![[information springs from everyplace!]](http://www.librarian.net/pics/springlib.gif)
More news about the goverment. My Senator, among others, is working on strengthening FOIA so that, among many other good things, "writers for Internet outlets" can get their FOIA fees waived, the same way writers for traditional media can.
![[link to it]](http://www.librarian.net/pics/linktoit.gif)
27Feb05 . . . . blog people get more FOIA respect 25Feb05 . . . . "blog people" respond I've read a few really good responses to Michael Gorman's blog people article that are worth sharing. Michael Stephens, Kevin Smith, Jason Griffey and Steven Cohen have written lengthy responses on their blogs. I hear all the hot action is going on on Web4Lib where Blake from LISNews chimes in with some perspective, as does Roy Tennant. This reposting from a Slashdot discussion made me laugh, as did this one.
Gorman obviously has a lot to say. If only there were some tool available to him that would facilitate his putting it online, perhaps with a way for those interested in it to receive a notification when something new was available, and to respond with lively, rough-and-tumble comments...
23Feb05 . . . . TTW: ibraries Doing Cool Things with iPods Of course if you're aksing questions like "how can I use this nifty technology in my library?" you know Michael will have something to say about it.
4Feb05 . . . . a few shorter links A few other worthwhile links that came in but don't require too much in the way of explanation: A Librarian's Alphabet & Jinfo [from the folks at Free Pint].
26Jan05 . . . . librarianavengers: Designing for hyper-attentive cyborg children I have two confessions to make. 1. I never did like the International Children's Digital Library much. I want to, I just don't. 2. I haven't been reading Erica's LibrarianAvengers blog enough [now added to my RSS feeds]. Today's post about the ICDL made me laugh out loud.
We need to run everything we do through a filter that asks: "If I click on this without an MLS, will it piss me off?" We need to acknowledge that design matters. We need to remove ourselves from our collections. We need to design websites that don't mock the resources they contain. We need to do these things because otherwise all of our efforts are worthless. We need to design websites that don't suck, because otherwise the kids that we care so much about are going to wander off and smoke crack. And it's going to be our fault.
21Jan05 . . . . reading lists redux I have a somewhat hard time keeping my reading list updated. Sometimes it's a choice between writing about one book, or reading another one. Patricio on Flickr has found another way of keeping track of his reading for 2005.
18Jan05 . . . . folksonomy downsides Back on the free-tagging thing. One downside which is getting some play lately. It's one thing to use offensive or hurtful language when you are tagging your own content, but what about when those tags are shared in a large nebulous community of people with widely disparate political and personal beliefs? Rebecca Blood talks about some of those issues. [jjg]
16Jan05 . . . . where's the swag at ALA? Please see TangognaT's schwag wrap-up, this is the sort of thing I love reading blogs for.
13Jan05 . . . . learn this word: folksonomy What do you call a classification system where everyone gets to be a creator? Metadata by community? Grassroots free tagging? A folksonomy, of course. Systems like this are being used at places like Flickr and Del.icio.us and unalog. I've seen this term hitting the blogosphere but not really getting a foothold on the library blogs yet so here are some links for further reading. Can you say "user oriented"? I bet you can.
- peterme from Adaptive Path [who coined the term weblog] waxes folksonomically
- slashdot, naturally
- a neat little bullet-pointed list
perhaps the most important strength of a folksonomy is that it directly reflects the vocabulary of users. In an information retrieval system, there are at least two, and possibly many more vocabularies present (Buckland, 1999). These could include that of the user of the system, the designer of the system, the author of the material, the creators of the classification scheme; translating between these vocabularies is often a difficult and defining issue in information systems. As discussed earlier, a folksonomy represents a fundamental shift in that it is derived not from professionals or content creators, but from the users of information and documents. In this way, it directly reflects their choices in diction, terminology, and precision.
12Jan05 . . . . Twelve Techie Things for Librarians 2005 List maniac Michael Stephens has a good list of tech things good for librarians to know about. It's a great big hyperlinked list of tech terms and descriptions and worthwhile no matter what your tech level of knowledge is.
11Jan05 . . . . can I get things done @ my library? I don't know if you're at all familiar with the GTD [getting things done] organizing craze sweeping the blogosphere. Merlin -- a non-librarian with a great blog -- asks the lazyweb "Can I get an RSS feed of my library books?" Discussion ensues. [thanks bill]
One of the joys of serendipitously dipping into random blogs by way of keyword searching Feedster or Technorati is the occasional discovery like this one: booksdelicious, a pretty new blog written by a pretty happy-sounding librarian. Be sure to read the weeding entry.
