The fourth installment of the Carnival of the Infosciences is now up at lis.dom. Thanks to Laura for hosting.

Next week, the Carnival will be hosted at Christina's Library Rant. I implore you to submit your week's best via email to cpikas at gmail dot com.

This is a crucial period for the Carnival, where I think we will really see if this concept has legs or not. It won't work unless we have a critical mass of regular submissions. And I'll be the first to admit that I haven't held up my end of the bargain in that regard. Then again, fatherhood is pretty all-consuming. Anyway, please consider taking a moment to contribute to the Carnival. That's where the fun is.

You are hereby ordered to visit Carnival of the Infosciences #3, admirably hosted by Joy over at Wanderings of a Student Librarian. A wonderful selection of last week's finest.

Laura at lis.dom hosts next week's Carnival, as outlined here. This week's submissions should be sent to laura [at] newrambler [dot] net, following the submission and hosting guidelines.

Please spread the word. The potluck is better when everyone brings something on which to feast.

Looks like my grad school has relaunched its website with a few syndicated feeds in nearly every flavor of RSS currently in use. Nice.

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Originally uploaded by planetneutral.

Please join me in welcoming our newest family member into the world. Jackson Brooks (J.B., if you like) was born on Sunday, August 21. Vitals are 8 lb. 1 oz. and 20.5". We are home and both baby and mom are doing well.

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.

Now presenting: Open Stacks #17

Also available via the podcast feed.

Today's show clocks in at 12 minutes and 55 seconds.

Show Notes:
1. A brief note about the Carnival
2. LibriVox Project
3. Denver revisited
- CAIR letter demanding Ashton's resignation
- Denver Post article covering protest
4. Librarians now responsible for actions of patrons?
- Gainesville Sun article
- Lengthy Slashdot thread

OK, people, it's Thursday evening and I have a very thin (but high quality) stack of submissions. C'mon, folks! The Carnival's only fun if everyone plays together. I know it's summer and you're not writing much, but you must have read something worth nominating, right? Just to make it as easy as possible for you RSS folks, here's another link to the contact form for your contributions. Thanks as always.

And so it begins. It gives me great pleasure to roll out the cotton candy machine, crank up the ferris wheel and present the inaugural Carnival of the Infosciences. We had a short stack of great submissions this week and they are presented below, along with my commentary. I have fleshed out the selection with a few choices of my own, which are presented at the bottom. My sincerest thanks to everyone who participated.

This past week's submissions are an auspicious beginning, but I hope we can get the Carnival to grow. From the excellent Carnival of Education:

"A successful carnival is a team effort. Please consider helping to spread the word. The more folks that know about this collection of exhibits, the more that will "drop-in" and visit the midway. Trackbacks, links, and mentions all help." So tell your friends. Know someone in LIS who just started blogging? Let them know that we're here and ready to shine the spotlight their way.

The Carnival will spend another week here at Open Stacks, so I hereby invite your submissions for Carnival of the Infosciences #2. Please send posts via the contact form by Sunday, August 14, no later than 6 PM Eastern time. Submission guidelines are here as are the hosting guidelines. I am always looking for more hosts! In fact, I can't wait for the Carnival to go on the road, so I can see more creative presentations than my own. Here's a link to the current hosting lineup.

And without further ado, let the carnival begin.



Our first post comes from Dave Hook, The Industrial Librarian, who tells us Why blogs & RSS feeds will help drive open-access journal publishing. He presents complementary scenarios that illustrate the potential impact of online access to journal articles on the readership of said work. Will this drive print journals to change their ways? I'd like to think so.

Joy Weese Moll over at Wanderings of a Student Librarian submits Part 1 of her MLS Success series entitled Learn to Learn. I only wish I had realized earlier that I, like Joy, have a high music intelligence. Better still if I had realized that I am not a visual learner prior to selecting Art History as an undergraduate course of study.

