lis.dom

this blog has moved

2006-01-26T23:27:00.000-06:00

Go to http://www.newrambler.net/lisdom if you want to read the latest.

Thanks!

on the move: lis.dom, carnivals, and possibly me

2006-01-24T15:35:00.000-06:00

Lots of things are happening, and these are just a few of them:

First (though not exactly foremost), I'm happy to announce that lis.dom is bidding farewell to Blogger and moving to my web site and to WordPress! With some much-appreciated help from my friend Mitchell, lis.dom will henceforth be residing at http://www.newrambler.net/lisdom. [Feeds: RSS, atom] There are still a few bugs in the system--I'm working on categorizing all the old posts (and at some point I may even do the Technorati-meme, CW!) and at picking out, modifying as necessary, and installling a new theme--but, in the meantime, in the spirit of living in beta, I'm just going to move the main posting over there. I will leave these Blogger posts up, though, so old permalinks will still go somewhere.

The Carnival of the Infosciences has made a couple of stops in the past two weeks. Check them out (if you haven't already): Carnival #20 at TangognaT and Carnival #21 at Infomancy.

And finally, as for the "possibly me"--well, that's just one of those awful blogging teasers. More will be revealed, soon.

Read Roger!

2006-01-11T22:47:00.000-06:00

Did you know that Roger Sutton (editor of The Horn Book) has a blog?

We children's lit people are not so far behind the times after all. (And if you like children's literature--as I hope you do--and are a reader of blogs--as I assume you are if you are reading this--I hope you're reading Your Fairy Bookmother. Thanks to Rochelle for pointing that one out to me.)

Sutton (I just don't quite feel right calling him Roger, even if he does use it in his blog's name) points out a nifty little article in the most recent issue, complete with a very cool demonstration of what a digital picture book could be. And he points to a little bit of flawed logic coming out of ALA (you're shocked, I'm sure):

ALA has inserted itself into Audible.com's "Don't Read" ad campaign. For the wrong reasons, I think: "trademark violation," which is a bit obnoxious given that the ad is a parody and the ALA is allegedly in the business of protecting intellectual freedom.

Good stuff, and worth reading, if you're so inclined.

communities, suburban and virtual, then and now

2006-01-11T09:33:00.000-06:00

Rick, my blogosphere friend and neighboring librarian (I live one suburb over from the Thomas Ford Memorial Library) has a wonderful post about reading through old local newspapers on microfilm.

I sometimes hear that people today feel a little threatened by the amount of personal information on the Internet. In 1956 there was a tremendous amount of such information in the weekly newspaper. Of course, there were announcements of births, engagements, marriages, and deaths, as you might find in today's paper, but to a greater degree. One wedding story listed everyone who came. . . .

How did the Citizen get so much news? Did it have a large team of reporters? I think the answer to the last question is "no" and "yes." No, the newspaper did not have many reporters on its payroll. Yes, many people in the community called the newspaper with every bit of news they had. They participated in the making of the newspaper. It really belonged spiritually to the community.

It sounds kind of like the blogosphere, does it not? Or like a suburban Wikipedia--if you can imagine subversive gardening in the suburbs.

carnival #19

2006-01-09T19:22:00.000-06:00

Hear ye, hear ye (how I love to use archaic language in a digital environment): the first Carnival of the Infosciences (#19!) of 2006 is up and running over at Wanderings of a Student Librarian.

Among its many gems are someobvious to some but good nonetheless interview tips from Grumpator. Heidi Dolamore, who writes the wonderfully named quiddle (and is running for ALA Council!) has also been posting on the topic of the great librarian job hunt. If you're looking for a job yourself, definitely check out her blog--she's been giving great run-downs on different kinds of interviews and what kinds of questions they ask.

I have, in fact, embarked upon the Great Job Hunt myself and may have more to say about it in the coming weeks and months--although it's also entirely possible that I'll be extremely busy with said job hunt plus the usual jobs and school and thus not posting much at all.

In the meantime, enjoy the Carnival and consider signing up to host one yourself!

low tech library 2.0: the picture

2006-01-04T10:46:00.000-06:00

suggestions
Originally uploaded by newrambler.

See the entry below for more. . . the picture upload from Blogger doesn't seem to have worked, at least not from what I can see. Apologies if it worked in your browser and you're getting this twice.

low tech library 2.0

2006-01-04T10:01:00.000-06:00

Michael Stephens reiterates that library 2.0 is more than technology, to which, I imagine, some of us are saying, "Well, thank goodness!" Not all of us have us have huge budgets to send people to conferences or the space/time/staff support/equipment to holdDDR nights or coworkers who are hip to (or interested in being hip to) the latest hot tags on del.icio.us. Many of us are still operating in .98 beta.

But does that mean we can't use any of the principles of library 2.0? (Which, as many others have pointed out, are not so different from the principles of Ranganathan). No. This, then, is my inaugural post for a series on low tech library 2.0. I've been trying to come up with more ways for YA patrons to contact me. Since we don't have a YA space in the library--just some bookshelves and a bulletin board--and since I work in the children's room, out of sight from the YA shelves, I don't see them very often. Since my library doesn't allow IM, they can't IM me. Since many of our patrons don't have home internet access, IM and e-mail wouldn't be an option for them anyway. So I went with a very old-fashioned idea. Pictured above (at least if the Blogger photo upload worked) are some of the most recent suggestions that have come into the suggestion envelope I put on an empty slot near the YA magazines as another way for the YA patrons to communicate with me. How is this L2.0?

It's where the patrons are--literally. There is a suggestion box up near the front of the library, and there's an electronic one buried in the library catalog (which I can't link to directly, since the catalog runs on sessions). Neither of these are very user-friendly, nor are they where teens congregate.
It's as anonymous or as open as the user wants.
It's interactive--I post responses to the requests (e.g., "Okay, the first few volumes of Ceres Celestial Legend are in my next book order. The latest in the Alice series is Alice On Her Way, which we own, and there's a new one called Alice in the Know coming out in a few months, which I'll definitely get.")
It's my attempt to connect in some way with patrons and to make them feel that they have some connection with the library and with "their" librarian.

What other low tech library 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) is out there? Feel free to comment below, write about it on your own blog, e-mail me at lauracrossett at hailmail dot net, or IM me (at home) at theblackmolly on AIM.

lost and found @ apple

2006-01-04T09:38:00.000-06:00

lost and found @ apple
Originally uploaded by newrambler.

On Monday my computer (an iBook, circa 2003) had a complete meltdown--weird static on the screen, followed by more static, followed by the computer refusing to show anything on the screen at all, or for that matter do much of anything else.

So yesterday morning I drove it over to the Apple store. I got there about five minutes before it opened, and there were already 12 people waiting outside. I got an appointment for about forty minutes later, which I figured was pretty good, considering. The guy at the Genius Bar confirmed what I had suspected--my computer was the victim of the faulty logic board problem (see http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/). The bad news was that the computer had to be sent off for a week to ten days; the good news is that the repair would be covered. Whew.

So off I went to walk dogs for a few hours, and then I came home to shower and rest for a little bit before going to work at the library--and it was then that I realized that I no longer had the book I was reading, which I'd last had at the Apple store. I called up, and they said yes, they had it. Thus I got to drive back to Oakbrook, where, happily, the book was waiting for me, topped with the lovely blue sticker you see here. Trust Apple to make even their lost and found signs look pretty.

privacy: a preface

2005-12-22T22:20:00.000-06:00

I have a long, thoughtful post that's still mostly in my head about online presence and privacy, and someday I'll get it all down in print (or pixels, or what have you)--probably about the same time I catch up on reading Cites & Insights (Walt, it's not even 2006 yet! Slow down! :-)). In the meantime, though, I offer these prefatory remarks.

I just added some old pictures to Flickr. The quality is not that great--many of them were originally Polaroids, and then I scanned them--but they have a certain sentimental value, and it's kind of neat to be able to see them out on the web. When I was uploading them, though, it occurred to me that being around and available online is not for everyone. Not everyone wants to put themselves out there, and I feel some responsibility for not forcing them on to a stage they didn't want to be on.

It's true that almost no one can avoid being online somewhere--if not through Google, then through ZabaSearch or one of the other online white pages. But there's a difference between that and having snapshots of yourself with bad hair out in the world. Maybe that will change--but for some of my friends and family, it hasn't changed yet.

So while I have no problem letting you see one of my poor '80s fashion choices or letting you know who I voted for in 2000, or explaining how I got arrested, or even telling you about the time they couldn't find my cervix, I know that's not for everyone.

All this, really, is by way of explaining why, if you're one of my Flickr contacts, you've been upgraded from "contact" to "friend." Everyone can see pictures of me; I've made the ones with other people in them friend only, which lets my online community see them but keeps them at least a little bit private. If you're not listed as a friend or contact, it's not because I don't like you; it's just because I haven't gotten around to it (or I don't know who you are). But feel free to add me, and I'll reciprocate--and then you too can see poor-quality photos of my friends and family in front of my tree. Oh, the excitement!

book notes

2005-12-18T19:10:00.000-06:00

Jessamyn West pointed the other day to a piece about lifehacking books by writing in them, with apologies to librarians. It brought to mind a bit from Roger Tory Peterson that I quoted in a paper I wrote about DRM and e-books last spring:

Roger Tory Peterson, author of the classic A Field Guide to the Birds wrote, when the book's second edition came out, that he was always happy when people showed him their copies of his book.

"It is gratifying to see a copy marked on nearly every page, for I know that it has been well used. Although the cover is waterproofed, I have seen many copies with home-made oilcloth jackets; I have seeen copies torn apart, reorganized and rebound to suit the owners taste; others have been tabbed with index tabs, or fitted with flaps or envelopes to hold daily check-lists."*

Nothing new under the sun. (And if you really like reading about how to lifehack your books, if you haven't picked up a copy of Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, do so soon!)

And on a final note, you can now comment on librarian.net. Apres moi le deluge.

*Roger Tory Peterson, A Field Guide to the Birds (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934): xviii.

this past week. . .

2005-12-18T11:14:00.000-06:00

Monday
I finished up a collection development project for LIS 721, Library Materials for Children and discovered the existence of phantom reviews. I used Baker & Taylor's Title Source II to help locate some books and reviews, and my partner used Follett's Titlewave, and then we'd go look up the full citations for the reviews we found. . . or at least we tried. Let's say that for one title, B&T said it was reviewed in the July 2000 issue of Booklist. I would dutifully go to Dominican's databases and start searching for the review. I couldn't find it by author, title, keyword, or date. I then tried going more directly to the source and looking through the Booklist indexes (which exist somewhere on the ALA website, though naturally now I can't find them). No luck there either. It was time to get serious. I hit the stacks. I grabbed the microfilm and spent half an hour or so scrolling through Booklist from July 2000 and from November 2000, when Follett claimed it was reviewed. No cigar. And this happened again and again, not just with Booklist, but also with School Library Journal, VOYA, and others. My partner, meanwhile, was having a similar experience with Books in Print, Book Review Index, et al. I wrote my professor. Were we going crazy? Apparently not. She said she'd noticed this problem before. We did the best we could. A few days later, I mentioned this to my professor for LIS 745, Searching Electronic Databases, who pointed out that Baker & Taylor and Follett are, after all, in the bookselling business, not the bibliographic verification business. Still, it's maddening. My adventures in bibliography were not over, though.

Wednesday
I turned in my final project for LIS 745, Searching Electronic Databases, which was a 25 item annotated bibliography on the subject of state guardianship programs for adults, prepared for my client, the Iowa Substitute Decision Maker Task Force, a group of people (including my mother) who are trying to establish such a program in Iowa. The week before, I did my final presentation on the project. I found many beautiful pictures with which to illustrate my presentation via the Creative Commons search on Flickr. I'm a big believer in giving people things to look at when presenting, but it does make for a monster-sized PowerPoint, which convinced once again that I really need to learn the S5 and/or Jessamyn West version of slides. . . I thought about doing it for this presentation, but as time was beginning to get short, I thought perhaps that would be an untenable exercise in procrastination.

Thursday
I began the morning of my 30th birthday by oversleeping. I am hoping that this was the last gasp of the past decade rather than a sign of the decade to come. I finished up and turned in the paper on virtual readers' advisory for LIS 763, Readers' Advisory Services. Thanks to everyone who commented on my previous post on the topic, and thanks to all the biblioblogosphere folks who've created, written about, or fantasized about how we could make OPACs more useful and interesting. Not surprisingly, I found much more material for this paper by searching blogs than I did by searching professional journals. "Folksonom*" as a search term in one of the LIS databases turns up one citation ("Metadatering door de massa: Folksonomy," by Sybilla Poortman and Gerard Bierens), which looks really cool, but unfortunately it's in Dutch, which I can't read. Partly, of course, this is because I was writing about stuff so new that it simply hasn't made it in to professional literature. In fact, the very afternoon at work before I turned the paper in, I read a couple of new things I wanted to add. But I stopped, went to class, turned in the paper, listened to some cool book talks, and so completed my third semester of library school. One more to go!

And now it's winter break, which I plan to spend a) reading, b) working some extra hours at my dog-walking job, c) sleeping, and d) getting serious about the job hunt. Expect more on the first and last of those in future entries--I'm also planning to a bit more blogging, now that I have a few weeks free from one of my obligations.

IM RA etc.: technology for readers' advisory?

2005-12-11T10:15:00.000-06:00

I'm writing a paper for my Readers' Advisory class about the present and future of of online readers' advisory. I've been doing research in the usual academic sorts of places, but it just occurred to me that this would be a good question to bring to the biblioblogosphere.

So, if you happen to read this and use or know of anyone using online resources for RA, leave a comment or e-mail me at lauracrossett at hailmail dot net. "Online resources" could mean anything from plain old websites to newer social software--blogs, wikis, IM, and so forth.

The paper is due Thursday night, but I'm getting interested in the topic and may try to turn it into an article of some sort, or at the very least a blog post, so late contributions are welcome.

Gracias!

index this!

2005-12-04T18:05:00.000-06:00

Walt writes that he is done with C&I Volume 5. If you’re a reader of Cites & Insights, you’ve probably already downloaded and printed out the latest issue, as have I (though I haven’t read it all yet). I was particularly delighted, however, to be able to download and print out the index [.pdf] to the whole volume.

I love indexes (or indices, if you prefer). So far as I know, the C&I index is the first one in which I appear, which gives it a certain added appeal, but I like pretty much any old index.

For one thing, an index is kind of a paper version of a tag cloud. Go pull a biography off the shelf and flip through the index. Chances are that some terms will have several lines of pages listed after them, while some will have only one or two. Some will also have sub-index terms underneath, rather like the sub-subjects in the OPAC tag cloud that everyone’s been talking about. I’ve also always thought that a good index reads rather like a bit of found poetry.

And then, of course, there’s what I have always considered to be the greatest literary reference to indices: Chapter 44 of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, called “Never Index Your Own Book.”

“It’s a revealing thing, an author’s index of his own work,” she informed me. “It’s a shameless exhibition—to the trained eye.”
“She can read character from an index,” said her husband.
“Oh? I said. “What can you tell about Philip Castle?”
She smiled faintly. “Thing’s I’d better not tell strangers.”

Want to know what? Well, as we say in my readers’ advisory class, if you want to find out, you’ll have to read the book.

Technical notes for this entry: I’m trying Blogger for Word for the first time. We’ll see how it works. [Update: I wrote this in Word, but I’m going to be posting via Blogger, since so far as I can see, Blogger for Word is not for Mac. Furthermore, I was unable to cut and paste from Word to Blogger, so I had to cut and paste to Text Edit, then cut and paste from there to Blogger, then put in all the links again. Poopy.] I consulted several books in the course of writing this entry—a dictionary, because I was curious about whether there was a preferred plural form for the word index (not really, though indexes was listed first in The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), which was what happened to be closest), and a copy of Cat’s Cradle, because I couldn’t remember the exact title of the chapter, and because I wanted to use a quotation. I know there are many wonderful online dictionaries, both free and fee, plus of course that handy Google operator, define: X, but I never think to use them. It did occur to me to try out Google Book Search to see if Cat’s Cradle had been scanned, which it doesn’t seem to have been, though there are plenty of books that reference it. A search for “never index your own book,” however, did turn up this little gem, which I’d love to read. Google, oh, Google, why do you not synch yourselves with Find in a Library?

carnivals past, present, and future

2005-11-22T22:58:00.001-06:00

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.

my librarian trading card

2005-11-22T22:58:00.000-06:00

My trading card
Originally uploaded by newrambler.

