DIY Librarian

I’ll be giving a talk about a blogging project at my library on March 28 at the APLIC-I 39th Annual Conference in Los Angeles. If you’re interested in population libraries and will be in the area, come to the conference! We are waiting to get our new web server installed before making the blog fully public, but I’ll post more details here when that happens.

Library @ Your User: A Case Study Using New Technologies to Extend the Reach of the Library

Tara Murray, Jennifer Darragh, & Kiet Bang
Population Research Insitute, Penn State
March 28, 2006
APLIC-I 39th Annual Conference
Westin Bonaventure, Los Angeles, California

After the flurry of year-end lists, you probably thought you were safe for a few months, didn’t you? Not so, my friend. Blake over at LISNews.org has posted 10 Blogs to Read in 2006, along with descriptions of the blogs and his reasons for including them. Somehow this approach seems more positive than the typical year-end best-of list.

The SLA Maryland Chapter has started a blog for SLA 2006 in Baltimore, Quoth the Raven. I’m looking forward to getting information about Baltimore without having to check a Web site repeatedly or sign up for an email list. They’re also exploring some new tools, like a Wayfaring map of points of interest.

I started DIY Librarian in the summer of 2003. This year, I think I took the biggest steps since I first started blogging. Way back in 2003 I wasn’t sure how much I would like blogging or whether I would stick with it. I was also a little nervous about putting myself out on the Internet. In 2005, I migrated the blog to its own domain and started using WordPress. I opened up comments and have been very happy with the results—some thoughtful comments on my posts, and very little spam. You can still access the pre-WordPress posts at my old site.

Coinciding with the move and subsequent increased exposure (I have no empirical evidence of that, but it certainly seems like more people are reading DIY Librarian now) I’ve tried to focus a bit more on professional issues. This is still a fairly lighthearted endeavor, and subject to my personal whims and schedule. I do occasionally post about things that are tangetially library-related at best, but so do many of the library bloggers I most enjoy reading. I don’t announce blogging breaks because I usually don’t know about them myself. Quite often, I don’t post because I simply have nothing to say.

I signed up for a Google Analytics account so that I can track some minimal information about my blog. I get web stats for some other sites that I manage, and I only trust them so far, but there is some interesting stuff in there. For instance, I can see that one of the most popular keyword searches leading to my site is “librarian”. Seriously, how many pages of results did you have to scroll through to get to DIY Librarian?

I’ve been mentioned a few times in This Week In LibraryBlogLand (which sadly doesn’t seem to be active right now) and had a booth at Carnival of the Infosciences #17.

2005 was a good year for DIY Librarian, I think. There are still a lot of things I’d like to improve on, both technically and in my writing, but that’s part of the appeal of blogging for me. I can meddle away to my heart’s content.

Here’s to a happy & healthy 2006!

’Tis the season for lists, and I love lists. Not as ends unto themselves, but as beginnings for conversation and debate. I thought I’d start by listing the library blogs that have stood out in my reading this year. I have a small list of blogs in the sidebar, which I do weed and reseed occasionally, but it remains more a collection of the blogs that originally inspired me than a current reading list. I also have a public Bloglines blogroll so you can see what I’m reading in RSS, but the categories may not make sense to anyone but me. (For instance, “News” is health and science stuff that I read for work.) So, without further ado, here is the short list. It doesn’t include everything that I read and enjoy, or even everything that I think is important. It is quite simply the

DIY Librarian Top 5 Library Blogs of 2005

librarian.net. One of my original inspirations, both for blogging and as a librarian. Jessamyn continues to offer unique insight, to bring attention to important issues in libraryland, and to be very gracious and helpful to the up-and-coming (including me).

Library Dust. The biblioblogosphere is blessed with many eloquent writers, but I enjoy Michael McGrorty’s prose the most. I save the Library Dust entries in my aggregator because they are almost invariably worthy of savoring rather than scanning. This is one of the few library blogs that I recommend to people who aren’t librarians.

Information Wants To Be Free. I’ve only started reading this blog fairly recently, but it’s quickly become one of my must-reads. Meredith has a calm and rational, yet simultaneously exuberant, take on library and technology issues.

Librarian Trading Cards.This one has only been around for a couple of months, but I hope Amy keeps it up. Lots of fun and good for the profession too.

Open Stacks. I have not been reading Open Stacks as much since the focus has turned to podcasting—something I’m sure is very cool and worthwhile that I just haven’t made time for yet. However, I am completely in love with the Carnival of the Infosciences that Greg started back in August.

Honorable Mention: Conference Blog

SLA 2005 Conference Blog. For the first time, I wished I had more Internet access at a conference. Not so I could check in at work or post to my blog (sorry!), but so that I could check in on SLA 2005 for program changes, session reports, and local restaurant and recreational tips. This was also my first time participating in a group blog.

Honorable Mention: Non-Library Blog

The Comics Curmudgeon. Kind of like Mystery Science Theater for the funny pages. Instead of taking a smoke break, I read The Comics Curmudgeon.

For the first time, I have a booth at the Carnival of the Infosciences, hosted this week by The Krafty Librarian. I’ve really been enjoying the carnival (especially since there hasn’t been a new This Week In LibraryBlogLand in a while) so I was happy to finally have something to contribute.

After writing about the value of associations yesterday, this morning I found a message about the SLA IT Division Blogging Section’s new blog in my inbox. I had dropped my IT Division membership, but perhaps I will join again. I don’t think much has been written about blogging in special libraries compared to blogging in academic and public libraries, although I know a fair number of special librarians have personal or group blogs. We are starting to use blogs in my library (more on that soon!) and SLA itself has been using blogs as communication tools—there is the official SLA 2005 blog, the PAM blog, the Chapter Modeling Task Force blog, and even a memorial blog.

I don’t write about comics enough to belong to the Legion of Librarian Comics Bloggers, but perhaps someday I can work my way up to Librarian Comics Blogger Sidekick.

I knew I hadn’t posted in a while. Things have been busy at work. Things have been busy at home. I took a much-needed vacation.

But I had no idea it had been a whole month since I last posted! Things will probably be slow for a while, too, as I catch up on my reading.

I did, however, find a few minutes to complete Michael Stephens’ “Who are the ‘Blog People’?” survey. If you’re a library type and you blog, help him out with his research and take the survey.

On Sunday, a I attended Blog U, a mini-conference attached to Web Search University. The faculty line-up was stellar (Blake Carver, LISNews; Steven M. Cohen, Library Stuff; Jane Dysart, Dysart & Jones; Amanda Etches-Johnson, blogwithoutalibrary.net; Sabrina Pacifici, beSpacific; Aaron Schmidt, walking paper; and Jill Stover, Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book). Their presentations were great, but the best part of the conference was how interactive it was. I really liked the format, with a few brief presentations and then time for questions interspersed throughout the day. It made me feel like my question didn’t have to apply directly to the presentation at hand, and it seemed to make the presenters more comfortable answering because they could defer to another presenter—or all provide an answer, which happened several times. I even asked some questions, something I’m often reluctant to do at sessions.

The presentations should be linked from the Blog U site soon, but you can also find most of them on the presenters’ blogs.

I particularly liked Schmidt’s not-PowerPoint slides. I’d read about Jessamyn’s HTML slides before, but this was the first chance I had to see them in action.

I felt like I, along with my colleague/friend Jen, was among the more advanced students, since we are already testing a WordPress blog behind the scenes at work, but I still learned quite a bit. In particular, I’m finding more ways to integrate the blog content into our website.

(With apologies to Ralph Wiggum.)