From CLA: The
Canadian Library Association (CLA) is pleased to announce that October
has been designated as Canadian Library Month! The idea for a month
dedicated to library and information services in Canada was developed
by library partners from across the country to help raise public
awareness of the valuable role that libraries play in the lives of
Canadians.
Canadian
Library Month will be launched October 3, 2006 and will be celebrated
under the theme ” Libraries: the world at your fingertips / Les
bibliothèques : le monde au bout des doigts. ”
So we were doing our tour of the LPL today and I was formulating an updated “Things I Like/Don't Like About LPL” post in my head all afternoon.
But then Linda introduced me to the Coordinator of Children's and Youth Services so I could give my spiel about about Art Slade coming to FIMS on Oct 23 at 12pm in NCB285. “So anyhow, I was hoping that some of the LPL librarians could join us.” “Oh, I knew about that already,” she said. “Oh?” goes I, wracking my brain. “Did I send you something? Did someone tell you about it? Do you know about about my blog too?” “No, I was on Art's web site last week and he's got it listed in his upcoming appearances.” “Oh…cool.”
How's that for synchronicity? Plus all of LPL's branches are closed on Mondays (which normally I'd list as a “don't like”) so that might free up more librarians to come than would've been able to otherwise. Awesome!
My hometown was featured in a special advertising supplement in the Regina Leader Post newspaper recently. Check it out for a taste of life in a small prairie town.
Vote Jim Holmes, executive member of the Friends of the RPL, for mayor of Regina. A friend of mine in Regina has been doing a great job of tracking some of the improprieties of current mayor, Pat Fiasco Fiacco on the “Politics 'n' Poetry” blog (and yes, those two things do go together and should go together more often!)
Speaking of the Friends of the Regina Public Library, their story is a great one. In April 2004, the Regina Public Library board announced plans to cut three branches (mostly in inner-city locations) as well as the Dunlop Art Gallery and Prairie History Room, both of which were housed in the central library. The board planned to move from the current nine branches to a model with a central library and four branches in each quadrant of the city, preferably tied to shopping mall locations. A Friends group sprang up and “In only 85 days, 26,048 Regina citizens signed our petition in support
of increased funding for library services. That's more people than
voted for all ten city councillors combined in the last civic election!”
The drive was successful and nothing was closed. How frickin' cool is that? In our “Public Libraries in the Community” course, we're learning about the importance of friends groups and I think that story brings it home like no other (although our instructor's story of a group of seniors storming a public meeting when a branch that was popular with seniors was threatened is pretty cool too!)
The vast majority of people I talk to who have recently started blogs all seem to say the same thing: “I don't really like blogs but I decided to give it a shot.” This instinctive reaction against blogs is interesting – why is there a natural resistance to blogs? (Going way back to entry one you'll see that I shared that feeling myself.) Probably because there's (still) a misconception that blog = online diary, because they're now “trendy” and maybe because they're associated with amateurish, informal writing?
Somebody asked me recently why I started blogging. I list a few of my reasons in that first entry – the realization that the library blogosphere was both huge and something I wanted to be part of, to keep people at home up-to-date on my life and as an easy way to modernize the existing home page I had. Have any other reasons come up in the past eight (wow!) months I've been at it?
I guess that one big reason I've kept it up is that once I found a niche writing about my experiences and thoughts at library school. I realised this could be valuable to students who come later and are increasingly going to turn to the web for information. I remember how disappointed I was that I couldn't find a blog or web site that had a student perspective specifically on UWO's library school when I was accepted so, just as the best writers “write the book they want to see on the shelves”, I turned this blog into the web site I was looking for when I was accepted here.
I think I've mentioned previously that I actually got an e-mail over the summer from someone who was accepted to start this fall. She said how helpful my blog has been and asked if I would mind helping provide any tips for finding housing. I didn't mind, knowing this is something that's not available via either the FIMS or the Student Council web site (well, it is but that's a private site so she couldn't get to it.) Receiving that e-mail was one of my proudest moments in my brief blogging history as it meant that this goal was being achieved. <Jason resists urge to make Management jokes about purposes and goals.>
Why am I thinking about this today? I have a list of about 10 classmate blogs I check regularly and another list of about 20 or so that I check less frequently (update your blogs, people! Aim for the first list! ). Another strength of blogs that I rarely think about is the interlinking of ideas and commentary that happens. In the last few days, I've seen a couplepeople who've put best wishes about our pregnancy on their blogs. How cool is that to know that complete strangers who visit these people's blogs will know about this happiness in our lives and may even visit my web site to find out more? (Quinn has a friend who visited my site via a link on his blog and apparently told him “I don't know why but I find myself still going back to your friend's site.”) And the more incoming links that happen, the more people that will find your site over time. (I know that I still get hits from people who linked to my Alberta user fees essay five months ago for instance.)
The other thing is that, as of today, September marks the first month that I actually met my goal of posting at least once per day (and knowing what the next nine months eighteen years have in store, will likely be the last time I hit this goal..)
