lis.dom

Laura Crossett on the LIS domain

help the LSW send Walt Crawford to ALA!

Posted on 15 March 2010 by laura

On Saturday, Walt Crawford, friend to many of us, foe to the absolutist, “library voice of the radical middle,” author, blogger, lover of stone fruit and old movies and the Lovin’ Spoonful, and probably the foremost expert on blogs by library people in the English-speaking world, announced that he had lost his job and that he might thus not be able to go to ALA this year or to continue Cites & Insights. In the course of chatting with a few people about this, Laura Harris said it would be really great if the LSW could somehow sponsor Walt to go to ALA, with any extra money going toward Cites & Insights. Meg Smith came up with a clever way of soliciting help on FriendFeed without Walt knowing about it. After Steve Lawson and Rochelle Hartman pointed out this morning’s post from Walt, though, we decided we’d better go ahead and tell him, and I’m very happy to say that he has accepted our sponsorship.

Since Saturday night, when we first announced this project, 26 people have so far donated $815. If you’d like to help out (I figure this will get Walt to Washington, D.C. and lodged for a bit, but he might want to get back to California at some point), you can send your contributions

  • to me via PayPal (my account is newrambler at gmail dot com)
  • to me by check (Laura Crossett, Send Walt to ALA Fund, PO Box 85, Meeteetse, WY 82433)
  • directly to Walt via the PayPal button on Cites & Insights

I was a wee baby blogger five years ago, when I first heard the name Walt Crawford. Everyone in the library blogosphere was abuzz (we were not yet a-twitter; Twitter didn’t exist then) with the word that Walt Crawford was going to start blogging. I’d never heard of the guy at that point, but I went ahead and subscribed to this new blog, and to the RSS feed for this other project of his that people were always raving about, a monthly ejournal called Cites & Insights. I soon learned that Walt was smart and funny, that he had a great talent for reading and synthesizing information, and that he had little patience for grammatical gaffes. A few months later, I met him in person at the first ever OCLC Blog Salon at ALA in Chicago, and I learned that he was also personable and generous (Walt, you may not remember this, but you offered to share a cab with me, and you were deeply apologetic about not paying the whole fare, since you had to get off first).

What I really learned, though, was that Walt wasn’t cool because he had a blog (although it was cool that he had one). Walt was, and is, cool because he takes us seriously. He reads our blog posts and our FriendFeed conversations; he points out the flaws in our logic, and then he writes cogently and well about the ideas he sees emerging.

I don’t always agree with Walt, and he can be exasperating (although who among us is not, at some time or other? — I certainly am), but I admire and respect the work he has done. His one-time co-author, Michael Gorman, famously ranted about the “Blog People.” A lot of us ranted and raved about that, and proudly put up “Blog Person” badges on our sites, and added Gorman pictures to the lolbrarians group. Walt didn’t do any of those things. He read our blogs, and he thought about them, and he wrote about them — and he continues to do so.

If you’ve ever read Walt at Random or Cites & Insights (or just searched for your name) or talked (or sparred) with Walt in a comment thread, please consider making a donation.

Posted in library society of the world, the biblioblogosphere | 3 Comments
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open argument 101

Posted on 30 October 2009 by laura

I’ll admit it: there’s almost nothing I like more than drama and action on the internet, and the past 24 hours or so have provided plenty.

Yesterday afternoon saw the release of the much-hyped Library 101 video and its attendant website, which was largely, but not exclusively, lauded. Yesterday evening my FriendFeed brought me the white paper on open source ILS systems [pdf] by SirsiDynix VP of Innovation Stephen Abram, which has been largely, but not exclusively, criticized and ridiculed. (ILS, for my non-librarian readers, stands for Integrated Library System — basically the software that runs your public catalog and your backend record-keeping — cataloging, aquisitions, circulation, statistics, the whole works.)

