DIY Librarian

Feed2JS has posted a personal ad. Adam Levine is hoping that someone out there will take over maintenance and improvements for Feed2JS.

Finding Feed2JS when my library was developing a blog was a lifesaver. We knew that most of our patrons would never go to the blog site or subscribe to the feeds, so getting the blog content onto sites they were visiting was critical. We have installed Feed2JS on our server and use it to put content on our library web site, as well as on web pages on our parent organization’s site.

I hope that Feed2JS finds a good match!

Here’s an opportunity for SLA members to share ideas with colleagues at the Social Science/Museums, Arts and Humanities Open House at SLA 2008:

Call for Posters: Building Bridges with Collaboration Tools

The Social Science Division and the Museum, Arts, & Humanities Division invite proposals for a poster session to be held during the DSOC & MAHD Joint Open House at SLA 2008 in Seattle, Washington. The Open House and Poster Session will be held on Sunday, June 15 from 8:00-10:00 p.m.

In keeping with the SLA 2008 conference theme, “Breaking Rules, Building Bridges,” the theme for the poster session is Building Bridges with Collaboration Tools. Proposals should focus on the use of collaboration tools (blogs, wikis, etc.) in libraries or information work. Posters may include examples of collaboration tools in use, innovative ideas for future uses, comparisons of available tools, or any other idea relevant to the theme.

The poster session will be a relaxed and informal time to share ideas with your colleagues. We welcome proposals from any SLA member, new or experienced, and especially from students. In the event we receive more qualified submissions than we can accommodate, members of the two sponsoring divisions and student members will be given priority.

Proposals should be submitted by March 1, 2008 via e-mail to murray@pop.psu.edu or mail to Tara Murray, Population Research Institute, Penn State, 601 Oswald Tower, University Park, PA 16802. Please include a title and description of about 250 words, and your name, institution, e-mail address, and address. Proposals will be reviewed by a committee for relevance to the theme and quality. We will notify applicants of our decision by April 1, 2008.

Compare these two headlines, both reporting on the same survey:

• Nearly half of all adults play video games (PC World)
• Many parents avoid video games with kids (Washington Post)

Meanwhile, The Wired Campus reports that video games can promote health and peace.

I find it interesting (not surprising, though) that so many parents avoid video games. I was introduced to video games by my dad. This was back before the Xbox, back in the days of the VIC-20. My dad even wrote a game to teach my little brother how to use a joystick, a skill he apparently thought would be useful. I am sure that if the internet existed back then, my dad would have introduced us to that too.

In a recent piece in Library Journal, Terence Fitzgerald urges librarians to develop more of a sense of play in their work. I feel like I have that sense, and I wonder if it comes from growing up with computer games. To me, the computer was always something to try things out on, to experiment with. Gaming teaches you to play, to pick things up and try them out, to try to hack the system. Far too often, I see people who are afraid they will “break” the computer by playing with it. In most of my jobs, I’ve become a default Microsoft Office “expert”, but I didn’t get that way because I took lots of Microsoft training. I got that way by playing with the software when I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted.

I don’t believe video games can change the world, but I do think a sense of play, and a sense of DIY, can’t hurt the up-and-coming generation.

Oh, and thanks Dad!

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.

Around this time last year, I wrote about how getting cable internet service at home changed my habits. At the time, I was using a desktop computer in a corner of my office/guest bedroom/sewing room, so while my connection was much faster, it was still rooted to one spot in the house, and only one person could use it at a time.

Now, we have made the next big step of setting up a wireless network, which it seems has made just as big a change in our computer habits. First, we can both be online at the same time, which means we aren’t rushing to finish up whatever we’re doing as quickly as possible. Second, the connection is portable, so I use it for different things. For example, if I’m cooking and need to look up a recipe I found online, I just set the laptop up on the dining room table. (I won’t bring the laptop in the kitchen because I’m a messy cook.) Third, I keep my laptop in a corner downstairs, where I spend more time, so I’m more likely to turn it on and chat with my brother while watching TV, or blog about something I read in the paper while I’m eating breakfast. (Obviously this isn’t happening much with this blog, but more so with the blog I contribute to for my local newspaper’s web site.)

And perhaps most importantly, we have become those people who log on to sports web sites while watching the game. I’ve always wondered who those people were, and now I know. They are us.

I thought we would just use it to monitor games we weren’t getting on TV, but yesterday during Superbowl 41.5, we had the game on TV and the stats on the laptop.

DIY Librarian is back up and running, with a new look. Let me know what you think of it.

Sorry if old posts showed up in the RSS feed while I was working. I was fixing some bad coding before I remembered that editing posts makes them show up in the feed again.

…while we work out some issues with the DIY Librarian WordPress theme.

Steven Bell, writing on ACRLog, says that static personal web sites are becoming less common among academic librarians as they are replaced by blogs, social networking profiles, and other interactive web tools. He argues, however, that a static site can still benefit librarians. Brock Read, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus, asks, “Should professors and librarians delete seldom-used personal pages, or keep them around for posterity?”

More important than whether your site runs on WordPress or Drupal or hand-coded HTML is whether visitors can find out about your professional accomplishments. (I’m assuming here that your blog is not anonymous or pseudonymous, and that you consider it part of your professional self.) Is there a link on your blog to your academic credentials? to awards and honors you’ve received? to your publications and presentations?

In my roles as a conference and program planner for professional associations, I often look at personal and staff pages of all varieties looking for information. And I do sometimes rely on web searches to help me identify potential speakers. I’m much more likely to give you a call if I can find that you’ve already presented on a topic I’m interested in. In this day and age, why not also add video of yourself speaking?

I think (though I’m not as immersed in the culture) that other academics benefit from enhanced personal sites as well. I regularly research potential speakers for lectures and symposia sponsored by my organization, as well as prospects for open faculty positions. I can give the committee a much more detailed profile if I can find a recently updated profile (or CV or resume or whatever you want to call it). If I can’t find a profile, I have to rely on what I can find through web searches and literature searches, which is probably not as complete, nor as focused.

The bottom line: a personal web site, of any variety, gives you some control over how people view you. Here’s mine, also linked from the sidebar of DIY Librarian, and from my employer’s web site. OK, the design won’t get me hired as a web designer, and it’s nothing revolutionary, but it is up-to-date.

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.

* * *

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.