Librarian Trading Card

Librarian Trading Card, originally uploaded by rfisher2861.

I just had to try this!

Internet Down!

The Internet went down yesterday. I reached for the phone to call ITS, but realized that it's an IP phone and THE INTERNET IS DOWN!! I tried calling ITS with my cell, but wasn't able to get through as their phones are also IP...

Fortunately this only lasted for an hour. I sent a student to the ITS department to find out what was going on. They told him that the connection had been down for 4 hours...How could that be?

You don't really know how much you depend on the 'Net until it's down. I had almost forgotten that I could use my computer if I checked the "workstation only" option.

Advice? Stay calm and breathe deeply. Enjoy the silence!

Web 2.0: Info Lit

I'm getting ready to co-present a workshop for adjunct faculty on the info lit implications of the Web 2.0. My main question is: "Is user created content reliable?"

Looking back to the BPC (before personal computers) days, we classified information resources not by format but by the proximity of the creator to the information provided:

• Primary sources--journals, diaries, letters (all created by the person with first hand experience of the event described)
• Secondary sources--journal articles, newspaper articles, etc. (information gleaned from primary source)
  
• Tertiary sources--encyclopedias, textbooks, library catalogs, survey articles, reading lists, bibliographies, etc. (information gathered from both primary and secondary sources)

Couldn't Blogs and photos on Flickr be considered primary sources? When it is so easy to create content, how do we determine if the creator is indeed knowledgeable/truthful about the topic presented?