So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You
This is my final post as guest blogger on FGI. I've really enjoyed this gig and I want to thank FGI for invting me. This is also probably the last time I'll be contributing to public discussions as a librarian. Last week I learned that my position is being abolished. The budget was tight, they needed to cut, and my position was selected.
So indulge me a moment as I stroll down memory lane.
My first library job was at the Steenbock Agricultural Library at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. This is where I first mastered the intricacies of gov docs.
After college I moved to Chicago, where I got a job at the John Marshall Law School library, still filing government documents but now expanding my repertoire to include serials checkin (on a kardex, remember those?) and looseleaf updates.
After Chicago I moved to Los Angeles where I got a job at the RAND Corporation library in Santa Monica, doing serials checkin again, as well as acquisitions and copy cataloging. One year they gave us all PCs and a few months later Migell Acosta loaded a Mosaic browser on my machine. Things have never been the same since.
A few years later I got my MLIS from UCLA. I was no longer a "paraprofessional"...
I moved to D.C. and hopped around a bunch of library jobs (including one that took me to all the Marine Corps base libraries on the East Coast- Semper Fi!) until I arrived at the IMF where I took a job as librarian in 2000. I did systems librarian work mostly, then got into training and that pretty much brings me to today.
So that's it. While I never say never, it's most likely that my career as a librarian is over.
See you on the dark side of the moon.
Continue readingRead Your Own DHS Travel Dossier
Last month the Washington Post published this piece on how DHS is collecting information on travelers:
"...new details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel."
Now you too can find out what DHS knows about you. The Identity Project has created this site to walk you through the steps to obtain the unclassified portions of your DHS travel dossier. Bon voyage!
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FEMA Workers Play Role of Reporters
What?! That's right. FEMA deputy director Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson held a phony news conference on Tuesday (story here and here) about assistance to victims of wildfires in southern California. At the news conference, FEMA employees played the part of reporters and asked Johnson softball questions. I don't know which is worse: having a director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who's previous job was as a commissioner for an Arabian horse association or having a FEMA director who thinks it's ok to hold a sham news conference for political gain. FEMA deals with serious life and death situations (Katrina, wild fires etc) and so should have leaders of the highest qualifications, NOT political lackies who do not take their jobs seriously.
Continue readingState Blue Books – ALA GODORT – Accept no substitutes
I need the help of the FGI community in a strange way. I need you to link to the now official copy of the State Blue Book guide I originally created in 2005 and updated with great assistance from Jennifer Manning of the Library of Congress.
That link is http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Blue_Books. Please post it whereever you can.
Why? Because if you do a Google or Yahoo search on the term "state blue books", the page that comes up isn't the one hosted by ALA GODORT and patrolled by several eagle-eyed sysops (Hi James R!), but the former well-meaning host. I haven't actively looked at old page for over a year.
And that was a mistake. Ugly spammers got to the former page from the history, it looks like they've been there awhile. I had forgottened to watch the page and only found out the problem because of someone who had been planning to show off the page as an example collaboration, but thought twice. Then I realized that I hadn't updated my personal web page to reflect the shift to GODORT, so not only were the search engines going to an outdated page, *I* was telling people to go to an outdated page.
No more. I have redirected my links to http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Blue_Books. If you've got a link to my guide, please update your link. And if enough of us do that, the search engines will direct to the page where we've got the guide's back.
And accept my apologies for not updating the community sooner.
Continue readingConversations, Not Memos
Last week saw the launch of a new blog, the Ideas for Development blog. Authors include the Director General of the World Trade Organization, the President of the African Development Bank, the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, and other A-list types. A quick scan of the posts (why are there no dates on the landing page?) shows big chunks of text with no hyperlinks. This tells me that it's a one-way conversation. A blog is not a memo distribution system. A blog is an online conversation.
And speaking of conversations, James Jacobs responds to my World Library post.
Moving on in the blogosphere, Simon Johnson, Director of Research for the International Monetary Fund, launched a blog last week. Yes, this is the second blog launched by the IMF in the past month. "Strange days indeed".
Finally, a short requiem for the IFC's Innovations in Emerging Markets blog, which appears to have died over the summer. I am sad because these folks, along with the PSD blog, were the ones who introduced blogging to our IFI community. The fact that the IFC let this blog die tells me we still have a ways to go in convincing organizations of the benefits of blogging.
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