a few notes from Boston

Posted on by jessamyn

The big drum. Boston Peace Jubilee

I participate in a holiday card exchange every year. I don’t celebrate Christmas but most people I know do so I like to have something holiday appropriate and possibly library interesting at the same time. Thanks to Boston Public Library’s Flickr stream, I think I’ve found the perfect image, available for me to use within the terms of their license. Thanks BPL! The Boston Globe is also a great source of library information, I swear they have someone working there who is on the library beat. This semi-recent article on Information Overload and what that looked like five centuries ago when the newest boogeyman was the printing press is an enjoyable read.

Astute readers may notice that this blog now has a twitter. If you want to subscribe to this blog’s posts via Twitter, you can follow the @librariandotnet account which is auto-posted to from this blog. All the rest of my updates will be at @jessamyn. I set it up without too much trouble using the Twitter Tools plug-in and the bit.ly APi to shortne the URLs.

Why the Library of Congress Is Blocking Wikileaks

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m not totally comfortable with Library of Congress specifically blocking access to Wikileaks for staff and patrons at the Library of Congress as confirmed on Talking Points Memo. Here is the LoC blog’s response which refers to the same statement they are giving to reporters and the press. The situation is, of course, quite complicated but I find this to be an odd precedent that makes me a little itchy.

season wind-down

Posted on by jessamyn

I’ve been doing a lot of winding down in preparation for getting ready for holidaytime and all the rest. Here are some things that I found very useful that can not be explained in 140 characters. Sorry it’s taken a while.

– Want to read Overdrive books on your iPad? A combination of the Bluefire Reader (free) and a handy bookmarklet (also free) let you download books straight from Overdrive to read right on your iPad.
– Sunday Sunday Sunday! I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while but one of my almost-local libraries just made a major hours change and got funding to stay open on Sundays. This is a huge rarity where I am and much appreciated. It even got a nice write-up in the paper.
– Enjoyed a recent blog post by one of my perennial favorites, Molly Kleinman, talking about going to an Open Education conference and being dismayed at the perception of librarians that seemed to be held by the education community there. There was the perception of librarians as risk-averse, hung up on metadata at the expense of content and concerned about copyright to the point of letting copyright concerns outweigh digitization efforts. Molly writes up her thoughts and some approaches she thinks might help in her post When librarians are obstacles.
– Bullying, while perhaps assisted by technology, is not happening because of technology. Former YALSA President Linda Braun explains why.

virtual conferencing and a few more talks

Posted on by jessamyn

I was at an NHLA business meeting talking to people about why they might care about what I had for breakfast. It’s a flip way of talking about the whole “Who cares about Twitter/Facebook/Social?” stuff that I feel I hear softly filtering down from offline populations who mostly know about this sort of technology through print media and TV. So, given an opportunity to talk about what I do all day, I explained how social media permeates and penetrates the things I do.

My employer, MetaFilter, has a strong social component as well as claiming over 200 librarians among its members. While the site itself is fairly restricted to bloggish interaction, we have some super-organized members who like to compile Best Of sorts of lists over on our wiki. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the Read Me page on the wiki now has links to over 1000 threads worth of book recommendations.

Last week I was down at Simmons where I gave a really short talk about … talking. Basically talking about what public speaking entails and offers in the larger world of librarianship. It’s called “You Do What For A Job?” and you might like it.

So, since I was sticking around town working this month I didn’t go to Internet Librarian or most of NELA, and a few smaller conferences. It was fun to read other people’s summaries, and occasionally real-time reactions, for all the presentations. I’ll be making a sort of “what I learned from not going to conferences” post sometime in the next few days. For now, I’m done with public speaking until March and I’m pretty okay with that. It’s been a fun Fall season.