Email Box Filling Up Again...

...except that just lately a lot of our randomized librarianly input is coming from twitter. We've mentioned Twitter a few times, but have a hard time explaining to people what it is. Try David Free's presentation, Welcome to the Twitterverse, created for the Social Software Showcase at the ALA annual convention. We set up a twitter login and added a few librarianly Friends to it, so you can see it work. Sort of. Traffic is light right now as a lot of the librarian population of the US, maybe 20,000 or so of them, are in Washington, DC, at the moment for the American Library Association convention.

One of our readers sent us two links about reducing the amount of electricity your electronics consume (and therefor the amount of carbon emissions you cause to be produced): a software called CO2 Saver, and a New York Times article, Putting Energy Hogs in the Home on a Strict Low-Power Diet. Another reader sent us historian Lewis Lapham's then-and-now blog, part of Lapham's Quarterly.

What else? If you hate the neologisms that have come along with network technology, you are not alone, as this funny article points out. The New Mexico State Library has started blogging!! Their first post went up this morning. Geeks may want to watch David Weinberger's presentation at Google about his new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. The PubLib email list has spent a lot of time lately discussing video game addiction, apparently more of a problem elsewhere than we find on our own public internet machines; someone today came up with an article on the subject (1).

Bye Bye Bye Dewey Bye-Bye. At the beginning of the month, the new Perry Branch of the Maricopa County Library district opened after a flurry of news stories. (1)(2)(3). They are not using the Dewey Decimal System to organize the books, but rather a system based on the bookstore industry's subject divisions. The Public Libraries email list discussed it endlessly beforehand. After the opening, silence. So far we have not seen any first-hand reports, from either librarians' or library users' points of view, on how well it is working.