In other conference blogging news, the Music Library Association is going to be live-blogging their conference coming up in February. The blog is already up and running here. [thanks beckie]
9Jan05 . . . . Google + Stanford, some real info While I'm not a wide-eyed blogging fanatic, this is a great example of a superb reason for a blog. Eli the Mad Librarian works at Stanford. She was at a meeting this week about the Google/Stanford digitizing project and wrote about what she learned. It's not a press release, just one person's observations. [scratch]
26Nov04 . . . . library law blog Speaking of libraries and politics -- as I will be in Australia real soon -- some of our favorite legal librarians are working together on a Library Law Blog. Really engaging Q&A format for some posts, just raw information in others. Thick with good information, or, as they say "Not legal advice - just a dangerous mix of thoughts and information."
19Nov04 . . . . librarian activist, now with RSS! Librarianactivist.org now has an RSS feed.
18Nov04 . . . . free range librarian looks at Yahoo/OCLC toolbar Karen gives her feedback about the YahoOCLC toolbar gadget.
I wouldn't use Yahoo-see-el-see, based on this experience, because I don't trust it. I'll start with my local catalog and go from there. Still, in the realm of hot new cool tools, kinda fun. Though if users believe this is a trustworthy resource, but it's not leading people to YOUR local catalog, beware, beware. "Yahoo says it's not there!" Go ahead and talk yourself blue in the face about how your catalog works... it won't matter.
I have to say, I'm as likely to brag about how many feeds I'm subscribed to as I am to crow about how many people I've slept with (my age, weight and salary are fair game, however). Both numbers are a little on the high side and may reveal a certain lack of discretion on my part. The correct answer to the question "How many feeds do you subscribe to?" should always be "Enough."
16Nov04 . . . . kinja guide to netlib 2004 Got to stay home and mind the store while Internet Librarian is happening in Monterey? Richard Akerman has set up this Kinja Digest that pulls together the posts of people who are attending. If you're already an RSS fanatic, Kinja may not be what you need, but if you're curious about feeds and blogs but you're not quite sure how to get started, check Kinja out.
14Nov04 . . . . the power of many ... bloggers Stephen posts about a new book about social networking written by my friend Christian Crumlish who was also a blogger at the DNC.
13Nov04 . . . . ALA-WA web site back online Welcome back to the web Copyright Advisory Network
10Nov04 . . . . what in the world is a wiki? What can you do with a wiki? Well... Here's what I have been working on lately, wikiwise
- I've been keeping up the Opac Manifesto. Feel free to add anything you can think of, I'm putting this one to bed this weekend. Some version of this will appear in Searcher magazine
- Some friends of mine are looking for housing during ALA Midwinter and I decided to try out a housing share page. Again, contribute if you have anything to add.
- My Australia notes page. This is locked, but you can see how an online scratch pad might be useful.
9Nov04 . . . . library juice has an rss feed! Good news, Library Juice has an RSS feed. Rory has also lowered the markup on his cafe press items to only ten cents aboive Cafe Press minimums so if you wre contemplating ap urchase, now's the time.
22Oct04 . . . . idiolibraries, search strategies What we think about when we think about personal libraries, some thoughts from librarian Tracy Seneca.
To be honest, the search strategies that librarians teach are often not the methods we ourselves use to find information. If we consciously track our own behavior, we’ll find that we still get a great deal of our published information by accident and by referral. But more importantly, the text that is “about your topic” may very well not be the text that inspires you – that makes you see something in a new way. Sometimes we learn most from texts we disagree with, or our innovations come from seeing a connection between texts and ideas that no one else has put together before. [unalog]
8Oct04 . . . . patronized, possibly a new librarian publication I have no idea what this is, but perhaps you can help out? patronized a semi-annual publication about the lives and labor of librarians.
7Oct04 . . . . xISBN blog to watch out for I almost never link to new blogs with less than a few weeks of posts in them, but Glenn Fleishman [you may know him from such hits as isbn.nu] has a proven track record and is a delight to read. His new blog ISBlogN which tracks the "authority problem" with the ISBN system for most people's real-world search needs. He's got big plans, it will be fun to watch them unfold.
