kristin buxton › Likes

Hehehehe. Or asking the patrons of the Cabaret Voltaire what they think about still life painting. - s t e v e

Oh yes. I was hoping it didn't sound like I wanted to squelch discussion. Just that there will be some skepticism. And that this "society" is on another wavelength entirely. - s t e v e

Lawson, Griffey, I love you guys! and the pants of the vicar are closing rataplan rataplan rrrrrrrrrrrr! - josh neff, geek at large

Asking LSW about professional library organizations is like asking vegans for steakhouse recommendations? - Chris Z.

doesn't LSW want to place members in other organizations to promote their ideals throughout the entire system? Of course barring that maybe LSW needs subgenre orgs? p.s. I would totally ask Bob if he thought their was a good Universalist church in my area. His wisdom is all knowing and ultra perceptive - JSNFLMNG

I don't know that the LSW wants anything. There are too many of us to have any specific agenda. And I wasn't trying to say that LSW people are anti-organization any more than Unitarians are anti-organized religion. It's just that the what Unitarians and LSW members think is an "organization" may not be what other people think it is. - s t e v e

Me too, Jill! - s t e v e

truetrue. I thought for example that code4lib was a great response to my thread. I never thought of it as an organization, more of a conference. Just the kind of suggestion I would expect from the LSW - JSNFLMNG

code4lib is in its way rather lsw-ish; similar kind of "if you want it done, just do it" vibe - D0r0th34

Not that it really matters, but my former UU church minister (JUC) is now the UUA prez. JUC also has a buncha librarians, including the former state Librarian, but I still need to convert them to the LSW faith. - joe is...

Excellent, thank you. What else? - D0r0th34

that you're likely to be building collections that support academic areas out of your area of expertise. - Marie is merry.

that there is usually going to be only one or two faculty in a department interested in talking with you, and how do you go about building a collection that supports the whole department anyway. - Marie is merry.

how *do* you go about that? :) - D0r0th34

okay, one more thing i wish i'd learned: as the formats for scholarly content change - the latest evolution being from print to electronic - a collection developer needs to be in touch with how people use the materials collected. if a coll developer is going to prefer e-content, he/she then becomes the responsible party for ensuring that those using the materials know how to access the content. this demonstrates that collection development is more complicated than simply selecting materials. - Marie is merry.

From the PL perspective: where to find the short popular series before the kids start asking for them; "do I put it in children's or teen"; series development (when to give up, when to replace); where to buy; standing orders: good or bad --I recall learning a lot about weeding, not so much purchasing.... As it is now I read a boatload of children's lit, still trying to catch up and I know there are holes in the chapter book collection because all the money went to Harry Potter books for at least two years. - Abigail

from the academic perspective - how to shift an organization and its staff roles from buying stuff to enabling the creation and free use of stuff. (Do I get a star? Seriously, I'm thinking about this a lot...) - barbara fister

You definitely get a star. I think I was tapped to teach this CD course because that precise scenario is kinda the sum total of my professional life. - D0r0th34

oh oh! I really wish we would stop dividing the world into what we subscribe to and what we don't. We do ourselves a disservice when we don't promote great websites and data resources (or gosh, even open access archives!) along side all the stuff we pay money for. Students and faculty don't see the world like this, and nor should we. Damn I typed all that before I saw Barbara's response. Glad others thinking of this too. - Fiona Bradley

thank you, Fiona :) - D0r0th34

What Fiona, Barbara, and Marie said about the formats changing and enabling access, managing subscriptions rather than just buying things. I learned *nothing* about license negotiation, troubleshooting subscription access, promoting/providing access to e-content. - Galadriel C.

This is from a PL perspective as well, but I learned much of what I needed to know in library school. Economics in Collections taught by a non-librarian, a mathematician. Look at the stats, predict the action, order the right material. - Jeff Scott

Someone donated 44 cents? - Jàson Puçkett

Heh. PayPal takes a small cut of each PayPal contribution. So at some point I just cleaned out my PayPal account, and this is how much it was. - s t e v e

Hey Steve, looks like your site is down? - Jàson Puçkett

It was having trouble for a bit--OK for you now? - s t e v e

I am still wrestling with my paypal issues, but hope to have a contribution coming soon! :) - Connie Crosby

Connie, several people have sent checks, so if you'd rather do that it's no big deal. - s t e v e

we are not academic (large national research org) but similar issues. Just about (next week) to launch blogs. Have divided by discipline which also reflects org structure. 1 main blog then 5 subject areas with sub disciplines covered by categories. Using WordpressMU. - suelibrarian

