Thoughts and selected news updates on the Library Science/Information Science field(s)
There are 262 posts filed in Libraries/Info Sci (this is page 22 of 27).
After some last minute mixups and shenanigans, my plans are finalized for ALA next month! I’ll be arriving in Chicago on the afternoon of Thursday the 23rd, and leaving late on Sunday the 26th. I’d love to stay longer, but can’t afford to miss any more classes.
P.S. I’m talking June here, not May.
I’m officially registered for the ALA conference next month!
I likely won’t be there the whole time due to class schedules, but the student registration rate and similarly dirt cheap airfare (Southwest is just setting up shop in Pittsburgh and has deep discounts) made it too good of an opportunity to pass up.
Anyone have any recommendations on hotels? That’s my one missing piece of the puzzle. ALA’s website has some tips up, but I’d like an insider’s perspective.
Edit: I just discovered the ALA Chicago Wiki, which looks to be a big help!
OCLC has a mini-feature up on gaming in libraries. I’m glad to see this area getting some attention, but have a few things to add:
In fact, I’d ditch the broader ‘hint books’ entirely, and focus on volumes specific to in depth coverage of one game. Video game cheats and codes can be found in abundance, and fresher, on the Internet for free. Why duplicate? Strategy guides for one specific game will have a longer shelf life and fill a ‘not for free’ niche.
I’m on my way to bed, but just ran across an article:
Primitivist OR Luddite AND Librarian
It’s rather… inflammatory to say the least.
Here’s the ending line:
“Perhaps it is time to throw the computers and the tech-savvy librarians out of our libraries.”
I’m not sure quite what to make of it yet, except to say that I obviously disagree. Still being in school, I’m probably not qualified to respond to many of the points anyway. So here’s some good responses from others wiser than I that I agree with 100%:
P.S. – I’ve updated my Permalink structure to something more logical. If you’ve got any links to entries saved, you’ll probably have to update them. Sorry! But now it’s a much clearer system I think.
Yesterday I learned that the Library of Congress recommends for Dewey placement:
Pirates are filed under True Crime.
Lewis and Clark are filed under Travel (next to books like guides to hotels in the Western states).
Why is the job picture so different between LIS professors and practicing librarians?
Professors always tell me that jobs are plentiful and easy to come by. People I meet in the field almost universally tell me it could take a while before I find anything.
It’s sort of demoralizing.
For more, see LISnews.com
Apologies for lack of posts recently, end of semester rush is upon me.
Walt Crawford’s newest issue of Cites & Insights is out! It contains a well-executed article about printability of blogs, or rather the lack thereof.
Of course, the whole issue is worth reading, not just this article.
But I’m very happy to see that Hidden Peanuts made the A-List of printable blogs! But as he says, that doesn’t account for content. 🙂 I thank WordPress more than anything I’ve done; there’s been no conscious effort on my part to make HP any more or less printable.
That’s why I like the article so much. It’s something I’d never even thought about before, but now strikes me as an issue worth considering. I don’t imagine that many readers would be interested in printing out what I have to say, for any of Crawford’s three reasons, but of course other blogs lend themselves to that much more ably.
After reading the piece, I checked out HP in print preview out of curiosity. Interestingly, I get slightly different results between browsers. If an image straddles a page break, Firefox just cuts the image in half – one part on page 1, the rest on page 2. IE is a little more intelligent, and bumps the whole image to the second page. I gotta give Microsoft the edge in this department.
Because I’m a native son of Rochester, NY, I still read the local paper online now and then.
As the home of Kodak, the city has always had an interest in photography. Today there’s an article on the pitfalls and perils of digital image preservation in the home/consumer environment.
The issue of image loss is a big one. My brother ran into some Windows issues a couple years back and ended up losing almost every digital picture he’d taken. They weren’t backed up anywhere.
I’ve been paranoid ever since. I back up photos regularly on an external hard drive, distribute CDs of photo sets to friends, and now have uploaded the majority of my snapshots to Flickr. I think I’m safe, but you never know.
Think of it like a digital shoebox. I’ve got piles of ‘traditional’ pictures as well, and really should see about getting them scanned in.
One of the more cogent points in the D&C article is that digital photos have no inherent backup. Film at least provided negatives to derive reprints from should the worst happen.
The article also mentions the advantages of keeping your digital photos organized. Maybe I’m weird, but I actually quite enjoy organizing my pictures. But even so, I wish I’d started sooner. I did a major overhaul of my organizational scheme, which was haphazard at best, about a year go. In the process I discovered that my old camera had very often not recorded the correct date. So I wasn’t able to classify some of the pictures accurately. The best I can do is narrow it down to the year. But now that my scheme is in place, dropping new files into it is a breeze.
Digital preservation and standards creep like this always interests me. Will the JPEG format still be readable 50 years from now? If so, will the storage device they’re located on be readable?
Who says Librarians don’t have a sense of humor?
edit: the site had all kinds of april fools stuff up, obviously gone now.
The debate topic testerday in my management class was whether or not digitization was a good idea. Naturally, Michael Gorman’s name came up in the discussion. The points made on both sides were interesting, and this was the first topic in the class that I felt everyone in the class really engaged with. Most debates peter out with a question or two, but yesterday the prof eventually had to cut them off for time!
The really interesting part came during the break immediately afterwards. Gorman remained the topic of chit chat among the desks; the topic turned to his remarks on bloggers, which as you might remember caused quite an uproar in the LIS field and beyond. Suddenly the guy who sits next to me turns and says:
“So Chad, you were at Computers in Libraries, right?”
I was taken aback, I couldn’t recall ever mentioning this to him. It turns out that he saw my picture on TameTheWeb!
I swear, the Internet makes it a smaller world every day.