Along with 64 or so other people, I tuned in to the UStream broadcast of the Library 101 presentation yesterday, or at least the video part of it. My connection was a bit shaky, and while the video itself seemed to work fine, I couldn’t hear much of what the presenters were saying. I’ve watched a few things from Internet Librarian this year on UStream, and in general it is pretty great, so my thanks to the folks who set it up. Since then, a couple of people have said to me that they didn’t think it was really that great, or that they didn’t really understand it, or that they had some other reaction that was not entirely positive — and they felt that because their reaction wasn’t entirely positive, they couldn’t say anything. And that made me really, really sad.

I read the white paper last night and participated in some of the early online commentary, and I’ve had several discussions about that with people, too, and today I read Stephen Abram’s blog post on the subject, where he seems to be quite hurt by the pileup of criticism. Reaction has so far not been terribly sympathetic.

Two events, two commentary pileups, two very different tones. Why? We’ve talked in the biblioblogosphere in years past about uncritical me-tooism and how it stifles conversation and shuts down thoughtful, critical voices. We have also seen plenty of trainwrecks: comment threads rife with personal attacks and you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists mentality. (In this particular instance, Abram’s paper has a bit of that quality to me — you use a standard ILS (preferably SirsiDynix’s) or you’re stupid (“Proprietary software has more features. Period. Proprietary software is much more user-friendly.”) — but then it is a piece of marketing material from a for-profit corporation, so to some extent, that’s to be expected.)

But I digress.

I was underwhelmed by the Library 101 video. It was neat to see so many faces in it (although, like Jessamyn, I would have liked to see them in the credits), and it’s clear from the video that Michael Porter and David Lee King care about it deeply and are enthusiastic about libraries and the future to a degree that few of us can manage. The site, although somewhat annoyingly slow to load, has a lot of good resources, and I look forward to reading the essays that people have submitted. I don’t really get pouring that much of one’s time and money and effort into an online video project, but if it gets some librarians to think about their skills and what they need to move into the future, and if its creators had fun doing it and there are people who enjoy watching it, that’s all to the good. Despite what readers of this blog may think, I actually think there’s a great deal more to being a librarian than being tech-savvy, and I’d like to focus more on some of those things, but I know there are a lot of people who still need to hear the tech message, and perhaps this video and its attendent resources will reach some of them.

So maybe you can’t in fact really criticize Library 101. It’s a labor of love and a labor with a message. The message is hard to criticize, and while you can critique the artistry, you have to remember that it’s a couple of guys doing this in their spare time. They’re not out to make money — in fact, from what they’ve said, they have lost money on this thing. I don’t want anyone to feel that they can’t criticize the video, but at the same time, I don’t think there’s much damage done by the pile-up of compliments.

But it is entirely legitimate to criticize Abram’s paper. ILSs are big money, and they are sold largely by for-profit companies and paid for — in the public and state university library worlds — with public money. I am not an expert on open source ILSs, but I think they are an important and worthy development. It’s possible that the flaws Abram cites exist. I could point out a number of flaws that are present in SirsiDynix systems, too. But the existence of flaws is not an argument against development — if anything, it is an argument for it. I value open source projects because they are, to my mind, ideologically aligned with libraries in a way that corporate enterprises never will be. That doesn’t make them perfect; that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think long and hard before adopting any given ILS. But it makes them worthwhile — and worth defending.

Posted in change the world, opacs, the biblioblogosphere | 6 Comments
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  • 30 October 2009 at 9:56 pm Steele Lawman
    Laura, one thing I like about this post and love about your writing in general is that you write like an essayist and not like a PR flack. You admit and expose ambiguities and uncertainties and don't always try and wrap them up in a neat package or position.
  • 30 October 2009 at 11:47 pm laura x
    Stephen Abram just commented on the post, if anyone's curious.

the 2.0 aesthetic: a draft with some comments

Posted on 1 July 2008 by laura

One of the great pleasures of college was that I got to spend time around a lot of very smart (and often very funny) people. It was a lot like the biblioblogosphere in that respect — the biblioblogosphere with cafeteria food. Among the smartest of these friends was the guy who introduced me to the idea of an aesthetic — that is, to the idea that what you wore and what you listened to and what you liked expressed not just a peculiar set of preferences but also, quite frequently, something about your socio-economic status and your politics and your belief system. I was bowled over by this (please remember that at the time I was 19 or 20 and it was probably 3:30 in the morning at Denny’s in Poughkeepsie).

