The other day, a KCLS patron emailed in and requested Amazon-like features for iPac (the web catalog), such as people who checked out this author’s work also checked out these other authors. Now, of course we can’t do that right now because it’s not one of the features available in iPac, but the question got [...]
Inspired by Bob Stephen, I'm posting a list of ALA's 100 most frequently challenged books for 1990-2000, with the ones I've read in bold. I've actually read distressingly few of them. Must remedy that.
Last Friday, my digital reference class met upstairs in the computer classroom for synchronous (chat) reference practice. I'd done asynchronous (email) reference previously but was unprepared for chat reference, other than what Lydia (the instructor) had said about it in class. This was to be our practice session. Half of us were librarians and the [...]
In class discussion on Wednesday, when the Digital Reference Assignment was due, Michael Harkovitch mentioned one of the questions he had answered for the IPL, about the meaning of the word pimping, used by a certain person in a certain context. For him this question raised issues of authority, due both to the lack of [...]
Today I turned in my Digital Reference Assignment for LIS 521. The meat of this assignment was answering nine questions for the Internet Public Library. In the course of writing up my little report of my IPL experience, I started thinking about Google Answers and how different it is from the IPL, even though they [...]
ALA librarians are not the quiet, unassuming stereotypes you see on TV and in the movies. (Paul Walfield, The ALA Library: Terrorist Sanctuary)
Coming eventually to a television near you: The Librarian, a new action movie planned by TNT. Librarian centers on a cache of mythical objects secreted beneath the New York Public Library, including the Golden Fleece and the Ark of the Covenant. The title character must guard them against the forces of evil. Too bad it's [...]
Today I spent about 4 hours at the Issaquah branch of KCLS shadowing the reference librarians there for an assignment. The class is on reference services, so we're supposed to shadow someone providing an information service, in order to see how it's done in the field. My supervisor in ITS was nice enough to introduce [...]
Holy horn-rimmed glasses, Stephen Cohen of librarystuff.net has linked to my librarian blog, saying More library school students should be blogging like Laurabelle. So my hits have exploded in the past few days, people are commenting like mad, and I'm left feeling a bit like I've been hit by a car and wasn't wearing clean [...]
It occurs to me that it would be cool to research how people organize their own bookshelves. This may indeed become my research project for LIS 570, whenever I get around to taking it. Outside of libraries, how do people arrange books for their own consumption?