Riot Librarian

The revolution will be organized.

  • Another Shiny New Year

    Despite the fact that I’ve been a bit slow-moving into 2012, it is, in fact, here. It’s another new year, and for me, that always means time for reflection and planning. I’m kind of sad to say that in 2011, I yet again didn’t write as much as I wanted to write. Not even on…

  • What I read in 2011

    Another year, another lamentation that I didn’t write as much as I wanted. I did, however, read a lot last year. Here’s the list of books I read in 2011. Asterisks indicate my favorite book in each month, and (RR) indicates that it was a re-read. January “In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female…

  • Standards for Social Reading

    On Wednesday, I had the privilege of attending a NISO working meeting on creating a standard for Open Ebook Annotations. The meeting was held the day before the Books in Browsers conference, and was the third such working meeting, after meetings held in New York and Frankfurt. The purpose was to brainstorm around what the…

  • Ranganathan has a posse

    In the “I’m a dork” files, I just installed a fun little WordPress plug in created by Steve Lawson, called Hello, Ranganathan. If you’re a WordPress user, I’ll leave you to go find out more. Not sure who this Ranganathan fellow is? His Five Laws of Library Science are considered guide points for librarians around…

  • Banned Books Week: A Defense

    Another Banned Books Week is coming to a close, and once again, my RSS feed has been filled with arguments for and against this most well-known library tradition. I’ve always been a supporter of Banned Books Week, even organizing events around it for the Simmons College community when I was chair of the Simmons Progressive…

  • Kindle Library Books

    The inability to check out books from my library using my Kindle irked me from the first moment I started using the Kindle. When Amazon and Overdrive announced that they were finally partnering to allow library lending on the Kindle, I was pretty excited. Sure, as a librarian I know it’s far from a perfect…

  • Know Your MARC

    I’m deep in the midst of a project that involves dealing with a lot of MARC records, and I know I’ve said it many times before, but seriously? How is it possible that this “standard” involves so many un-standard elements? Sure, a lot of the core data really is in the same place in every…

  • Being a metadata librarian at the CDL

    My second post on The Desk Set is up for your perusal! In which I talk about the many varied projects of the California Digital Library, and my specific metadata-related work therein. All you ever wanted to know about the CDL…

  • My long and winding road to the library

    I’m guest blogging over at The Desk Set this month, and I’m pretty excited to have the chance to write about my work. My first post is up this morning, in which I recount the long and winding professional path that brought me eventually to the library. Throughout the rest of September, I’ll be talking…

  • Phew, August.

    So, about two weeks ago I broke my finger. You don’t realize how important a little tiny pinky finger is until the breaking of it necessitates the immobilizing of your whole hand in fiberglass. I have the use of my first two fingers and the thumb on my left hand, and thank god for that.…