I’ve been thinking a lot about aesthetics lately, and about how thinking about a 2.0 aesthetic is helpful in thinking about some of the thornier — and often unacknowledged — problems in what we want to do in libraries.

First, let us admit, for the purposes of this argument, that we have an aesthetic. We like Gmail better than Hotmail. We think Flickr is a better way to share our photos than Kodak Gallery. We’re opposed to unnecessary file formats, and we generally think CSS is better than tables. Many of us like Moleskins and are Mac devotees. We are RSS bigots. LibraryThing is better than Shelfari! Twitter and FriendFeed are duking it out!

I’m generalizing, of course, and I’ve undoubtedly offended more than a few of you, but can you honestly tell me that you relate to nothing in that list, or in a list like it? I doubt it. I’m guilty on multiple counts.

We have this aesthetic, or these aesthetics, and they play a big part in our lives, since a good chunk of us spend much of our lives in front of a computer, using a web browser. I’m always stunned that there are people who find Internet Explorer an acceptable way to surf the web, but you know what? A lot of people do find it satisfactory.

I worry sometimes that we are so caught up in our aesthetic that we let it guide our decisions without questioning whether what we are doing is really in our patrons’ best interests or is simply what we would want as library patrons. Awhile ago I was putting together a presentation about how to make a website. My initial opening involved showing a bunch of what we would all consider really ugly websites. Then I showed a few slides to someone and realized that, to them, these sites didn’t look that bad. They weren’t picking up on what was, to me, an obvious aesthetic difference between “The Wizard” and, say, the lovely chicago6corners site. What I considered to be obvious and immediate “bad” and “good” weren’t obviously bad and good to everyone.

Aesthetics tend to be associated with looks, but there is more to an aesthetic than just design. In much of the web world, “free” is as essential as rounded corners and valid markup — so important that Chris Anderson is making money on it. Things that are free on the web make up a big part of my life these days. I love Twitter and I love the LSW Meebo Room, and, like most other denizens, I get frustrated when one of them isn’t working. But I wonder how much of that frustration is really justified. I mean, think about it — Twitter is running this huge service for free for all the thousands of us who use it. I have no idea how they’re funding the thing — I assume they’ve got venture capital to spare and are counting on getting us hooked enough that we’ll put up with ads later on, the way that people still shelled out money for cable TV even after it started to have commercials. If we were all paying to use Twitter, I could justify the anger. But we’re not — we’re just expecting people to cater to our addiction to the thing. (Many of us might well be willing to pay, of course, but we’re not, not yet.)

That kind of expectation of entitlement is dangerous. It’s dangerous because expecting things to be free means you’re increasingly willing to let advertising enter your life. And it’s dangerous, as Walt points out, because it means we no longer value people who make things, particularly intangible things. I’m all for Creative Commons licensing — most of what I put on the web comes with a Creative Commons license. But (with very rare exceptions) I don’t write for free to other people’s specifications. I don’t work for free at my library, either. I get paid, and I get paid with public money that has been put aside under the understanding that there are certain things in life that should be out of the control of the market. Anti-commercialism is a big part of my aesthetic, or so I believe. But some days I run up against things that make me question whether my other aesthetic principles are in accordance with the ones I hold most dear.

