ask the librarian column by Alice Maggio

Posted on by jessamyn

Ask the Librarian is a well-written question-answering column written by Alice Maggio in the web publication Gaper’s Block. Can you say “reading list sidebar“? We should all have this sort of presence.

“Excuse me, can you help me?”

I heard this question as I sat, hunched over a book, on an overcast afternoon at a Brown Line platform on the Northwest Side. But a single woman, alone on an El platform, enjoys few things less than solicitations or unwanted advances from strangers. I steeled myself for a confrontation as I lifted my eyes from my book, the automatic “sorry” already halfway to my lips. But the word died on my tongue when I saw the young man standing in front of me.

email != domain name and other gaffes

Posted on by jessamyn

You know how there are people who like to act like they know what they’re talking about, but sometimes don’t really know what they are talking about? This happens with technology issues a lot. I have students who will report to me “And then I clicked on the Microsoft and the Internet turned off and I got an error saying ‘Can not find it’ but then it started to go again.” They sincerely believe they are communicating their tech support issues to me, but to my ear they are speaking gibberish. I can usually untangle the meaning with a few well-placed questions however. This is also the case with the ALA press release hyping the 2006 election and the electronic voting procedure they are forever refining. I am concerned that neither the person who wrote this press release, nor anyone else who read it before it was sent out and posted on the web site, knows the difference between an email address and a domain name.

jail library group at UW

Posted on by jessamyn

Speaking of library activism and useful results, I was recently made aware of the Jail Library Group of the University of Wisconsin’s School of Library and Information Science. You can view their slideshow [with its familiar presentation format] to learn more about what they do, from a talk they gave at the WI Library Association conference last month.