Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle at USF in 60 minutes

Brewster Kahle is coming to USF! Or may be here somewhere already. I am excited to learn a little more about this man- with a vision of archiving and preserving all information for all generations to come!- from his own perspective. Hopefully he will talk about himself.

This whole idea is pretty crazy and hard to grasp. Understandably I think. I am not sure there is a large enough way to say that this is a whole lot of information we are talking about.

Especially the idea of digitizing books. It's just not the same to cuddle up with a computer. But maybe Kahle will address how this isn't the point. This quote, from Kahle in an August 2007 interview with Andrew Richard Albanese, called Scan This Book for me illustrates the grand excitement of Kahle's vision.

"Books are the heart of the library. For thousands of years, humans have been putting their knowledge in books to pass on for future generations. So, yes, we have to have these materials in digital form, and we have to make them accessible in such a way that we can continue to have a library system like the one, frankly, that many of us grew up enjoying, where we can access and use these materials in new and different ways, as an engine for research, learning, and discovery, even if in ways not originally intended. So far, I think we have been negligent in our responsibility to perform this task. Not because we don't have the materials, but because we haven't put them into the formats new generations expect."

Also, I am curious what all he will say about Google. From what Kahle has said about Google in the above article, and in this one, and from the blog- the googlization of everything, I am beginning to think Google is the devil. What are they trying to do? And here I am writing on a blog represented by them, and owned by them? Shiest.

I am exited to hear more about this in less than an hour!

The Internet Connection

Ivan Chew, giving the most engaging power point presentation I've seen


Yesterday's blog would be impossible not to tie into the Davies Forum on Digital Literacy's speaker Ivan Chew and his talk at USF yesterday. Chew, expert blogger (he has 8 blogs- his main blog link is here) and Singaporean librarian, spoke mostly about the connections that can be and have already been created through blogs and the internet. It seems the couch on the street I spoke of is a symbol for the internet! and perhaps more specifically, blogs. I will elaborate.



The most interesting part of the talk for me was his mention of IG (Inter-Generational) relationships in his segment on seniors and blogging. I guess this part was so interesting to me because I do think about the divide between old people and young people. Maybe it is just as simple as that there's no relationship there because the two generations can't relate. But old people have stories to tell, and young people have so much to learn, that it seems there should at least be an attempt at a connection. What if, for example, kids in elementary school who were assigned a project about something that took place in recent history could have the choice to go to the library and check out a book, or to connect with someone who had actually experienced this time in history- through a library hosted blog? I think this would be great.

Some seniors don't blog or may be apprehensive about it because the internet in general is still foreign to them, not to mention that negative view the media can give blogging and the Internet. And also seniors are more private- they come from more traditional times. One thing that does get them into blogging, Chew pointed out, is so that their great great grandchildren can read about them. They usually don't trust the Internet otherwise. Maybe the library hosted blog could remedy this apprehension. If they were to realize that sharing their stories created positive results, and then saw the beauty of newfound connections, they would be more into it. The key is showing seniors the beauty of it. The Internet truly does get a bad wrap in the press- sex stalkers, identity theft, etc.

All seniors have stories, and do have motivation to tell them, they just need to be asked. A guest in the audience, identifying himself as a senior (he was in his late 50s or early 60s), pointed out that also most seniors don't want to write their own stories but dictate them to someone who will type them, or they will sit in a front of a camera- a videoblog.

I don't know, it seems pretty cool to me. I think if when I were in elementary school or high school and could have seen a videoblog of someone talking about what the depression was about, rather than learning about it in a book, I would have been wayyyy more interested. Hopefully this is the future.

The theme of Ivan's talk was -we are so alike-. His ideas may even be so profound to say that if more people used the Internet and connected with each other and realized this idea, there would be less war. He concluded by showing us a video he had made, with his own computer created music too- called, "Dolphins Galaxia." The music was lovely and inspirational and the visuals were a decoupage of visuals of different lights from all different settings (like stars in the sky and the sun and the earth and sun rays in water) so that while watching it I was thinking the lights represented the connections made by the Internet, and the dolphins swimming around represented the innocent bystanders, affected by the lovely connections. Like the couch provides a place for.