Posted in library 2.0, the biblioblogosphere | 6 Comments
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three little candles

Posted on 7 May 2008 by laura

I’ve been trying to remember lately how I first figured out RSS and when I got myself set up with a Bloglines account. I remember that Morgan told me there were a lot of great radical librarian bloggers during the summer of 2003, but since that was before I even thought of going to library school. I stowed that information away somewhere, I think, and dimly remembered it when a friend sent me the Wired article about Jessamyn West. I know I saw the early announcements for Radical Reference through some lefty discussion list in the late summer of 2004, just as I was starting library school.

I can’t quite figure out just how I got into this reading blogs business, but I do know that three years ago today I decided to plonk my marbles down into the virtual dirt circle that is the blogosphere, and I started a little blog called lis.dom.

Posted in me, the biblioblogosphere | 6 Comments
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she started to sing as she tackled the thing

Posted on 24 April 2008 by laura

Meredith Farkas says such nice things about me that I’ve had to spend the better part of the last few days keeping myself from repeating them, ad nauseum, to everyone I know. (I feel rather like the other lion at the end of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe: “‘Us lions,’ he said, ‘us lions.’ That means him and MEEEEEE!”).

Dorothea Salo says things that are so true they hurt — though I mean that as a compliment. You get more points in this world for being pretty than for being truthful, and we ought to acknowledge that, unpleasant as it is. But it is true that if not for Dorothea and the goth cats, my knowledge of open access would be close to nonexistent. It’s also true that if Meredith (among other people) hadn’t responded so kindly to my first half a dozen or so idiotic questions about editing wikis, I might well be one of the people who goes around saying they can’t do wikis (or blogs, or cataloging, or whatever.

I do not generally get questions about how to become a rock star (in fact, I’m fairly sure I’ve never gotten one). Since I’m not particularly a rock star, this doesn’t bother me, although I will add, for the benefit of anyone hoping to glean such information from this little ditty, that moving to a town of 351 people is not really the best way to go about rockstardom. (Had I only thought to move to a town of 300 people, and acquire a coyote, and live in a cabin, and take beautiful photographs! Ah well.)

In the course of thinking about all these things, though, it has occurred to me that perhaps the way I go about things is a little peculiar. I am the branch manager of a tiny public/school library. Most of my day at work is spent reading book reviews, ordering books, helping patrons find stuff (mostly books), doing various interlibrary loan tasks, walking down to the post office to get the mail, organizing programs, submitting people’s timesheets, and trying to remember to schedule people to work on Wednesday nights. Now that I’m also (by self-declaration) the virtual branch manager, I do a little website maintenance and a little statistics gathering from databases and such, too. But there’s really very little call for me to know much about open access, or link resolvers, or college-level bibliographic instruction, or any of the other things that I spend time reading about almost every day.

There’s no call for me to know all of that as the Meeteetse librarian, it’s true, but I feel there’s plenty of call for me to know it simply as a librarian. I can’t advocate for net neutrality or open access as a member of my profession if I don’t know what they are or how they affect it. And, quite frankly, like Dorothea, I can’t imagine going through day by day without at least trying to learn something.

I’ve been lucky to have found myself a place where I can do some of that learning and a community of people who provide friendly encouragement and answer even the stupidest questions. This morning I started my new project, which is learning PHP. PHP is actually directly related to my job, in that I’m learning it in part in order to build a little application for the library. All I’ve managed to do so far is build a little form that captures a word you type in and redeploys it as part of a sentence. Not much, but it’s a start. And, thanks to the many people I know out there doing cool things, I felt that it was a start that I could make. My mantra in such projects is always, “Hey, if John Blyberg / Jessamyn West / other librarian rock star can do it well, then surely it’s worth it for me to do it poorly.” Or, as the godawful poem I learned in third grade put it,

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That maybe it couldn’t, but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.

