I know it’s a longshot, but if any readers are in the Vermont area and have next Friday the 23rd off, I’ll be one of the panelists at Johnson State College’s Alternative Media Day along with Seven Days’ journalist Cathy Resmer and a lot of other local bloggers and media types who I haven’t met personally. All events are free and open to the public, if a bit remote.
Category: me!
Indiana bound
For any librarians in the Indiana area — Bloomington and Indianapolis specifically — I’ll be giving two talks next week. On Thursday the 15th I’ll be talking about libraries and technology with students of the library school at Indiana University [flyer1, flyer 2] at 6 pm. Then I scoot off to the Indiana Library Federation Reference Division conference where I’ll be talking about… libraries and technology on Friday at 10 am [flyer]. Right now I am newly back from a six day trip to New York City where I went to a wedding, visited a new library and celebrated my birthday. I just discovered Eric Lease Morgan’s Keynote from ILF annual So you want a new website. He quotes Ranganathan and says really sane things about usability testing, specifically about the idea of ascertaining success.
What We Want, The OPAC Manifesto
Andrew Pace reminds me that I used to have a wiki, way back when. This wiki was a place where, among other things, I had a roomshare page for ALA as well as the OPAC Manifesto which was going to be an article in Searcher Magazine. However, the final version was not quite Searcher material, so I shelved it temporarily while I thought about wikifixing and promptly forgot about it. The OPAC Manifesto is back for your viewing [though not editing] pleasure. Thanks very much to people who helped with it. Feel free to link or republish in any not-for-profit venture, just cite it and credit it.
update: for those of you who missed this topic before, the manifesto was set up on a wiki so that anyone could add or edit ideas on it. The intro and outro are mine, the rest was collaboratively built.
what do people do all day?
Most librarians I know can pinpoint a time where they learned that most librarians have much more to do than just sit behind a reference desk and/or buy books. This can be problematized by media renditions of librarians that highlight these parts of the job at the expense of others, or news reports that view every person working in a library as a librarian. These are hard issues to resolve, especially when you don’t want to widen the rift between professionals and paraprofessionals in the field, and espcially where in many libraries people wear many hats. In any case, since I’m now working with libraries, but not as a librarian, I thought I’d let people know what it is that I’m doing all day lately. My official title is Community Technology Mentor, but really I’m just the Computer Lady and one who works a lot with libraries and librarians.
me: blah blah blah blog
Rebecca Blood wrote one of the first blogs I ever read. She turned out to be a local contact and good friend. Her husband Jesse James Garrett helped me with the design of the very first librarian.net pages and is an early and continuing inspiration. When I went fishing around for a date for their wedding, I met my current boyfriend Greg through his blog. It’s been a pleasure having all of these people in my online and offline world. Rebecca is starting a series of blogger interviews on her site. She did one with Matt Haughey [of MetaFilter, Creative Commons and and PVRblog fame], and this months she’s done an interview with me. I talk about stats, birdwatching and why this blog doesn’t have comments.