internet.

From the original article itself:

Michael Twidale, an information scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that Wikipedia’s strongest suit is the speed at which it can updated, a factor not considered by Nature’s reviewers.

“People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica,” Twidale adds. “Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one.”

Today the House and the Senate reached a deal renewing the Patriot Act for another four years. Libraries CAN still be required to turn over records of particular patrons’ library usage. Here’s a snippet from a Yahoo! news article.

The compromise also makes changes to national security letters, an investigative tool used by the
FBI to compel businesses to turn over customer information without a court order or grand jury subpoena.

Under the agreement, the reauthorization specifies that an NSL can be reviewed by a court, and explicitly allows those who receive the letters to inform their lawyers about them.

The Bush administration contends that such consultation already is allowed, citing at least two court challenges to NSLs. However, in a letter obtained by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on its Web site, the FBI prohibits the recipient “from disclosing to any person that the FBI has sought or obtained access to information or records under these provisions.”

That means if you’re a library that’s been forced to turn over any records, you’d better not blog about it!

According to a recent news story, Wikipedia is changing their policy toward who can edit pages on their site. In response to accusations that they allowed an article that falsly blamed someone for the Kennedy assassinations, they will now require that contributors register with them before being allowed to post information to their site. They estimate that it will cut down their contributions from several thousand a day to one or two thousand a day.

Read the whole story on Yahoo News.

Here’s a funny little story I read this morning. It should make you chuckle and at the same time consider your role in the world.

A college student at a recent college football game challenged a senior citizen sitting next to him, saying it was impossible for their generation to understand this:

“You grew up in a different world,” the student said, loud enough for the whole crowd to hear. “Today we have television, jet planes, space travel, man has walked on the Moon, our spaceships have visited Mars, we even have nuclear energy, electric and hydrogen cars, computers with light-speed processing… and, uh….”

Taking advantage of a pause in the student’s litany, the senior citizen said, “You’re right. We didn’t have those things when we were young; so we invented them, you little twit! What are *you* doing for the next generation??”

So, what are we, as librarians and educators, doing to make things better for the next generation? We can’t just use the stuff passed on to us, we need to improve on it and develop new ways of teaching and communicating. Otherwise, we’re just resting on someone else’s laurels.

One of the challenges in designing a web page (or a blog or your living room) is getting the right blend of colors. A friend of mine mentioned a website that gives you a variety of colors to go along with the one you select. It’s called ColorBlender.com and it gives you the RGB number and the HTML code for each color provided. You can also send a link via email to a particular color blend, in case you’re working with other people to come up with a scheme. It also allows you to download the blend as a Photoshop Color Table or Illustrator Colors. Plus, you can use a cookie to save your blends and retrieve them again from the same computer. Very cool! Give it a try!