Author: jessamyn

some systems librarian writing from webjunction, and me!

Posted on by jessamyn

WebJunction finally wore down my resistance. After several attempts to get paid work for them over the years failed, I wrote them an article for free. The good news is that they’re all incredibly nice, flexible on deadlines, and not heavy-pencil editors so my article is pretty much how I wrote it. It appears in their Focus on Systems Librarianship section [which is full of good reading by the way] and is called “Those Darned Users! how to serve your users without sacrificing safety, privacy, or your sanity.“

hi – 09sep

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi. Permalinking is now a bit more functional and obvious. Let me know if anything isn’t working like it should. I’ve added a few more dates to my sidebar calendar. I’m sending my registration today for the Dartmouth conference in October. I’ve also been invited to somehow give a talk at a New Librarians Symposium in Adelaide Australia in December. This will probably take place via some sort of teleconference, but maybe, just maybe, I can get some funding and go. If anyone has any creative ideas on how to raise funds for a plane ticket to Australia, please let me know.

Posted in hi

Borges bio review

Posted on by jessamyn

The Economist reviews a new Borges biography.

It is a challenge to write a biography of a man who did little more than read and think, whose myopia turned to blindness in middle age, who was an auto-didact whose only real job was as a librarian, and who lived with his mother and her housekeeper in a poky Buenos Aires flat until she died at 99, when he was 75. Shortly before that, he wrote gloomily: “My father’s library has been the chief event in my life…the truth is that I have never emerged from it.”