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Archive for November, 2004
« Previous EntriesJury duty
Tuesday, November 30th, 2004I’ve got jury duty tomorrow (and hopefully ONLY tomorrow), so I may not have time to post anything. I would really like to be on a jury as I never have been before, but I’m a bit nervous because I have a job interview on Friday that I can’t afford to miss. I’ll let you [...]
Shelter from the storm?
Tuesday, November 30th, 2004Michael McGrorty has an eloquent article about the homeless and public libraries in his blog today. This is a really tough subject in public libraries. As librarians, we really don’t want to restrict access to anyone, but at the same time, we also don’t want to discourage many people from coming to the library because [...]
Recent articles on blogging (some great, some not so great)
Tuesday, November 30th, 2004There have been a number of recently published or written scholarly articles on blogging. Communications of the ACM has devoted most of their December 2004 anniversary issue to articles about The Blogosphere. I read the articles for free (one of the benefits of still being a University student) and didn’t really find anything in them [...]
Citizen journalism meets the wiki phenomenon
Monday, November 29th, 2004Amateur journalists take note: according to Wired, the makers of Wikipedia have now created Wikinews, which allows anyone to write and edit news articles (subject to a similar review process to that of the Wikipedia, of course).
Tech vs. Traditional in Library School and Libraries
Monday, November 29th, 2004I’m probably grossly oversimplifying this, but I think there are two types of librarians: those who embrace technology and those who are antagonistic towards it or ignore it. I have seen this in my work at a public library and, surprisingly to me, at library school. I have been amazed that many people in my [...]
Great American History bibliography
Sunday, November 28th, 2004December 2004′s American Heritage magazine features America Unabridged: The Definitive Guide to the Greatest Books About Our Past. This annotated bibliography covers a wide variety of topics and all of the time periods in American History, with materials chosen by many well-known historians. It includes not only books, but movies, photographs, and other works of [...]
What about open source in libraries?
Sunday, November 28th, 2004I couldn’t agree more with what Aaron Schmidt wrote about in his Ten Things to Stay Tech Current, but I think he should add a number eleven to his list: learn everything you can about open source and use OSS in your library. I really don’t understand why more libraries haven’t explored the world of [...]
Commonsense tech advice for libraries
Saturday, November 27th, 2004Everyone working at or interested in libraries should read Top Ten Things to Stay Tech Current by Aaron Schmidt at Walking Paper.
Paraprofessional jobs?
Saturday, November 27th, 2004This month’s LIScareer.com has an article about taking a paraprofessional job once you have your MLS. This is something I’ve certainly been thinking about now that I’m 2 weeks away from graduation and have seen what the job market looks like for an entry-level professional librarian. While Robert Newlen and Teri Switzer make good points [...]
Freevo is looking better and better
Saturday, November 27th, 2004A couple of months ago, I was impressed by how well TiVo was courting consumers by lowering their price and marketing to busy people rather than to couch potatoes. But my opinion has changed greatly now that TiVo is going to allow pop-up ads while users are fast-forwarding through commercials. This makes TiVo look like [...]
A-List Weblogs
Saturday, November 27th, 2004I recently read an interesting article for my Information Retrieval course about Power Laws and Weblogs, which I found very interesting in light of my recent forrays into blogging. The author states that blogs follow the same power laws that affect most social and economic systems. “A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free [...]
RSS and the death of print newspapers
Saturday, November 27th, 2004The Washington Post, in a series of focus groups, discovered that young people are far less likely to subscribe to newspapers than people 35 and over. Frankly, that wasn’t a great big surprise to me or most other people living on planet Earth. What was slightly more surprising is that many of them said they [...]
Counting and counting and counting
Saturday, November 27th, 2004According to Wired, the GAO is going to investigate how the vote was counted and during the election, particularly in hotly contested states like Ohio and Florida. This comes on the heels of many discoveries across the country of machines that were “incorrectly programmed” to give the advantage to Bush, and other irregularities. This is [...]
Google scholar buzz, consolidated
Wednesday, November 24th, 2004If you want to read as much as you can about Google Scholar all in one place, there is now a blog devoted entirely to the subject. It’s interesting to see the mix of opinions; that it’s the death knell for libraries, that it is the greatest invention since sliced bread, that it’s the anti-christ, [...]
The great librarian shortage debate
Wednesday, November 24th, 2004I came across this article in the Ocala Star-Banner, courtesy of a link from LISNews.com. It states that in Ocala, a city north of Orlando and about 3 hours north of my own home, there are lots of professional library jobs open, but no one to fill them. The article says “the county’s public libraries [...]
Ah but California…
Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004My hubby and I got married in the Napa Valley about 4 months ago and spent our honeymoon travelling around the CA coast. My dream is to live out there, but hubby says it’s unrealistic (considering housing costs, distance from our families, and all that). Sometimes I even start thinking that maybe I’m just romanticizing [...]
would you like cream cheese with that?
Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004I see some interesting wildlife outside my office window, but this one had me running for the camera!
Visionary libraries
Sunday, November 21st, 2004I’ve been applying for jobs since late September as I’ll be graduating in just a couple of weeks with my MLS (or whatever my school calls it). I’m not the sort of person who is dead-set on working in a specific type of library. If anything, the type of library I want to work in [...]
Google Scholar Buzz
Saturday, November 20th, 2004Wow, Google must be thrilled by all the free press and panic they’re getting from librarians with their brand new offering, Google Scholar. I’d put in my two cents, but I really don’t have much to add when it’s been covered by just about every blog I read. Instead, enjoy some insights on Google’s new [...]
PSA
Thursday, November 18th, 2004I just wanted to encourage everyone to watch series of lectures on C-SPAN organized by the Library of Congress entitled The Digital Future. There are some great people who are going to speak (Lawrence Lessig, David Weinberger, MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld, etc.). If you miss them on TV, you can access the video feed from C-SPAN’s [...]
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