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

she's such a geek

2005-11-22T10:19:00.000-06:00

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.

what help "the help" can offer

2005-11-09T09:42:00.000-06:00

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."

the tinfoil carnival

2005-11-04T21:17:00.000-06:00

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!

get real about your rights

2005-11-04T21:09:00.000-06:00

get real about your rights 3
Originally uploaded by newrambler.

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!).

on the uses of the biblioblogosphere

2005-10-29T20:48:00.000-05:00

I started browsing around in the biblioblogosphere sometime during winter break last year. I had heard of librarian.net and Librarian Avengers and a few others from various sources, but when I dove in to the land of links, I really had no idea who any of these people were. And as I started reading, I had no idea who all the people they talked about were. Who was this Walt Crawford person, and why was everyone so excited when he got a blog? I had a hard time lining up real names and blog names for awhile--was Jenny the Shifted Librarian or the Librarian in Black, or maybe the Free Range Librarian? And what the hell was all this RSS stuff everyone kept talking about? Feeds? Subscriptions? Aggregators? It was code to me; code being spoken by a group of people in the know, all of whom seemed to know each other and refer to one another in endless loops. In many ways, then, it was like a clique--like one of those supercool groups of people I never quite belonged to. But in important ways it was different from a clique--it existed (mostly) in virtual space, and, perhaps by virtue of that, it was a club that anyone could join. I never felt excluded in my early months of reading; I just felt like I was getting the lay of the land.

Eventually I started to figure it out. Bloglines! What a nifty tool! RSS goodness, as so many of the people I read would say. I figured out who was who. I started using my incredible printing privileges at school (they let you print out unlimited amounts of stuff for free--it's crazy, but hard not to like) to print out Cites & Insights. And then, perhaps inevitably, I started a blog of my own.
Now, thanks to Michael Stephens ofTame the Web, there are a bunch of Dominican students blogging. (Hi, Natalie and Connie and probably some others of who whom I know but am forgetting!) I stopped thinking of this as a sort of unofficial Dominican forum and started thinking of it as my own little personal domain awhile back. I had the great privilege and pleasure of meeting a whole bunch of the people whom I had myself started to refer to casually at the bloggers' shindig at ALA (thanks again to It's all good for sponsoring the party, and thanks to Walt for sharing cab fare up to the Loop).

I've been thinking a lot about all of this while reading various people's reactions to the Nielsen weblog usability article over the past week or so. I won't reiterate the excellent critiques made by Mark and Angel, but I will say this: I never felt unwelcome by the first blogs I read (my blog parents, as Rochelle so charmingly put it). I didn't understand everything I read, but it wasn't because people were using too much jargon or acting too clique-ish. I didn't understand everything I read because I was new to the biblioblogosphere and new to librarianship. I liked what I read; I liked figuring it out; and, most of all, I liked the feeling that I was entering a community I was welcome to join.

There aren't many places in the world where you can get by--get ahead, if you want to think of it that way--simply on the strength of your ideas and your willingness to express them. The biblioblogosphere turns out to be one of those places. I'm immensely grateful for that. I haven't been blogging much lately--the whole life trumps blogging thing that many have experienced--but I still dip in and sometimes dive in to this wonderful set of waterways that all of you have built. One way or another, I plan to keep on tumbling through it, and I hope that next June, one way or another, many of you will all wash up in New Orleans.

carnivals and dereliction of duty

2005-10-23T16:26:00.000-05:00

I am so woefully behind that I have even neglected the marvelous Carnival of the Infosciences. I am sure that, due to the wonders of the biblioblogosphere, you have picked them all up elsewhere, but to give them the credit they richly deserve, here they are:

Carnival of the Infosciences #8 at The Industrial Librarian
Carnival of the Infosciences #9 at . . .the thoughts are broken. . .
Carnival of the Infosciences #10 at A Wandering Eyre
Carnival of the Infosciences #11 at Christina's LIS Rant

And there'll be another one tomorrow!

my mantra

2005-10-23T16:22:00.000-05:00

Here's the post I wrote in Writely sometime back. Life has become more hectic since then, but I offer this to tide you over for awhile.

Everyone has their own set of frustrations (often with technology, sometimes with life in general). I've had my share over the past few weeks, too numerous and dull to mention, and thus instead I offer you today my favorite frustration mantra. You can find it at the very end of The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling.

COMMISSARIAT CAMELS
We haven't a camelty tune of our own
To help us trollop along,
But every neck is a hairy trombone
(Rtt-ta-ta-ta! is a hairy trombone!)
And this is our marching song:
Can't! Don't! Sha'n't! Won't!
Pass it along the line!
Somebody's pack has slid from his back,
Wish it were only mine!
Somebody's load has tipped off the road,
Cheer for a halt and a row!
Urr! Yarrh! Grr! Arrh!
Somebody's catching it now!

Note: One should really always try searching the Web before typing. I was just trying to find a nice Open WorldCat record to link to, and I found that (not surprisingly) there are full-text versions of the whole book available from Project Gutenburg and the University of Virginia. The UVA one even includes the proper italicizations, which the Gutenburg version lacks.

brave new word processor

2005-10-09T19:09:00.000-05:00

When I first read about Writely (I can't remember where, though I've since read about the experiences that Rick and Rikhei have had with it, and I'm interested to see what comes of Chad's experiments with SynchroEdit), I was extremely excited. Writely (and its rival applications, including SynchroEdit and WriteBoard, which Rikhei was unimpressed with) is a web-based word processor. All of them are hyped as collaborative tools--ways for multiple users in different locations to work on the same document, but they can also be used by a single user to work on the same document at multiple locations. That's the part that got me excited.

For years I have been schlepping files around (either literally, via floppy disk, or virtually, by e-mailing attachments to myself) in order be able to work on them as I move from home to school to work. It's kind of a pain, since I often have to reformat documents--I use a Mac at home and PCs of varying ages and with varying editions of Windows installed on them elsewhere--and from time to time the transfer simply doesn't work.

Wouldn't it be great if I could store my files in cyberspace, and work on them in cyberspace, and have them accessible to me anywhere I can I get online, no muss, no fuss? That day may be coming, but it's not quite here yet. Writely lets me write and keep files on the Web, but so far (and I should cut them some slack; I know they're still in beta) it doesn't provide many of the functions that I need and want in a word processor. It's great for blog posts and probably for Web content in general; I like the template layout rather better than Blogger's, which I'm using now, though I haven't been able to post to my blog directly from Writely yet. But if I'm writing a paper or an article, there are a lot of things I can't do. I can't add footnotes. I can't get a page view to get an idea of how many pages I've written and how much space I have left to fill, and I can't get a word count. In theory you can export the document as a Word file or a .zip file; on my Mac, the .zip file came out nicely as an .html document, but the Word file came out as an Excel file, and I wasn't able to read it at all.

Despite these difficulties, I'm still excited about Web-based word processors. I have a Web site in part because it's such a handy way to store information, although the process of storing it there is somewhat laborious. Web-based e-mail and blogs are wonderful because you can create them on the Web as well as storing them there. I look forward to the day when I can do fully functional word processing on the Web and stop worrying about how to get my words from one place to another.

metablogging 2: the why I blog post

2005-09-30T22:06:00.000-05:00

So Travis Ennis wants to know why we--we here being ML(I)S students--blog.

The snarkier part of my nature is of course tempted to say "Because I can" and/or "Because I'm good at it"--two responses often given by Famous Authors who have been asked Why They Write. I am not a Famous Author (I mean, really, I'm not even dead yet!), and such a response would seem pretty obnoxious even if I were.

I have always known that I am pretty good at writing--it's one of those things that makes up for other things, like being unable to run or throw or catch, being unpopular, being awkward and unsure of your place in the world. Going through an MFA program is a pretty good way to shake your confidence in your writing abilities, in some cases because everyone seems so much better than you do and in some because everything they're doing seems like such crap that you figure you can't be much better, but I got through more or less intact.

I used to write a newspaper column, which is still my idea of a totally ideal job. I keep hoping someone will say, "Here, let us pay you a living wage to give us 800 words several times a week on whatever you're thinking about," but it's never happened. I loved writing a newspaper column even when I only got $15 0r $20 for it, though, and I'd do it again for that little, or less. In the interim, though, blogging is a nice substitute. (Among other things, there are no deadlines and no required word counts. I sometimes miss the discipline of 800 words every seven days, but not too often.)

There's a very long explanation over at my other blog about how that got started, and there's a little explanation of my original reason for starting this blog in its very first post. Oh, and then a few weeks later, I hopped on the metablogging bandwagon again with a little more explanation. lis.dom's purpose has changed over time--as I've noted before, starting a blog in order to tell people about the existence of blogs is probably a little illogical--but some of what I've said before remains the same.

At the moment, though, the real reason that I blog is that I want to be part of a community (or, as I sometimes put it, I want to be one of the cool kids). Can you imagine a library run by the members of the biblioblogosphere? I think it would be the most amazing library in the world. It would have all the hottest new technology, but the technology would work for us, not the other way around, and nobody would get burned. It would have provocative, timely, and enriching programming. It would be the place everyone wanted to hang out and where everyone was welcome. It would be staffed by people relentlessly, zealously working to make the library a better place--working to make library vendors give us what we want, working for, and often with, patrons to make sure they had the information they wanted. It would be a thing of beauty, if not a joy forever. Some people work in libraries that are closer to that ideal than others, but here--wherever here is, wherever you imagine cyberspace to be--we all get to be a part of it. I think that's pretty neat.

the obligatory banned books post

2005-09-30T18:09:00.000-05:00

Just in time for the end of Banned Books Week, here's a little something I wrote three years ago, long before I ever thought of becoming a librarian. I find I still pretty much agree with myself.

So read freely--and fight to keep our libraries free--free to speak in and free to use.

the long tail of relief

2005-09-25T22:39:00.000-05:00

I'm glad to hear that organizations are getting their act together and jumping in to do what Geaux Library Recovery set out to do. Now they're trying to decide what to do with the site:

One idea is to use it to apply Michael McGrorty's endangered libraries idea. Maybe a clearinghouse of information for libraries in crisis--any sort of crisis. ALA chose not to officially support a resolution on endangered libraries, for several reasons. My thought is that this would be a source for libraries that wanted to identify themselves as endangered. Mind you, it's still all very much in the brainstorm stage. Since we have this space, we'd like to do something with it. Your ideas are appreciated. And, if shutting down is the best idea, we'll honor that. --rochelle

Perhaps such a project will have a similar effect on the powers that be and ALA will get serious about libraries that are endangered by budget cuts. Well, one can dream.

I've been fascinated over the past few weeks to see not just the outpouring of aid to people and institutions on the Gulf Coast but also to see the varieties that aid has taken. You know about Geaux Library Recovery, and about ALA's Adopt-a-Library program. You've probably also seen Radical Reference's compilation of resources for Socially Responsible Katrina Relief. But there's more.

The Neighborhood Story Project, which I wrote about a few weeks back, is looking for volunteers to "help get their local independent bookstore to take a box of these incredible books to sell as a way to raise money for relief and recovery, and as a way to get out the amazing stories of the people and neighborhoods of New Orleans." Contact jamieschweser [at] yahoo.com for more information.

On September 8, I got an e-mail from Poets & Writers with a list (since added to) of how writers can help.

And then a few days later, someone from my old writing program forwarded this e-mail [thanks, pasta!] from Bret Lott, editor of The Southern Review at LSU.

Common Ground is running an incredible clinic (and then some) in Algiers, and Naomi Archer is writing up a storm of Real Reports of Katrina Relief from the ground.

And I could go on.

While I am as appalled as the next person by the level of disorganization and incompetence in the official response to the disasters of the last month, I'm simultaneously cheered by the many people--and the many kinds of people--who have come out to help. It pleases me to know that there are as many kinds of help as there are people affected. Perhaps it's not enough--perhaps nothing ever could be enough--but it's a start.

big wheel keeps on turning. . .

2005-09-21T11:09:00.000-05:00

Carnival of the Infosciences #7, at Mike's Musings.

Carnival #8 stops next week at The Industrial Librarian. Send your submissions to davehook [at] rogers [dot] com. Here are the carnival guidelines, in case you're new to the show or want a refresher.

I have all kinds of things to say but no time of late to get them written up. A substantive post or three should be coming up sometime in the next week or so; in the meantime, cruise on over to the Carnival and enjoy the ride.

back to school

2005-09-13T22:36:00.000-05:00

by the numbers
Originally uploaded by newrambler.

update on 9/21: URLs fixed!

I've now started all my fall classes, which are a slightly different line-up from when I last posted on the topic. I'm now taking

LIS 721 Library Materials for Children
LIS 745 Searching Electronic Databases
LIS 763 Readers Advisory Services

All told, that makes for 9 hours a week of class, 19.5 hours a week at the library, 8-12 hours a week of dog-walking, and 8 hours a week commuting, not counting time spent schlepping between dogs. And all told that adds up to lots of time spent on various duties and not so much time for blogging, I expect to be checking in periodically.

Also, may I belatedly add that you should check out the most recent stops of the Carnival of the Infosciences:

Carnival of the Infosciences #5, hosted by Christina's LIS Rant
Carnival of the Infosciences #6, hosted by Mark of . . .the thoughts are broken. . .

this post will self-destruct. . .

2005-09-11T19:11:00.000-05:00

Surely you've seen this by now, but in case you haven't:

"Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be."

And as a special bonus, all the archives of The Onion are now available online for your perusing. I first heard of America's finest news source one night in college. I was working patrol and walking around with a friend, who said, "Do you read The Onion? No? You should. This week's headlines: 'Secondhand Smoke Linked to Secondhand Coolness.'"

Thanks to Jenna for the link. . . and by the way, have you ever wanted to run for ALA Council? She's recruiting people.

while supplies last. . .

2005-09-05T21:31:00.000-05:00

certificate
Originally uploaded by newrambler.

(Gosh, this Flickr business is fun. . . .)

I don't normally keep track of the books I read, although I keep meaning to. I didn't manage to this summer, either, but in case you did and feel that your summer reading efforts have gone underappreciated, may I offer you this handsome certificate, complete with Latin motto, suitable for thumbtacking to an appropriate surface?

The end of summer reading seemed to coincide with a lot of vacations, and thus a number of kids never showed up to pick up their certificates. If you would like one, please send an e-mail indicating your name as you wish it to appear on the certificate and your snail mail address to lauracrossett [at] hailmail [dot] net. I can also fill in the number of books read, and any number of Book Bucks you want, though I'm afraid that at this point they're about as useful as Confederate money in 1865.

Iowa City Ped Mall

2005-09-05T15:37:00.000-05:00

Iowa City Ped Mall
Originally uploaded by newrambler.

I'm just practicing this whole blogging photos thing. This is what the downtown of my hometown looks like in late August, mid-morning. If you kept going straight down the ped mall and then swung left, you'd hit the Iowa City Public Library.

on and off the bandwagon

2005-09-05T14:45:00.000-05:00

update 9/5/05 9:55 pm CST: Flickr link at the bottom is now fixed and will actually take you to pictures and not to Wired article

I am late to jump on many bandwagons, and, quite often, just simply late. Last weekend, which now seems impossibly long ago, I took a trip home (though I spend most of my time in Chicagoland these days, I'm still an Iowa resident, and Iowa City is still home) to do a few things and see some friends. It was in the course of hanging out with my friends that I realized that in the last six months or so, I have started to speak another language.

