thoughts and rants

Stephen Abram came to speak at McGill and the SLA Eastern Canada Chapter and rocked the house.
he wore an awesome tie.

key points from his chats:

• reciprocal mentoring: the concept that newer librarians have skills to share with established librarians. love this concept. share share share people!
• the concepts of victimization and risk aversion have become part of library culture. this is bad.
• it’s very important for librarians to play with new technologies. (hence the creation of SLA’s Innovation Lab - to be launched very shortly.) you don’t have to love it, or even use it, but you need to play with it to have an informed opinion.
• the internet is terrible at answering “how?” and “why?” questions, which is why librarians rock.

it was a great day and i always laugh a lot when i’m hanging out with Stephen.

this is the LAST CALL for the Emerging Leaders issue of Library Student Journal - get off your butts and nominate someone!

*****

LAST CALL for emerging leaders in the LIS student community

Library Student Journal (www.librarystudentjournal.org) believes that
LIS students have new and exciting ideas. We see information needs in
new places (and new worlds). We can, and should, make a vital
contribution to the LIS field while we are still students.

Do you have a colleague who is doing innovative research? Have you met
someone at a conference whose blog you read daily because it inspires
you to think in new ways? Has a classmate come up with a creative
solution to address a current problem in your local library?

If so, we want to hear about these people!

The deadline for submission is March 31, 2008. (Sorry - current LSJ
staff members are not eligible for this award.)

To nominate an emerging leader, please send us the following:
1. Full name, school affiliation and email address, of nominee.
2. Reason for nomination. Try to be as specific as possible - which
project, event, concept makes this person an emerging leader.
3. Your full name, affiliation and email address.

Send your nomination to librarystudentjournal [at] gmail [dot] com,
and be sure to put “Nomination” in the subject line.

The special issue will appear in April 2008.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Cheers everyone!
Amy
Editor-in-Chief
librarystudentjournal@gmail.com

photo credit: jambina

think my prof will believe that my assignment is late because my cat is impeding my highlighting capabilities?

ya, me neither.

today i helped some folks who live in countries where a lot of news is censored, find quality information to answer their immediate needs.

Amy Kearns had an idea a few weeks back about having a 24 hour “twitter librarian” that would answer questions shot into the twittersphere.

Metafilter offers similar reference services (tho not answered specifically by librarians), through a community of users.

THIS. THIS is why i love the possibilities of the web. getting information to people, via avatars, micro-blogging, or discussion forums.

get.
information.
out.
there.
now.

my LIS friends at Université de Montréal (who blog here) pointed to a truly hilarious video by Têtes à Claques about a monsieur visiting a library, looking for a “magazine with pictures of the human body”
guess what he was really looking for… ; )

the video is in French, naturellement.

and please don’t ask me to explain Têtes à Claques. there’s some info at Wikipedia about it, but really, you have to live in la belle province to truly get it.

*over the past few months i’ve discovered oh-so-many blogs and podcasts that i consider required reading/listening. i’m going to try and blog weekly about one of them and why i think LIS students - hell, even regular library-folk - ought to check them out.*

Uncontrolled Vocabulary is “A weekly live interactive roundtable discussion of all things library”. the podcast is recorded Wednesday nights at 10pmEST and here’s the kicker, ANYONE can join in (thanks to TalkShoe). if you can’t join in during the recording, you can always check out the podcast which is posted to the blog shortly after the recording. (and downloadable from TalkShoe.)

the issues to be discussed are posted before the show is recorded, and they are always timely. and the invited guests are, frankly, some. really. interesting. folk.

i can’t recommend it enough. i’m busy catching up on all 33 previous episodes.

oh, and i found out about it through the Twittersphere - which continues to amaze me as a LIS resource.

for those of you unaware of who Stephen Abram is, he’s the president of the Special Libraries Assocation and has an oh-so-fun blog (Stephen’s Lighthouse).

(as an aside, i attended the SLA conference in baltimore just prior to beginning my MLIS and it confirmed my decision to go into the LIS field. i still have all the business cards i collected at the conference and though everyon was from a different industry, doing a different job, they were all concerned with the dissemination of information. exactly the people i want to surround myself with.)

so Stephen is coming to talk to the LIS students of McGill (aka SISsies) and having seen him speak before, i know that a) it’s gonna be fun, and b) we’re gonna have lots to talk about.

i may live-blog it, since i’m addicted to Cover It Live.

i’ve just finished reading all the Movers & Shakers profiles.

my RSS feeder is now wonderfully full with the blogs of exciting folk in the LIS community.

so fortunate.

… except that i haven’t actually filmed the movie yet.

i’m a bit in awe to be included in the list of Movers & Shakers.

i can’t believe i’m on the same list as these people - all of whom i look up to for the amazing work they’ve done in the LIS field.

as for me, well, let’s just say, i guess i now really have to “do something!“