sometimes a blog by Dan Greene
I’ve had a Ning account for about a year, but I really hadn’t used it much. Well recently Ning seems to have gained popularity, at least among library folks.
ALA now has a Ning site, and Bill Drew has started a Library 2.0 site on Ning. There is also a Librarian Bloggers site. It will be interesting to see where these sites ago.
P.S. I was going to leave my last post up a bit longer, but for once I actually had something to write about.
Well work on new UTK templates has kept me from blogging much lately. But I still read blogs, Walt at Random among them.
So when he posted today about Kathy Sierra of the blog “Creating Passionate Users” receiving death threats and canceling speaking engagements, I had to go to her blog and read her latest post.
This is sad, sick and disturbing. So taking a cue from Walt and Robert Scoble I’m leaving this post up a while, which lately isn’t a big deal. I’ve dealt with a few nuts out here in blog land but this is just above and beyond.
From Flickr
Update: Just to be clear, I didn’t take this photo. I just found it on Flickr and thought it looked cool.
Research Beyond Google: 119 Authoritative, Invisible, and Comprehensive Resources
There’s plenty of good information and links here. Some of these resources I knew about, but there are plenty on this list that I didn’t.
Google is great for the quick fact check or the shotgun approach to just see what’s out there. But when you need more in depth info it’s hard to beat a specialized database.
Library Journal has a short article about a session at the recent PLA conference in Boston, titled “Is the MLS Needed for a Career in Public Librarianship?”. Daniel Walters, director of the Las Vegas–Clark County Library District, sees nothing wrong with hiring non librarians, especially in technical areas such as cataloging. Cataloging is being outsourced in many libraries. Michael Gorman, president of ALA, took issue with outsourcing, saying to leads to lower standards.
I don’t know who’s right on that score, it depends who you outsource to I suppose. But Gorman has a great quote in this article in response to whether library science and information science are the same discipline. “Information people work in kiosks, librarians work in libraries.”
Some may liken this quote to the now famous “blog people” article. But Gorman has a point when he says that the ALA degree accreditation system is flawed. What ALA accredited programs need is a well defined core. If a degree is going to be accredited by the American Library Association, it needs to prepare librarians. If you can get an ALA degree without having taken a collection development course or a reference course, something is wrong.
I’ve got nothing against the I schools, I’m a tech oriented library person myself. Nor do I think information science and library science are entirely separate. But you have to wonder if LIS programs shouldn’t offer different degrees for information science and library science.
Too much information? In a stunning breakthrough research librarians have now discovered ‘The Cure for Information Overload‘. Their paper has some interesting findings based in part on Nick Belkin’s Anomalous States of Knowledge.
According to PABBIS (Parents Against Bad Books in Schools) “ALA will soon have absolute power in deciding what is appropriate in English class and the libraries for all America’s children”
ALA and absolute power? Clearly these people have never been to any ALA meetings. I for one welcome our new librarian overlords. 🙂
For those of you out of the overlord loop, here you go. Overlords can be anyone, not just librarians. 🙂
This posting about Ph.Ds for academic librarians at ACRLog made me think about my long, strange road to the Ph.D program here and where I’m going afterwards. I’ll talk about that, at length, in a bit. Basically I’m getting a Ph.D not so much to be be better qualified for a management job now, but to be ready for one when the opportunity arises. My thinking about a Ph.D was that if I kept going immediately after my Masters I would still be in grad student mode and things would be easier. I also got assistantships for both my first attempt at a Ph.D at UT and again here at Missouri. So I’m not investing a lot of money, just time.
This post is long, and is pretty much a personal narrative beyond this point. … Continue reading “Thoughts on an LIS Ph.D and bit of history”
ALA has jumped on the button bandwagon again and has their own Radical Militant Librarian Button. To me it seems a little over the top. So you go with the homemade classics. Librarian Avengers has a nice design as well.
Walt provides a nice overview of Library 2.0 in his Cites & Insights Midwinter 2006 issue . I’m still reading it but my take on Library 2.0 still stands. Libraries are about people. “Library 2.0” seems to be a rush to use technology, without considering how to use it. Like Walt, I think that “Library 2.0” gets in the way of Library 2.0. I’ll have more detailed thoughts once I finish reading Walt’s essay.