librarian.net

A question over on Ask MetaFilter which I don’t really know the answer to: why do so many library catalogs have human names?. It’s gotten some decent responses and I suspect there isn’t really one answer but if you have more information than the hive mind team over there, feel free to drop me a note or, if you’ve already got an account, log in and chime in.

I was asked to fill out a Predictions Survey by the Pew folks. In it, they describe the modern-day status quo of technology and ask for predictions on where these technologies are going and how society uses them. At the end, they ask if anyone has friends or colleagues whose input might be useful. My input was along the lines of “I don’t even agree with your status quo statements” so I figure it might be useful for them to get other opinions. The link to the survey is http://www.psra.com/experts and you have to use the pin 9000 to log in to it.

Hi. I have an odd request. I’m going to be speaking at the Access 2007 conference in Victoria BC on October 11th. I’m really looking forward to it. However, travelling there involves going from Tinytown USA to Tinytown Canada which means two small airports which means two long (or expensive, or both) trips. If anyone is driving to Access and heading either through Vancouver BC or Seattle WA on their way there and wouldn’t mind giving me a ride to the conference — I speak on the morning of the 11th, pretty flexible otherwise — I’d be happy to chip in for gas, share my hotel room if it’s logistically possible, or otherwise make it a non-sucky experience for you in the interests of saving the conference promoters money and me some time. Drop a note in the comments or find me in the usual places. I’ll be buying tickets sometime this week. Thanks.

South by Southwest is a big conference thing in Austin Texas in March. It’s made of music, movies and something they call “interactive” which is basically Internet. It’s an interesting conference that I went to once in 2000 and it changed my life pretty much forever. I met a bunch of early bloggers in the flesh and we became friends and the rest is pretty well trod-upon history. During SXSW since then I was often petsitting for my blogger friends while they went to Texas. This year I may be going. There is a panel called Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting! put together by Annalee Newitz who is all sorts of excellent. There is a good chance I will be speaking on that panel in my role as moderator of MetaFilter. IF… if the panel gets chosen. Fortunately, SXSW is a pseudo-democracy so you can vote for panels you’d like to see. And I say pseudo because you can also implore your friends to vote for you and/or your panel and it’s all kosher. So, if you’re picking up what I’m laying down here, please consider voting for my panel, or any number of interesting panels you’d like to see, whether you’re going or not. And the title of the panel? Pure coincidence.

I rarely post links to job here because it seems to me that most postings for library jobs are more or less the same. This one is different. The Open Library project, which I linked to here before, is looking for some new folks. You’d be working with a fun team of geniuses, most notably Karen Coyle who is the chief librarian of the project. Telecommuting an option. Interested? Read the job description, then email Aaron and tell him you heard about it here.

Tasks include: working with our chief librarian, Karen Coyle, to implement algorithms to do data merging and other processing tasks; writing scrapers and crawlers to grab various data sources; writing importers to parse this data into something that can be imported into our database; and managing all the people who want to help us with these tasks.

Chad strongarm^H^H^H talked me into hosting the wandering Infosciences Carnival which was probably something I should have done a long time ago anyhow. You can participate too, it’s incredibly easy. Send a link to the best library stuff you’ve been reading this week, either via del.icio.us using the carninfo tag or this submission form. Need to know more/ Check out the submission guidelines on the wiki, or just ask me or Chad. Thanks for contributing.

If you have a second, please take this ten question survey about academic libraries’ presence on social networking sites. [web4lib]

Merdith Farkas is doing a survey of the biblioblogosphere to follow-up on her survey from two years ago. Please take a sec if you are a library blogger and take her survey.

Coming on the heels of my article in Library Journal, Carolyn Hank has a survey on Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation that she’d like you to take.

I’m clawing through the fog of jetlag and email backlog. Thank jehu that I have Twitter to help me feel even further behind! If you have more free time than I do, you may want to help out with some surveys.

• Rachel Singer Gordon is looking for librarians pursuing nontraditional career paths and has a few questions she’d like you to answer.
• A “group of librarians” involved in the 2007 ALA Emerging Leaders program would like you to take a short survey about what new/young librarians would like to see more of at conferences. Jenny implies (and their blog confirms) that the Project L team is behind this, more power to them.