While we are on the subject of busting librarian stereotypes, this pic of mine both confirms and denies a few that I have.
Category: librarians
conservativism and ALA and the profession and you
The Lonliness of a Conservative Librarian ends “[W]e should welcome diverse viewpoints within our profession.” I’m sure it would suprise nobody to learn that I wish ALA was different too. So, I joined some committees, tried to keep my wisecracks in check, worked with people who I vigorously disagreed with in the name of getting things done and, to a certain extent, sucked it up that ALA wasn’t exactly like I wanted it to be, because I felt that I could help make it better. I was also aware that I got more out of ALA than I would gain professionally without it, so on balance it was worth the headaches, the fustrations and the cost. I re-evaluate this decision a lot but it’s one that I made consciously.
Everyone needs to make their own balance sheets about these sorts of things. I empathize with people who have strong enough political convictions that they feel like a paraiah, but it’s a big profession out there and the jerks, naysayers, trolls and halfwits [on all sides of the political spectrum] are a small small minority of the people you get to meet and work with. Not letting them get you down is a good part of public service work, as is learning how to not be that jerk in the first place. No one’s ever going to bury me with a headstone that says “She was polite” but I try very very hard to treat all my fellow professionals professionally and I think it’s a good place to start from.
a few odd and offbeat librarian groups.
I’m picking through my bookmark folder. I’m hoping to be able to move more to a del.icio.us list for “add this link” sorts of items in the future. Found the home page for the Association of Part-Time Librarians which pointed to two Yahoo groups for librarians one of which, for librarian stay at home parents seems to be pretty hopping. It also point to Pregnant @ The Reference Desk which is mostly a maternity page but has some good tips for librarians who are expecting.
Dan Chudnov “more librarians need to be coders”
I’ve been meaning to link to some of Dan Chudnov’s essays for a while now. He’s a librarian programmer, or a programmer with an MLIS, who works on some pretty interesting tools. Unlike many other people who can codeswitch between high-tech and low-tech aspects of the profession, he hasn’t eschewed one for the other. In fact, he spends an awful lot of time trying to bridge the gaps that exist. His work log should be on everyone’s rss feed list. The latest entry is about library development, not fundraising, but coding. Dan codes, for a library. Dan thinks more of us should learn to code. I’ll let him tell it.
There seem to be two levels operating here of relevance to library types: First, you cannot afford to be slow, so whatever it takes to learn how to do things faster and better. Second, don’t be stupid about being faster and better – the means exist today to design scalable platforms on top of scalable platforms, and tools on top of tools. So you’d better know what you’re doing, and you’d better be good at it. Or, you’d better know whom to emulate and take every possible advantage of their good work when it can get you up your own curve.
This kind of message needs to be broadcast profession-wide – at the TLA meeting this past April several audience members challenged my assertion that “more of us need to be coders.” My response was, and remains, that in the aggregate, our profession is borderline incompetent w/r/to software development, and the more people we can get who understand this stuff, the more likely our chances of basic survival as an industry.
Paul Otlet and classification
Meet Paul Otlet, the forgotten forefather of information architecture and co-creator of the Mundaneum.
[Otlet] wanted to penetrate the boundaries of the books themselves, to unearth the “substance, sources and conclusions†inside. Taking the Dewey Decimal system as his starting point, Otlet began developing what came to be known as the Universal Decimal Classification, now widely recognized as the first—and one of the only—full implementations of a faceted classification system. While Ranganathan rightly receives credit as the philosophical forbear of facets, Otlet was the first to put them to practical use.