In her most recent ExLibris, Marylaine Block transcribes an interview with Carrie Bickner, The Digital Library's Assistant Director for Digital Information and System Design at the New York Public Library. One great quote: I think that the most important experience that I have had as a librarian and technologist is the cataloging work that I did as a library school student and intern. Cataloging is the intellectual foundation of our field, and it is critical that today's library students have some cataloging experience, especially those students interested in digital library work. Isn't that great? I agree totally. Something else I read today talked about how search specialists need to understand the underlying structure of the databases they use as well as how the search software works. It all makes sense to me, and it speaks to the reason why librarians are still needed. 10:44:12 PM     [comment []];[]

Everything About Weblogs for Librarians Dr. Anne Clyde, professor at the University of Iceland and webmaster of School Libraries Online, the IASL website, has a very extensive page about weblogs. In fact her article in Teacher Librarian was one of the items that got me interested in this phenomenon of blogging. When I see that I'm actually going to keep up with this effort, I'll send her my blog address to add to the list of librarians' weblogs. Perhaps she can also give me some suggestions for directions I can go with this. 10:27:35 PM     [comment []];[]

Today is World Book and Copyright Day "By celebrating this day throughout the world, UNESCO seeks to promote reading, publishing and the protection of intellectual property through copyright."[Peter Scott's Library Blog] 10:57:00 AM     [comment []];[]

Blogging and School Librarians I've just been going through lists of librarian websites and weblogs. There are lots of public library/librarian blogs, and plenty of graduate library students are blogging through their experiences, but I am struck again by the fact that school librarians have not gotten into blogging yet. I wonder if this is due to the fact that most school librarians are keyed into LM_NET or OZTL_NET. Perhaps huge listservs like these are easier, but one of the reasons I started this exercise was to see if it might be a way to organize all the stuff I get from the many listservs and newsletters I receive. More later on how successful I think the experiment is for me. I did come across at least one example of a librarian who uses her blog to highlight resources and then posts them to the library webpage in the appropriate category. Another example from a college library uses a weblog to highlight new resources in the collection. Highlighting resources seems like a fairly easy use I could start with at school -- one way to keep the library pages on the school's Extranet constantly updated. 8:46:02 AM     [comment []];[]