And now for something low-key and inspiring...

Weeding through the library and librarian videos on YouTube is a daunting challenge.  It seems everyplace and everyone wants 15-seconds of fame.  However, when I find one that inspires me, the world becomes as magical as any library's stacks.

Take this one for example.



I particularly like the cop at the beginning and the parallel between house cat and World Cat.

Maybe libraries should stop trying so hard

You know, this is a really good idea that doesn't quite measure up.  Maybe less is really more.
(And how typical do all these people look as librarians?)

Library Juice: 4-26-2010

Rory Litwin in her April 26, 2010, blog post for Library Juice asks what the role of a librarian in an academic library should be and comes up with the idea that because academia has embraced SLOs (Student Learning Outcomes) that librarians should in effect be teachers.

I find this very funny since I just spent three years getting my MLIS after teaching English composition for over 20 years with my MA degree.  What this breakthrough means to me is that I'll go from teaching to. . . teaching!  The big difference, of course, is that I won't be taking stacks of student papers home to grade--maybe.

Because SLOs must be measureable, librarians have to come up with some way of proving that students have "learned" something.  Teachers do this all the time by giving tests, but traditionally librarians aren't test givers.  Librarians are answer givers; they don't ask students to give them answers.

How Can Librarians and Cyberlibrarians Save Us All?

Author Marilyn Johnson in her new book This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cyberlibrarians Can Save Us All has decided to tell us.  After reading The New York Times review of the book this morning, I decided this was a must buy.  And Amazon provided a Publishers Weekly starred review as well.  (Having been a PW reviewer for about 15 years and knowing how much extra trouble reviewers go through to make something a starred review, I sat up and took more notice.)

Being the very, very happy owner of a Kindle, I immediately bought a copy (delivered in under a mouse's breath) and will read it after I finish the Lynn Kurland and Betty Neels novels that are in the queue before it.