OH!Libraries & Preach Baby, Preach
July 17th, 2005A colleague at a recent conference told me that he has a PubSub feed for the words libraries or librarian because the content that it brings back is perfect for what he wants. Searching for libraries over librarian displays what people are talking about when they discuss our libraries, not the professionals that work in them (most of the time). I told him that my PubSub query for our profession was for the term librarian (too many hits for the word library) as I was interested in what people were saying about the workers. Different strokes… We compared results and I was convinced to edit my query to include the word libraries as well as librarian. Boy, have I been missing out.
Case in point. This morning my new subscription sent me a post from OH!Libraries, a blog that I had never seen before, (it highlights Ohio library services and is maintained by the staff of the Ohio Public Library Information Network) on their One Book Project. George Needham (of It’s All Good) was there to kick off the event.
Don Yarman, the Interim Executive Director of OPLN blogged the following:
“I love events like this. I love it when libraries come together to imagine their grand futures and the immediate steps they can take to get there. Mark Mabelitini of Westerville Public Library noted that George was preaching to the choir — ‘We should all be wearing robes,’ he said — but don’t we all enjoy a really good choir performing at its best?”
This goes back to what I was saying last week in response to Steven Bell’s commentary on Barack Obama. We go to library events like this to celebrate our profession, show off our accomplishments, and see colleagues. Surely, this event in Ohio was a celebration, not a place for a “mind challenge” (I’m loosely using Bell’s phrase here). Leave the controversy talk for other places (E-lists are perfect for this stuff) and let us celebrate our profession with people who want to conduct, preach, and ally themselves with the choir.