Friday, April 17, 2009

Library Culture / Information Culture

I had never heard of this before:























LIBRARY CULTURE INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL CULTURE
Careful selection

a. quality of editions



b. perspicuous description to enable judgment


c. authenticity of the text

Access to everything

a. inclusiveness of
editions


b. operational training to enable coping


c. availability of texts

Classification

a. disciplinary standards


b. stable, organized, defined by specific interests.

Diversification

a. user friendliness


b. hypertext--following all lines of curiosity

Permanent collections

a. preservation of a
fixed text


b. browsing

Dynamic collections

a. intertextual
evolution


b. surfing the web




It is clear from these opposed lists that more has changed than the move from control of objects to flexibility of storage and access. What is being stored and accessed is no longer a fixed body of objects with fixed identities and contents. Moreover, the user seeking the information is not a subject who desires a more complete and reliable model of the world, but a protean being ready to be opened up to ever new horizons. In short, the postmodern human being is not interested in collecting but is constituted by connecting.



The chart is from an apparently unpublished lecture by computer scientist extraordinaire Terry Winograd; the commentary is by Heidegger scholar extraordinaire Hubert Dreyfus.



H/T to Snarkmarket commenter John the Heideggerian.

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