more on flickr

This might not surprise readers who know anything about my attention span, but flickr has replaced del.icio.us as my new favorite toy. Tonight in class we took photos of & around the SCILS building. Now SCILS isn't the most beautiful building I've ever seen . . . but I like words. So most of my photos are of words . . . but some are of the stairs, which I really like, aesthetically speaking:



these are the up stairs.



these are the down stairs. (and yes, I know that up/down, with stairs, is relative.)

Check out my other photos of SCILS. And if you want to see what SCILS really looks like (beyond stairs and words), see more photos of SCILS here.

check out my arty photos

on flickr . . . so fun!

podcast on "Re-education"

More thoughts on:

• librarians connecting students and communities
• learning about vs. learning to be (revisited)
• solutions? ideas?

Click here to listen:


click to listen

steel cage death match

It's LibraryThing vs. Shelfari. Both are online communities where users catalog their own libraries--then tag and review books and share recommendations with other users. After a brief tour of each of their websites, here are my impressions of each:

Shelfari:

• Offers a Shelfari widget for users to post on their blogs or MySpace. If I indulged my widget desires, my blog would be cluttered with them. The widget holds weight with me.
  

• Shelfari apparently joined forces with Amazon.com this year. Can world domination be far behind?

• Users are called Shelfarians. How can you beat that?

LibraryThing:

• More users, it seems like--the better to add to my virtual book club! LibraryThing has been out there longer than Shelfari, and was on my radar screen before I started library school.

• Much more advanced options for tagging, organizing, and searching--and these options are accessible on the user interface--not a whole ton of clicking through.
  

• List option for displaying your catalog: I think the covers are helpful, but they can clutter the display.
  

• LibraryThing has a blog widget too! Wheeee!
  

As someone who regularly experiences book club envy (but . . . how to find the time?)--both Shelfari and LibraryThing appeal to me. But as someone who wants a personal catalog that is as versatile, searchable, and well-organized (the last according to my definition) as possible, I'm going with LibraryThing. I guess that makes me a thingamabrarian (although, for the record, I prefer Shelfarian, as a term).

for the (maybe) two non-librarians who read my blog

social bookmarking is so. fun. Try it, you won't be disappointed. Check out my new tag roll, on the right. Okay Mom and Dad . . . talk to you later . . .

check out our wiki

Our group's wiki is on the Literature Resource Center. It's still under construction, so don't mind that my bio page says I'm a rockstar--that'll all get straightened out soon enough.

my thoughts on the reading

a preview:

• "learning about" vs. "learning to be"
• librarians as links between patrons and communities of practice
• communities of practice for librarians

listen up! and check out the Library Success wiki while you're at it.

Click To Play

hear my first podcast!

I'm so proud of it . . .

click to listen

more hope for librarians

With a couple more days to absorb the Brown reading, I have even more hope for the future of librarianship. Like Korrie said:

As librarians we are taught how to process/sort/rearrange/recombine as part of our knowledge set. Does this mean we have an advantage in the coming trends of web 2.0? I feel it is our nature to want to tag/categorize/identify information as we receive it and as Brown says "reduce knowledge into data." This is instinct for us...to break large information sets into smaller categories to make it easier to find/use later. This can only be an advantage if we are willing to embrace new technologies and have the ability within our environment/institutions to implement them.

A few people have commented that they, too, have had people challenge their reasons for going to library school. By the end of this class, I think we'll all have learned a few more tricks that will keep us relevant, even indispensable, in the future.

reports of (our) death have been greatly exaggerated

While reviewing the reading for this week ("Limits to Information," Chapter 1 from The Social Life of Information), I kept thinking of all the people who have told me they think librarians are headed the way of the dinosaur. I'm not sure if it's just me, but since I started library school, people just keep coming out of the woodwork. A woman at my salon tells me librarians won't even be needed in a few years, "because of computers." A guy at a party says all books are going to be online soon, and asks me why I would train for a job that will be obsolete in a few years.

The reading has armed me with some interesting arguments for the next time I'm faced with these ideas. Basically, Brown and Duguid argue that saying that the rise of information technology will lead to the demise of librarians (or universities, or business organizations . . . ) is to ignore all sorts of social aspects of our lives that influence our behavior just as much as information technology. They posit that the reality is much more rich and complex than the guy at a party and the woman at the salon would have it--and I tend to agree.

blogs in libraries

Instead of looking at just any old library blog, I decided to examine blogs associated with my professional area of interest--academic law libraries. I started on the Library Success Wiki, which eventually linked me to the Blogging Libraries Wiki. So many blogging libraries! (If you know of any more, you can add them to the wiki!

Et Seq., the Harvard Law School Library blog, is very well done--easy to read, frequently updated, well organized. The posts on Et Seq. are archived by category as well as date, and include items--from new databases to law school casebooks on MP3 to a book about a pig who attends Harvard Law School--of interest to law students/professors/librarians. Even this recent NYT Style section piece on hip librarians (with some mentions of Web 2.0/Library 2.0) made the cut. To me, the posts on Et Seq. are just mixed enough to keep it interesting.

The blog for the Widener University Law Library on the Delaware campus is neither as frequently updated nor as intellectually broad as Et Seq., but as a law library blog, it is just as effective. Topics covered in the posts range from library hours to interesting summer reading to new recycling procedures.

It doesn't seem like it's been that long since I finished law school, but the adoption of new technologies makes most law library webpages look wholly different from what I was used to four years ago. I would have loved to use a blog back then to keep me apprised of developments in my law school's library.