I guess I'm not sure that a Playaway is unmediated. It's just that the mediation is transparent to the end user. The user doesn't have to put a disc in; they just put in batteries and push play. Mediation for digital content is likely to become increasingly transparent. In a sense everything tangible that we catalog is an object, but a Playaway is presumably wanted not as something to be looked at or touched, but as an integrated audio carrier.
If you could move content on and off the Playaway, would that change your opinion? If a library circulates audiobooks on ipods or ebooks on a Kindle, should those records also be for objects? This actually seems to be an unsettled area. Kelley On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Robert Maxwell <robert_maxw...@byu.edu> wrote: > In my opinion a Playaway is unmediated. You don't need anything other > than the object itself (and a source of electricity) to get the > information, in contrast to, say, a CD, which you need to put in a machine in > order to use. > Media type is "a categorization reflecting the general type of > intermediation device required to view, play, run, etc., the content > of a resource." No intermediation device is needed to hear/play the > content of a Playaway. > > I find it analogous to a music box, which would also be unmediated. > > There is not a good unmediated carrier type (yet) for a Playaway. But > as noted below, there isn't a good carrier type under the other > categories either.