LibraryTechtonics

This is why I *heart* Susie Bright, a hero of mind ever since I saw her present at Wesleyan when I was an undergrad. Not to beat a dead horse, but I want to share just an excerpt of her post about the The Higher Power of Lucky bochinche over the word “scrotum.”

You Say Scrotum, I Say Hoo-Ha
[c/o Susie Bright's Journal, posted 20 feb 2007]

The Times’ sample of quotes reveal a group of obvious religious conservatives who betray more about their own ignorance, phobias, and lack of library professionalism than they do about the state of the English vocabulary— in literature or social life.
Anyone who says that “male genitalia are not in quality literature” needs to have their resumé examined. What’s more, this is hardly the first time that the word “scrotum” has appeared in children’s books. Think again, Ms. Bosman!
Children’s libraries, librarians, and authors are being smeared in stories like these. Children’s Lit is a field that includes the greatest writers of all time, speaking on every topic, with every nuance of language. I’m sure E.B. White is turning over in his grave to contemplate this canard, one that Templeton the Rat wouldn’t scratch his testes with.
…other bits you should go read, then…
Most librarians are not tight-lipped prudes, they’re courageous front-liners on First Amendment issues. Most families are nonchalant about the daily-observed behavior of their dogs and cats. Parents— who are not in the grips of fundamentalist fever— believe it’s helpful for young people to know the correct terms for their own body parts, be they a nose, elbow, vulva, or scrotum.

It’s really, really hard to make the argument that not buying the book is a “budget decision” or a “collection decision” when buying everything on the Newbery list is standard operating procedure for most (I say most, not all) school and public libraries, often beating out non-award-winners in the purchasing decision process.

Much like kids using the internet at the library, or just using the library in general, it’s up to parents and guardians to police and moderate content consumption for their kids, not me or any other librarian. Like the Allston librarian interviewed by NPR about the whole mess, I would no sooner warn a parent ahead of time that the word scrotum is on the first page than tell a teenager not to read Go Ask Alice. I also think it might help if some librarians didn’t have such a trigger finger for trying to avoid controversy.

And that’s all I hafta say about that. Dead horse beaten.

It’s amazing just how much planning I’m doing, just how far (and not so far :D) in advance. Right now I’m prepping for the PLA Symposium this weekend (blogging and presenting), and trying to put together the March Netguides calendar (an entirely different post, I promise). I’ll also meeting with a few librarians who requested tours of my library’s RPLWiki later in March, helping out with LSTA grant programs throughout March and April while I also teach classes and wrangle Netguides, attending MLA in early May (and possibly blogging it for MLA) as well as presenting a social networking talk to the MVLC Youth Services committee, and heading to ALA in June, since my contract with PLA is being renewed again (w00t!).

Today, I received an email from the ALA Public Programs Office (PPO) listserv about all of the programs they’ll be offering at the annual meeting. I thought to myself, “My, how organized and proactive! I *love* PPO.” Most other ALA conferences are a mire of poorly delivered information, in my experience, which is either spread out too thin in too many places to be coherent (very little on the web site, then really confusing in the horrible online meeting planner, then more/less information and some redundancy in the wikis), or non-existent. I often have a really, really hard time planning travel for ALA conferences because I don’t know what I want to attend (and what I want to cover for PLA) until just a month or less before, when they finally publish real schedules (but by then, who knows where the real schedules will be, and if they won’t be painful to look at), which makes requesting time off a bit difficult.

So, in an effort to not have Kathleen harass me to give her my travel dates, I thought I might try checking the conference site to see if, just this once, there would be information to help me be proactive, too. PPO distributed a really nice listing in email, so I figured what the heck, I’ll check.

My my, is there information! Preconferences are listed. The special events section is already nicely fleshed out. A preliminary overview schedule of programs and sessions is available in HTML format, and the preliminary schedules for each day and a programs by track in .pdf form.

In *February*. For a *June* conference.

It might have something to do with the early bird registration deadline on March 2, and I don’t know if that’s unusually early, since I don’t normally keep track. I do know that when I’ve tried to plan this far in advance in the past, I’ve been unable. So props to ALA.

