explodedlibrary.info

library koan to ponder: subversive gatekeepers

I've tried to stay out of some of the debates which librarians have been having about Wikipedia. But this post by Karen G. Schneider is an excellent statement about why even tech-savvy librarians have concerns about Wikipedia. I don't share all of Karen's opinions about Wikipedia, but after feeling somewhat on the defensive about the value of blogging for the past week or so, it is nice to be able to point to some good posts and say, "this is why blogging is relevant and deserves its place amongst the other communications media."

What really caught my attention was that Karen's discussion also touched on the librarians as gatekeepers issue. This has also been in the back of my mind lately. I wanted to explore this issue in my previous post, but decided that this would be opening a huge can of worms which would distract attention from the main point of that post.

I don't feel up to studying this issue (or the Wikipedia issue) more deeply tonight. I just wanted to make a note of Karen's contribution for when/if I do return to this in the future.

linkily returning to a Meta Monday

I first started blogging by linking to interesting things which I'd read. I usually just linked, and provided very little commentary of my own. There's nothing wrong with this sort of blogging, especially you have a gift for drawing together very eclectic sources (which I didn't) and you aren't too opinionated (and I realize that I am too opinionated). For a while I  preserved this metablogging style on my Meta Mondays, when I mainly provided just links with minimal commentary.

For some strange reason I feel like doing one of these tonight.

Michelle Goldberg, Salon, In theology they trust
This makes me feel relieved to be an Australian, but even so, this is scary stuff.

If you're too lazy to get the Salon day pass, at least read this Washington Post article which the above one references. Will it take a judge to be killed via a US religious right fatwa for people to wake up to what's going on here?

On to something completely different, Ernie muses about the sometimes awkward and disconcerting phemonemon of meeting people who know so much about him because of his blogging, and he knows nothing about them. Talk about being at a disadvantage...

I'm still exhausted from my last job search, and don't even want to think about job interviewing for the time being, but Meredith has some very interesting advice for job interviewers. Some of this information would also be helpful to interviewees, to help understand the process.

counter-point on networking

In my last post about job-seeking methods, I wrote that is possible to conduct a successful job search without relying on networking. I want to make it clear that  although I've really had much luck with networking myself, that doesn't mean that it doesn't work. As a counter-point, I'm posting this example of how networking can work. I like it because the example is low-key and realistic, but still successful. [thanks to Fran M for posting this on the aliaNEWGRAD list]

now that I have your attention for maybe 90 seconds

Here's a very interesting post in How to Save the World about the growth in blog creation and the even larger growth in blog readership. I'm pasting the most interesting snippets, but encourage people to read the whole thing.

These surveys also indicate that the average blog reader stays only 90 seconds per page, and only 40 seconds per page on 'A-list' blogs.
...
What this means is that if blog readership continues to soar (doubling every 18 months) and newspaper readership continues to stagnate, in three years the average B-list blogger will be getting significantly more reader attention than the average unsyndicated US newspaper article or column, and the average A-list blogger will be getting almost as much reader attention as the average US daily paper.

According to the definitions on this post, I'm a happy C-List blogger so things won't be quite so exciting for me. For me, it's just about doing my own thing, and if other people get something out of it, great, and if not, well it doesn't matter. It's fine for me to think this now, but would things change if I were getting a hundred thousand hits a day? Would I feel any additional sense of responsibility if I were in this position, and would that take the fun out of it? Would the blog totally consume my real life? Of course, I don't need to worry about these things happening to me, but if there's any truth to this post, this sort of thing will happen to others.

moving to Sydney hiatus

I've been very busy in the past few days preparing for my move to Sydney. I leave tomorrow, taking the boat from Devonport to Sydney. I've been looking for apartments at www.flatmates.com.au, a great free Australian site. I'm not going to have much time for this blog in the next couple of weeks, so please excuse me if I'm slow in responding to comments or emails.

