hi – 23nov

Hi. I’m away for the holidays visiting familly in Massachusetts. I’m having lunch today with one of my favorite local librarians who is leaving her job. I’ve been working on a 3500 word essay for CounterPoise about the digital divide, so I’ve been scarce around here but I have been sneaking peeks at the Librarian Trading Cards pool as it grows over at Flickr. Fun, and not just the usual library blogger suspects. Invite your friends and librarians

my talk at UAZ SIRLS

I’m back from Tucson/Phoenix. I had a great time getting to spend the day with the students and faculty of the University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science. I gave a variant of my digital divide talk The Information Poor & the Information Don’t Care Small Libraries and the Digital Divide (the notes look the same but all the talks are really really different). While I was in Arizona I also got to see the downtown branch of the Phoenix Public Library, the North Valley Regional Library (my first big suburban library!) and the Tucson Pima Public Library. I also did a quick walk around the University of Arizona library but got quickly distracted by the amazing art exhibit Reading Our Remains (waxed and sliced books, fascinating) and didn’t take a lot of other pictures.

hi – 06nov

Hi. I’ve been reading Jakob Nielsen’s Homepage Usability book and have made some modifications to my sidebar to make some of my stuff a little more findable. Any of you rss readers who wants to remind themselves about the lovely orangeness of my home page, here’s a link: librarian.net. My to do list includes getting some solid archive links up, and getting my tag cloud visible. The current incarnation of the tag cloud just shows my top ten tags which, while interesting, doesn’t tell the whole story.

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.