librarian.net

home for the summer

And I’m home for the summer. Well except for ALA. This long weekend I went down to RILA and gave a talk, one of my favorites, about social software and intellectual freedom and privacy. Then I got to see my family, all of them, and then I went to a Connecticut Library Consortium meeting and talked about 2.0 stuff. Notes from that talk are here. I had a great dinner with some of the usual suspects which was a fun chance to swap brilliant ideas about out future perfect library world. Driving home from Hartford was like going back in time. First the tall buildings recede, then the roads get darker, then the billboards go away and finally I’m alone on the highway on a hot steamy night listening to a shrinking number of radio stations. It was a good trip. Thanks to everyone who hosted and helped and graciously listened to me.

One of my goals for the summer is to get over my user interface design issues with WordPress and start spending more time putting interesting things on librarian.net. I will probably ask MetaFilter for a nice way to interact with WordPress that is not directly via their [overbusy, overscrolling] form. If anyone has suggestions, please feel free to let me know.

quickie plug for an ALA event

Posted on 06Jun08 by jessamyn

Hi there. I’m heading down to RILA this rainy morning but I wanted to mention for those of you who are ALA-bound and looking for activities, my pal Kim Cooper [from SaveLAPL fame] will be leading a full-day Raymond Chandler bus tour heading through Los Angeles on Tuesday July 1st. More details on the website. I’m leaving the day before otherwise this is a bus I would be on.

This tour will dig deep into Chandlerâ€™s life and his fiction in downtown Los Angeles, featuring stops at the Oviatt Building, Lady in The Lakeâ€™s Treloar Building, the Barclay Hotel (aka The Van Nuys, site of the icepick murder in The Little Sister), Bunker Hill and Union Station.

“needing the stupid things” Luc Sante on the book collection that devoured his life

Posted on 01Jun08 by jessamyn

Luc Sante is profiled in the Wall Street Journal talking about his book collection and its relationship to his space and his sanity. I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned this, but I have a whole house that just sort of holds on to my books. The real explanation of why me and my books don’t live together anymore is longer and more complicated but let me just say that I know exactly where Luc is coming from and this article delights me. Don’t miss the sidebar history of private libraries.

I would very much miss books as material objects were they to disappear. The tactility of books assists my memory, for one thing. I can’t remember the quote I’m searching for, or maybe even the title of the work that contains it, but I can remember that the book is green, that the margins are unusually wide, and that the quote lies two-thirds of the way down a right-hand page. If books all appear as nearly identical digital readouts, my memory will be impoverished. And packaging is of huge importance, too — the books I read because I liked their covers usually did not disappoint. In the world of books, all is contingency and serendipity. Books are much more than container vessels for ideas. They are very nearly living things, or at least are more than the sum of their parts.

remaindered links and a short report

Posted on 31May0831May08 by jessamyn

People have been sending me some great links which I’ve been consolidating for a “best of inbox” post here today. This is a rainy Vermont weekend coming up which means indoor projects and I’m waiting for the kitchen floor to dry.

The above image is from the Royalton Library up the road from here. I went there on Wednesday after recording the MetaFilter podcast. The librarian had a patron who had gotten a “free” computer (actually two) and needed help setting it up. I went over with Ubuntu CDs and a cheery frame of mind. That outlook soured somewhat when I learned more about the computers. They were given to this family by the VT Department of Children and Families. They were, I think, donated to them. Neither one worked right — one had no operating system (and a possibly broken CD drive) and one froze intermittently. DCF had given these computers to this family, this family already needing a bit of help, as a way of helping them out. All they wound up doing was giving them a project, a somewhat futile project. The mom and daughter were good natured about it, but I felt totally on the spot — if I fixed the computers, the family would have a computer. I took them home to mess with and I’ll probably just replace them with a working computer from my attic. What a pickle.

On to the links I’ve assembled.

This one is sort of self-referential, but Steve Cisler died about a week and a half ago. I had met him when I gave a talk at SJSU and he came up and introduced himself to me. He was the first “internet librarian” I ever knew. There are a few wonderful memorial posts about him and I summarized some of them on MetaFilter.
Superpatron Ed V is putting together a list of libraries that have catalogs with mobilesmall screen versions. Does yours? Contact him.
I can never get enough of Brewster Kahle. In this podcast he talks about defending the Internet Archive from a National Security Letter. Good stuff.
Noisy punky library fun.

That’s the short list for now, I have a few that are begging for more explication which I’ll be getting to shortly.

A few links and a talk

Posted on 30May08 by jessamyn

I’m wrapping up the end of “talk season” here at librarian.net. I’ll be speaking at the Rhode Island Library Conference on June 6th and the Connecticut Library Consortium on June 9th. Then I’m done except for ALA. Yes, I’ll be going to ALA, giving a presentation with the incredibly talented Louise Alcorn for the MaintainIT people. It will be the first time I’ve been funded to go to a library conference… ever. Exciting times afoot at the Disneyland Hotel.

This afternoon I finished giving a talk online for the Education Institute. It was called Collaborative Information Systems & Reference Service and I’ve put a lot of notes and links online. Basically I talk about the changing nature of how people look for information and “Ask A” type services like Yahoo Answers and, of course, Ask MetaFilter. I have some statistics there that I think are sort of nifty. It’s very strange giving a talk online. I basically sent people to tmy website and then did a talk over the telephone. Except for the convenor, Liz Kerr, I wasn’t really aware of other people being present and it was unnerving. I know that continuing education is important and especially so for people who are too remote to go to standard talks or conferences, but I still feel like we’re trying to find a good delivery mechanism for this sort of content.