A few examples:

"I'm sorry I never read your site, but OpenDiary doesn't have an RSS feed."
"Oh, you've got a blog for your radio show? Send me the url and I'll add it to my aggregator."
"The camera's just on loan, but I'll just upload the pictures to Flickr and then I'll be able to post them wherever."

I got a lot of blank looks from my friends, who, as you may surmise, are not technologically oriented. They are very smart people. Most of them graduate students at the University of Iowa; the rest are the over-educated, under-employed types one finds around a college town. I don't consider any of them hopelessly uninformed. But I now inhabit, at least part of the time, this whole world that most of them are only barely aware of.

Now that I've found this world, I'd never want to leave it behind, but my visit home was a little reminder that it is, in many ways, still a small and insular community. I love RSS and think it is one of the greatest things since the resurgence of decent bread, but I've been reminded that it's not part of the picture for a lot of people and that, for the most part, they are getting by just fine without it.

You've probably heard about different kinds of learners (visual, oral, etc.) and different kinds of intelligence (emotional, intellectual, practical). There are also different ways of gathering information. I get most of my news from the radio, though when I lived in Iowa City, I also read the Daily Iowan in its hard copy version. I got an iPod for Christmas, and while it's a nifty little device, at least a third of my music collection is still on LP and cassette. In my car at the moment all I have is radio, and thus when I'm driving around on my dogwalking route, I mostly (shudder) listen to commercial rock stations, since "Fresh Air" loses something when heard in 5 minute chunks with 20 minute gaps in between.. I did listen to a bunch of Greg's podcasts on my drive home (I don't have one of those handy gadgets that will play your iPod through your radio, so I did this by listening through one ear bud), and they were pretty great, but I don't know that I'm going to get hooked on podcasting. My friends are mostly not tapped into the world of feeds and aggregators and social bookmarking, and that's okay.

I started this blog with the idea that it would be a way to show fellow grad students about the wonderfulness of library-land blogs, which I now realize was kind of a nutty idea. I continued it, though, because I was getting so much out of it, which seems like a fine reason. And now just as I've learned that lots of people are considering jumping off the Flickr bandwagon, I'm jumping on. I don't actually own a digital camera, so posts will be few and far between, but I did borrow my mother's while I was home for the weekend and put together a little tour of Iowa City (only the parts I like, and only some of them). Take a look if you like (and remember I've never used a digital camera before). Enjoy!

New Orleans stories

2005-09-04T16:56:00.000-05:00

I've never been to New Orleans, though, as I've written elsewhere, I feel connected to it by way of water and the imagination. The closest I come to a real connection is this:

In high school I knew a guy named Jamie Schweser. He was a senior at one of the town's high schools when I was a freshman at another, and I met him via the anti-war movement--the "first" Gulf War happened that year. He went on to do various things--he was involved with a pirate radio station and public access television and all kinds of activism, and he co-wrote a book called Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing with Abram Shalom Himelstein. Some time in the late 1990s or early 2000s, they both moved down to New Orleans and got active down there, and I'd get an occasional e-mail from Jamie. I haven't heard from him in years. Just a few weeks ago, though, I read a piece in Publisher's Weekly [sorry; only the abstract is available without a subscription] about what Abram Himelstein is up to now: working with kids in New Orleans on the Neighborhood Story Project, an oral history project, a writing workshop, and now, five books, all written by teenagers. I meant to write about this sooner; now, of course, one can't send mail to or from New Orleans, and so you can't order the books.

The other day, I got this e-mail of another New Orleans story from Ted Glick, via the Independent Progressive Politics Network mailing list:

One of the better pieces I've seen.

Ted

----- Original Message ----- From:
To:
Sent: Friday, September 02, 2005 4:42 PM
Subject: Notes From Inside New Orleans

Thanks to all the loved ones and long-lost friends for your sweet notes of concern, offers of housing
and support, etc. Yes, I stayed through the storm and aftermath. I'm fine - much better off than most of
my brother and sister hurricane survivors. Below is my attempt to relay some of what I've seen these
last few days.

Please Forward

Notes From Inside New Orleans
by Jordan Flaherty
Friday, September 2, 2005

I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I was staying in by boat to a
helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to examine the attitude of federal and state officials
towards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps.

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90%
black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving
sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it
would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people
would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we
were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston,
Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for
example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get
out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in
Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come
within 17 miles of the camp.

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National
Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when
buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the
several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information
from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local
Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told me "as
someone who's been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: get
out by nightfall. You don't want to be here at night."

There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up any sort of transparent
and consistent system, for instance a line to get on buses, a way to register contact information or find
family members, special needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for
possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.

To understand the dimensions of this tragedy, its important to look at New Orleans itself.

For those who have not lived in New Orleans, you have missed a incredible, glorious, vital, city. A
place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70% African-American city
where resistance to white supremacy has supported a generous, subversive and unique culture of
vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hiphop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades, Beads, Jazz
Funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and
dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world.

It is a city of kindness and hospitality, where walking down the block can take two hours because you
stop and talk to someone on every porch, and where a community pulls together when someone is in
need. It is a city of extended families and social networks filling the gaps left by city, state and federal
governments that have abdicated their responsibility for the public welfare. It is a city where someone
you walk past on the street not only asks how you are, they wait for an answer.

It is also a city of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New Orleans has a population of
just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this year, most of them centered on just a few,
overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods. Police have been quoted as saying that they don't need to
search out the perpetrators, because usually a few days after a shooting, the attacker is shot in
revenge.

There is an atmosphere of intense hostility and distrust between much of Black New Orleans and the
N.O. Police Department. In recent months, officers have been accused of everything from drug
running to corruption to theft. In separate incidents, two New Orleans police officers were recently
charged with rape (while in uniform), and there have been several high profile police killings of
unarmed youth, including the murder of Jenard Thomas, which has inspired ongoing weekly protests
for several months.

The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years.
Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child's education and ranks 48th in the country for lowest
teacher salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of Louisiana
schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any given day. Far too
many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a former slave
plantation where inmates still do manual farm labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the
prison. It is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are are low-paying, transient,
insecure jobs in the service economy.

Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster is one that was
constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence. Hurricane Katrina was the inevitable spark
igniting the gasoline of cruelty and corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to the
treatment of the refugees to the the media portrayal of the victims, this disaster is shaped by race.

Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but with the tragedies of this week our political leaders have
defined a new level of incompetence. As hurricane Katrina approached, our Governor urged us to
"Pray the hurricane down" to a level two. Trapped in a building two days after the hurricane, we
tuned our battery-operated radio into local radio and tv stations, hoping for vital news, and were told
that our governor had called for a day of prayer. As rumors and panic began to rule, they was no
source of solid dependable information. Tuesday night, politicians and reporters said the water level
would rise another 12 feet - instead it stabilized. Rumors spread like wildfire, and the politicians and
media only made it worse.

While the rich escaped New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left
behind. Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have spent the last week demonizing
those left behind. As someone that loves New Orleans and the people in it, this is the part of this
tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply.

No sane person should classify someone who takes food from indefinitely closed stores in a
desperate, starving city as a "looter," but that's just what the media did over and over again. Sheriffs
and politicians talked of having troops protect stores instead of perform rescue operations.

Images of New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into black, out-of-control,
criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured against loss is a greater crime
than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars of damage and
destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic, just as the eighties focus on "welfare queens" and
"super-predators" obscured the simultaneous and much larger crimes of the Savings and Loan
scams and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being used as a scapegoat
to cover up much larger crimes.

City, state and national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at least the mid-1800s, its been
widely known the danger faced by flooding to New Orleans. The flood of 1927, which, like this
week's events, was more about politics and racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated
exactly the danger faced. Yet government officials have consistently refused to spend the money to
protect this poor, overwhelmingly black, city. While FEMA and others warned of the urgent impending
danger to New Orleans and put forward proposals for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the
Bush administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood control,
and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes as a result of global warming. And, as the
dangers rose with the floodlines, the lack of coordinated response dramatized vividly the callous
disregard of our elected leaders.

The aftermath from the 1927 flood helped shape the elections of both a US President and a
Governor, and ushered in the southern populist politics of Huey Long.

In the coming months, billions of dollars will likely flood into New Orleans. This money can either be
spent to usher in a "New Deal" for the city, with public investment, creation of stable union jobs, new
schools, cultural programs and housing restoration, or the city can be "rebuilt and revitalized" to a
shell of its former self, with newer hotels, more casinos, and with chain stores and theme parks
replacing the former neighborhoods, cultural centers and corner jazz clubs.

Long before Katrina, New Orleans was hit by a hurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment,
deindustrialization and corruption. Simply the damage from this pre-Katrina hurricane will take
billions to repair.

Now that the money is flowing in, and the world's eyes are focused on Katrina, its vital that
progressive-minded people take this opportunity to fight for a rebuilding with justice. New Orleans is
a special place, and we need to fight for its rebirth.

-----------------------------------------------
Jordan Flaherty is a union organizer and an editor of Left Turn Magazine (www.leftturn.org). He is not
planning on moving out of New Orleans.
-----------------------------------------------

Below are some small, grassroots and New Orleans-based resources, organizations and institutions
that will need your support in the coming months.

Social Justice:
www.jjpl.org
www.iftheycanlearn.org
www.nolaps.org
www.thepeoplesinstitute.org/
www.criticalresistance.org/index.php?name=crno_home

Cultural Resources:
www.backstreetculturalmuseum.com
www.ashecac.org/
http://198.66.50.128/gallery/
www.nolahumanrights.org
http://www.freewebs.com/ironrail/
http://www.girlgangproductions.com/

Current Info and Resources:
http://neworleans.craigslist.org/about/help/katrina_cl.html

I don't imagine that Abram Himelstein, or Jamie Schweser, if he's still there, are planning to move out of New Orleans either. I hope someday I'll get to see their city. And I hope that they, and the people they know, are safe.

Carnival of the Infosciences #4

2005-08-30T08:59:00.000-05:00

Summer is ending, school is starting, and, like me, many of you may be wishing to spend these last few dog days sitting around and watching the river flow. But time stops for no one, and neither does the Carnival of the Infosciences, although it may this week be showing a few signs of wear and tear. The rides are still running, though, so step right up, grab yourself something from the concession stand, and enjoy the ride.

This week's carnival is small but meaty. Our first stop takes many of us far afield, or perhaps more accurately, far out to sea. Von Totanes, the Filipino Librarian, weighs in on the great digital divide debate in "Digital Divide: The Other Side." I've noted before that the world is not flat, and I hope we see more international voices in the Carnival to give us an idea of just how varied a world we live in.

Just in time for those of us who are going back to school, Joy Weese Moll of Wanderings of a Student Librarian comes out with some advice on "How to read a journal article".

Joy's advice is so good that it was recommended by Mark and followed up on by Angel. Mark also points us to another just in time for back to school post from Angel, the Gypsy Librarian. "What does Generation Y Want?" is a review of an article from portal: Libraries and the Academy which suggests that what Generation Y needs are just the kind of skills that Joy recommends. (Oh, the synchronicity!) Mark notes "it is one of the few things I have read that takes a pragmatic approach to serving this group versus just wanting to hand over the keys to the asylum to them."

And now for a few added Editor's Picks:

Since I've already stretched the rules of the Carnival a little by posting a day late, I'm going to stretch them just a tiny bit more so I can include "Codex Seriphanianus," by Nichole of nichole's auxiliary storage. It's a fascinating and beautifully illustrated piece about a librarian's worst nightmare: unwittingly buying a stolen book.

I am not a cataloger, but I live in awe of them, and two cataloging blogs this week have items of note. The first, "Lafof zobac (Ĉu vi parolas Dewey? 2.0, with added religious fervor)," comes from Jonathan Furner of the Dewey Blog and picks up on the international theme with a discussion of the Dewey Translators Meeting at IFLA's World Library and Information Congress. One important discussion dealt with the options in the 200s (where, as you may recall, Christianity takes up a bit more than its fair share of numbers in the world of religion).

In "Trackbacks," a post on Catalogablog, David Bigwood considers the possibilities of trackbacks, tagging, and other Internet classification tricks for libraries and library catalogs. The folksonomy vs. the taxonomy seems to be another one of those subjects where people tend to freak out and zealously guard their ground. There will be no tagging of our carefully controlled vocabulary! say the taxonomy people, while the folksonomy folks rant that taxonomies are dead, wooden, lifeless things (rather like taxidermy, which perhaps explains why I often have difficulty keeping the two terms straight). David points out that there's room for both.

Finally, Christine Borne, NexGen Librarian extraordinaire, has reemerged from a dormant period with several thoughtful posts about being a librarian, including this one, "More introspection." I like old people, too.

That's it for this week's carnival. I'll pack up the bags and send them on over to Christina's LIS Rant, the next stop on our virtual tour. Here are the general submission guidelines. And if you've missed any of the previous stops of this extravaganza, check them out:

Carnival of the Infosciences #1
Carnival of the Infosciences #2
Carnival of the Infosciences #3

updates, carnival and otherwise

2005-08-29T09:07:00.000-05:00

Greetings from Iowa City, my hometown. I'm currently sitting downtown on the pedestrian mall, using wireless courtesy of theIowa City Public Library. I took a last minute trip here this weekend and will be headed back today.

Due to the nature of traveling (lots of time spent with friends, not so much time spent online), I've only just now learned that a number of e-mails to me have been bouncing. My apologies.

Due to various crises, I also have a rich full day today, and so--with apologies to Greg if this violates the laws of the carnival--I'm going to extend submissions to 6 pm tonight, and I'll get the carnival up tomorrow morning. So, if you haven't been able to reach me, send a submission of a blog post (yours or one you admire, or both) from last week to lauracrossett [at ] hailmail [dot] net (which should work--and if that bounces, try laurapalooza [at] sbcglobal [dot] net). Of course, if you've written something this week (since 6 pm last night) that you're especially proud of, you should save it for next week's carnival, at Christina's LIS Rant.

Again, my apologies for the technological snafu and the delay. I promise a carnival, due penance, and (special added bonus!) some pictures from my trip when I get back.

bricks and wireless

2005-08-22T21:45:00.000-05:00

There was a little tidbit on NPR's "Morning Edition" this morning:

Real estate company RE/MAX says it will create a Web site listing homes for sale across the country. Some observers say the growing availability of Internet listings will increase competition in the real estate industry and that could lead to lower commissions. [audio of full story]

Realtors, meanwhile, are tripping over themselves to tell you about all the things that a real estate agent can provide that a web site can't. Realtors know about houses before they go on the market; they know the quirks and ins and outs of their terrain; they know how to operate; they know, in short, more information than you will ever find out by surfing the web.

Sound familiar? Try replacing the word "Realtor" with "librarian," make a few other minor adjustments of lingo, and you'll see where I'm going.

The most fascinating thing, though, was that apparently people who look for houses on the web are actually more likely to use Realtors than those who forgo the internet altogether. Is that true when it comes to librarians? I doubt it.

I am not generally taken with the notion that we must hasten to be as much like the market-driven world as possible: I think you lose some of your essence when you try to be too much like a thing you are not. But the library is a fundamentally socialist institution in a society and an economy that are fundamentally hostile toward socialist projects (except, of course, when it comes to government subsidizing of the oil industry and other corporate welfare), and we have to figure out ways to trick the system into supporting us anyway. Wifi in your library is one way to do that--it's pretty cheap to install and run; it makes the people with wireless devices think the library is a happening place and thus, one hopes, makes them more willing to support the library the next time a referendum comes around, thus making it possible for you to buy more books and computers and dedicate more staff to helping out the folks on the other side of the infamous (but in no way imaginary) digital divide.

The library needs to be an information source for those who don't have access to the internet, but there's no reason it shouldn't also be an information source for those who do.

roll up for the mystery tour

2005-08-22T21:12:00.000-05:00

The Carnival of the Infosciences #3 is here, hosted by Joy, of Wanderings of a Student Librarian fame! Meredith notes the brilliance of the whole carnival idea:

[I]t highlights bloggers who are writing great stuff and who may not yet be on people’s radar screen (probably because they haven’t been at it too long). Second, it physically brings people to different blogs every week that they might not otherwise visit, also expanding their biblioblog repetoire. Third, it’s a great reader’s digest version of the best material of the week for those of us who don’t have the time to read everything. Finally, it motivates some people to write thoughtful, interesting posts so that they can be submitted for the carnival. What a cool idea!

