DIY Librarian

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.)