There seems to be some talk about blogging the 2005 SLA conference in Toronto (Christina's LIS Rant, Science Library Pad). I've enjoyed reading other conference blogs (especially the InfoToday Blog from SLA 2004) but never really thought about doing it myself. I think the Science Library Pad post sums up the reasons for doing it (or for reading conference blogs):
I blog during the sessions because, quite frankly, I rarely manage to write a full-blown retrospective conference report afterwards, and I have a lot better things to do than transcribe paper notes into electronic after the fact too
I always take notes at conferences, but unless I write a report, I tend to forget a lot of the details of the conference. Two years ago I wrote a report on SLA 2003 for the APLIC-I Communicator that helped me synthesize the conference experience for myself, and hopefully pass on some of that experience to my colleagues.
Speaking of SLA, I'll be in Tampa next week for the Leadership Summit.
1-19-05: wrestler reads novel, discovers inner ballerina
I've got a thing for wrestlers with book clubs - what can I say? Lance Storm likes to read for many reasons ("Nothing kills time in an airport or on a plane like reading.") but now he can add solving back injuries to the list. Thanks to a Greg Rucka novel, he has learned about a back injury which is usually sustained by ballet dancers, and which he believes he is suffering from. He concludes: "I guess this [wrestling] is closer to ballet than any of us realised." You can read the whole post on his web site.
Unfortunately, the link to Book Marks, his book club, seems to be broken at the moment, so I can't check it out.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. --George Santayana
The past is the luxury of proprietors. --Jean-Paul Sartre
The Globe and Mail reports on the effects of increasingly restrictive permissions costs on documentary filmmaking (How copyright could be killing culture, 1/17/05). [via Library Link of the Day]
This hit home on New Year's Eve when I was watching the top 10 shows on ESPN. They showed footage for all the items on the lists, except for NFL events. For those, they only showed still photos, which hardly had the same effect. I guess (and I don't know for sure) that either they couldn't afford the rights to the NFL footage, or the NFL simply wouldn't give them the rights. Now, ESPN has deep pockets and a business relationship with the NFL. What if someone wanted to make a documentary about professional football and American culture? Is that even possible in this copyright environment?
It's worrisome enough when it's about football, but even more worrisome when it's about Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy. Will our entire history be reduced to a commodity?
Will Shetterly's The People Who Owned the Bible - a story is more scary than it is funny.
1-18-05: librarians are the sexiest thing at Princeton
Perhaps it doesn't say much for Princeton's student body if the library is the "repository of sexiness". Or actually, maybe it says a great deal for the student body. From the Daily Princetonian: Libraries, the Princeton campus's unknown repository of sexiness [via Free Range Librarian]
Education no doubt can be suggested in the classroom; but education happens in the library.
Perhaps Harvard should have hired a librarian as 'fun czar'.
In other news, you know you've been hanging out with demographers too much when your husband gets a job and you say, "It's great to be a dual-earner household again."
1-14-05: more blogging in the classroom
Another post for my dad. Campus Technology's eLearning Dialogue has an article about a study on blogging in higher education courses (Blogs in Higher Ed: Personal Voice as Part of Learning). The article discusses four examples of using blogs in courses, and talks about expectations, outcomes, and both instructors' and students' reactions. [via The Kept-Up Academic Librarian]
Type each letter of the alphabet into the address bar of your browser. See what link is suggested.
A - PRI Library/Data Archive Catalog Search (my library's catalog)
B - Bloglines
C - Comic Book Resources
D - Popline
E - Environmental Protection Agency
F - FedGrants
G - Gmail
H - Health Resources and Services Administration
I - Indiebride
J - JSTOR
K - Kiss the Cook (a kitchen store in Burlington, VT)
L - Library Information Access System (LIAS) (Penn State libraries)
M - Yahoo! Mail
N - PubMed (National Library of Medicine)
O - Oni Press
P - Population Research Institute
Q - nothing
R - Research Buddy (I haven't been able to get this to work for me yet)
S - SLA Central Pennsylvania Chapter
T - THOMAS (Library of Congress)
U - USA Today Health and Behavior
V - Sizzling HTML Jalfrezi
W - William & Tara
X - XML.com
Y - Yahoo!
Z - nothing
It does provide a pretty good snapshot of a typical day for me. A couple are kind of personal, but to be honest I left them in. A few of these don't seem to have much to do with the letter - for instance, my library catalog is housed on a server called athens, which is why it appears under A instead of the expected P. [via TangognaT]
Happy New Year! My resolution for diy librarian in 2005 is to include more "professional" writing - i.e., more serious thoughts about libraries. That doesn't mean I won't still include the silly stuff, too. (And maybe some more guest posts - how about it, W?)
I would be remiss if I did not mention the passing of a comic book pioneer. RIP, Will Eisner. (That link is to the BBC obituary. Newsarama has a more detailed obituary.)
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