Authority doesn't mean that the information is correct. Rather, it means that you have authoritatively settled on a single form of a category of information that might be represented in several ways. It's a way to collapse lots of individual information that is fundamentally about the same think into a single set of information that is mapped to the same thing. This is closer to how people conceive of what they want from a book search than any of the tools I've seen..... I believe that with a little effort and some coordination, along with the tenets of Feist v. Rural, the Internet community could develop a WikiBook-a-pedia, or a compendium of updatable bibliographic information along with authority and chunky linkages that could be distributed freely.
5Oct04 . . . . feed of the day, again? It's sort of flattering to be Feedster's Feed of the Day twice in two weeks, but I bet it's just because they have a lack of strong authority control and spelled it once with an uppercase L and once without.
1Oct04 . . . . Library Juice, juiced If you like Library Juice, Rory has put together a "Selections from Library Juice" page which is a best-of sort of thing. If you don't know Library Juice, this is a good place to start getting acquainted with it.
29Sep04 . . . . why aren't the vendors blogging? Jenny tosses down the gauntlet "Why don't OCLCs blog or news releases talk about the new OCLC stuff?" OCLC [or the staff that maintain a non-official blog] responds. This sort of notification would have been really handy during the whole OCLC sues the Library Hotel flap where we had to dig through press releases from them to get any news. I'm not sure we would have seen more than a few official announcements but it's better than nothing at all. ALA could benefit from this as well. Right now most of the rotating content on the ALA front page is sales and marketing and public information office news. Nothing wrong with that, but I'd like to read the news that's relevant to me as a member of the organization, not as just a potential buyer of products or services. Things like "The search engine wasn't working earlier, it's fixed now" or "A list of hotels is now available on the conference site" or "New councilors added to roster" or "List of new committee appointments made by incoming ALA President." Part of the problem is that this sort of effort requires either coordination [to get news in] or trust [to get people using the tools that affect publicly viewable content] both of which are hard to come by in an organization that is tight on funds and short on IT staffing. As it stands there is currently no way to figure out what content has been newly added to the site which means users spend a lot of time clicking through to all the pages that reflect their interest. What was it that Ranganathan once said...? Incidentally, if you want to help out with the "What We Want In Our OPACs" wiki, please email me and I'll give you the URL.
26Sep04 . . . . LISCareer has a blog! Great news, LISCareer has a new blog where you can get updates on articles added to LISCareer. Priscilla's also getting some help from new assistant editor Rich Murray.
21Sep04 . . . . catalogablog, good reading for good people I fear that if you don't catalog, you might miss out on some of the great information coursing through Catalogablog. Here are two great posts from Catalogablog, one recent, one not as recent.
"If anyone wishes to contact me by e-mail here are some things to avoid" [a lot of this goes for me too]
A number of wonderful things happening in and around ISBNs lately.
18Sep04 . . . . feed of the day? me? Jessica helps demystify why my site wound on as Feedster's Interesting Feed of the Day a few days back. I am still waiting for the day when my hand-coded RSS feed from jessamyn.com makes it there.
Top ten reasons why anti-spyware legislation is dumb, from the new blog that I've been reading a lot of, Technology Liberation Front written by Adam Thierer over at the Cato Institute.
7Sep04 . . . . two good articles from Library Juice Library Juice has two very good articles this issue, a short outline of the Radical Reference project from last week's DNC and. Even better, he has written a longer piece about the "librarian image" told from the personal point of view of someone who hits many of the librareotype bullet points [as I do, as many of us do] and doesn't think it's all bad.
In a sense, I am saying that we should embrace our stereotype in order to emphasize its positive aspects (without allowing ourselves to be reduced to that stereotype, as that would rob us of our individuality and diversity). The stereotype fits only a few of us perfectly, but anger over not being represented fairly by it shouldn't lead us to deny the ways in which we do fit the traditional understanding of what a librarian is like, because there is much that is true and positive in that idea. We should be proud of being librarians according to what the word "librarian" is commonly understood to mean, and should assert our value on that basis - not on the basis that the public has misconceptions about us....
6Sep04 . . . . why you can't be unbiased AND comprehensive in your taxonomies JOHO, the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization, begins to look at the biases implicit and explicit in the Dewey Decimal System. Incidentally David Weinberger was one of the DNC bloggers as well as the writer of this article. We kept saying we'd get together to talk taxonomy and haven't yet.
