print vs online

sometimes print really is better. (Photo credit: inju at www.flickr.com/photos/35468141938@N01/112082907)

CBC’s Spark (i love Nora Young!) had a recent episode discussing the value of offline formats of communication: basically, stuff printed on dead trees.

hearing about Ben Tennett’s project Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet, where he selected blog posts and published them as a newspaper, made me think about the things that i prefer to read in print. (bias: i worked in the newsroom of a major metropolitan daily newspaper for 8 years, so i like pretty much everything about newsprint, from the smell to the inky fingers. also, i am an EXPERT at refolding a newspaper so that it looks unread. talents, i haz’em.)

thinking about my love of newsprint, i looked at all the paper on my desk: memos, catalogues, course outlines, to-do lists, and a bunch of pieces of paper which i don’t remember putting there but which have magically appeared on my desk.

• how many of these bits and pieces could be delivered in a different format?
• maybe more importantly, how many of these pieces of paper should be delivered in a different format?
• would i treat them differently if they weren’t printed and in a pile on my desk?
• with my inbox (all of them) already overflowing, do i want previously-printed items to be delivered electronically?
• do we feel differently about things we read in print? things we read online?

while blogs serve many purposes within an organization, they can’t do it all. i worry that some of us are jumping on the blogging bandwagon because we think that it will solve all of our communication problems.

how often does your organization evaluate your communication needs and address which can be met best with online vs print information?

michael franti = awesome

Michael Franti released a new tune in honour of Barack Obama

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd9xU8cw1JE]

hellz ya.

in another life…

… i worked in the newsroom of a major metropolitan daily.

the site Stuff Journalists Like – is very accurate. especially post 3. i was a starving student (okay, not starving, but the lowest paid in the room) and even i knew that the food at the election night buffet was for everyone working that night and i shouldn’t fill up tupperware and keep it at my desk.

also, i wore shoes at work. can’t say the same for all of the editors ; )

sept choses meme: things you don’t know about me

no one tagged me but we all know how much i love a bandwagon – there’s a meme going around…

here are seven things you might not know about me.

1. i can sing the alphabet backward as easily as i can forward. i was a bored child and took to reading books backward once i had read them the “proper”. if you buy me a beer i’ll even serenade you with “mary had a little lamb” backward. if you want me to do this on karaoke night, it’ll cost you more than one beer.
2. i can read hebrew (with the vowels, pls) and russian but have no idea what i’m saying.
3. i was in a “reverse-integration” (holy gawd i hate that term) program in grade five where i was lucky enough to go to Mackay Centre with kids with various physical disabilities as well as share a building with a deaf school. my sign language, at the moment, is atrocious.
4. my cousin is a bit of a rock star in quebec. for the record, i hated him between the ages of 9 and 13 because he was always being told how awesome he was for being able to sing so well. now, however, i think he’s a big sweetheart.
5. this was the first gizmo i ever used to get on the internet. (actually, my uncle had a coupler so i could get on it at his house, but this was the first thing we had chez nous.) my parents had no idea how to work it. i won a samantha fox cassette answering a quiz on a bulletin board.
6. i was on the opening crew of the Disney Wonder and loved everything about it. i trained at Disney World for a month (working in the Magic Kingdom). then was flown to the Fincantieri shipyard in Venice to pick up the ship and sail it first to Southhampton (where Sir Richard Branson sponsored an “open ship” event and we had the most amazing fireworks EVER), then to Porta Delgada in The Azores, then across the Atlantic Ocean for a week (sans guests) to home port in Port Canaveral, FL. i sailed through hurricanes and worked with 3 year olds. i consider this some of the best management experience i’ve ever had and actually feel the company gives (some of ) their employees an awful lot of autonomy to make people happy. cult-like corporate culture, i eats it up.
7. due to my diastema, i have amazing accuracy when spitting water out through my two front teeth. i love knowing that i share a bar trick with the Wife of Bath, Cleopatra, and Madonna.

according to the rules of this meme – i have to tag seven peeps. so here ya go!

1. jason puckett
2. david rothman
3. jan dawson
4. graham lavender
5. steven cohen
6. jason hammond
7. anna creech

things i look forward to in 2009

actually becoming a business librarian. sure i like to play with emerging tech and figure out how to use it in my library, but i plan on spending 2009 developing my knowledge  of business databases. Bloomberg, Datastream and WRDS – i will master you!

The Trotsky a movie written and directed by a friend from high school.  (well, we were kinda friends then, and everytime we bump into each other we have a good laugh, but i guess mostly i’m friends with his sister.) other than the cast being terrific, the one thing i will always remember about Jacob, and definitely why we still seem to have a good laugh whenever we bump into each other, is that he is a frickin’ smart and funny guy. the movie is about high school days as seen through jacob’s eyes, with Jay Baruchel as one of the main characters. i’m fairly confident this will be hilarious.

spending more time outdoors NOT playing rugby. the mister got me a pair of very fancy snow shoes two winters ago and i have yet to use them. (i suk. i know.) i plan to rectify this situation this winter. Mont Royal has lots of great trails for snowshoeing, what am i waiting for? (and Mont Royal Park was designed by the same dude that did Central Park in NYC).
also, there are at least five outdoor skating rinks within a 10 minute walk of my house (that is when the streets and sidewalks are not, in fact, skating rinks themselves) so i’m going to pick up a pair of second hand skates. i used to love skating at midnight in the winter – everything is so peaceful.
(this being said, i can’t wait to play rugby this summer. taking last summer off was good for me – and the first summer in 17 years that i didn’t play – but i missed my team mates, and the tackling. mostly the tackling.)

open access awesomeness. i really want to learn more about open access issues as they relate to publishing and libraries. i’ve worked in publishing a looong time (this is year 14) and i used to edit and now publish an open access journal (which i think more academic libraries should get involved in – i’ll talk about this at CiL2009) but i really want to know more and get a better idea of all that is involved with it.

meeting more librarians. social networks have been essential to my development as a librarian. i have no idea where i’d be know if i hadn’t hopped on second life two years ago (and yes, i do think that on top of everything else going on in SL, that it is also a social networking tool) where i met librarians from all over the globe who were quick to support me through my degree. and twitter, well twitter is still THE BEST THING EVAH as far as my professional development. (though friendfeed is proving to be a very close second – anything that almagamates all the different networks into one screen, is a good good thing.)
i also got to “meat” a lot of librarians this year thanks to all the conferences i managed to hit up – OLA in february (toronto), CiL in april (arlington), SLA in june (seattle), IFLA in august (quebec city), Access in october (hamilton), IL in october (monterey). next year will see less travel since i now have a full-time job which won’t cover ever single conference i want to go to (though they’ve definitely been good to me this year), but i will be at CiL in late march (arlington, encore), SLA in june (in DC), and i’ll be at the CLA emerging tech preconference at the end of may (montreal) since amanda and i organized the bad boy.  “meating” librarians is always the best part of conferences and i’ve made some pretty networks – especially with my fellow recent grads who ended up in academia. and to all those of you that i met this year – i am one lucky girl to know ya.