Oh, and the other semi-related thing that I've always wanted to do was to take the time to pick out some of the funny/interesting referral messages I get. The stats available for this particular blog hosting company are decent but not great. But one of my personal highlights is looking at the sites and web search terms that brought people here. The following are all things that brought people to my site in September: “Supernova + Lukas Rossi + Fan” “Support your troops in Ontario Red Fridays” “How to Print a Little Booklet” “libraryschool” tag on Delicious “Are institutional paper towels better than kitchen rolls?” “On a MAC computer, what is the equivalent of the Windows start button?” “Sarnia Couple Swingers” Master of Library Science Degree + Cleveland “Places to cruise for sex in London Ontario”
This is a list of potential slogans to put on our class t-shirts last semester – provided by classmates, other students, faculty, staff, alumni, library joke sites and more. Some are pretty obvious, some are in-jokes that only our class would get. I've put the winning choice in bold and her personal favourite in italic.
020.7 (This is Dewey for “Library & Information Science — Education”)
Embrace Your Inner (Book) Nerd
I Learned More in 3 Hours at the Grad Club Than 3 Semesters at Library School
I Went To FIMS (And All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt)
I'm Part of the Librarian Hegemony
Less Powerpoint, More Charisma
Librarians Have Nice Buns
Librarian In Search of A Metaphor
Library School 101: Shhhh!
Library School: Like Being Pelted With Popcorn
Maximum Access to Information
My Fate Is In The Hands of FIMS
Photocopier Expert
Putting the rarin' in Librarian since Jan 2006
Semester One = Anxiety, Semester Two = Anger, Semester Three = Apathy
Spider Web Tattoo = Prison Gang Symbol and/or Bad Library School Metaphor
“That's what the books say but what's it like in real life?”
We're All Fools For Rules
What *Is* Information? (or “…And I Still Don't Know What Information Is”)
Which one would you vote for?
2006-10-06 Update: Rob Craig, who teaches LIS645 and is a former Student Council Chair, passed along a couple t-shirt slogan ideas from his time at what was then known as SLIS:
Dewey or Don't we?
Major SLIS Tool (“back in our day” – man that sounds like I'm old, the SLIS network had a link to all of the electronic databases called “Major SLIS Tools”).
As September comes to a close, it’s a good time to point out that Wikipedia has an option to view the Top 100 viewed pages of every month.
In September 2006, sex-related pages (List of Sexual Positions, Sex,
Pornography) compete with popular media stories (Steve “Crocodile
Hunter” Irwin, Dawson College Shootings) and more general topics
(Canada, Brazil) for the top spot.
As for Classmate of the Day, yesterday goes to Iona Henderson who brought some smoked salmon her dad had sent her to our Thursday night class. Today, it goes to Linda Bussiere, Quinn Dupont (and Robin and Rory) Mike McNally, and Christina Winter who all joined Shea and I at the Grad Club for what felt like old times in so many ways (except for a lot more talk about cloth v. Pamper diapers and the advantages of breastfeeding than I'd ever heard with MLIS'ers at the Grad Club before.)
Former CLA President, Wendy Newman, who is teaching “Advocacy and Libraries” this semester has kindly agreed to let me reprint this list. The full version is a speech that she gave as U of T's Faculty of Information Science on March 22, 2005.
What I Wish “They” Had Told Me When I Started Out In Librarianship 1. There really is a tension between being an employee and being a professional. 2. Know what you believe in. 3. In your first three years, become a ranking practitioner-expert in one great thing that becomes your “brand”. 4. You and not your employer, are in charge of your morale and fully responsible for your own feelings. 5. Presentation is more important than you think. 6. Take the long view of any job, even if it is a temporary job. 7. I wish someone had told me how much librarians could strengthen their leadership skills, knowledge, network and resume through volunteer work in associations. 8. I wish someone had told me the simple truth that the higher up you go in any organization, the more ambiguity you have on your plate. 9. You must be a skilled advocate. 10. Finally, I wish I had the benefit of some frank talk about when to quit.
I'll be at the Grad Club tomorrow afternoon around 4pm to celebrate the impending birth of my child (okay, it's nine months away but any excuse to go for a drink, right?).
Actually, Quinn Dupont who was in the program but is currently on leave after being accepted for a Masters of Philosophy at the U of T will be back in London-town so we're going to be hanging out.
Quinn is legendary in this program (er, or at least within my cohort) for a variety of things including:
running the Untitled Movie Series featuring films about libraries and library-related issues
working to start a comic book as a response to Access Copyright's “Captain Copyright” character
regularly using phrases such as “socialist hegemony” and other multi-syllabic words in class comments
maintaining a blog which had weekly pictures of his Tuesday beer drinking exploits mixed with gourmet-level recipes and in-depth accounts of his battles with Rogers Cable Internet
being a virtual giant of a man (in this photo, the bottle he's holding is a 66 oz but he makes it look like a mickey).
Here's the blurb from his Spirit of Librarianship nomination last term:
“Quinn embodies many of the qualities of the ideal librarian
– whether it is enabling access to information by sharing digital
versions of
readings with his classmates or by raising awareness by running a movie
series
that is focused on librarians and library-related issues. Beyond this,
Quinn has a deep intellect and a collegial manner. One classmate
summed up his presence like this: “Did you ever notice that Quinn's the
only one of us, who, when he puts up his hand to make a point in class,
everybody stops typing or daydreaming and pays attention?” Finally,
although it is only in the planning stages right now, his idea to do a
“Captain Commons” comic book in response to Access Copyright's biased
and library-unfriendly “Captain Copyright” character is a stroke of
genius that I'm sure will show another side of the copyright debate and
garner
much attention from the wider library community, across Canada and the
beyond.” If all of that hasn't intimidated you into submission, everybody's invited to join us.
