Category: librarians

unintended consequences for econtent

Posted on by jessamyn

The law of unintended consequences, applied to electronic content and how it works for and against information professionals.

he creative info pro will look at any new information resource and think about how to hack, er, repurpose it for other uses. I use the search functionality of the Wayback Machine to track the emergence of a catch phrase or hot-button issue over time. eBay is a great source for images of virtually any object, as well as a way to find old (but often still useful) textbooks. And some of the Whois domain name registries can be used to glean information on emerging customer dissatisfaction by locating what are delicately called “sucks sites,” since many of the domain names are some form of ThisCompanySucks.com. [lisnews]

librarian writers, advice from someone who knows

Posted on by jessamyn

Writing tires me out lately. In addition to my job at the library, I’ve been cranking out one or two articles a month for various publications. You saw the link to the WebJunction article a few days back. I also wrote a very basic “My First Library Web Site” article for the Vermont Library Association [not online] and a piece on the USA PATRIOT Act for Clamor Magazine [not on their site but my local copy is here]. Many librarians are librarian-writers. Marylaine Block who maintains Ex Libris has published a long essay by Steven Bell called What Works for Me: 10 Tips for Getting Published. Well worth a leisurely read.

a word about well-covered ideas, or what I might refer to as “done to death” or “jumping on the bandwagon” ideas. You know them – information literacy, blogging in the library, digitization projects, virtual reference. I don’t think these are off limits, but you need to bring a different perspective to any of these topics. nmrtwriter

who votes for whom

Posted on by jessamyn

Another incidental big-media librarian mention, along the lines of what sorts of people vote for whom, from the New York Times.

There are two sorts of people in the information-age elite, spreadsheet people and paragraph people. Spreadsheet people work with numbers, wear loafers and support Republicans. Paragraph people work with prose, don’t shine their shoes as often as they should and back Democrats…. For librarians, who must like Faulknerian, sprawling paragraphs, the ratio of Kerry to Bush donations was a whopping 223 to 1. Laura Bush has a lot of work to do in shoring up her base. emily