Why is the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system so embarrassingly behind the times? After all, its owners are fully modern, reasonable people, many with advanced library degrees, who report to work in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. How can they let their classification scheme get it so wrong? After all, if the US Census can finally, in 2000, acknowledge that many people don’t fit into a single racial bucket, surely the academics and intellectuals managing the nation’s standard library classification system can end its 130 years of religious bias. [stuff]
15Aug04 . . . . librariansforbush Tired of librarians talking about the USA PATRIOT Act? Then you both will and will not like Librarians For Bush which does talk about USAPA a lot, but from a different perspective.
23Jul04 . . . . blog: Baghdad Biblio-Files Baghdad Biblio-Files an infrequently-updated blog about rebuilding Iraq's libraries.
Thursday's meeting at the University of Baghdad went really well. They are probably going to be the library in the best shape. It does have some burned out areas, but like the national library did, the dean sealed the doors and bricked them over, so their collection, and their cataloging records are intact. Probably the biggest problem that they have is white ants. They have to treat once a year, and I think they weren't able to treat for a few years. [thanks pauline]
22Jul04 . . . . what else do the filters filter? What do a hotel chain and the public library system of Georgia have in common? They're both using SmartFilter which, among other things, blocks access to blogging tools.
"I'[ve] often jokingly comparing bloggers to pamphleteers of yore, but within blogging there are definitely some significant cases where people have a message to get out that can change the world. To find out that an institution of democracy like a library might be barring someone from sharing their perspective with the world saddens me."
15Jul04 . . . . Michael McGrorty - writer/librarian/advice columnist Does anyone read Michael McGrorty's blog over at Library Dust and say "Man, that guy is almost too erudite to be a librarian"? I know I sometimes do. One of his latest gems is about Nancy Pearl, and what makes her so special, and by a related tangent, what we are all looking for in a special librarian.
I certainly expect you to know, and to say, and then to show. What that means is that I consider it necessary that the librarian have done a considerable amount of reading—close, critical reading at that, and that she keep reading as if her livelihood depended upon it. Because it does. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t hire anybody to work a reference desk who couldn’t be awakened from a dead sleep to give a book talk to a reading club.
12Jul04 . . . . wherefore art thou luddite librarian? Luddite Librarian, MIA. And we were just starting to like you... [update, seems to be back with some of the old comments missing, hmmmm]
8Jul04 . . . . conservatives are librarians too I added some of the more prominent conservative librarian blogs to my links page. Agree or not, this page on one of them made me laugh.
Speaking of chilling effects, the student body president of the Faculty of Information Studies at U of T is ending the livejournal that he [she?] was keeping to share information with the student body. Read it quick while it's still online.
24Jun04 . . . . an outsider's view of ALA I know what do when I go to conferences, but what do you suppose non-ALAers think we do?
I never joined ALA, because even in 1966, it was beyond the pale for me, then a liberal Democrat. Soon they, or it, will be meeting in Orlando, Florida, world of fantasy and make believe, where librarians will meet to pretend that our society will some day pay them what they are worth if they make everyone else's business their own.
[shush]
She's so nerdy, her blog is all classified according to the Dewey Decimal System. You may have already seen it, but now there's some follow-up.
The proprietor of LibrariansHappen.org has invited you to "Kick some patron ass with me." I enjoyed today's Open Letter to Microsoft
19Jun04 . . . . luddite with an rss feed I'm looking forward to some critiquing from the Luddite Librarian blog. The LL believes, as I often do "...that criticism is a worthwhile approach to improving our image.", dislikes PowerPoint, and is critical of the gadget-craziness that permeates at least some of the librarian-blogger community.
17Jun04 . . . . No democracy...When BPL fails to give...documentation 11Jun04 . . . . why bookslut... you're ... gorgeous! 9Jun04 . . . . "are you sure you're using that citation properly...?" Kung-Fu Librarian has one of the most attractive library blogs I've seen. I've been enjoying looking at library blogs/websites off the beaten path. I'll find one I haven't seen, in this case Librarianguish, see who links to them, find another blog [tinylittlelibrarian], repeat.
8Jun04 . . . . information literacy land of confusion The Information Literacy Land of Confusion [lisblogsource]
Anyone gotten a blog from the folks at library-blogs.net yet? I just now noticed this page but without setting up a blog myself, I can't really tell much about it.
