DIY Librarian

I’ve just started a blog for the SLA Central Pennsylvania Chapter. It’s nothing fancy—just a TypePad blog set up through SLA. It’s primary purpose is to make it easier for me to get new content on the chapter home page (using Feed2JS). I used to hand-code a news archive page and then copy the most recent content into the index page. Not a lot of work, but it gets tedious, especially when you have to squeeze it into free moments at work. I’ve already noticed I’m more likely to post things than I was before, and I think this will make things much easier for whoever succeeds me as chapter webmaster.

I don’t know whether SLA conferences are getting better, or I’m just getting better at attending them, but this was a great conference for me. I have been appointed program planning chair-elect for the Social Science Division, so I ended up attending planning meetings when I could have gone to more sessions. On the other hand, having some insight into the planning process makes me even better at navigating the conference, so I think it will be a good experience for me. I seem to be making a habit of this conference planning thing…

Things have been hopping over at the SLA 2006 Conference Blog (and we seem to have inspired SLA CEO Janice LaChance!). My SLA Blogger ribbon was a great conversation starter, and hopefully I inspired some more people to take a look at the blog. I’ve found that as a blogger I take more notes at the sessions I plan to blog, but fewer notes at things like the general sessions that I know other people will blog about. Way to share the workload!

If you followed the link to the APLIC-I conference program in the previous post, you may have seen a presentation authored by yours truly and two colleagues about my library’s blogging project, News from the PRI Library and Data Archive.

The blog may seem overwhelming at first—we have a lot of categories and a lot of posts—but we are primarily encouraging our users to subscribe to the particular categories that interest them and using the feeds to provide content for other web pages. For instance, we’ve included the feed for the library categories on my library’s home page.

We think the majority of our users are not currently using feed readers, so we’re introducing this gradually. We do already have a few people subscribed to our feeds, though, and all four of our staff members are posting regularly to the blog

SLA 2006 is next month, and SLA is once again hosting a conference blog. I think they’re still tinkering with the setup—some of the sidebar links are broken, and I think the “Subscribe to my Podcast” link is wrong (unless they are going to podcast SLA too…). I’m planning to blog the conference again this year.

The SLA Maryland Chapter has had a great pre-conference blog going for a while now: Quoth the Raven. And the SLA IT Division Blogging Section is, naturally, also blogging and hosting a bloggers get-together in Baltimore.

librarian.net, one of my main inspirations for starting DIY Librarian, turned 7 yesterday. In celebrating her milestone, Jessamyn notes the homogenizing effect of using a CMS:

And then a weird thing happens… all my entries from September 2003 on are all in WordPress. I imported the Movable Type entries when I moved, and so there is an odd sameness to the rest of my posts, even though things have clearly happeend and I have remained your trusty correspondent through thick and thin. It’s not the same thing, browsing a month’s worth of entries from three years ago when they don’t look any different from today’s entries.

I resisted moving from a hand-coded blog to a CMS for many of the same reasons. When I first started DIY Librarian (then referred to in all lower case letters), I sometimes used different stylesheets for each month—a Halloween stylesheet for October, or a Valentine’s Day style for February. The old entries are still there, but when I did some redesigning I had to fix some of my hacked-out HTML code and just applied one stylesheet to the whole mess. Now that I am using WordPress, any style changes will automatically apply to the whole blog. The holiday-themed logos I designed are still there: Halloween DIY Librarian, Halloween DIY Librarian 2004, St. Patrick’s Day DIY Librarian, and my favorite, Valentine’s Day DIY Librarian. I was able to retrieve a few primitive iterations of DIY Librarian using the Wayback Machine: September 2003 (the stylesheet seems to be having some issues) and October 2004 (with the Halloween stylesheet and a photo of the pumpkin plant which my landlady subsequently “disappeared”—apparently the front stoop is not the appropriate place for pumpkin-farming, unbeknownst both to myself and to the previous tenant who dropped seeds there during while carving a pumpkin).

In the beginning, I was using the blog as much to practice my coding as to publish my writing. Now, I’m more concerned with the writing and learning how to tweak a CMS than I am with the coding.

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.