Library Stuff

I would like to apologize to Michael Stephens for being a jealous jerk. Not to get too personal, but I haven’t been myself for a while and I thought I had my anxiety and depression under control. Far from it. I dealt with my personal issues by striking out against one of my closest friends and colleagues. Worse, I did so publicly. That was absolutely wrong. I’m sorry Michael.

Last night, it all came to a head. As I sat in my den, crying my eyes out for my actions, not knowing what to do, I realized that I took a current hot topic and spinned it out of control. Again, it was a way of denying what was really happening inside. This morning, an e-mail from a colleague (Thank You!) confirmed what I had been denying. Again, I broke down.

To everyone else that I have hurt with my words, I’m sorry. There are too many of you to name, and I don’t think that we need to get into that anyway. I would like to put my nonsensical, jealous, and unfathomable behavior behind me (I look back at some of my posts from the last few months and cringe). You don’t have to forgive me (it’s not easy to do when people take shots at you), and it may take some time before you can trust me again (fair enough – I deserve it), but I’m going to try to win back as must trust as possible.

I love this profession and everything it stands for, and I’m ashamed to call myself a librarian tonight. We not only help people, but we help each other. I was of no help to librarianship over the past few months. For that, I’m sorry.

Where do I go from here? I don’t know, but this is a first step. Say goodbye to Steven 1.0

I just found out that I will be in Seattle next week from Thurs => Saturday. More info when I get it. Any Seattle librarians want to hang?

+ Peter Scott mentions that Dialog now has a bunch of RSS feeds. Ah, but not for keywords, right?

+ A bunch of RSS Feeds from the Society of International Affairs. OPML enhanced!

+ Fidelity Investments has a new blogging tool for Real Estate agents. RSS’d and all. And free.

The Red Haired Librarian read my post on not defaulting to Google and commented on each point. She agreed with most of what I said, but had issues with two of them. She’s makes a good point about #6, but I’m not sure that librarians who are hip to social software are “fairly accomplished” at searching. I’m savvy about social software (even Walt thinks so – I received my own parentheses today!), but I still need to brush up on my skills all of the time and keep up with it. Learning search never ends. It’s a continuous process. But I can see where she was going with her comment.

Nicole Engard also took a look at the post and was “saddened” by what she read in the comments. What’s so funny is that my original post was not about Library 2.0 at all, but librarians’ searching skills. It just so happened that the search topic was Library 2.0, which really could have been about anything. It was not me that made it an issue…this time. Sigh.

Last, Chris Armstrong has a few thoughts on my quote from Gary Price on tagging.

Sheesh. What a busy link day.

The National Law Journal has launched a new design and features for their site:

“The site’s new home page now offers expanded content, including Web-only stories, daily updates and advance postings of stories scheduled for release in the following week’s print edition. An enhanced navigation bar and added links and tools allow users to scan, search and forward stories from any site page and an RSS feed is now available to alert users to site updates throughout the day.”

Lots of other new features as well…