Now, if they could just figure out how to fit the wiki into the information distribution better (less redundancy, HTML formats instead of all pdf, the idea of a single point of digital service), and implement a better meeting planner if they insist on having one (I often wonder what the usage stats on that thing are, searches vs. actual schedules, etc.), I’d be super-duper impressed. This, however, is a great start.

I’ll be attending the PLA Spring Symposium in San Jose, CA from March 1-3, so if you’re going to be out there and want to meet up, send me email, or leave a comment on my MySpace page, or a message on my Facebook wall, and let me know.

Kathleen Hughes (my boss at PLA) has been awesome about looking at the schedule and laying out possible event coverage aside from just the sessions. I’ll be posting a “coming soon”-ish post to the PLA Blog about The Plan, which is a nice mix of podcasts of sessions and interviews, as well as your plain old text coverage of the event, pictures, and eventish stuff.

I will be doing a wiki workshop at the symposium which will cover the public library wiki project (a.k.a. the PLWiki, my name for the project), as well as a general overview of what wikis are, how they work, and an overview of some free options. It’s much like the continuing education class I taught at Southern Connecticut State University back in December, but shorter, and a bit less formal.

I’m guessing that, for the size of wiki we want, we might end up paying some money somewhere. While my temptation is to set up a MediaWiki install (as it is the same software that runs Wikipedia, and would be one more step towards getting librarians involved in Wikipedia in general, which would totally rawk my world), I’m also concerned about maximized, broad-range usability. So, it might behoove us to consider another option that might be a bit easier to use, and may cost a little money to host.

Whatever we use, a big part of the plan will be to make copious use of the Community Portal section of the wiki (the place to go to find out what projects need help in a wiki, and what you can do to help), and to make a big deal about the Community Portal from the home page of the wiki. I’ve got a plan laid out in my brain about how we’ll go about organizing the wiki to start, which is a bit more formal than most wikis work, but I consider it learning from the evolution of the wiki to apply some planning tactics ahead of time. It’s like seasoning a garden plot before planting: lay good basic groundwork, and everything else will take care of itself organically (to a certain extent).

Ah, the wheels, how they turn in the technology planner’s mind and make smoke…

We’re still tossing around all sorts of issues, which will be discussed at the session (the time and location for the wiki presentation is still being firmed up, but I’ll post the update here and to the PLA Blog as soon as I know). We’ll also be recording the session to podcast, so if you can’t be there or you miss it, you’ll be able to listen to the audio later.

Sent to me by my good friend Jeanne, who is also a Wes grad and a MLS student in an archives concentration. Check out her blog over at Spellbound Blog.

The Wesleyan Special Collections & Archives blog was started back in January, and is run on WordPress, which makes me very happy. It looks clean, it’s easy to navigate, and it’s really mighty pretty overall. They highlight news and bits from their collections, and are also branching out and including YouTube content (although the video currently posted on their blog is no longer available… brings up the interesting problem of broken video links that don’t actually show up as broken until you click on them, which is a usability problem on the YouTube end).

Hurray Wes Archives!

Some of you know of my Threadless addiction. If you didn’t know before, you know now.
Threadless is social networking on a capitalistic and artistic scale. People submit designs, members of the community vote on them, the shirts with the most votes get printed and sold. When you create an account, you can roll in links to your blog, your flickr account, and other bits, you can have your own blog on Threadless, and you can interact with other users. You get Street Team points when you send in pics of yourself wearing a shirt, or when you link to a shirt from your blog and someone buys it; those points turn into dollars that you can use to buy more shirts.

I can’t tell you how addicted I am. My husband once said I’m 10 shirts from an intervention. That was, like, 10 shirts ago, at yet he encourages me when I see the good ones. ;D

In this week’s new T’s newsletter was this gem:

I’m thinking I need to cash in some Street Team points and own me one, and wear it to work (I wear my Threadless T’s to work frequently, and my coworkers love them). I encourage other library folks and fans to do the same.
Happy Friday from the Icy Northeast!