Michael 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 …
There 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 …
Amateur 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).
I’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 …
December 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 …
I 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 …
Everyone working at or interested in libraries should read Top Ten Things to Stay Tech Current by Aaron Schmidt at Walking Paper.
This 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 …
A 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 …
I 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 …
The 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 …
According 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 …
If 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, …
I 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 …
My 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 …
I see some interesting wildlife outside my office window, but this one had me running for the camera!
I’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 …
Wow, 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 …
I 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 …
One of the many wonderful things about RSS feeds is that they are blissfully devoid of advertising. That may not be the case much longer. According to Wired News, “a new pilot program from FeedBurner embeds ads in the feeds of a number of the company’s content-publishing partners.” This is probably the begining of the …