Carnival of the Infosciences #47

Come one, come all to Carnival of the Infosciences #46. (Note: Was scheduled as #47 but the production schedule changed on me. I would change the title but it would break any links....) The entries here were selected from my blogroll and from items uncovered doing Technorati searches on library oriented subject tags or were submitted by fellow bloggers. The editorial choices are simply topics or points of view I found interesting.

Submissions:

Rick Roche is taking on a very ambitious project in bulding the Practicing Librarians' Book Review wiki. The site provides a forum for librarians to write about books they have read and communicate their thoughts to the library community without having to be accepted by a journal. Becoming a contributor to the wiki is as easy as signing up and logging on. Good luck, Rick!

Steve Matthews at the Vancouver Law Librarian blog provides a general summary in Drupal & An Introduction to Open Source CMS Products. Drupal is a content management system build for LAMP. (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP for those unfamilliar with the acronym.)

Editorial picks:

At Library Juice Rory Litwin discusses "Wikipedia and Why Librarians Make Good Wikipedia Contributors". Wikipedia is cited by some librarians as a non-authoratative source because of the lack of content and editorial control, but Rory argues that librarians should take a more active role, which I agree:

"Initially I didn’t see much of a connection between librarianship and Wikipedia editing, because working on an encyclopedia seemed to me to be more of a writer’s or a researcher’s pastime than a librarian’s. As I got into it, however, I realized that the standards for writing a Wikipedia article are similar to a reference librarian’s approach to answering a reference question, especially in relation to one of the main “pillars” of Wikipedia: the “Neutral Point of View,” or NPOV, policy."

StevenB posted to ACRLLog his reaction to a Boston Globe editorial about the "Catered Generation". There are probably many Carnival readers that agree with his perspective:

"Is [sic] seems our profession has likewise become preoccupied with discovering methods to provide students with the lowest-common denominator research tools and the elimination of anything that might be perceived as too complex for fear that students will - what - complain that libraries are too hard to use. Do we fear that students will abandon our resources for the ones that do coddle them by eliminating the possibility of failure? It’s almost impossible with most search engines, no matter how awful your search is, to get nothing in return. You can’t fail. With a library database if you do a poorly conceived search you will likely retrieve nothing - the equivalent of failure. Heaven forbid we might expect someone to show some resolve and actually think about what they did and try to improve upon it - even if the cause of failure is as minor as a mispelled word."

In Continuous Learning: Making it a Priority Without Breaking the Bank , Meredith Farkas at TechEssence writes how librarians need to continue to learn, to grow, to expand our views of libraries and technologies. As library professionals this learning process needs to happen every day, every week, and every year that we are on the job. Perhaps most importantly this activity should be encouraged by administrators as an integral part of our work:

"Administrators should encourage all employees to continue developing their skills and knowledge in this rapidly changing field. It should be just as much a part of our job as attending meetings, serving on committees, and other basic responsibilities."

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Next week's carnival (#47) will be hosted by Woody over at ISHUSH.
For future dates, check the wiki. Make sure to take a turn hosting as well!!!

"La Grande Wheel" is by laanba and published by rights granted through Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0

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