March 2, 2006
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Knowing it ALL
Despite the fact that my mother and plenty of other people have often
called me a know-it-all, I have always known that I still have a lot to
learn. When I was a little girl, I actually thought that I could
just keep learning and learning until I knew it all. Sad to say,
as my own capacity for learning has slowed down through the aging
process, the field of things to get to know has grown
exponentially. Today, when I expressed that sad thought to Doug,
he reassured me thusly: “The most important thing to know is
where to find the information you need.”Even though I no longer expect to ever know it all, I still intend to
go on getting as much of it as I can. I suppose I’d better
qualify that statement. Since I have resigned myself to not
learning everything, my intention is to continue learning within a
relatively narrow set of fields of interest, with occasional forays out
into new areas of interest whenever some intriguing new idea catches my
attention. In the interest of that pursuit the librarian at our
local public library pointed me today to a set of worldwide online
library catalogs.Photo (about 100 years old) of ivory carver
Angokwazhuk and his wife, by Otto Daniel Goetze
Ever
since I have had internet access, only about five years, I have used
search engines to find much of what I wanted to know, and have
benefited from serendipitously stumbling across many new-to-me but
nevertheless very interesting and useful bits of data. Many
times, my searches would dead-end in a review or ad for a book that
contained the information I sought. The web’s database is vast,
but not anywhere near infinite and not even close (yet) to encompassing
all the data in books and libraries.Prior to being on the web, I was in the habit of reaching out through
Inter-Library Loan for books I wanted to read. I usually
discovered those books through reviews or ads in various periodicals or
through other media. For some time now, since I can’t afford to
buy every book I want to read and don’t have room to store them, I have
been using the website of our “local” (a borough the size of
Pennsylvania) library system to track down books I learn about online,
and have them sent to my local library for me to pick up – or, usually,
for Greyfox to pick up on his way up the valley and deliver to me.Image (about 100 years old) by J.E. Worden, of Tlingit woman,
Shak-Ish-Tin, who was over 100 years old at the time.
Not
every book in the world exists in our local system. Until today,
when I really craved one that I couldn’t find there, I’d call up the
library and ask the librarian to find it for me, as I had been doing
for decades. Today, the librarian pointed me to SLED, the
Statewide Library Electronic Doorway, in which Alaska has provided
access for Alaskans to library databases virtually everywhere
onplanet. Now I can be more independent in my specific book
searches, and can browse through things I had never imagined
existed. I got hung up for a while today in the Virtual Library and Digital Archive,
looking at pictures. I’m sharing just a couple of the long-gone
people I found there. I can’t even begin to describe the
gazillions of nostalgic and historic images there.There is another new-to-me website that has some interesting apparent potential for tons of usefulness. Are you hip to The Wayback Machine? From 1996 to very recently, The Internet Archive
has been taking periodic “snapshots” of the internet. If you
encounter a broken link to a site that’s just not there anymore because
its host site went down, or a page that has changed and no longer has
the information you once found there and would like to find again,
enter the URL in the Wayback Machine. I found twelve different
“snapshots” of my old “PainSwitch” site that vanished when Cosmiverse
Folksites folded, and eight shots of the “Shaman” site we had on the
same host.When I have more time, I intend to use the Wayback Machine to fix some broken links in readings on KaiOaty’s site. When I have more time,
I’m also going to take care of the backlog of readings and other
housekeeping/indexing work over there. But right now I need to
start getting ready to go to the spring for water. This time it
will be a full carload. The last one was a short load and
therefore the interval from then to now was too short. It’s
either bigger loads or more frequent trips, because water is one thing
we can’t do without.
Comments (6)
Have you discovered Wikipedia? I, too, desire to know as much of everything as possible, and routinely get lost on that website, feasting on the knowledge there to be found.
Good point. It’s a great place, though, for background info. A springboard, as it were. I’ll often go there to get a general understanding of something, and end up clicking off several topics linked in there, and continue that process until I end up with 200 tabs open in my Firefox browser, most of them completely unrelated to the original topic. A great way to waste 4 hours.
More fun to learn about SS troops and the god Dionysus than study for Dr Watson’s class…
Wikipedia is quite useful.
I am quite fond of older publications. A website that picks up on old texts and stories whose copyright has expired is: http://www.gutenberg.org, they have a large number of classical readings and the like. I enjoy it greatly.
I’ve come to you through NotForProphet, who, despite his clever naming, has entirely sold out in the past four years, to xangans of a more fickle nature who would have him babbling about useless freeware, rather than describing something openminded and original.
Help me bring him back to a proper path and join me in slamming his commercialized ramblings.
Drop me a line and slam me also, for my insubordination of elders.
Wow, great sites, Kathy. Love the pictures, particularly the “over 100″ Tlingit woman. Great face and she doesn’t look that old, does she?
BTW, did you get my email?
gail
those are really interesting pictures.
Hopefully you’ve had breakfast by now, but if you haven’t, you can wait for a while to answer this question as I’ll be out the rest of the day. The email I sent was recent. I asked if you knew exactly which blog contained your Gluten-free Muffin recipe. I finally got all the flours for them, but neglected to make a note of the recipe. I could go back blog by blog, but I expect you know exactly where it is!
g