Posted in libraries and librarianship, me, the biblioblogosphere | 2 Comments
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solidarity, virtually: my CiL2008

Posted on 10 April 2008 by laura

I’ve been watching Computers in Libraries (and Internet Librarian) from afar for three years now, starting with the OPML file Steve put together for CiL in 2006. I’ve watched the conference tags make it into Flickr’s hot tags list every year, and I’ve seen hundreds of sea lion photos from Monterey. I’ve read the complaints about internet access, read scores of blog posts about conference sessions, and I’ve watched attendees plan dinner dates via an ever-evovling series of technologies, from wikis to Twitter.

But there was something different about this year. Usually, as much as I love following the action, I get depressed looking at all the pictures of people having drinks and fun because I’m not there and I’m sure I’m missing out on things. This year, for some reason, I didn’t feel that way. Maybe it was the increased level of wifi that meant more people were Twittering. Maybe it was the back channel in the LSW Meebo Room. Maybe it was that I got to be at the conference by being in the LSW Room when Josh, Steve, and Rikhei were talking about it. Maybe it was that I got mentioned in that presentation. Maybe it was that at least one person I talked to via some medium thought I was at the conference. Whatever it was, though, it left me feeling as though I was in fact there, and today, it’s giving me that post-conference let down, where you suddenly realize that you have to take all your great ideas back home and deal with the 179 emails you’ve accumulated and the garbage you forgot to take out and making dinner instead of going out for sushi with your friends, and you’re exhausted because you haven’t slept much all week.

I’ve been trying to place the sense that I got while the conference was going on, and it finally dawned on me: it felt like the sit-in.

While we were at Weeg, we ran through Heidi’s e-mail accumulated over the past day, almost all of it from the USAS listserv. It’s not just us and Purdue, it’s all over–and spreading like wildfire. Kentucky, Tulane, Michigan, Oregon, Yale, Wesleyan–they’re all holding buidlings or camping out or hunger striking or something, and I know there are schools I’m forgetting. This movement is national, and though the national media haven’t picked up on it yet, we know it (thanks to the wonders of modern technology). But sitting there, reading all those posts from all over–somebody compiled all the letters asking for support and sent them out in one mass e-mail–we felt it. All over America right now people are sleeping, but some of those people–a critical mass of those people–are college students and supporters, camping out on lawns and in libraries, in hallways and on doorsteps, demanding change, demanding a voice, demanding a better world.

Well, not exactly like that, of course, but it had much the same energy, much the same silliness promanading with serious intent.

I’m happiest when I think I’m changing the world. I’m not certain that Information Today Inc. is changing the world, or not in exactly the ways I would like it to, but I’m certain that the people in the Library Society of the World are changing librarianship, and I like thinking that I’m a part of this amazing group of people who are all tinkering away in our own corners of the world. Someday I hope to meet more of you in person, but I think it’s a testament to the power of the intertubes that you all feel like comrades already.

Posted in change the world, conference reports, the biblioblogosphere | 4 Comments
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with a lot of help from my friends

Posted on 18 December 2007 by laura

This post is long overdue.

On October 3, I did the official soft launch of our new library website. There are still some improvements to come (online library card sign up!) and some things I’d like to do but which may be hard to institute (MeeboMe reference!) but on the whole, it’s done.

It’s basically a WordPress installation with some of the bloggy parts taken out, a modified WordPress theme, and a highly customized sidebar. I use Google to run the events calendar, because I wanted something that would easily handle repeated events such as story times. There are still some little problems (for instance, the header has a blue background in Internet Explorer and none in Firefox), and the header does kind of hog a lot of real estate, but given the amount of time it took to get it working at all, I decided against trying to do more with it right now). On the whole, though, it wasn’t really very hard to set up, despite the devils in the details, and if you’d like more information, just let me know.

Websites don’t usually come with acknowledgements pages, but they should. This, then, is an acknowledgements post.

First, I’d like to thank everyone in the Park County Library System: our director, Frances Clymer, for giving me permission to go ahead with this project; our IT person, Ty Wright, for doing the WordPress installation; everyone on the web team for putting up with multiple logins, long instructions, incessant e-mails, and general nattering from me; and the library staff for embracing the new site.

