| Blog Name & URL | Focus | Writer/Compiler | Established | Excerpt* |
| Blog Without a Library
http://www.blogwithoutalibrary.net/ |
"what libraries are doing with blogs, RSS, and other emerging technologies to serve their users" | Amanda Etches-Johnson, reference librarian at McMaster University (Ontario, Canada) | September 2003 | "For those of you who have recently found yourselves wondering just how many libraries are blogging these days, you might enjoy having a glance over these numbers…." |
| Carnival of the Infosciences
http://infosciences.pbwiki.com/ |
"a weekly weblog post that endeavors to showcase the best posts in the blogosphere about topics related to the wide world of Library and Information Science." | Greg Schwartz, Madison, Indiana | August 2005 | [Provides a list links to current, past, and upcoming weekly sets of highlights from various library-related blogs.] |
| Dave’s Blog
http://daweed.blogspot.com/ |
“cool stuff about library web sites – usability, searching, new technologies, design… and whatever else I decide to post” | David King, , Kansas City, Missouri | September 2003 | "According to a recent survey, teens (age 12 - 17) think email is for grown-ups (even though 90% of the kids DO have an email account, too)." |
| Ex Libris
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/ |
"how we can use the internet, computers, and databases, to improve our services"; "ways in which computers, the internet, and databases will irrevocably alter libraries, our users, and our political and financial environment"; "what we have to do to make our systems usable for our patrons"; any really good readings I come across" | Marylaine Block, longtime freelance librarian and author | 1999 |
|
|
Fade Theory
http://fadetheory.com/ |
"information and reflection on book history, book arts, publishing news, and reading theory" | [Anonymous] | June 2005? | "John Baker [at John Baker's Blog] has a post on the saddest books. I’ve read some devastatingly sad books, and I’d say that Ethan Frome is definitely on my list of saddest books. In retrospect, it may not have been the best book to read in 6th grade." |
| Free Range Librarian
http://freerangelibrarian.com/ |
"postcards from the edge of librarianship" | Karen Schneider, honcho of the "Librarians Index to the Internet"; 3-time councilor for ALA; author of 100 articles and 2 books | July 2003 |
"Librarians are primarily
concerned with last-mile
issues: access, organization,
preservation, intellectual
freedom, and information
literacy.
Content providers, such as journalists and bloggers, are primarily concerned with first-mile issues: creation, dissemination, delivery.... Information is a conversation, not a lecture. Users can and should be given the opportunity to participate in information's journey. But it should not be a forced march. Those who can participate in the discussion have an obligation to recognize the many silent stakeholders we represent: the single mother working 12-hour shifts at Walmart, the visually-challenged user slowly reading a blog through text-to-sound software, the older person experiencing the Internet for the first time, the librarian serving a busy line of users, and the many quiet, regular users of information who, like lurkers on an email list, play an important and underlooked [sic] role as an audience of listeners." |
|
It's All Good
http://scanblog.blogspot.com/ |
"about all things..that impact libraries and library users." | Alice Sneary, Alane Wilson, and George Needham, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) | May 2004 | [Posted by Alane]: I am a squeaky (and no doubt annoying) wheel on the matter of the the vanilla OPAC interface, devoid of personality, personalization, any hint of the community it supposedly represents and as exciting and friendly to use as an online parts catalogue. One reason, I think, is librarians' collective belief that patrons' privacy is being protected from the potential plundering of their identities. Bull-pucky, is what I retort to that...because as a profession we've done little or no research into what amount of privacy our communities expect from library OPACs…. |
| Librarian Activist
http://librarianactivist.org/ |
"news, information, and resources to librarians who want to be active in political and social issues surrounding libraries and librarianship" | Danielle Dennie, science librarian at the Université du Québec à Montréal | November 2003 | Eyes on the Prize: Copyright v. History From the website Eyes on the Screen (put together by DownHill Battle, a non-profit): "Eyes on the Prize is the most important documentary ever made about the Civil Rights Movement--but copyright restrictions have kept it from the public for the past 10 years. We can't let that continue...." |
