Pull quote: “Consensus. We used to think that we ‘all’ agreed on some things. We had authorities we ‘all’ trusted. Now we have communities of belief. Links and conversation can help us get past the fragmentation that makes us stupid, but not past all fragmentation.”
Pull quote: “Scholarship conjures up a set of ideas that are in some ways more useful than the ideas invoked by “knowledge,” if only because the ideas around scholarship are not focused first and foremost on content. Rather one thinks of the long-term pursuits of serious women and men, within some sort of community, and likely supported by some sort of institution. If you think about the effect of the Net on scholarship as opposed to knowledge, you immediately get turned toward the right questions: What are the new resources? What sort of online communities are emerging? What can be done to make the Net a better place for scholarship, both for the scholars and for all the rest of us who benefit directly and indirectly from scholarship?”
Pull quote: “It would give its community open access to the objects of knowledge and culture. It would include physical spaces as a particularly valuable sort of node. But the platform would do much more. If the mission is to help the community develop and pursue knowledge and culture, it would certainly provide tools and services that enable communities to form around these objects. The platform would make public the work of local creators, and would provide contexts within which these works can be found, discussed, elaborated, and appropriated. It would provide an ecosystem in which ideas and conversations flow out and in, weaving objects into local meanings and lives. Of course it would allow the local culture to flourish while simultaneously connecting it with the rest of the world — ideally by beginning with linking it into other local library platforms.”
Pull quote: “The old sovereign paradigms of encyclopedic knowledge were on the wane long before Wikipedia. By the twentieth century, encyclopedism’s grand epistemological project had been blackboxed, dumbed down, and commodified for aspirant middlebrow readers, the disruptive ambition of Diderot sold door to door. As a project, the encyclopedia was bracing and grand; as product, EB was just another widget courting obsolescence.”
Pull quote: ” I wonder if we should focus less on how to find and more on how to filter. Though we give a nod to evaluating sources, we tend to start with finding them, and that’s backward. We need to help students understand the vast web of meaning in the making and develop ways to shape their own ideas about what parts to pay attention to. They need to know not just how to find finished information but how to grasp meaning as its made and how to participate in its making.”
Pull quote: Actually, if anything, the value of Too Big to Know is best found in the way it draws attention to issues that bring librarians to the forefront. For example, Weinberger is concerned about knowledge creation in a networked and social world and his proposal is that we abandon (or at least heavily modify) things like fact, truth, reason, and objectivity. However, what he fails to realize is that we already have an entire field of study devoted to knowledge in a social world; it’s called social epistemology and it was first introduced by none other than Jesse Shera…a librarian.”
