Connecting Librarian

Welcome to the Carnival! This week we have a plethora of great rides for you to check out and enjoy. We will begin with our Carnival submissions. Many thanks to those who sent in some great links!

The Carnival starts with Jodie Schneider, who points to a post from Cataloguing Futures. “Why Web 2.0 is leading back to full cataloging” highlights snippets from a Library Juice post, which posits that the best outcome is cataloguing and tagging together. Chris Zammarelli highlights a post at DIY Librarian entitled “The Plane Speech” - which gives advice on what to say to the person with whom you get chatting and asks aren’t libraries obsolete? He also points to Notes about Libraries where Claire summarises the key talks from the London Librarian and Archivists Group in “All Change LMLAG Conference”.

therapydoc highlights one of her own posts at Everyone needs therapy, entitled “Commencement”, which explores how when after attending many graduations, she finally sits through a whole ceremony and realises how boring they can. But can anything be done to change that?

If that isn’t enough to give you your fill of fun, then here are my picks for the Carnival.

Great post from John Blyberg at Blyberg.net entitled Buzzkill 2.0 - I’ll let you read it to find out more. I loved Karen Schneider’s post at Free Range Librarian, “That’s OK lady, nobody thinks you’re interesting, either” where she lambasted a journalist for their review of Twitter, because of their sloppy research and overuse of assumptions - very entertaining!

Sarah Houghton Jan from Librarian in Black posted “Sarah’s social network presences, and the dilution thereof” which talked about whether its worth all the effort to maintain a wide range of presences online. This has also been on the mind of Meredith at Information Wants to be Free (amongst others - myself included!) She also ponders the issue of archiving her blog in Blog Backup (a concern of mine too - too much to think about!)

Great excitement in library land with Danbury Library being the first to use Library Thing for Libraries - go check it out! (try searching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and look at the tags at the end of the record). And to finish, a video. Andrew Finegan, the Librarian Idol, produced his “Libraries in 2010″ video for a Libraries Interact competition for Australian Library Week. It won! You can check out the other entries at Libraries Interact.

Hope you enjoyed the Carnival and don’t forget to get your submissions in for the Carnival of the InfoSciences #73, which will be hosted at Libraryola. Thanks for dropping in!

I am the honoured host of the Carnival of the InfoSciences #72, which will be posted on Monday 28th May. For those who don’t know the Carnival, it’s a travelling weblog post that endeavours to show the best of the information science blogosphere. Its hosted fortnightly by a different library blogger and well coordinated by Chadwick Seagraves of InfoSciPhi.

So your help is now needed. Please send me your links to include in the carnival, either to one of your own blog posts or any other post you found interesting and would like to share with other bloggers. That is the nature of the Carnival. Send your posts as per the submission guidelines or email me and I will be sure to include it.

There’s lots of fun things going on in the biblioblogosphere at present, so please get your contributions in. See you at the Carnival!

Infotoday now has the Presentations from Computers in Libraries 2007 on their website. So if you are interested you can check out the presentations from pretty much all the sessions at CIL, including the slides (with my speaker notes) and references from my paper “Libraries building community and Library 2.o initiatives in Australia”.

I am amazed and honoured to see that my paper was blogged about by Connie Crosby (great gal who I had a lot of fun spending time with) and my interactions, both at CIL and at other times have been blogged about all over the biblioblogosphere.

Which leaves me with my final dilemma for which I need your help. I actually wrote the full text of the paper on which the slides and final presentation were based. I would like to also make that available for anyone who is interested, along with anything of relevance I can dig up from my past or produce in future. Do I put them on a specially created page on my husband’s business’s website, do I create a wiki for my professional dealings and put them there? This is all very new to me and I’m not sure which way to go with it. Any thoughts, suggestions, etc on how I can resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated.

I am hoping my trip has helped me to see what my library will look like in the next year, but what will it look like further down the track?

