Friday, October 30, 2015

Five Laws of Information and Society

I am currently am working on a MSLIS degree from a large public university in the Midwest. One of my current courses in my first semester here is Libraries, Information, and Society.

In the past two weeks, I learned about Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science. On Sunday afternoon October 24, I got a moment of creativity and wrote my Five Laws for Information and Society.  Here are the revised five-sentence version, per the request of the professor I had shared with last Sunday.

Five Laws of Information in Society
Paul Wheelhouse

Abbreviated 5 Sentence draft, October 29, 2015

All people and every individual needs information for life, from information necessary for locating, obtaining, and using such things as food, clothing, housing, health/medical care, libraries, schools, laws, public safety and law enforcement, government agencies, public welfare, political representatives, banking, religious/spiritual houses, etc.

Every individual should have the freedom to access all the information the need for life in the form they want whether printed on paper or digital premised on the view that digital information does NOT have an intrinsically greater value over paper/printed information just because its digital.

All people have a right to basic and necessary information (non-proprietary) for life and no one should be denied access to it. 

There are several kinds of information that should be freely available to all citizens, rich, middle class, or poor, provided by government agencies, public libraries, and non-profit organizations, such as laws, tax forms and instructions, schools, family planning, health care, political representatives, etc. but there are some areas of information that citizens may expect information to Not be free, but a charge, such as higher education, professional growth, personal growth, and business training and development.

Google is not God, no matter how big their data centers become and no matter how amazing fast search results appear and its sheer quantity of results or any other “wizardry” it will be able to code.



Friday, October 9, 2015

Remember and Honor your Ancestors

"Remember and Honor your Ancestors. Its good for your soul even if they do not remember you."
Paul Wheelhouse, USA, October 9, 2015, first used in an email last week.