Monthly Archives: March, 2008
Professionalism, respect, and the riot at large
From (my new hero) Mary Carmen, of the blog Circ and Serve,
Every time a librarian says or does something that makes a non-MLS library employee feel like a second class citizen the profession and the degree loses its value. Every support staff person who is treated badly is one more person who thinks librarians are [...]
Library Riot joins Flickr
Yeah, I probably should have mentioned this in the last post, but Library Riot (after much nudging from Laura) has finally and proudly joined Flickr. I’ll be posting pictures from whatever conferences I attend, as well as random but still (hopefully) relevant library pictures. I’ll also be posting pictures from (what I call) [...]
MALA / SLA Spring 2008
This past Thursday, I was invited to speak at a panel discussion for a joint meeting of MALA (the Metro Atlanta Library Association) and the Georgia chapter of the SLA (the Special Libraries Association). I had the great honor of presenting on Web 2.0 technologies and public libraries with Laura Savastinuk, co-author of the [...]
ALA Report on Non-English Speakers
Serving Non-English Speakers in U.S. Public Libraries: 2007 Analysis of Library Demographics, Services, and Programs.
From the report’s executive summary,
About 21 million people in the United States speak limited or no English, 50 percent more than a decade ago. This impacts public agencies in health care and education the most but impacts other public agencies, [...]
Twittering: Raising my white flag
OK, that’s it.
I surrender. I give up. I give in.
My friend Kelly invited me to join Twitter. So I did.
I’ve actually been meaning to try out the Twitter thing for a while now, but I’ve always felt it was kind of redundant. I’ve had coworkers ask me to explain it — coworkers [...]
Seriously? Seriously.
So a friend of mine sent me a strip from the awesome webcomic “Boy on a Stick and Slither.” I’m kinda new to WordPress, so embedding the image in the post like I want isn’t working — so bear with me and see the comic here.
Setting aside the Grey’s Anatomy reference in the post [...]
Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
The March 2008 edition of First Monday is a special issue: “Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0.” For the theorist in (any of) you, this really is some amazing stuff to read. I personally recommend “Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0” by Kylie Jarrett. It basically applies and (re)interprets Foucault’s [...]
Bookaholics
“Bookaholics are the ones who start to feel uncomfortable and uneasy in another person’s house, and suddenly realize there are no bookshelves or magazines lying around. People who only own a telephone book and their high school yearbooks scare us.”
– Robert Lee Hadden
Thanks to Susan K for passing this along.
Riot Rule #1: “Complaining is never enough.”
While I was in high school, I spent four years on the debate team, and those four years ended up being some of the most important for me, at least in how I grew as a person. It definitely must have left some kind of impression, because I’ve spent the past six and a [...]
Reccession sex
Emily over at Scanner features a list of reasons why the looming recession “will rock your love life.” I don’t know about you, but economics never seemed so much fun, especially with Reason #4 in mind: “Library-sex will make a come back”:
Combine America’s declining interest in knowledge, free admission, and sultry, stuffy sex-maniac librarians, [...]