And, not entirely incidentally, I'll be hosting the Carnival #4. How do you get on board? Check out the original submission guidelines, and then send your submissions to me at laura [at] newrambler [dot] net (incidentally, if you have another e-mail address for me, it will probably work too--most of them lead to the same place eventually) by 6 pm on Sunday. I'll say 6 pm central time, since that's where I live, but if you east coasters don't get to it till 7, I don't imagine it will be a problem. And if you're submitting from outside the continental U.S. (you never know), send it on in by 0000 Greenwich mean time (or coordinated universal time, as one is apparently now supposed to call it).

And might I add that if you've been thinking to yourself, gee, I should start a blog, why not do so now and join the carnival? The blogging community--and the biblioblogosphere in particular--may be one of the few places where more are always welcome--at least, I have yet to hear anyone say, "@#$%!, not another goddam library blogger!" We've got room for all kinds of sideshows here on the virtual carnival grounds, so come join the fun!

the world is not flat

2005-08-21T09:51:00.000-05:00

I hate to break it to you, but, despite recent rumors to the contrary, the world is not flat.

The world is not flat at all: it is filled with dizzying heights that fall off into the deep, with shifting sands and fiery eruptions, with water and wind constantly carving the land into new shapes, and with vast expanses which a great many people perceive to be full of nothing. The world is bumpy, messy, variegated to the extreme, and it is bumpy not only in its physical terrain but also in the lives of its inhabitants, in all the sorts and conditions of humans who live on it.

Recently Celvio Derbi Casal, a library student from Brazil who has a blog, wrote to tell me a little about the public libraries there:

We have a very sad field here!! In my city (Porto Alegre, you may know because the World Social Forum was made here 3 times) and its a big city, the capital of the state, the Municipal Public Library has no computers, even for the staff, and the catolog is a card catalog (the old 7.5 x 12.5 cards!). There's no money for acquisitions, and there's only one librarian in charge. You can project this picture to the small towns, where there are no libraries sometimes.

So when I read the US blogs about virtual reference or online resources for public libraries, I live a wonderfull but distant dream, and wonder about when our libraries will pass to this condition.

We have wonderfull libraries here too, and very good eletronic information resources, but they are developed and shared only in the college, academic and specialized libraries. Be a public or school librarian here sometimes is an adventure like be an archaeologist, crossing tons of old stuff, searching for something with value.

Contrast that with some of the statistics on computers and the internet in US libraries, as reported at BlogJunction (see the full study from Florida State University)

99.6% of public library outlets in the United States are connected to the Internet
98.9% of public library outlets with a connection to the Internet provide public access to the Internet

Sounds good--but that's still not the full story:

Only 14.1% of public library outlets report that there are always sufficient terminals to meet patron needs. Of the other outlets, 70.2% have insufficient terminals to meet patrons' needs at certain times of the day, while 15.7% have insufficient terminals to meet patrons' needs on a consistent basis
Most libraries do not have plans for keeping systems running. Nearly 70% of libraries have no set upgrade schedule for hardware, 77.4% have no set schedule for software, and 96.4% have no set schedule for connection speed
and, as Jessamyn noted recently, there are still libraries out there who don't have any computer at all

I don't think of the digital divide as a tired old cliche, but I also don't think of it as a single thing. There is not one digital divide, there are many--as many divides as there are lines on a contour map of our bumpy, crazy world. People come into the library where I work every day to use our computers because they do not have computers (or internet connections) of their own at home. For these people, the divide is not ability but access. But othepeoplele come in each day who do not know how to use computers at all, who, if we were to plop them down in front of one of our machines, would not even know where to begin. And many people, of course, never come in to the library at all. Some of them, like many of the undergraduates I used to teach at the University of Iowa, have all the access to technology they could want but are remarkably lacking when it comes to interpreting and evaluating the information they find. Others are among the 21-23% of American adults who cannot read well enough to fill out a job application or read a picture book to their kids.

All of those people need things, often very different things. Some need computers; some need to learn how to use computers; some need help learning to interpret the things they find; most need some combination of all these things. If you stay in your own contour of the map and spend your time talking to other people who live at that same level, it may well appear to you that the world is flat, but it's just not true.

When I was in junior high, I was taught that the United States was the world's largest oil producer but also the world's biggest oil importer and that the Soviet Union was the world's biggest wheat producer but also the world's biggest wheat importer. The world situation has changed since then, but the insane way in which its resources are distributed has not. The people with the greatest access to technology are also those who constantly seek more of it and who benefit most from many of the decisions that get made about technology. (A municipal wireless system is kind of neat, but it doesn't do you a damned bit of good if you don't have a wireless device, and I haven't noticed Philadelphia running around handing out laptops to the poor). Libraries are one of the few places in the world where you can hope to have some flattening effect, but you can only do that if you are fully aware of thheightshs and the depths that surround you, and of all the gradations in between.

survey madness

2005-08-20T22:22:00.000-05:00

Meredith has put up her survey of the biblioblogosphere, which I just took. A number of people have commented on it already; while I would have probably asked some slightly different questions and asked some questions slightly differently, since I did not go to the work of putting the survey together, I am not going to complain. Anyway, if you are in any way a library person and you have a blog, head on over and fill it out. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes, and the more respondents it gets the more interesting the results will be.

After that, I was on a roll, so I tried taking the Blogger survey that they've been advertising on the page you get when you log in to post to your blog, but sadly, it was closed. Ah well.

Now that I'm all in a surveying mood, I'm thinking about following through on my idea of a survey of blogger linking habits, which would consider questions such as

Do you link chiefly to other LIS blogs, to other non-LIS blogs, to outside news sources, to studies? And (this is the hard part) why do you link? To back up your argument? To position your argument? Because you admire the post you’re linking to? Because you’re trying to get your blog noticed? Do you link more to short, “hey look at this neat thing!” type posts or more to longer, more reflective ones?

I have never designed a survey at all (except for this very short survey that I did many years ago), so I'll have to give it some thought, but stay tuned. . . .

better late than never: the Carnival's next stops

2005-08-19T09:43:00.000-05:00

That last post was mostly by way of whining and partly by way of explaining the paucity of posts of late, or at least of posts containing much in the way of original content.

One of the things that happens when people say incredibly nice things about your writing (thanks, Meredith, Greg, Mark, and my mom's friends) is that on the one hand you think, Dude, I'm a rock star! and on the other hand you think, Cripes, I'm never going to be able to write anything again because it's not going to live up to people's expectations. That's my other excuse for not writing much recently.

I have no excuse, however, for not having pointed you to the Carnival of the Infosciences #2, where you can read all kinds of great stuff from the biblioblogosphere. And I have no excuse for not pointing out that the Carnival will be moving over to Wanderings of a Student Librarian next week. You've still got till Sunday at 6 pm to get your submissions [here are the guidelines] in to Joy [write her at joy [at] mollprojects [dot] com], who has some great suggested topics, in case you're looking for one. And don't be afraid to jump on board--as Mark says, it is a friendly crowd here.

yesterday

2005-08-19T09:36:00.000-05:00

6:30 am get up, eat breakfast
8 am walk big dog
9 am see doctor
10:30 am bump into brand-new car en route to work [NB no one was hurt; the other car got a small scratch on the left rear fender, mine might have a scratch near its front right bumper, but I can't really tell]
11 am-2 pm walk dogs in pouring rain
2:30 pm go to Berwyn Police station to fill out accident report
3:30 pm get back home, eat lunch, shower, call insurance company, explain accident for nth time
4:30 pm get in car again
5-9 pmwork at library
9:30 pm get home, eat dinner
10 pm watch Daily Show
10:30 pm read about 3 paragraphs of An American Childhood
11 pm sleep

Wash, rinse, repeat--except for the car accident. I'm hoping I don't repeat that.

worst practices for services to teens

2005-08-16T15:16:00.000-05:00

Hand out felony charges for improper computer use. [via The NewStandard]

LIS student bloggers

2005-08-15T20:22:00.000-05:00

I'm a bit belated in posting this, but Joy, from Wanderings of a Student Librarian, has started a list of library student bloggers, plus a few recent graduates, plus a couple of additions. I'm proud to be among their number--and if you are among their number and aren't on the list, please let her know at joy [at] mollprojects [dot] com.

an open source search engine?

2005-08-15T20:00:00.000-05:00

Back in May, Google announced that it would be adding a "credibility" factor to the algorithm that ranks its Google News results. "Credibility" would be measured by various factors, including the size of the news outlet's staff and how long it had existed. As Brian Dominick reported on The NewStandard staff blog, such a system would be devastating for independent and alternative news sources. That got a some people thinking that what the world needed now was an open source alternative to Google. They've now officially launched the project, dubbed Openzuka.

If you care about alternative and independent voices having a fair shot in this world (and as a librarian, you certainly should), check this out. And if you're at all technologically inclined, consider lending a hand--and if you know anyone else who would be interested, please pass it on!

NEW OPEN-SOURCE SEARCH ENGINE PROJECT NEEDS YOUR HELP

Are you afraid of the world's major internet search resources under a single gatekeeper, or by a small number of gatekeepers?

Are you nonetheless fascinated by the speed, power, and accuracy of current search engines?

Are you intrigued by the prospects of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people around the world contributing their expertise to build a distributed, open-source search engine, without a single gatekeeper, with the speed, power and accuracy of current search engines?

Then get involved in the Openzuka project.

Openzuka is an effort to build an open-source internet search engine--distributed architecture, fully transparent, open source, on a widespread scale with the speed and effectiveness of current commercial search engines like Google and Yahoo.

And we need your help to help us design and build it.

We imagine that the effort will require software developers, hardware specialists, theoreticians, information science experts, and anyone interested in knowledge exchange more generally. But we'll need lots of contributions from a host of different fields.

If you wish to learn more about the project, and can contribute your expertise, ideas, suggestions, please join our online discussions:

www.openzuka.org

Thanks.

--The Openzuka Team

the anxiety of influence

2005-08-14T08:45:00.000-05:00

Of all the jobs I do at the library, the most thrilling and frightening by far are buying and weeding books. I am in charge of all the YA books, which live (except for the nonfiction, which, when it is no longer new, gets interfiled with adult nonfiction) in two long shelves tucked in the back corner of the adult room. They are so hidden that often when I take people to find a book back there, they are surprised to learn that there is a YA section.

Because we don't place a book order in August, I have now had over a month to fiddle with my September order. It is rare that a day goes by that I don't take something out, only to put it back in the next day. I can spend a good deal of time worrying about the books, worrying about what kind of service I can possibly be providing to our patrons if I neglect one of them in favor of another, wondering what influence my choices will have on the people who rely on the library. For instance, the other day, courtesy of A Wandering Eyre, I happened upon this piece on the censoring of YA books from Bookslut, which praises Perfect, a novel by Natasha Friend. It was published last year and has been the subject of some controversy, chiefly, it seems, because it is about a girl who has bulimia, and it is quite graphic in its descriptions of how to become bulimic. Of the eight libraries in our system, five own it, but my library is not among them.
Now, I am all for the stocking of banned books, particularly when (as is the case with this one) they have gotten good reviews and they seem to be popular (three of the five copies in the system are out right now, and one was only just returned). I add this book to my order every few days, and then periodically I take it out, not because of the content (although I will admit that I am squeamish about eating disorders) but because, usually, there's a newer book that I want to buy instead.

After all, the book is available in our system, I tell myself. But it's not available in our library, says the other little voice in my head, and the other libraries aren't anywhere near ours. If kids don't see it here, they're not likely to find it. But they can find it through the catalog. How the hell are they going to know to look for it in the catalog? It's not like there are lot of high quality bookstores in Franklin Park, IL (yes, that third one you see on the list is an adult bookstore--actually, there's another adult bookstore that doesn't show up here that's even closer). But I have to make choices, and if I buy this, I can't buy a new book that might be equally important!

Well. You see how that goes.

The other day, in another fit of anxiety, I decided to do a little quasi-scientific experiment with my book order. I've been reading lately about the paucity of books (especially children's and young adult books) that appeal to males and how this could be part of the reason that guys don't read. I went through my order and classified each book, to the best of my ability, as appealing more to females, more to males, or equally to both. The results (excluding half a dozen graphic novels, which were requested by a guy but which I really don't know where to place):

everyone--20
females--20
males--7

Oh dear. (And that, of course, provides another argument for not buying Perfect, which is likely to appeal only to girls).

But if the process of buying books is sometimes fraught, it pales in comparison to the process of weeding them. There are moments when weeding is satisfying. Clearing out beaten up paperbacks by R.L. Stine is a fine feeling. But more often than not, weeding is difficult, frustrating, and sometimes painful. As Rick Roche recently wrote (on both buying and weeding), "I have to accept the reality that I can not perfectly predict which books will be well read and buy the potentially hot books and shift other books to make a little more room." I hate that.

I also hate it because I was a reader of obscure books when I was a child. At my elementary school, which was filled with the offspring of doctors, lawyers, and professors, there were lengthy waiting lists for every new book that came it. Because I did not want to wait three months to read a book, and because I didn't know how to get on the waiting list anyway and was too shy to ask, I prowled the stacks to find the oldest, most abandoned books I could. My ideal was to find a book that hadn't been checked out since before I was born. I read many wonderful books this way--Octagon Magic by Andre Norton and Quest in the Desert by Roy Chapman Andrews and many more. In high school, I found The Lady's not For Burning, which had not been checked out since 1972. I checked it out nearly once a trimester for the remainder of my time there; recently, I checked the catalog to see if it was still there, and wrote to the librarian, who confirmed said that yes, the last checkouts dated from the early '90s--my last few years in high school. (Christopher Fry, the author, died only recently. I hadn't realized he was still alive. I would have written him a letter--the people who help get you through high school deserve to be thanked). Every time I get rid of a book, I can't help but wonder if the book I'm tossing is one of these, if it's a book that's meant to be found by someone at this very library, if it's somehow going to save even a small portion of a person's life, and if I am interfering in God's great plan. This is the sort of thing that can keep you up at night.

The last best word on the subject of keeping odd (albeit, in this case, well-circulating) books in libraries, though, comes from Annie Dillard, in An American Childhood. She writes about growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s and visiting the Homewood branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh every week and what she learned from borrowing books there:

The Field Book of Ponds and Streams was a shocker from beginning to end. The greatest shock came at the end. . . . When I checked out The Field Book of Ponds and Streams for the second time, I noticed the book's card. It was almost full. There were numbers on both sides. My hearty author and I were not alone in the world, after all. With us, and sharing our enthusiasm for dragonfly larvae and single-celled plants, were, apparently, many Negro adults.
Who were these people? Had they, in Pittsburgh's Homewood section, found ponds? Had they found streams? At home, I read the book again; I studied the drawings; I reread Chapter 3; then I settled in to study the due-date slip. People read this book in every season. Seven or eight people were reading this book every year, even during the war. . . . The people of Homewood, some of whom lived in visible poverty, on crowded streets among burned-out houses--they dreamed of ponds and streams.

I miss the days when you could see the date stamps on your library book. I learned a great deal from them. When I stand now in the aisle, computer printout of circ records in hand, trying to decide what goes and what stays, I can only hope that I am doing justice to the worlds that reside on the shelves. The library is a growing organism, but that means, unless you have unlimited amounts of space, that it is also a dying one.

film & poverty: things not normally combined

2005-08-13T21:04:00.000-05:00

Looking for something to watch? Check out this fascinating list of films on poverty, compiled "by Steve Fesenmaier with additions from the field" for SRRT's Homelessness, Hunger and Poverty Task Force. [thanks to HHPTF's John Gehner for pointing this out on LISnews.com].

I win!

