Surprised to not find any mention of this year's Library Journal Movers and Shakers issue in my aggregator this morning. I guess it doesn't actually come out until tomorrow, but it's already arrived at my workplace. Anyway, big ups to Meredith Farkas, John Hubbard and John Blyberg for making this year's list. Well deserved. Congrats as well to all the others who were acknowledged.

Update: How did I forget to mention Sophie Brookover? My apologies!

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

In celebrating the naming of good friends Michael Stephens and Aaron Schmidt (see y'all tonight!) as LJ Movers and Shakers, I should note that Tom Peters of the OPAL project, about which I just posted, was also awarded this honor. Congrats to all. And thanks to Steven for the pointer.

I mentioned on the second show that, having reviewed the South Carolina study, I would like to see more states doing Return On Investment (ROI) analyses. Michael Pate pointed out that Florida has recently published a similar study. I haven't looked at the final reports closely yet, but here's what stands out right away: "Florida's public libraries return $6.54 for every $1.00 invested." Yeah, baby!

Updated 02/03/05: Alane Wilson sent along this bibliography of sources consulted for OCLC's Advocacy advertising effort. The list includes the Florida study along with other interesting papers on the valuation of library services.

Just a quick minute out of my busy life to mention that the URL to my Blogs for Libraries article has changed. If you happen to have it in a bibliography or otherwise, you may want to update your link.

What I proffered as my reason for retiring my position as editor at the Open Directory Project:

Mostly lack of time and energy to devote to the cause, but also due to the following message I received today:

"Hi,
You need to improve your basic editing to bring it in line with ODp guidelines.

Let me know of any other queries.
Thanks.
pchere
Meta Editor."

Put simply, I don't have the time, energy or interest to interpret useless criticism from so-called "Meta Editors." I found it particularly striking to come across the following in the suggested guidelines: "You should be accommodating of various individual styles, and avoid adopting a fundamentalist view of these guidelines by being overly critical and nitpicky of URL format, titles and descriptions. Editors should keep in mind that while the quality of the annotations is important for relevancy, the quality of the links themselves are most important to the ODP's overall quality and usefulness."

To which I say, damn straight. Why doesn't someone else try to come up with annotations for 200+ personal weblogs and see what you can do to make them relevant and guideline-conforming? If you want to offer criticism, say something meaningful. Blanket negativity, besides being insulting, is de-motivational and indicative of poor stewardship.

Something vaguely supportive of the hours I've poured into the directory may have offset my frustration, but it is with an overwhelming feeling of malaise that I resign my post as ODP editor."

Of course, there are other practical reasons why now would be a good time for me to get out of the dmoz fold. I've done it for a year, more than quadrupling the size of the LIS Weblogs section. It's someone else's turn.

I'm also very happy with my work on Blogsource and would prefer to devote my energy to that project.

And there are other high quality lists of LIS weblogs out there.

So one door closes...let many more open in its wake.

Just found out from my buddy Jerry that my local public library (where I live, not where I work) received the full sum of a grant request to provide wireless Internet access to the public. Nice work, Jerry! Now I just need that laptop...

Howdy, folks. No, I haven't disappeared off the face of the earth, but I have taken on some new responsibilities that have gotten in the way of my usual news reading/blogging regimen. First, my wife and I have purchased and moved into our new abode. Three days of intense moving and setting up have made our house into something like a home.

Second, I have taken on a new position within my library system. No longer an Assistant Branch Manager, they now call me Circulation Support Supervisor. This is a complicated way of saying that I supervise a crew of 19 pages at the Main downtown branch.

I do other things too. I'll be working on streamlining our ILL service into something that resembles an organized department. I'm responsible for the shepherding (the hot buzzword of the moment that suggests an advanced level of awareness/responsibility/leadership) of our new materials and circulating magazines.

I've also been part of the committee charged with a sorely needed website redesign. Through this involvement, I expect to assume responsibility for content updates in the near future, a charge I openly welcome.

And then I'll also be the acting Supervisor On Duty for a large metropolitan library, which is a somewhat intimidating prospect. However, considering that I served as Supervisor for every hour I worked as Asst. Manager, it's really not that much of a change.

