librarian.net

I think the Read posters are fine. However, they are also amusing for various reasons, some more than others. Your Neighborhood Librarian takes a few to task in amusing ways.

• BOFH stands for Bastard Operator From Hell. This entry is about vampire librarians, or something.
• Can architects save librarians from the Internet? Slashdot talking about Slate.
• ListenUpVermont, a project to get participating Vermont libraries together to be able to lend digital audiobooks to their patrons is going live this week. I’d love to say this was my doing but mostly I’ve just consulted with a local non-automated library about how they can make this work for them. This is the result of an informal (possibly formalized now) consortium of Vermont libraries from all over the state lending titles via Overdrive. In just browsing the collection I’m sort of surprised at how many titles can be burned to CD (and transferred to ipods) I was expecting less. Big congrats to Stephanie Chase from the Stowe Free Library for getting this project going.

Now the story comes full-circle. Wired publishes a story by my friend Mat who I paid $10 to blog about how awesome libraries are. You may recall I mentioned this before. I even made the article!

This isn’t specifically about libraries, but I know that many librarians consider Neil Gaiman a member of our tribe, since he’s so bloggeriffic and knowledgeable and appreciative of our profession. So, I thought you’d enjoy this story about how Neil Gamain pitched in to help scifi fan Jason propose to his girlfriend during a book signing event. Here’s Jason’s blog post explaining how it all went down. Neil Gaiman says it was his favourite bit of his visit to the Phillipines. [mefi]

My web friend Mat Honan does a lot of neat stuff. He does triathalons, he writes for Wired, he goes traveling to interesting places. I follow him virtually via Vox and Flickr and other random places, not in a stalker-y way but just in a “hey this person is interesting” way. I think we have friends in common, but I don’t know him in person. So, when he started doing pay-per-post posts to his blog, I wasn’t sure if he was making a big joke or earnestly trying to make some money. His posts were definitely interesting and amusing, not taking themselves too seriously it seemed. However, I was and still am a little skeptical about this whole pay-for-placement thing. I keep an eagle eye out for it in libraryland, and I think many of us do. While I don’t think we’re perfect at this game by any stretch I like to think that you go to the library, and your librarian, to get objective information not filtered through shopping incentives, advertising and viral marketing.

I thought this was a worthwhile point to make, so I decided to pay Mat Honan to make it for me. Ten dollars well spent, I think. Don’t you?

The California State Archivist reports on the status of archives, museums in affected fire areas in California via the California State Library Blog. [thanks anarchivist]

Not super fleshed out, but how cool is it that one of our venerable library institutions has a blog outlining some of the new things they’re trying and evaluating what they’ve already been doing? Please subscribe, right now please, to labs.nypl.org. [thanks pk!]

So, I gave my talk at Access and it went pretty well. I was a little out of my element since I’m usually the techie person talking to less techie people. Here I was representing the non-techies with a message of “hey don’t forget usability!” among other things. I had a lot of downtime in various lobbies and airports on the way back and so I poked around looking to see what, if anything, people had said about it. There was a short blurb on the K-State Conference blog about it.

Anyone who has been following my travels knows I have a particular soft spot for Kansas both because I’ve had a great time meeting and talking to people there, but also because they are doing some neat stuff with technology that helps make up for their geographical disatance from other KS librarians as well as other libraries generally. Just look at this list of blogs and feeds to see just some of the stuff Kansas State University is doing. Anyhow, I saw the post on my WordPress dashboard and left a comment. One of the things that I think separates people who I consider “bloggers” from people with blogs is this sort of inter-blog commenting. If someone says something nice (or not nice actually) about me, I try to leave a note. It just seems like decent etiquette and a way to say “hey welcome to the blogoworld” for newer bloggers, particularly library students.

I think an easy mistake for first-time bloggers to make is to assume that their blog is going to become some conversational destination wthout realizing that they need to go out and converse as well as bring people in to do it. The conversation that we all talk about cluing in to doesn’t happen in any one place, it happens in a lot of places all at once. Dale Askey, who was at Access 2007 and wrote the little blurb about my talk follows up with a little more explanation about some of these blog effects. He tells us about how after Amanda did her nuts and bolts talk about the Endeca rollout they did at McMaster, someone from Endeca’s Canada office emailed her a few hours later interested in talking with her about some of her ideas. Neat. This is the sort of back and forth we’d like to be having, it’s nice to see it really happening in ways that help libraries.

There’s a point to this story: people read and process our blogs in ways we cannot control and do not intend. Far from being a cautionary tale, I want to do a little dance because of this. We’re seeing what we said was the point behind blogging. Put information out there, and let people do with it what they will. Thanks to this little bizarre set of events I’ve related, I met new people [and] caught the interest of Endeca with my comments…

And, on the heels of that, NELA has a conference blog, complete with a Flickr photo pool and a team of local bloggers so anyone who can’t go can follow along at home. It’s worth noting that the entire cost to set this all up — except human time which is important but separate — was probably close to zero. Free WordPress.com account [note to NELA blog admin: consider disabling Snap previews, they’re an obnoxious side effect of WP.com blogs], free Flickr account [note to Flickr admin(s): choose a Flickr web address by clicking here when you’re logged in so the URL for your pictures is even more customized] and all the rest of it the feeds, the comments, the basic designs, just come along with it. I’m sure one or more of my talks will show up there and I’m excited to get to read about the large number of presentations that I can’t go to which I now know I can still read about.

Kathryn Greenhill has a great sensible post on why learning emerging techologies is part of every librarian’s job. Kathryn worked with other Australian librarians on Library2.0 on the loose, an unofficial unconference for Western Australian library folks (and a few from other places). Kathryn is one of the many international librarians that I feel comfortable calling a colleague because even though we’ve only met in person once, I see her “around” many of the online places that I frequent and keep up with her via blog, twitter, flickr etc. I know this is sort of old news online, but I found it again via Manage This which is quickly becoming one of my favorite library blogs.

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.