librarian.net

For some wacky reason I’ve been asked to guest blog over at Boing Boing so I’ll be scarcer than usual here. I’m working on a post about the Gale/EBSCO thing but trying to find the hook that makes it … explicable to a plain old library user. If you have suggestions, or other things that you think would fascinate a Boing Boing audience, feel free to drop them in the comments. And if you happen to live in the Florida Panhandle, I’ll be in Niceville on Friday talking about CMSes.

I’m adding another microjob to all the microjobs I have. Starting next week I will be the super-part-time IT lady at the vocational high school that I work at. This means that I’ll be the triage lady between the IT troubles at the school and the expensive tech consultants that do the networking and account management and mail server for the school. This is good news for me. I’ll even, sort of, have a classroom because there’s an empty one. I’m going to dial back my adult ed teaching in the evenings for a semester so that I can be around at night. So, for anyone curious or keeping track at home, here is my “what I do for work” list at the moment.

• I run MetaFilter – I am one of two full-time moderators. In addition to the guy who owns the site and the coder who builts a lot of it, we’re it. Running Ask MetaFilter has taught me a lot about how people look for information and how they do or do not find it.
• I give talks – as other people have observed, public speaking opportunities seem to be dropping off somewhat. I was turning down offers last year because I was overbooked, now I’m doing maybe one a month? Works out well for me, but it’s hardly a reliable income stream.
• I am still automating the Tunbridge Library using Koha. It’s slow going. Some of that slowness is me, some is not. I work a few hours a week on it. We’re at the point where everything’s got a sticker and now we’re linking records to items. Exciting.
• I’m writing a book for Libraries Unlimited about teaching people to use computers over on this side of the digital divide. Due in March and I’m doing my own index. Wish me luck!
• I’m still doing drop-in time at the local vocational high school which is a different job from the IT job though also just a few hours a week.
• I got a royalties check from Mcfarland for about $20 so I guess that’s sort of like a job.

I’m sure there are other things I’m forgetting. As usual, librarian.net is just a hobby blog and not something that brings in any money which is AOK by me. This is post #3001 after 10+ years of doing this.

I have proposed two presentations for the SXSW conference in Austin Texas next March. There is a complicated series of steps to determining which of the proposals will actually get picked. Part of this determination (30%) is a very basic voting thing where you can thumbs-up or thumbs-down a particular presentation. Voting is now open. We are encouraged to use our powers of persuasion to get you to vote for our ideas. I would like you to vote for my ideas. Here is a link to all of the proposals. There are over 2000 of them and 300 or so will get chosen.

My two proposals are linked here

- How The Other 1/2 Lives – Touring The Digital Divide
- Curating Cultural Content – Libraries Save Your Ass & Etchings

Voting involved signing up on the website and then clicking the thumbs up. I’d appreciate it if you’d consider doing this. I’m pretty into both topics but the first one is nearer and dearer to my heart, while the second one seems to fit in more nicely with the SXSW gestalt. A few other library-themed things you shoudl check out

- David Lee King presenting on Designing Your Customers Digital Experience
- Heath Rezabek’s Connected Youth: Austin Public Library Teens Get Mobile
- Cecily Walker’s Can I Reserve This Book With My iPhone?
- Jason Schultz’s Reading ReInvented: Can You Steal this Book?
- Tiffini Travis’s Librarian Glasses or Stripper Heels about information fluency.
- Brian Rowe’s Digital Accessibility on Ebooks and Phones : #$@^ Kindle
- Bill Simmon is also proposing a panel which I may be on: Hyperlocal Focus: Growing A Vibrant Community Media Ecosystem

And a few presentations about books more generally…

- Allen Weiner’s Publishers Look To E-Reading to Reach Digital Consumers (curious about this one)
- Travis Alber’s The Future of Reading: Books and the Web
- Dharmishta Rood’s Networked Reading: Viewing as an Act of Participation
- Aaron Miller’s Books and the Twenty-First Century – The New Realm of Reading
- Bradley Inman’s Too Busy To Read? The Future Of Books
- Two related seeming panels: Kindle 2020 and The Book in 2050

Please vote early and often and for as many ideas as you like. There are a lot of great ideas in there on related topics like gaming and accessibility and web standards. Even if you’re not even considering going to SXSW, please take some time to vote up ideas you think should be getting exposure at a web geeks conference. Thanks.

Oh hey, people are doing this all week, so I can participate! I’ve had a busy day, some of it library-related, all of it me-related. This is all in pretty approximate order.

