This was a meeting of cheerleaders when the topic deserves and requires reasoned debate and development.
The SI 2.0 conference seems to assume that LOC digitization and flickr Commons projects are unmixed successes.
Digitalization of SI collections is already diverting budget from research and collections management; assuming the public can blunder into the collections without huge expenses in dollars and staff time is, to say the least, naive.
It's not like curators and informed lay enthusiasts in each field don't already interact; perhaps some invitation-only wikis could help there. The problem is that of the two elements of the SI mission, "...increase and diffusion of knowledge...," the boring old "increase of knowledge" has become subservient to "diffusion" of free entertainment.
If the quality and authority of SI research is compromised, the value of the knowledge it disseminates -- and even its value as an edu-tainment attraction, co-marketing brand, and corporate donation-magnet -- will decrease.
That said, sorry I missed the meeting. Looked like fun.
1 comment:
This was a meeting of cheerleaders when the topic deserves and requires reasoned debate and development.
The SI 2.0 conference seems to assume that LOC digitization and flickr Commons projects are unmixed successes.
Digitalization of SI collections is already diverting budget from research and collections management; assuming the public can blunder into the collections without huge expenses in dollars and staff time is, to say the least, naive.
It's not like curators and informed lay enthusiasts in each field don't already interact; perhaps some invitation-only wikis could help there. The problem is that of the two elements of the SI mission, "...increase and diffusion of knowledge...," the boring old "increase of knowledge" has become subservient to "diffusion" of free entertainment.
If the quality and authority of SI research is compromised, the value of the knowledge it disseminates -- and even its value as an edu-tainment attraction, co-marketing brand, and corporate donation-magnet -- will decrease.
That said, sorry I missed the meeting. Looked like fun.
Post a Comment