So I've been doing some research recently for a chapter I'm contributing to an upcoming book (working title right now, I'll update when the title is confirmed) on the future of libraries, to be published by Scarecrow Press in early 2004. The section I'm contributing to is on libraries and the web and my chapter will deal with web-based paid services like Google Answers and Yahoo! Advice and their impact on traditional library reference and online ask-a services. I'm still in the lit review/reading stage of the whole thing but I anticipate my chapter to be fairly chatty, given that I hope to talk to librarians about their experiences/opinions. If you have an opinion or any experience on the topic, I'd love to hear from you.

Good news: the Freedom to Read Protection Act has gained the support of 58 members of Congress so far.

Independant booksellers are purging their databases in response to the Patriot Act. Go independant booksellers! Whereas, it appears that the bookselling big guns are wimping out on taking a stand.

Queen's University Library has invited submissions for the "creative redesign" of their website. All details are in this file.

Rory has put together a new petition, this time to get the word out that librarians want this war to stop.

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published Monday, March 31, 2003  @ 16:09 | |

I am collecting and archiving images of peace/anti-war ephemera (leaflets, posters, displays, etc.) from the campus I work at and I'd love submissions from other campuses as well. More details are here.

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published Tuesday, March 25, 2003  @ 23:25 | |

National Library Legislative Day is a day when librarians are invited to DC to address their senator or representative on issues and legislation that impacts libraries. Sounds like a great venue to raise some important questions and engage in meaningful dialogue on some of the stuff we're always talking about. It's a shame that last year only 450 librarians participated.

Those anti-war virtual sit-ins aren't bringing any servers crashing, but they are being noticed. It's good to have people speak out, regardless of how they choose to do it, although I will admit that I favour an actual sit-in or protest over a virtual one. I'm not sure why other than the fact that it seems so much more impactful to have a collection of likeminded individuals make the effort to come together to have their voices heard. As opposed to them individually logging on to a website and running a script.

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published Monday, March 24, 2003  @ 15:36 | |

A copy of the Bill of Rights that has been missing for 138 years has been recovered. Maybe now they'll read it.

The 4th Annual Anarchist Bookfair in Montreal is scheduled for May 17, 2003. I prefer to call it the Salon du Livre Anarchiste.

Wondering who the movers and shakers of the library world are? Library Journal makes it all clear (scroll down to the very end of the ToC for links to each mover and shaker article).

Another new library that begs the question "but, where are the books?". Don't call it a library, it's actually "an idea store" [thanks all].

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published Thursday, March 20, 2003  @ 12:26 | |

National Library Week is April 6th to 12th and ALA has some new promo stuff online for the occasion.

ALA's new website launches in April and a preview of what we're in for is here.

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published Friday, March 14, 2003  @ 10:51 | |

This symposium sounds decent (the blurb is about half way down the page), but it is being marketed on listservs everywhere as a response to "a national shortage of academic librarians that threatens to become a crisis before long." These librarian shortage pleas are really starting to piss me off.

Many have been encouraging the Sault Ste Marie library to take the filtering issue more seriously. And here again, the misguided collection development argument:

A special edition at LII this week: resources on the Patriot Act and its impact on libraries/library users.

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published Thursday, March 13, 2003  @ 12:28 | |

That RSS feed for library blogs I mentioned has been unveiled. Obviously lots of work went into it (thanks Steven), it's very much a one-stop-shop now. I considered changing my feed from full to short descriptions for the occasion, but I don't quite like what Blogger does with short descriptions (namely: strips formatting, truncates after 255 characters, and provides no indication when the post is actually longer than 255 characters, which can make some entries altogether incomprehensible).

