DIY Librarian

Twelve students at St. Lawrence University in New York are living in the wilderness of the Adirondack Park as part of the “Adirondack Semester” program (NY Times). Every other week, they make an excursion to a nearby town for supplies. According to the Times article, necessities included doing laundry, visiting the library, and for some, a visit to a yarn store. [via The Kept-Up Academic Librarian]

It’s kind of ironic that my last post was about a very different kind of unplugging, and yet I find the concept of abstaining from modern life quite appealing.

The Wired Campus reports that a judge has ordered a student to stay off the internet after he harassed another student via e-mail. This seems to me like banning someone from the telephone.

Commenters point out that banning the student from the internet will make it difficult if not impossible for him to complete his coursework. One suggests he could “use the library,” but as so many library resources are online, that’s not really a solution.

UPDATE: The Carnival has been extended!

Welcome to the Carnival of the Infosciences #78!

We might as well get started with a little action. Ryan Deschamps submitted the Annoyed Librarian’s The Cult of Twopointopia. Don’t miss the comments for some cult analysis and lively discussion.

AL is not the only one questioning Library 2.0. In another submission, Second Life Hype vs. Human Needs on the ALA Social Responsibilities Round Table Hunger, Homelessness & Poverty Task Force blog, John Gehner writes, “it’s disappointing at times to think that some of the best and brightest information professionals are devoting their substantial talents to the denizens of a virtual world founded on leisure time rather than a real world with millions of people struggling for a Better Life every day.”

Now don’t get too comfortable with that cotton candy, because next we have a report from John Dupuis at Confessions of a Science Librarian, The PRISM Coalition: Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine. It’s not just big publishers against Open Access—non-profits and society publishers are joining with the bigger commercial publishers.

Also from John Dupius we have Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting, in which he reports on a movement among academic bloggers to differentiate their “serious” writing from other blog posts.

On a related note, submitted by your editor, LibrarianInBlack Sarah Houghton-Jan asks Library literature: academic and generally useless? Several bloggers have noted that blog posts can generate more attention and be more immediately useful to others in the field than articles in refereed journals. Again, don’t miss the comments for further discussion.

One more editor’s pick before we pack up and move on: John Miedema asks Have you ever reached a blog impasse? Is that a good thing? Miedema closes his post with the questions “Have you ever reached a blog impasse? How did it resolve itself?” Walt Crawford comments succinctly:

1. Of course. Frequently.
2. I stopped blogging until I had something to blog about.

Well, that’s it for this carnival, folks! The next stop is September 17 at Libraryola. Submit blog posts to the next edition of Carnival of the Infosciences using the carnival submission form, or use the del.icio.us tag carninfo to submit your favorites. Make sure to use the “Notes” field to state why you tagged it and sign your name. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.

Using del.icio.us to submit entries seems to work well. I didn’t get any email submissions—they all came from del.icio.us. My only problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to read the whole “Notes” in del.icio.us, so I didn’t know who to attribute the “Second Life Hype vs. Human Needs” submission to.

Photo: Neptune (Hudson Maxim), Miss America (Margaret Gorman) at Atlantic City Carnival, Sept. 7, 1922 / photo by Bain News Service, 225 Canal St., New York. Library of Congress via pingnews.

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September 4, 2007. Folks, looks like the Carnival of the Infosciences is in town for one more day. Turns out there were submissions from the form, but they got caught in a spam filter and didn’t make it to the carnival in time.

Joshua Neff submitted a post of his at goblin in the library inspired by the recent revisits to the Library 2.0 topic: Library 2.0.0.3. Turns out the secret ingredient to Library 2.0 is ice cream. Go figure—and we’ve got plenty of ice cream at the carnival!

Kathryn Greenhill submitted her post, Why libraries should care about mobile phones, from Librarians Matter. Greenhill asks, “What do your library users use more often, their PC connected to broadband or their mobile phone? What do more of them own? What do more young people have exclusively for their own use – a mobile phone or a PC?”

Chris Zammarelli submitted Jenica Rogers-Urbanek’s Keep it secret, keep it safe, about anonymity in professional blogging and whether to put your blog on your resume. Zammarelli added, “Personally, I do mention it since my potential employers will find it by Googling me anyway.”

Heather Leask Armstrong submitted Volkswagons and Road Trips I Have Known and Loved from BookScribeBlog.com, about cars and road trips and books. Hopefully reading this will make up for the road trips I didn’t take this summer.

OK, I think this carnival is finally moving on now! It’s been fun, and I’ll see you in 2 weeks at Libraryola!

Photo: Cotton Carnival, Memphis, Tennessee / photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF33-030905-MD DLC.

Happy Blog Day 2007! I’m celebrating by sharing five blogs that are a little outside the usual content at DIY Librarian.

OK, I’m bending the rules a little bit, because these blogs aren’t new to me, but hopefully some of them are new to you.

Tumaini Kids! is a blog written by kids at the Tumaini Children’s Center in Nyeri, Kenya. The kids are part of the Hope Runs project, started by two Stanford University students to provide an understanding of personal health, social entrepreneurship, and technology to orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) through running. The kids write about running and other events in their lives—they are inspiring, hilarious, and will steal your heart.