I'm not a liaison, but.... we have one main library blog and several blogs for individual disciplines. http://homer.gsu.edu/blogs... - Jàson Puçkett

We're not doing any blogs at present because of issues with legal. Hope that will be changing soon. - Rachel Walden

We have one main library blog and blogs for different colleges. (More or less.) But not every college has a blog. We also use categories for different subjects within a college. I think it largely depends on how many people / how much time you've got to maintain the blog(s). - Deborah Fitchett

I have about 7 different departments. I tend to tag the entries according to the various liaison areas, such as: http://sci-eng-penrose.blogspot.com/search... - joe is...

we're about to start one out at the biz library for our faculty as a pilot project. i proposed them at the branch level to a) make sure we aren't just syndicating our "events & announcements" stuff from the library home page, and b) to make it easier to know what content to add. plus i see it as more of a tool for reaching our faculty over our students - so i'm going to try and showcase faculty research (deep linking into our resources) as well as giving them the headsup about other biz programs. - jambina

Subsidiary questions for those that do have subject blogs and a main blog. Do you pipe the posts from your main blog to the subject blogs? I am in two minds about this. It would save the time of the reader and remove the issue of expecting them to subscribe to two places but for those that have cross subject interests they would get those posts multiple times. - suelibrarian

We don't. I suspect it'd be tricky with our software. If something's important enough we'll copy and paste (or copy and edit if I want it to suit the style of our particular users). One thing for ours is that we have php set up to pull snippets of the most recent blog entries onto library webpages - eg main blog shows on library homepage (http://library.canterbury.ac.nz) and subject... more... - Deborah Fitchett

I am using WordpressMU so I was just going to use the feed plugin to pull from the main blog to each of the others. It would take a bit to set up which is why I havent done it yet.Thks for the examples. Unfortunately our main library are part of our intranet and static only ATM. - suelibrarian

We have one main blog and pull feeds into various pages based on categories. I thought that librarians would be excited about having such a quick and easy way to push news/information out to users, but only our electronic resources librarian is using it. I think I'm going to start an informal brown bag series to communicate these ideas better. I get it, but not sure my colleagues even have it on their radar. - Jen

One main blog (Wordpress) with multiple categories representing different departments/campus libraries. This way posts can be assigned to multiple categories, if relevant. We also use a little Javascript/PHP to display the headlines on the main library site and campus sites. We basically treat each category as a separate blog with it's own RSS, but it's nice to let librarians cross-post items. - jönαthaη

Rachel--I'm curious to know why legal is holding up blogs? - Connie Crosby

Connie, they just haven't really gotten it and are nervous about the whole thing. For example, there is a med center blog, but you have to log in with med center ID and password to view it and comments always have that identifying information attached. Not allowed to have public blogs. They say the only way around this currently is if no comments are allowed, which sort of defeats the purpose. (added: and that med center blog hasn't been updated since Feb) - Rachel Walden

That's what I was told last time I checked anyway - I think there have been some personnel changes in a position to shake it up a bit, though. There are some existing blogs on the univ side, but my understanding is that there's a freeze on new ones. *sigh* - Rachel Walden

Unfortunately counsel often don't understand Web 2.0. Their whole purpose is to mitigate risk, so it is easier for them to just say no. What kind of organization are you in? - Connie Crosby

We started out with all comments pre-screened. Once we got authentication working we got to give the choice so people can comment with their name attached and it appears immediately, or anonymously and it's pre-screened. Once long ago people had to log in just to view, but fortunately that was rapidly seen as Sub-Optimal. - Deborah Fitchett

Connie, I'm at the med library at an academic medical center. - Rachel Walden

A tricky area, Rachel. It will take some work to educate them that you are using blogs to facilitate communication, not to say anything confidential or give out medical advice. Too bad they can't see blogs as just a quick-to-edit website news page, or a newsletter. I think it is the word "blog" that gets people tied up into knots. I like the idea of moderated comments with a comment policy posted. Could they live with that?? - Connie Crosby

I came up with the name & started the original wiki. The original idea was sort of a gestalt thing on Twitter. And it's grown because of many people. - josh neff, geek at large

Awesome dude. I still owe you a better hug, so this is a virtual hug. - joe is...

Dude, that whole post is a virtual hug. You made my day! - josh neff, geek at large

Count me it. 2010 in Denver. (BTW, there's likely to be another library unconference in Toronto in spring 2009.) - John Dupuis