Library Stuff

…and Steve Brian Mathews over at The Ubiquitous Librarian is knocking me over with his ideas. Take a look at what he blogged today:

“Why don’t academic libraries provide a free document delivery system for all patrons? Many libraries offer this service to faculty or to distance learning students, but why not to all students?”

He links to a service by the Orange County Library System that mails books to patrons. For free! A total no brainer as far as I’m concerned. Libraries have always wanted to model Amazon.com (How many times have I have heard, “Why isn’t the library catalog like Amazon”?). Well, here’s an easy way to model Amazon, Netflix, and even pizza delivery!! To me, that is user-centered librarianship. Thanks Brian!

Updated – The Ubiquitous Librarian is Brian Mathews, not Steve Matthews – Steve Matthews is another blogger. Thanks Greg!

I’ve been in a bit of a funk over the past few days. I’m sure it will pass. It already has started to fade. That’s life. It happens. Every now and then I read something that encourages me to “defunk”. This time, it came from Never Eat Alone, one of my favorite non-library related blogs. The guest blogger today was one Dr. Mark Goulston. He writes about having the “best life possible::

“The essence of it is that you need to have a clear, precise, compelling and totally convincing vision of what your best life looks like. When you see it, commitment naturally follows. If commitment doesn’t follow, the vision wasn’t important enough.”

Wow! That’s a hard enough slap to wake anyone up, right? Thanks Dr. Goulston.

For those that prefer e-mail to aggregators for blog content delivery (or have users that prefer it this way), take a look at this breakdown by Robin Good.

Update – Correct link to Robin Good piece added – Thanks Hope.

Jessica Baumgart will be at SLA and is asking about a possible blogger gathering. I’ll be there from June 13th (around Noon) until June 14th (late) so both days are good for me. I’d love to have a few drinks with fellow colleagues. I’ll be presenting on June 14th with Hope Tillman on the 14th.

Oh, If you have an extra bed or wouldn’t mind me crashing on the floor of your room, let me know. I have to do this conference on the cheap. Very cheap. Drinks will be on me

I’m not sure if the fastest growing field in the blogging arena is PR (There’s more than 400 blogs on the PR list) or librarians (I haven’t checked the number lately on the librarian list, but it’s alot). I follow both closely. Here’s a bunch of new-to-me blogs that Aggie sent me today:

i love libraries: “I am doing this to learn a new technology, explore trends in the field, communicate in a new and exciting way.”

info pill – “Collection of RSS and weblog (blog) resources and links of interest to librarians, including other types of information when we go off-topic. We’re currently using this blog to communicate about our RSS workshop for library staff.”

Rochester Public Library – Reference Blog – Their home page currently has a poll for users on RSS. Nice.

St. Mary’s University Twin Cities Campus blog. They’re pushing the feed on their library web presence. Yay!

Have a new-to-me library blog? Send it my way (stevenmcohen [at] gmail.com) and I’ll mention it here.