Ed Felten has a reasonable suggestion to help libraries deal with accommodating the CIPA decision: open-source censorware. Hopefully, this idea creeps into the development community…and I mean soon!

INFOZO again comes through with a weblog I hadn’t seen yet:

The Creative Librarian - The Creative Librarian is a hub for matters important to librarians/information scientists of today. There is a definite lean towards electronic issues, however is isn’t restricted to only those. Hopefully this site will also be useful for informing non-librarians on these issues as so many of them affect us all.

And this one came to me as a dmoz submission:

-=(In Between)=- - A weblog on scholarly online publishing, open access, and library related technology.

Update: Sorry, I had the wrong URL for The Creative Librarian. It’s correct now.

Christine from the aforementioned class at Wisconsin wrote about her experience of perusing my dmoz LIS>Weblogs category (great choice, although, Christine, dmoz is much more than just a directory of blogs).

She was hoping to find in LIS blogs more cross-fertilization of ideas and interblogular (?) discusssion of pressing library issues, much like she has found on the listservs:

I briefly poked around clicking on varies sites and the trend seemed to be that public libraries are using them as in information bulletin board advertising the library’s current events. What I did not see, and what I was looking for was a dialog between librarians and how they were coping with challenges in the work place. For example, tips on fund raising for public libraries, suggests to on how to promote your special library or creative ways academic libraries are handling budget cuts. Perhaps given some more time library blogs will move towards these types of discussions.

Now of course a blog tied to an actual library has to be more discrete than to discuss the politics of library operations and “how we deal with our paltry budget.” But that’s no excuse for the rest of us. Maybe we could use an issues/discussion-based, rather than news-based LIS collaborative blog. Hmmmm……

That said, blogs and listservs are not the same and shouldn’t be.

what I was looking for was a dialog between librarians and how they were coping with challenges in the work place

The main challenge for librarians is managing change, whether technological, political, financial, what have you. Keeping up with the LIS blogging community is particularly effective in coping with technological and political change. The important news comes down these pipelines long before it reaches the masses.

Blogs are both a currency tool and an advocacy tool. When enough of us write about CIPA and point to the SCOTUS decision, it shows up on Popdex and thousands more read it. Blogs also demonstrate the creativity, diversity and *individuality* of librarians in a way that is impossible on a listserv.

Listservs foster intense (sometimes unnecessarily so) discussion amongst our ranks; blogs open up that discussion to the world. Listservs are topically focused, while blogs are free, unfettered and therefore better equipped to view the LIS world cross-topically.

My point is that there is room, and in fact need, for both blogs and listservs in our domain. They are both undoubtedly professional tools, but it would be missing the point to hold them to the same expectations.

Although I didn’t notice the word privatization anywhere, Peter Scott linked to presentations from a conference entitled Outsourcing library and information services: threat or opportunity?, which at least acknowledges the inherent tension in the concept.

Since we’re on the subject of TrackBack, I may as well unveil my newest pet project, which I am apparently calling Indiana Blogs!. There are two components:

1. Your ordinary Blogroll featuring blogs by authors stationed in Indiana.

2. The meat of the thing is an attempt to implement TrackBack to aggregate posts written by Indiana bloggers. By encouraging bloggers to ping the site whenever they post, I can display excerpts and hope to provide a nice cross-section of Hoosier blogging.

If you want to see a similar content aggregating project in action, check out Blogroots Blogpopuli, which collects posts about weblogs.

So if you know someone in Indiana who a) blogs or b) has some web design skills, send ‘em my way: greg [at] lishost dot com.

Kudos to Steven for finally implementing TrackBack. The credit is mine, all mine. Let the pinging begin!

Thanks to the power of Trackback, I discovered an entire class worth of thoughtful, interesting blogs crafted as part of a summer course at The School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison:

875: A course about the mass organization and retrieval of information on the web. On the web.

Yeah, baby, yeah! Just the course syllabus alone has me drooling with envy. Start with the instructor’s blog, but don’t neglect the fellow travelers (especially the clearly wise Toby).

If you actually come to my site, rather than viewing this in your aggregator, you may have noticed I’ve been toying with certain elements of the style. Since these may not appear to be substantial changes, you may be wondering why. And the answer is accessibility. I have been very negligent in designing for people with lower screen resolutions than mine (1280×1074) and my server stats tell me that means just about everybody.

I haven’t intentionally viewed a page in 800×600 in years, but when I did, I was stunned to see the whole layout essentially broken with the sidebar disapperaing into the netherworld and a single post taking up well over a screen. So towards remedying those issues, I’ve made some changes that are somewhat less appealing on my screen, but hopefully more comfortable on yours. Any comments?

Since Amazon never got around to providing syndication for new product info, Lockergnome did it for them. There’s more than 160 new feeds covering almost all of Amazon’s product categories. Now I too can keep up to date on the latest in baby travel systems.

And Tasha says BBC News is doing it too.