Blog people… Sounds like creatures from a cheesy sci-fi movie you’d see on MST3K. 😉 I know this has been talked to death, but as a dues-paying member of the ALA, I wanted to offer my two cents on Michael Gorman’s opinion piece in Library Journal. I thought about writing last night, but I thought …
Yes, another new Google search tool (it seems like there’s been a new one every day over the past few months!). Google Blog reports that Google has come out with Google Movie “just in time for the Oscars.” It’s not a whole new search engine, but an operator that you can use to search for …
Sometimes we all need a little reminder why we got into the library field in the first place. When you hear about the lack of a librarian shortage, the low wages, the closing libraries, the bureaucracy that keeps change from happening, etc., it can all seem pretty discouraging. From the listservs I subscribe to, I’ve …
This month’s big library RFID news came when the Berkeley Public Library announced that it was spending $650,000 to place RFID tags on 550,000 library items. This is a library that has already exceeded its budget and has borrowed $500,000 from the city for the project: The library has slashed its books and materials budget …
Starting a blog can be indimidating. I remember when I first started, I’d considered it more of an exercise in writing commentary than something I was writing for an audience. That was mostly because I never thought anyone would actually read my blog, and I had no idea how to get people to read my …
In the LA Times yesterday, Bill Maher echoed the sentiments I expressed yesterday about what is going on in our country and how it is reflected in today’s high school students. Of course he’s way funnier than I am and somehow finds a way to make even serious concerns hilarious (and thus, more palatable). Take …
I was more than a little frightened when I saw the survey, sponsored by the James L. Knight Foundation, which found that 35% of the high school students surveyed thought the “First Amendment goes to far in the rights it guarantees.” The study also found that three-quarters of the students think that flag burning is …
The WikiBibliography pulls together articles and commentary on Wikis from a variety of areas. Most of the citations have links to the actual article, so it’s a great resource for those of you who are interested in what Wikis have to offer. It’s a really comprehensive webpage, and very useful if you can ignore the …
Thanks to digitizationblog, I just found an amazingly cool blog that I wanted to share with you. Digitization 101 is a blog created by Jill Hurst-Wahl for Hurst Associates. Hurst-Wahl writes some fantastic posts on just about every aspect of digitization (from the practical to the existential), including such topics as “finding digitization vendors”, “Digital …
I just found this very interesting website via TangognaT. John Kupersmith, a reference librarian at UC Berkeley has collected usability survey data from various libraries as well as the library terminology used on library websites to create Library Terms That Users Understand. In it, he suggests best practices for library website usability testing and the …
Ever since I started this blog, I’ve made a big effort to post regularly. Unfortunately, I slacked off last week. Well, I don’t know if packing, putting our junk into storage, and moving to the other side of the country is considered slacking, but I do feel badly about falling out of the loop and …
I was very excited to hear, via Research Buzz, that Firefox has been downloaded more than 25 million times! That’s fabulous! Hopefully we’ll see it replacing Internet Explorer more and more in libraries. Most of the library bloggers I know seem to use Firefox (or Safari), but I really haven’t seen it on library public …
The Linux Librarian has a great post on why open source and blogging are so great: This is why open source works. From my comments, from yesterday, from James Robertson: Hi, I’m the main BottomFeeder developer. What system are you trying the app on? What specific version did you try? Thanks This is why open …
Thank you Librarian Avengers for spelling out what most of us say to ourselves day after day as we navigate library websites and library catalogs: most library websites suck. In one of the classes I took for the MLS, we had to critique library websites, and we certainly found no lack of terrible websites to …
Michael Stephens and Aaron Schmidt (the Batman and Robin of the library blogging world) will be presenting The Library Blogosphere: Toward a Working Taxonomy at the Online Social Networks Conference, which is an amazingly affordable and accessible conference for busy (or unemployed) people. According to Michael, they’ll be discussing “what libraries and librarians are doing …
I know this article isn’t new, but it’s new to me and it may be new to you. Jon Udell wrote a concise and tremendously insightful article in InfoWorld entitled The network is the blog, in which he defines a blog in terms of the network it is connected to (the blogosphere). Like the “sound …
Feedmelegal is a blog all about RSS and blogging in the legal field. The author has a great list of links to tools for the growing world of RSS. Included are search feed creators, feed aggregators, feed creators for HTML sites, RSS to email tools, etc. All of this is meant to supplement his 16 …
I’ve applied and interviewed for jobs that I have not gotten. I’ve gotten used to rejection letters and all that. Usually I don’t get my hopes up, so it’s not so bad when I don’t get it. But for the job I interviewed for in the Chicagoland area two weeks ago, I did get my …
I’ve had many interviews, both in the social work and library fields. Some have gone great and some have been disasters. But the disasters haven’t always been mine. I’ve read plenty of books that talk about how to do well in an interview as an interviewee, but are there books for teaching people to be …
If 2004 was the year of the blog, I think 2005 will be the year of the Wiki. Wikis first came to my attention in 2003 in the form of the Wikipedia, which I thought was a fascinating and fabulous idea. What I didn’t know at the time was that Wikis have been around since …