Week 1, Assignment 1

Notes gathered from “2004 Information Format Trends: Content, Not Containers”

(OCLC report: Information Format Trends: Content, Not Containers (2004). http://www.oclc.org/reports/2004format.htm)

This paper claims that content consumers generally don’t care what sort of form information content comes in, such as books, journals, or Web pages.

• According to Mark Federman of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.2

• A recent study shows that almost 41 percent of the academic libraries sampled plan to “aggressively” reduce spending for print and increase expenditures for electronic resources.36

• What seems clear is that libraries should move beyond the role of collector and organizer of content, print and digital, to one that establishes the authenticity and provenance of content and provides the imprimatur of quality in an information rich but context-poor world. The challenge is how to do this. The best way to adapt is to understand what’s forcing the change.

• This new world is abundant and unstructured, but contextual mechanisms for navigating and synthesizing the information commons are scarce, even in—perhaps especially in—libraries. “We are drowning in information but are starving for knowledge. Information is only useful when it can be located and synthesized into knowledge.”53

2. Mark Federman, “What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message?” n.d., http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/article_mediumisthemessage.htm (viewed July 18, 2004).

36. Primary Research Group, The Survey of Academic Libraries, 2004, Press release, PRWeb, March 2004, http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/3/prweb112699.htm (viewed July 19, 2004).

53. Mani Shabrang, Dow Chemical Business Intelligence Center as quoted in Drew Robb, “Text Mining Tools Take On Unstructured Data,” Computerworld, June 21, 2004, n.p., http://www.computerworld.com/databasetopics/businessintelligence/story/ 0,10801,93968,00.html (viewed July 18, 2004).

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Notes from “Information Literacy and Information Technology Literacy: New Components in the Curriculum for a Digital Culture”

(Clifford Lynch, “Information Literacy and Information Technology Literacy: New Components in the Curriculum for a Digital Culture” http://www.cni.org/staff/cliffpubs/info_and_IT_literacy.pdf)

In this paper, Lynch deals with the differences between information technology literacy and information literacy, and emphasizes the need for people of all walks of life to be well-versed and up-to-date in the skills needed to operate and understand information technology, as information technology tools become obsolete so quickly. He gives his view of the difference between information technology literacy and information literacy: he believes information technology literacy deals with understanding the technology tools that support everyday life, while information literacy deals with the content itself and communication. He also gives what he believes are the two general perspectives of information technology literacy: the first emphasizes skills in the use of information technology tools, while the second focuses on understanding how technologies and systems work.