This is an amended version of a review which will appear in Aslib Journal of Information Management. Luciano Floridi is well-known as the leading active philosopher with a strong interest in information, and his latest book extends his contributions into the area of information ethics (hereafter, as in the book, IE). IE became recognised as… Continue reading Floridi’s Information Ethics
Category: digital, onlife, infosphere
How I (nearly) fell out of love with Apple
I am not by nature what you would call an early adopter of technology. So it was only a few months ago, quite a while after Apple introduced the latest version of their operating system, that I obeyed the little light on my iPad and upgraded. And got rather a nasty shock. Nor was I… Continue reading How I (nearly) fell out of love with Apple
Requiem for AltaVista
“AltaVista”, you will say, if you are an Internet user of a certain age; “ah yes, I used to use it before Google came along”. The news of the demise of the venerable - in Web terms at least, since it’s been around since 1995 - search engine will not cause many ripples in the… Continue reading Requiem for AltaVista
Visualizing, saving time and promoting insight
An interesting recent paper by Luciano Floridi, doyen of the philosophy of information, and his colleagues Min Chen and Rita Borgo asks what information visualization, one of the hottest topics in the information sciences over recent years in really for. Their answer is an intriguing one; it is not, as most visualization enthusiasts would have… Continue reading Visualizing, saving time and promoting insight
Alas for the paperless office. Weep for the fragile archive.
Farewell, obscure objects of desire, an article by Matthew Reisz in the Times Higher (19th January 2012) reports a British Academy conference on open access academic publishing. It attributes some interesting views to Alice Prochaska, principal of Somerville College, Oxford, who notes that libraries and archives have invested huge resources in digitisation projects to make… Continue reading Alas for the paperless office. Weep for the fragile archive.
iPads, blogs and the information future
O'Reilly has been known as a publisher of books on information technology for over thirty years: as their website puts it "a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and galvanizing their adoption by amplifying the faint signals from the alpha geeks who are creating the future".… Continue reading iPads, blogs and the information future
Why it’s always nice to ask first
Coming back to the blog after an enforced lay-off during a busy term, I was more than a little disconcerted to find that someone had hacked into it, and vandalised it; or so it seemed when viewed on an iPad. Of course they hadn't really. It was just that WordPress had thought it a good… Continue reading Why it’s always nice to ask first
The end of media and the continuance of skills
Although I have never had very much to do with newspaper libraries, and other media information services, I still felt a little sad at the news of the demise of the Association of UK Media Librarians. For over 20 years this was the professional body for information specialists in this sector. Now, alas, the double… Continue reading The end of media and the continuance of skills
Bush, Goldberg, Memex and the revision of history
This is a version of an editorial to appear in the Journal of Documentation. Vannevar Bush gets a mixed press these days. Once he was hailed as a 'father of information science' - some called him our 'Godfather' – on the basis of his 1945 Atlantic Monthly vision of Memex. This was, and in some… Continue reading Bush, Goldberg, Memex and the revision of history
Magic searching
I have written a review of a new book Magic Search: getting the best results from your catalog and beyond, which will appear in due course in Journal of Documentation. Here's a flavour of the review of what proved to be of much more interest than we have any right to expect from a book… Continue reading Magic searching
The Occasional Informationist 