LSW, here I come!

After much too long reading about the Library Society of the World, I've finally "formally" joined up. (Am also using Meebo for the first time today in the LSW chat!) I met a lot of LSWers for the first time at Internet Librarian and this is a group of folks I want to know! (And go to pubs with.)

Currently 65°, grey and gloomy, with a 100% chance of precipitation in the forecast. w00t!

3BT: Thursday

1. Waking up to rain. (It's still raining!)
2. Perfect bananas for breakfast.
3. A morning without a single toddler power struggle.

And now the coffee's brewing! w00t!

Random Musings: Catching Up

Interesting concept: "Sexy Librarian: Critical Edition of the Original Novel" by Julia Weist will be coming out this fall. Think I might have to keep an eye out for it.

Give "Addy Will Know" a listen! "Serving as a musical tribute to the modern librarian, it is about a real librarian who leads a lost patron to the four books he is looking for." (Long overdue thanks to Kris!)

More on the Australian TV show "The Librarians": read an article from The Daily Telegraph about the comedy, and you can watch the episodes in full on the ABC website! (I need to do this.)

Check out this very cool commercial from the University of Buffalo library! "Save Time... Ask a Librarian!" Love it! (Thanks to Liz for sending this to me, and congrats to Jill on doing it!)

Cold, grey, gloomy, and only 64°! Brr! (Yes, I'm a weather wimp.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm off to give thanks for my family and friends - I hope you all have a lovely, fun-filled and joyful holiday weekend!

Secret handshakes are never boring!

A few short articles that came through my newsstream today:

"Secret librarian handshake revealed!" - Brad Barker at the Modesto Bee shares our secret handshake with the world, along with breakfast preferences and pickup lines. Gave me a grin!

"Upon reflection, being a librarian is never boring" - Julie Winkelstein at the Contra Costa Times reminisces about her library columns over the years.

76° and sunny; maybe fall has come to stay this time!

I am the Annoyed Librarian.

Drat...the secret is out. The AL is not Meredith, or Karen, or any of those other impostors out there. It's me!

3 Beautiful Things: Monterey

Lazy Morning
Originally uploaded by desertlibrarian

(A slightly delayed post...)

1. Watching a little boy and his grandmother dancing to Gemini Soul's music at the arts & crafts festival on Sunday.

2. Spending some time just watching the ocean, listening to the sea lions.

3. Meeting up with new friends and catching up with old ones.

LISNews for teh win!

Congratulations to Blake on his successful (still ongoing but lookin' good) migration of LISNews to Drupal! (w00t!)

Aah, fall in the desert... currently 88° and sunny. I hear there was snow in the Northeast.

Slides on SlideShare

So, I created a SlideShare account and uploaded my (admittedly not very descriptive) slides from my Internet Librarian presentation. I was very impressed with how easy it was to use; now if only I could get a microphone so I could turn it into a slidecast and do the descriptive part!

| View | Upload your own

A Librarian Without Books

I'm happy to say that the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series #377 is now published, aka Library and Information Services in Astronomy V: Common Challenges, Uncommon Solutions. I had the privilege of attending and presenting a poster at this conference in June 2006.

You can see a copy of the poster that was presented, and read the abstract for the summary paper in the proceedings, if you so desire.

IL2007: Content Management Systems

I kicked off this section with a brief overview of our year-long investigation into content management systems (CMSs), then passed it off to Amy Radermacher (Concordia University) and May Chang (University of Maryland) to discuss their own experiences with the CMSs chosen for them by their universities. I have to say I felt pretty lucky after hearing what they've had to go through...

Anyway, I'm going to learn how to use SlideShare and post my slides later today; in the meantime, thanks to ellbeecee for the action photos!

IL2007: Folksonomies and Tagging

(Catching up on my last few posts!)

Tom Reamy, KAPS Group (Knowledge Architecture Professional Services)

Libraries & the Hive Mind

Essentials of, Improving the quality of, and In libraries

advantages: simple, lower cost of categorization, open ended, higher relevance (to the user), support serendipitous browsing, can tag anything, and it's always better than nothing at all! (what if it's bad or incorrect tags?)

disadvantages: quality. Hard to find with unstructured tags; no structure, no conceptual relationships. Issues of scale, limited applicability. Errors keep cropping up, makes it even less useful.

Dangers of Folksonomies: The Unwisdom of Crowds

Popularity can drown out quality

KAPS did a multi-year study to see if social networking has improved folksonomies; result is, not so far.

faceted navigation: combines strength of having structure with the ability to support personal perspectives - big advantages of a folksonomy

flickr: over 90% of the tags cover 6 basic facets; less than 1% cover subject matter.

del.icio.us: topics, not facets. findability a big problem here.

improving the quality: cluster tags, add broad general taxonomy (natural categorization), evolve the quality of tags.

librarything: turns out book people aren't any better at tagging! (Ha!)

Doesn't think traditional library strategies are going to work, nor will social networking efforts (good for socializing, not tagging).

What might work: semantic infrastructure and evolution, integrated evolving solution, new relationships