|
Librarian in Black
http://www.librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/ |
"Resources and discussions for the 'tech-librarians-by-default among us" | Sarah Houghton, electronic services librarian for the Marin County (California) Free Library | November 2004 | Jessamyn West, Michael Gorman, and Sue Davidsen were interviewed for a Wired sidebar question: Will the Internet put public libraries out of business? Short answer? Of course not, but our roles will shift, as they always have as things change... |
|
Librarian Avengers
http://www.librarianavengers.org/ |
Erica Olsen (Ithaca, NY) |
1998 | "We need to run everything we do [for Internet-using library customers] through a filter that asks: "If I click on this without an MLS, will it piss me off?" We need to acknowledge that design matters. We need to remove ourselves from our collections. We need to design websites that don't mock the resources they contain. We need to do these things because otherwise all of our efforts are worthless. We need to design websites that don't suck, because otherwise the kids that we care so much about are going to wander off and smoke crack. And it's going to be our fault." | |
| Librarian.net
http://www.librarian.net/ |
"Putting the rarin' back in librarian": "links to things online that I think are interesting and thought provoking, as well as some discussion of a few of those topics" | Jessamyn West, employee of the Rutland Free Library (Rutland, VT), ALA Councilor, and editor of the book Revolting Librarians Redux | 1993 | "I missed this from the PLA
Blog before I left ALA but there's a pretty interesting
statistic here: 80% of
libraries serve populations of
less than 10,000. Even a
rural-ish library like mine
serves a population of almost
30,000." |
| Library & Information
Science News
http://www.lisnews.org/ |
Breaking news in the library world. Hyperlinked alerts are posted throughout the day, every day, by a volunteer contributors. | Blake Carver,
a librarian in "Western New York" |
November 1999 | "Yet Another Article, this time from Oklahoma, about a local mom who says she was shocked when her children were recently exposed to inappropriate images being viewed by computer users at the Ardmore Public Library. This is a good long article that looks at the issue rather well." |
|
Library Juice
http://www.libr.org/Juice/ |
"discussions, commentary, announcements, humor, web links and news affecting the library world" | Rory Litwin
(Duluth, MN) |
Early 1998 | "Noel Peattie, librarian and poet, has passed away..." |
|
Library Link of the Day
http://www.tk421.net/librarylink/ |
A single link, without commentary, posted each day to an item from "the latest library news, good reads on the web, and...valuable resources that a library knowledge worker should know about," based on scans of several dozen library blogs. | John Hubbard, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | January 2003 | Today's Link: "Philadelphia Hopes to Lead the Charge to Wireless Future" [The New York Times]" |
| Library Stuff
www.librarystuff.net/ |
"Resources for keeping current and professional development." | Stephen M. Cohen | February 2003 [or before?] |
Librarians as Babysitters? The [news] story about a head librarian [in Florida] suspended because of what her patrons
were viewing online has…[resulted in] some great comments [at SlashDot], as usual:
|
| The Shifted Librarian
http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/ |
"Cool tools for to
help us librarians
become as
techno- logically adept as our users are so that we can deliver services to them when and where they wish to use them and in their preferred medium and platform." |
Jenny Levine, Internet
Develop- ment Specialist, Suburban Library System (Burr Ridge, IL) and honcho for what may have been libraryland's first library blog (circa 1995), the now-extinct "Librarians' Site du Jour" |
January 2002 | " 'We've got an entire group
of people under age 30 who
grew up playing video
games,' said Jim Gee,
professor in the UW-Madison School of
Education. 'It's completely
changing the way people
think about education and
the workplace.'
This 'gamer generation' includes some 90 million people in the U.S. alone, ages 15 to 35. In fact, sales of video games have now surpassed sales of TVs, DVDs and CDs…." |