"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order." - Whitehead

First off, the video we watched for this lesson, Has Higher Education Changed?, was wonderful. As someone who just graduated last May, I can definitely relate to the message, as I'm sure most of us can.

When Radiohead's In Rainbows was released for downloading, I was one of the many who took the opportunity to download a full album from a favorite band for cheap. I think I ended up paying $5 for it because I felt bad about not supporting a good band. Though, I am a pirate when it comes to music, movies, and TV (and in many other aspects of life). Don't tell the cops.

I read our mission statement again and I do particularly like this part:
"The Library connects our changing community to the evolving world of ideas, information and technology."
I feel that this sentence is exactly what OCLS is and what we continually strive to be.

I read most of the DaVinci library article. The part I found to be interesting was the 'Recommendations for Libraries' section. OCLS does, or attempts, these ideas already.
1) We have patrons evaluate the library with the online survey and the 'Evaluate your Library Experience' paper survey.
2) We attempt to introduce new technology for the staff and for the patrons. With the subtopics of that suggestion, we already have a technology committee and we have guest lecturers that integrate technology and the future of libraries in their speeches. This is the exact topic our guest speaker will talk about on Staff Day.
3) OCLS is involved with Orlando Memory and also has a committee to help come up with ideas on how to get the patrons more involved.
4) The main library, especially, has creative spaces. The one that really comes to mind is Club Central on the first floor. This area is designated for teens only and it's a great place for them to work and play.

Open Source

Open source isn't new to me. I've known about wikis and Yahoo!Answers for a while now, but it's still a very interesting topic to read about. There are so many things we can do with open source information. At the library, we could use wikis to share information with each other. Not just from department to department, but from branch to branch as well. A great idea would be to turn Orange Seed into a wiki so that anyone could post an idea and see what kind of reaction it would get. That would definitely show which ideas people would be open to compared to the ones are now shown on Orange Seed.

Instead of posting a question on each of the answer websites, I typed in a topic, "Philip K. Dick" to see what sort of questions and answers there are about this author. Yahoo!Answers had the best topics. The one question I choose to explore was "Why was Philip K. Dick heralded as a great science fiction writer?" Answerbag had this question "What do you guys think of Philip K. Dick?" and askville didn't seem to have to many serious questions concerning the author beyond "What is your favorite Philip K. Dick story?" Yahoo!Answers seems to be a bit more intellectual with the questions, as well as the answers that are given compared to Answerbag. In fact, the question I stated coming from Answerbag was the only one having to do with the author, the other questions that came up were a bit inappropriate. I did not find this on Yahoo!Answers, there were pages and pages of questions that were relevant to Dick. If Answerbag wants to become more popular that Yahoo!, they've got some work to do. Primarily with weeding out the inappropriate material.

I have googled my name before and have never found anything remotely close having to do with me. I googled again, and sure enough, absolutely nothing. And man, does that make me happy.