7Jun04 . . . . karen's moving on up, in green I'll be happy as hell when feeds that move have some way of automagically updating themselves in my aggregator if the blogs themselves post some little widget. For now, link propogation will have to do. Karen's Free Range Librarian now has its own URL.
6Jun04 . . . . new councilor's new blog Michael McGrorty is an incoming ALA Councilor whose writing you may have read in Library Juice and other places. He's now got a blog where you can read his writing all in one place. If you haven't already, please send him a library card.
4Jun04 . . . . BiblioAcid: Informatique, Documentation numérique et autres questions bibliothéconomiques French-speaking library enthusiasts will enjoy the blog, everyone willl love the URL: BiblioAcid.
31May04 . . . . blog vs. blog, or something If you're entrenched in the library blog world, you might be interested in the back and forth that has been going on between Library Juice and LISNews. Kathleen has a very good point w/r/t the very real downsides associated with anonymous posting on community forums.
14May04 . . . . lisnews too liberal? too conservative? Interesting article by Rory over at this week's Library Juice talking about what he perceives to be a conservative shift in LISNews' content and membership. update: LISNews responds.
12May04 . . . . more neat blogs Every state library association should have a nifty little blog like Library Stories to collect local library news, national news of relevance, and links to useful associations [and me!]. Oklahoma is lucky to have this.
I know it says "tech news" at the top, but Copyfight should be required reading for all librarians because it tackles the increasingly legally problematic issue of free information. In the library, we give our information away, freely. We learn about Fair Use to watch our asses, but who is going to sue a library? Well, here is a good post about Fair Use and folks who are challenging the DMCA with their own legislation, the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, or DMCRA.
5May04 . . . . the [another] anarchist in the library Siva Vaidhyanathan is going on a tour to promote his book The Anarchist in the Library -- a book about who is maintaining control over information in a world of digital knowledge, among other things -- and is guest blogging over at the Lessig Blog this week. [copyfight]
3May04 . . . . a nice grouchy blog Sulkbrarian is just trying to keep it real, people. Her [?] posting of a listserv gem "Subject: An Open Letter To Library Directors" is worthy of Revolting Librarians any day.
"And lastly to those info pro recruiters who think that an individual can survive as a $10/hr temp in one of the most expensive cities in the US, as former librarians and MLS holder you are cheapening the profession by sending master's level professionals to do work for
only 75% the going rate of your average GED holding secretarial temp worker. The message that you are sending to employers is that we have no worth as a profession. " [thanks jemmy]
30Apr04 . . . . Greg goes to MLA Speaking of librarian activism, Greg from Shush, the conservative librarian blog, has been at the MA Library Association conference doing a little conservative library activism. Greg and I may disagree politically about pretty much everything, but he was personable when I met him, works a few towns over from where I grew up [and may very well represent the views of a lot of that community], and anyhow I'm always interested in people's activist awakenings, even if it's not for "my" side.
28Apr04 . . . . yay, it's late April Like the Male Librarian Centerfold, I too am glad the tax season is mostly over at my library.
23Apr04 . . . . how to talk at conferences Michael has a great short list of tips for giving presentations at library conferences. I agree wholeheartedly with everything he says [especially being prepared to do the material cold, and sitting through other speakers]. I even have a few more points based on my experiences...
- Being well-prepared includes being mindful of time limits. Even if you have a normal stump presentation, try to tailor it for the time you have available. It's good practice for you and polite to your audience who often has many presentations to attend.
- I always tell people to raise their hands if I use words they don't understand. This reminder gives me a chance to informally talk to an audience beforehand and lets me know if I'm misjudging their level of knowledge.
- Offer multiple ways for people to talk to you after your presentation. Not everyone feels comfortable asking questions in front of a large group, but if you stick around afterwards, or make your email/IM/web address clear, they can follow-up with you. I also put all my talks online so people can refer to them, or click through some of the links I had later on.
- I always try to thank the people who invited me or otherwise facilitated my being there. Conferences are often stressful for everyone involved and trying to be affable and low-maintenance as a speaker, as well as appreciative as an attendee afterwards can help ensure that you are invited back.
21Apr04 . . . . thoughts on an evolving profession Has librarianship survived?
I like to think that even if rooms full of books are no longer the most important sources of information, at least the principles of Librarianship are growing in importance, value, and respect. [thanks hanan]
Greg from Open Stacks is retiring as the editor of the Dmoz Library and Info Science Weblogs category [and not without good reason]. Any one else want to step up to the plate?
