Friday October 20, 2006

Print library versus internet, the Harvey Mudd experiment

Here is an interesting story recounted from a presentation by Bruce Sterling at the PopTech conference:

"Bruce also related a story told to him by an engineering professor friend of his. The prof split his class into two groups. The first group, the John Henrys, had to study and learn exclusively from materials available at the library...no internet allowed. The second group, the Baby Hueys, could use only the internet for research and learning...no primary source lookups at the library. After a few weeks, he had to stop this experiment because the John Henrys were lagging so far behind the Baby Hueys that it is was unfair to continue."

Subsequent Googling indicated the experiment occurred at Harvey Mudd College.  It would be nice to read a full write-up of this experiment.  If the library print collection fares so poorly in this context one might ask several hard questions about the role of print collections in academic libraries.

(via kottke)

GRAZR - a tool for organizing feeds and more.

Grazr, http://grazr.com, is a tool that seems both interesting and potential useful. I found it when looking for information on OPML files, which are ways of creating sets of RSS feeds. ResearchBuzz has a review as do many other sites. I started thinking about this after seeing discussions about using RSS for TOCs for researchers. Subscribe to several of these, or in different subject areas, and things could get messy fast in most feedreaders.

I have to admit that the number of blogs I subscribe to can be counted on both hands and the number I actually read on any kind of regular basis on one hand, but for people who subscribe to a lot, this could be useful. I bookmark frequently and fairly indiscriminately because it is so trivial to do so (a keystroke for all intents and purposes). If blogs, social network stuff, YouTube channels, mashups, and podcasts, all of which Grazr handles, were one keystroke things (and if I had oodles more time to actually view, read, participate, listen, etc.), then I think this tool would be pretty useful. Or it might end up like a fancy version of my bookmarks lists: dozens of things of which I have no idea why I actually have them there and only a handful that actually are useful much less used.

I'm just curious - for those reading this, do you subsribe to lots of blogs? Or channels, podcasts, etc? I have no idea what sort of norm, if any, yet, exists for these numbers (and those norms for particular segments of the population too). Are you good about organizing your bookmarks? If so, maybe Grazr is for you. Finally, anyone know of a library doing something with this? Or like this?