Blog Archives

One day when I was surfin' on the Internets
I saw a picture there that caused some bloggers stress
Mud Flap Girl!
Are you good P.R.?
Mud Flap Girl!
Will you become a star?
Like the doll of Nancy Pearl
Oh, Wyoming Mud Flap Girl ...

(Apologies to the Dead Milkmen.)

P.S. Thank you, I, Asshole, for making us spit Coke on our laptop!

Update: Just had a thought ... Shouldn't they be marketing audiobooks to truckers?

At around the 2:15 mark (update: around 2:53 on the reverse timer), Sofiya starts talking about her local library's fiendish ways.



"I know what you're doing, Santa Monica Library. I've got tabs on you."

Oh, there's a good Vonnegut reference later in the vlog.

The head of the U.S. Copyright Office describes herself as a Luddite and does not have a computer at home. Which could help explain why she thinks the DCMA is just fine and dandy.

Check out these French trading cards from 1910, showing the artist's interpretation of life en l'An 2000. We're probably not the only librarian who takes a special liking to this one.

Coupla weeks ago, in response to someone else's old blog post which was printed up in American Libraries, Annoyed Librarian wrote "A Librarian's Anti-2.0 Manifesto".

And last week, AL (Annoyed Librarian, not American Libraries) posted one, two, three follow-ups about "twopointopia".

We had a revelation of sorts: Annoyed Librarian's twopointopian cultists would be well represented by the pink and blue unicorns harassing Charlie (if someone else can see the cartoon as a warning against liberalism, then we get to read it as a Library 2.0 parable) - "You silly sleepyhead, wake up!" "You have to come with us to Candy Mountain!" "Shun the non-believer! Shu-u-u-u-u-u-nuh!" "But you have to enter the Candy Mountain magic cave, Charlie!"

We're familiar with the fanaticism that Annoyed Librarian describes (we once heard a 2.0 evangelist say to an audience, "You have to do this!"), but we're not sure we like the term "twopointopian". We think "twodotnaughty" is better. We haven't paid much attention to Library 2.0 talk in the last year and a half, though, since shortly after we wrote our "Library 2.0 is evil" post. Maybe things have changed, but back then, the real problem with at least some twodotnaughties is they sometimes spewed bullshit.

We don't mean bullshit in the sense of "ideas we don't agree with". We mean bullshit in the sense of bullshit. Example: We heard two different speakers at two different events mislead (one of them outright lying to) their audiences about the number of user comments that Ann Arbor District Library was getting on its website. That's bullshit, deceptive bullshit. We sincerely hope that twodotnaughties aren't still talking about opening up a blog for comments as a way to build community. At least not without also mentioning that the average number of comments made on a public library blog item is, when rounded to the nearest whole number, zero. This is even true of Ann Arbor if you don't count the articles about video games.

At least, that's our hypothesis, based on a quick glance at things. Great project for a library school student: Examine library blogs with dedicated rigor - to hell with anecdotal evidence - and test our hypothesis. How much "community" is being built? Put a little actual science into library science. The data's just sitting there like a big, dead toad of data, waiting to be resuscitated through the amphibian CPR of reasoned analysis.

Here's another avenue for research: Look at all the libraries you can find on MySpace and answer these questions: How many of their friends are libraries, librarians, or authors? How many are actually the people the libraries supposedly went onto MySpace to serve? When most of a library's MySpace friends are librarians, isn't that just the saddest thing in the world? Sad enough to make a bunny cry? Maybe the Library MySpace Study students could undertake this project.

A third: Exactly what are the minimum technical requirements for Second Life to be any fun? Are those specs different for a librarian than for a patron? How many non-librarians visit the Information Archipelago, are any of them pissed about the intrusion of real-world shit into SL, and can any of them recommend a source for those virtual penises that Annoyed Librarian's anonymous commenter is talking about? And where's the best place on the Info Archipelago for interspecies avatar sex?

Maybe someone's been dutifully reporting on all this, but we haven't seen it. Hopefully, this kind of research will produce sufficient results to enable David King to draw up a model of Library 2.0 that makes sense to us. Or maybe an MLS student can work one up.