Library Stuff

Congrats to Tim Spalding on the Abebooks deal. Huzzahhhhhhhhh!

The Centered Librarian blogs about a new library marketing blog. We need more of these! I do a lot of WOM marketing for PubSub and I plan to learn alot from this one.

The “M” Word, from Nancy Dowd:

“I’ve started this blog because as a marketer for the NJ State Library, I am always coming across interesting articles, new concepts and great ideas that I think anyone trying to market their library might be interested in having a chance to read. Plus I wanted to create a forum where we could all start to share our ideas and thoughts and help each other to find answers to problems we are encountering in journey to tell the public about our libraries.”

Also, don’t forget about Thinking Outside the Book from Jill Stover and LibTalk Blog from Candi Clevenger

Mary Carmen Chimato and Darren Chase, librarians working at the Health Sciences Library at Stony Brook University (my alma mater and a mere 10 minutes from my house) have started a blog. Very cool!

Gary Price
Originally uploaded by ASIS&T@Simmons.

For some reason, I love this picture of my good friend Gary Price. It’s been a while since I last mentioned his name on here so…

well…

Gary Price!

Update – Blake wants to play “caption this picture” in the comments. A couple of funny ones in there already. This is all in fun, so please play nice.

New to me blog called PiscesLibrariana:

“experiments in the digital representation of one librarians professional development”

Check out what Dave Winer is working on:

“The next development project is a connection between NewsRiver and the Share Your OPML community server. I’ve written code that allows you to set up NewsRiver to automatically ping SYO when your subscriptions change”

This is exactly how I want the Community Lists to run. The editor has a web-based OPML file and whenever it gets updated, it pings the specific associated list. Automatic update. Seemless, flawless, and easy. Just the way RSS and OPML was meant to be. Ah the future…

I just uploaded my recent OPML and I’m currently number 46 on the most prolific subscribers. Yowsa! I AM an RSS Bigot!

Tim and Abby over at Library Thing have gone live with a new blog, called Thing-ology:

“The main LibraryThing blog will continue to focus on features and announcements and exciting new things like that, and over here we’ll get to go deeper into some of the bigger and more theoretical issues that LibraryThing raises.”

“So. This is the place where we’ll talk about the meanings, methods, and debate around LibraryThing and its features. I expect there to be discussion of Web 2.0, Library 2.0, social software, FRBR and LT’s “works” system, folksonomies and taxonomies, and much much more. Information Science! Philosophy! Controversy! To the library world and beyond, people!”

Suweeeeet! I think we should give Tim Spalding an honorary library degree. I spoke to Tim on the phone a week ago and we had a long engaging talk about the topics that this new blog will discuss. Great stuff.

Here’s an interesting new blog that I just came across. Blog about Libraries:

“Having read blogs about libraries for some time, I am tired of just making comments and have decided it’s time to be a poster.”

This is pretty slick. Tagground allows you to plop in a URL and you can see how it has been tagged by a few tagging services (they’re working on getting it to work in others). You can also find out which URLs have been tagged with certain keywords (not as fun, but still somewhat useful). Wanna see how others see you? Throw in your blog URL.

Michael McGrorty is, hands down, one of my top 5 favorite librarian writers. Take a look at his latest blog post:

“What will remain, no matter what, is that the library will be a repository of literatures, of recorded culture, in many forms, a universal archive and an instant link to the new and indeed, to the future. Within that, the librarian will be nothing, unless she is an interpreter. That will require the ability to understand information, history, fiction, music, drama—every form of intellectual transmission—in its broad sense, and in many instances, in its finer details, particularly in its local and contemporary dimensions.”

“The librarian must return to the role of explicator: not to pass judgment; certainly not to condemn, but to place things in context, if she can. We need not return to the days of “good” and “bad” books, but to a time when a librarian made earnest attempts to understand literature in the broad sense—and was ever in pursuit of the impossible goal of trying to absorb its totality. A career of that makes for a glorious failure indeed.”

Amazing. Spend two minutes with Michael at the next ALA conference and you will not only feel, but be,smarter. As an correlated aside, congrats to ALA for dedicating yet another “American Libraries” to the importance of reading and literature.