2005-08-12T10:56:00.000-05:00

My post "The Medium is Not the Message" over on my other blog won "Best Overall" in the EFF Blog-a-thon. You can read the many other fine posts here or here. I'm deeply honored--and humbled--by this. There are so many people out there working at the ground level to bridge the digital divide, rescue and preserve knowledge, fight restrictive DRM, and on and on. I am but a midget amongst giants.

If you're not familiar with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, go check them out. Along with ALA, they are responsible for the victory over the broadcast flag back in May. They do a lot of good work and a lot of good for libraries, and even if you're a bricks and mortar fanatic, you have to admit that the world is becoming increasingly digitized. As with any new frontier, many people have an interesting in staking out a claim for themselves. If you care about keeping the digital commons common, you should care about EFF.

Thanks to them again, and thanks to librarian.net for the coverage (and, for that matter, for covering digital rights and libraries in general).

come one, come all!

2005-08-09T22:19:00.000-05:00

The Carnival of the Infosciences is here! Step right up and enjoy this week's fine selection of readings from the biblioblogosphere, hosted by Greg Schwartz.

libraries meet MTV

2005-08-05T20:06:00.000-05:00

Jessamyn had a great idea the other day--a show called Pimp Your Library:

Pimp My Library would take some ratty old library with an outdated web site, half-busted computers, no good YA room and terrible signage and trick it out to a level suitable for a modern-day information crossroads. Librarians and other staff would be forced to take the day off under the guide of professional development and would be returned to a sparkling new ergonomic and fashionable workplace with accessible standards-compliant web site. We’d still call the library. It can be done. Maybe we’d need to call the show something else though.

And then tonight's episode of This American Life had a story about the rock band The High Strung and their summer library tour in Michigan.* (Remember those photos Michael Stephens posted the other day?)

Are you ready to rock?

what for and for what?

2005-08-03T23:46:00.000-05:00

My mother, Judith Crossett, is a geriatric psychiatrist (or, as we usually put it, she treats old crazy people). She works at the University of Iowa, where she treats patients and also teaches in the medical school. A few weeks ago she was telling me about the first thing she teaches any medical student or resident working with her.

"When someone asks you for a competency test, the first thing you ask them is competency for what?

"Do they mean is this person competent to choose chocolate or vanilla ice cream? Do they mean competent to drive a car? Do they mean competent to make decisions about being committed to the hospital? These are all very different things, and there is no universal competency test for them."

How does this relate to libraries, you ask? Well, it struck me a little while ago, while reading yet another article bemoaning Wikipedia/Google/the Internet as the end of the world, that for what is exactly the question we need to ask when we're talking about sources of information. The answer to "Is Wikipedia a good source of information?" is not "Yes" or "No"--it's "A good source of information for what?"

If you're looking for information on podcasting, you're not likely to find a better resource online or in print (where you'll hardly find anything, except perhaps in the newspaper) than the Wikipedia entry. If you want to know more about DRM, Wikipedia can be an interesting, though sometimes controversial (check out the discussion) source of information. If you're looking for an analysis of gender roles in A Winter's Tale, it might not be so helpful.

Let's consider the movies. What's a good source of information on the movies? Well, if I want to know what movies are playing near me, I check out the listings on My Yahoo!. If I want to know who was in a certain movie, I look at imdb.com. If I want to know what kinds of reviews a movie was getting when it came out, I head for the subscription databases. And if I want to know about auteur theory, I hit the stacks. All of these are good sources of information for specific purposes.

Another way of looking at this business of "good sources of information" is to think about what Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation and author of a great new book called A Matter of Opinion, calls the "ideology of the center":

If The Nation has the ideology of the liberal left and National Review has the ideology of the conservative right, then The New York Times, The Washington Post, the newsweeklies, and the networks have the ideology of the center, and it is part of the ideology of the center to deny that it has an ideology.

Navasky also quotes the late, great journalist Jack Newfield:

Among these unspoken, but organic, values are belief in welfare capitalism, God, the West, Puritanism, the Law, the family, property, the two-party system, and perhaps most crucially, the notion that violence is only defensible when employed by the State. I can't think of any White House correspondent, of network television analyst, who doesn't share these values. And who at the same time, who doesn't insist that he is totally objective.

We tend to think of encyclopedias--"real" encyclopedias, those heavy tomes with the gold leaf edges, as good, objective sources of information. But consider a few selections from a list by A.J. Jacobs (who spent a year reading the Britannica and wrote a book about it called The Know-It-All), on how to get into the Encycopaedia Britannica:

1. Get beheaded. This is perhaps the surest path to getting written up. The Britannica loves nothing more than a person -- preferably a noble one -- who has had his or her neck chopped in two. One of my favorite games involves reading a biographicalsquibb that begins "French revolutionary" and then guessing how many years it takes before he finds himself under the guillotine.

4. Become a botanist. Scandinavian ones seem particularly popular. Also, the study of mosses and peat deposits shouldn't be underestimated.

5. Get yourself involved in commedia dell'arte. The Britannica's obsession with the Italian 18th-century comedies borders on the unhealthy. The EB has great enthusiasm for commedia dell'arte actors, whether they happened to play the pretentious but cowardly soldier Capitano, the saucy maid Columbine, or the madcap acrobat Zanni.

8. Design a font. Apparently, coming up with a new typeface is a more impressive feat than I had previously thought. The Britannica especially likes controversial typefaces that are initially dismissed haughtily, only to be revived later and recognized as brilliant, like Baskerville, designed by font hero John Baskerville.

I mean no disrespect to the dead, botanists, Italian comedy, or fonts, but you have to admit, their selection criteria can be a little bit nutty--one might even say subjective--at times.

Lastly (yes, this post will come to an end soon), how could I not give some space to Google and everyone's favorite anti-Google (and blog) ranter, ALA President Michael Gorman? One of Gorman's favorite anti-Google tropes has to do with his stand against atomized information. I would tend to agree with him that Google Print is not going to be the best way to read The Education of Henry Adams (although, I must confess, I have not read it in any way myself). But imagine how useful atomized information might have been to my mother (remember her?), back when she was getting her PhD in English (we follow odd career trajectories in my family):

She was doing an edition of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. That meant she had to go through every edition she could find of the book (which does not survive in manuscript) and try to decide whether Twain wanted to write "schoolhouse," "school-house," or "school house." Or whether he meant to describe the blackness of the night or the darkness of the night. Or--well, you get the idea. In the 1970s, this meant sitting around with books and microfilm readers and undergraduate research assistants. One person read aloud; the others followed along in different editions, looking for differences. Now just imagine that all those editions were scanned and searchable. Presto! Results!

There's no such thing as a "good source of information" or a "good technology"--there are only sources of information and technologies that are good for certain things.

What? You're still reading? Then check out a few of the many posts that got me thinking about this topic over the past few months:

Karen Schneider, on why she's skeptical about Wikipedia
Luke Rosenberger on Wikipedia as subversive gardening
Jessamyn West on OCLC LC Google and You
Morgan Wilson on other ways to use atomized texts
Robin Hastings at the LJ Tech Blog on blogs and wikis as alternative news sources

Thanks to them--and to all the library bloggers out there--who've gotten me thinking.

blog-a-thon! (more shameless promotion)

2005-08-02T10:36:00.000-05:00

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been having a blog-a-thon for the past couple weeks to celebrate their 15th anniversary and their work on behalf of bloggers.

What does all this have to do with libraries? Well, a few months back, the American Library Association and EFF (among others) successfully challenged the FCC's broadcast flag mandate. (Essentially, the broadcast flag was a form of digital rights management (DRM) that would have meant that you could only play broadcast-flag- equipped media on approved players [sounds to me a bit like a Coca-Cola licensing agreement, wherein beverages can only be dispensed in approved cups]. For some idea of what it's like to deal with DRM, check out The Shifted Librarian's travails.)

EFF has been at the forefront of most, if not all, of the battles for free speech online and for civil liberties in general in the digital world. If you read at all in the biblioblogosphere (aka library blogland), you'll see them again.

In any case, I wrote up an entry of my own for the Blog-a-thon. If you're interested, you can read it over at my other blog.

a book, an interview, a web site: lots of blatant promotion

2005-07-29T22:36:00.000-05:00

Looking for something to read in the 300s (335.998, to be exact)? You can check out my interview with Fran Hawthorne, author of Inside the FDA: the Business and Politics Behind the Drugs We Take and the Food We Eat.

In other publishing related news, I'm happy to report that Third Coast Press* is moving this very weekend to its new place of virtual residence, LIShost. Expect some fluctuations over the weekend, but thirdcoastpress.com should be up and running smoothly again by early next week--and then (yippee!) we'll be able to fix up some things on the site and (double yippee!) start adding new content again.

*Third Coast Press was an alternative monthly newspaper published in Chicago from January 2003 through March 2005. It's now a web site and will, we hope, resurface as a quarterly print publication. The Fran Hawthorne interview was originally scheduled to run in the May issue.

Update on 7/31/05: I just realized that the link at the bottom of the interview was broken. That's fixed now. Also, one of the images (which is really just a quotation pulled from the interview) doesn't show up on Internet Explorer or Safari (and Safari, for some reason, messes with my fonts). All the more reason to switch to Firefox, I say! Everything looks dandy there.

only connect. . .

2005-07-28T02:10:00.000-05:00

According to yesterday's newsflash, the Dominican web site is Webby worthy. The Webby Awards are, as you might imagine, kind of like the Tonys, but for web sites. This year, in addition to the winning nominees, the judges picked about 20% of the over 4000 entries as "Webby Worthy."

According to the judging criteria,

The Academy evaluates Web sites based on six criteria: content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity, and overall experience.

One can only assume that they were awed by the little rotating pictures of happy Dominican students and grads and that their monitors were large enough (unlike, say, most of the monitors at Dominican) that the menus all fit on to the screen. And, for that matter, one assumes they did not happen upon the infamous GSLIS Information Center.

If you have a high-speed connection and plenty of plug-ins, the Webby winners can make for some good browsing. In February 2004, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that

34% of all adult Americans have access to high-speed Internet connections either at home or on the job
24% of all adult Americans have high-speed access at home

That means that 66% of Americans don't have high-speed access at home. The study further notes that "[o]nly 10% of rural Americans go online from home with high-speed connections, about one-third the rate for non-rural Americans." [Here's the full report from the Pew people.]

(And remember, none of those statistics indicate the number of Americans who don't have internet access at all. Interestingly, the only report I've been able to pull up about that so far--with, I must admit, only a modicum of searching--is six years old.)

scheduling and grumbling

2005-07-26T11:55:00.000-05:00

I just registered for fall classes at Dominican, or at least I sort of registered. I'm registered for

LIS 763 Readers Advisory Services with Roberta Johnson
LIS 722 Library Materials for Young Adults with Jeanne Triner

I'm waitlisted for

LIS 745 Searching Electronic Databases with Marilyn Lester
LIS 748 Collection Management with Karen Brown

Course descriptions are here. I need to end up with three courses, for financial and health insurance reasons. (Oddly enough, I'd also like to take 743, Reference Sources in Business and Economics, but that woud entail dropping one of the other evening classes and driving to Schaumburg. . . anyone want to tell me it's worth it?)

If this schedule seems a bit schizophrenic, there's a reason: I'm trying to strike a balance between things that I think would be useful (e.g. Searching Electronic Databases, which I'd just like to know how to do better) and things that I think might be good to have on my transcript (e.g. Library Materials for Young Adults, since I'm considering the whole teen librarianship thing as well as the reference librarian thing).

I wandered over to the LISSA [Library and Information Science Student Association] Blackboard, where a few people have posted requests for information about classes and professors, and one astute reader of the schedule has noted that there are only 5 morning classes (as opposed to 41 evening classes, 8 afternoon classes, and 7 weekend/all day classes) and that two of these are core classes and the other three meet on the same day at the same time. As the writer points out, evening and weekend classes are great for those who work 9-5, but those of us who work evenings and weekends are kind of screwed. I'm lucky in that I only work a few nights a week and that my place of work is understanding and flexible about my schedule. Not everyone, I assume, has that luxury.

Also of note on the LISSA Blackboard is the "LISSA and GSLIS Request and Suggestion Forum":

LISSA and the GSLIS administration want your suggestions and questions. Please help us make our school better. We can’t do everything you may want, but we would sure like to try, or at least help you make a difference. Students, faculty and administration are welcome to read and post.

Not surprisingly, there are no messages in said forum. LISSA is supposed to be a student forum and an advocate for students: by opening their forums to faculty and administration, they've pretty much guaranteed that students aren't going to feel welcome. It's often hard to make honest criticisms and suggestions when you know that the people in charge of evaluating you are, or could be, reading.

more books

2005-07-25T22:24:00.000-05:00

Remember the book meme thing? Here's another response--this one from the Gypsy Librarian--that I've been meaning to post for awhile.

cataloging tidbit

2005-07-25T16:10:00.000-05:00

You'll be glad to know that you can now render eBay as eBay (instead of Ebay, I guess), according to the latest update of AACR2. Hurray for "unusual capitalization." [Via Catalogablog]

books they don't want on display in Hillsborough County, FL

2005-07-24T15:57:00.000-05:00

If you haven't been following the news, here's the latest on the gay-themed books brouhaha in Florida. And here, courtesy of Martin Sicard, is a list of those extremely dangerous "teen-friendly books that were on display at the West Gate Library that spurred the Hillsborough County Commission to bar county agencies from acknowledging, promoting, and participating in Gay Pride recognition and events." Protests against the county's action have included a Read-In and something more like a Read-Out, featuring a librarian with a bullhorn. [Stories via LISnews.com]

My Father's Scar by Michael Cart
Hello, I Lied by M.E. Kerr
Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block
Girl Goddess, #9 by Francesca Lia Block
Talk To Me: Stories and a Novella by Carol Dines
Tomorrow Wendy: A Love Story by Shelley Stoehr
Breaking Boxes by A.M. Jenkins
My Heartbeat by Garret Freymann-Weyr
Empress of the World by Sara Ryan
Ironman by Chris Crutcher
Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
The Shell House by Linda Newberry
A Face in Every Window by Han Nolan
Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence by Marion Diane Bauer
Alice on the Outside by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
True Believer by Virginia Euewer Wolff
The Car by Gary Paulsen
Postcards from No Man's Land by Aiden Chambers
Razzle by Ellen Wittlinger
Box Girl by Sarah Withrow
Eight Seconds by Jean Ferris

The County keeps saying that they are not banning books, they are banning the endorsement of books, or, as one Tampa resident put it in the Tampa Tribune a few weeks ago

It's not the job of librarians to highlight collections of books, argued Patrick McDowell, a Tampa resident who frequents the West Gate library branch, where one pride display was removed. "I would defend their right to have the books in the library, but it's not their job to promote books.'' [full article]

Next thing you know they'll be telling us we're not supposed to promote literacy.

Finally, if you're looking for more gay-friendly teen lit to add to your collection, Martin also recommends Geography Club by Brent Hartinger, Luna by Julie Ann Peters, and Misfits by James Howe. I'd remind you not to forget the wonderful and frequently challenged Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden. Don't forget to check out the Lambda Literary Awards for books for all ages, and ALA's GLBT Round Table for some further resources.

do you Dewey?

2005-07-22T13:38:00.000-05:00

My new favorite blog (aside, of course, from the wonderfulness that is Overheard in New York [thanks to sivacracy.net for pointing that one out--and note to enterprising Chicago area folk--I think there'd be a market for an Overheard in Chicago]) is the Dewey Blog.

Where else could you read about the proper cataloging of muggles (and the lack of a suitable catagory for quidditch?) or where to book books on flirting? Of course, you can also weigh in on more serious matters, such as the cataloging of graphic novels or cultural objects. But it's things like learning that catalogers have favorite Dewey numbers that makes me a happy reader. (I myself must admit that I don't have a favorite Dewey number, but my favorite section of the DDC is the Table of Last Resort. It's almost as good as the Greek verb construction know as the optative of unfulfilled desire.)

