lower east side librarian

I'm getting awfully tabby lately, so here are a bunch of links, so I can close tabs and not feel so bad about it.

• Betty Charm♥cils
• The future of federated searching
• Greens, after the nomination of the McKinney-Clemente...
• Is it Protected by Copyright?
• Library questions and answers
• Life on the command line
• mon.thly.info
• Not guilty!
• Our government wants to define some forms of birth control as abortion

Annotations and provenance information if you read the whole post.

Yesterday I attended a Free and Open Source Software for Librarians program by Scott Dexter and Samir Chopra, based on their book Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software. Before you read my report back, you should know that the content is familiar territory to me. My spouse, Eric Goldhagen, gives a similar talk in his half of our "Radical Reference: Community Librarianship and Free/Open Source Technology" (and other talks) road show.

Free and Open Source Software for Librarians

with Scott Dexter and Samir Chopra, authors of the book Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software and Associate Professors of Computer and Information Science at Brooklyn College

Thursday, July 10 @ 10:30 am
New York City College of Technology (City Tech) Faculty Lounge
Atrium 632 300 Jay St., Brooklyn

Over lunch with a Columbia colleague, Karen Green, we discussed how our previous, non-library work prepared us for librarianship. For her it was bartending, for me mostly theater electrics and production management.

While I think there are some really great young librarians who went straight from college to library school, I think having post-college real life and even those random jobs you have in your twenties is extremely valuable for our work.

Yesterday I went to Library Camp, an unconference held at Baruch College, and it was good. Perhaps the best library conference I've ever attended, in fact.

This is a way long post, so I'm going to split it up into three additional sections: blogging and microblogging, effect change, and green librarianship. This is the overview.

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I am a total sucker for in-jokes, especially when they're as bibliogeekarific as this punny history of cataloging. I just wish they'd kept going instead of stopping in 1916.