One of the types of questions we get a lot in Ask MetaFilter is “what book should I read on XYZ topic?” It’s one of those questions that the hive mind is actually good at answering because it’s just brainstorming and list generation by a self-selected group of people, not the “do I need to get this wound looked at?” sort in which you really shoudl ask a doctor. So, someone on MetaFilter decided to organize these questions into a wiki page. MetaFilter has our own wiki where a lot of information that may not need its own home on the site can reside, and where users can contribute content directly. The page is called ReadMe and contains a categorized list of over 650 topics on what to read, linking directly to the Ask MetaFilter thread where the topic was discussed. There’s even a section about libraries. It still needs a bit of tweaking, but what an awesome resource and a good concrete example of the nifty aggregating effects of blogs, and the “anyone can build something” effects of wikis.
books change lives
This isn’t specifically about libraries, but I know that many librarians consider Neil Gaiman a member of our tribe, since he’s so bloggeriffic and knowledgeable and appreciative of our profession. So, I thought you’d enjoy this story about how Neil Gamain pitched in to help scifi fan Jason propose to his girlfriend during a book signing event. Here’s Jason’s blog post explaining how it all went down. Neil Gaiman says it was his favourite bit of his visit to the Phillipines. [mefi]
a librarian’s worst nightmare?
I don’t know about you, but my worst nightmare is more along the lines of someone vomiting (or worse!) in the overnight book drop, but Slate has an article about Yahoo Answers and how librarians hate it. Of course the writer doesn’t seem to have talked to any librarians, he just likes to rail against the wisdom of crowds — with some valid points, certainly — and make fun of stupid answers on YA which is of coruse the opposite of what any decent librarian would do. There is a lively back and forth in the disucssion section which is hard to follow and hard to find but if the topic is as near and dear to your heart as it is to mine, I suggest you dig it out. I commented. [thanks alexandra]
My talks at the ILN Conference in Dubai
So yesterday was the big day. A keynote talk, a Q&A session, and two blog/wiki workshops at the Information Literacy Network Conference in Dubai, UAE. I’ve been feeling, before this trip, that I was going someplace really different compared to places I’ve been before. I’ve never travelled out of the country on my own before (except to Canada) and I’ve never been to the Middle East before. I have a friend, Step, who lives out here, so its been a great chance to see a place through the eyes of someone who lives here, not just out a hotel window. My pictures are on Flickr though since Flickr is sort of blocked here it’s been a bit of a challenge getting them all uploaded.
The absolute weirdest thing about this trip so far is the number of people here who I wasn’t expecting to know, or who knew me. The director of the Zayed University library and I served on an ALA committee together. Two people at the conference had seen me speak before — one in California and one in Perth Australia. Another two people had attended the same conferences that I had been to. One woman grew up in a small Australian town I had driven though in March. One woman owns a house literally five miles from my own house in Bethel. Another participant had grown up in Vermont. Keep in mind that this is a tiny conference with just over 100 registrants.
So, I gave a talk on Library 2.0 technologies which is an interesting thing to do when some of my favorite technologies — Flickr, Twitter — are actually blocked at a country level and so are completely unavailable to these librarians and educators. During my workshop we actually got to mess around with a locally installed version of WordPress and a locally installed version of Mediawiki. It was tough to do a bit blog/wiki workshop in just under an hour but one of the neat parts was that for a workshop of 40 or so people, we had 20 wired laptops available so that people could actually use the software, not just hear about it.
So, the two notes pages from my talks are here
If you’ve seen my other 2.0 talks, this is a slightly different version with a little more background and links to more handouts. Thanks so much to the nice people who brought me out here. I’ll be heading back to the conference today just to sit in and maybe take a few photos.
the future of reading, Amazon.com’s then and now statements
I learned what I know about greasemonkey and an awful lot about accessibility by reading Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility and Dive Into Greasemonkey. He has a blog at DiveIntoMark, of course, which I sometimes read. Today I was directed there by David Weinberger to the post called The Future of Reading. As David points out Mark’s post is not just a cheeky then and now juxtaposition of some of the things Jeff Bezos has said, it’s also “the story of the coming change in norms. And a change in norms rewrites all the stories leading up to it.” How are you feeling about your digital rights, and the content in your libraries?