theorywatch

I met Derek de Solla Price when I was a very junior editorial assistant at MIT’s Center for Advanced Engineering Study back in 1978 when Myron Tribus was director. I worked for Project PROCEED, which was a National Science Foundation-funded continuing education publishing project in chemical engineering for which Professor Price was an advisory board member. He was blazingly clever AND amazingly charming (and of course his work itself was fascinating, both then and now). So I was interested to note that his biographical entry on Wikipedia has been edited by his son Mark, who also comes across in his own writings as clever, charming, and courageous as well. This makes a good example to bear in mind when I talk about the pros and cons of so-called “user-generated content” in teaching bibliographic instruction. (And of course I wonder who is writing the brilliant Price-ish essay bringing together the topics of citation analysis and social tagging, because clearly citations *tag* additional user-generated content.)

citation, information