The three twirling Big Wheels of the carnival this week were:

• Teaching the concept of authoritativeness as applied to information
• Podcasting
• Life Trumps Blogging.

Catalogablog’s David Bigwood, of the Center for Information and Research Services of the Lunar and Planetary Institute, pointed out the initial display on this topic by Jenny Levine at the ALA Techsource Blog. Jenny was still mulling over what she’d heard at the 2005 Internet Librarian conference, specifically the keynote presented by Will Richardson.

Richardson had emphasized the need for “negotiated meaning” by which Jenny says he meant “teaching kids how to negotiate what is true given that you can not just point them at a single authoritative source.”  Jenny's stance is that this instruction can be enhanced through the use of RSS and aggregator services.

What David might not have noted is that authority of information was also one of the points touched on by Boxes and Arrows as they interviewed Peter Morville regarding his new book, Ambient Findability.  Morville points out that the ability to differentiate between good and bad information is not just an issue for children; it’s a problem for adults as well. The significant quote is this: “My sense is that many adults lack the information literacy skills needed to cope with a mediascape that enables us to select our sources and choose our news. We grew up in an overly simplistic world of centralized authority with teachers and encyclopedias that taught us “the truth.”

Library Crunch picks up the discussion with his entry entitled “We have the information; how are we going to get it to our users?”  His key quote is: "The way we serve our users needs to change continually to reflect the changing way they wish to be served.  With that in mind, for libraries it has become less about what we offer, and more about how we offer it.”

Podcasting – the second Twirling Big Wheel of the Carnival – seems to be one of the ways in which libraries can offer up the information they have. David Bigwood’s library is doing just that: see What's New there.  Jenny Levine also pointed to podcasts of content provided at Internet Librarian 2005 by Paul R. Pival of The Distant Librarian. Paul himself included a podcast of the closing IL2005 keynote by Stephen Abram of Sirsi and then provided practical details of how he created the podcasts. As a relevant sidenote, as this week's host, I wanted to include a link to Paul Miller’s discussion of podcasting at TALIS, which discusses the need for transcripts of podcasts as well as the potential revenue stream that transcripts might represent for publishers.

It's not surprising that Greg Schwartz of Open Stacks will be doing a podcast himself. See details here. Our thanks to Greg for allowing us to participate this week as host for the Carnival. But we're not done yet -- there's the final big wheel of our Carnival to be pointed out.

Carnival nominations were rather thin this week, something that might be attributed to the busy travel schedules of the various usual contributors. It might also be due to a situation noted by Walt Crawford of http://walt.lishost.org/ in an important piece entitled Life Trumps Blogging. (Blisspix talks about it here.) The particular issue of Cites and Insights in which that relatively short piece appeared also includes an extended documentation of a conversation held across a variety of blogs over the future of libraries.  Both articles are relevant and timely.

The smaller attractions of our carnival? Those would include a few additional items from individual blogs associated with the NFAIS membership. 

Raphael Sidi of Really Simple Sidi points to this initiative, calling it a remix of Yahoo Images, Google Scholar and NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information). For the record, Ispecies has its own blog.  Raphael is Vice President of Engineering Information and he's one of our featured speakers at the NFAIS November event on Web 2.0  

The U.S. General Printing Office is using a blog to gather feedback from the user community on GPO's future digital content management system. The most recent link is actually outside of the time frame for our carnival but it's useful so I'll point it out anyway. It's a link to the most recent presentation by Mike Wash at the Fall Depository Library Conference.

Computing Chris (an editor at Elsevier) notes how rapidly things can pile up in your email when you’ve been away.

Next week’s carnival (#15) will be hosted by Christine over at Ask Nettie Day. Click through to find out how she’ll be handling submissions. Steven Cohen at Library Stuff (hosted by NFAIS member, Information Today) will be handling the Carnival of the Infosciences #16.