moving, shaking, shoving, making

It is customary at this time each year to write a blog post congratulating the people who have been named as this year’s Library Journal Movers & Shakers. And if you move in the circles I do, it’s also customary to note and link to all the M&S you are friends with or whose blogs you read or who you saw give a presentation once.

I’d like to do all of those things, and so I congratulate the winners, with shouts out to Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, whose writing and thinking I’ve admired for years; Jason Griffey; Karen Coombs, who once reassured me that yes, the OPAC did indeed suck; my gracious session presenting partner from Internet Librarian 2008, Sarah Houghton-Jan; Michael Porter; fellow Rad Refista and excellent silkscreener (and apparently pie baker) Lia Friedman; LSW Meebo Room denizen and whacky perl script generator Dave Pattern; Lauren Pressley; Lori Reed; Jamie Markus, who is here at our very own Wyoming State Library and who ran the Get on the Bus program; and Dorothea Salo.

Some of these people I’ve met; others I just know from online, and I’m kind of bowled over that I know so many in this great group of people — and I’m particularly pleased that my nomination (with able seconding from Steve Lawson) of Dorothea Salo got her on this year’s list. (I hadn’t quite thought through the implications of the my mythological allusion when I wrote up the nomination, and I fervently hope that neither Dorothea nor open access meet such an end.)

Librarianship is a small world, and some days I feel it’s all just a circle of people all boosting each others’ PageRanks and otherwise virtually scratching each others’ backs. That is not necessarily a bad thing — I’ve certainly benefited from it. But I’m also happy to read about the work of Movers & Shakers I don’t know. Lisa Harris runs literacy programs for people in prison and for their children. I remember emailing my mom about Women’s Health News when I ran across a link to it some years ago. I didn’t realize until now that its author, Rachel Walden , was the whistleblower on “abortion” being made a stop-word in the POPLINE health database. Ingrid Kalchthaler started libraries in homeless shelters. It sounds like J. Drusilla Carter turned a whole library system around by working with the community to develop teen activities, literacy programs, prison libraries, and a Spanish language collection. And the list goes on. . . .

Last Monday, word of the Library Society of the World Shovers and Makers started to trickle into the feed of the LSW Friendfeed Room. As my good friend Iris has noted, there’s already quite a bit of overlap between the current crop of M&S and the LSW membership (insofar as the LSW has a membership). I know there are all kinds of awesome librarians out there whom we haven’t heard about. I hope we’ll learn more about some of them soon.