The latest podcast in the Digital Campus series focuses solely on the current state of the Digital Public Library of America. The discussion includes Dan Cohen who has just accepted the position of Executive Director of the DPLA, which is just wonderful news. Not only does he have a rare combination of skills and experiences — ever hear of Zotero, hmm? — but he is also — and there’s no other way of putting this — nice.
Dan explains what the DPLA is. Nick wonders if if the DPLA will hurt public libraries. I try to explain why I think it won’t. Amanda suggests the DPLA is the Mr. Potato Head of libraries. I thought it was a good discussion.
My Radio Berkman interview of John Palfrey and Urs Gasser about their suprisingly wide-ranging book Interop is now up, as is the video of their Berkman book talk…
At the Future Forum conference in Dresden, I had the opportunity to hang out with Ranga Yogeshwar, a well-known television science journalist in Germany. We were deep into conversation at the speakers dinner when I mentioned that I work in a library, and he mentioned that his grandfather had been an earlly library scientist. It turns out that his grandfather was none other than S.R. Ranganathan, the father of library science. Among other things, Ranganathan invented the “Colon Classification System” (worst name ever) that uses facets to enable multiple simultaneous classifications, an idea that really needed computers to be fulfilled. Way ahead of his time.
So, the next day I took the opportunity to stick my phone in Ranga’s face and ask him some intrusive, personal questions about his grandfather:
I’m delighted to count Christopher Lydon as a friend, albeit one I don’t see often enough. He has traveled the road, as a reporter for the NY Times, as an esteemed (and controversial) talk show host on NPR, and as one of the first adventurers in the world hybrid radio and Web.
Chris and I talked last week. Here are the liners notes, so to speak, and here’s the recording.
Ok, so the title of this post grossly overstates the findings of Kevin Lewis, Marco Gonzalez, and Jason Kaufman who analyzed how tastes spread among friends on Facebook, at the one college they were able to study. Still, it’s interesting data, and I enjoyed interviewing Kevin Lewis about it for this Berkman podcast.
The CBC show Spark a couple of days ago ran an 8 minute piece about the two biggest projects coming out of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, ShelfLife and LibraryCloud. It does a great job cutting together an interview of me with an illuminating narrative from Nora Young. (I co-direct the Lab, along with Kim Dulin, although credit for these apps goes to our team: Annie Jo Cain, Paul Deschner, Jeff Goldenson, Matt Phillips, and Andy Silva.)
