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.
Category: blogz
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.
I’ve read at least one good thing a day on this blog
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.
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….
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]