rock and roll library tours

Posted on by jessamyn

The High Strung [myspace] is on a National Rock & Roll Library Tour this Summer. How do I know? I read about it on Flickr. In other mashup-type news, Bloodhag [myspace] has come out with … a book. Who else is touring libraries this Summer? Jetpack UK [myspace] and Harry and the Potters [myspace].

Marylaine has a nice write-up about the power of these shows to do a little image improvement for the public library.

Two quotes that echo 100% of the surveyed results:

“Before it was just ole ladies and now it’s young people. It’s a lot of fun.”

“Yes it did, it made me think that if librarians could make a library not very much a library, basically anyone could do anything,” said one ten-year old.

The High Strung enjoyed the library tour as well. Not surprisingly, they say, librarians are better at organizing and promoting rock shows than most rock promoters. And have better pay etiquette. Of course, on a regular tour, they don’t have to stick around for a Q&A after every show.

feather books – digitally on display at McGill

Posted on by jessamyn

I post about bookish things less and less lately. Please enjoy this one, straight out of MetaFilter. “The Feather Book, digitized by and on display at McGill University: A seventeenth-century book containing illustrations of birds and men — composed of real feathers, beaks, and claws. More information about the book and its contents and history can be read here.”

Library Camp East, 2006 – join me!

Posted on by jessamyn

Newest on my “list of librarians on IM who I bug a lot” is John Blyberg (I know, I am slow on the uptake) who I haven’t met and in fact had never seen until this past conference. This will all change at Library Camp East, coming in on the tail end of the Virgo Month of Leisure, on Septemebr 25th in Darien Connecticut. It’s an unconference which means that anti-authoritarian — and broke — dorks like me will probably appreciate it. I’m just hoping I can carpool with both Meredith and Casey. Here’s the wiki. sign up and I’ll see you there.

library careers – two national organizations

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m looking around at library careers sites this week after the interesting story about the IMLS grant from a few days back. I was sent a link to the Canadian Library Association’s recruitment-type site, InfoNation. ALA launched their own site at LibraryCareers.org which, given that it’s the ALA website, redirects to http://www.ala.org/ala/hrdr/librarycareerssite/home.htm which is the URL you’d bookmark, no matter what the website says. Check out CLA’s library blog page with its subtle use of RSS feeds (and the inclusion of ALA employee Jenny Levine’s blog, how collegial!). Check out this competencies page that looks like a tag cloud and this page with desktop wallpaper. And who is this handsome man who says “I first became interested in librarianship due to my desire for world domination.”? Wouldn’t you like to find out?

Canada has actually published research about the current and future human resources aspects of librarianship in the The 8Rs Canadian Library Human Resource Study. Their work is something of a response to what we think we already know which, as they put it “the existing literature on recruitment, retention, and leadership in the library profession is based on either anecdotal evidence or aggregate statistics, most of which are American.” You can read the reports they have published here. The woman who emailed me about this sums up one of the results

while there’s no imminent crisis in numbers of recruits, there are issues around competency match between grads and workplace needs, need for leadership and management, etc. In other words, it’s more about personal / professional qualities than the panic about needing “bodies” for our libraries (as was expressed over & over in the literature a couple of years ago).