The Other Librarian

I’ve had a tongue-in-cheek post-in-waiting for a while now that would look at traits I notice in online cultures as a way of understanding whether or not a particular service is for you or your library.    It had been percolating, percolating, percolating. . . and then I read Greg Schwartz’s post on Managing His Own Social [...]

There have been a few, ahem, debates going around and I could make a post on each of them, but things have just been too much in my home life recently, so I’m going to chime in one on one.
MLS or non-MLS?
My favorite call on this issue is coming from Dorothea Salo, but there [...]

APIs (Application Program Interfaces) are among those things that most presenters talk about with the caveat: “You do not have to know how to do it; you only need to know they exist.” You have to be fair to the presenters — an api is not really something you can explain without [...]

One of my favorite Monty Python works, is the famous “Accountancy Shanty” coming from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. With the lyrics “It’s fun to charter an accountant and sail the wide accountant-sea,” it’s obviously a satirical look at the idiosyncracies of your friendly neighbourhood bean counter.
Five Accountant-ish Things for Librarians to Know
Well, [...]

Steve, Iris, Rikhei & others are going through some kind of meme on why they are librarians. I think self-reflection is great. In fact, when I started this blog, that’s what I intended to do — take opportunities to look at the library world in ways that might reflect “others” in [...]

I cannot say that I am completely convinced Twitter has specific library applications, it does have very excellent librarian applications. I can attest to this, as a librarian who loves using Twitter. Like regular blogging, microblogging is most effective when there is an individual you appreciate behind the wysiwyg.
That does not [...]

TLA
What it stands for: Three-Letter-Acronym
What it should stand for: Lazy Coder’s Obfustication Device
How to recognize it: Three letters; used in place of actual words without explanation.
What it does: Makes computer geeks feel a little bit more sophisticated than they really are.
What a librarian needs to know [...]

Ten more ideas about how I can make my life better, in libraries and elsewhere:

 Plan an unconference — somewhere, somehow.

The field needs more unconferences, and I’d like to host/organize one for local librarians this year — probably in the summer sometime.

 More controlled and productive computer time.

No, this has nothing to do with social software.   I [...]

Last year, I created a post of Ideas for the New Year as a way to mark my progress over the year.   Overall, I don’t think I did too bad in completing them.  Here are the ideas, and how well I’ve done in completing them.

 New Website for the library.   

Check.  It happened, go look.

Contribute to [...]

 So the big news for this Carnival post is that most of y’all were too busy eating turkey to send in submissions.   So this one’ll be fairly short and sweet.
Larry Ferlazzo thought the set of tutorials from the Calgary Public Library would be pretty useful.   I agree — it’s always good to show [...]