theorywatch

Can’t resist the title of this provocative discussion over at Green Chameleon…..

Had the pleasure of attending an informal talk yesterday at the Schusterman Center where Dr. Max Manwaring of the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, best known for his so-called “Manwaring Paradigm” regarding “small wars” and other forms of low-intensity conflict, spoke about all the intelligence difficulties surrounding the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran, related military knowledge management problems (and, yes, he notes that hierarchical managerial mindsets are a huge part of the difficulty, at just about all levels of command.) Anyway, I had the opportunity to sit next to Dr. Manwaring during lunch and chat with him a bit about both “actionable intelligence” (which is my summer research project, as I’ve mentioned before) and about libraries (he recalls his time as a teaching assistant in political science based at the University of Illinois library with great fondness, by the way.) So here’s a digital library for all you wannabe defense intellectuals….

People coming out of my CI class should already be familiar with the National Security Archive, the independent research institute and library at George Washington University, but here’s a link that I don’t think I ever mentioned in class. This one allows you to browse and search the so-called CIA “family jewels” up through 1973 and to read PDFs of the actual documents. Note the subject headings in the sample below and take a moment to consider which of these might well still be in active use by the agency for similar documents 35 years later…. Read the rest of this entry »

Oooh, a collection of graphs!!! And here’s one that looks just right for librarians and teachers, for example….. though the comments are worth reading!)

The clever folks at Overdue Ideas have blogged the collection-related ALA sessions, so it saves me some of our very limited travel funds (and the trouble of attending the actual sessions) by taking advantage of their notes on such things as institutional repositories, etc. And of course it’s always interesting to get another blogger’s perspective, especially as Overdue Ideas came all the way from London to attend. (Probably easier to get to Anaheim from London than from Tulsa, at that!) One of the items in their post covering the Tech Trends session indicated that there is likely to be much less actual conference travel and more virtual participation in future, which I can easily believe: though I will deeply miss the ALA book cart drill team competition, which just isn’t the same via YouTube….