Blogging Librarian

- I’m an otter
Neil Gaiman’s interview with The Guardian on blogging and him being a bestseller author. If you didn’t know, Neil Gaiman has his own blog, which he shares writing duties occasionally with his daughter, Maddy.

- The Librarian Who Loved Books
An inspiring story for everyone, not only librarians.
(via LISNews)

- BBC Worldwide buys Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet has been sold yesterday to the BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Lonely Planet was founded by Tony and Maureen Wheeler in 1972 in Australia. Besides the 500-plus travel-related books published each year, Lonely Planet also produces factual programming through Lonely Planet Television for international broadcasters and online.

- They are community centers, says chief who bans hushing at libraries
A new approach to how public libraries are run. The new executive director of Brooklyn Public Library, Dionne Mack-Harvin, has directed that staff do not ’shush’ the library patrons. Honestly speaking, I don’t think it’s the librarians who need training, but the patrons will need to have a total re-think of what a library should be. I’m quite sure some library patrons will not be too happy with a library becoming too noisy.
(via LISNews)

- OK, Sony Here’s What You Can Do to Make It Up to Us
If you didn’t know, Sony recently launched a portable e-book reader called the Sony Reader. And their tagline for the Sony Reader is “Sexier than a librarian. The Reader. From Sony.” You can see a photo of the advert banner on Flickr. How can an electronic device be sexier than a librarian?!
(via Library Stuff)

- How judging a book by it’s ‘girlie’ cover is putting boys off reading
Apparently, the number of boys reading have fallen because of the increasing number of book covers featuring ‘girlie’ covers as boys wouldn’t want to be caught dead holding and reading a pink book by their peers. From the article, some publishers have focused on gender-specified marketing for children’s books with a higher degree towards marketing to girls. The publishers are just assuming that the books they published would not be read by boys. And the end result is that they found the lesser and lesser boys are picking up reading and inadvertently, the boys’ reading levels have fallen.
(via LISNews)

- What are people doing on Facebook?
Facebook seems to be the ‘in’ social networking site at the moment. I know of quite a big group of librarians - both local and overseas - who are on Facebook. And I’m sure that there’s an equal or higher number of our patrons who are on Facebook. So, it would good to know what they are doing on this ‘hot’ social networking site. There’s also a report which you can refer to with regards to what people are doing on Facebook.

- Internet providers show how it’s done
The Chronicle of Higher Education, a US publication, has hosted talks between the University of California librarian Daniel Greenstein and executives from Google and Microsoft this year. The talks aimed to explore the effect of the digital revolution on books and journals and the way university libraries are responding.
(via LISNews)

- Bookworm Chengdu
Although this is not exactly a public library, it is a library nonetheless. And it’s a very difficult sort of library. Though the collection is quite small (only 5,000 books) at the moment, I found that it has a very interesting concept for a library. Besides being a library, it is also a European restaurant and a coffee/alcohol bar. In addition, the whole library has free wireless Internet access. And from the pictures on the site, they also host meetups, programmes and talks, performances and children’s story times. Hmmm … maybe the new and upcoming library@orchard can think of some similar concepts. I know in some of our libraries, we already have cafes in-built. But we might want to attract a little more upmarket type of restaurant to partner us. Worth a thought!
(via Real Public Librarian)

- Librarian … A People Job
A profile of Elissa Kinzelman, currently a librarian assistant in a medical library. She has been taking library training classes on a part-time basis and will graduate soon. The part I liked best in the article is in the last paragraph where she states that librarianship is “very much a people job“.
(via LISNews)

- 2007 Survey of the Biblioblogosphere: Index of Results
Meredith Wolfwater conducted an online survey of librarians and those working in the library field who blog. She has since collated all the submissions and is slowly releasing the survey results.

- Young reader’s medal effort - AdelaideNow
A eight-year-old boy in Adelaide has read 1000 books since February 2007 as part of South Australia’s Premier’s Reading Challenge. It is reported that he averages about 4 books a day.

- Hottest Facebook Group for Librarians
A very useful list of groups that are relevant to librarians. Am in some of the groups since I joined Facebook not too long ago. If you’re on Facebook, add me as a friend.
(via iLibrarian)

- BookJetty goes global
One of my favorite tools online is BookJetty as it allows me search for books on Amazon and see if we have it available in our catalogue. Now, BookJetty has expanded to more than 300 other libraries around the world. There is also the social networking part where you can share the books you have read with others. And also post reviews. Just waiting for a Facebook app.

Technorati Tags: blogging, reading, bookjetty, survey of the biblioblogosphere, librarians, social networks

- Beyond Google: How do students conduct academic research by Alison J. Head
A research paper that looks at how students do their research. Surprisingly, the study found that the majority of the students started their research by first consulting their lecturers’ course notes or on their school’s library website for online access to scholarly journals rather than going straight to Google, Yahoo! or Wikipedia. However, they did have a difficult time in determining and evaluating the information they found from the scholarly journals. Well, that’s a very short summary of the entire paper. What I found interesting from the paper is that the students do know where and how to search, but what they have difficulty with is the evaluation and presentation of the information found. As for students in Singapore, they rely a little too much on search engines and Wikipedia, which I found out when I was conducting a library workshop on electronic databases yesterday. So, more effort needs to put into encouraging better use of our electronic databases that are available in our public libraries.

- Multimedia Librarian
A wiki of useful websites, listservs and other resources that are of help in the collection development of DVDs, CDs and web content.
(via LibrarianInBlack.net)

- Beloit College’s Mindset List for the Class of 2011
A useful list for everyone, particularly teachers and librarians, to just know a little bit more about those who were born in 1989 and who would be entering university this year (for the ladies in Singapore as the guys will have to serve National Service).
(via The Shifted Librarian)

- Ask for What You Want
An interesting article in this month’s Library Journal by Michael Casey and Michael Stephens about the need for librarians to change our image in the eyes of the public. Whenever I tell someone that I’m a librarian, their first impression is that I stamp books or spend the whole day reading. So, what do you think can help change the image of librarians?
(via Tame The Web)

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Technorati Tags: librarians, libraries

Very interesting comic strip on Penny Arcade about two guys wrangling over what to call male librarians. And the folks at Penny Arcade has written up a blog post about how they come up with the comic.

(via Unshelved)

Technorati Tags: comics, librarians, librarymans, penny arcade

Meredith Farkas of Information Wants To Be Free is conducting her second “Survey of the Biblioblogosphere“. It’s a way to find out the characteristics of the library blogosphere that we are in. So, go on over to do the survey.

While you are there, you can also have a look at the results of the first survey she did two years ago.

Technorati Tags: blogging, librarians, libraries, library 2.0, survey

Two New York newspapers, New York Times (registration may be required) and The Sun, have published articles about new-look librarians. If you thought new-look librarians exists just in New York, think again. They are right here in Singapore too.

Forget about the image you might have of librarians with thick glasses and stern looks who shushed you if you made a little noise. Most of the librarians I know are just as hip as those mentioned in the two articles. There is a scriptwriter, quite a number of musicians, an artists, a couple of photographers, a hip-hop dancer, and many other stuff that they do off work.

Oh, and I like the word ‘Guybrarians’ that appeared in both articles. That is another trend that I’ve seen increased in recent years as more guys join the library field. But females still outnumber the males.

So, what are your views about us? Or what about thoughts from other librarians?

(via Library Garden)

Technorati Tags: librarians, library 2.0