With Australian Library and Information Week fast approaching, my friends and co-bloggers at Libraries Interact are asking for your vision of what the library will look like 2010. So head on over to Libraries Interact, read Get Creative for May and be inspired, before putting fingers to keyboard and telling us all about your vision. You could win an autographed copy of Meredith Farkas‘ new book “Social Software in Libraries” which is currently winging its way to our shores, fresh from her own supply.

Entries close on May 20th, so start dreaming and get those entries in! I can’t wait to see where you think libraries will be in 2010 (not too far away now!).

Wow, my last visit and I spent a lovely day at Thomas Ford Memorial Library (TFML) in the outer Chicago suburbs. Thomas Ford is a single branch service with 7 librarians plus support staff. However, besides the number of branches and staff, our respective library services have a lot in common - more on that soon.

Thomas Ford’s ILS is part of the 81 (correction, it should be 96) library SWAN consortia which shares the same ILS and has reciprocal borrowing rights. They are looking to try a new module on their ILS which has more of an Amazon-like interface, which will incorporate reviews etc.

They offer downloadable audio for iPods, with content from iTunes. They also used to get MP3 content from a statewide consortia, but wasn’t getting the use. Their iPod content started well, tailed off but use is picking up again, with classics and scifi moving better than bestsellers. Process is manually intensive, so is usually done at the reference. Only limits are 3 week loan periods and 1 simultaneous user - most they have ever downloaded for a user is 4 titles (they offer 67 titles).

Their website was created 3 years ago (correction, it was 2002 - current iteration is from 2005) , by Aaron Schmidt (Walking Paper blogger - now Director at Northern Plains Public Library) using Moveable Type. Their site is hosted at LIS News. It runs the website, with some blog content and fixed template content, as well as a staff blog where they share notes, news and more. Comments are not enabled due to overwhelming spam. The blog entries can feed to different pages on the website. Very nice. Have a slight problem with uploading files, as Movable Type disallows the upload of large files, including images.

They are about to do a redesign of the website, keeping Movable Type for blogs and use another form for the rest of the website, using Dreamweaver as their editor. They want the website to do more to promote the services and collections of the library - at present this content is down too deep in the site and is rarely accessed.

They would like to have the public contributing book reviews via a public blog and will invite some early contributions so that they launch it with some content already available. They will use a Google Co-op facility to search their reviews (cool!). In the new website they want more staff collaboration, to make it easier for staff to contribute, have more community involvement, and be interactive. It will be interesting to watch it all develop over the coming months.

Their Staff exchange blog for staff news is supplemented by their new staff intranet, which uses Media Wiki and is well populated with great content. Its very comprehensive and more content is added nearly daily. They also have a Flickr page and MySpace and Facebook profiles.

They have some “listen to a story” podcasts and are looking to do some screencasting at some stage. They have created a blog, using Word Press for their Big Read 2007 program which involved 8 public libraries in the area. They would like to do more with their patron picks, staff picks and blurbs about new stock.

I felt really at home here, because like my work, we have no programmers on staff and our website is hosted offsite. Yet Thomas Ford have done some marvellous things with mainly the desire to learn and try new things. Very motivational for me, showing that its possible, even when you don’t have many technical resources available to you.

Their local history wiki came out of inspiration at the 2004 PLA Conference. It is blog based and came out of grant money which was used to pay Aaron to set up the website and Nancy, other TFML staffer, to do the digitisation and metadata. They already had a high quality scanner/copier for their central printing and for digitisation of the historic photos. At the time, a blog was the easiest option - the content has been duplicated at the Illinois Digital Archive, but took a year to get it uploaded.

The Western Springs History blog, using Word Press, has over 100 photos of local houses with accompanying info. It was supposed to be a starting point, but has not developed much beyond that at this stage. However, they are meeting with the Western Springs Historical Society in the next month to investigate further collaboration efforts.

Wow, such cool, achievable stuff. Thanks to Rick and Kristin for taking time out to share their achievements and future plans and to Thomas Ford Memorial Library for making me welcome, I really appreciate it.