I just noticed that when looking at patterns from books on Ravelry, there is a link at the bottom of the page that says,
“search your local libraries”
which links to the record for the book you are looking at on WorldCat. Very cool.
I spent the last few weeks scanning some very old family photos and it gave me plenty of time to think about the digitization of paper-based media, and why I have such mixed feelings about it.
I appreciate the ability to preserve documents and photos by moving them to a digital format. But at the same time, doing so removes a lot of information you gain by working with the originals. We interact with objects using all of our senses, but when dealing with digital media we are no longer interacting with the object as such, but with the object we are using to access the media.
If I’ve lost you, think of it like the difference between watching a video of something and actually being there. You lose the connection that you have from being part of the experience and interacting with your environment.
I find this extra layer problematic. Sure, you can read the same text you could have read before and you can see the same images that you could before. But not in the same way. Something gets lost because we no longer have that direct interaction with the object.
I finally got my marks for last term. I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t get them before starting the new term. Not that it really mattered since there was no way that I’d get bad marks. But I was hoping for straight As. It turns out I didn’t quite get that, since I had one B+, but it was close. Much better than last term, that’s for sure.
I’m trying to be excited about next term, but so far I’m ambivalent about most of the classes. I guess we’ll see if I’m more enthused once they start and I have something more than a course outline to go on.
There’s a workshop at a conference in Windsor next month that I want to take. I’m not sure if I can do that without having to pay for the whole conference though, so I wall have to contact them and see. One of my courses this term might get into that stuff so I wouldn’t have to worry about it at all. I find out on Monday though so I won’t have to wait long for that.