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Showing posts from February, 2013

Closed vs. Open, Free the Web?

When I was in graduate school, the web was a different place than it is today.  Some new technologies and concepts were cloud computing, RSS, and social networking.  Wikis had been around for years, but wikipedia had only just become popular.  It was a time of shifting paradigms and new toys.  Facebook had just gone public, previously only available to college students.  Much of the details were still a mystery to me, but I caught on quickly and wanted to learn more.  It seemed to me that all the new media sharing could only serve to make life easier and more fun; it was certainly helping me, anyway. Another subject that really interested me was cataloging and indexing.  As an emerging information professional, I felt it my duty to understand how knowledge and information has been organized up to this point.  Librarians had been responsible for organizing and disseminating information for the general public, and they had done a great job.  Using data schemes, like the Dewey Decimal