lis.dom

• update 9/5/05 9:55 pm CST: Flickr link at the bottom is now fixed and will actually take you to pictures and not to Wired article

I am late to jump on many bandwagons, and, quite often, just simply late. Last weekend, which now seems impossibly long ago, I took a trip home (though I spend most of my time in Chicagoland these days, I’m still an Iowa resident, and Iowa City is still home) to do a few things and see some friends. It was in the course of hanging out with my friends that I realized that in the last six months or so, I have started to speak another language.

A few examples:

• “I’m sorry I never read your site, but OpenDiary doesn’t have an RSS feed.”
• “Oh, you’ve got a blog for your radio show? Send me the url and I’ll add it to my aggregator.”
• “The camera’s just on loan, but I’ll just upload the pictures to Flickr and then I’ll be able to post them wherever.”

I got a lot of blank looks from my friends, who, as you may surmise, are not technologically oriented. They are very smart people. Most of them graduate students at the University of Iowa; the rest are the over-educated, under-employed types one finds around a college town. I don’t consider any of them hopelessly uninformed. But I now inhabit, at least part of the time, this whole world that most of them are only barely aware of.

Now that I’ve found this world, I’d never want to leave it behind, but my visit home was a little reminder that it is, in many ways, still a small and insular community. I love RSS and think it is one of the greatest things since the resurgence of decent bread, but I’ve been reminded that it’s not part of the picture for a lot of people and that, for the most part, they are getting by just fine without it.

You’ve probably heard about different kinds of learners (visual, oral, etc.) and different kinds of intelligence (emotional, intellectual, practical). There are also different ways of gathering information. I get most of my news from the radio, though when I lived in Iowa City, I also read the Daily Iowan in its hard copy version. I got an iPod for Christmas, and while it’s a nifty little device, at least a third of my music collection is still on LP and cassette. In my car at the moment all I have is radio, and thus when I’m driving around on my dogwalking route, I mostly (shudder) listen to commercial rock stations, since “Fresh Air” loses something when heard in 5 minute chunks with 20 minute gaps in between.. I did listen to a bunch of Greg’s podcasts on my drive home (I don’t have one of those handy gadgets that will play your iPod through your radio, so I did this by listening through one ear bud), and they were pretty great, but I don’t know that I’m going to get hooked on podcasting. My friends are mostly not tapped into the world of feeds and aggregators and social bookmarking, and that’s okay.

I started this blog with the idea that it would be a way to show fellow grad students about the wonderfulness of library-land blogs, which I now realize was kind of a nutty idea. I continued it, though, because I was getting so much out of it, which seems like a fine reason. And now just as I’ve learned that lots of people are considering jumping off the Flickr bandwagon, I’m jumping on. I don’t actually own a digital camera, so posts will be few and far between, but I did borrow my mother’s while I was home for the weekend and put together a little tour of Iowa City (only the parts I like, and only some of them). Take a look if you like (and remember I’ve never used a digital camera before). Enjoy!

Meredith has put up her survey of the biblioblogosphere, which I just took. A number of people have commented on it already; while I would have probably asked some slightly different questions and asked some questions slightly differently, since I did not go to the work of putting the survey together, I am not going to complain. Anyway, if you are in any way a library person and you have a blog, head on over and fill it out. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, and the more respondents it gets the more interesting the results will be.

After that, I was on a roll, so I tried taking the Blogger survey that they’ve been advertising on the page you get when you log in to post to your blog, but sadly, it was closed. Ah well.

Now that I’m all in a surveying mood, I’m thinking about following through on my idea of a survey of blogger linking habits, which would consider questions such as

Do you link chiefly to other LIS blogs, to other non-LIS blogs, to outside news sources, to studies? And (this is the hard part) why do you link? To back up your argument? To position your argument? Because you admire the post you’re linking to? Because you’re trying to get your blog noticed? Do you link more to short, “hey look at this neat thing!” type posts or more to longer, more reflective ones?

I have never designed a survey at all (except for this very short survey that I did many years ago), so I’ll have to give it some thought, but stay tuned. . . .

I’m a bit belated in posting this, but Joy, from Wanderings of a Student Librarian, has started a list of library student bloggers, plus a few recent graduates, plus a couple of additions. I’m proud to be among their number–and if you are among their number and aren’t on the list, please let her know at joy [at] mollprojects [dot] com.

My new favorite blog (aside, of course, from the wonderfulness that is Overheard in New York [thanks to sivacracy.net for pointing that one out--and note to enterprising Chicago area folk--I think there'd be a market for an Overheard in Chicago]) is the Dewey Blog.

Where else could you read about the proper cataloging of muggles (and the lack of a suitable catagory for quidditch?) or where to book books on flirting? Of course, you can also weigh in on more serious matters, such as the cataloging of graphic novels or cultural objects. But it’s things like learning that catalogers have favorite Dewey numbers that makes me a happy reader. (I myself must admit that I don’t have a favorite Dewey number, but my favorite section of the DDC is the Table of Last Resort. It’s almost as good as the Greek verb construction know as the optative of unfulfilled desire.)

The Dewey Blog does what all good blogs should: it gives a human face to something that used to seem like a monolithic block. And if, like me, you’re still trying to get a good handle on your Dewey, reading the blog is one nice way to do so.

The last post I made here was meant, actually, to serve as an introduction to this post from the Shifted Librarian about the new Ann Arbor District Library web site. Happy reading!

One way I’ve changed, after a year of library school and a few months of working in a library, is that I am much more demanding of my sources of information. I’m not quite sure how this happened, but now when I’m looking for something on a web site or in a library and I can’t find it, I ask. If I have an idea about how information could be made more accessible or more helpful, I suggest it. Sometimes that suggestion goes nowhere, but sometimes the results are faster and better than I could have imagined.

For instance, the other day I was reading the PLA Blog. They have these great round-ups of public library news from all over the country, but it was often hard to tell where exactly the different articles were from (there are, after all, a great many Springfields in this nation). So I wrote in to ask if maybe they could include the city and state of the library in question. They wrote back saying, hey, good idea, and the next day, lo and behold:

We had a request to add the city and state of the library being discussed in each article. I will also add links to the library’s web site as well. I hope this enhances your PLA Blog reading pleasure.

Thanks, Steve, and thanks PLA Blog!