The Dewey Blog does what all good blogs should: it gives a human face to something that used to seem like a monolithic block. And if, like me, you're still trying to get a good handle on your Dewey, reading the blog is one nice way to do so.

librarians--we're everywhere

2005-07-19T23:17:00.000-05:00

PopMatters now has a column called "Bad Librarian," written by a library paraprofessional (a bibliotechnician, in his words, or a librarian in all but respect and pay, in others). Here's his take on Section 215 of everybody's favorite act:

Mr. Fed: Gimmee that.
Librarian 1: Sir, this is private information! You've no warrant!
Mr. Fed: I said gimmee.
Librarian 1: Okay, here.
Librarian 1 hands over the records and sits down to weep fitfully. Librarian 2 walks over to chat.]
Librarian 2: What was that all about?
Librarian 1 (sniffs): What?
Librarian 2: The guy with the Oakleys.
Librarian 1 (wipes nose): I really can't say.

Enjoy!

change, part 2

2005-07-17T15:54:00.000-05:00

The last post I made here was meant, actually, to serve as an introduction to this post from the Shifted Librarian about the new Ann Arbor District Library web site. Happy reading!

change

2005-07-17T12:54:00.000-05:00

One way I've changed, after a year of library school and a few months of working in a library, is that I am much more demanding of my sources of information. I'm not quite sure how this happened, but now when I'm looking for something on a web site or in a library and I can't find it, I ask. If I have an idea about how information could be made more accessible or more helpful, I suggest it. Sometimes that suggestion goes nowhere, but sometimes the results are faster and better than I could have imagined.

For instance, the other day I was reading the PLA Blog. They have these great round-ups of public library news from all over the country, but it was often hard to tell where exactly the different articles were from (there are, after all, a great many Springfields in this nation). So I wrote in to ask if maybe they could include the city and state of the library in question. They wrote back saying, hey, good idea, and the next day, lo and behold:

We had a request to add the city and state of the library being discussed in each article. I will also add links to the library's web site as well. I hope this enhances your PLA Blog reading pleasure.

Thanks, Steve, and thanks PLA Blog!

librarian pixels

2005-07-15T17:35:00.000-05:00

The Curmudgeonly Librarian points us to two new photo pools on Flickr: Librarians in Glasses (started by Rochelle) and Modified Librarians.
If you've never played around with Flickr, it's great fun--and, as Aaron Schmidt points out in the little technology pull-out section of the latest Library Journal, it's a great way to get photos into a blog--or a library. The La Grange Park Library has a set of photos of their renovation project.

Me, I just like to look at pictures of Utah.

library services in extreme temperatures

2005-07-13T14:56:00.000-05:00

This morning on Chicago Public Radio there was a pretty good story on the 1995 heat wave [Real Audio file] that killed over 700 people, the majority of them poor and elderly people who had no access to air-conditioning. I haven't yet read Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of the Disaster in Chicago, but it's worth noting, as did Micaela di Leonardo, reviewing the book for The Nation in 2002, that

first we need to come to terms with the epidemiological realities of heat crises. Extreme heat, Klinenberg explains, tends not to be taken as seriously as other weather and human disasters--hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, blizzards, plane crashes. But "more people die in heat waves than in all other extreme events combined," and the '95 crisis has "no equal in the record of US heat disasters."
[Micaela di Leonardo, "Murder by Public Policy," The Nation (September 2, 2002) Available online to subscribers and via various databases]

The City of Chicago's Hot Weather Safety page (which is sort of buried, I might add) provides tips for keeping yourself and your pets cool, and a list of related links, including Chicago Public Library locations and the Department of Human Services Weather Relief page, which explains when extreme heat and cold warnings are issued, and what the DHS does about them:

The Chicago Department of Human Services coordinates the operation of Cooling and Warming Centers. Beginning with its own Human Services Centers, CDHS works with the Chicago Department on Aging, Chicago Park District, Chicago Public Schools and Chicago Public Libraries to make public buildings available. In times of excessive need, the City enlists the help of community organizations that can open their facilities to the public for respite from the weather. [emphasis added]

In addition to coordinating the Cooling and Warming Centers, the department also works to

Provide transportation to Warming and Cooling Centers.
Conduct well-being checks on those at risk.
Expand outreach to homeless people on the street during times of extreme cold.

As summer continues, you might want to think about the people in your library and what kinds of services you are providing to those who may need the library as a place to stay cool. We can't all provide this kind of service. [link via Ruminations] But we can make sure that we provide all library users the same courteous service, whether they're looking for a copy of Heat Wave or just looking for a place to stay out of the heat.

fall schedule, finally!

2005-07-11T10:30:00.000-05:00

The fall schedule of courses is finally available (~~special bonus: spring 2006 is also up~~).* Registration hasn't started, and I haven't been able to retrieve my pin (and, interestingly, Firefox gave me a number of warnings about entering an insecure site), but at least one can now begin to plan one's schedule.
I checked the LISSA Blackboard and people are starting to look for information on courses/professors/etc., so head on over there. Alternatively, if you e-mail questions to me, I'll post them here (minus your name, if you wish) and people can leave comments.

In other GSLIS news, there are still no new announcements at the GSLIS Information Center. If by any chance you're reading this because you're thinking about coming to Dominican, there is a GSLIS Information Session on Tuesday, July 19. [Thanks, Events at DU RSS feed!]

* Update 7/11/05 at 4:08 pm : Spring 2006 is listed as an option when you pick semesters, but if you try searching for LIS classes, nothing shows up. Thanks to David (see comment below) for pointing out my lapse.

Grokster round-up and another ALA tidbit

2005-07-08T15:52:00.000-05:00

Just in case you can't get enough grokkin':

American Libraries' news brief on the (somewhat disappointing) ALA reaction
Siva Vaidhyanathan's article in Salon.com, his sugggestions for background reading and analysis, and an amusing tidbit he dug up
The Mad Librarian's initial musings on the ruling
The Grokster ruling and DRM, from DRMblog.com
and finally, Seth Finkelstein is always worth reading, despite his feelings on punditry

Finally: I was late (the usual McCormick Place is really far away from everywhere else thing) to "The Googlization of Everything: A Threat to the Information Commons?" and thus only caught the last 10 or 15 minutes of Siva Vaidhyanathan's presentation, but you can read some coverage from Aaron Dobbs (thanks, ALA Wiki!). Also, if, like me, you arrived late (or if you attended a different event at the Intercontinental and didn't hear about the boycott), Rory has helpfully provided some coverage of the boycott, including a letter of protest you can download, in the latest Library Juice.

me too! me too!

2005-07-06T09:55:00.000-05:00

I actually got randomly selected for this several weeks ago, but now that all the cool kids (plus more I can't track down now) are putting the link up on their sites, I just had to, too.

ALA day 1: fostering civic engagement, part 2

2005-07-05T09:18:00.000-05:00

Here's part 1 of this report.

We all know that the most common question at the reference desk is "Where is the bathroom?" But what's the most common question if you're serving as a librarian on the street? The next presentation at Fostering Civic Engagement had the answer.
Jenna Freedman talked about Radical Reference: "serving activist communities and independent journalists online and in the street," as her handout put it. RadRef started as a response to the 2004 Republican National Convention. As you may remember, not everyone was happy about the event, and many protesters were coming to town. The earliest RadRef members saw a role for themselves in the midst of the mayhem--they could be roving, on-the-street librarians. Ten or twenty RadRef volunteers went out on the streets, armed with ready reference kits that included maps, phone numbers for legal and medical aid, and a very detailed schedule of events, useful for answering that most frequent question, "What event is this?" They also carried cell phones, which allowed them to call in to other volunteers based at home, who provided back up support. They also set up a website and an AIM account so that people could post questions that way.

Nearly a year later, the group is going strong, with over 150 volunteers still answering questions on the web site and at events. There are local Radical Reference collectives in Austin, Boston, NYC, San Diego, and San Francisco who work on local projects--the Boston group put together the Alternative Guide to Boston for ALA Midwinter 2005. Additionally, they've been providing reference and information services, including workshops on fact-checking and how to file a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act request], for independent journalists across the country, most recently at the Allied Media Conference in Bowling Green, Ohio. Sometimes, as Jenna pointed out, these workshops are a simple as teaching people about the resources available in your local library--like databases that mean you can get older articles from the New York Times for free.

She also talked a bit about the nifty open-source technologies that RadRef uses, and about a library school education summit being planned for New York this fall. Watch this space for more on the latter.

Finally, Jenna addressed some of the problems and challenges Radical Reference has faced, including accountability, quality control, collaborating in a virtual environment, decision-making in a large group, and working with the many working styles and ideologies that Radical Reference volunteers bring with them. If any of this sounds at all interesting, you should think about getting involved. Good times, great company, fascinating questions, and a chance to exercise your reference skills in a variety of ways.

Next up was Debbie Abilock, editor of Knowledge Quest, the magazine of the American Association of School Librarians. Her presentation consisted of a list of questions and ideas of ways that schools and school libraries could foster civic engagement. Here are just a few of them:

How are students engaged in and involved with the governance of the school? How are students making decisions--and more importantly, can they make decisions, and are those decisions about issues more substantive that what colors to use for prom decorations?
What role do parents play in the school? Are they engaged in more than bake sales and car pools?
How transparent are faculty meetings, board meetings, and administrative decisions?
How are students part of the planning process for libraries and other areas in the school?
Do students have the ability to contribute to or suggest assignments?

Her point overall was that you can't have civic engagement without engagement--you can't teach students that they live in a democracy and expect them to believe it or care about it if you don't let them exercise some democratic rights of their own, in their own sphere. Amen, sister! I say. And I got to tell her my great story about my grade school and the Pledge of Allegiance. (Short version: we got to vote on whether or not we'd say the Pledge. We voted no, except on special occasions, and then only if you wanted to say it.)

Cathy Carpenter, the last speaker, talked about her experience organizing a voter registration drive in the library at Georgia Tech in the fall of 2004. The last-minute effort garnered 500 new voters in 3 weeks. The best reason to have a voter registration drive at the library? Well, there are lots, but here's my favorite: very few young people affiliate themselves with any political party, and thus they are less likely to register to vote at partisan events or tables. What better place to have a non-partisan voter registration effort than at the library, where, at least in theory, there's a little bit of every point of view?

Finally, there was a small amount of time for questions and comments. Here are the ones I jotted down:

Use your library trustees/board members as links to the community.
The Things They Carried is a great one book, one community title, as it is, among other things, attractive to the young male reader. It worked well in Philadelphia.
Libraries can do outreach to organizations, not just individuals.
Check out the September Project.

jobs et al.

2005-07-03T22:30:00.000-05:00

Jessamyn beat me to the news, but I have been meaning for some time to point to a recent post about the library job market (from an Australian perspective) by my friend Morgan over at explodedlibrary.info. (For more on the same, you can visit the very first post on this blog [she said, shamelessly]).

As I have noted before, I would have less of a problem believing the ALA job-hype if I didn't read so much news about libraries losing funding.* It's a bit hard to believe that the world is awash in jobs for librarians when it is also awash in libraries closing, cutting budgets, hours, staff, etc., etc.

On the other hand, I am not in a state of total despair.Meredith and Dorothea both recently landed jobs, and I can't tell you how many people I met at ALA who told me encouraging things. I didn't walk away with job offers, but I did walk away with a clutch of business cards and a handful of opportunities to submit articles to various publications and get involved in sundry organizations--and all from such enthusiastic and interesting people! I'll tell you, it's a big change after being in a writing program, a field in which there truly are no jobs.

In the unlikely event that you are waiting with baited breath, I shall mention that I will be finishing up my ALA coverage in the near future. I've spent most of the past week recovering lost sleep and organizing various summer reading programs @ my library. In the meantime, if you are desperate to learn more about what happened, check out the coverage at the PLA Blog, the LITA Blog, and the extensive guide to online coverage over at the wiki. (And thanks to whoever put up the links to the posts I've made so far!)

*NB questions by Rochelle and comments by Jessamyn on the underfunded libraries map.

2005-07-03T11:28:00.000-05:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

the other news about the Court

2005-07-01T22:26:00.000-05:00

Before you get too deeply ensconced in worrying about the fate of Roe v. Wade et al. in the wake of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's retirment, please take a few moments to familiarize yourself with two extremely important decisions handed down by the Supremes this past Monday.

The Grokster case you probably know a bit about already--it's sort of Napster, Round 2. The Brand X case, however, which deals with whether the Internet is a telecommunications service or an information service (a more crucial distinction than you might think), is potentially even more important. Millions of Americans are able to have telephones because they are a telecommunications service and are considered a near-essential service and are thus regulated to make them more affordable. The Court, in examining Brand X, decided that cable modems were actually an "information service," which, for reasons beyond my ken, is not considered as important or essential as a telecom service.

For far more informative and enlightening discussion of the effects of the Court's decisions than I can give you, read on. Thanks to Mitchell Szczepanczyk for research assistance.

Don't stop Grokkin', from our libertarian friends at Reason
Two interviews from Democracy Now!: Fred von Lohmann on Grokster and Brand X attorneys
Brand X press release from Jeff Chester, one of the co-defendants
Coverage of Grokster case from The New Standard

ALA day 3

2005-06-27T06:23:00.000-05:00

What happened to day 2, you ask? Too much craziness! It is not often that your intrepid (okay, semi-intrepid) correspondent runs out of words, but it does happen. After a rich full day of Nancy Pearl, Siva Vaidhyanathan, gobs of incredibly cool bloggers (see subsequent entries on It's all good for photos), and Victor Navasky, publisher of The Nation, I made my way back to where I'm staying and collapsed on the sofa, muttering "can't. . . talk. . . too. . . much. . . stuff. . . ."

I also spent the obligatory afternoon at the exhibits yesterday. They're kind of frightening, and I have to say, kind of overrated. Imagine a football field or two full of elaborate displays that you know are just going to get taken down in a few days, goggly-eyed librarians walking around, jaws dropped, at the scannning machines (there are machines that will turn the pages of books and scan them, like some kind of weird robot reader), and every other minute someone trying to sell you something. I did get lots of posters for the children's room at work, many many book catalogs that I probably don't need, and a copy of A Matter of Opinion with a lovely inscription from Victor Navasky, who happened to be at The Nation booth at the time.

Today's schedule:
8:30 "Classism in the Stacks" talk by Sandy Berman
11:30 ALA membership meeting II (I didn't make it to I, but I'm happy to report that the end-the-damn-war now resolution passed--we'll see if it makes it through ALA Council)
2-4 pm Radical Reference skills share
6-9 pm Free Speech Buffet (at Roosevelt University--all are welcome!)

I'll post more about Saturday, yesterday, and today, at some point in the near but not immediate future.

ALA day 1: fostering civic engagement, part 1

2005-06-25T16:51:00.000-05:00

I did make it to the panel on Fostering Civic Engagement this afternoon, put on by the Fostering Civic Engagement MIG (Member Interest Group--love those acronyms), which was excellent. Basically, it was all about how libraries and librarians can do things to encourage participatory democracy [SDS, of course, did not come up with the idea of participatory democracy, but they're often given credit for the phrase, and in any case, a little Port Huron is good for you now and then].

Former ALA President Nancy Kranich kicked things off by talking about how different people have defined democracy and how FDR's definition--that democracy is participation--is her favorite. Libraries, she noted, have an active role to play this kind of democracy: they are sources for information, they are civic spaces, and they are places where citizens can become literate. Rah rah!

Joan Durrance, of the University of Michigan School of Information, then discussed the need to create best practices for fostering civic engagement. "I'm the question lady; I'm not necessarily the answer lady," she said, as she outlined many of the questions we might need to ask when thinking about these best practices. What are civic engagement information needs? How can/do libraries build community? How do they understand the context of civic engagement and people's information needs? What differences does library civic engagement make?

