a few things I would have emailed you about…

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi there, I spent a chunk of my weekend selecting images from the NYPL digital valentine gallery and sending them around. Hope you had a decent weekend. I’m heading to San Francisco this week for the MaintainIT steering committee meeting. Should be an interesting time, the MaintainIT project has been an interesting one and they’ve produced some great information, but the funding cycle is ending and the big question is “What now?”

With that in mind, here are a few things I’ve been reading online over the past few days that didn’t hit escape velocity enough to merit their own post but that I thought you’d like.

  • The Future of Reading – a NYTimes article about a school librarian that doesn’t resort to the usual cliches and drives home the point that I like to make – in the age of information overload, being able to separate good information from bad is more important than ever and librarians can help you do that.
  • YANAL stands for You are Not a Lawyer – one of my favorite blogs, Freedom to Tinker talks about the difference between technology being able to introduce doubt into a legal proceeding (hey you have no idea if *I* was the one who downloaded that movie illegally) and what would happen to you if you’re even suspected (i.e. a world of hurt) so why you should understand the laws.
  • CRS Reports to the People – part 1, part 2. The Congressional Research Service writes white paper style reports for Congresspeople. These are generally not made available to the public despite being paid for with tax dollars and being incredibly useful and well-researched documents. FreeGovInfo has been agitating for them to be made publicly available as a general principle, not just continually leaked via Wikileaks or Open CRS
  • A portrait of Spencer Shaw, the first black librarian in Connecticut, who received a lifetime achievement award from the Black Caucus of ALA in 2005.
  • Freedom to Read week is next week in Canada. I like this idea of a readers’ holiday better than Banned Books Week.
  • TicTOCs a table of contents service. I was reading about this in Computers in Libraries and it’s great. RSS feeds of Tables of contents for many many journals. A great project.
  • Library phobia – my goal in my professional life is never to be the sort of librarian people are afraid of.

I’ll try to write some actual longer posts this week but I wanted you to know what I’d been reading

I am terribly jealous of the digital branch style guide

Posted on by jessamyn

David Lee King shares his digital branch’s style guide. A little long, but all recommendations are simple, clearly explained and sensible. Oh look, they spell email just like normal people do, yay! Style guides do more than just help you be consistent, they also set a tone for best practices for people who don’t know as much about the online environment as others. Nice job, David.

smell like old books, delicious!

Posted on by jessamyn

In The Library, a perfume for people who can’t get enough of that “work smell” [thanks scott, via]

Whenever I read, the start of the journey is always opening the book and breathing deeply. Don’t you find there are few things more wonderful than the smell of a much-loved book? Newly printed books certainly smell very different from older ones. The ink is so crisp. I’ve also noticed that books from different periods & different countries also have very different smells. And then there are the scents of different bindings: leather is marvelous of course but I find a peculiar pleasure in musty worn clothbound books as well. Perhaps just a hint of mildew!

Shiny Toys or Useful Tools? Wikis and Blogs

Posted on by jessamyn

Walt Crawford’s new version of Cites & Insights contains the freestanding article version (pdf) of the talk he gave at the OLA Superconference that I thought was so useful. Lots of good charts and graphs and stats about the world of library blogs and library bloggers. Interesting reading no matter what your familiarity is with either of these tools.

Blogs and wikis aren’t shiny new toys for libraries and librarians any more. They’ve moved from toys to tools. As with most tools, they’re not magic, they’re not right for everything or everybody, but they can be powerfully effective in many situations.

Google’s book people talk to librarians at Midwinter

Posted on by jessamyn

Library Journal has a thorough article reporting on the panel on the Google Books settlement that happened at Midwinter.

Mitch Freedman, past president of ALA, wondered about changes to the “free to all” ideology of libraries, asking whether Google would permit, as do other databases, site licenses for public libraries. [Google’s Dan] Clancy said that, given the consumer market, there was no agreement on remote access, but that could change down the road. “Authors and publishers were not comfortable with remote access.” While Freedman said that issue was resolved with database publishers, Clancy responded that those publishers don’t have a model aimed at consumers. He noted that “the challenge of selling into this market is not Google’s core competence,” so consortial discounts are authorized in the agreement.