I’m on a committee–the ALa Member Participation Task Force–that just put up a blog andn then back-filled it with earlier discussions we’ve had about moving ALA forward (which is a phrase that brings to mind pushing a comatose elephant uphill, but no matter…).
You can read my comments (because of course you want to read MY comments, right, Gentle Readers? Oh, yes, and a few other folks’ comments, too, I suppose…) in the change history and comments within a Word document posted to the blog in the entry, If I Joined ALA Tomorrow.
Though Jessamyn West suggested we shouldn’t have uploaded a Word document, I’ll defend that, not only because it allowed stuff to get on the blog sooner than later, but also because the document, with its annotations and changes, so intriguingly documents our discussion as it happened. (Even Wikipedia only tells you, rather than shows you, a document’s change history.) I do agree with Jessamyn that the blog title should link to the full blog entry, not a document, and it took me a while to hunt down the blog entry link (it’s an eensy-weensy square under the post). That’s a green stop sign (my shorthand for a usability flub where a convenient convention was blatantly overlooked). But you know… hats off to those who made this blog happen.
You can comment there, or you can comment here, but I’d be curious to hear other takes on this document (or anything else on this blog)… from you or people you work with or students you teach or the guy down the hall who’s real quiet but seems kinda thoughtful.
Posted on this day, other years:
- Reviews and their Discontents - 2005
- O Holy Shopping Day, Further Thoughts on Yahoo-See-El-See, and Cats in Casts - 2004
- Bancroft Break-In: Are We Ready for Prime Time? - 2003
Can’t those changes be expressed somehow in the blog entry itself? While I agree that tracking changes is a neat way to show the evolution of a document, it seems to me that the only thing preserved by keeping this text in Word format is formatting and formatting alone. And I think that the concerns brought up by Jessamyn are more important than formatting.
I’d also like to bring up the possibility of technical problems within Word. When I opened the document, I only saw a half page of text, with a few notes from you in the margin. From what you said, it sounds as if there’s supposed to be more than that. I’d likely be able to see the other comments and changes with a simple tweak or two, but that’s exactly my point – the user should not have to do that.