Do you know someone who would look great gracing the pages of Library Journal for all the good library work they’ve been doing this year? Do they rock? Are you in awe of their librarian superpowers? If so, nominations are open for Movers & Shakers 2006. If you need to refresh your memory of who has already been selected, here are the winners for 2002 [there’s me!], 2003, 2004, 2005. Push the envelope and ask Library Journal if maybe we can submit nominations electronically this time. [thanks marylaine]
Dan Chudnov “more librarians need to be coders”
I’ve been meaning to link to some of Dan Chudnov’s essays for a while now. He’s a librarian programmer, or a programmer with an MLIS, who works on some pretty interesting tools. Unlike many other people who can codeswitch between high-tech and low-tech aspects of the profession, he hasn’t eschewed one for the other. In fact, he spends an awful lot of time trying to bridge the gaps that exist. His work log should be on everyone’s rss feed list. The latest entry is about library development, not fundraising, but coding. Dan codes, for a library. Dan thinks more of us should learn to code. I’ll let him tell it.
There seem to be two levels operating here of relevance to library types: First, you cannot afford to be slow, so whatever it takes to learn how to do things faster and better. Second, don’t be stupid about being faster and better – the means exist today to design scalable platforms on top of scalable platforms, and tools on top of tools. So you’d better know what you’re doing, and you’d better be good at it. Or, you’d better know whom to emulate and take every possible advantage of their good work when it can get you up your own curve.
This kind of message needs to be broadcast profession-wide – at the TLA meeting this past April several audience members challenged my assertion that “more of us need to be coders.” My response was, and remains, that in the aggregate, our profession is borderline incompetent w/r/to software development, and the more people we can get who understand this stuff, the more likely our chances of basic survival as an industry.
Paul Otlet and classification
Meet Paul Otlet, the forgotten forefather of information architecture and co-creator of the Mundaneum.
[Otlet] wanted to penetrate the boundaries of the books themselves, to unearth the “substance, sources and conclusions†inside. Taking the Dewey Decimal system as his starting point, Otlet began developing what came to be known as the Universal Decimal Classification, now widely recognized as the first—and one of the only—full implementations of a faceted classification system. While Ranganathan rightly receives credit as the philosophical forbear of facets, Otlet was the first to put them to practical use.
IPL turns ten
Happy tenth birthday Internet Public Library! I didn’t know when I started doing some online reference for them in my last year of library school that they were so new and that a lot of the things they were trying to do were really pretty cutting edge. I still go there today to find good links to author information, to get POTUS information or just to see if my list of the seven basic plots in literature is still there. I guess some of the admiration is mutual, since I just found this on their blogs page
It would be wrong of library students to drop out of their programs and simply read Vermonter Jessamyn West’s blog about creatively integrating techonology and a human-centered approach into library services. But it would be understandable. A great blog.
Google print, a card catalog for the future?
Why EFF thinks Google Print Library is going to win the lawsuit brought by the Author’s Guild. The AG in turn has their own talking points about the case. Read the longer copyright analysis of the Google Print project if you’re really curious.