Thanks to Mitchell Szczepanczyk for doing the test site WordPress installation and to Mitchell and his co-worker Holmes for various troubleshooting.

Thanks to Desiree Saunders at the Wyoming State Library for her indefatigable database access fixing and for pointing out a number of decisions I’d forgotten I had to make.

Thanks to Aaron Schmidt for showing what a blog-based library website could look like.

Thanks to Dorothea Salo for pointing out some faceting errors in an early iteration of the Research page and for sending me this at a crucial point. The Research page still has problems, but those aren’t Dorothea’s fault.

Thanks to Michael Sauers for blogging about the importance of valid code. I know ours isn’t perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than at least one (far more expensive) example he cites.

Thanks to Andrea Mercado and Jessamyn West for their offers of assistance. Thanks also to Jessamyn for writing the post that inspired me to make the iPod options page into its own front-and-center page rather than just having it be a post.

Thanks to Steve Lawson for fixing every CSS problem I created and some I didn’t. I am planning to leave a bequest to Colorado College when I die mandating that they always employ at least one person who can fix other librarians’ CSS problems, since I think that’s on the verge of becoming an official part of Steve’s job description.

Thanks to the Twitterverse and all the regulars in the LSW Meebo Room for advice, encouragement, and general good humor.

And thanks to the people behind WordPress, Twitter, and Meebo for creating the tools that made all this good stuff possible. (Oh, and Google, but they get enough props, right?)

Thanks to everyone I forgot.

Posted in the biblioblogosphere, website(s) | 7 Comments

social anxiety and social software

Posted on 28 June 2007 by laura

For various reasons, I’ve been trying out a few new social networks lately, and I plan, gradually, to add a few more.

This past weekend, I went down to Denver to a wedding. The bride is an old, old friend–we’ve known each other since first grade, though we haven’t been in touch regularly in several years. The only people I knew at the wedding were the bride and her parents. One woman there remembered the column I wrote for an independent weekly newspaper in Iowa City, and a couple of people looked vaguely familiar, like I might have met them around campus in the late ’90s.

I suffer from a certain amount of free-floating anxiety, some of which attaches itself to social situations when it has the chance. One of the reasons I live in such a small and out of the way place is that in a place as small as this one with as many eccentric people as this place has, my own eccentricity and awkwardness don’t stand out very much. Going to a wedding where you have to dress nicely and converse with people about potentially mine-field-laden topics such as What You Do for a Living and the State of Your Social Life is not, therefore, generally my idea of a good time. I put myself in these situations, though, because I don’t want to lose the ability to function in them at all, just as I don’t want to lose completely my knack for driving in the city.

A lot of people have social anxiety of some sort, but lately I’ve been thinking about the ways that sort of anxiety might translate to social software, where you have both friends and “friends,” where you can poke someone but no one will tell you what doing so means, and where, in some cases, people are not who they seem.

When Meredith and Sarah wrote awhile back about their disliking of the rush of “friends” one gets when one joins a new social network, and how that makes it hard to use the network with your actual friends, I saw their point, but then I immediately began to worry. Had I become “friends” with too many people? Were these people adding me back out of obligation or out of interest? When I tried a new site out, was I a librarian trying to learn more about the tools her patron uses, or was I Laura, trying to make more friends, not just more “friends?”

Very few of my actual, non-librarian friends have much of a presence online. There are a smattering of Flickr accounts, and recently there’s been a small rash of Facebook accounts, and there are a couple of blogs. I know of a few LiveJournals and MySpace accounts, but as I’m not on either of those networks (yet), I don’t really keep up with them. Everyone I follow in Twitter is a librarian. Twitter is fabulous that way, as is the LSW Meebo Room–or rather, it’s fabulous if you’re a library person with an interest in the internet. I’m sure to many people–even many librarians–the conversations we have there would sound very much like the biblioblogger sounds to the local branch librarian. If you were hoping to use Twitter to keep up with your college friends, it would be maddening.

