[WEB4LIB] Re: need technology news not business news

[Tony Barry]

At 5:15 AM -0700 30/7/01, Drew, Bill wrote:
>  Thank you to Rich for saying what I was trying to say.  Even magazines like
>PC World have less and less on new developments in IT and computers and more
>on what company is going to be the next dot com failure.  While knowing that
>type of thing is important for us systems librarians, it is screaming at us
>from everywhere.   I get the e-mail edition of the New York Times everyday.
>The technology section is dominated almost exclusively by business news.  I
>also get several of the "free" trade journals; Interactive Week and others.
>When they first started the majority of articles was on how busnesses and
>others were using the new technologies of the internet.  Now again they are
>dominated by what company is taking over what other company.
>
>Sorry about this whining.

The solution is in our own hands. We start a list (not this one as 
it's for discussion). It's an announcement list and defaults to 
digest mode.

Individuals put their hands up to watch a particular online 
publication and post a summary or the lead in paragraph and the URL 
of anything of interest to libraries.

Anybody else can post things of interest which go to the moderator.

The moderator approves postings and filters duplicates.

It has an archive at a web site which also lists who has volunteered 
to watch what publication.

There is a search engine on top of the archive.


While this list is US-centric it does cover a large proportion of the 
potential market of those interested in library technology. Who knows 
if it was done sponsorship might be forthcoming to support it.

Tony

-- 
phone  +61 2 6241 7659
mailto:me at Tony-Barry.emu.id.au
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/Tony.Barry