I don’t know anyone who thinks they do enough professional reading. I frequently hear colleagues bemoaning the stacks of articles collecting dust on their desks, in manila folders, or on their bookshelves. By contrast, I know many people who use Bloglines to read blogs and news sites regularly, if not daily. Of course, reading professional blogs certainly counts as professional reading, and some blog entries are lengthy, well-written articles that could easily appear in a peer-reviewed journal.

But recently I’ve noticed that Bloglines is definitely having a negative impact on the small amount of journal reading I normally do. If I have a few minutes to spare between meetings or some down time at the end of the day, I am much more likely to peruse headlines in my feedreader than to pick up an entire article to read beginning to end. It’s just easier on my brain. So I’m getting more breadth but less depth.

It doesn’t help that many of the professional journals I try to read don’t have RSS feeds. If they did, I’d be picking up the tables of contents in Bloglines, and then maybe the contrast between blogs and journals wouldn’t seem so great.

From Librarian Avengers:

I can see why the process of creating web accessibility guidelines is so difficult. The perspectives involved are broad and often divergent. This isn’t like web standards, where you can just close your tags and call it good. Real people will be discriminated against if you screw up. The responsibility is sobering.

And actually, those last two sentences could apply to more than accessibility. Bad design discriminates against everyone who doesn’t think like a librarian!

So I have to write up some professional goals for my tenure packet, which I started working on today. Unfortunately, all the goals I could think of off the top of my head didn’t really seem appropriate for a document that will eventually go to the University President, never mind the JPC. So I’m putting them here instead, in no particular order.

Own my own staple remover.
You don’t necessarily think about this until you’re trying to make copies of all your annual reviews and Provost reports.

Get better wall art.
The better to meditate upon my professional goals, of course.

Delegate or otherwise shed all my job responsibilities related to all the paper in my office, so I can truly become an Electronic Resources Librarian.

Drink more water.
$3/month all you can drink. The price of about two cups of coffee. Less coffee, more water.

And speaking of goals, what’s with this blog anyway? One reason I haven’t posted for so long is that I’d like to set up my own WordPress blog at my own domain–you know, something with a catchy name and a cool graphic instead of a cookie-cutter template (no offense Blogspot). The problem is that it’s easier to ponder than to implement, so in the meantime three months have gone by and still no nifty new blog. Now that I’ve mentioned it here hopefully I’ll get off my virtual you-know-what and do something.

Turns out the happy ending in my previous post was not so happy after all. My computer is off getting a cure for “catastrophic hardware failure,” which is why it’s so quiet here it at BiblioTech.

Meanwhile, I got a week behind on my Bloglines reading. Now that I’m catching up I find references to COinS all over the place. COinS is “a way for websites to embed bibliographic citation metadata into a web page” according to Openly Informatics. Openly has created a plugin that allows you to add OpenURL linking to pages that otherwise don’t support it. Definitely something to follow up on… sometime.

Heed these words. I just spent the last 24 hours coaxing my computer to give me something–anything–other than the “prohibitory sign,” as the Apple website so euphemistically calls it. I yearned for the bomb (remember the bomb?), the flashing question mark, anything other than something that reminded me of cigarettes and Ghostbusters. Well, I did go to work and slept for a few hours, but you get the idea. Things got so bad I actually considered calling Apple support, and I thought I just might have to do something called an “Erase and Install.” Yikes! So, consider this a public service announcement. If your iTunes purchases are backed up but your financial data is not, it’s time to reconsider your priorities.

By the way, if you’re wondering, it was the usual Fab Ab method that got me out of my mess: restart, restart, with all possible permutations, curse, call spouse for long-distance internet connection and moral support, restart, threaten introduction of PC into household, restart, yea! Works with cars too. But now I’m going to reinstall my system software, just in case.

Now that’s innovation! Did I mention it’s caffeinated beer?

Wired article

scilib chica has tagged me (sort of).

Total volume of music on my Mac
1978 songs, 5.5 days, 7.39 GB

Last CD purchased
Little Sparrow::Dolly Parton

Last album purchased at iTunes
American Idiot::Green Day

Song playing when I started this entry
Island of Time::Patty Larkin

Song playing right now
Nullarbor Song::Kasey Chambers

Five songs I listen to a lot
1. Wagon Wheel::Old Crow Medicine Show
2. The Sweetness::Nerissa and Katrina Nields
3. The Kid::Cry Cry Cry
4. Blue Savannah::Erasure
5. Chelsea Burns::Keren Ann

Five songs that mean a lot to me
1. Free Man in Paris::Joni Mitchell (or any song from Court & Spark or Blue)
2. 1974::Amy Grant
3. Closer to Fine::Indigo Girls
4. Traveling Again (Traveling I)::Dar Williams (or any song from Mortal City)
5. Svadjebnaja Pjesnja

First concert
Mylon LeFevre and Broken Heart (1986)

This is slightly off-topic, but I have to gush. Now that iTunes offers a podcast directory, it is even easier to download podcasts to your desktop (or iPod of course) and listen at your own convenience. Since I’ve lived and worked in Binghamton, I’ve mourned the absence–or ungodly hours–of some of my favorite NPR shows. Now I can listen to On the Media (7:00 a.m. Sundays–yeah right!) and Science Friday anytime–perfect accompaniments to filling out MetaLib IRD forms!

PublicRadioFan is a great site for finding NPR podcasts.

If you like to learn about interesting RSS feeds, check out Pluck’s Feed of the Day. Available via RSS, of course.

“Beta” is a word I used to associate with a snobby high-school sorority, but, thanks to Google and some time spent learning Greek, the word now has other connotations. I was happy to read this over at It’s All Good, posted by Alane Wilson,

One piece of advice George, Cathy and I pass along to people when we do presentations is “go beta.” By this we mean do what Google does, and try new things out, in public, live, with real people. Instead, many libraries still appear to be keeping things under wraps, waiting until everything is Perfect, planning for the “Rare Event” (as Marshall Keyes called it at a presentation I attended a while back).

Beta projects are helpful when it’s hard to do usability testing before a new service is launched, or when you can’t really judge a product or service without giving the patrons a chance to dig into it in a real, non-simulated environment (isn’t that almost everything?).

You can find a beta project on our website in the form of the SFX Version 3 menu. We haven’t switched over to v. 3 quite yet, but we have links to it in Library Lit. When we do switch over, there will be a new “Advanced (Beta)” section on the menu, offering some new–and fairly untested–services. The plan is to offer them throughout the summer and then evaluate before the fall semester starts.

Other beta projects: IM reference (we’re calling it a pilot–same difference) and reserves via Blackboard (another pilot). Maybe in the future, wikis.