ALA and porn, other people’s opinions

I don’t spend a lot of time reading what the American Family Association says about ALA and pornography, but from time to time I check in. You never know when someone will use one of these pages as a “to do” list and show up at your library. So, without further commentary – except to note that “pray” appears before “reaserch” on the AFA’s list of steps — please see Plan2Succeed’s Library Porn Removal page and The American Family Association’s Library Internet Filtering page

hi – 17mar

Hi. This blog has tags, thanks to the WordPress tags beta plugin. Actually right now it has one tag, affectionately called “tag” but I’ll be changing that. I figured if I was ever going to even try to backtag 1100 or so entries, I’d better get on it before Winter was over.

way to make a good impression, librarians!

No seriously. Found this blog post from Fil, a member of the “video game community” talking about meeting some librarians at a symposium about the future of libraries.

I imagined droning on about the Dewey Decimal System, and waxing rueful over the “good old days” before the internet ruined research.

I could not have been more wrong.

The people (at my table, at least) were dynamic, technically savvy people who are trying very hard to keep information “alive.” I had some great conversations about user interface, podcasting, RSS feeds, and the digitization of collections.

be prepared for anything when you present.

Andrea’s at CiL and has some tips for presenters that are right on the money. I went to show off one of our library databases at an elementary school yesterday. Everything was fine until we got to the database login page. For some reason IE wouldn’t let us in, the tech guy had gone home, and no one else knew if there was a firewall or virus software on the machine. Fortunately, I had brought all the screenshots of the database that I had used when I was demonstrating it on public access TV. Oddly, the demonstration search I had used for the TV show just happened to be the same as the name of the town I was in. I walked away from that talk looking well-prepared and smart instead of tech-clueless and frustrated. And that IE problem we were having? We switched to Safari as an afterthought when I was on my way out, and we logged in to the database no problem, vexing!