358 days old / March 17th, 2009 @ 8:31 pm /
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More news today about dwindling city newspapers. Ok. I’m not partial to newspapers. I do prefer the Web for my news. But as a local history librarian I harbor the concern that the loss of local papers does mean a loss to the community’s history. The newspapers have always played an important role in documenting stories about a region. I’m not sure how this source to a region’s history’s will be replaced. Right now the Kansas City Star isn’t out of business, but it has suffered drastic layoffs. It’s seems to be only a matter of time. Other local papers have recently retired or retreated to a Web presence only. Recent examples include the Lenexa Centennial and the Kansas City Kansan.
I’m interested to know what role libraries will play in these upcoming changes.
Challenges include the community’s apathy to the region and it’s history, local and institutional politics, dwindling human resources for research and writing, preservation across different item formats, copyrights, and preserving dynamic community Web resources for future historical research.
Opportunities might include producing more original and researched content, annotated bibliographies covering hot topics like mass transit, community issues driven programming, and actively collecting and preserving, with systematic foresight and creativity, what might become the future’s history.
Posted by scott vieira
400 days old / February 3rd, 2009 @ 9:32 pm /
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I just finished a wonderful book on how settlement in the United States has changed the wildlife landscape. It’s an older book published in 1999. But with the wonders of book displays at the library I discovered it for the first time. The book is The Condor’s Shadow: the Loss and Recovery of Wildlife in America by David S. Wilcove with a foreword by Edward O. Wilson. The book provides an interesting portrait of the complexities of wildlife management and the deep, often misunderstood, ecological relationships between all lifeforms. One of these important relationships is between the predator and the prey. So what does killing off grizzly bears and wolves have to do with the endangerment of songbirds or native grasses? A lot. In the end Wilcove illustrates how little we understand about these relationships. Our ecological footprint is so large that we are often forced to intervene to save a species. For example, stepping in to save the black-footed ferret as its prey, the prairie dog, succombs to the plague. The prairie dog, itself, a victim of ever expanding urban and rural development. But any interference only seems to set off another imbalance, another unexpected chain of events.
It is interesting to recall that once in Johnson County, Kansas there were bison, pronghorn, elk, wolves, and grizzly bears. Bounties were placed on the predators and in a short period of time they became extinct. Is Johnson County a richer place without them? You would think that we would have learned from such short-sighted policies. But have we?
Listen to actress Ashley Judd as she speaks for Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund about the wildlife management policies of Alaska governor Sarah Palin.
Sarah Palin’s Ongoing Wolf Slaughter
Posted by scott vieira
490 days old / November 5th, 2008 @ 1:15 am /
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Kudos to Obama tonight!
Infrastructure. Infrastructure. Infrastructure.
I’m excited about investing in this. And, I’m willing to pay more taxes for it. I’m sorry Ms. Palin, but paying your share of taxes is patriotic. Of course, I don’t make anything close to $250,000, but at the same time do I really need a tax cut. I guess only those who make over $250,000 are concerned about this.
Posted by scott vieira
498 days old / October 28th, 2008 @ 8:55 pm /
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I can’t believe it has been since February since I last posted. It was in March that I started spending a lot of time outside walking. I walked off about 30 pounds this spring and summer. I’m hoping to lose more, but winter is coming. I’ll do well if I can maintain my current weight. I’m actually dreading winter this year. I have enjoyed getting out more, taking walks, and even reading books while walking. The summer was cooler this year and I think that helped. But with it getting dark earlier and winter just around the corner, maybe I will feel inclined to post more often.
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759 days old / February 10th, 2008 @ 8:29 pm /
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On Martin Luther King Day I was downloading some photos I took when my HP Pavilion laptop took its last breath. It wasn’t long before I figured out that the motherboard had died. It would cost about $400 to get a new one, but I had no guarantee that I wouldn’t continue to have overheating issues. This laptop was about four years old. I had it serviced once when under warranty and just recently replaced an harddrive. I’m suspicious the old harddrive was damaged by the over heating laptop shutting off all the time. So with great sadness, I decided to move on. To replace my HP behemoth I purchased one Dell Inspiron with Ubuntu installed. By doing this I probably saved at least $300 by not getting Vista. This weekend I’ve spent a lot of time getting acquainted with the new laptop. For the most part I’m pretty pleased with what I got. I had been using Ubuntu now for nearly a year, so there wasn’t any learning curve here. I did find the printed documentation for the Inspiron entertaining since it was printed up for Vista. I would have thought that Dell would have customized some printed documentation for Ubuntu, maybe they only sent me the wrong one. Still I would assume that most Ubuntu users are tech savvy, so this shouldn’t matter too much. But this could all be changing. I’m continually encouraged by how much Linux has caught on over the last year. Also, Dell could make it easier to find the open source PCs on their site. It’s not terribly hard to find them if you know their there, but they’re clearly not getting the best real estate on the Website. In the end I believe I made a good choice, but it was still strange not to buy Vista. I have been using Microsoft operating systems going back to DOS 3.3 and Vista’s the first MS operating system I don’t plan to use.
Posted by scott vieira