One of these days a talented young athlete named Samuel Adams will emerge from college as a two-sport star and like Bo Jackson before him end up playing in Major League Baseball with Milwaukee and NFL football with New England. But this post is not about Sam Adams: Brewer-Patriot. This is about all the great librarian-bloggers out there.
The Online Education Database (OEDb) has set out to rank the Top 25 Librarian-Bloggers. Jessamyn West appears a bit nonplussed to be ranked number one. Meredith Farkas and the panel at Uncontrolled Vocabulary are among those who take issue with measures used to rank blogs. This includes doing a Google Search for “librarian blog” which is going to miss a lot of people who don’t include those words in their blog names, like myself (albeit this is the most unprofessional blog so I don’t feel I’m at all slighted compared to those librarians out there writing on library issues each and every day).
The good news is that this is a way to learn about more blogs by librarians whic is a good way for me to learn more (even if The Ecletic Librarian is right about the five types of news stories about librarians). Granted as you’ll see from my blogroll, I’m already trying to keep up with a lot of librarian-bloggers. So many people with so many good things to say, although I’ll confess that I’m usually only interested in a portion of what each of them writes. It’s nice when 3 or 4 bloggers bring up the same issue as it finally gets me to pay attention to something I may have otherwise chosen not to read about.
With that said, here’s a selection of blog posts and news articles regarding the library from the past month or so:
- Librarian in Black asks How did professionalism get pitted against tradition? (July 18), a response to Librarian 2.0- The new professional or the responsible one? on Library Garden (July 12).
- Tame the Web proclaims: Politeness Allowed At Your Library (Aug. 8).
- Mr. Library Man wants you to speak up and ask questions at the Modesto Bee (Aug. 29).
- Unshelved spotlights a library-related graphic novel that’s worth checking out, Bookhunter by Jason Shiga (Aug. 30).
- Random Musings from the Desert comments on The Librarian as “Professional” (Sept. 4). Link to the original article in Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments.
- The Other Librarian looks Under the Hood of Web 2.0: the top ten programming concepts for librarians to understand (Sept. 7).
- And #1 librarian-blogger Jessamyn West shows us the weirdest library design EVAR (Sept. 11). As a counterpoint to the odd plans for a national library in Prague, read Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries at Curious Expeditions.
- Finally, Library Web Chic declares The future of Web Services isn’t the Library website (Sept. 16). Amen!
