LISNews: Librarian News

I was at my favorite home-away-from-home study center. Actually it is not the library, but a nice hangout for Wi-Fi'ing, eating, drinking (coffee mind you :-) and other miscellaneous activities.

Anyway, I have found new ways to use my time and that includes actually conducting business, both personal and official, via my cell phone. I feel I have a good phone, an excellent carrier and a good connection. The idea, and this applies to both librarian and layman, is that there is absolutely NOTHING that can compete with a land-line connection.

It has been determined that nearly 20% of telephony users in the U.S. are now utilizing cell phones as their primary number. Isn't this blasphemy? Am I turning into a Luddite? Although I cannot speak for my collective generation (Boomer's), I can say that most of us still prefer that nice little device called the home telephone, wall phone, desk phone, cordless phone - by any other name it would SOUND as sweet!

Maybe our hearing has never adapted to the sound of cell phones, but I struggled today with insuring that I was being heard by the distant party. That is downright disturbing - I shouldn't be worrying about something like that. There are trade-offs though, and I cannot be tethered or home bound. Thus is the magic of the cell phone, but the true magic is that nice instrument at home - or whatever you want to call it - is as clear as a Bell, er bell....not to be confused with Ma Bell. -- Read More

I don't know if you noticed, but there's a lot of stuff I need to do. And that's it. If there's an answer for why someone quits a blog, then, "I got other shit to do," is it.

People talk about "tipping points," and I hit mine when there was something I missed because I was being the.effing.librarian. I was blogging or tweeting or commenting and I missed something that my real life should be doing.

And that's when I realized that I had to stop.

And It stopped being fun. If I had to give the simple answer as to why I stopped blogging, that would be it. It stopped being fun. Nothing complicated. I just made the choice that something is less important than I thought it was. There's no deep philosophical lesson I discovered. It's just that some shit is more important than other shit. And I have to get back to it.

I gotta go, but you guys have fun.

"We have put up our display of 'Books Amazon Doesn't Want You to Read.'"--@Vromans tweet in reaction to Amazon's de-ranking of LGBTQ books (Shelf Awareness, April 13, 2009).

In a subsequent bookstore blog post titled, "Amazonfail & The Cost of Freedom" Vroman's observed that "independent publisher sales rep John Mesjak put it best when he tweeted this statement: 'I haven't read all of #amazonfail, so I am likely repeating, but my takeaway: this S#!T happens with monoculture gatekeepers. "

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Despite opinions to the contrary, blogging can be good for your academic career. So says John Dupuis, head of the Steacie Science & Engineering Library at York University, in Toronto, on his blog, Confessions of a Science Librarian.

The days of making a big splash with a personal blog may be over (see a recent article in Wired), but in this era of Googling, blogging is still a good way to build a reputation, promote yourself (something job seekers should do more often), and network with like-minded individuals, Dupuis suggests, using excerpts from an article by Graham Lavender, a McGill University library student, to prove his point.