LIFEHACKER
Comment#1:
The Lifehacker site www.lifehacker.com was interesting to say the least. However I completely disagree with the argument that procrastinators sabotage themselves and intentionally place obstacles in their own way. One theory that I have about procrastination is that some individuals actually work better under tighter time restraints. Honestly many individuals procrastinate because they can get away with it. What I mean by this is their procrastination does not result in lower grades in their classes or late work, for example. However I will admit that some individuals take procrastination or being a slacker to the extreme. So much so that it negatively affects every aspect of their lives. I know this is not very scholarly, but the first thing I thought of when I visited this site was Ellen Degeneres’ act that she does on procrastination. Her motto: “Procrastinate now…don’t wait!”
Comment#2:
Margaret Hedstrom in her article entitled “Digital Preservation: A Time Bomb for Digital Libraries” http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/DL/hedstrom.html discusses several of the pressing issues surrounding digital preservation. One problem she explores is the preservation of frail and rare books. This brought up an issue I had in regard to last week’s discussion on archiving or preserving data on the web. How can it be called preservation when in all reality you are destroying the document to in order to record its content for future generations? It all seems a little too similar to the flawed ideology of having to destroy the village to save it. In addition our technology is moving so fast that the means through which we retrieve and store data are outdated at an ever growing pace; thus creating a need for conversion to these new technologies. Roy Rosenzweig and Daniel Cohen in their chapter entitled “The Long-Term Fate of Your Site” http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/preserving/6.php concede that “it does not hurt to have copies of digital documents and images in a variety of formats; if you are lucky, one or more will be readable in the distant future.”
Comment#3:
The discussion by Roy Rosenzweig and Daniel Cohen brings up an interesting contradiction. In last weeks discussion we focused on archiving materials and collecting data on the web for preservation, but after reading their chapter entitled “The Long-Term Fate of Your Site” http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/preserving/6.php it is apparent that the web is not the permanent storage space it is made out to be. Not to mention the fact that hard drives themselves do not last indefinitely and the information they contain will one day be lost forever if the right precautions are not taken.