Blogosphere welcome wagon

For almost a month I’ve been meaning to write about three great new blogs that came on the scene fairly recently, but the post somehow got lost in the suffle of life.

Library Garden – I’m really excited to see the growth of collaborative blogs. Not that I don’t like following 155 things in Bloglines, but I think it’s neat to watch a diverse group of people work over the issues that face libraries in a single space. Library Garden is particularly unique because the bloggers come from such different areas in the field — public, academic, consortial, state, youth, LIS. They’re all from NJ though (go garden state! — I’m from there too, BTW). They’re writing a lot about service philosophy, knowing your patrons, going where your patrons are, assessing the effectiveness of your services and the needs of your patrons, etc. It’s very “L2” without ever actually mentioning the term.

David’s Random Stuff – I was very psyched to meet David Free at Computers in Libraries this year. He’s does the Listen Up! podcasts at Georgia Perimeter College and is really passionate about implementing social software in libraries. He finally bowed to peer pressure and started a blog where he discusses his experiences using a variety of social software apps at his library. Welcome to the blogosphere, David!

There is only one person within the executive structure of ALA whom I’ve had any contact with. She is also the only person who has given me any hope that ALA can get better. Mary Ghikas, the Senior Associate Executive Director at ALA, has a real passion for our field and for making sure the ALA represents the interests of all of its members. She works tirelessly to make the organization better and is really open to new ideas from crazy people like me, Jenny Levine and Michael Stephens. In the interest of making ALA more transparent… more human, Mary has started a blog. And it has a terrific name, The Green Kangaroo, after a book by one of my favorite authors, Judy Blume. Keep up the great work, Mary!

I also wanted to welcome the 50 fabulous people taking part in the Library 2.0 Innovation Bootcamp. For those of you who don’t know, Michael Stephens and Jenny Levine are offering a course through ALA on the future of libraries for fifty lucky people from all sorts of different library settings. The course consists of a distributed learning network of blogs (a main blog and one for each participant to reflect on what they’re learning), podcasts, chats, and OPML reading lists. Jenny and Michael also created a cool reading list for L2 using Squidoo (something I’ve been meaning to play with forever) and also created an OPML file of blogs they want the participants to follow during the course. I’m thrilled to be one of the blogs they’re following during and I am following the participants’ blogs as well. I threw them all onto a Netvibes page so I can keep up with what they’re discussing. As a Distance Learning Librarian, I am really interested in seeing how this model for teaching online courses works out. It seems like a terrific idea.

Welcome to the blogosphere y’all!