14Apr04 . . . . google bombing Speaking of Google, I have very mixed feelings about the librarian Googlebomb meme that is going around now. On the one hand, it's fun and LoC and LII deserve positive attention. On the other hand, another recent Googlebomb -- the one for the word "jew" -- was done with significantly less good intention. One of the new paradigms we need to deal with in the Internet age, is the authority question. It used to be easy to trust the authority of print materials because they remained static. Once the encyclopedia is printed, unless someone rips the pages out, the information is inviolate. You may or may not agree with it, but you know that everyone reads the same words. Citing a web site for your information involves a "date accessed" indicator and, if you're really being careful, a cached copy of the page. Information changes. While this fluidity is more indicative perhaps of the "real world" of information, I feel that my job as a librarian is to use the tools effectively and be aware of their accuracy. While I find the planned outcomes of the librarian Googlebomb amusing and generally positive, I ultimately feel that it's a cheat -- a way to use tech-savviness to affect sources that others feel are more objective. If the Googlebomb precedent hadn't been set already, I feel that librarians would not feel that this was an appropriate way to manipulate an index. Ultimately, this is Google's responsibility to deal with, but shouldn't we be helping?
update: Steven appears to have called it off.
update: Steven appears to have called it off.
12Apr04 . . . . Open Access explained and made plain If you're interested in Open Access, or perhaps you'd never heard of it before reading Jason Griffey's paper, the Open Access blog is a great place to start learning. It's a group blog and has one of the best content-rich "about this blog" pages as well as a helpful acronym-definining "about the Open Access movement" pages [from the smartie librarians at Earlham, natch].
It has been a while since I checked in on the Bellydancing Librarian. Now there is a whole gallery of other bellydancing librarians too!
The Anti-Adventures of a Gay Male Librarian, where else but at Gaylibrarian.net
9Apr04 . . . . comments on the article from yesterday Fred over at commons-blog has some good critique of Jason Griffey's article from yesterday.
6Apr04 . . . . libraries + blogs = TLF Blogwithoutalibrary.net has its own domain now and -- one of my favorite new online content bits in '04 -- a set of lists of libraries with blogs, broken down by type of library and... it just keeps getting better... an RSS feed for each list.
Library Underground is back with a slightly different URL as well.
31Mar04 . . . . library school student body presidents with blogs U of Toronto's library school's student council president has a blog. I happen to know that the library school president at Simmons does too.
What happens when your site is the first hit for "instant message question answerer" on Google? Kids ask you their homework questions, duh!
30Mar04 . . . . bloggercon II - ad nauseum Sorry to sort of harp on this but you have no idea how excited I am to meet some other librarian blogger types. Jessica will be officially moderating BloggerconII's librarian session and she's discussing some of what she'd like to do there. Check in [and register] if you haven't already.
Aaron from The Bizz has a new attractive blog called Walking Paper where he is already tackling interesting library issues like his Keeping Your Computer Clean class and, my favorite, using AIM or other already existing chat services for virtual reference which Michael from Tame the Web has already mentioned once.
25Mar04 . . . . where's the stuff? Steven Cohen from Library Stuff has posted about why he's been away from blogging for a bit, and about a bit of lifestyle change he'll be going through. Here's hoping things continue to improve.
23Mar04 . . . . BloggerCon II -- now with librarian bloggers!! BloggerCon II [April 17, Cambridge MA] now has a time slot specifically for librarian bloggers lobbied for and organized by Jessica Baumgart, cool!
16Mar04 . . . . bloggercon ii, see you there? Jessica Baumgart is trying to put together some sort of librarian blogger event at BloggerConII which will be in Boston/Cambridge the weekend I'll be down to speak at Simmons. Anyone else interested in getting together? If so, sign up [it's free, free as in $0] and email Jessica.
8Mar04 . . . . new favorite blog My new favorite blog this week: A Library Writer's Blog. Information about writing opportunities. Sort of like the job postings blog, but for writers, maintained by Corey Seeman who also maintains this page about PC health.
3Mar04 . . . . our patrons will not be smelling better, so... "As librarians, we have to smell twice as good." more loveliness from the now-more-rural well dressed librarian.
2Mar04 . . . . redesign and anniversary for Constant Reader The Constant Reader is four years old this week.
4Feb04 . . . . something you don't see every day in the world of library weblogs SHUSH: a website for the conservative librarian.
