librarian.net : September 2003

30Sep03second day with the new weblog

Hi. Okay so welcome to librarian.net at ibiblio! ~~the reason this is not already at the new servers may be partly my fault~~. In any case, I said "come hell or high water" so I figured I'd add some content here. It's a funny thing about that New York Times article. They included the text of my signs, not the signs themselves, and they cited my weblog, and not my name. Weirder still is they changed where I had written "National Security" and hyphenated it? I mean I agree that any publicity is good publicity, but it was just so weird.

Speaking of New York, and libraries, this understated library club looks like it might have some fun parties.

PATRIOT Watch: Karen Schneider has told me that this is a week for rejoicing. According to her, all state library associations have now passed resolutions against the PATRIOT Act. You wouldn't know it by looking at ALAs website, color me surprised. Oh wait, here's the link. How could I have missed that?

The "stack of random literature" that comes with the Librarian Action Figure includes a book on Bulgarian Flan, and the Devil's Dictionary. [thanks jen]

Oh Lord help us. Tori Amos considers herself a librarian.

You have no idea how unglamorous it can be sometimes but if you think of me as a librarian from a different dimension, these are books that come to me in sonic form and I have to stay focused or I am manipulated. [thanks josh]

Georgia's only accredited library school may be closing. The Black Caucus of the ALA is starting a letter writing campaign [thanks bill]

Laura Bush, slightly unclear on how prescription medicine works in this country. A nice idea, stupidly put.

29Sep03meet the new site, same as the old site

Hi. So I guess this site was mentioned in the New York Times magazine [in a sidebar that is not online and so I haven't even seen it yet] during the two-day window when I am switching to a new web host. The only time this site has ever switched to a new web host. Hello, I am Jessamyn West and this is my supreme being's idea of irony. Updates resume tomorrow, come hell or high water.

28Sep03first day with the new blog

Hi. If you can read this, then my DNS has propogated and I am now on the ibiblio servers instead of the eskimo.com servers. And I am running Movable Type instead of coding and uploading by hand. I am aware that some things are not yet working. This week I aim to get archiving and all the templates straight so that Oct 1 begins an "all MT all the time" world here for me. Send major complaints to the usual place. Let me know if stuff is broken. Tips and advice are also welcome, I'm pretty new to this CMS stuff.

25Sep03past entry 25sep

Hi. OCLC responded to my email to them. They copied and pasted their press release into an email. Classy.

As It Happens, a CBC radio show, has a small radio spot on the Library Hotel vs OCLC dispute. [ thanks iboy ]

PATRIOT Watch: Send a fax to urge your senator to fix the PATRIOT Act.

PATRIOT Watch: The Maine Civil Liberties Union is sponsoring an all-day seminar on the USAPA. If you are in the area, please stop by. [ thanks aaron ]

Librarian Dolls Defend The Nation! An interesting article I am cited in, over at chicklit.

24Sep03past entry 24sep

OCLC's press release on the whole matter.

Banned Books Week over at Overdue Media.

PATRIOT Watch: Conservatives are really pulling out the stops on this Ashcroft vs Librarians dispute lately.

The unwillingness to keep vagrants out of libraries goes to the fundamental inability of leftist librarians to distinguish between maintaining minimal public standards and creeping fascism. [ thanks robert ]

The Sacramento Bee is doing a special report called Liberty in the Balance about the confusing overlap between civil liberties and national security. There have been two good articles about libraries, one about what present-day CA libraries are doing in the wake of the PATRIOT Act, and one about the Library Awareness Program. [ thanks pete ]

Just in case you want to check out the report I referred to the other day in which many librarians claimed to have been visited by law enforcement, it's here. [ thanks george ]

Hey, it's a moblog that seems to be all about pictures of books. [ thanks john ]

22Sep03past entry 22sep

Hi. For some reason I am finding it easier to update this site now that I have a job. And I don't even update it while I'm at work. I'm just more easily plugged in to things librarian, I suppose. To anyone who reads this site using RSSify via LISNews.... 20% of my traffic is suddenly coming from there. This site has a fair amount of readers, but not like that. Please consider setting your RSS reader to check for updates less frequently, or use one of the pre-made feeds that are linked above. I almost never update more than daily; setting a bot to check for updates every 5-30 minutes wastes bandwidth.

PATRIOT Watch: What do we need to get to the heart of this recent USAPA mess? Simple questions simply answered.

here's the questions to ask your elected representatives to ask the Bush administration:

If these new powers are needed to fight terrorism, why aren't they being used?
If these new powers aren't needed to fight terrorism, why do you have them? And why did you misrepresent your reasons for seeking them?
If these powers have been used, why are you lying to us now?

Joe Janes talks about ALA-Toronto and the punch-in-the-gut that was the CIPA decision.