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published Sunday, March 09, 2003  @ 01:10 | |

Rory was bored at library school. I will admit that when I first got to library school, I was a little culture-shocked. Reality was turning out to be very different from expectations and since I had been forewarned that library school was difficult and intense, I too found myself asking, during my first months there, when does the difficult stuff start? This doesn't feel like graduate school, I've been to graduate school and this is nothing like it. And then towards the end of my first semester, I had a conversation with a sage classmate who reminded me that a library school degree is nothing like an academic graduate degree so expecting the same level of theory and research was going to result in me being very disappointed with the library school experience. And she was right. And I'm glad I had that conversation with that sage friend when I did, because if I didn't, library school would have been a lot more frustrating and unrewarding than it actually turned out to be. That said, Rory has another way to make library school more interesting and intellectually-stimulating: these research topics. And they're all good topics too.

I've been trying to compile a list of online library instruction resources for a while, but to limited avail. Particularly, I've only found one current instruction blog and it's actually a blog for a teaching centre at UNBC, and not a library instruction blog at all. And this one at WIU stopped being updated in June 2002 and besides that, I can't even tell if it used to be administered by library staff or a WIU student (mangled URL). So, all that said, I'm asking for links to library instruction resources online if you have any, and would love to see some blogs (or at least one?) on the list. Thanks folks. (P.S.: I know all about libraryinstruction.com and LOEX).

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published Friday, March 07, 2003  @ 12:27 | |

United States vs. ALA, at the Supreme Court, as we speak. I had to do a double take when I read this Slate article about the case and the manner in which Solicitor General, Ted Olson, is arguing the case. To wit:

More accurately:


and easily one of the most painfully deluded sentiments discussed in the article, and a particular favourite of mine:


Awfully keen of Olson to pull out the print censorship card, and while his argument probably seems convincing to some (sadly), the larger issues (and smaller ones) that are at stake here are being glazed right over: that the filters themselves are a long way from being accurate (and therefore useful), and that collection philosophy is more about preventing censorship than implementing our very own breed of it. Or is it naive of me to still believe that last one?

Addendum: And, playing on Olson's collection policy argument, since when does funding to my library hinge upon whether or not I choose to buy (or not buy) a particular book or journal? This is another of the larger issues that is not being addressed.

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published Thursday, March 06, 2003  @ 14:40 | |

New article on LISCareers: "From Baby Librarian to Tenured Faculty: Strategizing for Success."

Hints of a Privacy Bill in response to the Patriot Act are circulating:

Picking up on the original library's mandate, Bibliolteca Alexandrina hopes to build (or at least link to) the largest digital archive of books in the world.

If you haven't seen Nina Katchadourian's book stacks, you should. Katchadourian visits libraries, arranges the books on certain shelves so that the words on the books' spines reveal a narrative. Examples here, here and here. [via Caterina]

Have a look at this right-wing dreck.

And this is probably more of a reminder to self than anything else: registration for WILU opens today.

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published Tuesday, March 04, 2003  @ 14:28 | |

That was quite a week. That brown bag lunch session I had to give that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago was on Friday, so much of my week was spent preparing for that. Once I got up there and started talking about all those great online resources and utilities, I was fine, but preparing for the session was a bitch. I'm not good with on-the-fly presentations, so practice is what I do (to my husband, cats, colleagues, anyone). But with this type of session, there could not possibly have been a script so I went into it feeling very uncomfortable at what seemed to be insufficient preparation. But it went well, and everyone loved it, and I basked in reflected glory for a few minutes after (since the real glory rightly belongs to the folks who dreamed up and created these utilities). Anyway, I'm back.

Steven, the lauder of all things RSS, is working on a feed for library blogs.

Fire at Biblioteca Alexandrina.

Apparently in Alabama "a college library, more and more, is not just a fancy book warehouse". Good emphasis on information literacy and instruction in this one. We were told all about the importance of instruction when I was at library school, but I had no idea that such a large percentage of my job would be instruction related. And I'm loving it.

Headline that sounded good at the time but turned out to be a bad idea in print: "Town to Vote if Librarian is Smart Idea".

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published Monday, March 03, 2003  @ 09:40 | |