another book, another blog

Now that I’m no longer a teen librarian (or at any rate no longer exclusively a teen librarian–nowadays I’m a little bit of everything librarian–I no longer read quite as many YA books as I used to.  Still, though, I’m a sucker for them, and I especially enjoyed this past year’s Printz Award winner, Looking for Alaska by John Green.

John Green has a new book, An Abundance of Katherines, coming out in the near future, and he also has a blog.  Currently, he’s running a contest, or really a series of contests to give away some copies of the new book. 

blasts from the pasts and looks towards the future

In the course of working on a web page for my summer class, I was reminiscing about some of the very first web sites I remember seeing.  Many have gone the way of the dinosaur (the Iowa City/Cedar Rapids ICON, an alternative weekly that I read online in college and wrote for after I graduated, but a few are still around (I’m so happy to see that Fireland is still alive, even if it is described as rickety). 

Also still around, and now a blog as well as a repository of wonderful things, is Literary Kicks, which points to the coolest use of Google Maps I’ve seen so far: a map of Sal Paradise’s journey in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. 

The web site I look at most often these days is the fairly new InciWeb, which tracks forest fires around the country (and gives updates on them via RSS!).  The about page notes that InciWeb is currently being tested and will be “used nationally in the 2007 Fire Season.”  Thanks to an IM conversation today with Steve Lawson, it occurred to me that perhaps a few others out there in western states might want to tuck it away for future reference. 

Our fire is still burning, although many of the 332 Forest Service personnel who were here to fight it have now left.  A hundred or so of them were camped up by the school (and thus also by the library) last week.  People frequently came into the library to hang out or check e-mail or look through the books in our booksale or browse our magazines.  I can’t tell you how many of them were amazed that we had internet access.  “Actually,” I said, becoming a walking talking ALA quotable fact sheet, “98% of public libraries in the US offer internet access to the public!  And have I told you about our databases?  And you can download your digital photos using our handy memory card reader on this computer where I’ve got Picasa installed!”  Some days I frighten even myself–but I hope they left with a few more ideas about public libraries than they had when they came in.

wyoming librarianship: another day

Today was, while not exactly typical, interesting, and since people seem to like these day-in-the-life posts, and since I haven’t done one in awhile, I thought I’d write it up.

The big news around here at the moment is that we’ve got a forest fire burning about 30 miles from here, at Venus Creek in the Shoshone National Forest.  (And yes, you can now get RSS feeds for forest fires).   The whole area is blanketed in smoke: this evening the sky was dark and the moon was shining red long before the sun set.  My friends took some pictures of the smoke on Sunday, which I uploaded to Flickr.  When I left work today, there were bits of ash in my car.

Today was the day after the last day of summer reading for the kids, which meant that my coworker, who runs the program, spent the day figuring out which kids will get which of our fabulous prizes at the party on Thursday.  They’ll also get cookies from the Meeteetse Chocolatier.  In addition to the usual day’s work–recording statistics, working the circulation desk, walking down to the post office at 10 to get the mail, and so on, I spent the day typing up lists of discarded westerns and self-help books.  The Wyoming State Library has prepared a guide to the needs of the libraries at Wyoming state institutions, and I’ve been e-mailing with some of the librarians there to see if they’d be interested in some of our discarded and donated books. 

The population of Meeteetse doubled this afternoon and evening as riders from the Tour de Wyoming poured into town.  Many of them came in to the library and were pleased but surprised when I told them that yes, we had internet access, and yes, they could use a computer, and no, they didn’t have to sign up or show ID or anything.  I had planned to stay after work for about an hour to do some work for my online course before I went swimming.  There were still a number of bicyclists using the computers, reading magazines, and generally doing library-ish things at 4, when we normally close, so I decided I might as well just keep the library open for an extra hour, since I was going to be there anyway.

This evening I went to dinner with a friend at the Spoke.  Aside from the owners and staff, we were pretty much the only locals there, and so we regaled the out of towners with various tales (some tall and some not) and heard, more than once, someone say, “Wow. . . you get to live here!”–to which I could only nod and say, “Yes.  Yes, I do.”

wyoming librarians on the web

While it’s true that Chicago still ranks as the center of the library webiverse, we’re not doing too badly out here in the West.  Here are a few Wyoming librarians I know of on the web.  If you are one and aren’t listed here, or if you know of others, please let me know, and I’ll add them. 

