Jon Udell on InfoWorld - "Filling in the margins":

"As I watch the students typing at the Dell PCs in the hallway, I realize that none of these kids has ever seen or used a card catalog. That's mostly a good thing. But when I joined a group of librarians on a panel last month, I was reminded that something useful has been lost: a tradition of local annotation. This isn't just old-fogy nostalgia. Librarians could talk to patrons through the medium of the library card, and although they weren't supposed to, patrons could talk back to librarians - and to one another. It was a useful back channel that online catalogs could have supported. But because it wasn't part of the official protocol, they didn't.

The fuzzy intersection of official and unofficial data has never been a comfort zone for information technologists. In chapter 4 of Klaus Kaasgaard's Software Design and Usability, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) alumnus Austin Henderson says that "one of the most brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was the idea of the margin." There was always space for unofficial data, which traveled with the official data, and everybody knew about the relationship between the two."