We then have a wonderful post from Meredith Farkas of Information Wants To Be Free entitled Online communities in a "locked down" society. The post's purpose is two-fold: first, to note the disconnect between the preponderance of online communities for librarians versus the total absence of librarian-facilitated online communities for the patrons we serve; second, to introduce the notion of the "community wiki" with the library playing the logical role of host and shepherd.

At Christina's LIS Rant, Christina Pikas asks the question Is blogging for personal information management generalizeable or just for some? That is, does blogging as PIM work uniquely well for information professionals or would the approach function equally as well for scientists or engineers? Interesting. I suspect that it is more inherent to the individual learning style than to the profession, such that there are both info pros and scientists for whom blogging wouldn't quite do it.

Rebecca Hedreen submits a slightly older post to the Carnival, but I've decided to be less restrictive in this first go-round. So I present for your consumption her comments on Wikipedia over at the Frequently Answered Questions blog. I wonder if the possible changes at Wikipedia will impact her opinion and that of so many others.

Building on the Wikipedia theme, Laura Crossett at lis.dom invites us to select resources by asking the tough question "What for and for what?" Where does appropriateness rank in the criteria for resource selection? Pretty high, I reckon.

Over at ...the thoughts are broken..., Mark describes the shock of discovering that his own neophyte cataloging work is now part of our collective bibliographic universe.

In her post The Digital Audiobook Divide, Jenny Levine gives a thoughtful explanation as to the importance of providing not only audiobooks, but the hardware needed to play them. It's all about access, as well it should be.

And finally, the Feel-good librarian shares the power of What books do. Also a powerful reminder of what librarians do.


Editor's Choices

On the LITA Blog, Eric Lease Morgan provides a useful list of the technical skills of librarianship for those looking to develop their technology skill sets.

Eric's post is nicely complemented by Karen Schneider, the Free Range Librarian, who wants all you technology instructors out there to remember that We're All Newbies Some of the Time.

George over at It's all good draws parallels between the problems facing the movie industry and those facing libraries in his post entitled "I am big. It's the pictures that got small...".

Keeping with the theme of parallels, Stephen Abram asks you to consider the similarities between The Store Window and Your Portal. Are there lessons to be learned from retail? Both in the digital and physical spaces?

Library Dust's Michael McGrorty, in his post Relics and Libraries, observes that the textbooks of his youth were conservative and weak when compared to the revolution awaiting him on the library's bookshelves.

Thanks for visiting the inaugural Carnival of the Infosciences. Please, please, send your comments and suggestions my way.

Italian Peepshow


Originally uploaded by MisterEric.

Courtesy of Boing Boing, this pic comes from a Flickr set of unfortunate children's books found at the a public school library.

This is just a pre-weekend reminder to get those Carnival submissions to me no later than 6 PM Eastern time on Sunday.

C'mon kids, solicit some free exposure for your blogs. Have some confidence in the quality of your writing and share it with a broader audience. We have a great basis for the inaugural Carnival, but I'm greedy. I want more. If you need to see the submission guidelines again, you can find them here.

Thanks to those who've already submitted. Now go tell your friends!

Now presenting: Open Stacks #16

Also available via the podcast feed.

This is a quick one. Nine minutes and seven seconds to be exact. I wanted to get something out about the Carnival, but that didn't seem enough to warrant breaking out the microphone. Then I stumbled upon this article (courtesy of LISNews) about Denver Public Library's plan to open branches with a Spanish-language focus. My thoughts are poorly formed and even more poorly articulated, but I made the difficult decision to live with the inadequacies and not re-record it. My apologies in advance.

Submissions for the first Carnival of the Infosciences have been trickling in, but there's plenty of room for more rides at this theme park. There was a question as to what was meant by the "current post" parameter for submission mentioned in this post. In my mind, the Carnival should highlight the best content of the previous week, so submitted posts should have been published in the same week in which they are being recommended. Let me know if that needs further clarification.

I'm going to use this post as a holding place for the schedule of upcoming carnivals. We've already scheduled a stellar line-up of hosts and I know other people will step up to the mic. Remember, if you're interested in hosting, you need to do things: 1. Submit a post to a carnival and 2. let me know that you're interested.