DIY Librarian

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.

As a postscript to my post about gray and scholarly literature, I give you Eric Schnell’s manuscript saga. I feel like every time I turn around, I see another sign telling me to forget about traditional journal publication for the moment and focus my efforts elsewhere.

That said, I have resolved to try to start reading more traditional journals, so that at the very least I can talk more knowledgeably about them. It’s something I keep meaning to do but haven’t been very good at since I got my degree.

Roddy MacLeod provides an update on (and a little peek into the future of) RSS in the latest FreePint Newsletter. MacLeod is, among other things, involved in the ticTOCs journal table of contents project. He envisions a day when we no longer have to explain “What is RSS?” because subscribing to a feed has become seamless.

I think a lot of new technologies follow a similar path. They come out, a few techie types embrace them, and then if they start to catch on, the technology becomes more or less invisible. Think of HTML. I remember taking classes on HTML, and we’d painstakingly hand-code simple pages showing our resumes or photos of our pets. Today, those kinds of pages can be created using point-and-click interfaces with little or no knowledge of HTML. Of course, the code is still there, underneath it all (and I’m glad I know it), but most users don’t need to think about it.

One of our most time-consuming services at my library is collecting and aggregating journal tables of contents for our faculty, so they don’t have to subscribe to individual feeds or email alerts. If ticTOCs accomplishes its mission, we could simply direct them to that site and they could set up one feed with all of the tables of contents, and we could focus on other things (like finding money to continue subscribing to the journals so they can actually read the articles).

I believe that gray literature—blogs, this ejournal, a few similar publications and some lists—represents the most compelling and worthwhile literature in the library field today. (Walt Crawford, Cites & Insights, August 2007)

Having just gotten a rejection from my first submission to a peer-reviewed journal, this statement immediately caught my attention.

In preparation for writing my article, I did a literature review and read some scholarly articles. I also read a lot of blog posts and online publications. Reviewing the journal literature was helpful for background, and uncovered some things (mainly having to do with special libraries) that hadn’t been reported elsewhere. But for the most part I found the journals to be seriously behind the curve.

By the time I revised my article and submitted it to another journal, and then waited for review and publication, it would really be old news. While the idea of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal is appealing, in part because I work in a research environment, it is neither required nor supported in my current position. My real motivation in writing this article is sharing a story with my colleagues, and most of them are probably more likely to read it on a blog or listen to it at a conference than they are to pick up a journal and read about it there.

Crawford goes on to question the value role of peer review in furthering discussion in library science (note: not of scholarly publishing):

Which would you pay more attention to, and which would you regard as more likely to move discussion forward in useful ways: An article in a third-tier print journal by someone you’ve never heard of, or an “unrefereed” blog post by, say, Lorcan Dempsey or Eric Schnell or Laura Cohen or Iris Jastram or, for that matter, Mark Lindner or Walt Crawford?

I think there is probably a place for all kinds of literature in our profession, but right now it’s all I can do to keep up with the gray literature, and it feels more relevant to me as a practicing librarian.

[Edited for accuracy]

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).

Ron Charles, a book critic for the Washington Post, has become disenchanted with Harry Potter – both the books and the cultural phenomenon.

I see a lot of parallels between book critics and librarians in this article. Charles writes about being told, “Imagine being able to sit around all day just reading novels!” He laments the fact that fewer American adults are reading novels, and very few are reading anything but bestsellers.  He worries about the future of his profession, with dwindling newspaper book review sections. He wonders whether the “long tail” will ever really appear.

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