U.S News and World Report just released its annual list of 31 careers with bright futures (i.e. that offer strong outlooks and high job satisfaction.) Librarians are listed as being part of that group. According to the description:
It’s an underrated career. Most librarians love helping patrons dig up information and, in the process, learning new things. Librarians may also go on shopping sprees, deciding which books and online resources to buy. They even get to put on performances, like children’s puppet shows, and run other programs, like book discussion groups for elders..
Librarians are actually on the list twice, as one of the other good jobs included on the list is Usability/User experience specialists (one of the training backgrounds they suggest for this job is library science).
Google will soon be releasing their own take on a Wikipedia-style of information resource - Google Knols (screenshot).
Some of the significant differences will be: named authors (who can choose to receive a portion of ad revenue for the “knol” pages they write) instead of Wikipedia’s anonymous author model. The site will allow multiple “knols” on a single topic (each will be written by a single author) with the community voting for the best one and suggesting changes in a separate area instead of the collaborative style of composing articles used on Wikipedia.
On a completely unrelated note, this will be the last Friday Fun Link I post on LibrarianActivist. After some recent discussions with the other two librarians I took on this project with about the future of the site, it was felt that we need to re-focus on the serious side of activism. We also discussed some other potential changes and improvements to the site. Hopefully more details about these items will be forthcoming in the weeks and months to come.
I am happy to remain involved with LA as a contributor but for anyone who’s enjoyed this recurring feature, I will continue to post the Friday Fun Links on my personal blog.
This list is focused mostly on the Internet and technology as things that librarians are better at (rather than librarians successfully utilizing these tools beyond what normal users might do - he says, typing on a blog) but it’s still a lot of food for thought.
To be honest, I think it wouldn’t be hard to make a 100 item list of why libraries and librarians are still essential.
Plus they forgot #34 - “Librarians are the ultimate service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.” (Thanks to Michelle L. for the quote.)
“The Canadian police announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use. Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers instead of the cash flow of large corporations.“
My French isn’t good enough to know if a Le Devoir article linked from this TorrentFreak post is saying that this is a national policy of the GRC (er, RCMP) or one that only applies in Quebec. But either way, this is a pretty rational stance from the police and it makes me happy to hear that I can download to my heart’s content exercise greater freedom in my choice of online activities.
On a semi-related note, the Writers Guild of America is on strike with appropriate compensation for sales from electronic media being one of the major issues. (Writers in Canada dealt with a similar situation a few years back - as new technology that no one foresaw when initial contracts were written came into being, corporations tried to put up works (reviews, essays, articles, etc.) without additional compensation. Needless to say, writers wanted to be compensated for the reproduction of their work, no matter the form it appeared in. I can’t remember how this resolved itself - anybody? Bueller? Bueller?)
Anyhow, if you’re missing “The Daily Show, one of show’s writers did this update from the picket lines:
Lazy Library is a website dedicated to recommending books that are no longer than 200 pages, on any subject, to help those that find reading to be “time consuming”.
Like Michelle, I think it’s not as dumb of an idea as it sounds at first and might have some utility in today’s culture. (I had a lengthy conversation with the person who buys the majority of the fiction at our library system recently about how so many of the most popular books today tend to be the ones with short, snappy chapters. “The Da Vinci Code” is the penultimate example of this but even something like “The Road” which won the Pulitzer Prize fits this description. And have I mentioned how highly I recommend this book? So good.)
My only criticism of the site is that it could really use a browse feature to go with its search function.
She also has a Learning Center that lets you search for free educational information, sites, games and software online.
Finally, to complete the trifecta of excellent resources, she also offers a search for free online audio books, e-books and textbooks. The search provides results from literally dozens of the biggest and most complete libraries that host free resources.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has put up over 13 000 segments going back to 1999. That’s pretty cool…or at least it would be if I could get any of the videos in the archives to load.
Maybe the site’s just being hammered with traffic because it’s so new. But it almost makes you wish some of these media giant properties would skip the proprietary site designs and media players and just put it all up on YouTube instead.
[Edit: Just saw that there’s also a proposal to make all of the books shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize available for free online as well. Following up the Radiohead announcement, that now makes the announcement of a major music, TV and book release for free online within a very short period of time. So, the big question is - which will be the first big Hollywood movie to follow this model? We should all avoid buzzwords where ever possible but this really does feel like a paradigm shift. Oh, and the commentator I linked to about Radiohead says they won’t make any money but the goodwill they recieve from fans for the move will pay off in the long term. But another commentator speculates that Radiohead have made $10 million already, more than they made from their last three albums combined. The truth is probably somewhere between these two extremes but I’d lean towards this being a very profitable move for the band.)