- got up at 9:30-ish and made coffee
- checked email and the MetaFilter moderation queue to see if anything was “on fire” [it wasn't]. Caught up on the site. Someone posted something questionable (self-linky) and talked with co-workers (over IM) to decide what to do (we deleted it).
- added an update to an anonymous post for a question-asker on Ask MetaFilter
- sent in receipts for reimbursement for recent trips using Freshbooks, filed too-many icons on my desktop which now just has a few folders on it
- answered some MetaFilter mail (a lot of my work is customer service type stuff) and did some administrative stuff
- added some things to the MetaFilter sidebar
- emailed with boyfriend who is in Puerto Rico
- got ass kicked at online Scrabble
- went to lunch at the local hospital cafeteria, across the street from me, with friends & then back to their place for coffee
- chatted with neighbor across the street about a possible job at the high school next year, a little more in-depth than my current tech instruction gig
- post office, asked the guy at the post office some questions that MeFites had about the post office, walked home
- chatted with my co-worker about my past weekend and my upcoming weekend
- updated the Tunbridge Library as to the status of the automation project — 220 books have been item+record linked and my friend Stan wrote a little web-based app. to facilitate further scanning which we were doing on Sunday
- chatted with Stan about the app and moved it to the library server so anyone can scan [if we show them how] talked about the UI for the app
- read facebook email and got some disturbing rumor about some Koha/LibLime drama that I’m still trying to parse (new features not being built back into the code) and don’t know enough about to talk more about
- accepted a few facebook friend requests
- got facebook email from a friend whose dad’s book is coming out in paperback asking me about social software ways to promote it. I gave her some ideas and then asked a friend of mine who is in publishing who not only had more ideas but knew the people releasing the book. Yay small world. The book is good, you should read it.
- That same friend had also just edited a book that she sent a copy of to my Dad who seemed to love it. My Dad can be a tough nut to crack, so this was good news. She and I chatted about work and other things.
- Made a plan via phone to hang out with my Dad next week
- Read the ALA’s new Library Bill of Rights interpretations which are interesting. Wrote a blog post. Tried to see if I could figure out more about what’s changed in the edited interpretations.
- Read more about the Google Book Search Settement via the new website (twittered about yesterday) dedicated to it called The Public Index. Not only can you read the settlement, you can DISCUSS it. Very exciting.
- read twitter, did not post to twitter
- deleted blog spam, bought some postage stamps on ebay
- talked to president of VLA about options for using WordPress to build a “librarian substitute pool” on the VLA website. We’ll probably do it using BuddyPress.
- emailed a recruiter explaining how to post jobs to the VLA website.
- played some facebook Scrabble
- watched the Daily Show’s bit about Sarah Palin, searched The Pirate Bay for some TV I like to watch (The IT Crowd)
- deleted some AskMe comments, deleted a MeFi comment where someone called someone else a “fucking idiot”
- checked out the blogs of someone who will be staying at my place while I am away
- read some email back-and-forths on the MeFi admin list
- checked out the Fenway Park website because my sister’s boyfriend is playing there with his fantasy baseball team on Friday. I am going but I guess I can’t bring my laptop
- cleaned up the paperwork on my kitchen table that’s been there since I got back from New Orleans
- printed maps to wedding I am going to on Saturday
- paid bills (online!)
- read envelope-o-stuff from Sandy Berman
- read Scream at the Librarian briefly in the bathroom
- read the information on the RFID chip that is going to be in my new enhanced driver’s license
- cleaned the bathroom
- prepared a welcome-basket for my friend who just bought a house in my neighborhood
- thinking about dinner, it’s now about 8 pm.

So that’s what I can remember. I’m sure there was more misc noodling. My web cache would tell a better story, but I don’t know how much math you need about this. The upshot was: a lot of email, some in-person time, very little phone time and doing small parts of maybe four different jobs today (library, MetaFilter, VLA webmaster, high school stuff). I did most of it from home, listened to a lot of music (oops, just accepted a ton of pending friend requests from last.fm) and watched the birds on my feeder (blue jays, nuthatch and a cardinal). Now I’ll go have some dinner and maybe see what everyone else has been doing today.

I spent Friday at the NELA-ITS CMS Day. I gave the keynote in the morning, just talking about what CMSes are and why they’re useful with a little overview of a few, and then hung out to see other librarians talk about how they’re using their CMSes. It was a great day. We had a wonderful, if chilly, room at the lovely Portsmouth Public Library and I learned a lot about how some New England area libraries are running their library websites with Drupal, Joomla, Plone and Wordpress.

Having the actual people behind these websites talking about what worked and what didn’t work — and people were very candid about what was good and bad about these CMSes — made for a fascinating day of show and tell. Add to this the fact that all the software demonstrated was free and open source and I really think we sent people away with some great ideas on how to save money and still deliver good web content. Not having the chilling effect of a vendor’s stink-eye [or lawsuit threat] was also delightful. I’m now done with public speaking stuff until October I believe. Glad to end this season on such an up note. Thanks to NELA-ITS and Brian Herzog for coming up with the idea in the first place. Notes for my talks — links to slides and a page of links to what i was talking about, are here: Website 2.0! why there is a CMS in your future. Thanks to everyone for showing up. Here are the links to other people’s presentations and websites.

