Forgot to mention, I’m not going to Midwinter which by my estimations (and Flickr photostream) is already in progress. This is the first ALA in a long time where I haven’t had a professional responsibility to be there and so even though Seattle is the city of my dreams, I’m staying home and working with my group of librarians instead. None of them are going to ALA either. After a crazying but fun year of travel last year I decided that staying home for a few months was a little higher on my priority list than getting to Midwinter. I’ll be at Annual where I’ll be on a panel with Eric Alterman, talking about blogs. Hope to see you there, if not before!
MIT watch out, the librarians are here!
This is a non-library post just to say that I am in Boston for the weekend for the MIT Mystery Hunt. Myself and fellow non-traditional librarian J. Baumgart will be working with Codex Ixtlilxochitl, a giant team of brainiacs all over the world using wikis and IM and Google spreadsheets and all sorts of other high and low tech means to solve puzzles and have fun. The first time I really used a wiki was as part of a puzzle hunt team and I think it really helps with all of this social software stuff to see some of it in action — helping you solve problems — to see why people think some of this stuff is so great. In any case, emails and IMs may go unanswered for a little bit, but feel free to cheer us on from home. We’ve got (at least) two librarians on this team, how can we lose?
update: we came in second by about 90 minutes. The winning team, Doctor Awkward, had some of the famous puzzlers from Wordplay on it. This means that next year they get to make the puzzle and we get to play again. From what I can gather, this was the outcome that a good chunk of my team was hoping for anyhow.
I am not saying this is true, I am only saying you should read it
If anyone with more of an understanding of the Montana ILL system would like to comment on this very odd post about a small library, the PATRIOT Act and an alleged “watch list” I would appreciate it. Update: story was not exactly true, the result of a misunderstanding, good to know.
who weeds the weeders?
They weeded the library science section at my local library. I took home a few books from the FREE cart and also snappd this picture.
a few things I have been reading
Some of these have been mentioned to death other places, some I haven’t seen a lot of talk on. I’ve been fighting with Gates Computers this week and haven’t been reflecting much but I thought you might like to read them too.
- Rochelle discusses politeness. Heidi offers some ideas from the world of engineering. Steve chimes in, agrees to disagree more on his very own blog. Walt discusses the line between candor and rudeness. Meredith has a well-thought out response with some action in the comments
- Richard Akerman talks about our OPACs and how they (sort of) solve some problems for humans but surprisingly don’t solve a lot of problems for machines talking to other machines. He asks “how can you expose your data for use by other people and machines“
- Eric Schwitzgebel asks “Do ethicists steal more books?” Part one & part two.