My colleague Lois and I meet weekly and set little, we hope attainable, goals for ourselves for the week. One of mine this time around was to close five Firefox tabs, which for me meant blogging about them. Therefore, here is another buncha things I wanted to write long posts about but never will get around to, with some shortish annotations:
>
Published by the Feminist Task Force of the Social Responsibilities Round Table of ALA, this is an annotated list of feminist children's and young adult books of the year.
This is an online tool for organizing meetings. One of the best (and perhaps worst, as well) things about it is that there is no registration. My local book club (as opposed to my long-distance book club with Celia) and I used it recently to pick a date for our first meeting. I created an event (or whatever their jargon is), selecting 6 different days for people to choose from. Once I'd created the event, Doodle gave me a URL, which I sent to my fellow bookies. Each participant could select any and all dates that were good for her. Since you're not registered, you have no way to change your selections if you change your mind or if you got the system backwards (checking days that you aren't available, rather than days that you are). In that case you simply go to the site and vote again. If the first time you signed in as "zora," you might sign in this time as "zora2" or "zora do over." Doodle keeps a running count for you of how many people have selected each choice. I think it's nifty. Thanks to Mary Ellen Tucker from Barnard Academic Technologies for turning me on to it.
This article describes the work of Chris Dodge, Street Librarian and other book indexers. I was going to write a whole long post about this, including quoting from Cat's Cradle, where the professional indexer discusses her craft and all that, but I just haven't been able to get around to it. So all I'll say is that I was really sad that the Indexing class never came around while I was in library school. The archives class too, for that matter.
This fancy new Drupal site has a zine catalog, features a random zine (refresh to see the next one) on the home pages--which I think is an awesome idea, a blog, and all sorts of other 2.0-y stuff. I'm very psyced to see this progress, and being involved with the ABC No Rio Zine Library's effort to migrate to a Drupal catalog, I'm really interested in how they're doing it at SLCPL. Still and all, I remain suspicious about the motivation behind the name change and what will ultimately happen with the collection, based on what happened to its founder, who no longer works there.
I forget how I stumbled onto this, but I see some familiar names and think it's a good idea. I haven't signed up myself yet, but maybe that's because I'm embarrassed about my web presentation of my zines, which is partially on my old site, and with a few links on this blog.
In case you're interested, my other to dos for the week were getting my work inbox to under 200 messages and prepping the two talks I gave this week to Pratt LIS students. Lois has some inbox troubles of her own, but I won't rat her out.