I’ve been really lucky lately that the talks I’ve been giving have been at conferences that I’ve really enjoyed attending as well as speaking at. This past week I was in Athens, Georgia giving the closing keynote talk at the Evergreen International Conference. I was able to show up a day early and went to a full day of programs where I got to learn how the Michigan Evergreen project is doing and heard about a multi-lingual Evergreen instance in Armenia which will have documentation and catalog entries in not just three languages, but three alphabets! As you probably know, the library that I am helping automate is using Koha, not Evergreen, so I talked a little about our project and the things that make FOSS projects more similar than different.

There was a real excitement to being part of the first annual conference. People were really jazzed about Evergreen generally, and Equinox Software did a great job as one of the co-sponsors both talking about what they were doing, but keeping the conference from being a single vendor-focussed event. Karen Schneider was my main point of contact for the whole big shindig and did a wonderful job with preparation, communication and high energy on-the-ground cat herding during the conference. You can see some of the slide decks over on slideshare and I know they recorded video at many of the talks. It was so darned relaxing to be among a group of people committed both to libraries and open source projects, I almost forgot my day-to-day library job fighting with Overdrive, OCLC and Microsoft. It also fortified me for my long trip home. Here are my slides, available in the usual formats.

• A big fan of open

Thanks to all the sponsors and all the people who showed up to make this conference terrific.

I gave a talk at MLA on Social Software and Intellectual Freedom. It’s hard to sum up the topic in 75 minutes. I did about an hour of talking and opened the floor up to questions which seemed to go well. If my talk had a thesis it was “Make sure your privacy policy expands to include social networking; don’t chastise people for what you know about them online; don’t be frightened.” but I think it was a little rambly. It did, howerver, come with a huge list of links which is what more and more of my talks lately have. I talk about 30 things and then give a lot of well-curated “and here’s where to go for more” sources. In case anyone is curious, the sldies and links are here

• Social Software & Intellectual Freedom

Thanks to MLA for having me down to Springfield. It was a nifty conference in a nice new building.

So, my resolution to write all new talks for 2009 is meaning I spend a lot more time on them. “All new” may be a bit of a stretch since one of my recent talks contained a part of an earlier talk, but they’re all revamped and recontextualized. I was away for eight days. I did a training at the North Country Library System — a consortium that serves many tiny libraries just like mine, only in upstate New York instead of Vermont — that was a lot of fun. I then drove down to the Jersey Shore for one of my favorite library conferences, NJLA.

I don’t know exactly why NJLA is always so fun. I think it’s a combination of a well-organized and fun conference put on by an organization that doesn’t seem to be going broke and held in a neat location. The New Jersey librarians I have met there are a mix of older and younger librarians who seem to work and play well together. Maybe it’s just that they get my jokes. I did a talk about how to do some advanced stuff on YouTube and then also did an expansion of the Firefox talk that I did at Computers in Libraries.

As always my slides, notes and links are online and you can see them on these two pages.

• Engage Your Patrons with Web 2.0
• Two talks for NJLA

Enjoy and if you came to any of these talks, thanks for being such a great audience.

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.

So, I gave a short talk at the Library 2.0 Symposium at Yale on Saturday. Put on by the Information Society Project, it was a gathering of people ruminating on the nature of future libraries. Only a few of the participants seemed to know our profession’s definition of Library 2.0 but that didn’t seem to matter much. There are some great summaries of the panel discussions on the Yale ISP blog. Most people there were academic, but I did get to hang out with Josh Greenberg from NYPL and see Brewster Kahle talk about the Internet Archive’s book scanning project. My general angle was that while we talk a lot about the “born digital” generation, there are still places here in the US — hey, I live in one — where the sort of network effect that is necessary for 2.0 sorts of things still eludes us. We each got about ten minutes and I could have used twenty, but you can look at my five slides if you’d like.

The whole day was worthwhile, but it’s somewhat ironic that we were encouraged to use twitter and blog our reactions while the room the panel was in had almost no wifi and no outlets. I don’t know why this sort of thing still surprises me, but I just felt that a high-powered panel would be able to receive high-powered tech support and handle things like this. Not so.

Today we got notification that public library statistics are available for Vermont and got a link to this page. No HTML summary so I’m going to pull out a few things that I thought were notable so maybe other people can link to it or maybe I’ll crosspost on the VLA blog.

• Vermont has 182 public libraries, the largest number of libraries per capita in the US.
• 174 of these libraries have Internet access; 160 of these have high speed access. Do the math, that’s 14 libraries with dial-up and eight with nothing.
• Half of the public librarians in the state have MLSes or the equivalent.
• 73% of Vermont library funding comes from local taxes; 27% comes from other local sources (grants, fundraising)
• Eleven public libraries filter internet access on all terminals (as opposed to some libraries that offer a children’s filtered option)

The library that I work in serves about 1300 people and is open nineteen hours per week. We’re the only library at our population level (serving 1000-2499 people) that loaned more books than we borrowed via ILL. Ninety-six percent of the service population have library cards. I’m still reading for more details, fascinating stuff really.