thoughts and rants

since we all read LISNews (and if you don’t - wtf?) and since Blake rocks all things LISHost (if you need a site hosted - check it out!), we should all subscribe to LISWire, which is:

a brand new idea from the guy behind LISNews & LISHost, Blake Carver. The plan is to allow member companies and organizations to use LISWire to send their full-text news releases and multimedia content to librarians, journalists, library professionals and the general public. We’re going to build a network to distribute this information world wide.

love it.

there’s a great meme making the rounds and i thought i’d jump on the bandwagon since some pretty rockin’ folk have uploaded their pix.

here’s what to do:

Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title. And link back to this post.

i’m going to tag a bunch of new/soon to be librarians on this

• Jan over at 7.9/8 librarian
• Karin, who blogs many places, but I’ll tag her at Musings of an LIS student
• Jason of Jason Puckett.net
• another Jason (this one’s a Canuck) at Head Tale
• Timothy who blogs at TimothyGreig.com

upgrading to WP 2.5 was totally painless. but the photo dropper plugin no longer seems happy. hmmm.

pecha kucha (pronounced “hootchie kootchie” by those of us who were tired of sounding like idiots) is a rockin’ great way to present at a conferences.

here’s the dirt: you get 20 seconds to talk about your slides, and 20 slides for your presentation. the slides advance automatically (well they’re supposed to - aaron was taking care of this for everyone but then started cheating during his own presentation so greg took over) so you really only have 20 seconds to get your message across.

it rocks.

you have to be creative with both the visual and the aural presentation, and the time constraints gives the whole thing a sense of urgency which the audience picks up on and it really increases engagement.

the presenters at this hootchie kootchie were all rock stars:

• amanda - IM
• greg - podcasting
• david - videocasting
• meredith - wikis
• aaron - facebook
• greg n. - skeptic

i really think this format would be great for students - it allows you to practice a presentation, using tech, where you have to be succinct and entertaining at the same time. you could hold monthly hootchie kootchies over a lunch hour. you could choose a theme, or even better, turn them into skill-shares/unconferences where people would present on a topic which they know particularly well.

so much fun!

UPDATE

check out the hootchie kootchie for yourself. 

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

i love waking up in the morning to great items in my RSS aggregator. like this one, about LIS students:

We’ve begun to make it easier for change to come and for them to have a stronger voice in our march to freedom of information and enlightenment for all. We’d like to pick and choose among these new librarians, through our programs for “emerging” leaders and other institutionalized indoctrination. But they have already begun to organize themselves, singling out their own leaders and demanding of us only that same access to the profession that enabled us to make some of our future dreams into today’s realities.

I remember that future, and I remember how tough it was to convince those in charge that we would define it and lead it ourselves, not simply pay our dues and wait to be selected. If our profession is true to its history, we’ll leave its door ajar so those new librarians can, once again, march through and change librarianship.

Blatant Berry, Jan 15 2008

it made my day/week/hell, year!

and i love her!

her name is Bette (all my compys have names. yup, that’s how i roll.) and she is so wonderfully functional.
(and no, my cat is not huge, that’s really how small Bette is.)

i’ve been using the XO to email, use the Google suite of fun stuff, update this blog, and for the most part, it’s perfect. it’s slower than all of my other compys, but that’s okay. my others don’t fit in my purse. (yes, i know about the eeePC, and i want one, but buying one of those didn’t get some education project in a developing country a new laptop, so i got an XO.)

oh, and the more i use Google Docs, the more i love it. i know “big brother” could be watching, but that’s okay. i’ll keep my anarchist manifesto off-the-grid until i virally infect every computer on earth with its dictum. (JOKE! homey can’t code. though i did just download Hackety Hack to see what all the kerfuffle is about.)

so everyone and their dog is talking about the demise of newspapers. the topic has even made it into pop culture, most recently in the newest season of The Wire (great line from the 20 minute promo: “You don’t do more with less. You do less with less.”) and a recent episode of The Simpsons where during election-mania in Springfield, the following happened during a CNN-type show:

Dan Rather-type, introducing a political panel: “… and Ron Mahar, a print journalist from the Washington Post.”
Nelson Muntz, pointing at print journalist: “Ha ha! Your medium is dying.”
Principal Seymour Skinner: “Nelson!”
Nelson: “But it is.”
Skinner: “There’s being right and then there’s being nice.”

so what should newspapers do to increase readership while still making a buck? let’s face it, giving the product away for free (as most are currently doing) is unsustainable. no kidding every newspaper is cutting down it’s local news and instead buying news from whatever the cheapest wire source is available - they are giving away their online content for free!

the New York Times offered TimesSelect- content exclusive to subscribers (cost of subscription: 49.95$) - until recently. that ended on September 19, 2007 and they now rely on the advertising on the site for revenue. this follows a number of other newspaper sites which offered paid content, and then saw online readership decrease.

i see the online presence of newspapers as a forum ripe for new content. on top of allowing readers to discuss articles in forums, newspapers could offer so much more additional content on their website, and people would be willing to pay for it!

for example, one of the most interesting events in ANY newsroom is the late afternoon news meeting where stories are presented by editors and when “newsworthiness” is determined. now i can see why editors are nine kinds of freaked out about having these made public - what if it comes out you didn’t know about a story/didn’t fight for it and it ended up being huge? or when some great (but tragic) art gets spiked in favour of local pets being blessed by the Catholic Cardinal? (never happens…) either way, wouldn’t the discussions started by this transparency ultimately benefit both the creators and users of the newspaper? and wouldn’t it create a tighter bond between the two sides, possibly increasing pride in the product? (or am I totally nuts and think too much of readers and editors?)

of course users aren’t willing to pay to read the “just” the news. between the internet, and frankly the radio (i *heart* CBC radio), why would they pick up a newspaper? radio covers local issues better, and national/international is well covered by the internet.

newspapers MUST add content to their sites. to say that at the moment they are doing what they can is simply brushing off a section of the population who would be thrilled to return to getting their news from a local newsroom, if not from the actual printed paper.

xkcd rocks

and the img titles to their comics are hilarious.