In the meantime, I thought that I'd post a link to Lies I learned in library school. I'm sure a lot of other blogs have linked to it (I've been behind in my blog reading lately), but I found it humourous (in that cynical kind of way) and fairly accurate.

the changing role of libraries as reflected in architecture: from warehouse to collaborative study centre

On the weekend, the New York Times published this interesting article, Spaces for Social Study. Unfortunately, the NYT requires registration to read and then after 7 days, the article will be archived and can only be read for a fee. So read it now, before that happens.

It's about the renovation of the Teachers College library at Columbia University. Here are a few snippets.
"Gone is the notion that it is solely a physical repository for information and a place of quiet individual study where librarians patrol the stacks, shushing errant blabbermouths. Instead, the campus library has become an intellectual gathering place."
...
'We asked people on campus, 'What would make you go to the library,' given that you can get a lot of things you want to work with in your dorm room,'' Mr. Natriello [the library's interim director] says. ''What folks said was that coming to the library was much more of a social academic experience.''

RFID: putting some librarians on the wrong side of a patron privacy debate

There is a very interesting article in Salon.com about a controversy about the usage of RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) tags in libraries. I'm not going to write too much about the article because I want to encourage people to to get the free day pass to my favourite news source, or even better, subscribe to it.

It is very strange to see some librarians on the opposite side of a privacy debate with the EFF, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the ACLU. I had never heard about RFID in libraries before reading this article. I am as yet undecided about the issue. As a former systems librarian who also did a lot of work in circulation, I can understand just how convenient RFID tags could be. I can also identify with the argument that RFID tags will help protect patron's privacy by making self-check out more effective. On the other hand, it could be very damaging for our profession if there is any question or doubt about our commitment to patron privacy. The idea that we are being slightly hyprocritical would definitely play into the hands of John Ashcroft and supporters of how the USAPATRIOT Act affects libraries.

male librarians have it good and/or bad, maybe

I had a great time on Maria Island (some photos will be posted soon), but I caught a very nasty gastric flu just after I got back. I won't go into the details :P Needless to say, it's been very light blogging for me this week.

The following two articles caught my eye:

Rachel Singer Gordon, The Men Among Us, Library Journal (June 15, 2004)

... Male NextGens buck librarian stereotypes by their very presence—both as male librarians and as energetic (and occasionally tattooed) younger professionals ... Unsurprisingly, NextGen men note that their workplace management still appears male-dominated and that men's premanagement salaries tend to track a bit higher. This may be owing to the encouragement men receive.

Michael Farrelly, They Lied to Us in Library School, Bookslut Library Rakehell (June 2004)

... I have searched lisjobs.com so many times that I have screen burn from the site. I have tried using and abusing friends and family and contacts who are friends of the family ... The sin of being over-educated, young, and not as experienced and in some cases I think, being a male. ... Men who work with kids are suspect and if you want to work with teenagers you might as well just register with the cops right now.

This is a topic I can't help but take an interest in. Typically, I have some contradictory thoughts about it. Sometimes, men can be at a disadvantage in this female-dominated profession. Sometimes male librarians have better opportunities and are likely to have more recognition. Either one, both, or none of these things can happen.

NYT on blogging: is it more of a conversation with ourselves?

Right now, you can view this interesting article here. It has also been posted in the blog sociology LJ community (which is a very interesting place in its own right).

I love this quote from Barbara Quint: "Here he is working all night on something read by five second cousins and a dog, and I'm willing to pay him."

open source legal research

I was going to write about the recent Salon article about Groklaw and open source legal research on the SCO case, but Copyfight's Jason Schultz has already written about it, so I'm just going to link to that and post a brief excerpt from the Salon article.

[Pamela] Jones [of Groklaw] has been praised by just about everyone in the open-source world for her efforts to undermine SCO. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has said that Groklaw shows "how the open-source ideals end up working in the legal arena, too, and I think that has been very useful and made a few people sit up and notice." Bruce Perens calls Jones "paralegal to the world." Clay Shirky, the influential tech pundit, points out that "Groklaw may also be affecting the case in the courts, by helping IBM with a distributed discovery effort that they, IBM, could never accomplish on their own, no matter how many lawyers they throw at it." [hypertext from original not included]