LIS bloggers of any stripe, please fill out Michael Stephens’ survey Who are “the Blog People?” A Survey of Librarians and their Motivations for Blogging.
Some IL05 thoughts
I’ve been chewing over things since I got back from Internet Librarian last week. I’ve been spending the week teaching people the difference between “save” and “save as” and showing librarians how to insert pictures into text documents and the whole simultaneous blogging, and even the giant calculators seems like a distant memory. I do know that it was wonderful to be at a conference with so many smart people and not have to have some of the tired old discussions that I have at some ALA functions where I feel that I have to justify having a laptop or teaching an email class in a library setting. I also felt like a lot of the things people were talking about tended towards making things more usable — more findable, more explicable, more understandable — now that we’re over the love affair with just having gadgets. The trend towards openness, though we have a ways to go as a profession, makes me cautiously optimistic. I welcome this evolution and I’m impressed and honored to get to hobnob with people who are getting to make really Big Decisions in the library world.
That said, I gave my talk as part of the “Jenny and Jessamyn” show and it went well, even though it was short. I like to keep my high tech chops in order and as my Dad says “tell them something they don’t already know.” Unlike almost every other talk I’ve given, by the time I got to the B&B Andrea and I were staying at, there were already five or six ten blogs that had posted about my speech. It made my toes tingle. I could feel something really great, just around the corner. I came home with ideas and a renewed sense of purpose which I’m pretty sure is what these things are all about. Here are the links to people talking about my talk, go meta yourselves out.
- Andrea from Library Techtonics knows a lot about tagging and what she wrote reflects that
- When Liz Lawley calls your presentation funny and smart you know you are doing something right
- David King made notes from my notes. Based on his website name, I always assumed he was a big hippie, now I’m not so sure
- The Travelin Librarian Michael Sauers is good — better than me — at writing in bullet points
- Jenny blogged while I was talking [I think] Her list of presentations are here, amazing functionality
- The Librarian in Black also wrote up some nice prose-y summaries
- Steve from See Also was a blogger I got to meet at IL05, has a good looking blog with tags right in it. He was IMing with Michael Stephens while I was talking
- Library Web Chic puts my slides into words
- Brief BlogJunction mention
- The Fashionista Librarian has a lot of pix but the page gives me trouble on Safari, you’ve been warned.
reference IS cool
Get your Reference is Cool button from Salem Press. If you’d like, send them some visual verification.
Salem Press is inviting you to submit evidence that reference books, the people who use them, reference librarians and teachers are “cool.” We are using the expression ‘cool’ to mean ‘excellent’ or ‘first-class’ not the sense of the word that implies merely ‘acceptable’ or ‘satisfactory.’ It is permissible, but not required, that the person, action, thing or event be relaxed – cool. But not chilly, please.
meanwhile Cronin attack bloggers “all anonymous”?
More on the Blaise Cronin/blogger back and forth. Apparently the story of Cronin’s lambasting from the blogger community has taken on legs of its own and is quoted in this Christian Science Monitor article about anonymity.
when Blaise Cronin, dean of the School of Library and Information Science, posted an essay lamenting the lack of civility among writers of personal Web logs (blogs).
“He was viciously attacked by people [from] all over the world – all anonymous,” says Center director Alice Robbin. “These people would never have made these awful remarks if they had to show their faces or give their real names.”
She says being anonymous provides an emotional rush that shapes the content of what someone says, as evidenced in responses to Mr. Cronin.
“They were so thrilled, and it was associated with antiauthority,” she says. “They were taking it out on a dean.”
Google Print, the beginning of atomized texts?
Google Print starts the scanners up again this week. What does Michael Gorman have to say about it? Is this the sort of thing that ALA needs to have a stated opinion about? Does ALA need to “get in the game”? Should we even be at a point where we are still asking these questions?