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Information Review does not care for it, but Lucy at Over the Backyward eFence does

June 15th, 2007 by

Tom Wilson of Information Research doesn’t much like it. He thinks it jumps around and doesn’t have much to say that’s either new or worth saying. In a sober and long-ish review, he finds lots of faults in the argument and presentation. (I respond a bit on the Reviews page.)

Lucy at Over the Backyward eFence likes it a whole lot more than Tom, and says so in a paragraph.

Later: Andrew Whitis at library+instruction+technology is really, really annoyed that I use card catalogs as my main example of second order organization, as if libraries still use card catalogs. He’s not the only librarian who’s had that criticism. True enough, and I do know that. But card catalogs are still one of the most familiar of second order examples around.

Later that same day: Jim Kalbach rounds out a set of posts (June 13, 2007, June 2, 2007, and May 28, 2007) about the book with one that evaluates it overall. His summary: “This is perhaps one of the most interesting books about information and its order that I’ve read. Though I disagree with Weinberger on many points, the book got me thinking, and I found it quite engaging overall.”

1 Comment »

One Response to “Information Review does not care for it, but Lucy at Over the Backyward eFence does”

  1. on 21 Jun 2007 at 4:00 pm1 John O'Gorman

    Professor Wilson’s review is an excellent example of the kind of arteriosclerotic (invented a new one, I did) attitude that most students are exposed to in the course of their ‘education’. You can almost hear the accent and smell the tea.

    It is easy to spot this kind of hyper- hypocritical blather when you can catch the author guilty of the same sins he finds reprehensible in others. The name of his organization is “Information Research” which by itself makes little sense until you read his ‘sub-title’ which informs us that he is in the “Books and Software Reviews” business. Ahh, now I get it.

    As is usually the case when someone is in love with his own cleverness, the good professor kind of misses the jist of the book in favour of flogging his own brand of shinola.

    You hit the proverbial dinger, Dave. Well done.