By Barbara Fister. Libraries have had a long time to develop a set of core values. What if those were applied to our broader information environment. More...
26 juillet 2018
A Values Proposition
Cool It
By Barbara Fister. It’s maybe not the right time to be slacking off. Every time I look at the news there’s some new horror. Even our generally cheery weatherman is shaking his head: This weekend will be a scorcher, and half the western states appear to be ablaze again. More...
Living in the Uncanny Valley
By Barbara Fister. A review of James Bridle’s compelling new book, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. More...
It's the Attention Economy, and It's Stupid
By Barbara Fister. This coda to my last blog post is, in part, inspired by John Warner’s latest discussion of replacing human teachers responding to writing with machines that can read for structure and grammar but not for meaning, because meaning is not required to prove you can write. More...
Access Means More than Abundance
By Barbara Fister. On average, over 6,000 scientific articles are published daily. Over 6,000 books are published, not counting those that are self-published. That’s just the tip of the content iceberg. Every day, according to various estimates, 1.45 billion people log into Facebook to share photos and links. Half a billion Tweets are sent. A billion hours of video content are watched on YouTube. Google responds to over 3 billion search requests using the 130 trillion webpages it has indexed. More...
Who’s Welcome Here?
By Barbara Fister. To continue my posts relating core library values to our broader information landscape, I am going to scramble them up a bit. I had intended to go alphabetically (an order that does not seem absolutely obvious and natural to many of our students – they probably have a point, there). More...
Anti-Social Media: A Review
By Barbara Fister. Facebook has been in the news a lot, lately. It’s getting flack for apparently violating a 2011 consent decree with the FTC by sharing data with device makers, including Chinese firms, one of which our intelligence agencies considers dangerous. More...
GDPR and U.S. News
By Barbara Fister. How U.S. newspapers are responding (or not) to the new European privacy regulations. More...
Wheaton.edu - A Website Birth Story
Launching a new higher ed website is a lot like giving birth – with all its joys and challenges. Here are a few takeaways from someone who’s recently gone through the process. More...
Don’t Freeze Out Your Prospective Students
If my recent appliance purchase taught me anything, it’s that you can draw a lot of parallels between shopping for a refrigerator and choosing a college. More...
