new orbits, digital planet
The Council on Library and Information Resources is focused on the changing nature of library services. Many intensive studies and their reports are just out or available next month.
“A three-report volume will examine key issues in the research library’s transition from an analog to a digital environment for knowledge access, preservation, and reconstitution. The volume will include an introductory essay by CLIR President Charles Henry, followed by three reports: Can a New Research Library be All-Digital? Lisa Spiro and Geneva Henry, On the Cost of Keeping a Book, Paul Courant and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen, Ghostlier Demarcations: Large-Scale Text Digitization Projects and their Utility for Contemporary Humanities Scholarship, report of a CLIR investigation”
“The report, Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-term Access to Digital Information, is the result of a two-year inquiry into the economic challenges of preserving an ever-increasing amount of information in a world gone digital. “ Report
happy haptic
“You’re not crazy, and neither are we: The touchscreen on the Apple iPhone really is more responsive than the screens on the BlackBerry Storm, the Motorola Droid, the Nexus One and many other phones, even though all of these devices use essentially the same touch-sensing hardware.” Wired
Flick, slide and pinch; elements of the touch screen navigation are acquired and refined from a general primate dexterity and haptic of hands prompting the mind. What is fascinating is this new navigational choreography reminds us of refinements of paper book navigation and it results from the same attentive and skilled intentions of the device maker.
So, for a second, to take an analog approach, do distinctive maneuvers of touch paper and touch screen navigation suggest a differing optimal display routine for the extensive and cohesive content of the book? Yes, they do. And we already know the correlation of haptic routine and display format for paper books. So it should be possible to solve for x.
connectivity
The April Cites and Insights is a 30 page exposition on disregard of connectivity and refocus on connective action. Sometimes Walt is an avatar of disconnectivity and going to Walt at Random can be an all night bus ride. But the regular post, screen version of double column print, of Cites and Insights is a wake-up. I enjoy the bouncing ball scrolling up and down to fill out the columns and the excellent pdf shadow edge between tail and head of the pages. But best of all is Walt’s great sweep of library Zen and the mixed attributes of digital collections delivery and blog based communications between librarians.
wheel of fortune
I guess I have a special problem. In preparation for an afternoon forum on the future of the book I am reading five different electrophoric display devices at the same time. This is different from reading five different books and each device will demonstrate a different connectivity, download application and display format. Why I don’t know, but this interactive portion will follow a stately presentation on the collapse of five industries in the automotive, finance, representative governance, music recording and print publishing sectors. Here a communality of disaster derived from innocent screen delivery of previously physical product.