lis.dom

Greg cleverly set up a Carnival of the Infosciences wiki, which, of course, comes equipped with its own RSS feed, so if you're not getting your Carnival updates elsewhere, go grab 'em there!

Oh, and check out the past couple stops: #15 at Ask Nettie Day and #16 at Library Stuff.

Yup, I got one too. Make your own and join the group!

Are you a geek, and a writer, and a female? Why not submit an essay to a book called She's Such a Geek, forthcoming from Seal Press next fall.

This anthology will celebrate women who have flourished in the male-dominated realms of technical and cultural arcana. We're looking for a wide range of personal essays about the meaning of female nerdhood by women who are in love with genomics, obsessed with blogging, learned about sex from Dungeons and Dragons, and aren't afraid to match wits with men or computers. The essays in She's Such a Geek will explain what it means to be passionately engaged with technical or obscure topics-and how to deal with it when people tell you that your interests are weird, especially for a girl. This book aims to bust stereotypes of what it means to be a geek, as well as what it means to be female.

Thanks to pasta, you can read the full call for submissions. Thanks to Mitchell for forwarding it.

I am still on a few mailing lists left over from my time as a graduate student at the University of Iowa. The other day, someone wrote to one about her experience taking a class on Extreme Web Searching at the UI Library, and she kindly gave me permission to reprint her remarks on the experience.

I signed up for this nerdy class at the library to learn about search engines beyond everyone's fav, Google, and to my surprise, the class was fascinating. There are a whole slew of search engines apart from Mister Google, and they're doing remarkable things. (They also have bizarre names like Clusty, Teoma, and Dogpile.) Since many of y'all research when you're not writing, and since others may enjoy a nice vanity-search, I thought I'd pass on the links. This page should be live for a while.

http://myweb.uiowa.edu/sostrem/xtreme.html

If nothing else, give KARTOO a whirl. I put in the name of the person I'm interviewing [for a conference] and thought I was bugging out when my results "map" appeared.  http://www.kartoo.com/

One might, I suppose, take this as evidence of librarians having done a poor job of marketing themselves as purveyors of useful and cool knowledge (i.e., a graduate student is surprised by what she can learn at the library?), but I am chosing to see it in a much more positive light. You see (and I'm admitting this here for the first time, at least in print), until I actually started library school, I was one of those people who thought the library had nothing to teach me. The more fool I. I'm glad to see that not everyone is as ignorant as I was, or as unwilling to take a chance on the idea that they might learn something from "the help."

I am going to stop apologizing for being so late in posting new installments of the Carnival of the Infosciences. As others have mentioned (I'm thinking at the moment of Walt Crawford's "Blogging Trumps Life" [edit 11/5/05: of course I actually meant "Life Trumps Blogging"--duh--thanks to Walt for noticing that little discrepancy] essay in the most recent Cites & Insights), the beauty of a) RSS and b) multiple people keeping an eye on things and writing about them is that we do not all have to be responsible for everything.

I am nevertheless greatly pleased to point you to the Carnival of the Infosciences #13, hosted by Rochelle Hartman of Tinfoil + Racoon. Enjoy!

Here's a photo of the display I did on teen rights at the library in honor of Teen Read Week (theme this year: "Get Real") and The September Project (I put it up back in September and spent a month adding to it).

Andrea Mercado did a very nice post about this display and another one I did over on the PLA Blog (thanks!).