Anyway, between the house and the job, things have been a little crazy around these parts. I suspect updates will be infrequent for now, as I focus on my new responsibilities both at home (lawn mower purchased and ready) and work.

I can't wait to see this, if it ever gets finished:

Checked Out, the Movie - "Checked Out is an indepedent feature length movie about a crazy day for four student librarians, currently in pre-production in Anchorage."

The link leads to a blog occasionally discussing the production status of the movie. There's also a link to some pictures.

Steven passed along an interesting tidbit for my ego-stroking pleasure. Looks like I've received my very first mention in a print publication. There's an article in this month's Computers In Libraries called "Here a Blog, There a Blog, Even the Library Has a Web Log" and the author has seen fit to mention me as a "champion of library blogs." I have to say I'm honored to have an entire paragraph devoted to my one and only article on the topic.

Fortunately, I was able to procure a photocopy of the article, but I'd really like to find a copy of the issue to hold onto for posterity. Does anyone out there either subscribe to CiL personally and not keep the issues OR work at a library that subscribes, but eventually weeds past issues? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Update: Copy procured. Thank you!

Did anyone see the moronic former Attorney General Ed Meese on this morning's Today Show? He was pitted against Nadine Strosser, the current president of the ACLU, for a discussion of the infamous PATRIOT ACT. Somewhere towards the end of the heated discussion, Meese takes a jab at librarians, accusing us of being "more interested in pushing pornography on kids than fighting terrorism." Now, up to this point in the interview, Mr. Meese had simply come off as an Ashcroft puppet. Once he made that claim, he came off as an ignorant, desperate Ashcroft puppet. Generally speaking, I take this as a good sign.

Sabrina mentions the story and points to a press release that includes a response by ALA prez Carla Hayden. The quote offered by Sabrina differs significantly from what I heard this morning. It has, however, come to my attention, that my version is corroborated by this Salon article, which I can't check due to my lack of subscription. Can anyone confirm?

Update: Sabrina appears to have modified/corrected her quote, but I'd still like confirmation on what the Salon article says.

I'm sure this story is going to be all over the LIS blogosphere, but I can't help myself this time. It looks like OCLC, apparent owners of the Dewey Decimal System, are suing The Library Hotel, accusing the hotel of trademark infringement for their egregious use of DDC. Here's an article about it: Newsday.com - Library catalog system owner sues book-based New York hotel

And here's a quote from the article: "I would term it straight-out trademark infringement," said Joseph R. Dreitler, a trademark lawyer with the Columbus office of Jones Day, which represents the Online center.

"A person who came to their Web site and looked at the way (the hotel) is promoted and marketed would think they were passing themselves off as connected with the owner of the Dewey Decimal Classification system."

OK, first of all, the average website visitor will be surprised to learn that the DDC has an owner at all. In fact, I think most librarians-in-training are surprised to learn that. Then the aforementioned visitor will be surprised to learn that our profession, working so hard for the propagation of the public domain, is largely under the thumb of a corporation (calling itself nonprofit) that goes out of its way to maintain its singular domination over a system of representing/organizing knowledge. They won't be surprised, however, to see that the library profession is represented by classification militants with a penchant for bad publicity and an ability to squeeze the fun right out of any good idea. Just the message we need to be sending...

Well, in another astonishing development in my very brief writing career, my Webjunction article was featured in the Clips and Pointers section of this month's D-Lib. I am humbled, again.

Also in Clips and Pointers, there's a link to the Music Information Retrieval Research Bibliography (MIRBIB), which happens to be a project of my friend, UIUC GSLIS Professor J. Stephen Downie. MIR is a really interesting multidisciplinary pursuit that concerns, amongst other things, constructing music as searchable data and developing methodologies to search and access that data. Check out this book chapter Downie wrote (warning: .pdf) that provides a nice introduction to the field.

Well, I've been home for two days now and I'm still catching up on the news. There were about 3000 headlines in my aggregator, which I've whittled down to about 900. By the time I get home tonight, there will likely be about 400 more.

