Mother Stork's Baby Book gets more press!

This time babble.com posted "Five Best Baby Books" on their blog and Mother Stork's Baby Book got an honorable mention.

At the end of the day, you've given 110%

An article from the UK paper The Telegraph about infuriating phrases.

"I hear what you're saying." The point was to pack the most clichés
into a single stretch of prose. So let me run this by you. After all,
it's not rocket science...

User Services Blogging

Each day in the news we hear about a huge variety of topics, each of which could be used as "Hot Topics" feature on a library or reference blog. For example, NPR has "Science Fridays" feature which discusses the science behind current events. With a little work, librarians could perform some quick research to find supplemental materials on the subject of the latest topic. It could be a current awareness service or a way to show off our collections to patrons.

practice vs. t-shirt

I was at the University of Chicago for a training meeting yesterday. I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt that said: "that's all well and good in practice..."

persevering

I'm going to move forward with the study, but I've changed the source of my information to a more higly regarded resource. I'm using flashgot to collect the information and refworks to organize it. I can't use the raw information I get from flashgot, but I can scrape the pertinent data, resubmit it to a different database, gather more info, and then test it to prove my idea, or not depending on the results.

A possible collections study

My Promotion and Tenure Liaison has discouraged me from a study I want to perform because he thinks it would be too labor intensive and not publishable. Since he is a giant in Library Science research (well, if not a giant, a towering figure) I should listen to him. But I really want to do the study and I think I can make a case for it as a viable topic and not just a self evaluation as he seems to think it is. If there is a literature for it I'll continue. If not, I'll probably scrap it unless I make some progress on the argument. The study is an evaluation of the titles reviewed in a major book review journal but not acquired by our profile or by my selection. I want to see if there are salient characteristics of the non-acquired books that are either support or invalidate aspects of our profile and/or my selections. As an example, here is a stab at a google scholar search. Here is the tiny url preview link. The results are vague. I'll finesse it later.

three things we can do better

I recently took a survey conducted by the 2007 ALA Emerging Leaders group in which they asked what three things could be done by librarians to: "better communicate to the outside world about their profession?"

1. Emphasize our expertise over the "librarian" label and the stereotypes that it connotes.
2. Populate existing non-library centered Web destinations that allow content creation and identify oneself as a librarian or connected to a particular library.
3. Provide research tips and tricks aimed at other professionals on information that the other professionals thought was strictly within thier domain of expertise.