Todo: promote #1lib1ref project on Wikipedia

Wikipedia 1lib1ref logo

I am excited about the #1lib1ref project on Wikipedia. The goal is to get every librarian in the world (or a reasonable subsection) to add a citation to a Wikipedia article, just one. This helps make Wikipedia better in the process. I added my cite today to the Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow article. I’m not even trying to be sassy, that is just the page that was handed to me by this great tool that lets you know which articles need citations. I did some Googling, found a Google Book that had some supporting detail for the fact in question, used a book citation tool to turn it into Wikistyle and there you go. I might do two, just in case someone doesn’t have time to add a citation to Wikipedia this week. We have a facebook page and a lot of people using the #1lib1ref hashtag on Twitter. Join us!

Men of the Stacks: why this isn’t just another wall calendar

I was happy that I caught the tweet early when the Men of the Stacks calendar came out because it’s been fascinating to watch this project grow and blosson. If for some reason you haven’t heard of it, the website is here and they have a facebook page here. Thanks to some nice photography, some cute librarians and a good message, this project has taken off, been mentioned in international news outlets, hit boingboing, Oprah and the Village Voice. The calendars cost $5 to produce through MagCloud and are sold for $20 which means for every calendar that gets purchased $15 goes to the It Gets Better Project. There’s a thoughtful post by the MotS administrator Megan about bullying and jerks online and why this sort of thing is so important. My favorite thing is probably close to what Will Manley says, this is “an image buster with a sense of humor.” My second favorite thing about this is, hey, I know those guys! A lot of the fellas in the photos are librarians we’ve known online for years and years–Brett and Trevor and Von and Gabe are people I know, and the others seem like people I’d like to know–and so we can smile along with them and say “Way to go guys!” Can’t wait to see how this evolves.

cross-site promotion, are you on metafilter?

Me and the nice people from MetaFilter are starting an ambitious back-tagging project where a team of volunteers will be adding tags to the 42,000 posts that were on the website before we added the tagging functionality. We’re hoping that this will make it easier to track down double-posts and related posts and make browsing the site via tags a little more thorough. I envy sites like Flickr that have had tags since the beginning, doing it this way is hard and not at all optimal. In any case, if you have a MetaFilter login and would like to do a little volunteer tagging, please drop me an email or (preferably) an IM with your usernumber and I can get you set up.