How do I find...

One of the activities I'm most concerned with as a scholar, an educator, and a librarian is finding stuff to answer questions, augment understandings, build cases, and generally elaborate the mental structures one carries around in wetware. We have a vast and growing array of information tools at our literal fingertips, and we have to keep practising and exploring and using these resources in order to get good at it. Some of them are in the public realm (Google is an obvious example --and OAIster and Wikipedia are others) and some are limited by licensing (including various databases we can access because W&L pays for them, like JSTOR) and still others can exist on our own personal machines (at the moment, Grokker, SnipIt, and a forest of bookmarklets are in that realm for me) but aren't available on 'public' machines.

The proliferation of ways to find stuff means that more stuff gets found, and has to be dealt with, so we have to find and develop the tools and skills that facilitate management of our personal information resources. This is a tall order, and will be a continuing problem as more and more stuff enters our own personal digital realms. In the last decade, I have tracked my own 'information evolution' in a forest of Web pages, most of them very imperfectly interlinked, and few of them constructed with any overarching system clearly in mind. Thanks to Google (augmented by a bookmarklet), I can search a lot of that territory by keyword and find bits that I'd forgotten... but my personal digital libary is, to say the least, imperfectly organized. That's a problem we all have, and will have more and more as our lives become more and more digital. The MP3s and images and texts that pile up in our personal storage spaces need to be organized and cross-connected...

My logfiles page is a recent attempt to make some order out of my sprawling digital real estate, but it really is linked here to introduce the medium to those who aren't already familiar, and to encourage creative engagement during the duration of INTR131. I've done the same in many courses over the last few years, always with mixed results: a few people take one look at the format and dive right in... most use it only when they have specific assignments to make entries... now why is this? What can I do about it?

Perhaps the problem is that many don't see the computer as a primary everyday work tool, though it's also possible that there are software limitations: if one uses FrontPage to make Web pages, it's necessary to 'work' in campus labs, or else buy the software from Bill Gates. There are alternatives, like the HTML option in Word, though they have drawbacks (Word puts all sorts of junk into a file, making it necessary to use ONLY Word on a particular page or risk htmeltdown...). Personally, I don't use a WYSIWYG editor for Web pages, which means that my pages are all pretty primitive... but I can work on hem anywhere, in WordPad, coding the HTML myself on the fly.

Tools I'm using these days: