After months of fruitless job hunting, I've finally been granted an interview for an Assistant Branch Manager position. The library branch sits in an urban setting that I will likely investigate tomorrow. The position sounds well-suited to my current qualifications/experience/goals and within a reasonable distance. I can only hope that the visit and interview reinforce that perception.
If you've ever wondered if dmoz and Google were somehow in cahoots, this article will provide some enlightenment: Google and Dmoz - Are They in Love?
As the article clarifies, getting listed in dmoz is a fairly reliable way to appear in a variety of search engine indexes. So bring it on people.
If I understand Pat Delaney's post correctly, the future of the great blogging experiment at MLK, Jr. Middle School is in jeopardy. This would be a real disappointment as it's the broadest endeavor I've seen at any academic level (perhaps with the exception of Harvard's effort). To see evidence of the collaboration between the library and the rest of the school, take a look at the mlk Digital Library Agenda. Education needs more of this interconnectivity, not less. Hopefully, someone sees the light before it's too late.
That's right, I'm back in Madison, IN and can now be called - of all things - a Master of Science (in LIS, of course). It's nice to be home. Now that my new cable modem is operational, I can turn to getting the Movable Type version of Open Stacks properly hosted. The last "personal web server" approach could have been considered a violation of my ISP agreement. I've been in contact with Blake over at LISHost about getting some affordable librarian-friendly server space. So expect that to happen soon.
In other non-news, I'll probably begin looking at short-term non-LIS employment in the coming weeks. 5 months and three weeks until the loan payments begin.
I'll be breaking down and packing up my computer tomorrow, which means that you should expect a) infrequent updates to the Blogger incarnation of Open Stacks for a few weeks and b) my Movable Type version of this blog to be down until I have a new ISP set up. Thanks for your patience as I relocate and begin to pursue the job hunt full-time. For now, please stay tuned to the Blogger-based Open Stacks for new posts.
A post over at Slashdot talks about electronic voting as negative in its lack of a paper trail. This got me to wondering about the long-term maintenance of paper ballots. How long do we keep the actual ballots, particularly for bigger national elections? Are they archived or discarded after some statute of limitations runs out on challenging the results?
In looking for an answer, I found this viewable PDF archive of "the ballots from Leon County, Florida that had no machine readable marks in the [2000] Presidential Race." The so-called undervotes. More to come as I find it. Anyone know anything about the fate of presidential ballots?
Someone on one of the GSLIS bulletin boards kindly posted a link to the the new nexgenlib-l group over at Topica. From the list info: "This list is open to the next generation of librarians - those of us who are under 30, of any gender, political persuasion, race, etc., and our friends (those who welcome us into the profession)." There are definitely some over-30 individuals on the list, so all those young-at-heart are encouraged to join in what are proving to be very active discussions.
I was checking in on Michael over at Libraryman and found a post about National Unappreciated Librarian Month. When's National Unemployed Librarian Month, I wonder.
Michael posits a correlation between the "celebration" and this article. I suspect he's wrong though, as the article doesn't even mention librarians. Instead, it attributes higher library traffic to the availability of Internet access for those on the wrong side of the digital divide. Now of course the foresight of librarians is at least partially to thank for this, but there is no such acknowledgement. Nor is there any suggestion that the true greatness of the library is the librarians who help people find their way through this ever-growing electronic information network that we are providing access to. While almost everything this article says is accurate, there is no love whatsoever for the role of the librarian.
The most contentious point may actually be a quote from CLA president Wendy Newman: "Everyone wants to be a good parent and one of the things they see as an act of positive parenting is taking their children to the library." Yeah, if positive means taking their children and leaving them for six hours under the supervision of the librarians until just before closing time. That's good parenting, all right.
And the article concludes: "Libraries are cool again." Apparently, librarians still aren't.
It looks like a new facility is being built in my part of the world. Let's hope they left a little in their budget for personnel expansion.
