Too much information? Not enough filters?

Hat tip to iLibrarian for posting about Clay Shirky’s (author of Here Comes Everybody) keynote at the Web 2.0 conference this week in NYC. The talk was titled: “It’s not Information Overload.  It’s Filter Failure.”   [iLibrarian also provided a handy link to the video of Shirky's talk.]

Mitch Wagner at Information Week had a good summary of the talk: “The problem is that our filters are inadequate. And privacy breakdowns are a similar problem — privacy is threatened because the filters we relied on to keep our private data confidential are broken, and we haven’t evolved good mechanisms to replace those filters yet.”

ATM for books now at Michigan

An earlier post here mentioned the Espresso Book Machine, for producing on demand copies of books.

Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the University of Michigan is the first university library to provide the Espresso to its patrons:

U. of Michigan Library Installs ‘ATM of Books’

Just about any digitized, out-of-copyright book from Michigan’s collection can be printed and bound on the spot. Printing takes five to seven minutes, and the cost is about $10 per book. Users will also be able to print books from online sources such as the Open Content Alliance.

A university press release includes a photo of the machine.