friday night short link list

Here in the frozen north Friday nights can often be a time to cook a big meal and curl up with a book and/or laptop while people in more populated areas do whatever people in more populated areas do. Here are a few of the things I have been reading this evening.

I am not saying this is true, I am only saying you should read it

If anyone with more of an understanding of the Montana ILL system would like to comment on this very odd post about a small library, the PATRIOT Act and an alleged “watch list” I would appreciate it. Update: story was not exactly true, the result of a misunderstanding, good to know.

a few things I have been reading

Some of these have been mentioned to death other places, some I haven’t seen a lot of talk on. I’ve been fighting with Gates Computers this week and haven’t been reflecting much but I thought you might like to read them too.

weeding and noisy libraries, a community response

Simon Chamberlain’s VALIS blog points to a bunch of responses to the Wall Street Journal piece about what they see as aggressive weeding. He gives two nods to MetaFilter, one for the discussion about the WSJ thread [which I participated in] and one for a related thread in Ask MetaFilter asking when libraries started being so … noisy. One of my favorite things about these discussions is the interactions between librarians and non-librarians in a non-library setting. The other thing I like is that thanks to MetaFilter’s use of the XFN protocol I can link to every library worker I notice in these threads as a “colleague” and then keep track of their posts and comments. Look at all those librarians talking to each other, and to their once and future patrons.