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On this webpage, Learning from Katrina: Conservators’ First-Person Accounts of Response and Recovery; Suggestions for Best Practice, you can find interviews with seven recovery volunteers who helped deal with the aftermath of Katrina. They helped the collecting institutions of the states hit to recover materials damaged by the hurricane and later shared their experiences and what they learned in these interviews.

This month’s Wise Guide from the Library of Congress includes a short article, titled The Library Exposed about Carol M. Highsmith’s photos of the Library of Congress Jefferson Building. The article links you to the Carol M. Highsmith Archive where these and other photos reside. Have a look at the 400+ photos of the LOC here.

The New York Times published an interesting essay titled Cancer Data? Sorry, Can’t Have It about the difficulties in getting medical researchers, even government employees, to share their data, even though more freely shared information may save lives.

This Library of Congress blog talks about the amazing success of their ongoing project to put content on Flickr to be viewed and tagged. In two days they had over a million views. Check out other stats at their blog.

Inside Higher Ed writes about Zotero Commons, a program through George Mason University to gather copies of open source material that have already been created during scholarship, and make them widely available. This program seems like a good way to take advantage of work that has already been done, and to make more useful material available online.

On Infoblog, Paul Signorelli writes about the San Francisco’s implementation of “Book a Librarian,” a program which lets a patron make an appointment with a librarian for help with training or research. This program was started in April, and is expanding because of its popularity.

I want to point out this pretty cool resource that is offered by the Library of Congress, the Wise Guide. According to their “about” page, the site “links to the best of the Library’s online materials.” The Wise Guide is definitely meant as a jumping-off point, but is an excellent way to learn about some of the Library of Congress’ resources. This month’s topics include WWII, Native American Indian health, and notable occurrences that have happened during the month of November.

Well, this article did come from LibraryThing’s blog, so I’m sure there might be some bias, but they are talking about the dubious email-a-friend practices of one of their competitors, Shelfari. Being against accidentally emailing everyone in my entire address book, I think I’ll give them a miss. It is, however, also interesting to see LibraryThing’s “take” on who their competitors are.

While the Czech National Library looks like it is going to be rather different, it isn’t even built yet. The National Library of Belarus in Minsk, however, has been officially open since 2006, and is also breaks the mold of your “traditional” library architecture. The photo on their official website is impressive. However, it doesn’t beat the many photos available online of the lightshows, including these by George.

Here is an interesting article from ForeWord Magazine about graphic novels and the event about them held by the Suffolk Cooperative Library System. The article has a quote that I like by graphic novel consultant John Shableski, that “…the graphic novel (GN) is to publishing today very much as rock and roll was when it first entered the music industry mainstream: a strange format already familiar to the popular culture but not yet understood by the established distribution channels.”

As a fan, I would definitely say that graphic novels are oft-misunderstood. Also, it was fun to read all the quotations by various people in the graphic novel industry.