Durrance listed some examples of libraries that have tried to answer some of these questions, and then she talked in more detail about the Hartford Public Library and "At the Table-ness." When researchers interviewed people in the community about the HPL, what they heard over and over again was that the HPL was "at the table." What did that mean? It means that librarians

attend and participate in community activities as part of their library jobs
network, network, network with people in the community
promote the library as a place for civic discussions

It sounds like the HPL librarians are a little like my grandmother. She's lived in her town for over 50 years, and she knows--and takes the time to know--everybody. She knows not just the names of the mail carrier and the guy who picks of the recycling; she knows their whole life histories. Whenever she calls a store and speaks to someone on the phone, she asks whom she's speaking to. She doesn't get out and about as much as she used to, but when she does, she invariably runs into someone she knows from a political campaign she's worked on. The result of all this? Well, a couple weeks ago our shower stopped draining properly. It was about 3:30 on a Friday afternoon. My grandmother called the plumber, and at 3:45 someone showed up with a toolbox and a snake, and about an hour later, we had a functioning shower again. That's kind of what I mean about what being an active community member can get you.

Now, can you imagine a library where they hold weddings, proms, funerals, and the breaking of the fast of Ramadan? Well, the Salt Lake City Public Library is one. Residents think of it as their most trusted and most valued city agency (although snow removal was a clsoe second). Nancy Tressman talked about how they built their new library with the community in mind--and, in fact, quite literarally with the community--set into the library's foundation are stones engraved with comments submitted by library patrons about the value of the library. "Our answer to how to be 'at the table' was to become the table." For those of us not possessed of the resources to build a new library, though, she noted that becoming the table was something you could try to do even without a snazzy new building. On the whole, it was a very encouraging presentation.

I've just looked at the clock, and my time is running short, so I'll post more about the panel after later. Now it's off for caffeine and Radical Reference!

ALA day 1: illumination rounds

2005-06-25T16:31:00.000-05:00

I'm back in the lobby of the Sheraton, putting my feet up and enjoying the free wi-fi, catching up on some blog reading, and generally basking in the librariany energy all around me.

Everybody and his sister is reporting on "Mining the Long Tail: Libraries, Amazoogle and Infinite Availability," the OCLC symposium yesterday, which I did not go to as I had to work. Actually, I must admit, I am still a bit unclear about what the Long Tail is, but I am planning to read the original article sometime in the near future. In any case, here are a couple of reports:

After this sojourn, it's off to find some caffeine and head to the Radical Reference meeting.

ALA day 1: HHPTF and standing in line

2005-06-25T12:49:00.000-05:00

My conference experience so far:

I made it to the HHPTF meeting just fine. It might be a bit of a stretch to call it a meeting--it was just me and HHPTF reinstigator John Gehner (a recent graduate of Dominican by way of St. Kate's up in the Twin Cities). We happily noted that the HHPTF statement "Are Libraries Criminalizing Poor People?" was reprinted in Public Libraries and mentioned as a resource in a recent article in Utne magazine [.pdf].

Not all the attention about the statement has been positive--a woman from Salt Lake City showed up to complain about what she perceived to be an attack on their libraries, which have instituted a "civility policy". She actually talked just to the SRRT coordinator, who then gave us a rundown. I guess you have to be pretty upset about something to come to a meeting at 8 am. I hope we can talk to her, and to others who might have similar feelings, in a civilized manner.

I'm very excited about some of the work we have planned for the HHPTF, though, including a possible study of how libraries have implemented (or not) ALA Policy 61 (the "Poor People's Policy") in the 15 years since its adoption and a number of articles about how libraries can/do/should serve the poor and the homeless. If this sounds at all interesting, you should get involved--the Social Responsibilities Round Table (of which HHPTF is a subgroup) is free to join for student members of ALA--and, we recently learned, it's the largest ALA round table, with about 1800 members, including Leslie Burger, ALA's new president-elect. You could do worse.

After the meeting I meandered down to McCormick place via the Red Line and then a walk along Cermak Ave., which was in its own way educational. The Urban League of Chicago recently released a study about segregation in the city. Did you know that something like 75-80% of African-Americans in Chicago live in segregated neighborhoods? I heard the Urban League's Paul Street talking about this on WBEZ [audio] the other day. He pointed out that when you drive around these segregated neighborhoods, you see a lot of differences, many of which I saw on Cermak: check-cashing places and payday loans instead of banks, liquor and convenience stores instead of grocery stores. All these things mean that it is more expensive to be poor than to be rich--and that's something libraries and librarians (not to mention the general public) ought to think about.

After that brief dip into the real world, I entered the air-conditioned surrealness of McCormick Place, where I meant to go hear Nancy Pearl. At about 10:15, someone said they'd heard the talk had been postponed till tomorrow--which seemed likely, since nothing talk-like seemed to be happening 15 minutes past the announced starting time. So I went to get my badge holder and conference program, which was an adventure in misdirection, confusion, and waiting around of the sort only a gathering of 20,000 people can produce. By the time I got done with that, it was about 11 a.m., and I decided the smart thing would be to leave early for my next event and get some lunch on the way. I found the shuttle bus with no problems, got some food, and now I'm relaxing and enjoying the afore-mentioned free wi-fi until it's time for Fostering Civic Engagement at 1:30.

I found free wi-fi!

2005-06-25T12:45:00.000-05:00

in the lobby of the Sheraton! They also sell tampons in the women's bathrooms for only a dime, so clearly these are people greatly concerned about services for poor people. . . well, it's better than other hotels I've heard about, where wi-fi used to be free but is no more.

I'll post the paltry reporting I've done so far this morning shortly.

ALA day 1

2005-06-25T06:14:00.000-05:00

I am up at what my friend, I am afraid to say, refers to as the butt crack of dawn, breakfasting and getting ready to head down for my first day of the conference. Here's what I've got slated:

8 am Homelessness, Hunger, & Poverty Task Force meeting
10 am Nancy Pearl
1:30 pm I'm still undecided, but the possibilities include Fostering Civic Engagement (always a good idea), Religion and Intellectual Freedom (can you have both? My seminarian friend says one of the speakers is great), Do Unions and Professional Organizations Belong in Libraries? (of course they do--but I'm curious to hear what the opposition says), or possibly Emergent Literacy: And Leave No Parent Behind, although that runs till 5:30, which would preclude going to. . .
2 pm YALSA Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers (or Best Books for Young Adults)
4 pm ALA Membership Meeting (democracy at work!)
6:30 Radical Reference

All of this, of course, is subject to change.

Rumors about about the "wifi access at a discounted rate" for conference attendees. It's either $25 for the weekend, or it's $9.95/day, or both, or neither. In any case, either of these is out of my budget, so I won't be blogging much directly from the conference, but I'll try to post some updates this evening, or during the day if I stumble upon the conference's Internet Cafe or some joint with free wifi.

For general reports on what's going on, keep an eye on the Conference Reports over at the wiki--I'll also index anything I do write up there.

I owe my soul to the Student Loan Corporation

2005-06-20T11:33:00.000-05:00

Congressman George Miller (D-California), freedom-fighter, champion of the little guy, and the man whose office found that a Wal-Mart employing 200 people costs taxpayers $420,750/year in public assistance [.pdf], is providing us all with an opportunity to testify about the affordability of education--or lack thereof. Much, much more below, but act quickly--the hearing ends June 24.

Students and Parents Urged to Comment on College Affordability for Congressional Online Hearing

House Democrats launched an e-hearing on college affordability so that students and families can tell members of Congress their personal experiences about trying to pay for a higher education. The e-hearing, on the Committee Democrats' web site, provides a forum for students and families to discuss student loans, tuition prices, and the pressures these put on their personal budgets and decisions about pursuing a higher education.

The e-hearing website is http://edworkforce.house.gov/democrats/ehearings.html. Students and parents are invited to provide testimony by writing to collegehearing@mail.house.gov by June 24, 2005 . Democratic staff from the education committee will write and circulate to the public a report on the testimony provided, and enter it into the Congressional Record. Testimony should be limited to 500 words.

"Americans get to hear from Congress all the time - it's time for Congress to hear from Americans," said Representative George Miller, the senior Democrat on the education committee. "Democrats want to hear what families are experiencing as they deal with the cost of college. Learning firsthand what people are experiencing will make us better at identifying problems and creating solutions."

**** **** **** **** ****

News - U.S. House of Representatives

EDUCATION & THE WORKFORCE COMMITTEE DEMOCRATS
Congressman George Miller, Ranking Member

Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Tom Kiley or Daniel Weiss, 202-225-2095

DEMOCRATS ANNOUNCE FAR-REACHING LEGISLATION
TO MAKE COLLEGE MORE AFFORDABLE
Launch E-Hearing for Students & Parents to Testify about Paying for College

WASHINGTON , D.C. - To help the millions of students and families that are struggling to pay for college, House Democrats today announced far-reaching legislation to make college tuition and loans more affordable and to boost college scholarships.

Democrats also launched an e-hearing on college affordability so that students and families can tell members of Congress their personal experiences about trying to pay for a higher education.

"There has never been a more important time than right now to help students and families afford a higher education," said Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, who will introduce the legislation along with Rep. Dale Kildee (D-MI), the senior Democrat on the Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness.

The bill, the College Opportunity for All Act of 2005, would:

double the maximum value of the Pell scholarship;
provide incentives to public and private colleges to keep their tuition costs from rising too rapidly;
significantly reduce the costs on student loans;
ensure that more students who go on to college actually graduate from college; and,
eliminate the wasteful use of taxpayer dollars to pad banks' profits when they should be used to help make college affordable.

"This legislation solves the dilemma we've put our students in by prioritizing grant aid over loans," said Kildee. "Additionally, when a student is forced to take out loans to pay for college, this bill ensures they receive the lowest interest rate possible. This bill is good for students and their financial future."

A number of policy decisions and economic trends have combined to make it more difficult for students to afford college. The Bush tax cuts of the last few years have led to federal budget cuts that, coupled with the recession four years ago, have seriously harmed state budgets. This has driven up tuition prices for the 75 percent of students who attend public colleges and universities.

Meanwhile, student loans have replaced scholarships as the primary source of federal student financial aid. Thirty years ago, scholarships comprised about three-quarters of total federal student aid, while loans comprised about 20 percent. This ratio has been reversed, so that today the typical graduate has nearly $20,000 in student loan debt, and 40 percent of graduates have unmanageable student loan loads.

"In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of students have foregone a college education because they can't afford it. Qualified students have earned their right to a college education and all the opportunities that education brings," said Miller.

Miller and Kildee also said that America 's standing in the world economy is threatened by the nation's failure to make higher education a greater priority. "If we don't prioritize an affordable college education, we are going to fall behind other world nations," said Kildee. "Investment in our students, which this bill would accomplish, strengthens our economic and security positions in the world."

The Miller-Kildee legislation aims to address these issues. It will also help boost college graduation rates, since today only about half of all students graduate from college within six years.

Miller and Kildee are urging students and parents to tell Congress about their experiences in trying to pay for college. Today, they are launching an e-hearing on the Committee Democrats' web site to provide a forum for students and families to discuss student loans, tuition prices, and the pressures these put on their personal budgets and decisions about pursuing a higher education. This is the second e-hearing by the Committee Democrats; the first e-hearing was on the collapse of United Airlines' pension plans.

The e-hearing website is http://edworkforce.house.gov/democrats/ehearings.html. Students and parents are invited to provide testimony by writing to collegehearing@mail.house.gov by June 21, 2005. Miller's staff will write and circulate to the public a report on the testimony provided, and enter it into the Congressional Record. Testimony should be limited to 500 words.

"Americans get to hear from Congress all the time - it's time for Congress to hear from Americans," said Miller. "Democrats want to hear what families are experiencing as they deal with the cost of college. Learning firsthand what people are experiencing will make us better at identifying problems and creating solutions."

The College Opportunity for All Act of 2005 will improve the system of higher education in the United States by:

Making tuition affordable:

Promotes affordable tuition by encouraging states to grow funds for higher education;
Provides incentives to public and private colleges to make tuition more affordable;
Ensures colleges curb costs - and tuition prices - through cost containment strategies; and
Gives students and families control by providing easy-to-understand information about college costs through accessible public disclosures.

Restoring America's commitment to providing scholarships for needy students:

Doubles the maximum Pell grant scholarship to $11,600; makes Pell available year-round.

Reducing costs associated with taking out a student loan:

Lowers the interest rate cap on college loans, saving the typical student up to $2,150;
Allows students to choose a fixed or variable rate on their consolidation loans-which will save the typical borrower more than $5,500 over the life of a loan;
Eliminates student borrower loan fees-saving the typical borrower more than $500;
Allows students stuck with high interest rates to refinance their loans and get lower rates;
Provides $17,500 in loan forgiveness to qualified teachers, nurses and child care providers; and
Permits student borrowers to choose with which lender to consolidate their loans, repealing the anti-consumer Single Lender Rule.

Strengthening America's commitment to minority and first-generation students:

Significantly increases the investment in minority serving institutions;
Establishes a competitive grant program to expand advanced degree opportunities at colleges that serve large portions of Latino students; and
Establishes 'Centers of Excellence' to enhance teacher preparation for minority students.

Boosting college access and participation:

Boosts college participation among veterans, low-income and minority students by nearly doubling the investment in the critical college outreach programs, TRIO and Gear Up;
Establishes a new initiative to significantly raise college graduation rates; and
Replaces the current 144 question application with a one-page E-Z form, and establishes a procedure to give students early estimates of their federal student aid eligibility.

Making students and taxpayers - not profitable banks - the highest priority:

Eliminates loopholes that allow banks in the federal student loan program to fleece taxpayers-for billions of dollars every year. The money saved from closing the loopholes will be dedicated towards increasing Pell grant scholarships for low and moderate income students.

www.house.gov/georgemiller
______________________________________

Ellynne Bannon
House Education & the Workforce Committee
Democratic Staff
1107 Longworth House Office Building
Washington , D.C. 20515
(202) 226-2068 (p)

http://edworkforce.house.gov/democrats

one more

2005-06-14T22:35:00.000-05:00

Another book meme entry, this one from the Librarian in Black. Hey, have I mentioned [warning: shameless name-dropping ahead] that Marilynne Robinson was on my thesis committee when I got my last master's degree? I have yet to read Gilead, but I'm looking forward to it.

In other literary news, the New Yorker is releasing an 8 DVD set of their entire 80-year archive. Great news for those of us who find their web site and general lack of indexing perplexing at best and damnable at worst. As Dominican students, we have the ability to search the magazine via a few databases--from 01/01/2002 to 7 days ago in Literature Resource Center, from 01/05/2004 to present in MAS Ultra - School Edition, from 12/27/1999 to present in LexisNexis Academic--but none go back more than a few years. At that point, you're stuck with the good old Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature (remember that?), which only indexes some of the magazine's articles.

I'll be interested to see how libraries integrate the New Yorker DVD archive into their collections. Let me know if your library acquires it.

words, words, words

2005-06-13T11:31:00.000-05:00

Here are a couple responses to the book meme:

from Ruminations, in Australia (!)
from Caitrin, in Iowa

Send me yours and I'll post it here.

so much for summer vacation

2005-06-13T11:13:00.000-05:00

We're gearing up for summer reading at my library. Registration starts today; programs start next week. I have yet to try out my homemade silkscreen frame, borrow a portable outdoor fireplace, and find a speaker to talk about collecting comic books, but other than that, I'm set, I think.

It's also crunch time for several other projects I'm involved in, most of them connected in some way to the ALA conference.

I'm helping organize the Free Speech Buffet, on Monday, June 27, from 6-9 pm at Roosevelt University (I don't yet know what room). Stop by to check out some alternative Chicago-area publishers and periodicals. Free food from the Chicago Diner, cash bar.
I'm also working on an alternative guide to Chicago for Radical Reference.
I'd like to get my (other) web site spiffed up and running. I'll tell you all about it when I do.

As a result, my posting here may be somewhat limited for the next couple weeks. I will, however, be blogging from the conference, and after that I've got a whole slew of new content planned, including a report on the meaning of "conditional accreditation" and some interviews with Dominican/Rosary grads doing cool things in the larger library world.

