Library Anecdotes Revisited: Free For All

Library historians, social scientists and library fundraisers will find this book interesting and a readable tell tale--about what makes the present day's public library from inside and how it looks from outside. I feel this is an excellent addition of existing works that support qualitative studies in libraries and librarianship in the USA.

Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library
by Don Borchert

Book Description
In Free for All, Borchert offers readers a ringside seat for the unlikely spectacle of mayhem and absurdity that is business as usual at the public library. You’ll see cops bust drug dealers who’ve set up shop in the men’s restroom, witness a burka-wearing employee suffer a curse-ridden nervous breakdown, and meet a lonely, neglected kid who grew up in the library and still sends postcards to his surrogate parents—the librarians. In fact, from the first page of this comic debut to the last, you’ll learn everything about the world of the modern-day library that you never expected.

Library Confidential@ Annoyed Librarian comments:
A forthcoming book should give the ALA and library schools a great marketing opportunity. Have you heard of Free for All: Oddballs, Geeks and Gangstas in the Public Library, by Don Borchert? According to the cover, it "puts the shh! in shocking." I read a review here, and boy does it sound exciting. (Note: the review is of Library Confidential, but the American edition seems to be entitled Free for All.) This is going to be such a great marketing opportunity, because after reading this everyone will want to work in a public library. We're always hearing about how librarians provide information and videos and stuff for people and how noble they all are, but we don't usually hear about things like this: continue reading

See also:

• [PUBLIB] library anecdotes (fwd)
• [PUBLIB] Troubled librarians (fwd)
• Library Anecdotes, facetiae, satire, etc -- a nice directory to sites that celebrate some of the more amusing aspects of our profession. It's also a guide to many of the librarian-produced weblogs and zines.
• Case Studies from India: Evidence-based Librarianship
• Same shelf and aisle @ Library of Congress Catalog Library users--California--Anecdotes. and Public libraries--California--Anecdotes.

From those who stumbled upon

PS. This review of StumbleUpon is not mine and this stumbling has nothing to do with a Mughal king who stumbled in his royal library at Delhi--In the words of the British orientalist Stanley Lane-Poole, "Humayun stumbled out of life as he had stumbled through it."

"I must say I was disappointed to find out that Ebay had recently bought Stumble, though. It seems that all the sites I most love are being snapped up by these huge corporations. One cannot blame the site developers, really, after all there is serious money to be made, and yet, my idealistic self would love to see these types of sites unfettered by corporate for-profit ties. But I guess that, across the board, things will be moving more in that for-profit direction rather than less… take a look, in fact, at my next post to see another chilling move in that direction." Read the full article @ Bookishdesi's blog

Putting Librarian Expertise to Work:
"StumbleUpon is a browser add-on for finding and sharing great websites. Unlike directories or search engines, StumbleUpon uses member ratings to form collective human opinions on website quality." [via MetaFilter]
This is somewhat similar to the tool I want for librarian pagerank. Instead of "good" or "bad," a site would be "authentic" or "trustworthy."

See also:

Good Gear Guide - StumbleUpon - Reviews - Software - Utilities - Desktop Search

Google it

Thanks to Dr. Smith for sharing his knowledge of how he stumbled...

Come see why The Wall Street Journal says:
"Next time you want to wander the Web, forget about Googling it. Stumble it."
– Chief 
drsmith@dr-smith.com

About Link Evaluator at OCLC's Openly Informatics

Info courtesy: Stephen Francoeur @ Digital Reference, Firefox extensions I can't live without

• Link Evaluator [OCLC - Openly Informatics]

see also:

• LinkChecker 0.6.1 @ Kevin A. Freitas

• Review: Web Link Validator, @ webreference.com By Lee Underwood

• Link Checker :: Webmaster Toolkit

• Watch videos @ YouTube: Link Builder Program Evaluating The Quality of a Link - Part 1 Evaluating The Quality of a Link - Part 2

Creating a Website that Works

PS. I have seen a lot of stuff on how to start and how to do defense driving. The following article is, nevertheless, one of the best and most precise.

Five Easy Steps to Starting Your Web Page

From Jennifer Kyrnin,
Your Guide to Web Design / HTML.

Ideas for Content On Your Site

If you are just starting out on the HTML trail, there are several steps you can take to create your first Web page. Keep in mind that this is not a tutorial, but it will help you get started with your Web page.

1. Discover the theme or content of your site.
2. Determine what type of tools you will use to create your pages.
3. Learn HTML or your editing software
4. Find a place to put your page.
5. Let people know about your site.... click here, for the highly illustrated article
   

NB. If the above this sounds too much, go fly and sign up for a blog with blogger or wordpress and you will find much of this is easy to learn as you get set go.

see also:

• 5 Things You Should Avoid in web design

• What they didn't tell you about blogging

• 25 Basic Styles of Blogging

• 5 Reasons to Update Your Blog

• Hyderabadiz Bloggers Carnival - final call

• Hamara Blog sab se bindas

Top 25 Nursing Blogs (By the Numbers) - Webmetrics revisited

PS. Web metrics (or Web analytics) applied to blogosphere is attracting the interest of many quantitative and qualitative visualizers. Here is one such by Rod @ Informaticopia:

"The Nursing Online Education Database has recently published their collection of the Top 25 Nursing Blogs

I think the piece highlights some difficult methodological challenges in assessing the "reach" of various web 2.0 technologies.

In ranking the top nurse blogs, their goal was to show — using objective data from reliable third-parties — which blogs are the most popular, according to visitor traffic and site backlinks. To this end, we used data for these four metrics to calculate the rankings: ... continue reading

See also:

• Web Analytics @ information visualization Blog
• CRITIQUE MY BLOG!
• Visualizing Traffic At My Blog Via Mapping The Pathways
• Visualizing Comments on Blogs

You can't beat free advertising! - Media Convergence’s

This is not a review, rather an example that helps you consider how to reach out and outreach, as well suggests the positive advantage of the push and pull medium-- a reflection on Dr. Ranganathan's Five laws, esp. books are for use.

"We received a multiple book order from a library today.
After replying to the librarian I checked our website to see if I could tell how she found us. What I learned was that our company and our two new local history titles were mentioned, along with a link, in the Kentucky Literary Newsletter which has over 1,700 online subscribers..." continue reading Bill Guffey @ Biblio-Technician

What book would you most want your kids to read?

PS. This is not my comment. Thanks to Prof. Norma Bruce Faculty Emeritus, Ohio State University Libraries, for her creative visualizations.

Here's a really odd response, showing great narrowness of mind and ignorance of what's on the shelves of bookstores and libraries, from an Ohio State University Professor of English, Kathy Fagan:

"I would be glad for my kids to read anything. Except maybe books by Anne Coulter." onCampus, Sept. 20, 2007, p. 16

See? Didn't I tell you about banned books starting in the selection process? I wonder what sort of grades she gives to conservatives. A sample of her poetry