I wrapped up my second month blogging over at FreeGovInfo.info. It’s very challenging to blog outside of your normal area of interest, thanks for letting me help out. They’ve got a fun little project going on that combines their site and Flickr. It’s called Best. Titles. Ever! Here is the page with the titles. And here is the Flickr pool with images of the actual documents.
Category: blogz
blog: ask The New Yorker’s librarians
Ask the [New Yorker’s] Librarians. Fascinating stuff. [garden]
Skills for the 21st Century Librarian
Meredith Farkas spells it out. Cogent, readable and clear. The tech stuff we need to know isn’t how to make a blockquote in HTML, we have buttons and software for that. The tech stuff we need is big picture stuff, how to solve the problems that are different than the problems that came before them.
So what skills should new librarians have in this first part of the 21st century? At first, I was thinking about specific tech skills like HTML, network administration, PHP and MySQL, etc. While those are certainly important, what I really think library schools aren’t teaching students is the “big picture†topics; how to really be able to keep up with technology, make good decisions about its implementation, use it and sell it to others. Here are a few of the things I came up with.
Answers, we have Answers
Sarah points to an article on SearchEngineWatch by Danny Sullivan about Yahoo Answers.
I’m interested in this particularly because I moderate and contribute to a similar but more blog-oriented site called Ask MetaFilter. The idea is simple. It’s a place where the 38,000+ members of the MetaFilter community blog can go ask each other questions and get answers. You can categorize and tag your questions, and everyone in the community gets to ask a maximum of one question a week. There’s a feature for marking “best answer,” marking favorite posts to keep track of, and asking anonymous questions which is quite popular. Each question has its own RSS feed. So does each tag. There’s a $5 [lifetime] barrier to entry that keeps the site from becoming just a one-off “free questions answered here!” site and there’s a group we informally call the MeFiBrarian Posse of info professionals (some of whom I’m sure you know) that answer questions like this one that I answered this week which seem like more typical reference questions. I’ve answered over 2300 questions since the beginning of 2004 and you can read every one of them. Going to where the user is, indeed.
I don’t know much about the traffic side of things, but MetaFilter is one of Technorati’s Top 100 blogs and AskMetafilter gets about as much traffic as the main part of the site. I spend a lot of time there keeping questions on track, helping write and organize the FAQ, putting out fires, enforcing the community guidelines, and being one of the human faces of a very effective website. I am the only librarian on a staff of three. I know I spend an awful lot of time talking about my small libraries and their trials and tribulations, but it’s worth knowing that there are also jobs in the online world at all that can test the mettle of even the most super-social and savvy librarian.
thing blog thing blog
Library Thing takes on the tags vs. subject headings debate in their new thing-ology blog, a complement to their other blog.