Andrea Mercado points us in the direction of Books for Ears, a site devoted to audio book reviews. This is something I’ve always felt there was a need for and even considered doing something about, when I was more of an audio book consumer. (I can no longer handle the sustained consumption of complex texts. Or so I’m told.)
But I’d always imagined it as an audio program, a natural interlude in the book listener’s audio stream. So Jeanne, when you decide to go that route, let’s talk.
And while you’re here, I may as well point you in the direction of Uncontrolled Vocabulary #32, entitled “Cranky people make good audio.” The discussion really gets going when we turn to the topic of sex offenders and Internet predators. Enjoy!
That’s what I always imagined my final post on this blog would be titled. But I should have recognized that others would get there first: Closed Stacks
Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out what the authors of the blog meant to imply by choosing that name.
Hey, while you’re here, why not check out episode 31 of Uncontrolled Vocabulary? Good discussions this week about the perturbing situations in Boston, Memphis, Wisconsin and on LITA-L.
Looks like we’re in business. All feeds have been redirected accordingly, so you RSS fans shouldn’t need to do anything. For the record, the proper feed URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/openstacks.
It’s amazing how properly redirecting my feeds has increased what Feedburner believes to be my subscriber count from 600+ to 1,000+. That’s largely due to the number of folks who are still subscribed to my RSS 1.0 index.rdf feed, which was never dealt with in the move to Feedburner (unlike its RSS 2.0 counterpart, index.xml) .
It also stands to reason that a certain percentage of readers are subscribed twice, for example in Bloglines and then again in Google Reader. There are probably 150+ feeds that get double subscriber counts from my Bloglines and Google Reader accounts. Perhaps a third, if my Rojo account is still active.
That said, I can’t ignore the fact that a lot of you are still here. It’s an incredible thing and I thank you for it.
This might actually work. One more test for the feeds. OK, we’re not quite working yet, but awfully close.
I had a fairly outdated installation of Movable Type using an antiquated database (Berkeley) with which I ran this site. Rather than try to figure out why the upgrade wasn’t working and then looking at migrating the databases, I decided to move to Wordpress. So far, so good, but I not sure about the feeds yet. Thus this test post, which you can disregard, except to note that the official RSS feed for Open Stacks is http://feeds.feedburner.com/openstacks. I won’t even begin to muck around with this theme (called Aspire) until I’m sure I’ve gotten the feeds redirecting accordingly.
Why does Technorati seem to hate this blog? I’ve had problems before, which I tried to pin on Feedburner, but I’m convinced that Technorati just hates me. It tries to tell me that Open Stacks hasn’t updated in thirty days. No amount of pinging seems to change that. Anyone know what I’m doing wrong?
Forgot to mention that Open Stacks turned three years old last week. If you would like to help commemorate this milestone, please submit something to this week’s Carnival. Thank you. 
I want to make special mention of the efforts of local (to me) librarian E.G. Yarnetsky, who has done an amazing job singlehandedly redesigning the Madison-Jefferson County Public Library website. The whole site is built around a Wordpress Textpattern (thanks Jerr) installation and includes a nifty Library Buzz blog. There’s a blog feed and a separate feed for library events.
The new site is something of an event itself around these parts. It was worthy of a front page newspaper article, as well as a mention at Syndication for Higher Education. Great job, Jerr!
In trying to catch up on my feeds, I saw that the DIY Librarian listed Open Stacks as one of her Top 5 Library Blogs of 2005. I greatly appreciate the acknowledgement, but that’s not why I’m writing presently. This was the part of her post that caught my attention: “I have not been reading Open Stacks as much since the focus has turned to podcasting”
Now I’m taking that statement completely out of context, but it got me wondering: Does it bug you, gentle reader, that I only blog about podcasting these days? There really is a reason for it.
When I started recording the show, I reserved any general LIS comments for that environment. Quite frankly, I found it easier to share my thoughts verbally. The blog became mostly a support mechanism for the show.
Then, a surprising thing happened. The “podcasting librarian” somehow became the “librarian with expertise in podcasting.” This has meant not only numerous opportunities to share my knowledge, but an impetus to maintain the currency of my knowledge. Thus, even though life has made it near-to-impossible to get back to actually producing the show, I feel compelled to keep current in the one area I’m considered to have some level of specialized knowledge. So blogging is now the mechanism by which I maintain my expertise in the topic of podcasting. Of course, if you have no interest in the topic, the blog is of limited value. So be it. For what it’s worth, I enjoy having a niche that beats a slightly different drum.
Hugs and kisses to everyone who has stuck with me through the “life trumps blogging/podcasting” stage. I am quite anxious to get back to the show. I have some new equipment to try out.
In a year full of joy and surprises, I am quite stunned to have been nominated for an Edublog Award. I can’t imagine who would have nominated me, but I genuinely appreciate it. That said, there are five other excellent candidates for Best Library/Librarian Blog and I can heartily endorse all of them as worthy recipients. Voting is open until December 17 (my 30th birthday, yikes! - that’s worth a vote, right?) and here’s a link to the ballot.
