First official blog of life--

Like many trends that have cropped up in my life, I independently came upon the concept of blogging via my "Massive e-Mail Madison Review" (MeMMR) which was sent to friends and relatives to chronicle my adventures out of my social and semi-geographical hermitage in southern Minnesota into long term residence of a large city. Much like the human brain a city contains far more capacity than is needed to function or the person to navigate and utilize resources but each new restaurant, store, library, and person adds to the texture or quality of the capacity. Naturally this diminishes the further they get from the interests of the agent, namely myself, but contributes to the quality of others who in turn intersect with myself and eventually Kevin Bacon: Madison is not a large city to me any longer but I ask myself whether I need something the size and complexity of a New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles which contains too much for me to possibly use. So too the Web contains capacity I may never partake and, for the sake of my health, never witness.

My MeMMRs were a proto-blog of my brain-fill and growing appreciation of new complexities but in a much more tangible way than a blog. The links and avenues of connectivity in this blog world are garish and decadent in the same way that repels me from facebook's myriad uses and applications but for the purposes of LIS 450 I must tell the Internet what I think in hopes I will be read rather than tell you all my opinion in person. It begins...

I read Week II's assignments amidst two, theory heavy archival courses. One of which I was preparing to lead a group discussion on legal/ethical issues and the other on archival appraisal and accessioning which would inform my considerations for a 20 page term paper I must develop a proposal for by September 23rd. Very immediate concerns made me view what I feared would be rudimentary readings of concepts I am very familiar but I found other reasons to be frustrated. Much like studying a language you already speak I read a sausage making like analysis of facts I'd taken for granted and concepts I've felt but never heard articulated. There were enough new or intriguing materials that compelled me to read rather than skim despite my homework time-line and I was rewarded with a synthesis of theory from my archives readings with the general practice and definitions contained in 450. For example this let me view the Saracevic reading differently as her(?) definition of "information" as basic phenomena was different from another reading which distinguished information as something constructed and "archive" as un-constructed (and I'd add ambivalent) communication. Information (communication) is something that exists because we generate it merely by existing just like gravity exists because mass does. We're not sure why--but we can try to get a handle on it.