Radical Reference is doing a bunch of things at ALA in Chicago. The Boston events that I went to were fun and low key and very welcoming to newcomers. If you’re interested in the work they do, swing by and say hello. I’ll be doing a short skillshare called “Oh No He Didn’t! Rumor Control As an Essential Part of Event Based Radical Reference” Monday the 27th at 2:30.
Category: ala
blogging at ALA
I have a very hard time both attending an event and blogging about it, or even reading blogs about it while I’m there. I appluad the people that try, certainly. Andrea and Luke the Librarian are trying to add some organized useful blogged conference reports to the ALA Wiki. They could always use some more hands to help out.
Gorman & Google cage match
Michael Gorman has some bad points and some good points in this Chronicle of Higher Education interview about Google. Good points: serious scholarship is about deep knowledge which is harder to get through Google in its current incarnation, than through print. Bad points: most library users are not scholars, really inappropriate hip-hop metaphor, inability to see the future usefulness of short scannable interlinked bits of knowledge for many day-to-day applications. Gorman is, in some ways, a librarian’s librarian, but he sure doesn’t come across as the public’s librarian. Some discussion on LISNews. This is my favorite excerpt from there.
I’m reminded of a quote in The Name of the Rose, something like “Brother Salvatore is guilty…. of confusing the love of poverty with the hatred of wealth.” I’m becoming more and more convinced that Gorman is confusing the love of accurate searching with the hatred of digital forms of information.
AL Online news feeds
American Libraries is on the RSS bandwagon and has a feed for their news headlines. It’s excerpts-only at this point, but send them feedback and tell them what else you’d like to see in feeds, Steven has.
My ALA Schedule – ALA Chicago
In the interests of meeting up with people, and my own terrible memory, I’m putting my ALA schedule online. To find me at ALA look in whatever room the Council meetings are at, I’m generally there. I’ve also linked to it on the Unofficial ALA Conference Wiki where others are keeping their schedules.