Though I didn’t know anyone else at the wedding I went to, I had probably known the bride longer than anyone there other than her family. But she and I haven’t been in touch in a few years, and though I can remember playing with her in the outdoor fireplace at her house in grade school and smuggling rated R movies into the house to watch when we were in high school (and were not, by her parents’ dictate, supposed to be watching such things), I don’t know much about her day to day life in the past few years. On the way down to Denver, I stopped overnight in Laramie and got to meet Kaijsa, and the day after the wedding, Steve Lawson drove up from Colorado Springs and we had lunch. I had never met either of them, but I knew all sorts of things about both of them quite well. I’d seen Kaijsa’s shoes and Steve’s son’s model rockets. In some odd way, I know some of my “imaginary” friends better than some of my oldest “real” friends.

There’s nothing new about the different ways in which we know our new friends verusus our old friends, but there is, perhaps, an added dimension–the ways we know our friends and our “friends,” and how sometimes people morph from one to the other.

My various online presences are currently listed in the sidebar of this blog under “meta laura.” Please feel free to add me as a “friend” or a friend, or both.

Posted in privacy, the biblioblogosphere | 6 Comments

some heroes

Posted on 11 April 2007 by laura

One of the most fascinating things about watching this meme, conceived by Walt and begun by Dorothea, has been seeing not only what blogs people highlight but also reading about what criteria they used to select them. The people below all do something blog-like, and they also all do some good in the world. In some cases, that good is manifest in the content of their RSS feed; in others the blog serves more as a chronicle. In all cases, they are people whose works I admire greatly.

Deb, blogging at REAL PUBLIC LIBRARIAN. I don’t know why more people aren’t talking about Deb, particularly in YA circles (of course, I’m kind of disconnected from YA circles at the moment, so perhaps they are all feasting on her wisdom and I’m just unware of it–all apologies if this is so). John Gehner, who will show up on this list in just a bit, writes frequently about social exclusion and the devastating effects it has on the poor and homeless. Deb works with youth within a similar framework. Check out this classic post on different kinds of youth and different kinds of youth spaces in libraries and this more recent one about the role of libraries in community development.

Michael McGrorty, blogging at Library Dust. If you’ve ever met Michael or gotten some correspondence from him, you know how charming he is. If you read his blog, you also learn that he’s smart and witty. And, in the course of doing some investigative blogging, he wrote one of the best tributes to the labor movement that I have ever read.

Jenna Freedman, blogging, answering questions, rabble-rousing, and inspring awe at Radical Reference. Some day Jenna and I are going to switch lives for a couple of months so that she can experience life in a town without stoplights and I can impersonate a Lower East Side librarian. In the meantime, I just admire her from afar.

Shinjoung Yeo, both people named James Jacobs, and assorted guests blogging at Free Government Information. You’d think everyone would be out to save free government information. These people do their best in a sadly uncrowded field.

David Bigwood, blogging at Catalogablog. Catalogablog is one of my all-time favorite blog names. It’s one of the first blogs I ever subscribed to, I think because Jessamyn linked to it, and though I rarely understand what it’s about, I admire the heck out of David Bigwood for keeping the world so up-to-date on the shadowy world of cataloging. (Cataloging itself isn’t inherently shadowy; there’s just something about the subject that lends itself to the adjective–all those tech services people hidden away in the back room, crouched over their machines.) Also, I’m still honored that he left a comment on my post about OPACs and children’s materials.

John Gehner, posting at the website of the Homelessness, Hunger, and Poverty Task Force. HHPTF is a subset of a subset of ALA. John revived it from the ashes a few years ago pretty much single-handedly. He has put together killer lists of resources and organizations, and he has consistently drawn out the best thinking about libraries, homelessness, and poverty going on today and compiled it for you all in one place, with an RSS feed.

There are many more heroes out there. These are just some of mine.

Posted in the biblioblogosphere | Comments Off