Happy Anniversary

I almost let it go by! Two days ago, Librarienne turned one year old. Oh, what a stormy year it has been. My head is a spinning cloud of many different thoughts right now so I’ll just pull a few out of the air and paint this post with random colors (how’s that for mixing metaphors!):

- As of this moment I have at least 5 posts in draft status … the oldest one was a comparison of Google Books vs. Google Scholars, another one looked at the paradox of librarians protecting patron confidentiality when so many people are so blatantly public these days, and the most recent post to go on draft status was a look at some movies we watched over Spring Break and which all seemed eerily related somehow (Sherrybaby, Lady Vengeance, Possession, Match Point).

- I wish I had made a screen shot of all the looks/skins/appearances I put my blog through in the past year. I must have tried a dozen different WordPress themes at one time or another with different widgets and what-nots. It would be nice to look back through them and remember what I liked or didn’t like about each one. For those of you reading this on an aggregator, I recently added a widget to my sidebar for my Google Reader shared items. That little box is *way* more active than this blog, I’m sorry to say, but it’s also a good place to see what I probably wish I had time to blog about.

- Which reminds me… I’m toying with an idea for a little class research project, but I’m not sure how well it would work so let me know what all you bloggers think of this. I’d like to find a lot of different blogs that feature a link or widget to the blog writer’s Google Reader shared items list and compare the number of items they share to the number/frequency of posts they write. Long ago in another land I had read something about the large number of content readers vs. the comparatively small number of content creators. I’m wondering if the amount of stuff we, as content creators read, affects the amount of our output. Of course it does, but how? I’m not sure exactly how to measure that. Number of links or citations per post? Number of shared items against words per post? At first I thought it might be better to look at Bloglines lists instead to know how many feeds blog writers subscribe to, but – with myself as a great example – I know that subscribing does not necessarily equal reading. The idea is still in its infancy.

- I’ve recently subscribed to a blog that is completely out of place in my blog reader – it’s not techie, not about libraries, not news … it’s about … (wincing in embarrassment) romantic comedies. Well, it’s from a guy who edits and writes screenplays for these bizarre little tokens of pop culture. And I, for one, think his blog posts are really fun and witty reads. He includes so many “what were they thinking??” quips when he discusses the latest script he had to suffer through, but he doesn’t go completely cynical, which is refreshing. One of my favorite posts of late has been his combination of “petting the dog” with “jumping the shark” thus creating “posting the pet” … I am plenty guilty of this over in Flickr (slideshow recommended).

- Some big changes at home of late. Very positive changes that raise big questions about the future, which is always closer than I think. In some ways my partner and I are complete opposites, but one of the things we have in common is that we’re both rather reserved, private people. It takes us some time to really integrate ourselves into a new circle of people. I’m thinking of this now in light of a theory I read about way back in high school, that has constantly popped up in my mind over and over since then. I like Erikson’s ideas but disagree with some of the values he includes in his stages of development. For example, my partner and I are on the cusp between two stages right now. The corresponding “crisis” per Erikson is “intimacy vs. isolation” and “success vs. stagnation” (… actually, Erikson uses the term “generativity” where I use “success” because he was referring more to producing children which has no interest for us whatsoever). So here we are, still trying to iron the details of “intimacy vs. isolation” as we look ahead to “success vs. stagnation” and I can see how a person’s methods of dealing with the former will significantly affect the latter. I can see we’ll have a lot of details to figure out in the next couple years but I think a lot of these details are going to figure themselves out, too. I’m wondering, in an excited what-will-I-get-for-Christmas way, what our backgrounds will make of us.

8 pointed star above

03-15-07_1903.jpg

Originally uploaded by Librarienne.

I’m sitting here in the big pretty library on campus (as opposed to the crumbling dark one) and I look up in search of a conclusion to my essay, when I realize that the 8 sided light casts a shadow of an 8 pointed star! That prob’ly won’t come out well in the photo, but I had to try. Back to essay.

Spring Break

Spring Break

Originally uploaded by Librarienne.

This is my break right here – five minutes on a bench before it rains, listening to Moby. It’s such a battle to get everything done but spend enough time on each thing to make it worthwhile. I could be learning all kinds of great stuff this term, but time is restricting me to skimming where I’d like to be concentrating. Ah well, break over.

Eyes bigger than my calendar

One of the biggest lessons I’m learning in grad school is time management … or, better put, how the absence of time management can really mess up every aspect of your life.  Smiles.