Looks like lots of good things happened in my short absence from the blogosphere:

1. My dmoz LIS Weblog category has been fully updated and now shows 277 entries. Thanks to Steven for noticing/promoting.

2. My response to the Distributed Library Project was given linkage by Jessamyn and subsequently Rory. Thanks!

3. My WebJunction article was mentioned in the most recent Internet Resources Newsletter. Again, thanks. I should also take this opportunity to thank Walt for his gracious write-up of the same article in the latest Cites and Insights (pdf).

4. I learned that two of my fellow Kentucky librarian bloggers, Catherine Lavallee-Welch of Englib and Anna Creech, the eclectic librarian, will be presenting at this year's Kentucky Library Association conference, which is conveniently located in Louisville. I'm definitely hoping to attend (perhaps making use of the aforementioned funding opportunity).

I just learned that Seattle librarian, Nancy Pearl, now famous as the model for the "librarian action figure," will be paying a visit to our library to talk about her new book. Not only am I invited to attend, it is expected of all managers. Hurray!

That little article I wrote for Webjunction has been published.

I'm trying to avoid any pre-emptive commentary about how it might have been different. There's one edit that was made that, having read it again, doesn't sit quite right with me. But that's OK - I had the chance to contest and it didn't bother me then. I'm mostly just pleased that they liked it enough to add it to their site.

Opinions are welcome.

OK, I have been brimming with anticipation all week toward making this announcement. It is my profound pleasure and privilege to introduce a new collaborative effort between myself and the estimable Steven M. Cohen:

LIS Blogsource - The library weblog about library weblogs (RSS feed)

The idea is to provide a portal for all things LIS bloggery: new blogs, redesigns, software migrations, what have you. As we have both devoted much bandwidth to covering this stuff in our respective blogs, the time seemed right to join forces and give you a one-stop news source on the ever-growing and changing LIS blogosphere.

It's a work-in-progress, but there is already some worthwhile content to check out. Suggestions are welcome, as are any notices about new or changing LIS blogs: greg at lishost dot com.

So here's the scoop on dmoz.org. On Monday, the public cgi scripts became active again, which means that the public is once again able to submit sites. However, edited categories are only now being updated on the public servers, one at a time, from the mirror dmoz site. This process should be completed sometime Thursday afternoon, so look for a current category listing then. Again, sorry for the misguidance.

Those of you who use dmoz regularly have probably noticed that there have been no changes to any directory in over a month. Sites that have been added or changed by editors in the past month or so have, up to this point, been invisible to the public. This was due to a system-wide upgrade that was apparently quite involved. The good news is that the freeze is expected to end tomorrow at noon PDT. Amongst other things, this means the count of LIS Weblogs should jump from the current 217 to over 250! When I started as an editor in March, this count was under 100. I see no indication that this growth has plateaued and look forward to seeing what the future holds for our little part of the blogosphere.

Update: It appears I misinterpreted the recent forum discussion, as nothing has changed at dmoz. Sorry for the apparent misinformation - I'll keep checking in and keep you posted.

Nice to see that my soon-to-be city of employment, Louisville, KY, ranked 8th in a study of America's Most Literate Cities. This gives me hope.

Courtesy of LISNews.com.

Saw this article in Wired News today about Hypertag technology: Wired News: Cell Phones, Billboards Play Tag.

The idea is to attach little smart tags to all variety of displays (billboards, posters, musuem exhibits) that would allow users of mobile technology to access digital content about the display. So you could go to a museum, check out the mummy exhibit and call up relevant web materials related to mummies.

There could be endless applications for this. How about we put these Hypertags in every book on our shelves? The user points at a book and immediately the OPAC listing appears, or the NYT book review, or even, dare I say it, Amazon reader opinions. Maybe we can use Novelist and the like to call up a page of related books based on our catalog's descriptors. See where I'm going with this? Seems like we should be keeping our eyes on this technology and our minds open to the possibilities.

It looks like my home state of Indiana on target when it comes to protecting its citizens from e-crime. As this press release reveals, there are two (actually, three, the third deals with credit history and insurance eligibility) interesting new public laws that have recently been enacted.