Mazurland Blog is the product of one of my co-bloggers on my other blog, The Runaround, and his brothers. The content is very eclectic—just this week there have been posts about punctuation abuse, gun ownership, and learning to play the guitar. I don’t agree with everything, but that’s part of what gets me thinking and questioning my own beliefs.

The Comics Curmudgeon keeps me updated on the intense dramas unfolding in Mark Trail, Apartment 3G, Rex Morgan, M.D., and the like. I can’t read this at work because people will wonder why I’m laughing out loud in my office. (“Oh! the latest issue of Population Development Review is just too funny!” wasn’t convincing anyone.)

I started reading Bad Librarianship because I thought it would be about libraries. While it is written by a librarian, it is about comics and pop culture. Well, and occasionally about librarians.

The Rambling Librarian is actually about libraries. I mention it because it may not be on everyone’s radar since it is from Singapore. It does ramble—the current post, as I type this, is about the custom of burning Hell Bank Notes—but many of my favorite blogs do. Right now Ivan Chew is in the midst of blogging about his trip to Durban, South Africa for the IFLA conference.

Carnival of the Infosciences #77 is up at librarian.net. Prepare to spend the day because it’s a big carnival, full of interesting and entertaining blog posts.

In 2 weeks, I will host Carnival #78 here at DIY Librarian. Let’s make it another big one! Submit blog posts (yours or someone else’s) to the next edition of the Carnival using the carnival submission form. You can also use the del.icio.us tag carninfo to submit your favorites. Make sure to use the notes field to state why you tagged it and sign your name so we know who shared it with us. Send submissions for COTI #78 by 6pm EST on Sunday, September 2.
Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.

Photo: Cotton Carnival, Memphis, Tennessee, by Wolcott, Library of Congress [VIA PINGNEWS]

I was in Vermont last weekend to run a race, and happened to pass by the Joslin Memorial Library in Waitsfield. I didn’t get a chance to go inside, but it looked like a nice library. I did go in the pottery store across the street, and in an outdoor sports store. When we pulled up to our motel, the proprietor was sitting on the front porch with a can of beer and his dogs. I couldn’t sleep the first night, so I went out on the back deck and looked at the stars and listened to the bullfrogs. In the morning, we were greeted by a great blue heron. I really like where I live, but there is nothing quite like a small Vermont town.

In a letter published in the April 1 Library Journal, Stephanie Chase asks the magazine to provide more coverage of truly small libraries—not small like LJ’s Best Small Library in America, a county library with a yearly budget of over $400,000, but really small like those libraries where the budget is not even equal to a decent professional salary.

I work in a tiny academic library. With 3 full-time staff serving about 75 faculty and a somewhat larger number of graduate students, we are a good size for what we do, but we are a tiny flea compared to the behemoth University Libraries next door.

This always presents problems when I fill out a research survey (which I try to do whenever I am asked). If select “Library Director” as my job title (which it is) and “University” as my type of institution (which it is) it makes my job seem a lot bigger than it is. Yes, I do have my own budget and make purchasing decisions, but my budget is so small that some vendors won’t even return a phone call. “Department Manager”, while also appropriate, doesn’t usually make sense because I don’t report to another librarian.

I rely very heavily on the resources of the behemoth next door, so in some ways I am as much a library patron as a librarian. However, I also do a lot on my own, and this was, in part, the inspiration for DIY Librarian.

I relate to the stories of very small rural libraries Jessamyn West tells at librarian.net. These libraries are quirky. They have limited resources, but they know their communities very well. While my budget probably seems like a dream to these libraries, in the academic world I think it is probably around the same level. We have good computer support and quality equipment, and we can easily purchase books that are priced for academic libraries and run around $100-$200 each. But we can’t purchase online databases or journals because of the price and because of technological issues (our users don’t have a defined IP address range because they are scattered across campus).

My previous place of work, a beautiful old Carnegie library which also houses a gymnasium and music hall, is hosting a Patti Smith concert!

I work with graduate students from all over the world, some of whom have not studied at an American university before, and I think one of their many challenges is getting used to our libraries. I decided to attend the Global Librarianship session at SLA to get a glimpse of how libraries work outside of North America.

None of the speakers talked specifically about university libraries, but their remarks about Africa were still useful to me, and all of their stories were very inspiring. I thought all three were great speakers on causes they were truly passionate about, and they demonstrated the great diversity within sub-Saharan Africa.

Melanie Sellars of Librarians Without Borders spoke about her work developing a library in Angola. Kevin Cullen of the Univeristy of Colorado spoke about his experience volunteering for Peace Corps in Botswana. Jane Kinney Meyers, who received the Dow Jones Leadership Award and a standing ovation at the opening general session, spoke about the Lubuto Library Project.

Constraining Public Libraries: The World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services, reviewed in the April 15 Library Journal, cautions libraries about applying business models, fees for services, privatization, and outsourcing in light of GATS. While reviewer John Berry says that “some readers will find this book alarmist,” he concludes that the book “provides an increasingly rare and thoughtful discussion of certain aspects of library management, such as the tendency toward privatization, to which the profession should pay more attention.”