Speaking of faceted classification, there is the Bliss Classification System. [ thanks rteeter ]

21Sep03past entry 21sep

This just in. OCLC is going after The Library Hotel with a ridiculous trademark infringement suit. Some discussion on MetaFilter here. You can contact OCLC here. [ lisnews ]

20Sep03past entry 20sep

Oh, hey, it's banned books week. And again people debate the relevance of the name. Russ Kick who manages the very useful site The Memory Hole has written one of my favorite essays about BBW.

The majority of books on the Banned Books Week list haven't been banned, but rather have been challenged. They are shelved in libraries and bookstores and included in school curricula across the nation. Virtually every book that is published can be purchased or checked out in the United States. [ thanks all ]

Or, as I like to call it Brand Books Week. Celebrate your freedom the American way, by shopping!

Lis has really pulled out the salient parts of this whole Ashcroft mess of late.

How to get Movable Type to do faceted classification.

Just Give it to Me Straight; A Case Against Filtering the Internet. [ thanks sethf ]

A real dilemma: being a library manager when only some of your employees are on strike...

What does it mean to be "too sexy" for an Ivy league library? Well, a lawsuit, for one. [ thanks jim ]

19Sep03past entry 19sep

Hi. I am starting to make San Diego plans. I will be in San Diego for ALA from roughly the 9th through the 14th of January. I would like a free or possibly cheap place to stay. Couches are fine. Let me know if you have some leads.

Special issue of the Juice out this week. In Rory's words "Special issue on the RIAA's lawsuit against a child for file sharing and ALA's legal counsel, the law firm Jenner & Block."

PATRIOT Watch: I am sorry, I do love this country but I don't believe my government. Their memos claim no feds snooping in libraries using the broad power of the USA PATRIOT Act. But what about this survey? Are all those librarians just wrong? We know we can be a little -- what was it Mr Ashcroft? -- hysterical sometimes, but still, that's a big margin for error, don't you think? [ thanks all ]

Or, as the DNC puts it: Librarians: 1, Ashcroft: 0 [ thanks greg ]

PATRIOT Watch: Humor. Would be more funny if it didn't seem so close to true.

Revised Patriot Act Will Make It Illegal To Read Patriot Act WASHINGTON, DC -- President Bush spoke out Monday in support of a revised version of the 2001 USA Patriot Act that would make it illegal to read the USA Patriot Act. "Under current federal law, there are unreasonable obstacles to investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism, including the public's access to information about how the federal police will investigate and prosecute acts of terrorism," Bush said at a press conference Monday. "For the sake of the American people, I call on Congress to pass this important law prohibiting access to itself." [ thanks kevin ]

17Sep03past entry 17sep

Good thing there's a new NYT login because you'll need it to read about uber-paranoiac John Ashcroft ragging on librarians. How dare he? I think what ALA says is right on. [ NYT ]

"If he's coming after us so specifically, we must be having an impact," said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of [ALA's] Washington office.

Some responses to the batty Mr. Ashcroft. ALA, Wisconsin, Ohio, Bernie Sanders, Virginia & California, so far.

The travels and travails of one of the world's smallest dictionaries. [ thanks dsdlc ]

16Sep03past entry 16sep

Hi. I changed the NYTimes login because, well, the old one stopped working. Sorry about lack of topicality lately, I'm experiencing a renaissance of love for classification schemes since I now work in a library and don't know DDC.

Please note that just because whitehouse.org is not representing an official branch of the government, they are still pretty damned funny. Please see: Terrorist Reading Lists. [ thanks erica ]

But what if I wrote a book on quiddich... what's that DDC?
Let's not forget that old favorite, faceted classification. They use it on the web, you know.

Then there's the Weine System, an adaptation of the DDC for Judaica. See also David Elazar's Classification for Libraries of Judaica. Dewey, sometimes accused of anti-semitism, files all Jewish books under 296.

15Sep03past entry 15sep

I fixed the link to Rachel's accidental systems librarianship page. And look, she's reviewed our book.

Cotton classification system. Not to be confused with this cotton classification system.

More on the Cotton Library and here.

12Sep03past entry 12sep

I know you already know what a genius Rachel Singer Gordon is. She's written a great piece on Systems Librarian Impostor Syndrome. For more on accidental systems librarianship, see this reference page. [ lisnews ]

I'm trying to pick up the Dewey Decimal System really sort of quick-like since I'm a bit embarassed that I managed never to pick it up in library school. This page is currently my favorite crib sheet, though this one is a close second.

And do weblogs belong in the 040's?

11Sep03past entry 11sep

Great letter to Adelphia in Library Juice. Have you seen their ads conflating their high-speed service with the library [only better, no card!]? I feel the same way about this stuff as I did about Google Answers. It's fine to have both services, but the people with the for-fee service seem to need to try to explain why they are better than the for-free service. And in reality, it's just apples and oranges. Adelphia, you are not the library. Google Answers, you are not librarians. Why pretend you are? I think it's the strength of our reputation, don't you? [ juice ]

I've been getting interested in alternate classifciation schemes. The Warburg Institute Library has its own brand. Four sections: Action, Orientation, Word, Image.

