librarian.net

Sarah Houghton-Jan has a new URL and an all new look. Go over to her inaugural post and say hello. Don’t forget to update your feeds!

I sort of have a “How can I miss you if you won’t go away” feeling about ALA most years. I went when I was a councilor. I went when it was near me. I went when I was speaking at it. This time, none of these things were true and I was still a little exhausted from ALA Anaheim last year where my credit card number was skimmed and I had to drive an hour to get a decent restaurant. This year ALA is sounding fun, from the reports. ALA is always a better time when it’s in Chicago. More of the staffers can go and more people are used to the location and can get decent hotel rooms and the weather isn’t horrible. At least that’s been my experience. My work travel this month is going to consist of a trip to New Orleans next week [another popular ALA summer venue] for MetaFilter’s Tenth Anniversary where I will be paid to drink beer and eat alligator and wear a catchy t-shirt. Here are a few links I’ve been seeing about what I feel I’ve been missing at ALA.

• Library Conference Secret Twitter Proves Librarians Sexy, Stern
• Zines! Takes me back to my early days printing out Cognots at ALA in DC.
• Watching the ALA2009 hashtag in real-ish time.
• Meredith got an award!
• ALA 2009 photo and tweet tracker (props to heather)
• Library Journal’s up to the minute news tracker including their amusing top-of-the-tweets report

It’s just like being there, only I’m still in my pajamas, and I slept til 11.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a new site with neat old pictures. I have a tendency to just trawl Google Books to find old images, but this site — From Old Books — has a bunch of neat images along with all the citation information and sometimes some nifty stories besides.

I forgot, with all the hubub about 4/20 [Hitler's birthday, the Pirate Bay decision, other stuff] that my blog is now ten years old. Older than most, younger than some. I’ve become a much less frequent updater, and often on Fridays for some reason, but I’m still enjoying writing it, reading it, interacting on it and being immersed in blog culture generally.

Thanks readers, for a decade of sharing library information here. Here’s a link to the first ten days of librarian.net.

Walt Crawford’s new version of Cites & Insights contains the freestanding article version (pdf) of the talk he gave at the OLA Superconference that I thought was so useful. Lots of good charts and graphs and stats about the world of library blogs and library bloggers. Interesting reading no matter what your familiarity is with either of these tools.

Blogs and wikis aren’t shiny new toys for libraries and librarians any more. They’ve moved from toys to tools. As with most tools, they’re not magic, they’re not right for everything or everybody, but they can be powerfully effective in many situations.

As much as the blogoworld might seem otherwise, ours is not a particuarly trendy profession. However we do have trends and HotStuff 2.0 uncovers them for us. It’s an autogenerated blog set up by Dave Pattern which tracks hundreds of blogs and looks for trends. Sometimes these are pretty prosaic (really, potato?) but other times you can sort of see somethign happening there if you squint a little. Either way it’s an attractive and interesting blog with the obligatory “Hot or Not” which I don’t totally understand but I guess I’m happy to be on. Neat project!

As I said previously, I’ve been reading more. One of the online things I’ve been reading has been the group library blog In the Library with the Lead Pipe. It’s a long-form blog by six authors that gets to go a little more in-depth into library issues than your average blog. Recent posts I’ve enjoyed include this look at the idea of universal catalogs and this look at how to make bibliographic instruction “sticky” (memorable). The thing I like abotu this blog is that in addition to having really good writing and heaps of links to more information, the authors actually comment on each other’s posts so that you get more of a sens eof the authors’ perspectives and also some built-in discussion at the end of nearly every essay. This is one of my favorite new blogs of 2008.

I’ve been writing more and travelling more this year in compensation for not doing teeny library work as much. One of my newer gigs has been as a reviewer for Rachel Singer Gordon’s new project The Tech Static, helping librarians do collection development for tech titles. I did a short review of a DVD/manual for people learning Access 2007. There’s already a lot of good content up there. Add it to your feed reader and check the meta category for more background information.

Again, here are a set of things that maybe don’t need their own post but are worth letting people know about.

• Literal videos? Have you seen these? They are remixed videos where instead of the lyrics, you see captions or hear lyrics that describe what is happening instead. Very amusing. The first one I saw was AHa’s “Take On Me” but now they’ve done the Tears for Fears “Head Over Heels” video which is one of the classic videos that takes place in a library. Enjoy. (and of course there’s this)
• Sarah Houghton-Jan and Laura Crossett presented The Broke Library’s Guide to a Better Web Presence at IL2008.
• Dan Chudnov has a great set of slides form a talk he gave at MLC about free software. Many slides, easy to understand.
• Some discussion about Library Journal’s decision to bring eyeballs to their advertisers in the form of hosting the Annoyed Librarian’s blog. Free Range Librarian, David Lee King, Walt Crawford. My feeling is that I wasn’t payign that much attention to LJ anyhow and will probably continue to do so, though I really do like a lot of the people that work there.
• LISJobs has a lovely redesign.
• GODORT — the govdocs people — has a custom search engine that searches 611 government document sites simultaneously.

I’ll be doing another post on blogs added to my feed reader lately. I had organized and culled and plumped up my feed reading list a few months back [down time on an airplane] and was all pleased but then the hurricane that was my HD crash set me back to the beginning. I’ve been reading some neat stuff that I’ll be sharing with you.

Via AL Direct comes this good news press release from ALA.

“Opening up American Libraries’ searchable PDFs at www.ala.org/alonline/ is just the first step toward making all future features and columns available on the site in HTML format in 2009,” said Leonard Kniffel, editor in chief. The current issue of the print magazine will be open to all, as will back issues through 2003; they were all formerly accessible only with a member log-in. The revamped AL website will link content to the AL online forum [hot link http://al.ala.org/forum/] where readers are encouraged to express their opinions about professional issues, news and controversies.

I wonder if this means that AL Direct will be archived and linkable online? American Libraries also has their own blog where they talk more about the decision to open up more of their content.