Library Stuff

When I first heard about Michael Casey’s LibraryCrunch and the term he coined, I was a bit…confused. The domain was an obvious spin off of TechCrunch, and the coined term and obvious spin off of Web 2.0. At that time, my mind was basically in the gutter professionaly and I didn’t take a good look at what he was trying to accomplish. Slowly, I’ve come to the conclusion that Michael Casey is going to go down as a legend in the profession, moving it forward to boundaries unseen before.

Move 7 months ahead to last week after the gang at O’Reilly made their “clusterfsck”. With the apparent prodding of Walt Crawford, although I assume that Michael would have done this anyway (I really don’t know – just an assumption), he announced:

“I have always considered the term “Library 2.0”, used alone or in combinations such as “Library 2.0 Conference”, to be in the public domain, usable by anyone, and not subject to trademark or service mark registration.”

This should not be taken by us as a pragmatic offering. This statement sets librarianship apart from many other professions. O’Reilly called their lawyers first and Casey acted first out of the sheer goodness of moving his cause forward. What an amazing thing to do. It’s non-corporate thinking, eerily collaborating with the Enron folk being charged guilty by a jury of their peers. It was the right move and I have the utmost respect for Michael Casey and the charge of our colleagues to move to the next generation of librarianship.

I have never publicly apologized to Michael Casey for any problems that I may have caused with my terrible rants about something that I truly didn’t understand and research first. Michael, you should know that my past statements of your theories do not reflect my true passion and love for librarianship (Take a look at the 6 year archives of my blog). I hope to meet you one day (It seems our paths will inevitably cross at Internet Librarian) and toast your accomplishments over a bottle of Pinot Noir.

Thank you Michael Casey.

OK, here we go:

+ I learned from BlogJunction that the Executive Director, Marilyn Mason has a blog. Very cool!

+ @ the library – “News and resources from Albertsons Library, located on the Boise State University Campus.” – And linked to from the Library site (very important)

+ Tales of a Librarian

+ The Scrolling Stone – “computers, Libraries and Life in General.”

All of these will be placed on the Librarian List next week. Keep sending in your library blogs.

Browster
Originally uploaded by stevenmcohen.

I read about Browster on Cnet and was intrigued. One minute later and I was thrilled! You see, most of my reading work is done via Aggie (my lovely and overworked aggregator) and if I read a summary post and click through, that takes time. Remember that I now have over 700 feeds in Aggie (I told you, she works hard)

My informercial presentation on “Keeping Current in 40 minutes or less, Guaranteed!”, may actually become “Keeping Current in 30 minutes or less, Guaranteed!” because of Browster. It saves loads of click time. Here’s how.

When reading my aggregator, I hate to move away from it, unless I really have to. With Browster, I “mouse over” a link, find a little box right above the mouse arrow and a new “browser” opens with the full text of the post (in fact, it’s the actual site). No clicking! I can then read the story and, if I’m interested, I can make this “browser” into a real browser and move on. If I’m not interested, I just move it off that new window and it disappears. This is truly an amazing little tool and very free!

My one complaint is that it doesn’t work for Maxthon. It should because Maxthon is just an IE skin. But sadly, it doesn’t. Still, this is one of my favorite downloads and tools for this year. Go go gadget Browster!

Edward Champion (who writes one of my favorite Litblogs) says:

“It is a fundamental truth that librarians are among the sexiest people on the planet.”

Warning (I really hate doing this): If you offend easily, don’t continue reading his post.

“gen” on InfoPill writes:

“I’ll stick to PubSub. Just wish I could use a matching engine on a specific feed with PubSub… hmm?”

I couldn’t find an e-mail address to contact them and they only allow comments from members of their blog, so this was the only way I could respond:

If you want to filter out a specific feed with PubSub, use our source: syntax.

With resourceshelf.com, just do this:

keyword AND source:resourceshelf.com

So, if you wanted to be notified whenever Gary blogged about RFID, you would put:

RFID AND source:resourceshelf.com