Simon Chamberlain’s VALIS blog points to a bunch of responses to the Wall Street Journal piece about what they see as aggressive weeding. He gives two nods to MetaFilter, one for the discussion about the WSJ thread [which I participated in] and one for a related thread in Ask MetaFilter asking when libraries started being so … noisy. One of my favorite things about these discussions is the interactions between librarians and non-librarians in a non-library setting. The other thing I like is that thanks to MetaFilter’s use of the XFN protocol I can link to every library worker I notice in these threads as a “colleague” and then keep track of their posts and comments. Look at all those librarians talking to each other, and to their once and future patrons.
making change stick @ your library
“[C]hange doesn’t really scare me, I am more afraid of being bored or useless.” Karen Coombs talks sensibly on how to really effectively promote technological changes at your library.
A library defiled
I never really liked this song before, but now that I’ve seen the video for “Every time we touch” (which takes place in a library in a sort of “hot for teacher” manner” I’m a fan. [thanks john13!]
hi – 03jan07
Hi — I’m pretty sure I’m finished with the redesign/retheming of librarian.net. The RSS feed will look a little different, but not much. The site looks cleaner and easier to use in my opinion. If you notice something missing or not working please let me know. If you do read the site only through RSS, you might want to stop by the place and take a look.
I just did a small retrospective at my personal blog about my last ten years of blogging. Yeah you read that right. I started jessamyn.com/journal (rss) January first 1997, in what feels now like a totally different life. I was out of library school but hadn’t been working as a librarian anyplace outside of the University of Washington. For a long time, my main web presence was at jessamyn.com and that didn’t change until the last three or four years. Now I’ve got four or maybe five little subsites spread all over the com/info/net universe and my work time is split between fixing little computers in little libraries and managing a large online community with a popular question answering site.
I’ll do a little “my library year in review” post this week, but I just wanted to note this little milestone here as well.
DOPA dies on the vine
With the shift in power in Congress, DOPA looks like it’s done.
the final nail in DOPA’s coffin came with the switch of Congress from Republican to Democrat. Legislation that doesn’t get signed into law by the end of a congressional term has to start from scratch during the next term. In January, the Democrats will be in charge of both houses of Congress, and there’s no sign that they’re going to rush and re-introduce DOPA. Key DOPA critics in the House and Senate, including Reps Ed Markey, John Dingell and Sen. Patrick Leahy, will soon be in leadership positions. With the Republican losses in November, it will be harder for their caucus members to re-introduce DOPA, especially since Fitzpatrick is gone and they lacked Democrat co-sponsors in the first place.