In the most recent Dispatches from a Public Librarian, Scott Douglas asks readers to “invent my life” on Wikipedia. By the time I checked out the Wikipedia article, which was not even linked from his essay, it had already been protected which is Wikilanguage for “we’re stopping you from editing this page until you monkeys quit messing with it.” A quick inspection of the page’s history, ah transparency, shows that the page was created by someone named Roboscott (which matches his email address) about two weeks ago and had a flurry of editing yesterday, the day the essay was published, culminating in it being protected about 24 hours ago.
Category: blogz
just in case you thought this place was highbrow
I would like to direct your at5tention to Babes With Books. Subtitles “Smart girls are hot! — Nothing but pictures of attractive literate females. A book blog like no other.” it even has a post with (a few) scenes from libraries. [thanks paul!]
the rainbow of librarian haircolor
Erica shows us another great use for Flickr — demonstrating the wide range of librarian haircolors to disprove people who would cast aspersions on the tones of librarian tresses. Nice work!
blog: typo of the day
Typo of the Day, highlighting one word each day from the list of thousands found by the members of the forum LIBTYPOS-L. More information about Terry Ballard’s typographical errors in library databases project can be found on his website.
budget cuts for staff = books lost forever
Books are getting lost. When they’re lost people don’t check them out. When people don’t check them out, we think people don’t like them. When we think people don’t like them, we sometimes weed them (if we can find them). Why is this happening? Bad cataloging, especially in books written in non-English languages. What’s going on, and how is rampant copy-cataloging making the problem worse?
Recently, [researcher Joyce] Flynn checked Harvard’s less-than-25-year-old computer-based catalogue system, and discovered that many – perhaps most – of the Gaelic and Irish books with Na … titles are miscatalogued and so, in this odd way, are half-missing. That catalogue system is now the only way the public can access titles in the Harvard College Library collections.
“The issue goes beyond just Harvard’s Widener Library,” Flynn says. “Because Widener is often the first North American library to acquire and catalogue an obscure foreign language title, Widener’s cataloguing data frequently become the standard for libraries that acquire the book later.