Shameless Self-Promotion: ROM Podcasting

If you're interested, check out the Podcast that I prepared while an intern at the Royal Ontario Museum in the Summer of 2006. It was fun and easy to prepare, and made a change from entering metadata about digitized photographs from the ROM collection. There are also several other podcasts from the ROM available through this link, and also through iTunes. Unlike some other museums with more sleek-looking podcasts, the ROM gave its employees free rein to develop, write and film their own shorts on topics that interested them. This means that some of the podcasts are better than others, but always on interesting and often obscure topics.

Miller and Chad's Library 2.0 white paper: My Two Cents' Worth

I was recently asked to review this "white paper" released by Ken Chad and Paul Miller and Talis in November 2005. Here's a summary of my conclusions:

The Library 2.0 concept is still young, and library professionals need to be cautious in implementing Miller and Chad’s vision of a web-driven, information-rich utopia. Their paper provides an accessible overview of the Library 2.0 concept, but fails to provide sufficient evidence to show that a Library 2.0 approach is necessary in an Internet age. Practical and theoretical problems in implementing the approach are also not explored in the Talis white paper. The need to clarify types of libraries and users served by a Library 2.0 approach is but one such example. The work of Hopkins and Leckie and Walt Crawford suggests several further avenues of exploration: the role of library buildings in shaping the library experience, the incursion of private technology companies into public space in Library 2.0 and the use of libraries for purposes other than information-gathering.

I found Walt Crawford's Summary of the Library 2.0 debate very useful for this assignment, as well as the following article, which is a very thorough and interesting study of the users of central reference libraries in Vancouver and Toronto:

Leckie, G. J. & Hopkins, J (2002) The public place of central libraries: findings from Toronto and Vancouver. Library Quarterly 72 (3) 326-72.

I look forward to reading the conclusions of my classmates at FIS regarding the white paper.

Blogging around the world (adapted from FIS1311 Wiki entry)

France

Figoblog was one of the earliest French librarian blogs, and is still going strong. It calls itself a "blog about the Internet, librarianship, and fig jam" and does indeed contain a smattering of posts regarding all things fig-related. However, it's also a treausre trove of practical tips and commentary regarding Library 2.0 internet tools, musings on the role of libraries and goodies such as cartoons. Note that the author uses a pseudonym, a common practice for French libloggers, who fear that having a liblog will be frowned upon by their colleagues and diminish their professional reputation.

Australia

One New Thing chronicles the attempt of a librarian new to the profession to learn (and post) one new thing about her job every day. Some of the tips are extremely useful, although her rate of posting has slowed somewhat since the blog's early days.

Iran

Virtual Ehsan Real Blog is one of the few Iranian/Persian blogs written in English. Its author is a LIS Master's student who often posts about his classes, conferences and other learning experiences. An excellent window into library science training in a country few of us will ever get to visit!

Austria

Orbus Librorum is the blog of the rare books and special collections department of the University of Graz. Library staff launched the blog in late June 2007 with the aim not only to make the University's digital collections more well-known but to spark discussion with colleagues and other rare book enthusiasts, improve their own professional skills and experiment with the use of digital techonology. Librarians posted a manuscript fragment that they were having difficulty identifying, and one of the blog's readers was able to provide useful information from his own work. The blog includes a recipe for potato salad from 1621 taken from the University's collection.