In the meantime, allow me to direct your attention to the growing list of blogs and other things with RSS feeds over on the right side of the screen, where you should find more than enough to keep you busy. Happy browsing!

wouldn't you like to be a blogger too?

2005-06-10T19:09:00.000-05:00

Well, if you've ever given it any thought and you're going to ALA, here's your chance. Not quite ready to commit to your own blog? The Free Range Librarian details how you can blog (and party) with LITA, no experience required. Over at the Unofficial ALA Wiki, Luke of lbr blog has started a central directory for reports on various events at ALA and invites any and all to contribute. Even if you're not going to the conference, the reports will be an excellent place to get a sense of what's going on. (And heck, even if you are going, it'll be a great way to see what happened at all the panels you couldn't go to because they conflicted with the ones you did attend).

Not going to the conference? Still want to get in on the action? Well, I still have one free pass to the exhibits to give away, and if you come to the Counterpoise booth (#2745) on Monday, June 27, from 2-4 pm, you can attend the Radical Reference Skills Share, where you'll learn how to decipher cop-speak, how to file a FOIA, and how to be a blogger, too, among other things.

registration update

2005-06-07T14:49:00.000-05:00

I just took the radical information-gathering step of calling the GSLIS office directly to see if I could learn anything more about registration for fall courses. Here's what I learned:

the fall scehdule of courses will be available sometime in the beginning of July
registration starts, like, the 3rd or 4th week of July
none of this is set in stone

If I get any more information on the topic, you'll be, like, the first to know.

but where are the books?

2005-06-05T22:46:00.000-05:00

When I was little and went to other people's houses, I often wandered around, poking my head into whatever nooks and crannies I could find, wondering where these people kept their books. I often feel the same way in library school. I don't have a place that I keep the books on this blog yet, but I thought I'd start with this meme.

Total number of books I’ve owned: Ever? It would be hard to say. I have perhaps 100 of my books with me, and another 8 or 10 boxes of books in storage. I grew up in a house with over 2000 books--that's after we gave away 108 boxes when I was eight. (My parents both had PhDs, and my father had inherited the library of a friend, also a Classics professor, also from (sort of) Enosburg Falls, Vermont. I grew up with the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica and LC classification (my mother still has the card catalog somewhere, I think), except for the period when my father decided to rearrange the books by date of author's birth. Susan Sontag, I have read, arranged her books this way, although she additionally divided them by country, which seems like a good system to me.) My grandmother, with whom I live now, has perhaps 1000, which are divided by genre and are sort of alphabetical. I was, perhaps, fated to become a librarian.

Last book I bought: Classic Rough News, a book of poems by Kenneth Fields, purchased as a present for a friend. I have a great many opinions about and complicated systems and rules for buying books, but that's another topic for another time. (If you are buying books online, though, may I recommend Powell's, your friendly union bookstore?)

Last book I read: Swollen, by Melissa Lion.

Last book I finished: Same as above. . . like Jessamyn (from whom I got this meme), I don't read many books I don't finish. At any rate, I have plans to finish them someday, really I do.

Five books that mean a lot to me: A somewhat representative collection.
The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley.
A Collection of Essays, by George Orwell. To my taste, one of the two greatest prose writers in English in the 20th century.
On Stories, by C.S. Lewis. The other one.
Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey. Why I love Utah, and many other things.
Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. I was sick a lot as a kid, and this was the book my mother always brought with us to the doctor's office. Once she forgot it, so we sat there and recited the whole thing from memory.

Five (more or less) people I’d like to see do this as well: Anybody reading this, plus my blogging friends: Sara, Felicia, Caitrin, Meg

the user is often right

2005-06-05T22:13:00.000-05:00

Aaron Schmidt, Dominican graduate, author of walking paper and librarian at the Thomas Ford Library in Western Springs (they've got wi-fi and green lamps and a job opening for a magazine reference person (so head over there and apply!) has an excellent post about being user-centered instead of library-centered. If you've taken Reference, you've probably noticed that when people talk about doing reference work, they spend a little time on the importance of serving patrons and following RUSA guidelines, but then they spend a lot of time talking about annoying patrons.

If you are excited about the idea of doing reference work, if you believe that everyone has the same right to your assistance, regardless of how strange or kooky or misguided they* seem, if you think that we ought to be looking for ways to make the library more useful to patrons instead of making patrons more accomodating to us, Aaron's post is encouraging. And if you want to see someone providing that kind of reference service on a daily basis, with compassion, intelligence, and humility, I urge you to become a disciple of the Feel-good Librarian.

*I have decided, at long last, to favor gender neutrality over grammatical accuracy.

news roundup

2005-06-03T13:38:00.000-05:00

Two reasons to be glad you don't live in Oklahoma--although in all fairness, I have a friend who lives there, and the second link shows there at least a few signs of hope. Anyway, I mention this not only to keep you up-to-date on the Dustbowl but also to point out that American Libraries, the in-house organ of the ALA, now has an RSS feed.

Elsewhere in the world of book-burning, a conservative rag has polled a group of "scholars and public policy leaders" on the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries, which I present without further comment. [via Information Wants To Be Free]

Closer to the home front, Dominican is having an event at ALA, although apparently its only for alums. All of us, however, are welcome at the GSLIS Book Group discussion on Tuesday. I have never actually managed to make it to one of these, and I can't go to this one either, but if anyone does go or has been in the past, drop me a line or post a comment here (to do that, click on the link below that says "0 Comments," which will take you to a form that will allow you to up that sad number) if you think it's at all good.

And out in digital library land, Siva Vaidhaynathan (of The Anarchist in the Library fame) is collecting opinions on Google's various book and library enterprises. Head on over if you want to comment. (I've linked to Alane's note on this at It's all good; she'll send you over to sivacracy.net, where you can also read a long excerpt of Michael Gorman's latest tirade [reported on here by the Free Range Librarian].

free beer!

2005-05-30T20:12:00.000-05:00

Well, not really, but I do have an opportunity for one lucky winner to get lots of other free stuff. (Interesting sidenote: the world can't seem to make up its mind about swag and schwag, except that the latter seems to be the prefered stoner term and the former actually shows up in a real dictionary.)

Anyway, if you're interested in getting some, I have in my possession one free pass to the Exhibits at the ALA conference. It's sponsored by the National Library of Medicine, so if you want some swag in the sense of trinkets, you could even stop by their booth (#3202) to talk about the potential health effects of schwag in the sense of low-grade pot.

First person to write me at lauracrossett [at] hailmail [dot] net gets the pass.

stuff to do

2005-05-27T12:37:00.000-05:00

Now that you've learned all about RSS, here's a list of 15 things RSS can do for you [via LiB]. Also, I just discovered that you can get the Dominican calendar as an RSS feed. They offer two versions of the feed: one for events by week, and the other for "recently added" events, which at the moment seems to mean mostly the sports schedules for next year. I don't know how useful either of these will be for us GSLISistas, but at least it's a step in the right direction for the web site.

Speaking of web sites getting a clue, it seems that ALA is planning to get a new content management system, which, it is hoped, will make the web site a lot better. You can read more about what they want in the new CMS in the RFP [.pdf file] [via many folks on the blogroll]

bureaucracy

2005-05-27T09:52:00.000-05:00

We have a new Dean. Her name is Susan Roman, and she used to work at ALA. Actually, this is not exactly new news, but it is newer than some of the news on the GSLIS site. As you may remember, gettin a new dean was one of the conditions the program to continue being accredited by ALA. More on the new dean, the accreditation issue, and other bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo soon.

metablog

2005-05-25T22:39:00.000-05:00

Yes, I have entered the land of meta--blogging about blogging. Or, at least, about some blogging.

If you're reading this, you have at least some idea of what a blog is. But I've noticed in a lot of my classes that when blogs come up there are a fair number of blank faces in the room. Fear not! You too can enter the land of blog-awareness. I was going to compile a nice big post about blogs and RSS and aggregators and so forth--but then I discovered that the indefatigable Jessamyn west, of librarian.net fame, had beat me to it with her talk Staying Current Using Blogs and RSS. The notes from her talk include numerous links to definitions, tutorials, examples, the works. If you feel a little lost out here in the blogosphere, check it out. And take a look even if you feel like an expert, just so you can see what a fabulous job Jessamyn does of breaking stuff down into understandable units. Okay, I admit, I'm a fan.

But much as I love librarian.net, it is but one of the blogs I read. As you can see, I've added an LIS blogroll over on the right. It contains all of the library-related blogs and feeds that I currently read (or at least skim). It is by no means comprehensive--there are a lot of library-related blogs out there--but it's a start. I use Bloglines to read all of these and like it pretty well, but I haven't tried the other aggregators out there, so I can't really give any educated recommendations.

Why, you may be asking, do I plow through all this stuff? Mostly I do it because these blogs are, of all the things I've consumed during library school, the place where I have learned the most about actual libraries and the actual issues they face and how actual people are dealing with them. In fact, it's gotten to the point that when I'm doing research for a paper, my first thought is usually, "Hey, mp3s in libraries--I wonder ." Still don't believe me on the value of blogs for research? Here, for your reading pleasure, is a paragraph from my section of the final paper for a group project on digital rights management for 770, with its footnote:

When a library buys—or, more often, leases—a digital resource, however, its rights over that resource are determined not by the library but by the seller. The copyright statement at the beginnning of a traditional book will explain that the book many not be reproduced in whole or part, by any means, except in certain instances, such as a reviewer or student quoting a brief passage in the course of her work. The digital rights management statement at the beginning of an e-book, though, reads more like this example:
———————————————————
DRM Rights:
Copy 25 selections every 1 day(s)
Print 25 pages every 1 day(s)
Reading aloud allowed
Book expires 150 day(s) after download
Note that Adobe eBooks cannot be shared.5
———————————————————

5. Jason Griffey, “Reading aloud allowed,” post on Pattern Recognition blog (March 30, 2005):

Happy reading!

multiple guess

2005-05-21T18:34:00.000-05:00

A lis•dom reader writes:

So you are a librarian and someone gives you $40,646 dollars. After much celebration you decide to:

a) update your adult reference collection,

b) spend the money on developing your extremely popular movie and motion picture collection or,

c) contract with a security company to install finger print scanners on your libraries computers in order to be able to monitor Internet usage more closely.

What do you decide to do with the money?

As you know if you saw Friday's Tribune (or, for that matter, picked up on pretty much any other Chicago media outlet--it was a slow news day, apparently), Naperville Public Library chose option c.

For further reading, check out what librarian.net has to say about it all.

Really, one just has to wonder what their PR people were thinking. (Then again, this seems to be a common problem in libraries these days--have you seen Mao the Librarian at the Minneapolis Public Library? [also from the invaluable librarian.net]

in search of. . .

2005-05-18T22:01:00.000-05:00

Everybody who is anybody in the library blogosphere has posted this tidbit sometime in the past week. Those of you who know me to differ at any cost may be stunned by this, but I'm going to go ahead and post it, too. [I got it from The Shifted Librarian, who got it from Caveat Lector who got it from Dilettante's Ball . . . .] This is someone talking about how they got a usability expert in to review their library Web site and OPAC:

"I'll skip over the part about our website (we're able to fix that pretty easily) and write about what they recommended for the catalog. The first screen they gave us was a redesigned search form. An interesting dialogue came out of that:
Usability Expert: Ok, so this is the search form...
Librarian(s): So... is this the simple search form or the advanced search?
Usability Expert: This is the search form."

Imagine that--a single, simple search form. Just like Google. Or, for that matter, the very cool RedLightGreen, which is a single-search box that will find books, tell you what libraries have them, and then (this is the best part) generate citations for you in your prefered format. No more need to consult me, your walking talking MLA Handbook/Chicago Manual of Style.

Sadly, we don't immediately have the ability to make all library OPACs this easy or this cool. But it's something to think about. It would certainly be an improvement over the Dominican/ILLINET catalog, although it, in turn, is not so bad as some. Got a favorite bad OPAC? Leave a comment and let us know.

back from vacation

2005-05-18T09:35:00.000-05:00

I've been in lovely Iowa City, Iowa for the past few days, more or less disconnected from the online world, although my hometown is now happily full of wifi hotspots, including a coffee shop and the Iowa City Public Library. (The latter was featured in the last issue of American Libraries for its architecture. I just like it because it has Time, Newsweek, and Life in bound editions back to about 1930 and lots of CDs. Oh, and books.)

I've got all kinds of goodies stored up to tell you about in the near future, but to tide you over, here's an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about why a PhD is not an MLIS.

wanna come work with me?

2005-05-12T17:19:00.000-05:00

The library where I work in Franklin Park, just a hop, skip, and a jump west of River Forest, is hiring another youth services assistant. It's 19.5 hours a week, $10 an hour--pretty much the same job that I have, except I'm focused more on doing YA programming and you'd be focused more on younger kids. As you can see, our kids' web site needs some serious help (love that clip art!), although at least now all the links work (when I arrived, no one had updated them in about five years).

If you're at all interested in working with kids, I encourage you to apply. It's kind of a nutty place, but I've learned a lot since I started here in February, and I've gotten a good taste of what real life library work is like. If you want to know more about the job, drop me a note: lauracrossett {at} hailmail {dot} net, or you can sometimes catch me on AIM as theblackmolly.

Oh, and here's a link for the job ad again, in case you missed my attempt at clever linking above.

publicly (and privately) speaking. . .

2005-05-09T04:09:00.000-05:00

Steven M. Cohen, of the ad-laden but useful Library Stuff, points to a recent post about the importance of public speaking skills for librarians at the elegant (and eloquent) Caveat Lector. I didn't get to attend the GSLIS shindig that Kate Marek organized for people to show off their work (no link because I can't find one in the uninformative GSLIS Student Information Center), but I know there are people doing smart stuff out there. Drop a comment or a line (see e-mail address in previous post, and don't forget to take out the spaces) and tell us about it. Or, if you don't feel you're doing cool stuff, what would you like to be doing? Do you think our courses are giving us opportunities to prepare for giving 20-25 minute presentations? No? Gosh, neither do I. Then again, is that the school's repsonsibility or ours? What can we do? All ideas welcome.

A note on privacy: My name is plastered all over this project, or at any rate it's pretty darned easy to track it to me. If you want to make comments, via Blogger (and yes, despite my devotion to the open source movement, I am using Blogger, spawn of that devilish Google--call it a shortage of energy and cash), you can do so anonymously. If you e-mail me, tell me whether you'd be willing to be quoted and to what extent, if any, you'd like to be identified. Of course, if someone really wanted to dig up whatever you may have said at some point out in the digital world, she probably could--but unless you're planning to run for office or work for the CIA, I kind of doubt anyone will want to look that hard.

ALA conference

2005-05-07T22:38:00.000-05:00

So I hope some other people are going to ALA. If you are and you haven't already seen it, you have to check out the Unofficial ALA Wiki--and better yet, contribute to it!

Also, I forgot to say how to get ahold of me: if you have suggestions for the blog or want to contribute, please e-mail me at lauracrossett @ hailmail.net.

welcome. . .

2005-05-07T21:03:00.000-05:00

Yo! So, this is here blog is for students in the GSLIS at Dominican University. Why? Well, earlier today I ran across an article about the library job market in Library Journal that I thought people might want to read if they hadn't seen it. I posted it on the LISSA Blackboard and was reminded again of how much I hate Blackboard (you can't always tell what a post is about until you look at it, the navigation system sucks, and no RSS! Poopy, I say, poopy! I should add that this is Blackboard's fault, not LISSA's). So then I thought, well, what would be a good system for communicating GSLIS type stuff? What would I like as a GSLIS student? Hence, this blog.

There are a lot of librarian and library blogs out there--librarian.net, Free Range Librarian, Tame the Web, Catalogablog, just to name a few--and it seems kind of silly to add to them. I don't intend for LISdom to do that. I just want it to be a place to post and exchange information: accessible, commentable-onable, RSS-able information.

So send me your contributions, rants, ideas--and if you'd like to blog on LISdom, let me know that, too--I can't do this all on my own.