adventures and observations of a library graduate student in montréal

Thanks to Coyote for posting.

Another fun little tool. Write secret notes and pass them along in links to your friends.

Probably other more practical uses as well?

http://tinypaste.com/89053

A neat little toy for making pretty word clouds. I pasted the full text of Alice in Wonderland into it (see below). Check it out.

I could start, I suppose, with an admission of negligence and a tender, heartfelt apology. I’ve sung that tune before, though, and jumping right back in is better than wasting time philosophasting about the difficulties of balancing blogging with daily existing. One thing is more important than the other.

I’m just about to leave Denver after attending the Reference Renaissance conference, which was rad and which I recommend to anyone to is a librarian and works mainly in reference. I found it so much more useful than the ALA Annual conference in many ways, though both have their own merits and resist weighing on the same scale. I guess the reason I would tend to attach more value to RefRen is because I’m leaving with oh-so-many more neat ideas about what I’d like to do with Virtual Reference services in Washington (among other things). This could be a product of where I am in my job now, but it’s also certainly part of the excellence of the conference and the quality of the topics covered.

I also got married recently. July 12th, 2008, to be exact, to a very lovely woman who I adore. Getting used to married life is a challenge, but we’re smoothing out some of the bumps and I’m looking forward to a long, long future with the love of my life.

So yeah, nothing exciting going on. Nothing at all.

…

Nope.

Miss Conduct of the Boston Globe Magazine explores how libraries might be allowing the idea of what it means to be public to disrupt what their mission is as a library.

But I do think we have the right to pick up a new Alexander McCall Smith or study for an exam without feeling threatened–and a large, unwashed, clearly unstable man is threatening to a woman, or an elderly person, or a person with children who need protection. In their zeal to remain “public,” are libraries in fact driving away significant segments of the public they are meant to serve? Are they emphasizing “public” at the expense of “library”?

Surely there’s a middle ground, but where do we toe the line? Thoughts?