librarian.net

Librarian.net is eight years old today!

You can take a peek at what it looked like when I first started it up, April 20, 1999. Back then we didn’t have CMSes and I had to upload the webpages uphill both ways in the snow to bring you all these excellent links. I didn’t have comments (though to be fair, I was slow on that bandwagon even once I moved to Movable Type). I based my design on Jesse James Garrett’s Infosift which predated lib.net by almost a year. I met Jesse mainly because I asked for design help [and to ask if he minded if I copied him] and my friendship with him and a big group of early bloggers paved the way to my work with MetaFilter and a lot of my interest in 2.0 technologies. Today I’m in Dodge City, Kansas preparing to give a talk about the big 2.0 thing and I’ll see if I can wrap all that in together and make it make sense to folks who don’t have a bunch of stuff on Twitter and who may wonder “Why MySpace?”

Thanks to MySpace’s birthday reminders, I can actually seem like an attentive friend and wish my pal Andrea a very happy birthday today! Like me, Andrea balances her professional time in both offline and online librarianish pursuits. She writes her own blog Library Techtonics and co-manages the PLA Blog while also working at the Reading Public Library where I am sure she was instrumental in helping them get their pictures on Flickr. We are in each other’s Top Eight how’s that for friendship? I hope you have a happy birthday Andrea.

Today is my birthday. I am 38. It’s been a pretty good day so far. One of the places I am going today is the library.

Hi. It’s my partner Greg’s birthday today. He is 30. All of the things I manage to do in my life, here, on the road, in my head, I do with his encouragement and rock solid support. If you’re near a camera today, maybe you could drop him a little birthday greeting in Flickr (tag: happybirthdaygreg)? A few other people you might recognize have already done so. Thank you.

Happy 127th birthday San Francisco Public Library. My how you’ve grown.

Happy tenth birthday Internet Public Library! I didn’t know when I started doing some online reference for them in my last year of library school that they were so new and that a lot of the things they were trying to do were really pretty cutting edge. I still go there today to find good links to author information, to get POTUS information or just to see if my list of the seven basic plots in literature is still there. I guess some of the admiration is mutual, since I just found this on their blogs page

It would be wrong of library students to drop out of their programs and simply read Vermonter Jessamyn West’s blog about creatively integrating techonology and a human-centered approach into library services. But it would be understandable. A great blog.

Please wish my co-Councilor, fellow blogger and librarian, and friend Rochelle a very happy birthday today.