putting the rarin back in librarian since 1999
People have been asking me, and they may be asking you, about the job opening for Librarian of Congress. I put together this little one-page website to give people a run down of the important issues as I see them. #nextloc
Reference question of the day was about finding public domain images. Everyone’s got their go-tos. If I am looking for illustrations or old photos specifically I’ll often use other people’s searches on top of the Internet Archive’s content. Here’s a little how to.
1. Check the Internet Archive Book Images feed on Flickr. What I often do is search (which finds the words that surround the images) and then click straight through to the book (which is always linked in the metadata) and then fish around. For example…
I went to the Vermont Library Conference last week and mostly handed out Vermont Libraries Passports but I also gave a short talk about Open Library in pecha kucha format. I’d never done one of these before. Twenty slides, twenty seconds each. Total talk is under seven minutes. You have to be brief and you have to practice. This was a session with six or seven presenters and we got to learn a little bit about a lot of topics. You can probably see what mine was about by watching my abbreviated slide show. I also learned how to make an animated GIF from a slideshow which is not as tough as you might think and quite useful.videochat18-roulette
I somehow managed to screw up the hashtag for my Connecticut Library Association slides so they’re at librarian.net/talks/cla15 instead of findable collocated with the CTLibs15 tag. I’ve rectified that here. I took some time off from public speaking in the last six months. Wanted to get some new ideas percolating. Was doing more writing and less speaking andtrying to do more listening. It was useful. I’m now back around. I filled in for a speaker who cancelled lateish at CLA last month in Groton CT and I’ve got a few more speaking gigs coming up including another CLA in California later in November. I’ve never spoken at that conference before and I am excited.
So here are my slides for my talk that I gave in Connecticut. Unlike past talks, I didn’t make a list of links to go along with it because I felt like most of them are Googleable if you need them (and I was pressed for time). Title, which I love, is Attitude: How to bring the empowerment divide by being more like Vanilla Ice. Enjoy. Feedback welcome.
It could have been the Avengers of librarianing. All these powerhouses working together to help increase low-income childrens’ access to good reading material. But I don’t think that’s how it worked out. Here are my thoughts on last week’s press releases about this new set of programs. Written for The Message.