Librarians Look At The World

One of our readers sent us a link to a post at The Shifted Librarian about a librarian who uses a gaming mat for conflict resolution and other purposes in her teen room. One of Jenny (Shifted Librarian)'s persistent themes is the place of gaming in libraries (and I'd never heard of Dance Dance Revolution), we're busy opening a new branch, and we make our own technical progress in tiny increments...

but there's a lot going on out there.

Eric Lease Morgan of University Libraries of Notre Dame, and the listowner of the NGC4Lib (Next Generation Catalog for Libraries) email list, spent the weekend playing with "tagging, automatic classification, and Del.icio.us", processing 675 etexts with about eight separate programs, and posting the result to Del.icio.us. It takes a long time to load, but there it sits, "Food for thought," as Mr. Morgan says, "regarding libraries, books, classification, social networking, the advantages of full text, Web 2.0 technologies, etc."

There are lots of blogs maintained by librarians and technical thinkers for the sake of communicating with their peers. For provocative notions and miscellaneous trains of thought, try LibrarianInBlack, Caveat Lector, Library Tourguide to Technology, Tame the Web, The FRBR Blog, Librarian.net, Off the Mark, Disruptive Library Techology Jester, See Also..., Hanging Together, LitaBlog, the OCLC bloggers, and a zillion more. Each is a gateway to other thinkers; Stephen's Lighthouse led us to a paper by Karen Markey about the future of the Online Library Catalog at D-Lib Magazine. We could go on indefinitely.