Carnival of the Infosciences #40 This is an exciting time in the biblioblogosphere with the major conferences all coming (SLA, ALA, AALL) or just passed (MLA). During conference season, there are usually a lot of new releases from vendors and excitement in the libraries. Also, many academic and school libraries get a lot of work done during the summer to be ready for the fall semester. It's been a while since I've hosted a carnival (#11, to be precise) and it's been a real pleasure to see the submissions this week.

Submissions:
Babyboomer Librarian (Bill Drew) talks about an interesting trend in "friends" in MySpace. Apparently there are a lot of interested writers. Does this mirror your library's experience? Maybe you should submit a comment on his post.

Joe Kissell presents a nice article about The Bodleian Library at Oxford. It discusses the history and statistics of the library.

Michelle, the Krafty Librarian, asks if in Podcasting, Are We Focused in the Right Direction? She continues, "a lot of librarians and libraries are creating podcasts but is that the best thing for us to do right now? Shouldn't we be looking at and creating methods to find or organize them rather than just simply adding to the flood of information or will that be an opportunity that will slip by us?" Greg Schwartz (our fearless leader) discussed this a bit at CIL2006 -- some of the keyword searches of podcasts are pretty rough. Should libraries archive, preserve, catalog, and provide access? Maybe. Promote better metadata assignment during production? Maybe.

John Hubbard celebrates the one year anniversary of LISwiki. He discusses how the year has gone.

OPACs are hot topics of discussion. Laura Crossett shares her Dream of the children's materials OPAC. I'm scared of children's reference so if she ever gets them to make this OPAC, we'll all be in better shape. Hmm, I wonder if someone could do an Ajax mashup with Novelist (or the children's equivalent) and the OPAC so it would tell you if the book is on the shelf or at least owned in the results list.... I used to work in a branch where they'd had a volunteer go through Columbia and mark which poetry anthologies we owned -- now that was sweet.

Nancy Dowd of The M Word asks: Isn't it time your library got buzzed? She talks about buzz or word-of-mouth marketing and gives some great pointers of where to look for more information. In her submission she says, "Buzz campaigns address the changing focus from manager driven to consumer driven marketing and offer libraries some neat opportunities." There will also be a session on June 25 at ALA.

Rick Roche of ricklibrarian has some notes on the first ALA he attended, Dallas, 1979. Wow, the more things change, the more they stay the same!

Part of being an editor is presumably *not* including some submissions; however, I am intrigued by Grrlscientist's submission so will include it. Apparently: a giant armored dinosaur has been discovered in Utah. I wonder if it should have gone to another carnival?


Editorial picks:
I'd like to highlight a couple of new blogs that might be of interest. First, Cornell librarian Pat Viele, who is well known in the teaching-of-physics world, has a new blog: Physics Information Fluency. She's interested in how to best integrate the teaching of information fluency into the physics curriculum at the undergrad and grad stages. Pam Ryan from the University of Alberta is spearheading a new blog on academic library assessment, LibraryAssessment.info. They already have a list of 15 contributors to the blog. With any kind of new project, program, or service, one of the key parts of planning is figuring out what the goals will be and how the product will be evaluated.

Karen at Free Range has just posted a Manifesto. The key may be, "the user is not broken." Comments, concerns, additions?

Congrats to Steven and family for their new addition.


UPDATED: oops -- it came out with the date I started working on it instead of the publish date.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Next week's carnival will be at Ruminations.
For once and future dates, check the wiki.  ¶ 9:36 AM| |cites (technorati) |