DIY Librarian

I have been tagged (I believe for the first time ever) in a meme by the Lipstick Librarian.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on this photo by Paul-W.

The idea of the meme is to select a photo (your own or one released under a Creative Commons license) and add a caption to summarize what you want the kids to learn about. Many of the responses seem to have forgotten the “about” (which is fine, interpret how you will) which has led to what the Free Range Librarian calls “Hallmarkian abstractions”.

The title is a quote I’ve seen attributed to an unknown trail runner. I like it because you can interpret it in many different ways - and that is what I’d like the kids to do. The photo brings to mind many things I would like kids to learn about (the environment, reading, self-sufficiency, and appropriate and functional clothing, to mention a few).

The meme:

1. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
2. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
3. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

I’m tagging: E-Tech, Libraryola, Rambling Librarian, TangognaT, Science Librarian at Penn State

I should note that I was in the process of marking a whole bunch of things in my feed reader as “read” because I am short on time, but I decided to actually read the LL’s post because of the title “Passion Quit” (emphasis mine).

If you’ve been wanting to check out comics, tomorrow is your chance. All you have to do is stop by your local comic book store (or library - some libraries are planning events) and get your free comics. Yes, they are free, no strings attached!

This year I’m excited about the Hellboy, Neotopia, IGNATZ, and Owly (and friends!) books.

I kept hearing people talking about ontologies, and was embarrassed that I, as a professional librarian, didn’t really know what they were. That all changed when I attended a program by Brandy King at SLA 2007. Not only does Brandy know ontologies inside and out (she developed one for a database at the Center on Media and Child Health) but she is really good at explaining the concept. In fact, she has a new book out. And now I can proudly explain that an ontology is a set of concepts and the relationship between those concepts, and can make for great search results (for example, in the CMCH database).

I’m really excited that Brandy will be teaching a continuing education course (Ontologies: What should librarians know?) at SLA 2008 in Seattle, and that my own Social Science Division is sponsoring it. There is still space in the class, so if you’re thinking about attending SLA 2008, sign up for the course. It will be on Sunday morning, before the main conference kicks off.

A medical librarian recently discovered that POPLINE, a reproductive health database administered by Johns Hopkins, had made “abortion” a stop word. I blogged about this at work, and NPR and the Baltimore Sun have good articles, but thought I’d offer some of my personal comments here.

I’m sure most readers of this blog know that stop words are typically things like “a” and “the” - not nouns like “abortion”. Indeed, “abortion” is a POPLINE keyword.

Apparently, the whole mess started when USAID, POPLINE’s funder, objected to a few articles it deemed “abortion advocacy”. By law, USAID is prohibited from promoting abortion and “places high priority on preventing abortions.” However, information about abortion is important to preventing it.

Johns Hopkins has since restored the search term. Kudos to them for a speedy reaction, but I don’t understand why the offending articles weren’t dealt with on an individual level to begin with.

Update (April 10): A commenter at librarian.net has an interesting possible explanation.

Update (April 11): Ipas, the nonprofit organization that published the magazine USAID objected to, has issued a press release.

The Ipas publication affirms women’s access to safe abortion as a human right. It does not promote abortion, maintaining that a woman’s decision to have an abortion is hers to make in accordance with her right to life, health, bodily integrity, nondiscrimination, privacy, liberty, and religious freedom.

On last night’s episode of Ghosthunters, TAPS investigated the Clapp Memorial Library in Belchertown, Massachusetts. If you missed it, you can watch it online (you’ll have to enable pop-up windows).

Last week I attended Plone Symposium East, which was held here at Penn State. Plone is an open source content management system, and should be of interest to library folks for a number of reasons.

The Oregon State Library uses Plone to power Plinkit, which provides public libraries with free web sites that they can maintain and update themselves. Darci Hanning was honored as one of Library Journal’s Movers & Shakers for her work on Plinkit.

A number of other libraries use Plone to power their web sites, including the Rosetta Project, an online linguistic archive. [Thanks to Karl Horak for pointing that one out to me.]

At the symposium, Jonathan Smith presented a Plone product called Origami Image Tools which I think has tremendous potential for special collections and digitization projects. I really hope that a video of his talk will appear on the Plone site soon, because it made everyone in the room ooh and aah, but there is no public site using this product that I can link to.

One of the biggest projects using it is Northwestern University’s Imag(n)ing Shuilu’an, which documents a Chinese temple. Unfortunately for us, the Chinese government does not want the site to be public. (Jon Fernandez demonstrated the site at the symposium, to more oohs and aahs from the audience.) The good news is that since Plone is open source, the university has a commitment to release the Origami Image View and Image Annotator.

Origami enables the display of very large high-resolution images - at least up to 3 GB - and includes an image tiler and an annotation tool. It has been used for other projects, including Brave New Worlds, an image collection created by three humanities professors, who then used Plone’s discussion tools to create a social environment, and an art history class where students took photographs of public art in Chicago to document its condition.

You can see the Origami Flash image viewer in action at the Encyclopedia of Chicago (which is not itself a Plone site). Watch what happens when you zoom in on sections of the maps!

Update: You can also see the Origami Image Viewer on its project page. [thanks Jeanne!]

As I was busy finalizing details for my division programs at SLA 2008, I stumbled across Conference Rules, Part 1 at the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article gives advice for moderators of panel sessions at academic conferences, but I think much of the advice is useful for moderators of other types of sessions as well. The tips for how to keep a Q&A session on track are particularly good. (Because when Q&A goes bad, it is really, really bad.)

I am attending my first tech conference today - Plone Symposium East. It is being hosted at my university, and it is about an open source CMS we are using at work, so it was an easy one for me to infiltrate. So far I’m feeling a bit out of my element, but everyone has been very welcoming. And there are other library people here.

It’s a very different atmosphere from the library conferences I have attended. There are no lines in the ladies room. Everyone has their laptop out. There are power strips under all the tables so they can plug in. Jeans and t-shirts are not out of place.

I’ll write more on what I’m learning later, but I wanted to let you know that some of the conference sessions are being streamed live and all of them will be available on the web after the conference. If you’re at all interested in Plone or content management systems in general, check it out.

It’s been a while since I did a fun holiday post. Today all the heart-shaped boxes of chocolate will be on sale - but that may just mean a discount on a marked-up price, if allegations about chocolate price-fixing are true.

The candy heart is from the ACME Heart Maker. Libraryman is also feelin’ the chalky candy heart love.

A community group in the town of Millvale, just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, wants to bring a library to the town, and they’re holding a benefit concert called BOOK’N Bands. Rock on, Millvale.