The first expands the definition of identifying information and facilitates easier recovery from theft scenarios. Of course, all librarians should have a vested interest in protecting vulnerable patrons from identity theft, so this can be viewed as a positive development.

I was more intrigued by the second law, which requires spammers to identify their unsolicited emails with a code in the subject line, as in {ADV} or for adult-oriented mail {ADV:ADLT}. Failure to comply will result in fines under the state's deceptive consumer sales laws, which carry penalties of up to $500 per offense. I love this concept and wonder if it's truly enforcable. I'm no expert on law, particularly e-law, but it seems to me that a single state enacting this kind of legislation will have virtually no effect as most traffic is likely to be interstate. Am I wrong? Seems like it's time for Congress to catch the wave, no?

Courtesy of BeSpacific.

Update: According to this Slashdot post, Michigan is following suit submitting similar anti-spamming legislation with even harsher penalties.

Anyone happen to catch the news report on ABC tonight about libraries and their response to the PATRIOT ACT? It was nicely supportive of the library position with clips of the gag order workarounds and some quality soundbites from Bernie Sanders. Pretty good stuff.

The latest issue of Network News, a online publication of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine - South Central Region, features a very brief article about blogs in its Technology Notes section. I'm not pointing to the article because you stand to learn anything from it, but because they used a screen shot of, you guessed it, Open Stacks as their exemplar.

In recent weeks, some people have been wondering what became of Erica's Librarian Avengers site. Fear not, she was simply lackadaisical about updating her registry, so she has a new domain (and a new look): www.librarianavengers.org

Following up on some earlier commentary, Darci Chapman reports that the Passaic system is delaying its vote on privatization. Let's hear it for inertia!

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!

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.

As an update to an earlier post, I report with displeasure that due to the predictable budget cuts, the MLK, Jr. Middle School blogging experiment is no more. Best wishes to the project's originator, Pat Delaney at his new cross-town gig. One library's trash will undoubtedly prove to be another's treasure.

Via The Shifted Librarian

I was looking at my referral logs and saw a number of hits from Netbib, a premier German blog. Following the clues, I discovered a very gracious mention of Open Stacks. I love the idea of an international readership, so those arriving here through Netbib: "Willkommen. Dank zum Besuchen meines blog." Ist das richtig?

Update: Check the comments for authorized German (Thanks, Daniel!).

I've been a little behind on my news-reading in the past few days, so I only just came across the news that EBSCO has successfully purchased RoweCom. Representatives from EBSCO paid a visit to my Technical Services Functions class last semester and we were quick to probe them on such a hot topic. It looks like they're making good on their commitment to manifest a high degree of publisher support to cover expenditures already laid out by RoweCom customers. Given the dwindling financial support from the federal government, it is gratifying to see private sector vendors and publishers unite to do the right thing for their customers. While the acquisition represents a major coup for EBSCO, it should also prove to be great news for the libraries who were left in the lurch in the wake of the original debacle.

I am quite pleased to report that today one of my close high school friends shared with me his intention to pursue the MLS (or related) degree. What really makes me happy is that he turned to me for insight. Not three weeks out of the program and I already have the opportunity to serve as a mentor and spokesperson for pursuing the degree. Now all I need is the job to back up all the great things I have to say about the merits of LIS education.

Incidentally, not long after my interview today, I was called regarding a different position within the same system. Looks like I have an interview. This time the position is more technology and instruction oriented, which plays to a different (although entirely related) set of skills than the managerial position. No matter what happens, I'm thrilled that there are librarians who see something worthwhile in what I'm presenting on paper. I hope they feel even more strongly about me in person.

I just received an email from a former schoolmate announcing that the UIUC ALA chapter has been selected as the ALA Student Chapter of the Year. Although I wasn't really involved, some of my close friends and colleagues deserve credit for the apparent success. Hopefully, this recognition will inspire some genuine activism within the ranks, instead of the perfunctory fundraising/film screening kind of stuff that keeps me away from student organizations in general. In particular, I'd like to see an advocacy committee that organizes opportunities for lobbying and the like. Still, this is great news for UIUC GSLIS, so I'm pleased.

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.