Meg Martin and Katie Jones run the Library Law Letter, which contains “summaries for recently decided Wyoming Supreme Court opinions and Wyoming State Law Library Information: announcements, how-to tips, and services.”  I’ve already learned several good things from their tips, and they’ve given me some great law-related collection development advice.

A librarian at the University of Wyoming in Laramie runs a blog called Jag soker job (that o in “soker” should have an umlaut over it, but my keyboard skills are lacking), and she’s got a Flickr account with some gorgeous photos of Wyoming scenery. 

Erin Kinney, the Digital Initiatives Librarian at the Wyoming State Library, has been adding photos all summer to a Flickr set on the state library’s relocation. 

the phoenix in the gulf

Last night I went to the Bloggers Bash/Reception for Gulf Coast librarians hosted by Leslie Burger. Over the past year, blogger gatherings have been among the most vibrant and memorable (and fun) parts of conferences. Blogger gatherings are where you get to meet your imaginary friends, talk shop with people who speak your language, eat and drink courtesy of people with more money than you have, and get stars in your eyes when one of the people you most admire recognizes the name of your blog

Last night had all of those features, but it had something else, too, and that something else, of course, was the librarians from the Gulf Coast. They were there, from New Orleans, from Louisiana bayou, from Mississippi. We heard some of their stories of loss and of renewal. We heard about what they need (money) and what they don’t (1980s encyclopedias, old books). We saw them, face to face.

On Friday, thanks to the great generosity of Beth Oliver, a librarian at Delgado Community College, Heidi Dolamore and I had the opportunity to see face to face some areas of New Orleans and Slidell that were hit by hurricane and flood. I haven’t begun to digest the experience yet, but you can see some pictures (more captions to come) on Flickr under the tag damage. I had a hard time deciding how to tag the photos of the effects of the hurricane: I need a word that describes both damage and the possibility of renewal, a word that shows an embroynic phoenix, rising from the ashes.

nifty stuff found while in the Denver airport

I’m en route to ALA and catching up with my feeds.  Sometimes I think I don’t do nearly enough spreading of link love, so here’s a little catch up.

Ack!  Plane about to board!  Must go!  See you in the Big Easy, or online.

library education discussions @ ALA

I’m still toying around with my schedule for ALA (if you want to see some of what I’m considering, head on over to my calendar), but there are a few places I’ll be for sure, including, of course, the bloggers shindig on Saturday night. If you see me drooping, please poke me–that’s way past my bedtime.

I’ll also be participating in the Library Education Discussions that Radical Reference is sponsoring. They’ll take place at the SRRT Booth (#3450) in the Exhibit Hall and will be lead by current students and recent grads. There’s a full schedule, with leaders and topics, at the RR events page. These discussions grew out of the Library Education Forum that took place back in March, just as I was getting started at my job here. I wasn’t able to make that forum, but I will be moderating a discussion from 4-5 pm on Monday, June 26th. The announced topic is “Practical Skills,” so please come with your laundry lists of Things I Wish I’d Learned in Library School–and with anything else library-related you’d like to discuss. If you’re not able to attend but have things you’d like to hear discussed, drop me a line or leave a comment here, and I’ll do my best to do your points justice.

love and blogging: a quotation without much comment

These days, I read The New Yorker two or three or four weeks after it comes out, because I get it second hand from my friend Jim.  Sometimes I wonder if that’s why I’ve felt so behind on everything lately, but most days I expect that it’s just a combination of laziness and of enjoying not being totally in the loop. 

Anyway, the Talk of the Town for June 5 contained a little squib about Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan, who were profiled in the magazine in a November 2000 article (which I have not read) called “You’ve Got Blog.”  The original article detailed their meeting, online and then in person, and budding romance.  The new piece recaps that and ends with their wedding (“Most Flickr’d Ceremony Ever”), and the last line of the piece seemed worth sharing:

Jason and Meg agreed that living at least some of their lives online had been a positive experience, even though there were times when it was uncomfortable.  “If you are looking to make friends and have experiences, you have to be open,” Jason said, an observation that may apply as much to love as it does to blogging.

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