I recently read a fascinating piece by Maham Javaid in the Washington Post analyzing the World Happiness Report . The report, produced by the Wellbeing Research Center at Oxford and the UN, looks beyond GDP to find what actually drives life satisfaction. I've always held the philosophy that happiness should be a state of mind—something that shouldn't depend on others. But I admit, that is difficult to adhere to. It's hard to stay internally happy when you don't receive kudos for extra effort, or when you find yourself analyzing praise to see if it was just an afterthought. While my own philosophy has always been that happiness shouldn't depend on others, the data suggests that for most of the world, happiness is inherently social. Here is what the top-ranking countries teach us: 🇫🇮 Finland: Material Security Finland takes the top spot, but not because they are outwardly the "happiest" people. It's about anxiety reduction. "Researc...
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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.