Googlezon, Episode VI: Return of the Librarians
Roy Tennant, California Digital Library
Friday, September 30, 2005, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m.
Like some sort of grade B movie, we've stood idly by while Googlezon has kidnapped our patrons and ravaged our collection and building budgets. Are we going to let them get away with it? Of course not! Come hear about how librarians can still vanquish Googlezon and win back our rightful place as the guardians of the world's knowledge and all that is good.
Blogging Outloud: Shifts in Public Voice
danah boyd, University of California-Berkeley
Saturday, October 1, 2005, 9:00 –10:30 a.m.
What is blogging? Who is the audience? And why would anyone write one anyhow? This talk will analyze the practice of blogging, emphasizing the diverse ways in which people use this medium to express that which is dear to them and share their thoughts with a broader community of like-minds. Embedded in this talk will be discussions of audience negotiation, the tension between textuality and orality, and the role of architecture in helping people manage their voice.
Bibliographic Control and the Web: An Oxymoron?
Michael Gorman, ALA President
Saturday, October 1, 2005, Luncheon
Information and the Quality of Life: Environmentalism for the Information Age
David Levy, Professor, University of Washington
Sunday, October 2, 2005, 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 noon
A recent New York Times article claims that American workers are increasingly stressed out, overtired, and overwhelmed. “Even at home,” it notes, “in the soccer bleachers or at the Labor Day picnic, workers are never really off the clock, bound to BlackBerries, cellphones and laptops.” The modern environmental movement began forty years ago with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and with the growing realization that unchecked urbanization and industrialization were upsetting the earth’s precious natural balance. If the environmental movement emerged in response to the pollution of our natural environment, could we be on the verge of a new movement spawned by the pollution of our information environment? In this talk, I will describe recent efforts at the Information School of the University of Washington to address the growing problems associated with information overload, fragmented attention, and the busyness and speedup of everyday life, and will discuss what we can do as individuals and as a society.