Hi,      CSL is a learning library. Students learn to use information and develop an awarness of its value here. I work with people to effectively and productively use information systems and resources to learn. It's a challenge to teach basic and specialized research processes in evolving networked environments; it's an adventure.      Discovering answers to all sorts of questions using knowledge of the structures of stored information and a melange of access tools to mine content is like my favorite avocation, fishing. One can research, plan, be savvy with all the right indexes/waters, use logical stratagies/proper lures,and the latest tools/presentations to find answers/FISHON!, and still succeed because of luck/statistical probability.      When I read the following passage more than eighteen years ago I viewed the situation as fiction and impossible. I now spend my lunch time discerning the occurence of such activities and investigating other novel developments regarding the discovery, transfer and use of information.      As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speak written corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.      What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up todate. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one in which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of the Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and re-written again and again, and were invariably re-issued without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of Accuracy.      But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. George Orwell, 1984      The potential for such a senario to become reality grows daily as information technology continues to evolove and more information is stored and used in digital formats. Such developments make a solid case for the continued teaching of information literacy and critical thinking, key tasks of a liberal arts college librarian.      I like fishing in the Finger Lakes and their tributaries, and in the Adirondacks. I've pretty much given up bass fishing in favor of trout and salmon, and I don't fly fish...yet. My boat is "The Pink Pooty".

Lake Ontario King Salmon