Digital Ephemera

By the very nature of our profession, librarians must harness the chaos of information and transform it into manageable, tangible data. Whether it is through a conversation at the reference desk or through the wilderness of metadata, it is part of our job description.

Lots of people argue that material objects can't provide you with true happiness but this month I disagree. I am currently in throes of an affair with my new 3G iPhone. The only reason it took me so long to obtain is through a series of tricky shenanigans by T-Mobile that hooked me into several long years of contracts. Two weeks ago I traded in my basic, 100% recycled MOTO W233 Renew to an iPhone encased in shiny red plastic like a candy apple.

I am always in search of new ideas to stimulate my work. Ever since I learned how to write web copy I have been following Hubspot's blog (http://blog.hubspot.com/) to gather fresh ideas and pick up tips.

About this time of year, recent graduates around the world are feeling a void of activity in the absence of classes. Regardless of what we have graduated from, whether it be a liberal arts undergraduate degree or Law school, the future seems way too unplanned. Finishing graduate school is similar to a vigorous workout in which every yard line was barely met with frantic overdue deliveries of signed forms via digital drop boxes. This is not even taking into consideration the manuscript-length e-portfolio that I drafted for admission to graduate candidacy last semester.

According to the Guardian younger social networking users are being chased away by their 25-to-34-year-old counterparts who are making social networks as uncool as jam band music or Garrison Keiller. While I personally consider my tech savvy professional peers to be cool we are not necessarily embraced by high schoolers as the epitome of hip culture. Personally, I was never considered hip even as a teenager except in an offbeat, is-she-serious kind of way.

NPR has published a new story about the rift between generation y (twenty-somethings), generation x (thirty-somethings) and older baby boomers in the workplace. Joshua Brockman reports that "...62 percent of Gen Y workers say they engage in social networking from work. That's according to LexisNexis, an online information service. The results LexisNexis's Technology Gap Survey show vastly different attitudes about appropriate technology use among various generations in the work force.

On my way home from running errands today I heard an inspiring opinion piece on NPR by Michael S. Roth, Michael S. Roth , president of Wesleyan University. In his essay Roth connects his own experience as a college graduate from Wesleyan in 1978 to the current challenges that 2009 college graduates face as they enter the job market during a period of recession.

Storytelling is not simply the act of recitation but an active adaption of a story that connects the teller to an audience, creating a sense of community. Whether a story is meant to edify, scare or simply provide entertainment, it is a time-honored tradition that dates back to a time before printed words. Oral tradition however has experienced an amazing renewal thanks to digital technology. I came to this course as someone interested in radio production. Especially in America, storytelling on the radio has been a staple of popular culture.

For the last four years Google has been digitizing millions of books from the collections of major research libraries and making the texts researchable online. For the last two years the company has been enmeshed in a legal dispute with copyright holders. Finally, a settlement has been reached between the plantiffs and Google that will create an enterprise known as the Book Rights Registry to represent the interests of the copyright holders.