My article for Library Journal’s NetConnect called Saving Digital History about archiving digital content is available online. LJ has done something weird and terrible with their web layout so that it’s now somewhat broken in Firefox for Mac so my apologies for sending you to the so-called “print” version. I also got to talk to Jay Datema and Peter Brantley as part of the NetConnect podcast series. It’s a hefty 50MB download, but I thought it was a pretty good conversation that Jay did a great job annotating.
Tag: blogs
Naked Librarians
Thanks to Dorothea for pointing out that it’s CSS Naked Day. Simply put, you toss up your website without a stylesheet. Then you see if you can still read it and use it. Then you think about web standards and intentional usability and good web design. It’s time to show off your <body>, for a good cause. If you don’t normally look at this website through anything other than an RSS reader come check it out.
I used up my April Fool on MetaFilter
I used up my April Fools energy making an April Fool AskMe page on MetaFilter. Those of you in reference positions may appreciate the jokes even if you’re not closely acquainted with the community. If you reload that page, you’ll get to the main page of AskMe as it usually is. The other site admins and I really tried for something that was mostly funny and not very confusing. I never like feeling that I spend the whole day on the first of April fending off bad jokes at my expense.
on harassment, a departure from things librarian, briefly
This is just to say that I think harassment of other people is wrong. And anonymous online harassment of people is wrong, and cowardly, and deserves to be called out. I agree with Ryan and Walt and Rafe, especially Rafe’s most recent post where he discusses how for many female bloggers this sort of harassment is nothing new. There was an incident that sparked this particular post — well two, one in the blogonets and one that has been taking place over email — but it’s something I’ve been thinking about generally for some time now.
I haven’t gotten a lot of harassing email and comments, but I have gotten some. I have gotten more of them than I would want. When I was running a blog about civil unions in Vermont — a hot topic at the time — I got an awful lot of hate mail including the “I hope you die of AIDS” variety. I’ve only gotten one “I hope you die” sort of email message related to librarian.net and the scary thing about it was that it was not anonymous. I’m also fairly certain that it was not serious, but it sure did creep me out. I get a bit of razzing and eye-rolling from people on other blogs, but the “hate mail” type communication has stopped, mainly since I left ALA Council. Sorry, but it’s true.
It’s a fine line between calling people out on their shenanigans, and starting a fight that you don’t wish to be involved in. I generally try to steer clear of hassling other people and for the most part they steer clear of hassling me. This doesn’t work for everyone, and I always worry that it won’t work for me forever, this “I have all my personal information on the Internet” thing. In any case, that’s all I have to say on this. More update on things librarian this week.
Update: a few more liblogger responses from Meredith, Dan Greene and Impromptu Librarian. I’ll add more as I see them.
caught up on my RSS feeds
So five days after getting back to the US, I am caught up on my RSS feeds. This is mostly because I prioritized things like getting pictures on Flickr, going food shopping, getting to the pool, arguing about Twitter, and making this little YouTube movie. Here are some things I read that I think you might like to read.
- Chris over at Libraryola does some actual investigating into the hubub surrounding the WaPo article about the library’s weeding policy. He gets a much more well-rounded answer from Sam Clay, the system director, than what the newspaper published.
- Walt asks if SecondLife and social software networks are where our patrons really are. I love the idea of SL, and the immediate potential as a place for geographically spread out people to come together is great (free teleconferencing!) but not a single person I’ve talked to out here uses it… yet. So, for me there’s a difference between going where my users are and trying to make them go someplace I like. I’ll evangelize about the usefulness of the Internet generally, especially for poor rural populations who can use it to save money and save gas, but I’ll wait a little before diving whole hog into SL. The comments seemed to have turned into a Walt vs. Jenny debate, we’ll see if they stay that way.
- Casey (that’s Mad Scientist Mover and Shaker Casey) has reprinted the Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming with a caveat about copyright. My favorite: Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience, that’s gotten me further than most of what I learned in library school.
- Jenny points to a cool opportunity to be a virtual scholar for the Urban Libraries Council. It’s a little outside my usual interest areas of services to rural populations, but it might be just perfect for someone.
- Rachel at LISJobs ruminates on why online publications still charge for classified ads by the word, and uses the opportunity to mention how LISjobs is still free as in beer.