I am pleased to announce the submission of my last paper as a graduate student at GSLIS: a stunningly persuasive Questionpoint implementation plan. Turning in a paper is less climactic than walking out of an exam, but still quite satisfying. Overall, these two semesters have been a wild ride, but I'm ready to do something a little more meaningful with my energy. Any takers?
I learned from the liblicense list today that the Lund University Libraries have put together a directory of open access scholarly journals. While I have little love for scholarly publishing in general, I am a big fan of open access and efforts to aggregate resources, especially when they are "free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals." Nice work. Hopefully, this project will encourage others to venture into open access publishing. And let's hope for enough open access LIS publishing to warrant its own category.
I was intrigued that Google has plans to create a separate search tool specifically for blogs. In reading the Register's article about it, I was led to this article by the same author from the April 3rd Register that essentially decries the ability of the blogging community, particularly the "A-list" tech bloggers, to transform the meaning of ideas in such a way that the original meaning is supplanted. Because of the incestuous linking amongst blogs, content from these authors takes precedent over other sources in Google's PageRank system, forcing the original sources into virtual invisibility (a process called Googlewashing). The implication is that this is a form of censoring the original idea by driving it into obscurity.
The author talks about how it took a million people to create the original meaning of the term "Second Superpower" and only a few people to take it away. This is utter nonsense. First, you know as well as I do that it only took one person to create the term and associate a meaning with it. Second, the Web (and Google in particular) is not the only tool of meme propagation and if the term had some legs in its original form, then it would have been picked up more widely. But it really didn't, mostly in my opinion because peace-seeking people don't really want to be seen as part of the Superpower paradigm, with all of the inherent combatativeness that it implies. Third, he bemoans that this happened in only 42 days. Well, let me suggest that those 42 days included the 41 days after the mainstream media forgot about it.
I think the real issue is the short-sightedness of the author. How can a thriving community that works to create new meaning through interactivity and collaboration be a bad thing? Rather than bemoaning the "power" of the tech community, why not learn something from it? The question shouldn't be why bloggers can make these transformations possible, but why more people aren't making use of this unharnessed potential. I'm not saying there aren't avenues for abuse, but the more participants, the more balanced the coverage will be.
I think I mostly resent the suggestion that bloggers are to blame for the loss of meaning, rather than celebrated for its creation and transformation. The author's perspective seems far too limited, much like the music industry's take on peer-to-peer. The one thing he did correctly was to repropagate the phrase's original meaning by writing about it in relationship to blogging. This article has be much-discussed and heavily linked (already replacing some of those top 30 Google listings that are the crux of his argument), which has provided more people with the origin of the term than any other media had up to that point. He should be thanking bloggers for the exposure.
Fellow members of the LIS community, I have reached the crisis zone. Graduation is in 10 days and the job hunt has been utterly fruitless. Not so much as an interview. I have a strict geographic limitation that limits my options. So I ask of the blogging contingent: if you have any professional connections in southern Indiana, Louisville or Cincinnati, please consider working them on my behalf (or directing me to them, so I can).
Why would you want to do that? Well, first, so you don't have to read of my unemployment on an ongoing basis. Second, it can't look good for an LIS blog to be written by someone who can't find a job. I don't really want to rename this site "The Unemployed Librarian." Third, a rookie can use all the help he/she can get, especially with networking.
Any other advice you might have would be welcome. This is my working resume, which is just a recreation of my paper resume (no web design quality - that will happen after graduation). How can I step it up?
BTW, to those who take the time to read my posts, a heartfelt thank you.
It appears that my commenting system Enetation has gone down. I don't know if this is a long-term situation, but it has encouraged me to at least attempt an import into Movable Type. The new location of Open Stacks is at http://planetneutral.gotdns.com/openstacks. Please come check it out. I'll be adding categories and trackback soon, while avoiding my last grad school project (If you know anything about implementing Questionpoint, let me know). I'll plan on posting to both sites, until I've relocated my computer and established a new ISP. So for now, please leave any comments on the new site.
Update: Apparently, this was just a temporary problem, but the Movable Type transition will continue as planned.