Author: jessamyn

Contest – help me with a guest blogger spot (closed)

Posted on by jessamyn

No, not here. For the last tumultuous month I have been a guest blogger over at Freegovinfo.info, that great site dedicated to maintaining and preserving free access to government information. I’ll be the guest there this month as well. I’ve made a few posts that I’m really proud of, about ALA resolutions, food recovery, identity document policy and, of course, the EPA library debacle. However, the area of government information, while very interesting to me, is not my specialty. Also, I am cleaning my room, like really cleaning it.

The way these two things are connected is like this: I am getting rid of some of the accumulated librarian schwag I have gotten over the past year. You can see the annotated schwag here. I would like some suggestions for good things to write about on FreeGovInfo as I am looking in my own usual places. I know that people around here are generally friendly and helpful anyhow, but I thought a few Read rings might sweeten the pot… or not. In any case, leave a comment with your suggestions — doesn’t have to be overtly political but should have some relevance to freegovinfo’s mission, needs to be about government information, not just goverment or just information — and I’ll pick a winner over the next few days. Winner gets mailed all that great schwag (I’ll email you for your mailing address) and gets a link to their blog/site/whatever in any post I eventually write. I may use more than one topic, but I’ll pick one winner just to not be mushy and equivocal.

Thanks for helping, and say hi to the FreeGovInfo people, they run a great site.

Open Access to Ranganathan

Posted on by jessamyn

I know, I know, I’m like a Ranganathan fangirl. “The library is a growing organism! blah blah blah” But this is Ranganathan news that is current! And cool! The Digital Library of Information Science & Technology Classics Project has gotten permission from the Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science to provide open access to many of Ranganathan’s works. There is some preliminary material scanned from the Five Laws of Library Science available already.

asking the right questions, when to be simple, when to be complex

Posted on by jessamyn

Dan Chudnov has a blog called One Big Library where he talks about the programmming and social issues invovled in helping people build their own libraries, or making library data so that it’s accessible and usable and repurposable by others, or rather everyone else. I like the site because while some of it verges into the “blah blah programming blah blah” realm, he is always thinking about the human side of why our systems work and don’t work. This post about building simple systems and why that’s so darned complicated really helps me get my head around some of the technology hurdles we as a profession are facing in the age of interoperability and openness, assuming we’re even interested in moving in that direction.

If you’re a librarian like me and you take this example and turn it toward your own work to help people build their own libraries, it hits you… it is not simple to build a library of one’s own. And if you’re a librarian like me, you have a ready list of why not:

  • Metadata is complicated
  • People in libraries don’t all use the same items the same way
  • Maybe 20% of the collection is responsible for 80% of the use but that other 80% includes some really important stuff
  • Attempts to use new tools works great for new data but can be exceedingly hard for old stuff. Like, anything predating 1960. Which we have a *lot* of, and which is often *really* important.
  • Did I mention metadata being complicated?

Our Work and How We Do It

Posted on by jessamyn

Rural Library Director's jobs

I went to teach a class in Internet Safety at the Ainsworth Public Library in Williamstown. While I was there, the librarian showed me her chart of all the jobs she does. She sometimes has to go back and forth with her Board of Trustees because they think certain things are her job that aren’t, or they don’t want her to do certain things that really should be part of her job. This is her outline. Every separate color is a different set of responsibilities. You may have to blow it up sort of largeish to read it. This librarian works about 20 hours a week.