Is protecting the rights of users and supporting free access to ideas one of the fundamental values of librarianship? I sure think so. [ commonsblog ]

Soon to be a new favorite of mine: Ref Grunt, pullquotes from life at the reference desk. [ blogsource ]

10Sep03past entry 10sep

Hi, The job is great, thanks for asking. You can check out my library at the library website which at some point in the future, I will be redesigning. Still working on the move to ibiblio. You know, this whole website takes up less than 2 MB... for four years' worth of content.

You'll have to scroll down for this gem from Neil Gaiman's blog.

if the whole point of the offended librarians is that librarians can, and, wisely, do, look like anyone, then any action figure would do. ("Isn't that a Gandalf toy?" "Nope it's a librarian. One with a hat and a beard." "And he's next to a... Bettie Page toy?" "Nope. Just a cute, half-naked librarian with a big smile and a Bettie Page haircut.") [ thanks michael ]

Hey, a writer is writing about reading. She'd like some input into people's feelings about reading for a book she's writing. Five questions, give her a hand?

PATRIOT Watch: doesn't this article make it seem, from the headline, that librarians are doing somethign bad? I mean, they're against making something easier.... really they're just making sure it's not so easy to get at your library records. [ thanks john ]

PATRIOT Watch: Slate chimes in detailing the "Attack of the Angry Librarians" among other things. [ thanks john ]

Librarian dating.

8Sep03past entry 08sep

Hi. The LiveJournal RSS feed is up and running again.

You know, whether you do or do not like the librarian "action" figure, it's still $9 for a hunk of plastic. Buy a book instead.

7Sep03past entry 07sep

Hi. Sorry if you were using the LiveJournal RSS feed and it broke when I changed formats. Regrettably, I have nothing to do with it, and LJs RSS feeds are sort of orphans in terms of support. Feel free to try one of the other feeds, linked above. Also, I have personally checked all the links on the links page and added a few sections, one on tech and one on library school. If anyone has suggestions for good resources in those sections, please let me know.

Hey I'm starting my job during Library Card Sign Up Month. I guess that's better than Pester Your Librarian Month. But really, isn't every month Pester Your Librarian Month? I wonder why the the press release doesn't have the URL on it? Maybe it won't fit on one line?

What do you do when you follow all the steps an organization gives you to avoid spam and you still wind up getting some? You ask a lot of questions. Emma Jane details her back and forth with ALA about junk mail she received when they sold her name to mailing lists before she had a chance to set her communications preferences at all. Upshot? Her name and address were sold before she even got her membership card and could login to set her preferences. Uncool.

PATRIOT Watch: Library cartoon. And not the one we already all know about.

Dear editor, do you really think no one has ever written a newspaper story about a library and used the phrase "checking out" in the headline? Austin TX seeks their own Big Beautiful Library, with retail space. [ thanks alisha ]

If reading banned books were really that scandalous, no one would admit it. Me? I read porn -- among many other things; where's my t-shirt? [ thanks jenn ]

When does "own" not mean own? When you own an ebook, of course. Smart talk from the shifted Librarian.

5Sep03past entry 05sep

Hi. Haven't gotten a lot of feedback on the CSS setup, so I am assuming it's mostly okay? Also, today is my birthday. Also, I got my first royalty check, it was for $38.

ALA is investigating whether their relationship with their law firm Jenner & Block is a conflict of interest since, well, they supported the RIAA in their recent lawsuit. Any word about this on the ALA website? No. [ thanks john ]

It is still okay to bring your gun into the library in Michigan, says the State Supreme Court. [ thanks tom ]

Meanwhile, in Kentucky, it's okay to wear your cross to work again also. [ thanks taylor ]

"Hey Hey librarian, tell me what they're reading" one of the great hits from the PATRIOT Act summer tour. [ thanks beth ]

If you're going to ACCESS 2003 in ~~Caliornia~~ Vancouver BC, consider spending some time at the Hackfest. [ thanks dchud ]

Attractive redesign over at Rogue Librarian. Would we expect anything less?

2Sep03past entry 02sep

Hi. Please join me in the awkward phase between pure-CSS implementation of this website, and the move to a new webhost where it will be maintained much more elegantly with Movable Type, not the hinky cut 'n' paste that I do now. If you can't read the new site, or if it looks unbearably awful, please let me know. My new job starts on Monday. I'm not sure why I thought this would be a grand time to mess with the website.

Not like I'm under thirty, but if you are, or you're just young at heart, check out the NexGen Librarian listserv over at Topica. If you're into social networking, there are librarian groups at Friendster and Tribe.net worth checking out. I'm at both, under my real name. If you're there, introduce yourself. [ thanks chris ]

The NPR librarians have a few words to say