Library Stuff

I have an “ego feed” on PubSub and Feedster set up for my name (all the different spellings of it). Today, my aggie pulled in this:

“It made me recall my idea for a film, a hybrid between ‘Looking for Chan,’ ‘Honk if you love Buddha,’ and ‘The Sweetest Sound’ I call it ‘Looking for Steve Cohen.’ I my proposed film, I go cross country and look for Steve and Stephen and Stefan Cohens around the USA and ask them if they feel like Steve or Stephens and Cohens, old young, white, Jewish, half Jewish, brown, asian, farmers, lawyers, celebs, etc.”

Laura Blalock chimes in with her thoughts on the article on libraries and weblogs:

“Where a blog works best (for librarians) is for dissemination of information, a traditional library service. It can be as simple as posting your monthly newsletter on the web for easily accessable back issues or as time-consuming as a daily updated journal of the latest news on a particular topic. The true draw of blogging systems is how easy they are to use to make updates to a website. You fill in a form and click “Submit” and the software does the rest of the work for you.”

Bingo! Thanks Laura.

An article entitled, “Weblogs: Do they belong in libraries?” tried to answer the question that has been asked of me many times throughout the past few years. While the author skirmishes around the question a bit and discusses some of the library weblogs that she has found, she does come to a valid and positive conclusion about weblogs in libraries:

“I think the late Douglas Adams would have approved of weblogs. The snowflake/blizzard analogy may refer to something completely different, but it does seem to encapsulate their very essence, i.e. something which starts life small, but which gradually ‘snowballs’ into something bigger as more people contribute comments, ideas, news, etc. Above all weblogs can, and should be, fun – which is perhaps why they appeal to children and are being used by children’s librarians.”

A comment. If I read one more article that includes sentences similar to “A search on Google (using the search terms ‘library weblog’) returned 544,000 hits on 21 June 2004…”, I’ll scream very loud (and since I do most of my online reading after Hallie goes to bed, her waking up is not a good thing, not to mention my wife’s reaction). Even though the author immediately writes, “…this is not indicative of widespread use of weblogs by libraries for user-related activities”, I still felt the need to flinch. Librarians shouldn’t be writing stuff like this, plain and simple. It only exaggerates the notion that Google is the “be all to end all” of the web search world. She was looking for library weblogs and could have used much better tools for her query. Why no mention of Syndic8 , NewsIsFree, or even Feedster? We have to get past the “Google this, Google that” scenarios that plague not only the general public, but librarians as well. This is not to say that librarians shouldn’t use Google. It is a good engine for some types of searches, but definitely not for finding library weblogs. Oh, a quick check at The ODP would have revealed better results as well.

Peter Morville, a regular at library conferences, started a del.icio.us account today. Of course, there is an RSS Feed. His seems to be in reverse alphabetical order. Must be inputing from his bookmarks. I’ve always wondered what certain people have saved in their bookmarks. Now they can share them. That’s the neat thing about del.icio.us. Here’s to social networking/bookmarking and collaboration.

I can’t even begin to explain how useful this would be at work. I don’t know the slightest thing about perl (I’m not a programmer) nor setting up such a script to run on my server, but it sure would be neat to have available. Too bad the USPTO hasn’t set up an RSS Feed for their patent/trademark stuff. That would make it a heck of a lot easier. (link via PubSub)