Maybe every student has a semester that they didn’t do quite right … I think this is mine.  I tried to pack in too many classes and too many jobs and here I am, barely half way through the semester, feeling like I’ve already run the marathon only to find this is just the turn-around point.

But just like a marathon (from what marathon-runners have told me), there’s a strange kind of high in there somewhere, too.  Less than two months ago I was in Prague at a library conference.  Today a whole gaggle of us are going to East St. Louis to survey community centers in low-income neighborhoods for computer labs.  How cool is that?   A few days ago I went to a lecture called “Visions of Time” given by a Princeton chronologist who, as if in irony, used faded black and white photocopied transparencies on a projector for his presentation.  I realized that was the first projector I’ve seen in use for, oh, six years at least.  It was like watching someone type on a typewriter.  It put things in perspective for me during this crazy term of back-to-back scheduling.  As fun as it’s been, next year I’m only taking 12 credits a term, tops.

Hopefully you’ll see some photos here soon of this weekend’s trip.  Updates to come.

“The world is… a conference room”

The full quote is actually “the world is the size of a conference room now” as spoken by Robert Scoble, whose recent presentation is up on Stealthmode.  I will warn you – the video of his presentation is almost an hour long, but only parts of it need to be seen.  The rest can be absorbed through the audio, so you can simply play it in the background while you’re working (as I did this morning).  I found the video through a link on Robert’s blog post about reading, which – combined with the video of how he uses Google Reader – addresses one of the things I’ve been wondering about for a while now: information absorption.  Maybe that’s not a good phrase.  Specifically, I want to know how to select, filter and keep all the (relevant!) information out there in some sort of useful form.

Or maybe the appeal of RSS readers and the like is even simpler than that – maybe we’re all just trying to stay in the loop.  As an “information professional” it’s hard to know which loop or loops to stay in; the organization of information is only one aspect of what we (librarians) do.  The content of that information is another issue altogether.  I know several fellow students in my library program who were drawn to the degree because it was the closest they could get to a sort of Renaissance-Scholar education … meaning, we want to be well-versed in a lot of different areas because we see the overarching connections between all these fields.  When you learn a classification scheme, you get the chance to learn a little about everything from political science to theology to literature to  astronomy.  Granted, we’re only learning enough about these other fields to sort it out into some sort of ordered schema of human knowledge, but that’s a start.  Sometimes, though, I do feel like this classification side gets in the way of the content side.

Is this the blogosphere?

A new video for Tracey Thorn’s song “It’s All True” gives a great visual representation of online interaction – a room full of people each sitting behind a computer and a desk, each flaring up in turn until eventually they’re all doing the same moves in synch. One could look at this as an optimistic example of the future of collaboration, or it could appear as a nightmare of conformity.

I also see the irony of so many people being so close together but only interacting indirectly. Like all the people I see at bus stops on cell phones, or when people are on their laptops in class and talking to each other in the online forum rather than looking up and speaking face-to-face. It’s a crazy world.
Oh, and I like the song, too.

Books and Blogs

As I have class in, oh, 15 minutes – I’m going to just give a bullet list of topics in my head:

- I’ve started using Google Reader instead of Bloglines.  Well, I haven’t even been reading my Bloglines feeds for a few months now, so trying out this new aggregator is also helping me reevaluate (and decrease) the number of blogs I try to keep up with.

- On the aforementioned Google Reader I read two nifty posts recently.

- The first post is about something we’ve all been waiting for: a Netflix-style book service.   I think the founders of BookSwim will find that people are much pickier about their books than they are about their movies, and having a limited catalog of just “in-print leisure reading” might not satisfy.  That said, I am delighted that someone is finally doing this and can’t wait to try it out!  My girlfriend will be so happy when I stop bringing home books to keep!

- The second post is the BBC asking – blogs or diaries?  Which one is better for what? I was surprised… really surprised … that the BBC even had journalists who were still using a diary format.  Is there any good reason to not put such a writing form into a blog? No, seriously, I’m really asking.  I can imagine specific kinds of diaries that are more narrative and don’t call for reader comments being better served by a diary than by a blog… I’ll have to read the article again and think about this one a lot more.  As a former diary (bleh!) journal-keeper, I do miss the bound paper and pen experience, but a website is a website is a website and should be reader-friendly in a wholly different, more dynamic way, yes?