Welcome back to the midway, one and all!

Thanks to everyone who helped publicize the Carnival over the past week. Keep it up. More exposure means more submissions and more interesting things for you to read.

Before I get to the Carnival itself, a number of people suggested that I highlight the addition of the billionth holding to OCLC. So consider it highlighted.

Also, congratulations go out to lis.dom's Laura Crossett for being awarded Best Overall in the EFF's 15th Anniversary Blog-a-thon. It's great to see LIS writers being recognized for their talents and I strongly recommend visiting her victory post and her winning entry, The Medium is Not the Message.

And now for the fun stuff.

Laura Blalock, the Creative Librarian, invites us to stop by her booth and take a look at some of the factors that helped land her a job. There can be little doubt that appearance counts more than most people would like to admit.

Joy Weese Moll of Wanderings of a Student Librarian is putting together a list of MLS student bloggers.** If you are, or ever were, a blogging MLS student, perhaps you might drop Joy a line at joy at moll projects dot com.

Over at ...the thoughts are broken..., Mark Lindner is not sure how well suited his blog is for Joy's purposes, although he is most assuredly a student blogger. If you need further proof, take a look at his reading from this past week.

Moving from student bloggers to former student bloggers, Andrea Mercado over at LibraryTechtonics gives color commentary on her first Geek Out Don't Freak Out program. The sad reality is that I could benefit greatly from a class just like hers.

Wondering why all the fuss over OpenURL? Jane over at A Wandering Eyre offers her explanation of Open URL - What is it and why every librarian should know about it. Why? 1. It saves the time of the user. 2. It saves the time of the user. 3. No poofters! 4. It saves the time of the user.

Library clips' John T offers an extensive look at the ins and outs of Blog Ranking: Incoming Links?? That right, folks, my request for linkage to the Carnival is really a thinly veiled attempt to increase my blog ranking.

Free Range Librarian Karen Schneider has a two part series on the recent debacle at the US Copyright Office over web standards, or lack thereof. In part 1, she highlights the obvious problem with a government agency limiting functionality to a single browser, namely that everyone else is shafted. In part 2, she continues her love affair with the acronym, introducing us to the all-too-popular LGTM (Looks Good to Me) standard.

In addition to reading her EFF Blog-a-thon winning post, stop by lis.dom and read Laura Crossett's post on the agony and ecstasy of collection development entitled the anxiety of influence. I happen to enjoy weeding. Very cathartic. There, I admitted it.

Rochelle A. Mazar invokes Don McLean to express her distrust of the conclusions drawn from a recent survey of professors in A Generation Lost in Space. According to the results of the survey, professors think that the Internet makes students stupider and professors smarter. Wouldn't this be the same as if I stated that the Internet makes librarians smarter and patrons stupider?

Dave Hook, the Industrial Librarian, looks at doing the tasks that really matter and asks the question Are librarians doing too many clerical tasks? He writes in response to (and essentially in agreement with) a post by the :30 Librarian provocatively titled Why (Many) Medical Librarians Deserve to Lose Their Jobs.

And let us take a moment to welcome Charlton Braganza to the LIS blogosphere. At his new blog, ReferenceWork, he focuses on "Librarians concerned with Workforce Development." This week, he offers commentary on how the ReferenceUSA database can be a tool to aid patrons in their job searches. I can just imagine all you librarians job surfing at the reference desk under the guise of "learning the database."

OK, time for some Editor's Choices.

Dorothea Salo of Caveat Lector read the first Carnival and found Eric Lease Morgan's post on the technical skills of librarianship. She found it all right. She found it seriously lacking. As an alternative, she offers an approach called Learning How to Learn. [Note: It appears Caveat Lector is offline for the moment, so this link leads to a 404, at least for now. Sorry 'bout that.]

Christina Pikas offers her commentary on the barrier that separates the OPAC from our other web resources in Our Whole Model of Online Presence Needs to Be Changed.

Anne at the new hangingtogether.org blog offers her take on the tension between security and access in a post entitled Bazookas and Box Cutters.

And finally, there is an excellent series by Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti developing over at the TeleRead blog. The first part covers Copyright basics: Not so basic after all. This is followed by a look at the question Is "fair use" fair?


Thank you for visiting the Carnival of the Infosciences. Next week's Carnival will be hosted at Wanderings of a Student Librarian. Please send your submissions to joy at mollprojects dot com. Although email to the upcoming host is preferred, feel free to continue to use my contact form on an ongoing basis. I will simply forward submissions to the current host.

Here's the link to the submission and hosting guidelines. And here's a link to the hosting schedule. Please let me know if you have any interest in hosting or have any other comments or suggestions.

Previous Carnivals: Carnival of the Infosciences #1

** Joy may not have known that, when I started this humble blog back in March of 2003, I too was a student pursuing my MSLIS. Indeed, everything prior to May 23, 2003 is the work of a student. Of course, I'm really a lifelong student, but you know what I mean.