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.

Where are LITA and ALA in social networks?

From an email exchange on: LITA-L

I just recently read about and joined Ning, But I am not yet convinced
that it is a better product than having presence(s) on older social
networks. If one is a frequenter of MySpace or Facebook where, as it
happens, there are a number of groups related to libraries, Where would
one find an entree to Ning? It seems that an important aspect of social
networking services is the chance for discovery. How does one discover
highly specific social networks on Ning? Maybe this is just an issue of
preferring what I already know over the unknown of Ning. If Ning takes
off and achieves saturation in the same way that the bigger social
networking sites have done then my concerns will be moot.

"Not Only is there No God, Try getting a plumber on the weekend."
--Woody Allen, 1965, from the new _Yale Book of Quotations_

Drew, Bill wrote:
> As many of you already know, I created a Library 2.0 social network on
> Ning. I have seen that ALA has a MySpace page and is present in Second
> Life. Why not get ALA and LITA to create official social networks on
> Ning? The Library 2.0 network now has over 450 members. It has be live
> only 10 days.
>
> Wilfred (Bill) Drew
> Associate Librarian, Systems and Reference
> Morrisville State College Library
> E-mail: mailto:drewwe@morrisville.edu

(Subsequently, I learned of Jenny Levine's ALA Ning.com network. ) -SB
--
Steve Brantley
University of Illinois at Chicago
Daley Library
M/C 234
Box 8198
Chicago, IL 60680
312-996-4032
jbrant1@uic.edu

Chime in with presentation ideas on Web 2.0

I am giving a presentation on Web 2.0 to faculty members and administrators who may or may not have any idea of what Web 2.0 is comprised.

I thought one way to illustrate the social and collaborative nature of this evolution of the WWW would be to leverage the power of Web 2.0 tools to help me create the presentation.

I want to make the presentation using an active network connection and feature my google docs, flickr, blogger, facebook, del.icio.us, youtube (you name it!), accounts as the location of my content.

I will of course have a canned presentation as well, if there should be some network burps.

My hope is that all my 2.0 homies, by which I mean all of you seeing this post via blogger, friendster, facebook, myspace or RSS willl chime in with a novel idea or comment about how I might utilize Web 2.0, or Library 2.0 in the presentation.

The presentation is only 10-15 minutes long, but I think can illustrate a great deal of the power of Web services in that time.


If, on the other hand, I do not have a readership or participants, then I will strategically leave this call out of my presentation. :)

CTheory Article

There is an interesting article about the Boston Litebrite panic of 2007, "Fear and Loathing in the Bay State" on CTHEORY.net