It is Monday and the 20th Carnival of the Infosciences finds people contemplating the future shape of libraries and librarianship.
We start with the idea of libraries as place, can a digital library help collaboration?
“Places of Quiet Collaboration” a commentary about a newspaper article by Alex Wright by Tinfoil + Raccoon, examines this question.
Woah, dude, can a career in libraries be excellent? Or is it heinously stressful? Take a look at The Krafty Librarian’s reaction to a couple newspaper articles published about librarianship as a career at The Librarian Career, Excellent or Stressful?
…thoughts are broken discusses those ubiquitous book lists in The Books I Read Last Year Post. Check out the comments for a discussion of book lists.
One of the big themes for library bloggers is Library2.0, and the Filipino Librarian gets us started with this week with Library 2.0: What’s in a Name?
Editor’s Choice
Many library bloggers reacted to a couple things this week,
Walt Crawford’s examination of Library 2.0 and the release of the NCSU Library Catalog.
See Also discusses a Library2.0 hangover, and over at Information Wants to be Free is the blog post that I think got the most comments this week, Let’s make libraries better, ok? You can read more Library2.0 posts in the weekly round-up at Travis Ennis’ Weblog.
Endless Hybrids discusses the library catalog and an assumption about patron behavior – people go to amazon to find what they want, then they visit the library catalog to see if they can check the book out. Can this behavior be facilitated? Check out the post New Front-Ends for Library Catalogs & the Amazon to OPAC Connection.
Household Opera writes on teaching and finding one’s niche
You can use RSS for everything, including tracking patents. Read all about it at The Patent Librarian’s RSS feeds make patent watching a breeze
Lastly and just for fun, I direct you to a livejournal meme where people are sketching everyone’s favorite superhero librarian, Batgirl!. I like Andi Watson’s character designs, Lea Hernandez’s Batgirl, and the fierce boots Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Batgirl is wearing. For the ultimate in character fusion, check out Yotsubatgirl.
Next week’s carnival is over at Infomancy, so submit your posts from this week early and often!