Current stands that S* has taken include Pro-Patriot Act, Pro-CIPA, Anti-MLS/Pro-BS, and anti-privacy-of-minors.
31Jan04 . . . . a few more blogs I'll be watching, and a note or two about RSS The Curmudgeony Librarian and the Kept-Up Academic Librarian are being added to my more-frequently-read list. One thing I haven't seen people mention lately about the benefit of reading content via RSS+aggregators is that it lets you skim. Now maybe this sounds crass, but I can access more content more quickly and filter out what interests me in order to give it a closer look, if I'm not doing the point-click-wait tango of getting 20 different web pages to load and render.
Another tool that alll those chatty blogging librarians seem to be checking out lately is del.icio.us, a bookmarking tool that is striking for its simplicity, ability to share lists and [best of all] an ability to create your own authority control structures via a keywording system that becomes a set of hotlinked categories. I'm mostly using it presently for my "to add" list of links for librarian.net, and because I enjoy the URL del.icio.us/jessamyn.
26Jan04 . . . . if we could each learn one new thing at our jobs each day we'd be a profession of geniuses It's hard not to describe the One New Thing blog without directly quoting the blog's sidebar itself, but here goes: one Australian librarian vows to learn one new thing each day. This is her blog. [openstacks]
22Jan04 . . . . welcome Eli I added Eli's page to my links page, even though her entry today has very little to do with libraries.
20Jan04 . . . . woo woo go carol!! The Constant Reader is back with a small piece on bestsellers of yesteryear.
16Jan04 . . . . marylaine, is in my ears and in my eyes Marylaine has a compendium of quotes on her site where she keeps all the old "cool quotes" that she uses. I discovered this well before I found out I was on it. Library Juice has this feature as well [links on the left side].
15Jan04 . . . . new in blogland New in blogland and looking for your input and information: LibrarianActivist.org.
6Jan04 . . . . new kid on the block I am enjoying this website already. In the accidental systems librarian vein, meet The Librarian in Black. Self-proclaimed techie gamer librarian chick.
This site was born out of my displeasure at having to wade through dozens of websites, blogs, & RSS feeds related to librarianship, technology, webmastery, and current issues to find those few posts that applied to me as a Tech Librarian. [thanks jessica]
3Jan04 . . . . cites & incites now out Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights [pdf] is out for January. He's got an excerpt from his new book on the process of writing and tips for doing it well as well as a short piece discussing the currency of library weblogs along with some recommendations for good reads. [openstacks]
18Dec03 . . . . elvis goofiness Librarians apparently don't go in for that sweat-soaked rag toss. Sorry Elvis. [thanks allen]
Searching for more on drunken abstracting led me to this strange blog. Who knows what it might have been?
17Dec03 . . . . inside the book, without all the guilt You mean I may be able to search inside the book without having to have all those soul-searching discussions about how sucky Amazon is and how maybe my library should be more like them anyhow....? Google beta-tests inside the book searching.
12Dec03 . . . . new blogerrific features on liscareers.com Liscareer.com is adding a commenting feature tho their newly added article. All the articles added in December 2003 -- such as this one on mentoring -- give readers the ability to comment on the articles.
9Dec03 . . . . why hate library weblogs? well let nanette tell you why. Nanette hates library weblogs [except this one, and a few others] for some good reasons.
7Dec03 . . . . congrats! Marylaine celebrates her 200th issue of Ex Libris and invites readers to share with her what they think about it. Drop her a note, will you?
The Shifted Librarian finds IE plug-ins for searching library catalogs.
Finally, a merger you can feel good about Rachel from lisjobs.com and Sarah from Library Job Postings on the Internet have combined forces and combined their jobs postings which are searchable and have an RSS feed.
2Dec03 . . . . new blog! Beyond the Job: a new worthwhile blog for information professionals. Good stuff here already, go see. From your favorite career advisors Sarah Johnson and Rachel Singer Gordon.
13Nov03 . . . . old skool represent Steven Cohen wrote a great article on the New School library bloggers for Public Libraries Magazine and they let him reprint it on the web.
10Nov03 . . . . ooooh, black and bloggy Library Autonomous Zone, nice looking blog from San Diego librarian James Jacobs.
LLRX -- now with ads by Google -- has published a wonderful pathfinder to researching medical lit on the Internet. This is not just lists of links, it's detailed analysis about what each resource contains, and how useful it will be to librarians. [thanks steve]