putting the rarin back in librarian since 1999
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a new site with neat old pictures. I have a tendency to just trawl Google Books to find old images, but this site — From Old Books — has a bunch of neat images along with all the citation information and sometimes some nifty stories besides.
I forgot, with all the hubub about 4/20 [Hitler’s birthday, the Pirate Bay decision, other stuff] that my blog is now ten years old. Older than most, younger than some. I’ve become a much less frequent updater, and often on Fridays for some reason, but I’m still enjoying writing it, reading it, interacting on it and being immersed in blog culture generally.
Thanks readers, for a decade of sharing library information here. Here’s a link to the first ten days of librarian.net.
Walt Crawford’s new version of Cites & Insights contains the freestanding article version (pdf) of the talk he gave at the OLA Superconference that I thought was so useful. Lots of good charts and graphs and stats about the world of library blogs and library bloggers. Interesting reading no matter what your familiarity is with either of these tools.
Blogs and wikis aren’t shiny new toys for libraries and librarians any more. They’ve moved from toys to tools. As with most tools, they’re not magic, they’re not right for everything or everybody, but they can be powerfully effective in many situations.
As much as the blogoworld might seem otherwise, ours is not a particuarly trendy profession. However we do have trends and HotStuff 2.0 uncovers them for us. It’s an autogenerated blog set up by Dave Pattern which tracks hundreds of blogs and looks for trends. Sometimes these are pretty prosaic (really, potato?) but other times you can sort of see somethign happening there if you squint a little. Either way it’s an attractive and interesting blog with the obligatory “Hot or Not” which I don’t totally understand but I guess I’m happy to be on. Neat project!
As I said previously, I’ve been reading more. One of the online things I’ve been reading has been the group library blog In the Library with the Lead Pipe. It’s a long-form blog by six authors that gets to go a little more in-depth into library issues than your average blog. Recent posts I’ve enjoyed include this look at the idea of universal catalogs and this look at how to make bibliographic instruction “sticky” (memorable). The thing I like abotu this blog is that in addition to having really good writing and heaps of links to more information, the authors actually comment on each other’s posts so that you get more of a sens eof the authors’ perspectives and also some built-in discussion at the end of nearly every essay. This is one of my favorite new blogs of 2008.